Amity & Sorrow by Peggy Riley Page B

forgotten apples. She ransacks his cupboards to find cups and plates, two mugs. Leaving the kitchen, she stops to peek behind a kettle-cloth curtain, thinking she will find a sink and toilet and use it, rather than crouch again behind the tree.
    She finds, instead, a pantry cupboard, the size of a closet and lined with shelves, covered in sticky paper and fly droppings. It smells of weevils, of flour gone off. But there is food. Food in rusted cans, food cloudy in Mason jars. There are plastic bins on the floor filled with dried beans and grains: kidney and lima beans, split peas and lentils, pearl barley, black-eyed peas. Food. Food enough to feed them all for weeks.
    ‘Thank you, God,’ she whispers. At last, a sign.
    Overhead, she can hear him walking, doors opening and shutting. She hears voices and the hiss of a TV coming on. She plunges a hand into turtle beans, cool and heavy, and drops a fistful in her apron pocket. Then she snatches up her plundered items and goes.
    She silences her daughters with her outstretched hands, stopping all questions and complaints with baloney. She soaks beans in water, to boil them come morning, and settles her daughters into a mustardy tangle to sleep. Tomorrow, she tells herself, she will go back into his house. No voice or daughter or man or devil will stop her. He has food and she will take it.

BEFORE:
The Fiftieth Wife
    T he first of the patrol cars came while Zachariah was still away, at the golden end of summer, when little fingers worked to strip the last of the berries, overripe, nearly fermented, from the rows and vines before the house. The leaves were turning ruby at their tips.
    It was Amity who came for her, lips stained and swollen, berry-red. ‘Mother, a car!’ she said. ‘Is it Justice? Is it Adam? Are they come back?’
    Is it Hope, Amaranth thought, heart leaping. She brushed the buckwheat flour from her hands and hurried out. Hope, Dawn, and the two boys had been gone since late spring. She missed them, particularly her oldest friend, her confidante, mentor, and midwife.
    At the end of the gravel path she met the black-and-white car. She told Amity to run back to the house and to keep everyone in. She approached the driver and leaned into the open window. ‘You got a warrant?’
    ‘You think I need one?’ A tubby policeman swung the door out toward her and squeezed his gut past his steering wheel.
    ‘If you want to come on this land, you need a warrant.’
    ‘Just want to ask you a few questions,’ he told her. ‘You got some ID?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Maybe I could come inside. We could have a chat. Hot day and all.’
    ‘Get a warrant,’ she said. She turned to go.
    He nodded and pulled a small pad from a top pocket, scratching his chin against its spiral binding. ‘You know a woman called Hope?’
    She glanced back at the house, checking for wives and children. ‘Maybe.’
    ‘She came in and told us some things. Said she knew you and that there were problems with a child here.’
    ‘We’re doing nothing wrong here,’ she told him. ‘There’s no law against what we’re doing.’
    He raised dark brows. ‘I think there is.’
    A curly-haired boy led a goat between them, pulling it by a striped tie. He was the child of Wife Thirty-Eight, she thought. Or maybe Forty. ‘Look at me, I’m a goat shepherd, Mama,’ he said. She shooed him away, goat bleating. The policeman watched him walking away in the skirts all the boys wore.
    ‘This is a consensual community,’ she told him. ‘We are adults here and there are no laws about cohabitating or having children out of wedlock. None.’
    ‘Well, and that’s a pity,’ he said. ‘It’s why the whole of the country’s going to pot, but I’m not here about that. I’m here about the child.’
    ‘What child?’ She thought of Adam and Justice, remembering the day they were sent away, banished by her husband.
    ‘Let me see here, it’s a funny name.’ He riffled through his pages. ‘Sorrow? You got