The Bird Sisters

by Rebecca Rasmussen

  Because Twiss didn’t understand that then, the morning Cousin Bettie was due to arrive care of the postman, who ferried people from town to the country for extra pocket money, she ran back and forth between the house and the barn as if the distance had already narrowed.

  “Race me!” she kept saying to Milly, who finally gave in and ran after her. The day was warm enough to go barefoot, but the mud puddles between the house and the barn were still cold enough to make them lose feeling in their toes.

  “Stop dragging your sister around!” their mother called to Twiss from the front porch.

  Twiss stuck her tongue out and ran toward the barn.

  “I saw that!” their mother said. “Come back here and apologize!”

  Milly ran after Twiss. When she reached the barn, she collapsed against the side of it, panting like the strays that came to the back door for scraps of food.

  “How do you have the energy to love her and hate her so much?” she said to Twiss.

  “I never said I loved her.”

  “Then why’d you want her to come out here?”

  “For him,” Twiss said.

  Milly looked at her mother, who’d dragged the wash bucket onto the porch and was scrubbing her father’s work clothes against the washboard, working at the milk stains with a bar of homemade lye soap. “You should be nicer to her,” she said to Twiss.

  “She should be nicer to me,” Twiss said, and ran around the meadow again, stopping now and then to look at the end of the driveway.

  Cousin Bettie was coming all the way from Deadwater, a fishing outpost in northern Minnesota. To make ends meet, her father had two jobs: during the week he was a fisherman and on the weekends a taxidermist. For Christmas, he’d sent them a buck’s head, which their mother had put in the attic. That morning, she dragged it down the stairs and hung it on the wall in Milly and Twiss’s room to make their cousin feel more at home.

  To get to Spring Green, Cousin Bettie had to cross a bog, a prairie, and the Mississippi River. She was traveling alone because her family couldn’t afford to go with her and their family couldn’t afford to come and get her. In her letter, she said she’d be the one standing at the end of the driveway at eleven o’clock wearing black rubber hip boots.

  “What is a bog exactly?” Twiss asked Milly between races.

  “A swamp,” Milly said.

  “Then why don’t they call it that?”

  While Milly thought about the answer, Twiss took off running toward the barn.

  “You tricked me!” Milly said, starting after her.

  “You’re easy to trick!” Twiss called back.

  By the time the mail truck dropped their cousin at the end of the driveway with a paper bag for a suitcase and an armful of mail, Milly and Twiss were in the middle of a new contest down by the pond; whoever caught the least number of frogs had to wash and dry the dishes that evening. They’d decided to catch as many frogs as they could so they wouldn’t end up on their supper plates again, although they were supposed to be clearing algae from the water so the fish didn’t get sick again. Last summer, they couldn’t swim without running into a floater.

  Their mother walked out to the end of the driveway to meet Cousin Bettie, who was wearing hip boots like she’d promised. She was taller than they thought she’d be; she had to stoop to hug their mother, who wasn’t short. The boots, which came up to the middle of her thighs, came up to their mother’s waist. When Cousin Bettie took them off, they grazed the tops of the stinkweeds at the side of the driveway.

  After a while, their mother and cousin let go of each other. Their mother carried the paper bag and Cousin Bettie carried her boots. The two of them walked toward the pond.

  “She probably has Amazon blood in her!” Twiss said.

  “She can probably hear you,” Milly said.

  When Cousin Bettie and their mother passed the pile of sand, which was supposed to have become a beach but had sat all spring collecting ground bees instead, Milly stopped pretending to look for frogs, but Twiss kept going, croaking and hopping after them.

  “Put those frogs back this minute!” their mother said to Twiss, when she and Cousin Bettie were within shouting distance. “You’re supposed to be raking muck off that water.”

  When they got closer and she saw the mud stains on Twiss’s coveralls, their mother added, “Stop making work for me!”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Twiss said, saluting.

  “This is your cousin Bettie,” their mother said. “She’s got weak lungs, so don’t run her around. If I even think you’re up to something,” she said, raising her eyebrows to Twiss, “I’ll make you breathe out of a straw for a week and see how you like it.”

