The Bird Sisters

by Rebecca Rasmussen

“That’s perfect!” their mother said to Mrs. Bettle, with more enthusiasm than she’d said anything in a long time. Since she’d taken Father Rice’s letter out of the Sewing Society’s vault, she’d been cheerfully embittered instead of just embittered; thievery became her. “Henry will be like the man who puts nails through his tongue. We’ve all paid to see that.”

  “It’s a religious song,” Mrs. Bettle reminded them.

  “I only meant he might be as popular,” their mother said.

  “Well then, carpe diem!” Mrs. Bettle said.

  The four of them got into the car, Mrs. Bettle and their mother up front, and Milly and Twiss in the back, the sack of birdseed between them. After they’d driven out of and beyond the Saturday market, their mother turned left instead of right; she said she didn’t feel like going over the County C bridge again. She was in too good a mood to see the skid marks that had changed their lives twice in one day.

  “Do we have to talk about him right now?” Twiss said. “The girls in my class do the same thing. They’ll spend the whole lunch period trying to figure out what some boy meant when he said, ‘Will you throw me the kickball?’ ”

  “Henry’s very straightforward,” Mrs. Bettle said.

  “That’s our nature,” their mother said.

  “To analyze what someone probably doesn’t even feel to death?” Twiss said.

  “Exactly,” their mother said.

  They drove along the road out of town and into the country, past the cornfields and the Clydesdale farm, the petting zoo and the underground house with grass for a roof, where a goat was grazing on the blue fescues that sprouted from the trestles.

  Milly slipped her hand into her pocket. She thought about showing the fossil to her mother the same way she’d thought about showing it to Twiss, but didn’t. Neither of them understood how she could like Mr. Stewart after what he’d done to the uniformity—A, A, A, A, F—of her report card. She’d even gotten an A in leadership, though she’d never led anything.

  “There’s such a thing as leading by example,” her teacher had said, when she asked about her grade. “You’re the only one who does what people tell you to do.”

  Milly didn’t know if that merited an A or not; doing what she was told seemed a lot easier than not doing it. But it wasn’t just that; along with saying no to Bett the day that Asa had arrived to mow their property, it didn’t occur to Milly not to do her homework or dutifully recite an answer when her teacher called on her.

  Q: Whose job is it to be pleasing?

  A: Mine.

  “The Sewing Society offered me a free piece of pie,” Milly said to her mother.

  “You didn’t accept one, did you? Tell me you didn’t.”

  “I know better than that,” Milly said.

  Her mother looked in the rearview mirror and smiled. “Maybe you won’t end up old and alone after all.”

  Milly smiled too. She wasn’t quite where Twiss was yet—Twiss said the word “spinster” with a kind of affection most people reserved for the loves of their lives.

  “I’m going to be the world’s most interesting spinster,” Twiss said again now.

  “You’ll need a house,” their mother said.

  “Not if Milly lets me pitch a tent in her backyard!”

  “You’ll have to ask her husband.”

  “I don’t have a husband,” Milly said before Twiss could interrupt with her thoughts on why women shouldn’t have to ask permission for anything, particularly from their husbands. After all, she might say, sisters have a stronger bond than spouses.

  “But you will,” her mother said.

  Milly was looking forward to the town fair for the usual reasons, in addition to whatever they were going to do there to raise money for Father Rice and the cake-baking contest, but there was another reason too: she wanted to visit the woman who read tea leaves again to see if her fortune had changed. She wanted the woman to tell her what everyone else had been telling her all along: you will be loved.

  Milly didn’t know if being loved by someone outside of her family had become important to her before or after she’d met Asa; she only knew that he amplified the desire so much that she’d felt envious when she saw a young family at the market this morning.

  The parents were carrying their two children on their shoulders, stopping from time to time to reach into a bag of kettle corn. The children had hair the color of corn silk, the color of hair Milly imagined her own children having. As they bounced along on their parents’ shoulders, they leaned back and forward, left and right, playing a version of Simon Says. The mother and father gave the impression they weren’t paying attention, but the moment either of the children wobbled, the parents’ hands tightened around their children’s ankles.

