Amity & Sorrow by Peggy Riley

Author:Peggy Riley [Riley, Peggy]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: General, Fiction, Contemporary Women, Literary, Religious
ISBN: 9780755394371
Google: ZCOAMAEACAAJ
Publisher: Headline Book Publishing
Published: 2013-03-25T11:00:00+00:00

Before dawn he wakes and his steps come shaky on the ground. He follows the light of the kerosene lamp from the pile of junk around the house, where she cannot sleep. He follows her light where she moves his soil, his legs bent like a spider’s, to kick a plastic bucket. He steps into its handle with his boot and it trips him, knocks him over as he tries to shake it off, while she’s saying sorry, sorry. The newspaper flutters down from beneath his arm and he lands on his backside, rocks his hips to rescue the brown-bagged bottle from his back pocket. He pulls it out and feels it, checking to see if he’s broken it. Finding he hasn’t, he unscrews the cap and tips it back to his mouth, paper rustling. He takes a thoughtful swallow and extends it to her. ‘Is it late or early?’ he asks her.

She looks at him and the bottle. ‘Did you eat in town?’ she asks.

‘Sure,’ he says. He stretches his frame along the grass. He smells strong, of alcohol and cigarettes, gasoline. She wants to kiss his mouth.

‘I been drinking,’ he slurs. ‘Old Mullaley’s dead. Cuttin’ in the storm and fork lightning struck a grain bin. Old as my pa and still up farming, not stuck in bed hopin’ to die.’ He sees the newspaper then, soaking up water, and he crawls over the mud path to retrieve it, shaking his knees up each time they find water. He curses, shakes the wet outside of the paper loose so she can just see, in the low light, all the pictures inside it, oversized faces, explosions, and men in camouflage, all the miseries of the world come back from town with him. ‘They’re swathin’ outside Dalhart. Reckon I’ll hire a draper header, make a start.’ He looks down at the newspaper again, as if trying to remember how it came to be in his hands.

‘Are we there?’ she whispers.

He thrusts the paper at her and she flips through the pages, leaning it into a lamplight. She sees fires and the flames, but when she looks at them they are not her fire. There are fires all over the world in the paper. Perhaps no one even knows about their fire.

He takes another slug of his bottle and sets it on the dirt. ‘You ever seen a ghost?’

She thinks of the voice of her husband, the lights behind her in the car, pursuing her. ‘Yes,’ she says. Maybe that is all he is.

‘Thought I seen her tonight. Thought I seen her, walkin’ ahead of me, and I followed her to a bar. I was waitin’ for her to turn ’round and see how fine I was, how I was doin’ fine, and I wanted her to see it. So I followed her in, only when I got to the bar and made her look at me, she weren’t nothin’ like my wife. I’d forgotten what my own wife looked like. Don’t know who it was.

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