The Bird Sisters

by Rebecca Rasmussen

  “I guess they liked A’s,” Bett said. “Mr. Peterson’s first name is Aubrey.”

  “That sounds like an old professor’s name,” Twiss said, starting to laugh.

  “Aubrey’s a fine name,” Milly said.

  “Of course you think so,” Bett said.

  “His wife and child died,” Milly said. “Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

  “We wouldn’t even know his name if it wasn’t for you,” Bett said.

  “No, we w-w-wouldn’t,” Twiss said.

  “There was blood on your handkerchief,” Milly said.

  “From shaving my legs, dummy,” Bett said.

  Before Milly could put together the question forming in her mind—If you’re not really sick, then why are you pretending to be?—she heard the clock downstairs, followed by the sound of her mother’s footsteps on the stairs and jingle of the plate on the tray she was carrying. At the end of his visit, Mr. Peterson’s doctor wrote out a complicated list of dietary recommendations for Bett, which included meat, meat, and meat, and also plenty of butter and cream. He said she was lacking animal proteins, what Bett called grrr. Now instead of washing and ironing all morning, their mother spent that time preparing meals—A carnivore’s delight! Twiss said—for Bett. She’d fry ground beef, bake it, or boil it until it was hard and gray.

  “Look!” Twiss said on boiled meat days. “A brain!”

  Milly was now in charge of the washing and Twiss was in charge of the ironing, which meant that all of their sheets were clean, and either badly burned or wrinkled. Twiss was supposed to dust the buck’s head, too, because it was making Milly congested. Lately, she’d sneeze so much that everyone stopped taking the time to bless her.

  “Time for meat!” their mother said, when she entered their room.

  When Bett saw the lump of meat on the tray, which Milly’s mother had garnished with a scoop of equally lumpy gravy, she said, “I’m starting to look like a biscuit.”

  “Meatballs are for lunch,” their mother said. What she didn’t say was what all of that meat was costing her. Only Milly knew that she’d traded her mother’s antique crystal brooch for a week of roasts and her gold promise ring for the promise of more.

  Twiss swiped a finger full of brown gravy from Bett’s plate, and their mother smacked her hand. “Food isn’t your deficiency,” she said. “How is it I have one daughter who can only think about herself and one who never does? You two are going to end up old and alone.”

  “What’s so bad about that?” Twiss said, licking her finger. “Besides, I’m not even thinking about myself right now. I’m thinking about Father Rice. I don’t understand how his address could be 6 1/3 Steele Street. Does that mean it’s one-third of a house or one-third of a room?”

  “What are you thinking about?” their mother said to Milly.

  “I’m thinking about him too,” Milly said, although she was really thinking about Asa and the loneliness he must have felt growing up without his mother and his sister, and also how much she wanted to take him in her arms and comfort him. The last time he’d mowed their property, she’d made him butter cookies and seen the tiny blond hairs at the back of his neck stand up and the drops of sweat trickle down and she’d felt faint, in the best possible way.

  “I liked it better when he wrote about margaritas and lime juice,” Twiss said. “He didn’t sound like himself at all in that letter. He sounds so—”

  “Helpless,” Milly said.

  “His life doesn’t sound that terrible to me,” Bett said, which made everyone look at her. “At least he has a job and a room, or one-third of a room, he can go back to at night. He even has a friend. That’s more than anyone has in Deadwater. Since they dammed the rivers, there aren’t any fish to fish for. The lakes are all algae. If you put your hand in the water, it’ll come out green.”

  “Father Rice has a stump for a leg,” Twiss said. “His friend doesn’t have hands.”

  “Everybody loses something,” Bett said.

  Their mother looked out the window at the barn. “That’s true.”

  Still, the four of them decided to try to help Father Rice, if for no other reason than it gave them something to do on the long summer days and even longer summer nights, when the clouds balanced on the horizon like the moon but would neither vanish during the day nor bring relief from the heat at night. All week, the weather vane had behaved like a still life; the arrow had turned to a north-facing position, and there it had stayed, although it still predicted the weather better than that morning’s Gazette, which advised people to bring along umbrellas to the Saturday market despite the sky being perfectly blue. Don’t forget to take home a watermelon, the article said. The kids will amuse themselves for hours with seed-spitting contests! Whole hours!

