The Bird Sisters

by Rebecca Rasmussen

  “Do you want to do it, or do you want me to this time?” Milly said, wondering if she had the energy or the strength of heart to dig another hole. She used to perform elaborate ceremonies for the fallen birds—she’d say prayers, sing songs, and recite poems about avian cousins that had not yet fallen, although the cruelty of the latter homage had recently occurred to her and the poetry had stopped.

  “I’ll do it,” Twiss said. “Do you want me to dig a hole for you, too?”

  “We’re too old for that to be funny,” Milly said.

  “Are we?” Twiss said, rolling up the sleeves of her beige coveralls.

  She’d gotten up from the table and was leaning against the door that led to the dining room. When they were girls, the two would stand against the molding to record their heights. The pencil marks began when Milly was six and Twiss was four, etching their way upward like rungs of a ladder. Halfway up the molding, Twiss had figured out how to make herself taller than Milly. She’d put coasters in the heels of her shoes.

  “Look at that!” she’d crow. “I grew two whole inches overnight!”

  The marks stopped at sixteen and fourteen, even though Milly and Twiss had continued to grow, sometimes legitimately, sometimes not.

  “Look how tall I used to be,” Twiss said.

  “You were never that tall,” Milly said, standing up to emphasize her point. She smoothed the front of her green housedress. After all these years, and the coming and going of the women’s liberation movement, she still wouldn’t wear slacks.

  Twiss stood on her tiptoes. “I might have been.”

  Milly washed the breakfast dishes and Twiss dried them. Together, as they did when they were girls, they carried their mother’s bridal tea set to the sideboard in the dining room. The poor light made the embossed finials look less regal than they did in the kitchen.

  Twiss traced the rim of a teacup. “Remember what she used to say?”

  Milly thought of the old lilac bush beside the barn, the little square window sealed shut behind it. “I remember.”

  The two sisters lingered in front of the sideboard, as if waiting for their mother to appear and caution them, before they took up their lists and went about their chores.

  Bone china is like your heart. If it breaks, it can’t be fixed.

  Since her hip replacement Milly kept mostly to the house. Whenever she sensed Twiss watching her—especially on the days she used a stepladder to dust the top of the bookshelves and the hutch—she’d make a joke to ease her sister’s concern.

  “I’ll be fine,” she’d say, knocking on her hip. “I’ve got more titanium than a rocket.”

  “But you don’t have a launcher.”

  “Who says?”

  “Gravity.”

  Twiss liked to have the last word and, because this seemed a small concession, Milly allowed her to. She’d direct her attention to an empty corner of the room, as though she needed privacy to consider her sister’s remarks, when really she’d be thinking about the feel of the duster in her hand, the snow-white feathers.

  “I’ll be in the barn then,” Twiss would say, and leave her to her thoughts.

  This morning, as she dusted the bookshelves, the rows that mingled culinary delights with field identification and bird anatomy, Milly stopped when she came to The Curious Book of Birds. Out of instinct or perhaps habit (Milly knew the words by heart), she took the book off the shelf to read the inscription on the worn title page:

  For Milly,

  Because.

  “Horseshit!” Twiss had called the book after she’d fished it out of the mailbox years ago, but Milly had been inclined to keep it.

  “For the illustrations,” she’d said. “Not for the history.”

  But history was exactly what Milly was interested in this morning: the time before she loved birds, when the wing beat of a hummingbird seemed as ordinary as the rustle of leaves, the sound of rain falling on a gravel road. Before Cousin Bettie came to visit for the summer, when Milly was sixteen and Twiss was fourteen, birds were background noise: something you heard but didn’t listen to. By the next summer, Milly could tell you which bird the pip-pip-pip and the pup-up-up belonged to, and she could tell you why.

