The Bird Sisters

by Rebecca Rasmussen

  “She’s as ridiculous as the rest of them, if you ask me,” Twiss said.

  “Nobody’s asking you,” their mother said.

  Father Stone smacked his Bible against the side of the pulpit. “Don’t any of you care that you’re going to hell?”

  “So this one’s kind of a pessimist then,” Bett said.

  Their mother, who was sitting next to Bett, started laughing. Usually, she had a high-pitched, floaty laugh. This morning, her laugh turned deep and guttural, the kind Milly had heard walking by the saloon. Their mother kept laughing until her entire body shook and she dropped her Bible and everyone stopped looking at Father Stone and started looking at her. When she finally regained her composure, after a short spell of hiccups, she picked up her Bible with one hand and reached for Bett’s with the other.

  “I haven’t laughed that hard since—”

  She squeezed Bett’s hand.

  “My God, I don’t think I’ve ever laughed that hard.”

  After mass was over, Bett and their mother invited Mrs. Bettle back to the house for supper, which Milly offered to make since her mother was tired of sticking her face into a hot oven in a hot kitchen in a hot house.

  “It’s weird,” Twiss said to Milly. “They’re two letters apart from being the same.”

  “Who?” Milly said.

  “Mrs. Bettle and Bett.”

  Milly put her hand on her sister’s shoulder. “You’re just jealous.”

  “Aren’t you?” Twiss said.

  While two of them waited outside for their mother, Mrs. Bettle, and Bett, Twiss gathered a handful of brown tulips and amused herself with the petal game.

  Supper will be good. Supper will be lousy. Supper will be good.

  Milly was trying to think of what she could make out of milk—their father had been told he was allowed to take home as much as he wanted from the dairy (as well as butter), which made him want a lot of it, although he claimed he only wanted it so Milly could bake for Asa. “What would you make with it?” Milly asked Twiss.

  “I’d pour it in a glass and drink it,” Twiss said.

  If they were alone, Milly and Twiss would have taken their usual shortcut through the field and across Mill Creek, although it really wouldn’t have been a shortcut because Twiss would have wanted to hunt down the leeches that lived beneath the stones and play with them, maybe even stick one to the milkiest part of her body for a joke. Milly would have bit her lip to keep it from quivering as she stepped over the bright green algae, the slippery black stones; like most people, she was afraid of having anything suck her blood.

  So today, thankfully, they stayed on the road, and watched the wavery heat mirages that formed in the dips ahead. They listened to their mother, Mrs. Bettle, and Bett talk about why women should be allowed to be priests.

  “We’re a lot warmer than men,” their mother said.

  Mrs. Bettle fanned herself with her hat. “At least when we have our monthlies.”

  “What about the sausage fingers?” Bett said. “I get to feeling so fat.”

  “I bet you were never fat,” Mrs. Bettle said to Milly.

  “She’s always had just the right amount of everything,” their mother said. “That’s why I named her Milly. Pretty women always do better with ugly names.”

  Mrs. Bettle nodded as if she knew what the consequences of their father’s selection would have been. “I never cared for dainty names myself. I’m originally German. We like more stoic arrangements of the alphabet.”

  “What about me?” Twiss said.

  “One of the nurses in the hospital named you.”

  “You don’t even know which one?” Twiss said.

  Twiss kicked the ochre-colored gravel on the road with the tips of her church shoes, which were badly scuffed from previous occasions of hurt feelings. “What was Dad doing?”

  “It was a Sunday afternoon,” their mother said. “What do you think he was doing?”

  Everyone knew the answer, but nobody said it out loud. “Golf,” a word that used to roll off their tongues as easily as water, now got stuck in each of their throats like phlegm, which women were taught to swallow instead of cough up.

  “I bet he played the best game of his life in honor of me!” Twiss said to their mother with her chin pointed high up in the air, just after they’d turned onto their driveway.

  “Ask him,” their mother said, as if it were a consequence.

  Twiss stared at the barn. “Milly needs help with supper. It’d be selfish to leave her alone in the kitchen to wait on all you trolls!” She ran all the way down the driveway to the front porch and into the house.

