The Almost Sisters

by Joshilyn Jackson

  Wattie shook in her arms, saying something I could not understand.

  “What’s happening?” I said again.

  Birchie met my eyes over Wattie’s shoulder, and now her words seemed made for both of us.

  “That test is going to come back positive. Doesn’t matter that you swapped them. The answer will come back the same,” she said.

  “No,” I said, a red bolt of negation.

  That could not be so. But my artist’s eyes were looking for it now, without permission. Once it was said, my eyes could not help seeing it.

  Not in their faces. Birchie had small eyes, close set. Wattie’s were large and round and spaced wide. They had different noses, different mouths, and they were made of such different color palettes.

  The truth was written in their bodies. As they held each other, Wattie racked with weeping, Birchie’s arms around a sorrow that was larger than the room, I could see it in the shapes of them. The downslope of their meeting shoulders, the rounding of their hips and bellies, the curve of their equivalent short calves. They had broad foreheads and small pointed chins, so that their disparate features were set in matching hearts. Their bodies told my future, and my body spoke their past; they had looked at me, and each had known that I was pregnant. They’d known because they both recognized their shape in me.

  “Jesus,” I said. “Jesus, Jesus.”

  I could not unsee, so I stood witness. I didn’t know how else to be in the presence of such ugly pain.

  Wattie finally looked up, eyes streaming.

  “Hear me,” she said, clear as day. “My daddy was Earl John Weathers, and that’s all.”

  “I know. I know he was,” Birchie said, and tears were spilling down her cheeks as well. “And Vina Weathers was the only mother that I ever knew. Whether she bore me or not.”

  She was saying Vina’s love had made them sisters, but my artist’s eyes saw that they were sisters twice over. Sisters in their hearts and in their histories, two halves clasped together in a tangle of good love and bad history.

  I’d thought that every human secret must eventually get too old to matter, but the echoes of this one filled the room. They wept in each other’s arms, and I was crying, too. They became a single thing in my blurred vision, smashed together, leaning on each other. They turned their heart-shaped faces toward me, their very different features painted on the same-shaped canvas, and now that I had seen it, I would always see. This was the past rising up alive to eat us. History breathing. Alive in their bodies, mirrored in mine.

  24

  Emily Birch was firmly on the shelf when she was twenty-nine, but it was a shelf of her own making. She was the rising Birch in Birchville, and the boys who came a-courting in her girlhood were overdiffident, cringing like dogs before her father. She knew it without being told: They would not do.

  It was plain in the amused, pitying way Ellis Birch invited them in when they showed up in fresh collars with combed-back hair. They sweated through their half hours in the parlor, and no vase of cool water could stop their field daisies and Queen Anne’s lace from wilting in his presence.

  Clayton Mack took a different route. He joined Emily when she walked out alone, cocksure and overly familiar, coming up behind her to tug on her braid. He made her laugh. He did not come by the house, properly, to genuflect, and he soon found himself invited to pursue opportunities elsewhere. In Georgia, say, or Mississippi. As Alabama sealed itself shut behind him, the already sour blood between the families curdled thoroughly.

  Emily was too beloved and too busy to be lonely, especially since her father practiced what he preached; she was the only person in Birchville he found worthy of his love. He was an early, wealthy widower, so maidens and spinsters and widows alike took solid runs at him. He was immune to casseroles and sympathetic ears and mothery dabbings at his baby, marching unscathed through a hundred honey traps with the same amused condescension that he gave Emily’s suitors.

  This very public attitude meant Ellis Birch was revered far more than he was liked. His father had been “Ethan” to quite a few families, but Ellis was “Mr. Birch,” always, to everyone. To Emily, however, he was “Daddy,” and she basked in every bit of his scant sunshine. It was rare, and all for her.

  Lord, he loves his girl, though, folks in Birchville said, like a refrain, like a forgiving chorus, when his pride had chilled the room. Their small, cold god had been big enough to carry Birchville through the Great Depression and beyond. He never treated Emily as decorative either. From birth on, she was told her life had higher purpose, sleeping on his knee through deacon and town-council meetings before she could talk. By twenty she was running all the ladycentric clubs her mother would have managed, had she lived: Library Friends, Garden Club, the Mary-Marthas.