  “We can’t afford to follow the doctor’s recommendations, but we can’t afford not to,” their mother said, when Bett asked if she could go with them to the Saturday market.

  “I get lonely when I’m alone,” Bett said.

  “Eat your meat loaf,” their mother said gently. “We won’t be gone long.”

  “Does Mrs. Bettle have to come?” Twiss said. “Her voice makes my skin itch.”

  “She has to get more food for Henry,” their mother said.

  “Holy, holy, holy,” Twiss said. “Henry in the highest.”

  After they picked up Mrs. Bettle, who had one of Henry’s green feathers pinned to the front of her hat, the four of them drove into town. The moment their mother turned the engine off, Twiss ran away, and Milly followed her. Twiss said she wanted to see the eggplant that was supposed to look like Saint Augustine, when she wanted to do anything but be near Mrs. Bettle, who’d debated the qualities of different birdseed mixes the entire way into town.

  “I can’t decide who I want to kill more: Mrs. Bettle or Henry,” Twiss said to Milly as they walked past the fruit and vegetable vendors, the stand of kettle corn, and the chocolate éclairs, which the baker had lined up like bullets. The air smelled of burnt sugar.

  “You shouldn’t be so mean to Mrs. Bettle,” Milly said. “She doesn’t have anyone but that poor old bird to talk to.”

  “Do you think he’d stay with her if he had the chance to go?”

  “He’s a bird,” Milly said.

  “Exactly,” Twiss said. “He doesn’t belong in a cage.”

  Milly didn’t mind Mrs. Bettle, though she knew Twiss was right about the one-way aspect of her and Henry’s attachment, which made her feel even sorrier for Mrs. Bettle because her love was requited insofar as Henry instinctively desired to stay alive, and perhaps to live well. Wasn’t that how most people lived, though? Surely their family wasn’t all that different. People just expected more from each other than they expected from birds.

  Milly and Twiss walked along the outer edges of the Saturday market to avoid the rush of people tromping over to see the eggplant, which did look a little like Saint Augustine. The eggplant had a pointy protrusion, vaguely resembling a nose, raisin-sized indentations for eyes, and a white beard, which sprouted mysteriously from its base.

  “Step right up!” the farmer said to everyone that passed. “ ‘Hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names are anger and courage; anger at the way things are, and courage to see that they do not remain the way they are.’ ”

  “That’s an eggplant with corn silk stuck to it!” Twiss said.

  “Only if you see it that way,” Milly said.

  “If you become a philosopher, I swear I’ll have to kill you and Mrs. Bettle and Henry.”

  Twiss stalked off in her own direction while Milly continued walking along the perimeter of the market. Her mother and Mrs. Bettle were standing in front of the birdseed stall, examining the different varieties in the careful way that jewelers examined diamonds for inclusions. Milly walked past them and the potato sacks filled with seeds, past the stand of summer squash and zucchinis. She stopped when she got to the stall that was usually filled with tomatoes but was filled with paint
ings today.

  Mr. Stewart, her old science teacher, was admiring a landscape of the river.

  “How strange,” he said. “I was just thinking about you.” Milly felt her cheeks getting warm.

  “And fossils,” Mr. Stewart said quickly. He reached into the pocket of his tan trousers. “I found this one by the river just before I came here. You’re the only one who was listening to my lecture on our field trip. I thought you might be interested in my discovery.”

  “I am,” Milly said, her cheeks cooling. “What is it?”

  “A fish, as far as I can tell. At least that’s what its bone structure suggests to me.”

  Mr. Stewart handed Milly the fossil, which fit neatly into the palm of her hand. She turned it over carefully, so that the sandstone wouldn’t crumble; even so, cinnamon-colored dust clung to her skin. Mr. Stewart said the fish in her hand had probably perished during the glacial floods that swept through the Wisconsin River valley, or maybe it was from a time when Wisconsin was an ancient sea where jellyfish and anemones floated freely over coral reefs.

