The Bird Sisters

by Rebecca Rasmussen

  Twiss and Bett walked to the edge of the sandbar. They began calling for Milly in a leisurely way at first. Neither of them wanted to appear to be gullible if Milly were playing a trick on them. They expected Milly to pop out of the water just like they had a few minutes before, especially since she was the best swimmer out of the three of them. When Milly didn’t answer them, they became more certain of themselves.

  “Milly!” they said. “Mmmmiiiilllleeee!”

  When Milly still didn’t answer, Bett jumped into the water.

  Twiss didn’t move. She was so stunned by the possibility that something bad was happening to Milly that, for the first time in her life, she couldn’t move. The idea of Milly drowning in the river made Twiss think of an angel falling from the sky; Milly had two pink birthmarks the size of dimes on her back, which always made Twiss think of wings.

  “Aren’t you coming?” Bett said from the middle of the river.

  When Twiss didn’t answer her, she yelled, “She’s your sister!”

  Bett didn’t have any siblings because she said her father had preserved what was dead for too long to be able to create life. When Bett was younger and had begged for one, her father gave her a marmot he’d stuffed for a man from Wyoming.

  “This is your brother, Christopher,” he’d said, placing the marmot on Bett’s pillow one night. “He doesn’t talk much, so you’ll have to pick up the slack there.”

  “You can love pretty much anything,” Bett had told Twiss.

  Usually, Twiss’s body would tell her what to do, and her mind would trail along behind her like a loyal farm dog. Her instincts would bring light and speed to whatever was dark and slow, so that her body could navigate the terrain that unfolded in front of her. This time, her thoughts kept edging out her instincts. There was the word “sister,” and there was Milly.

  Without Milly, her father’s No, I will nots! and her mother’s Yes, you wills! would seem hopeless instead of hopeful (Milly said that exclamation points meant they still cared). That was one of the benefits of having such a positive sister; together, they made one regular person.

  By the time Bett finally grabbed hold of Milly and pulled her to the surface, Twiss couldn’t hear herself saying Milly’s name, which made her wonder if she’d been saying it at all.

  Bett had draped Milly across her back like a shawl.

  That’s when Twiss remembered Bett’s asthma and her mother’s threat to make Twiss breathe out of a straw for a week if she played a part in rousing it. Something about visualizing her mother allowed Twiss’s body to take over once again. She pictured her mother with a hand on her hip, shaking her head. Stop doing whatever you’re doing! Don’t, don’t, don’t, which made Twiss want to do, do, do. As if by magic, her feet carried into the river. She followed Bett’s instructions and grabbed hold of Milly’s arms. Together, they dragged her onto the sandbar.

  “What happened to her?” Twiss said, after they’d laid her out on the warm sand.

  Milly’s bathing suit was torn. Her legs were scratched raw.

  “She isn’t breathing,” Bett said.

  Bett put her mouth over Milly’s—the way people did in the movies, except that no orchestral music swelled in the background and no stars fell from the sky. There was only the occasional low rattle from the sand crane perched on the beaver dam downriver and the unadorned expanse of blue above.

  Bett exhaled until a swampy breath leaped back at her, and Milly opened her lovely green eyes. In a croaky voice, quite unlike her usual melodious one, Milly said, “Am I dead?”

  “That depends,” Bett said. “Did you see a white light?”

  “I saw you,” Milly said.

  That night, the three of them sat in their bedroom in the quiet way they’d sat on the sandbar that afternoon while Milly got her breath and bearings back, which she was still doing and Twiss was still watching her do. Bett was sitting cross-legged on the rollaway cot between the beds combing out her tangled hair.

  “Two sisters in one day,” she said. “I should get a medal. One of those Bronze Stars.”

  “Those are for valor,” Twiss said.

  “I know,” Bett said, glancing at Milly, who’d pulled a thick wool blanket up to her chin, despite the fact that the evening air was so humid the walls were sweating. The buck’s head was also sweating; tiny yellow drops gathered like dew at his brow line.