  Milly could only remember herself and Twiss playing that kind of game once. Twiss had just learned to climb and took great pleasure displaying her new talents by climbing up people who allowed her to. Their father had taken them to the golf course that day, and their mother had come along, which wasn’t rare at that time.

  Milly was five and Twiss was three.

  Their father lifted Milly onto his shoulders first, after he’d gotten a hole in one and they were walking on the course to the next hole. “You’re light as a feather,” he said, spinning her around like the helicopters that fell from the trees in the spring.

  Their mother was waving to the members who passed, doing her best to be charming, which Milly remembered she was. Her mother was wearing a dress the color of vanilla frosting that day. In the sunlight, Milly could see the outline of her slim, sun-freckled legs.

  After her father put Milly down, he picked up Twiss.

  “You’re heavy as a stone,” he said to her, which made her giggle. Everything made Twiss giggle when she was a toddler. You could hand her a pinecone, and she’d act like you’d handed her the funniest thing in the world.

  “I’m not a stone!” Twiss said, thumping the back of their father’s head with her thumb, which she sucked despite the bitters their mother put under her fingernails. “I’m a baby!”

  “You’re the future female golfing champion of the world, that’s what you are,” their father said. “What do you want to achieve more than anything else?”

  “Wwwweeerrrlllddd,” Twiss said, still giggling.

  “Holes in one!” their father corrected.

  “She’ll probably want to be a ballerina, Joe,” their mother said, smiling.

  Their father covered his ears, but he was also smiling. “Don’t say that, Maisie. You’re the only one I want to plié for me.”

  “Tendu,” their mother said.

  Twiss was thrashing around on their father’s shoulders.

  “I’m a bird!” she said. “Watch me fly!”

  When Twiss started to lose her balance at the same time that her father leaned over to kiss her mother’s cheek, Milly started running. Halfway to them, Twiss tumbled down her father’s back and landed headfirst on the grass, where she lay looking up at the sky, deciding whether or not she wanted to go through the trouble of being hurt.

  That day, she did.

  “I’m still a bird,” she said, and began to cry.

  “Of course you are,” their mother said. “You just had an accident.”

  “You can still be a champion,” their father said. “You can still get a hole in one.”

  Twiss squirmed past their parents on the ground. She rolled across the grass until she got to Milly’s feet, which she hugged close to her chest.

  “Milly saw me fly,” she said.

  And Milly did.

  Though sometimes, she wished her parents had been the ones to lift Twiss onto their hips and ask her where she flew that day, to smile when Twiss said she’d been to the moon and eaten a piece of lacy white moon cheese before the moon king made her come back down.

  Milly stared out the window as her mother drove the four of them farther and farther into the country. The corn was rising along the river; the river was
falling. When Milly was certain Twiss wasn’t looking, she pulled out the yellow flyer. Aside from all of the practical things that twenty-five dollars could buy—flour, sugar, butter, meat—Milly thought of the handsome silver lapels shaped like tractors she’d seen in the general store. She couldn’t think of anything more pleasing than being able to give them to Asa after the fair.

  “You could win,” Milly heard the man say, but she didn’t yet believe it.

  She folded the flyer and slipped it back into her pocket.

  When her mother turned onto Mrs. Bettle’s road, the watermelon she’d bought at the market, unbeknownst to either Milly or Twiss, rolled out from under the seat. Twiss took out her pocket-knife and cut into the rind of the watermelon, exposing the bright red flesh, the hard black seeds. She lifted one of the seeds out of the watermelon and positioned the seed on the tip of her tongue. Then she sucked in her cheeks, stuck her head out the window, and spit the seed as far as the air in her lungs would allow her to; the seed landed first on the window and then bounced onto the road, where it quickly disappeared into the gravel.