  “What you’re holding is probably two hundred fifty million years old, and the Cambrian sandstone’s even older than that,” Mr. Stewart said, writing something down in the notebook he kept in his shirt pocket. “That it’s intact is something of a miracle. You can’t teach that kind of antiquity from a book.” Mr. Stewart turned his attention to the landscape he’d been admiring. In it, a sandhill crane soared on an updraft over the river. Its tawny wings spanned the length of the brush-stroked sky. “Maybe you can’t teach that at all.”

  Mr. Stewart took a long look at that landscape before he reached into his pocket for his wallet and said, “I’ll take it,” to the artist who had painted it. To Milly, he said, “You can’t imagine what it’s like to stare at white plaster. I don’t know why I didn’t notice during the school year. I guess I was too busy grading lab reports.”

  “We have wallpaper at my house,” Milly said, trying not to think of the F in laboratory that had marred her otherwise perfect report card. “There’s also a buck’s head mounted on the wall above my bed. It sweats on me sometimes.”

  “You be careful that sweat doesn’t have formaldehyde in it,” Mr. Stewart said.

  Milly handed the fossil back to Mr. Stewart while the artist wrapped the painting of the river in brown paper and secured it with twine. After Mr. Stewart paid the woman, he placed the fossil in Milly’s palm again. “Color deserves color.”

  While it was almost always appropriate to say “thank you” when someone gave you a gift, the sentiment didn’t seem personal enough for a two-hundred-fifty-million-year-old fossil. If Mr. Stewart had been his buoyant classroom self, the right appreciative words might have come to Milly more easily. But today, Mr. Stewart seemed unhappy and out of place at the Saturday market, in the midst of people haggling over the price of peppers and onions, tubs of freshly churned butter turning in the sun. He kept looking around, as if now that he’d purchased the painting he didn’t know what else to do with himself or the rest of the morning.

  In the distance, Twiss was making faces at the eggplant.

  “My sister and I are trying to bring Father Rice back from Illinois,” Milly said. “We were hoping you could help us.”

  “I’m not Catholic,” Mr. Stewart said. “I’m not really anything. Not since I was young. And then I was Episcopalian, mostly to please my mother and father. I think I might be an atheist. I’ve sure been working at it lately.”

  “You don’t have to believe in God to be a good person,” Milly said.

  “You sure?” Mr. Stewart said, looking at the paper covering around his painting and then at Milly. “I’ll tell you what. I’ll do what I can to help if you promise me one thing.”

  “What?” Milly said.

  “Don’t ever ruin your life over a broken heart.”

  Milly turned the fossil over in her palm, imagining the ancient sea that the fish might have swum freely in, among jellyfish and anemones, vibrant coral reefs. Then she imagined the rapidly melting glaciers, the rising water, and the flood that might have killed him, though the second of Mr. Stewart’s theories seemed odd to her. Fish were supposed to be at home in the water. Could they also drown there too?

  After Mr. Stewart took himself and his painting home, Milly set off to find Twiss to tell her about his promise of help. She passed the Sewing Society’s stall, where the members were selling slices of cherry pie and lemonade for a nickel to raise money for their hedge maze.

  “Come have a piece of pie!” one of them called to her.

  “You look absolutely famished!” another one said.

  “Ravenous!” said another.

  They were all wearing their yellow Society hats and resembled a swarm of bees.

  “I just ate breakfast,” Milly said.

  She didn’t know if they were aware that Father Rice’s letter was missing, but she didn’t want to stay to find out. Milly wasn’t a good liar—the truth would show on her face. She didn’t know what would happen to her mother but knew enough to understand that crossing the Sewing Society was like crossing God; in a town like Spring Green, they could sink you.

  “Oatmeal isn’t enough for a girl your age.”

  “You need eggs. Maple ham.”

  “Honey cured is better for the complexion.”

  “Actually,” Milly said, “I ate a piece of meat loaf this morning.”

  “For breakfast? Has your mother lost her mind?”