  When Milly opened the bird book, its spine cracked the way hers did when she bent over too quickly. Like her face, the pages had yellowed around the edges. They smelled sweet and sour and tingled the tips of her fingers when she touched them. The cover had buckled outward over the summers and inward over the winters, which had made peaks and valleys out of it, difficult topography. Milly turned to chapter one: a story about a woodpecker doomed by her disobedience never to quench her thirst in lakes or rivers, brooks or fountains. As punishment for her refusal to help build the water basins of the world, the Lord decided the woodpecker would spend her days pecking at dusty wood. Her voice would be heard only when a storm was approaching and her thirst would be quenched only when it arrived, and so the woodpecker spent her life forever looking at the sky, waiting for the first drops to fall.

  Milly looked out the window at the blue above and Twiss below; she was sitting on the porch pulling on the same muck boots she used to pull on when she was a girl and the fields were wet, though today the fields were dry. All summer they’d waited for rain and all summer it hadn’t come. For months the fans had been stirring up dust, which clung to tabletops and lamp shades and made the house feel weighty even though the specks were weightless. Milly thought about what the house used to look like (strikingly similar to its current state), then she thought about what it could have looked like if their lives had gone one way instead of the other. The book, which had arrived more than half a century ago wrapped in blue paper, was a gift, though on a day like today it was difficult to see it that way.

  When Milly heard the chime of church bells, she looked down at the book curiously, as if the sound had come from it instead of from the country chapel up on Lilly Road. The chapel had been closed after a tornado tore off the roof and dropped it back down into the river, but it was still used for weddings occasionally—mostly couples from Minneapolis or Chicago who were charmed by the overgrowth of honeysuckle and romanced by ruins. No one from Spring Green had been married there since she was a girl. A young woman. Young.

  When the sound of the bells faded and then disappeared altogether, Milly was left with the image of her childhood love climbing onto the John Deere, blades of freshly cut grass stuck to the back of his neck, lines of sweat streaking his work shirt like rain.

  “Asa,” she said, willing him to spring forth from the pages.

  Her will was met with the facts of history, which she blamed the mother for dredging up this morning. Only a person without children. A person without children …

  The truth was that the past and the present, hope and actuality, had been rubbing up against each other, and against Milly, before the arrival of the minivan. Instead of time continuing forward as it typically did, lately time had begun leaping about as it pleased, unsettling all that had been settled years ago. When Milly stood in the backyard, for instance, some days she saw a stump where the oak tree used to be. Other days she saw the oak tree itself, even though they’d paid a man from Wilton to cut it down twenty years ago now.

  This morning, Milly watched gold light work its way across the parlor floor and was transported to the last pew of the Lilly chapel, where dust motes swirled in the air and the air smelled of incense and damp feet. Death, she thought, even though she felt all right.

  On one side of her was Twiss, on the other her mother.

  Milly closed her eyes, hoping that when she opened them she’d be back in the living room again with the more singular smell of age, which she shared with the books and the upholstery, to affront her senses. She didn’t know if she could bear to see herself young again. Full of possibilities. Happy as the corn was sweet.

  Despite her hoping (or to spite it?), when Milly opened her eyes, she found that she was still sitting between Twiss and her mother in
Lilly chapel, which she used to do every Sunday until she was sixteen—that is, until Cousin Bettie came to visit for the summer and took her place in the pew. When Milly looked at her legs, she saw patches of silky hair where waves of loose skin used to be. Peeking out from the patches was the old kidney bean scar on her left knee, except that it wasn’t faded anymore; instead of white, the scar was red.

  2

  ow would you like to be stuck with someone like Adam?” Twiss said to her, frowning at the depiction of the Garden of Eden in the stained-glass window above their pew. “I’d have eaten that apple too. Just to get away from him.”

  Father Rice was standing behind the pulpit, staring at Jesus’s right arm, which he claimed had come unhinged from the cross the same way President Truman had from the heart of the country. It was a warm spring morning in early May, the kind that led to afternoon picnics, plates of baked chicken and wax beans. The crocuses had given way to the tulips, which surrounded the chapel like a yellow collar. The Sewing Society had donated the bulbs even though all of the members (except Milly’s mother) went to the church in town, where silver dollars came out of people’s pockets instead of lint.