  After the screen door slammed, their mother said, “No one wants to know the truth around here.”

  Mrs. Bettle took her hand. “No one wants to know the truth anywhere.”

  Milly and Bett walked behind the two of them, their hands fixed to their sides.

  “What’s wrong with your dad?” Bett said.

  “He can’t play golf anymore,” Milly said. “I mean not as well as he used to.”

  “So can’t a million other people,” Bett said. “But they don’t lock themselves in barns.”

  “It’s not locked,” Milly said.

  While Milly and Twiss made supper inside, Mrs. Bettle, Bett, and their mother sat at the table on the porch. Their mother opened a bottle of apple brandy that one of the members of the golf course had given their father after he’d helped shorten the man’s game. The label said MADE IN FRANCE—which was the only reason their mother allowed it in the house.

  “Fire and brimstone!” Mrs. Bettle said, gesturing wildly.

  “No salvation for you!” their mother said.

  “Or you!” Bett said. “He sure has got a stick up his—”

  “Arse!” Mrs. Bettle said, and then covered her mouth with her hand. “You’ll have to excuse me. Those are my roots speaking.”

  “I thought you were German,” Bett said.

  Their mother poured another finger of brandy for Mrs. Bettle and another fingernail for Bett. “I’ve seen the Eiffel Tower!” she said. “I’ve been to France!”

  “Here we go,” Twiss said.

  While their mother told Mrs. Bettle and Bett about her trip to France when she was a girl—Oh, Champs-Elysées!—Milly hauled out a bottle of milk from the refrigerator and a sack of dried kidney beans from the pantry. She opened her recipe book, looking for something to make out of the available ingredients: milk, flour, butter, and kidney beans. When she didn’t find a recipe, she decided to do what every woman in the country did when she lacked materials: bake a pie. Not every woman would have made a kidney bean pie, though.

  Milly sent Twiss out to the garden for tomatoes, which were still small, hard, and a little bit green but would do all right in a baked dish. The robins were already going after them, clearing pathways for the fruit worms. Protective coverings, which most women in Spring Green made out of stockings, would have kept both away, but Milly’s mother said there were only enough stockings to go on legs in their family, so the plants would have to bear the indiscretions done to them while they bore fruit this summer.

  “I’d rather go to the guillotine,” Twiss said, on her way out. “How can Bett stand it?”

  “The apple brandy?”

  “Her,” Twiss said, letting the screen door slam shut.

  Milly went to work on her piecrust. After she’d rolled out the bottom layer and then the top one, she moved on to the kidney beans.

  She didn’t know that the beans had to be soaked in warm water overnight and then cooked for several hours otherwise they’d upset the digestive tract—to the point of tears, Milly would read later in the cookbook. She plucked a sprig of thyme from her herb box on the windowsill and dropped it, along with the beans, into the pie.

  Poor things, she said to her herbs, stroking their leaves, which were soft as feathers.

  Twiss had knocked over the herb box when their father came into the kitchen unexpectedly the
day before. “Don’t mind me,” he’d said, swooping in like nothing had changed. He ignored the soil on the floor and opened the cupboard.

  “I came for a cube of sugar!” he said in a voice louder and more dramatic than his regular one. Milly and Twiss still saw their father every day, but they hadn’t seen him enter the house except to say that he wouldn’t be entering the house anymore the day before Cousin Bettie arrived from Deadwater. If they needed him, they were supposed to go to the barn.

  “What do you do about your clothes out there?” Twiss asked, as their father took down the tin of their mother’s special sugar cubes from the cupboard. She was scooping up soil from the floor and dropping it back into the herb box. “Your silk golf shirts.”

  “They’re hanging in the rafters,” their father said. “It’s a lot easier to locate things that way. It’s also nice because everything smells like hay.”

  “What about bathing?” Milly said.

  “A rusty wash bucket suited our forefathers fine,” their father said. “Lincoln was from Kentucky. Nothing but forests back then. The future.”