  Milly wasn’t sick, but she wasn’t well, either. Even though Bett had pulled her from the river hours ago, she was still shaking. Her scratches had turned bright red, then purple, then black where the blood had dried. Twiss had dabbed them first with salve, then with the sprigs of cooling witch hazel she’d found at the edge of the woods.

  I’m sorry, her fingers said, but they wouldn’t say what for.

  “Truth,” Bett said to Milly. She tore a knot out of her hair with her comb and placed it on the pillow beside her. “What did it feel like to almost die?”

  “Consequence,” Milly said in a voice still not quite her own.

  “You just came back from the dead,” Bett said. “Are you sure?”

  “It’s a game,” Twiss said. “You don’t have to play.”

  “The dead,” Bett said.

  “Consequence,” Milly said again, this time with more certainty.

  Bett set down her comb. “You’re going to regret saying that.”

  9

  illy and Twiss still occupied their childhood bedroom. They still slept in their old twin beds, the ones with fleurs-de-lis carved into the headboards, Milly with a plywood board under her mattress and Twiss without. When their parents died, they’d entertained the idea of separating, but neither of them had wanted to sleep on the bed their parents had once shared or the one they didn’t. Besides, Milly had thought, there were worse things than sharing a room with Twiss, even if she did thrash around like a wild woman.

  The summer Bett came to visit, she called Twiss “the tiger” and Milly “the lamb.” Bett would throw her pillow at Twiss to get her to settle down. She’d throw her pillow at Milly to rile her up. “Are you even alive under there?”

  Milly would hand Bett’s pillow back as her reply.

  “Now if we could only get your sister to stop growling,” Bett would say. “I keep thinking she’s going to turn over and bite me.”

  “She only does that when she’s hungry.”

  Bett liked to get Milly to participate in her style of verbal banter, and whenever Milly did, Bett would congratulate her. “I knew it! No one can be that nice!”

  Milly didn’t see herself as being either nice or mean, but sometimes it was hard to know who you were without someone telling you.

  “I’ll tell you who you are,” Milly’s mother would say to Twiss when she’d done something wrong. When Twiss ate a handful of their mother’s sugar cubes and denied doing it, for example, their mother said, “You’re a thief and a liar, and it’s only seven in the morning!”

  When Twiss used their mother’s nightgown to carry potatoes, she said, “You’re like that farmer who harvested Mr. Peterson’s alfalfa field. You take what isn’t yours.”

  People were making predictions about what Mr. Peterson, the rightful owner of the field, was going to do about the misappropriation of his property. Mr. Sprye not only had harvested his field but also had bought a three-piece suit from Italy with the earnings. Mr. Peterson’s delaying taking action made people believe blood might be spilled, even though he seemed like a good man—he’d helped their father, after all.

  “Maybe there’ll be a public hanging,” Bett said.

  “Or a shoot-out!” Twiss said.

  “This is Wisconsin,” Milly said. “If anything, there’ll be a fair and speedy trial.”

  In eighth grade, she’d studied the Constitution. So had Twiss, though she’d balked at the idea of a bunch of men getting together to decide people’s rights. “Where were all the women?” she’d said to her teacher.

  “Betsy Ross sewed a very nice flag,” the teacher said
.

  “At least we have the right to vote,” Milly said.

  “Hang voting,” Twiss said. “I want to be the president!”

  Milly liked to picture Twiss in the Oval Office, handing down orders and smoking cigars with foreign ministers. Twiss had a good voice for politics, a dramatic timbre.

  “Good morning, my fellow American!” she’d say to Milly when they got out of bed each day. She’d use the carafe of water as a microphone. “How did you sleep, fairest senatoria?” After Bett came to stay with them, her morning announcements changed to include their cousin. “How did you sleep, Senatoria 1? Senatoria 2?”

  “You’re worse than an old man!” Bett said one morning in late June. “Have you seen the circles under my eyes? The red balloons? No one will ever want to marry me like this.”