  “Why do you think they’re all yellow?” her mother said about the tulips. “It’s no coincidence scientists just discovered the color puts people in a state.”

  Even though her mother disliked the other members of the Sewing Society, she insisted on going to all their functions. When Milly asked her why, her mother said, “I can’t have them thinking they’re better than me. I’m the one who’s been to Europe!”

  “I thought you went to France,” Twiss said.

  “That’s part of Europe,” Milly said.

  “Why is it called the Sewing Society if you never sew?” Twiss said.

  “Shhh,” their mother said.

  On this particular spring morning, just as he did every Sunday after the Apostles’ Creed and before the Sanctus, Father Rice walked up and down the row of pews accepting contributions: a box of medicinal soap flakes, a jar of preserves that had sat too long in someone’s cellar, an egg from a nearby coop. By the time he got to the last pew, the basket brimmed with tarnished silverware, stained tablecloths, and secondhand clothing that had turned into third- and fourth-hand rags. Father Rice always gave thanks, but he gave special thanks when people donated something useful. That’s why, when their own father had spent the last of the week’s money again, and all that sat in the pantry was a lonely tin of molasses, Milly and Twiss decided to fish for their donation. Despite the shame it caused their mother, when it was their turn, Twiss placed a string of small-mouth bass into the basket.

  “I prayed for their souls,” Milly said.

  “Fish don’t have souls,” Twiss said.

  “Sure they do,” Father Rice said, licking his lips. “When you cook them with cornstarch, they melt in your mouth.”

  Their mother wagged her index finger at Twiss. She stared at her the way she stared at their front door whenever they came home. Though she’d had fourteen years to become accustomed to Twiss’s wide brown eyes and cropped black hair, the line of freckles that fanned out across her nose, she always seemed slightly surprised by Twiss, like she didn’t believe Twiss truly belonged to her, or should.

  Twiss tugged at the hem of her dress. “Why can’t I be playing golf?”

  “Because this family can only afford one person who doesn’t care about his soul,” their mother said.

  “He prays for holes in one,” Twiss said.

  “That’s the only thing your father prays for.”

  If in marriages disagreements were like roots, their mother and father’s were like the roots of the oak tree in the backyard that had grown into the house instead of away from it, cracking the foundation and setting the floors aslant. When Milly and Twiss placed a marble on one side of the front parlor, it would roll to the other.

  “Maybe he’s buying you a birthday present right now,” Milly said.

  “I refuse to have another birthday,” their mother said.

  “Because you’re old?” Twiss said.

  “Because I’m tired,” their mother said.

  Father Rice set the collection basket next to the pulpit and signaled Mrs. Bettle, who wasn’t technically a Mrs. since she lived with a parrot instead of a man, to play the organ. Bang went her fingers on the keys. Thunk went her feet on the pedals. Then came the singing, which was even less lovely than her playing.

  Holy, holy, holy Lord

  God of power and might

  Heaven and earth are full of your glory

  Hosanna in the highest.

  Hosanna in the highest.

  “You can be sure the Society’s still congratulating themselves about getting rid of the Beetle,” their mother said, adjusting her hat so it sat on the side of her head. She tried her very best to be fashionable. In the general store, she’d study the ladies’ magazines to see what the latest styles were. Always, she lacked the proper materials to achieve accomplished mimicry; she’d have to make a dress out of cotton when the pattern called for silk. Gray thread when it called for red. But however patched together she looked, their mother possessed a certain kind of power, a way of posturing that didn’t allow people to feel sorry for her.

  “Who donates a person?” she said. “Now they’ve got a music student from the divinity school up in Wausau. They say the boy sings like an angel.”

  When the Sanctus was over, Father Rice raised his hand to quiet everyone. This was the part of mass where he usually asked everyone to bow their heads and kneel, but today he asked everyone to keep their heads level and stay in their seats.