  Floyd Briggs didn’t start out as a suitor. He was only friendly and funny and kind when she went to his shop to supplement her garden with his fresh produce, and she noticed he’d sit out on the park benches in fine weather, reading poetry and novels by Austen, E. M. Forster, any Brontë. All her favorites. Soon they were trading books back and forth at church. He began slipping his own poems, handwritten and unsigned, into the pages. They were quite good, and one day Emily found herself at his shop buying spring onions when she knew very well the ones in her own garden were ready.

  She also knew, before he asked, that Floyd Briggs would not pass muster with her daddy. Ellis had dismissed boys with finer pedigrees, better prospects, older names. Ellis was the One True Birch and Emily his rising, only heir. But when the question came, she was tempted enough to talk it over with her father. He did not rail or forbid—these things might have tipped his strong-willed child into Floyd’s arms.

  He was cool and thoughtful, questioning Floyd’s motives. After all, Emily would be quite wealthy. He didn’t try to guilt her with the knowledge that if she married, he would be alone in his big house up on the hill. She knew that already. He himself had not remarried, and the unspoken message was that she was enough. In the end it felt too much like betrayal to tell him he was not enough back. She kept her name and let Floyd go.

  That was when her girlish figure started getting away from her. It was only Emily and her father, eating the good suppers Vina left behind for them each evening. One day Emily would be the Last Birch in Birchville, and at that thought she’d have another fried tomato, another slice of pie.

  At twenty-nine, had her name been anything but Birch, she would have been pitied. Another old maid sitting in the small row of the passed-over, running to fat. Instead she married the town. She cleaved to Birchville, carrying it forward as Birches always had, and the town honored every vow she made to it. She moved past ladylike committee work, becoming the fund-raiser and planner who rebuilt the town’s library. Jesus had clearly stated in some unfindable verse somewhere that women could not be church leadership, but the deaconate elected her to be their secretary. Then they rewrote the bylaws to give the “secretary” the right to speak in meetings and to vote.

  She loved the town, and she loved her father. She loved Vina and Wattie, and she loved the Reverend “Big Bear” Price when Wattie married him. She loved Wattie’s babies when they came. Everything she loved loved her right back. It was a good life. Her father told her by example that it was good, and filling, and enough. She believed him.

  She believes him until the day she comes home from Garden Club early with the beginnings of a sick headache. She goes back to her father’s office to tell him she will nap until supper. The door is open, and she sees. To see, in this case, is to unbelieve.

  She understands what is happening. Of course she does. Birchville is a small town, a country town, full of dogs and horses and barn cats. The Partridges keep goats, and Birchie herself has chickens and a strutting banty rooster. She has seen animals stacked this way, their eyebrowless faces blank, muzzles incapable of grimaces or smiles. Animal faces stay passive, strangely disinterested even when they are making other animals.

  This is what
Vina’s face looks like now. Vina, bent over her father’s desk, is all animal. Only animal, because Vina is not inside this body. The mouth is slack. The eyes point without seeing. Vina’s cheek is squashed against the wood, and her face slides back and forth on it, squelching her features into shapes that are only shapes and not expressions. She is rocked on her cheek by the thrusting of the body behind her.

  It is perversion at its most primal, because Vina is the only mother she has ever known. This man, her father, still has his human face on, concentrating. His face seems separate from his body as it attends to the animal business of its pumping. She has seen this face when he’s balancing his ledgers, calculating, straining toward conclusion.

  She backs away, but a noise comes soft out of her throat. Vina, gone from the room, the house, the planet, does not react at all, but her father sees her. His face is all shock now, but his body, engaged, keeps pumping, once, twice. She flees before his shocked human face can make his body stop.