  “I have asthma,” Cousin Bettie said.

  “And I have a line of linens to take in, not to mention the tractor and the wheelbarrow. If it were up to your father, he’d let everything rust.”

  “The wheelbarrow’s already rusty,” Twiss said.

  “Still,” their mother said. “He ought to come out of that barn and help me.”

  “I’ll help you, Aunt Margaret.”

  “I won’t have you dragging a wheelbarrow around. We can’t afford a trip to the general store, let alone the hospital. But I appreciate the offer. You won’t hear that from this one,” she said, motioning to Twiss. “You just tell me if she starts bothering you.”

  “I’m sure I’ll be fine, Aunt Margaret,” their cousin said.

  “Just say the word,” their mother said, and yanked a frog out of Twiss’s pocket before handing Cousin Bettie the paper bag and heading into the house, leaving the three girls alone.

  Milly and Twiss stared at their cousin, who was as thin and pale as the white asparagus growing in the vegetable garden. As unappealing, too. Except for the shock of red under her eyes and on top of her head, Cousin Bettie looked like the specimens Mr. Stewart preserved in formaldehyde at school. Dearly departed, or not so dearly.

  “You look dead,” Twiss said.

  “Tired,” Milly corrected.

  “I am,” Cousin Bettie said.

  “Which?” Twiss said.

  Cousin Bettie yawned. “Both, I guess.”

  Rarely did Milly and Twiss meet someone who could handle Twiss in full force without bursting into tears. The last girl they’d invited out to the farm walked all the way back to town after Twiss sprayed her with a hose and called her a water buffalo.

  “You want to catch frogs with us?” Milly said.

  “I have a better idea,” Cousin Bettie said, and sat down to take off her shoes. On the outer edges of each big toe were scaly, protruding bunions. More striking than the bunions were the blood blisters that covered her heels.

  “They’re as big as silver dollars,” Twiss said.

  “Too bad they’re not worth that much,” their cousin said.

  Beneath the blisters, the skin was purple. Cousin Bettie opened her paper bag and pulled out a sewing needle, which she’d stuck into a wedge of stale bread. She pushed the needle into the first blister until blood oozed out, and then she moved on to the other one. After the blood came white pus, then clear liquid, and then a look of relief.

  “I’ve already popped them twice today,” she said.

  Milly turned away, but Twiss kept watching.

  “I wish I had a blister,” she said.

  “Walk around in these for a while,” their cousin said, handing over her shoes. “But you’ll have to get your own needle. This one only takes my blood.”

  Twiss put on their cousin’s shoes, the soles of which had been reinforced with squares of corrugated cardboard, which had been reinforced with construction paper and cushioned with brown felt. “What’s it like to be eighteen?”

  “Everyone gets married,” Cousin Bettie said.

  Twiss stood on her tiptoes. “Why aren’t you?”

  Cousin Bettie squeezed more liquid out of her blisters. After she peeled off the dead skin and tossed it into the grass, she wiped her hands on her housedress
and stood up.

  “What’s it like to be so nosy?”

  She didn’t need to tell Twiss to follow her when she started walking toward the sandpile on the other side of the pond. Twiss adapted her gait to match Cousin Bettie’s, which made her look like she was trotting. The two of them kept bumping into each other.

  “Stop trying to hold my hand,” Cousin Bettie said.

  “I’m not,” Twiss said.

  A few more steps and they looked like they’d been walking along the bank together all their lives. When Bettie tossed a stick into the water, so did Twiss. When Bettie wiped sweat from her forehead, so did Twiss. It was as if their cousin had cast a spell on her.

  Milly stayed with the hip boots, the dead skin, and the paper bag. She couldn’t explain why the sight of Twiss and her cousin made her feel suddenly so alone, so useless. Twiss had left her behind plenty of times when she wanted to do something that Milly didn’t want to do.

  But she’d always looked back at Milly for encouragement, and Milly had always given it to her.