  “Actually, our forefathers had bathtubs,” Milly said, because neither she nor Twiss could scrape together the courage to ask their father why he’d decided to live in the barn. They couldn’t help but feel implicated since the house was where they, too, resided. I’d live in the barn if I had to be married to her! Twiss had said. Their mother had said that men were at their absolute worst when they were in the process of losing something, which Milly suspected was the observation closest to being right. None of them knew how bad his worst would get, though.

  “I’ll bet the servants didn’t have bathtubs,” their father said.

  He was speaking even more loudly than before and was looking toward the staircase, toward the door to their mother’s bedroom, their parents’ old bedroom, the recollection of which seemed as far away now to Milly as the words “once upon a time.” She didn’t know if she should tell her father that her mother had gone into town.

  What she wanted to say was, Sarcasm doesn’t become you.

  “I’m not too proud to join the ranks of a servant,” he said. “I work with a man who has no teeth and another who drinks milk right from the udder. It’s my ambition to end up in one of the shacks by the river. That’s the only way I could be happy.”

  There was that word again.

  The pantry door opened, and Bett stepped out from behind it with a broom and a dustpan, which she handed to Twiss. “Aunt Margaret’s not here,” she said to their father.

  Their father returned the tin of sugar cubes to its place in the cupboard. He smiled at Bett, but frowned at his girls. “Why didn’t you two say so? I wouldn’t have gone on like that.”

  The kidney bean pie turned out worse than Milly expected; eating it felt a little like eating gravel. “I think I broke a tooth!” their mother said.

  “I hope it falls out,” Twiss said.

  “Contrary for the sake of contrary,” Mrs. Bettle said. “I don’t envy you that, Margaret.”

  Bett looked toward the road. “Praise the Lord!” she said to Milly. “I’ve been waiting and waiting for your consequence to come, and here he is shifting gears on the hill right now.”

  “Who’s coming where?” Milly’s mother said.

  “There!” Bett said, pointing to the road.

  The moment Milly saw the John Deere cresting the hill, she felt like she might tip over even though all the legs of her chair were planted firmly on the porch. She knew what was coming, what had been coming ever since Bett pulled her out of the river.

  Bett had made her sign an IOU.

  I, Milly, hereby promise to follow through with whatever consequence Bett thinks up for me, even if I deem said consequence unsuitable to my personality or my personal values. X (signed) Milly

  Bett walked over to Milly. The others kept talking, but Milly couldn’t hear what they were saying anymore. All she could hear was the consequence Bett whispered into her ear, and all she could smell was Bett’s breath, which reminded Milly of the scraps of vegetables she spread over the garden as fertilizer.

  “I can’t do that,” Milly said.

  “Too bad,” Bett said, wheezing a little between each word.

  Ever since church that morning Bett had been coughing. Humid places weren’t supposed to be good for her asthma. Neither was exercise. In lieu of a trip to the doctor, Milly’s mother had offered Bett her drawer of handkerchiefs and her wool shawl.

  “He only runs on so much credit before he stops running,” she’d said. “It’s the same with the butcher. Last week, he suggested I take in his wash to pay for a roast. All the lye in the world wouldn’t get the blood out of those aprons.”

  “Let’s go,” Bett said to Milly.

  “I’m going by myself,” Milly said as firmly as she could.

  “Then I want proof.”

  “What kind?”

  Bett whispered into Milly’s ear.

  “I don’t like secrets,” Mrs. Bettle said. “That’s why I live with a bird and not a man.”

  “That’s the reason?” Twiss said.

  Milly put on her muck boots. When no one was looking, she took one of Bett’s handkerchiefs from the table and walked out to the meadow.

  Asa had parked the tractor and had climbed down to adjust the blades. As she got closer to him, Milly saw the lines of sweat streaking his shirt, the pale fuzz on the back of his neck. The muscles in his arms and shoulders grew taut as he lowered the blades to the level of the grass, which made her blush though she didn’t know why.

  “Hello,” she said, hoping that Asa wouldn’t hear her, but also hoping that he would.

  As much as Milly loved seeing Asa on that tractor, a part of her dreaded the days he came to mow, not only because her father made her go out to him with cookies and lemonade and watched her closely the entire time, but also because on those nights, Bett and Twiss would trick her into talking about Asa, and Milly would fall for their tricks. Milly understood Twiss’s reasons for teasing her—Twiss didn’t want to lose her—but she never understood Bett’s.