  Twiss stuck her knife into the watermelon again and scooped out another seed. This time when she tried to spit it out the window, the seed landed on the front of her shirt. She laughed, plucked it off, and began the process again. After they’d dropped Mrs. Bettle off and were turning into their own driveway, she handed Milly a seed.

  “I was thinking a guest room might be nicer than a tent,” she said. “Tents let in rain.”

  Milly placed the seed on her tongue.

  “What rain?” she said, and spit the seed out of her mouth and out of the open window. The tiny black seed sailed away from the car on a wave of hot white air, where it rose and fell like the prow of a ship, gaining momentum and then losing it, rising and falling, skipping and spinning, before it finally lost all its forward energy and landed in the meadow of bluestems and prairie onions beyond the car.

  I could win!

  14

  he day had become what the Gazette had predicted: hot and humid, without a cloud in the sky or a cooling patch of shade to stand in. When Twiss finished cleaning out the coop, she walked to the barn. She lingered outside the utility door, deciding whether or not to enter. All these years she’d been walking into that barn trying to make things right and all these years that barn had neither resisted nor yielded to her. Twiss picked a black-eyed Susan and tucked it behind her ear. Though the sun dangled like an ornament high up in the sky, the heat was above and below her, radiating from all directions. She walked over to the water pump and the white lilac bush. She didn’t feel like playing golf just yet.

  When they were young, she and Milly would take turns pumping for water on days when the temperature crested into the triple digits. The pump was rusty even then, which made the coaxing of water all the more difficult and yet all the more rewarding. One of them would pump until the other one got tired or until the water sputtered yellow drops then ran clear. After they’d quenched their thirsts, they’d run around the pump, filling up the tin coffee mug that hung from the pump’s handle and splashing each other in the face.

  “For the love of water!” they’d say, and go round and round.

  Twiss began the slow business of working the water pump now. Though her arms were puckered with age, they were still strong from swinging a golf club nearly every day of her life. As the pump rose, she could almost feel Milly standing by her side when they were young, both of them anticipating the first drops of water that would fall into the cup.

  That was one of the few marvelous things about aging—Twiss could travel from here to there without having to go anywhere at all. Her memories were her suitcases, and her mind her passport, only she didn’t need to leave Spring Green to see one of the world’s seven wonders; all the wonders that she needed were located in the Wisconsin River valley. True, she’d wanted to see the Taj Mahal and the Great Wall of China, Machu Picchu and the Egyptian pyramids (what were the others?); she just must not have wanted to see them enough.

  Standing on the Continental Divide was the only experience she felt she’d missed out on by staying in Spring Green. When she was young, she’d planned on positioning herself astride it and taking a photograph. She liked the idea of being in the exact middle of two watersheds. She’d planned on sending a postcard to Milly.

  From the Divide with Love, Your Sister, Twiss.

  While Twiss was on her trip, Milly would have been snugged into her life with the two children and the husband she’d always wanted to have. She’d be engaged in the time-consuming activity of darning socks or preserving jam when the postcard arrived. And for a moment, just a moment, amid the shrieks and tugs of her children on her shirtsleeves—Milly would be making chicken and dumplings for supper: their favorite—and the press of her husband’s boots on the porch steps, she’d wish she were standing on the Divide with Twiss.

  From Spring Green with Love (and a smidge of envy), Your Sister, Milly.

  When they were kids, Milly used to draw pictures of her future family. There was a son named Jacob and a long-haired daughter named Molly Blue.

  “Why blue?” Twiss would ask her.

  “Because it’s pretty,” Milly would say. Her future husband, tall and pencil-line thin, didn’t have a name.

  “Why didn’t you pick a name for the daddy?” Twiss would ask.

  “Because he hasn’t told it to me yet,” Milly would say.

  Twiss would draw pictures of the species she’d captured on the golf course. She had the idea that she would not only become a great explorer like Lewis or Clark, but that she’d also write textbooks filled with her own kind of science.