  “Aren’t you coming?” Cousin Bettie said to Milly.

  “Yeah, aren’t you?” Twiss echoed.

  The three of them walked to the sandpile, Cousin Bettie and Twiss weaving in and out of the murky water and Milly along the bank. Milly could already hear the hum of the bees, which surged, like her pulse, as they got closer to the other side of the pond. Since her father had paid a man to dump it beside the pond, Milly and Twiss had avoided the pile because the last summer a bee stung Twiss on her tongue.

  When the three girls arrived at the sandpile, Cousin Bettie rolled her sleeves up to her elbows. “Let’s see who can stick their hands in.”

  “That’s dangerous,” Milly said.

  “People only get stung when they think things like that.”

  “There’s no honey,” Twiss said. “What’s the point?”

  Cousin Bettie walked over to the pile. “There isn’t one.”

  Milly and Twiss watched as their cousin pushed her pale hands into the even paler sand. The bees came out in a giant black-and-yellow swarm, organized and armylike, and landed on their cousin’s hair and dress, her face and neck, accumulating in such quantities that she began to disappear. She didn’t flinch when a bee landed on her eyelid or when one landed on her nose. She simply closed her eyes and breathed out of her mouth, a maneuver that caused both Milly and Twiss to cover theirs. They’d heard of bee charmers, but it didn’t look like Cousin Bettie was charming the bees. It looked like they were charming her.

  “It’s like being God for a minute,” their cousin said.

  Milly took a step back. Unlike Twiss, when they went to church, Milly paid attention. Miracles, Father Rice had cautioned them when he was still the priest, were contrary to the laws of nature, and whatever was contrary to nature came at a price.

  “Your chicken may lay two eggs today,” he said. “But what happens tomorrow?”

  When Cousin Bettie pulled her arms out of the sand, bees occupied every inch of skin between her wrists and her elbows. Milly couldn’t tell where the bees ended and the sleeves of Bettie’s dress began. When Bettie backed away from the sandpile, Twiss stepped forward. She was still wearing their cousin’s shoes, which were too large to cause any blistering, but had left marks on her toes where the felt ended and the cardboard began.

  Milly took another step back, even though the bees had returned to the sandpile and her cousin’s skin had remained intact.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” Cousin Bettie said.

  “I’m not looking at you,” Milly said, because she couldn’t find a polite way to explain what she’d seen: a person so untouched by fear she was certain something terrible had happened to Cousin Bettie, or would. What Milly didn’t know then was that whatever happened to Bettie would, in its own way, happen to her, too.

  Milly looked at her mother, who was folding linens on the porch, and then at the front door of the barn, which her father had shut up despite the weather vane not spinning and the sky being perfectly clear. She hadn’t seen her father since he took Rust-O-Lonia and the can of nails from its resting place beneath the oak tree that morning.

  Cousin Bettie rolled down her sleeves, waving away the last bee and encouraging it to fly back to the sandpile. Out of the hundreds, not a single one had stung her.

  “I guess I win,” she said, moving closer to Milly to see what she was staring at now instead of staring at her. “By default, I mean. Since I was the only one playing.”

  Milly kept her eyes on the barn, trying to discern from the slivers of light between the wood slats what the woman at the town fair had discerned from a cup of tea leaves last summer. After Milly paid her nickel, she’d expected the woman to see a butterfly or a daisy, good fortune or love. But when it was her turn, the woman saw a raised finger: a warning.

  “You’ll fall in love like the rest of us,” her mother had said, after the woman explained Milly’s future. “It’s what happens after that you have to worry about.”

  “Listen to your mother,” the woman with the tea leaves said.

  Milly’s mother opened her change purse. “I’ll pay you a nickel to say that to my other daughter. She’s the one who deserves a warning.”

  Milly turned away from the barn, wondering what it would be like to be able to see into the future, wondering if she already could. Normally, she’d have asked Twiss her opinion, but Twiss didn’t look like she could be deterred from her courtship efforts. It didn’t take a woman with a cup of tea leaves to see that her sister was enamored.