  She runs up the hall and into the kitchen, where a pot of lady peas are slow-bubbling, glistening with bacon fat. Vina made this. It is meant to feed them once the horror in her father’s study is completed and Vina can go home. She runs to the dining room. Ethan’s portrait is on the floor, leaned against the wall. His nail has fallen, and her father is supposed to be rehanging the portrait, now, while she is at Garden Club. He is not. He is attending to other matters.

  Her father is still back in his office, but his portrait’s eyes follow her as she walks in distraught circles, twice around the table. She goes to the parlor, and the painted eyes follow her there, sterner than his real gaze on her has ever, ever been. Then she hears his footsteps, leaving his office. He is in the hall. She runs fast up the stairs, slamming the door to her room with a loud, announcing bang. He does not follow.

  She paces through her room, into the turret. She sits at the window seat, and her body cannot sit. She paces back and forth, and she can hardly stand to be inside her body. In every other moment, Vina has a human face. A face that looks on her with love. What Emily saw was worse than seeing Bill Palmer’s she-goat, blank-faced and resigned. Worse than her own hurtful rooster, who hops on any hen that takes his fancy. A horror happens, secret, in her house.

  She goes into the turret and sits again, then immediately rises to throw up in the white ceramic bowl in the shelving. Downstairs, Vina’s skirts have rustled back into place. Vina will be stirring the peas, counting eggs for cornbread.

  She thinks of Wattie in her own home with Big Bear and their newest small, fat baby. And now? Now that she has seen, she sees. She sees how it is written in the way her body matches her friend’s. How long has this been happening, under her roof? Her good Birch brain, well acquainted with sums and figures, is taking bad account here. Wattie is twenty-nine.

  As Emily stands in her room, the sun races across the sky. The cornbread is out of the oven now. She can smell it, but for Emily no time has passed. How is Vina already ringing the brass bell on the porch that means supper is served? How is Vina already headed home to her own husband? How is it that the sun is nearly down?

  Someone must stop her father. Someone must tell him that he must not do this thing. She cannot think who. Not the good white men of the town who run their businesses inside her father’s buildings, work in his mill, come to him for loans when their children are sick or the weevils eat up half their cash crop. The police all tip their hats when he passes. The deacons approached her father not a week ago to ask for money for a new organ. They watched him write a check for the whole sum.

  Not the good black men of Redemption who drink from the colored fountains and call Ellis “sir.” If one of them took a white woman to his bed, there would be strange fruit hanging in the trees outside town.

  Can she go to the women, then? The wives. What do they know? They likely do this thing facing their husbands, smiling, making their human babies eye to eye, hands clasped, the way that Wattie has with Big Bear. Wattie has told her in secret; it is a lovely thing, what happens in the marriage bed. It is not the same as what she saw.

  No man here has any power to stop him, much less any woman, any child of any shade.

  Vina herself cannot make this stop. Has not been able to stop it for longer than Wattie has been alive. Vina’s husband lost his leg to gangrene. This job saved her husband’s life, paid for his surgery and medications, fed her babies, kept a roof over their heads. If Vina tells, who will believe her? If the Birches turn her out, who in Birchville will take her? Vina has no voice.

  The only equal whom Ellis Birch acknowledges is hiding in the tower, throwing up. His daughter owns the only voice that he might hear.

  She does not remember going down the stairs, but more time has passed without her. Her father has eaten, and his empty dishes tell a story: His appetite is fine. Her own plate is empty and pristine. The lady peas and collards wait in covered dishes for her. The cornbread is swaddled in a napkin to keep warm.

  Her father has rehung Ethan’s portrait. The hammer and a small tin of nails sit on the close side of the table. In the morning Vina will find them and carry them back to the tool hutch under the back porch. Emily wonders if Vina will do this chore before or after she is raped again.

  Her father sits in his comfy chair in the parlor, having his port. His back is to her, his real eyes turned away. His painted eyes watch her, unreceptive.

  “Well, there you are,” her daddy says. “Did you fall asleep?”

  “No,” she says, because she has to talk to him. There is no one else. “I was being sick from what I saw.”