  While I was digging for a pot of gold in the Amazon, she’d written as the opening of her first textbook, I came upon the world’s first flying beetle. It has one hundred three and a half legs and uses them to fly to the sun to gather sunspots. This explains the shiny yellow dots all over its body!

  Although Twiss didn’t become a scientist or an explorer like she’d planned, rescuing birds was a little like being both at the same time. In order to repair a wing properly, she believed you had to understand what it was like to have one, which led to much mental soaring around the countryside, much unskilled flapping in the bathroom. A bird’s wing, though it contained several distinct bones, functioned as though it contained only one. You couldn’t fiddle with even the tiniest bone without repercussions in the larger ones.

  Twiss’s bird books said as much about avian anatomy, though the authors didn’t suggest that ornithologists take up flight as a mode of diagnosis. “Take up your disinfected stainless-steel scalpels,” the books said. “Your impermeable latex surgical gloves.”

  What words for restoration!

  Sometimes, Twiss wished she could be the one making vanilla drop biscuits in the kitchen, while Milly was in the bathroom guessing at the steps that would bring a bird back to full chirping life. Sometimes, she’d have rather been responsible for fixing breakfast than fixing what often, with her skill set, could not be fixed. There was nothing quite as depressing as running up against your limitations before you had your morning tea.

  That had happened with Father Rice—Twiss had believed she could save him. What she didn’t understand when she was fourteen, but understood very well now, was that not everyone in the world could be saved or, for that matter, wanted to be.

  15

  forgive you, Twiss wrote in the first of the batch of letters she addressed to 6 1/3 Steele Street during the month of July, because that’s what she thought Father Rice wanted to hear. Twiss expected Father Rice to say “thank you,” which he did, and be back to his old, fish-eating, tarnished-silverware-accepting self, which he wasn’t.

  Dear Twiss,

  I was greatly cheered when I came home to find your letter beneath my door this evening. I can almost see you skipping along the long dusty road into town to mail it, although you might be too old for skipping now. Perhaps you’ve always been too old.
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  When I left Spring Green, you and your sister, Milly, were the last people I saw. Your sister looked frightened from the pew where you two were sitting that morning, but you …

  All I can advise is read your Bible, my dear. If I remember right, you were quite a fast runner. As you know, it’s impossible to run without a leg.

  Sincerely,

  Edward Rice

  Father Rice’s letter prompted Twiss to write a second letter, which began indignantly, even for her.

  Dear Father Rice,

  I’m not a child! Please tell me what comes after these three dots … and before the words “All I can advise.” I can handle it. I’m fourteen now.

  Sincerely, Twiss

  P.S. I don’t read the Bible anymore, but I do still skip. Not because I’m young, but because I’m me.

  Dear Twiss, Father Rice wrote back,

  You caught me.

  What I meant was that you have a certain spark of life, which I would hate to see go out because of your own stupidity (which, in this case, is really my stupidity since you have not done anything to endanger your general well-being, yet).

  What I love and appreciate about you—what I’ve always loved and appreciated about you—is your ability to be truthful. Forgive me?

  Sincerely,

  Father Rice Not because I am trying

  to be conciliatory.

  P.S. Well, maybe a little. The truth is writing this letter has been the first activity in months during which I’ve temporarily forgotten to feel sorry for myself. Thank you.

  I forgive you, Twiss wrote, among other things. Again.

  She hadn’t received a letter back from Father Rice yet, which she was a little disappointed about since he’d already sent another letter and another payment to Father Stone, which Father Stone had handed over to the Society without the payment, and which her mother had attempted to steal during another emergency meeting, this time about the blight of Back Bend on the river landscape.

  Mrs. Merrykind, the president of the Society, had caught her mother with the letter and had smacked the back of her hand. When Twiss’s mother attempted to defend herself—Father Stone is the real thief! she said—Mrs. Merrykind called her a liar of the worst sort. Instead of voting to evict the people of Back Bend, the Society voted to evict Twiss’s mother.