  Bett would start innocently enough. “I heard Milly was talking to someone in the meadow the other day. I heard she baked him a red velvet cake shaped like a heart.”

  “I heard she did more than that,” Twiss would say.

  “With Mr. Peterson.”

  “She likes them old, yep, she does.”

  “Wrinkly,” Bett would say.

  “Hairy.”

  “Pruney!”

  When Milly could no longer stand the teasing, she’d pull her blanket over her head and say, “It wasn’t Mr. Peterson I was talking to, it was Asa! And it wasn’t red velvet cake; it was butter cookies! They weren’t shaped like hearts, either.”

  And then the laughter would come, and Milly would know she’d been fooled into giving up another part of herself that she preferred to keep secret. The night she first told them about how much she admired Asa’s work ethic (when she really just meant him), Bett and Twiss had made fun of her, and of Asa’s slight stutter.

  “M-M-May I eat one of your cookies?”

  “Y-Y-Yes, you may.”

  “M-M-May I love you like coconut flakes?”

  “L-L-Love me like coconut flakes, you may.”

  They laughed when they said the word “love,” but that was the word Milly had begun to think about—the possibility of it—whenever she was with Asa and, even more often, when she was without him. The word was with her when she pinned clothes to the line, or scrubbed the linoleum, or baked a pie. Sometimes, when no one was looking, she’d trace an A into a well of flour or hold a mop as though she were holding Asa’s hand.

  “Hello,” Asa said, shading his eyes against the sun.

  Milly thought about what Bett had told her to say and knew that she couldn’t make her tongue do what Bett wanted it to do—her brain wouldn’t allow her tongue to get stuck on a hard consonant for the sole purpose of amusing her cousin—but she
also knew now, as she looked back at the porch and saw Bett doubled over the railing at the beginning of another coughing cycle, what she could do.

  “My cousin’s sick,” she said to Asa, holding out Bett’s handkerchief so that he could see it. Even though Milly had folded the handkerchief into a neat square, the drops of blood on the inside were still visible. “Will you do something for me?

  “For her,” she added.

  “I guess I mean for both of us.”

  Milly whispered her request into Asa’s ear, even though there was no one else around to hear. “Thank you,” she said when she’d finished speaking, accidentally grazing his ear with her lips, after which Asa started the tractor and drove back through the meadow and back down the road as quickly as he’d come up it. He kept touching the ear that Milly had whispered into, which made her wonder about her breath.

  When Milly returned to the porch, Bett snatched the handkerchief out of her hand.

  “What did you do?” she said.

  “Nothing,” Milly said.

  “You’re a worse liar than Twiss. You still owe me a consequence.”

  The others were plotting ways to dethrone Father Stone and restore Father Rice to his former position as the priest of Lilly chapel. They’d need money, for certain.

  “The Sewing Society’s raised more than I’ve made in my entire life,” Mrs. Bettle said. “It’s too bad they’re the ones who helped choose Father Stone. He’s a cousin of a cousin.”

  “It would truly be a shame to have to go against them,” their mother said, smiling.

  “They tried to give me a winter coat last year,” Mrs. Bettle said. “A great big, feathery thing. I looked like a chicken. My cats attacked me. Henry started to cluck. It took me the rest of the winter to undo that. Parrots are smart, you know.”

  “How do you think Father Rice lost his leg?” Twiss said.

  Their mother set down the bottle of apple brandy. “The Society has his latest letters. They’re supposed to be quite blasphemous.”

  “I love blasphemy,” Twiss said.

  “I know you do,” their mother said, patting her hand.

  Milly got up to get a plate of pie for her father, who still ate whatever was prepared for the rest of the family, just in the privacy of the barn. After everyone went to bed, he’d walk from the barn to the house and leave his plate on the top step of the porch like a drifter between railroad stops. Even when Milly’s mother cooked milk and vegetables down to a soggy mess, his plate would be cleaned and his silverware set neatly aslant like people did in fancy restaurants when they were finished with their meals.