  “Well, of course,” her father says, sympathetic, calm. “It’s not a sight or a subject for ladies. Don’t think about it. Go on and have your supper.”

  Her obedient feet walk to the table, but she cannot imagine putting lady peas in her mouth. They smell like sulfur laced with rancid fat. She removes the lid from the collards, and they gleam with slime in her ruined eyes.

  “You have to stop,” she tells the collards.

  These are all the words she has, but he has more. They come to her from very far away, and the sky is dark, though she cannot remember when the sun went down. Maybe it didn’t. Maybe it is still afternoon and the sun has gone black, a testament to how the world has turned to ruin. Yet it is the same. Nothing has changed except her way of seeing, the image shifting, showing her a secret, second father. She sees there is a secret, second town, too, always present, alive inside the lines of the town she sees. The town she loves.

  Maybe this darkness came to eat her eyes for seeing. She wishes it would. She wishes it would shroud her ears, too, stop them with soot so she cannot hear her daddy telling her in a wash of calm, cool words that men have needs that Emily will never understand. No lady truly can, and that’s all right. That’s only proper. He tells her not to worry about Vina. Vina is not like her. Vina, he says, doesn’t mind.

  He is saying Vina is an animal. He is telling Emily that the mother of her heart is always, every moment, nothing more than that blank thing she saw splayed across his desk. She knows better. Her father evicts Vina from her body when he makes her body a bad place to be. He is killing Vina in those minutes, and he believes he has this right. Emily Birch is now deep inside the Second South. Her family helped make it, and her father has maintained it. He is it, and she is him.

  “You have to stop,” she says, because no one else in town will tell him. “You have to stop. You have to stop.” They are the only words she has.

  “All right, sweetheart. Not to worry. Have your supper,” her father tells her, and he is closing the conversation. He turns back around. He sips his port. “There’s lemon pie for after, in the icebox.”

  He will not stop, and no one can help. Not one soul. She knows because she is married to the town. She and the town share this powerful father, who has made both of them in his image.

  Emily stands by the table, looking at the hammer, and she says it one last time. “You will stop.”

/>   “Darlin’, we are not going to discuss this,” her father says, getting impatient. “Trust me. They aren’t like you. They don’t mind it.”

  They. Not Vina’s name, or even the dignity of the singular pronoun to make her a person. Emily knows that “they” is niggers, though this is not a word he says. Birches say “colored,” because they are not trash, like Macks or Beckworths. They are better. She herself was too good to waste on Carter Mack, who made her laugh. Too good to be thrown away on Floyd Briggs, who asked for her hand in a poem so lovely it made her heart jump in her body.

  She chose instead to be a worthy daughter to this man, and he is a horror. Her heart swells with an awful love for him. He is full of decency and sweet tea and Jesus, and he is a good place to live if you are white and well-to-do and Baptist and if you never let the people who are not these things be human. He will not stop hurting Vina, he will keep believing Birches are better than and too good for.

  Her hand takes up the hammer, and she says it one last time—You will stop—despairing, because he will not stop and she will not allow it to continue. Her hand rises behind him, and he says, his voice now stern, It is not fit to discuss this any further. It is done, and he is the town, and he is the times, and he is right: It’s done. The hammer has already come down, and the crush and shudder felt the same as stepping on the white seashells he imported for their driveway.

  She always knew she was this strong, because he told her so. She never knew she was a horror, but this means that she is still her father’s daughter.

  No one can accuse me of being too good for Floyd, now, she thinks, and hears herself laughing. The sound is sick and mirthless.

  She sits in his vacated chair with the bloody hammer in her lap and drinks the port and waits for morning. Time, which moved so fast before, has paused. In a thousand years, when the sun rises, Vina will come, and see, and put the nails away. The police will take the hammer. She will be dragged out, a chubby old maid found beside her father’s cooling body. She finds herself wondering what story will grow out of it. Nothing pretty, and is this her family legacy? They will drag her off to squander her next thirty years the way her father has squandered her first thirty. The town, the world, will go on as he made it. It is not the town she wants to make.