  “You’re my hero,” Twiss said to Cousin Bettie. She handed over their cousin’s shoes as if they were made of glass. “How did you do that?”

  Cousin Bettie—Bett she liked to be called—simply handed them back.

  7

  wiss had paused in the meadow long enough that she couldn’t remember where she’d intended to go. That happened often these days, remembering and forgetting. She’d get stuck somewhere old and have to wander around to find her mental footing again. The synapses weren’t firing the way they used to. At first, she’d put a pitcher of milk into a cupboard or a clean plate into the refrigerator and remember a few minutes later. Now when she walked into a room looking for something and forgot what it was, instead of minutes later, hours later she’d lurch up from a chair and say My reading glasses! or The photo album! and then she’d be fooled into thinking her mind was intact until the next bout of chair lurching.

  If Milly had noticed, she’d had the kindness not to say anything. Twiss had always been able to count on her sister for that. You better be using that walker, she thought, when Milly passed by the front windows, but she knew Milly wasn’t. However gracefully her sister had aged—Milly’s beauty hadn’t been chiseled down to jutting cheekbones and withered lips, gizzards, fur—a part of her refused to admit she was old. We’re old, she’d say, but her voice was caught between statement and question. What Milly didn’t realize was that the bariatric walker wouldn’t indict her any more than the floral print scarf she wore when they went driving or the housedresses with the removable lace collars, which she never removed.

  “Guess what I am?” she’d said to Twiss, modeling a new scarf one day.

  “Modern?” Twiss said.

  When Twiss was feeling particularly obnoxious, she’d lumber around the living room with the walker, which was too wide to fit through the doorways. Neither Milly nor Twiss mentioned the fact that the price they’d paid for those tennis ball gliders in the medical equipment department could have bought them a car full of them in the sporting goods department. Twiss didn’t know if it pleased her or displeased her that the people who designed walkers weren’t able to come up with anything more advanced.

  “We could mow a field with this thing,” she’d say to Milly.

  “If you mowed anymore,” Milly would say.

  Until last year, Twiss had made a point of mowing their property herself. Once a week, she’d ride the trac
tor around trying to look more defiant than she actually felt. The truth was, the tractor scared her with all its rotating blades and internal rumblings. In her lifetime, a handful of Spring Green farmers had lost their lives to steel blades. The less fortunate ones ended up in closed coffins because even with the best makeup the undertaker couldn’t piece together a man out of the materials. Twiss didn’t want to know what he’d do with a woman, so she gave in to Milly’s ultimatum: either they let the grass grow like indecent people or pay someone to cut it for them.

  “You still don’t know me very well, do you?” she’d said to Milly.

  “Why do you think I gave you one choice?” Milly said.

  “You didn’t. You gave me two.”

  “The chance to be indecent canceled out the other one.”

  “You sound like you should be sipping Jell-O from a straw,” Twiss said.

  “You love to be indecent,” Milly said. “I love uncut grass.”

  But Twiss remembered the opposite. She remembered switchgrass clipped down to the earth, great upward sweeps of black field birds. She remembered Asa.

  8

  he week Bett came down from Deadwater, Asa came to mow their property for the first of many times that summer. Asa’s father, Mr. Peterson, sent him over on the John Deere, which said PROPERTY OF THE SPRING GREEN GOLF COURSE. Before the Accident, Mr. Peterson had joked about putting Twiss’s father to work on his farm and must have felt sorry when his joke became a reality. Asa didn’t mow anyone else’s property for free.

  That first Saturday morning, Twiss’s father sent Milly out to Asa with a glass of lemonade. He vowed to bring home butter from the dairy by the next Saturday, so Milly could bake Asa something sweet. “One sugar cookie and he’ll be hooked,” her father said, as if he’d transferred his hopes of a better life to her. He and Twiss stood at the door of the barn and watched Milly walk out there, hand Asa the glass of lemonade shyly, and turn around.

  “It wouldn’t hurt you to linger,” their father said when Milly returned to the barn. “You’re about the right age now.”