  And off the Sewing Society ladies went, huddling together like bees, and gaining strength in the same way.…

  “Readjusting to new circumstances must be difficult.”

  “I heard he works in the dairy now.”

  “Milk is good for the bones.”

  “Oh yes, excellent.”

  “I could snap her in half she’s so thin.”

  “But pretty.”

  “That hair.”

  “Those eyes.”

  “I’d have her engaged by now if she was my daughter!”

  “I’d be planning her honeymoon to Europe!”

  The women stopped talking for a moment and looked at Milly. They tilted their heads the way people did when a stray puppy or kitten crossed their paths.

  “Poor girl,” they said, as if they’d memorized the same script. “Are you sure you don’t want a piece of pie? A glass of lemonade? We won’t charge you a penny.”

  “No, thank you,” Milly said, which was more gracious than it was genuine. Like a chicken, they’d cornered her and plucked her clean. A moment more, and they might also chop off her head with questions about her monthly. Milly thought of what Twiss or Bett might have said in the same situation and divided the fierceness of their imagined words in half, so that she ended up with something between honest and smart.

  “My mother’s making meatballs for lunch.”

  “Tell your mother she still owes us her monthly dues,” they said after Milly had excused herself, but by then she was far enough away that she could pretend she didn’t hear them and keep moving forward. “She hasn’t paid for her hat, either!”

  Milly walked until she could no longer hear their voices. She understood why her mother loathed these women, but not why she needed their approval. Milly continued past the kettle corn and the fruit vendor. She stopped when she saw the sign above the city council’s stall. CAKE-BAKING CONTEST. $25 FIRST PRIZE.

  One of the councilmen handed Milly a yellow flyer.

  “I’ve heard about your apple crisps,” he said.

  “The clerk at the general store must have exaggerated,” Milly said.

  “That’s not who I heard it from.”

  When Milly saw Twiss bounding in her direction, she folded the flyer and slipped it into the pocket of her dress. She didn’t want Twiss to chime in with her opinions about the irony of the city government holding a cake-baking contest when they’d just raised the taxes on sugar.

  “Really,” the city councilman said, just before Twi
ss reached for her hand and pulled her away from the stall. “You could win.”

  “Dr. Greene agreed to help us bring Father Rice back,” Twiss said, when they were alone. “Mrs. Collier said she would, too. I don’t know if we want her help, but she offered it.”

  “So did Mr. Stewart,” Milly said, patting her pocket to make sure the fossil was still there. It occurred to her then what she should have said to Mr. Stewart, what he probably needed to hear more than anything else. You’re a good teacher.

  Milly and Twiss walked until they found their mother, who was helping Mrs. Bettle carry a sack of birdseed to the car. After Twiss told her about Dr. Greene (the oldest of the old town doctors), Mrs. Collier, and Mr. Stewart, their mother said, “We need to raise money.”

  Mrs. Bettle wiped the sweat from her forehead with a handkerchief. Before she put her hat back on, she stroked the green feather pinned to it.

  “Henry can sing ‘Ave Maria’ in Latin. People might pay to see that.”

  “At your house?” Twiss said, imagining a recital of sorts.

  “At the town fair,” Mrs. Bettle said.

  The town fair, which took place over the last weekend of August each year, was just over a month away. If their family agreed about anything, it was the town fair. Twiss loved the Wild West game and the spun sugar; their father loved the putting game and the caramel apples; their mother loved the bean counting game—last year she’d guessed 1,245 beans and won a forty-pound sack of kidney beans—and the Ferris wheel; and Milly loved what everyone else loved, except the livestock show and the amateur rodeo, where boys from the 4-H club wrestled calves to the ground for giant gold belt buckles.

  Milly also loved how the fair transformed the abandoned field behind the high school from twenty-five dandelion-inhabited acres that went unnoticed most of the year into a kind of fairy-tale place, where people sucked on cherry-flavored ice chips and honey-roasted peanuts, and the Ferris wheel went round and round, and the firecrackers reached higher and higher. Milly was always sorry to see the field revert to weeds again.