  “Wood rails aren’t very gracious hosts,” he said. “I don’t know why I didn’t think about that before. So many of you have arthritis. Rheumatism.”

  “Won’t the Lord mind?” someone said.

  “What kind of Lord would He be if He did?” Father Rice said.

  “The Lord.”

  Father Rice unzipped his black robe, revealing a blazer and pants the color of cream instead of his usual red union suit. He discarded his slippers for a pair of shiny penny loafers, with even shinier pennies placed at the toes. All the years he’d been a priest, Father Rice had delivered mass in those dingy slippers, which everyone could smell despite the incense burning.

  “How many years have we waited for a new steeple?” Father Rice said. He stepped out from behind the pulpit with a suitcase in one hand and a straw hat in the other. “How many years have we waited for the Lord to repair what He destroyed with lightning?”

  “Twenty years?” someone called out.

  “Forty-five years!” Father Rice said. He picked up his suitcase and walked down the center aisle to the holy-water font, where he set his Bible and watched it sink to the bottom.

  “I think it’s safe to say He’s not coming.”

  “What are we supposed to do?” someone called.

  “Take what’s owed to you,” Father Rice said. “I, for one, have always wanted to drink a margarita and sleep with a Mexican woman.”

  A thunk from Mrs. Bettle. A wail from the organ.

  Twiss leaned forward. Milly leaned back.

  “Cover your ears, girls,” their mother said.

  An old country woman in an even older country dress pushed her way past the people in her pew to the center aisle. “What if I refuse to live in a godless world?”

  “Then I’m afraid you’ll have to shoot yourself, my dear,” Father Rice said in the kindest possible voice. “Either God doesn’t exist or He’s too busy to do it Himself.”

  The woman fainted, and all of the parishioners began to scramble around her, except Milly and Twiss, who minded their mother and stayed put in the last pew while she went forth to offer the woman a piece of chocolate because she believed it could cure any ailment.

  At the door, Father Rice looked back at the people whose morality he’d instructed for most of his life and theirs. He put the straw hat on, which he tipped in Milly and Twiss
’s direction. “Thanks for the fish,” he said and stepped out into the sunlight.

  “I’d sell my soul to the devil,” Twiss said to Milly on the walk home from church. “Just to see the look on that woman’s face again.”

  “You already sold it for a licorice rope,” Milly said.

  “Oh yeah,” Twiss said.

  Their mother had gone on to the Sewing Society’s annual luncheon to explain that not only had Father Rice abandoned them for Mexico, he’d also taken the Society’s donation—money to build a Sunday school classroom—with him to the tropics.

  Twiss had picked a tulip and was plucking the petals off one by one. There is a God. There isn’t a God. There is a God. They were halfway down the country road, alone except for the hum of crickets and the croak of a lone tree frog. According to the petals, there wasn’t a God.

  The two veered off Lilly Road into the wheat fields. Though no clouds were overhead, the air smelled of rain, earth. When they reached Mill Creek, they waded through it since the soles of their shoes were muddy and the water wasn’t. By the middle of the summer, the water would turn deep brown and become home to snakes and leeches, squiggly blue worms that would make Milly think of the map of the Amazon in the atlas. For now, though, the water was clear and swift moving. The gray stones at the bottom weren’t even covered with algae yet.

  “Margaritas must cost a lot of money,” Twiss said, letting the hem of her dress get wet. “Do you think he’s really going to Mexico?”

  “There’s only one place he can go,” Milly said, holding hers up.

  “You mean hell?” Twiss took off one of her shoes and sent it floating down the creek. “I think about saying stuff like that all the time. I bet you do too.”

  “I bet you get the belt if you lose that shoe.”

  “He wouldn’t belt me,” Twiss said.

  “But she would.”

  A moment later Twiss was standing on the bank of the creek with her shoes neatly placed on her feet. Water dripped from her dress onto the ground.