  “Cucumbers help puffy eyes,” Milly said, while she brushed out her hair at her dressing table. “Cold cloths, too.”

  Twiss started for the bathroom. “Why does everyone want to get married?”

  “Because I don’t want to be sleeping next to you for the rest of my life,” Bett said.

  She took the cold cloths Milly offered her, but they didn’t bring down the puffiness beneath her eyes, nor did they take the redness out. No matter how many hours she spent on what she called the Great Beautification Project, Bett couldn’t get her hair or the skin beneath her eyes to submit to her desires.

  “Here,” Milly said, offering Bett one of the silver butterfly combs her mother had given her for her birthday. The combs came from the small stash of items in the bottom of her mother’s jewelry box that had belonged to her mother since she was a girl. Before she and Aunt Gertrude had married for love and were cast out of the sphere of their immediate family, their father had given them each a set of sterling combs and dainty oval lockets with the words “For my darling” inscribed on the back. Her mother said she missed that—being called darling.

  “It’ll keep your hair out of your face,” Milly said to Bett, who took the comb, but frowned when she saw the result in the mirror.

  “You have no idea how pretty you are, do you?” she said to Milly. “You can have anyone you want.” Bett stared out the south window at the green of the front lawn and the garden, the spread of clover and crabgrass, the twists of yellow squash vines. Then she looked out the north window at the pitchfork and the pile of brown manure, which was steaming in the morning light. “I’m going to be stuck with that.”

  Milly fixed Bett’s hair for her and filed her nails like the women who worked in the beauty salon in town did. “This is the way the movie stars do their hair,” she said, after she’d swept Bett’s hair into a loose chignon. “At least in the magazines in the general store.”

  Bett looked at herself in the mirror. She didn’t smile, but she didn’t frown, either.

  The two of them sat on Milly’s bed and talked about their futures, how many children they wanted, whether they would be boys or girls and in what order. Milly wanted six and Bett wanted two. They laughed at the names the other one came up with.

  Jacob was Milly’s favorite for a boy. She pictured him having Asa’s wheat hair and sky eyes. When Asa had come to mow and she’d handed him a glass of lemonade, a part of her, which she didn’t even know existed until then, had wanted to jump onto the tractor with him.

  Jacob Peterson. Milly Peterson. Mother. Wife.

  Bett’s favorite for a boy was Donaldio Maurice Winterberry III.

  But when Twiss came back into the room, Bett jumped off Milly’s bed and declared that Jacob was a stupid name. Whenever the three of them were together, Bett found a reason to dislike Milly. And quickly.

  “You’re the most passive of the passive people I know!” she said, biting one of the nails Milly had just filed for her. “I’d give up my firstborn to see you get angry just once.”

  “Milly doesn’t get angry,” Twiss said, while she rifled through the closet for her coveralls. “You could cut off her leg and she’d still ask if she could get you anything.”

  “Her lack of anger makes me angry. She’ll never make it in Deadwater.”

  “I will, too,” Milly said, though she’d begun to doubt the truth of that statement.

  Bett’s last story about Deadwater gave Father Stone’s sermon about the difference between Civilized places and Uncivilized places some credence.

  “There was a man who got lost in the bog, once,” Bett had told them. “He walked for six days without food or water before he collapsed beside a badly injured bird.”

  With the last of his strength and because he was very, very hungry, the man began to devour the bird. He worked at the wings first, swallowing a tuft of black feathers without chewing before he moved on to the body and the legs, which snapped like matchsticks in his mouth. He continued to eat until he got to the bird’s head, which was still quivering the way a chicken’s head did on the butcher block just after it was chopped off. The bird cooed, which gave the man pause but did not stop him from putting the bird’s head into his mouth and clamping down on the bones and feathers.

  After that, the man was able to walk again. He found his way out of the bog and went home to his wife and children, who’d kept a candle burning in hope of his return. The man was overjoyed to see his family, and his family was overjoyed to see him. All of them were hoping to put the episode behind them.

  “Daddy didn’t die!” the children said, jumping up and down. “Daddy didn’t die!”

  That night, the man slept next to his wife as peacefully as a well-fed baby. He fell asleep with his arms around her, his lips pressed against the back of her neck, whispering some sweet and some not-so-sweet things into her ear.

  In the morning, the wife woke up to a soft trilling sound, which she thought meant her husband wanted to embrace in more elaborate ways than the night before. She pinched her cheeks to give them color. She was glad she’d thought to put on her pretty white nightgown instead of the ragged brown one, but the eyelets in the white lace made her cold, and her husband’s feet, which were entwined with hers, made her even colder. She felt a tug at one of the buttons at the back of her gown and heard another trill.

  “Oh, Bill,” she said. “Go and put some socks on. Your feet are freezing me solid.”

  Bill wouldn’t put socks on, namely because he was dead; neither would the bloody head of the bird that had crawled out of his throat and across his lips onto the pillow.

  “Oh, Bill,” the bird said.

  The woman shrieked, and then fainted. When she came back to the world of consciousness, she was relieved because decapitated birds that talked were the stuff of dreams, and dreams didn’t come true in Deadwater.

  “Put some socks on,” the bird said. “Your feet are freezing me solid.”

  The woman was so afraid that she followed the bird’s instructions. She didn’t know what else to do since her children were too young to protect her and her husband was too dead.

  “Kiss me,” the bird said, so the woman kissed the bird.

  “I love you,” the bird said.

  “I love you, too,” the woman said.

  After a while, she got used to the bird cooing to her in the morning and cooing to her at night. Her husband had never been particularly romantic. He’d been the type of man who saved his affection for special occasions. The bird was more effusive.

  “You look beautiful,” the bird told her. It raised its eyebrows. “Embraceable.”

  Months passed in this way, and the woman grew to love the bird even more than she’d loved her husband. The children grew to love the bird, too, since he let them ruffle his feathers.

  “We love you, Bird Daddy!” they’d say, while he made them pancakes or tucked them in at night. All the while, the husband was tucked away in the bedroom closet, turning as black as the feathers he’d swallowed in the bog.

  In church that week, Milly said several prayers, all of which included the words Please God, don’t make me leave Spring Green. She brought along a penny in cas
e Father Stone was right and a cash donation was the only viable avenue to salvation.

  Ever, she added when the basket came around.

  Father Stone had begun to skip the part of the service where people turned to one another and said, “Peace be with you.” He didn’t light incense, either, though it was true his feet didn’t smell. Although he always read from the Bible as smoothly as if he’d written the words himself, he chose menacing passages.

  “ ‘Every living thing that moved on the earth perished—birds, livestock, wild animals, all the creatures that swarm over the earth, and all mankind.’ ”

  That day, after Father Stone finished reading, he signaled to Mrs. Bettle to play “Thee We Adore, O Savior,” which seemed to Milly too cheerful a hymn to follow the mass destruction of human life. He thanked Mrs. Bettle ahead of time for her rudimentary twanging.

  “I’d like to see you play the organ,” Mrs. Bettle said. “I don’t care how Civilized you think you are. One note would expose you.”

  Mrs. Bettle got up from her seat at the organ. She put on her wide-brimmed, silk-flower-adorned hat and sat down heavily in the first row of pews. Her white stockings bunched around her ankles. Her ankles bunched around her shoes. She was younger than Milly and Twiss’s mother, but dressed and moved like a grandmother.

  “I’m tired of minor chords,” she said. “For once, I’d like to sing about something other than God and His works. I’d like to sing about the streets of Manhattan or my parrot, Henry.”

  “ ‘Upon the wicked He shall rain snares!’ ” Father Stone said. “ ‘Fire and brimstone, and a horrible tempest—this shall be the portion of their cup!’ ”

  “What is brimstone exactly?” Twiss said.

  “Damnation to hell,” Milly whispered.

  “It’s like she’s been waiting for someone to rescue her,” Bett said, “and just today realized no one was going to do that.”