“I wasn’t forced to do anything,” her mother said, after the meeting and after she’d brought Mrs. Bettle over to the house for moral support. She looked toward the barn as if for further validation. When she didn’t find it in the view, she said, “I renounced my membership.”
The afternoon was slipping into early evening; the sky was beginning to look like cotton candy, which was nice enough to look at but made Twiss’s tongue feel fuzzy.
“You’re braver than I am, Margaret,” Mrs. Bettle said. “I might have kissed their feet.”
“It was embarrassing, though,” Twiss’s mother said. “To have all of those women staring at me like I was the Antichrist or the devil—what’s worse?”
“The devil, I think,” Mrs. Bettle said.
Why are you even here? Twiss thought.
Thank the Lord that Henry was the pickiest parrot that ever lived—Henry despises drafts!—or else Mrs. Bettle probably would have moved in by now. Twiss had begun to love that spoiled old bird. She had fantasies about teaching him to look directly into Mrs. Bettle’s eyes and plead, Don’t leave me alone, Mum-Mum. The danger with this lesson was that Mrs. Bettle might bring him along with her instead of staying home. Twiss decided that teaching Henry to say something like You sure are ugly! or You sure are fat! was better because it would make Mrs. Bettle cry, and no one Twiss knew liked to do that in public, or at all.
Ah, fantasies.
Maybe Milly was right that Mrs. Bettle’s aloneness made her more annoying and more ottoman shaped than she would have been. The longest Twiss had ever gone without talking to another person was when she’d gotten stung by a bee, and that was only because she couldn’t talk, although she remembered having plenty to say. When Mrs. Bettle finally went home—Oh Lord, Henry must be starved!—Twiss decided to construct an experiment to see if she should stop fantasizing about Henry making diminutive comments and feel sorry for the Beetle instead. For one whole day, from sunset to sunset, she vowed not to speak to anyone.
“Does that include writing?” Milly said, after she and Bett had finished unpinning that day’s wash from the clothesline, folding what needed to be folded, and ironing everything else because they didn’t want Twiss’s burn marks on their clothing.
Twiss picked up a pencil. Yes, she wrote, and then added a smiley face.
“You might not want to smile just yet,” Bett said. “You’re a person who likes to talk.”
Bett was right; after only an hour of silence, Twiss had an incredible desire to say something hateful to someone, simply because by her own design she was not allowed to. Without her voice, everything else ceased to seem real to her. Or everything else was still real, but she wasn’t. And if she wasn’t real, then how could everything else be? People often asked the question: if a tree fell in the forest and there was no one around to hear it, would it still make a sound? For Twiss, the more pressing question was: Why did the tree have to fall in the first place?
At supper, Twiss tried voicing her desires without voicing them, first by pointing to the bowl of mashed potatoes, then, when no one passed it to her, by reaching across the table.
“All you had to do was ask,” her mother said cheekily. Bett had told her about the experiment after she’d scolded Twiss for not participating in that evening’s grace.
“It certainly is peaceful this way,” her mother said. “How long will this feeling last?”
“Twenty-four hours,” Bett said.
Twiss smacked the table.
“I mean twenty-two,” Bett said, smiling at her.
“It’ll be a short vacation then,” her mother said. “But a vacation all the same.”
Twiss smacked the table again.
“Stop acting like an animal,” her mother said.
I’m not an animal!
“Yes,” her mother said. “You are.”
By the time supper was over and the plates were cleared, Twiss was beginning to get the hang of expressing herself without words, although her modes of expression invited ridicule from everyone except Milly, who’d positioned all the food in front of Twiss.
That night, as they did almost every night, the three girls played Truth or Consequences, which ended up being more like a game of charades. The first question Bett asked Twiss was Have you ever kissed a boy?, the answer to which was easy to convey since it only required Twiss to shake her head. The same was true of Bett’s second question: Have you ever wanted to?
Twiss jumped onto the SS Forest and pretended to vomit.
Bett’s third question was not as easy to answer: What is your father doing in the barn?
Twiss looked at Milly, who was huddled under her covers despite the heat and the heavy evening air, pretending to be asleep since it was her turn to play the game next. Even asleep, she could be induced to play if Asa’s name were mentioned.
Twiss got off Bett’s bed and walked over to her own. The moment she got under the covers, Bett pulled them off her.
“If I have to be sick,” she said, “then you have to answer the question.”
You’re not that sick, Twiss thought, feeling betrayed by Bett’s question even though she knew it was a reasonable one. Twiss had begun to tell Bett things she wouldn’t have told anyone else—I’m actually scared of leeches, she’d said earlier that day. Every time I cross the creek in the summer, I stick one on my body so that over time I’ll be less afraid.
“It’s a perfectly reasonable question,” Bett countered, as if she’d heard Twiss’s thoughts.
Earlier, Bett had responded to Twiss’s fear with a fear of her own: I’m afraid I’m going to be all alone my whole life. And also, Once, I heard my mother tell my father it was too bad I was ugly.
Bett put on the robe Mr. Peterson had sent over for her. Against the soft blue chenille, her hair looked even more red. That afternoon, Milly had brushed it out for her, working at the tangles with the same concentration she reserved for knitting, until it fell halfway down Bett’s back, not quite like silk, but no longer like horsehair. Now, Bett looked as unremarkable as every other girl, which Twiss thought was worse than being ugly because it was average.
“I don’t see what he has to complain about,” Bett added, about their father. “At least he has his health.” She coughed to illustrate that she still didn’t have hers, and left the room.
Twiss and Milly didn’t need to speak to each other to know where their cousin was going, or to know that they were both jealous of her determination to find out what their father had been doing in the barn all of this time. Though he’d never said they couldn’t come in, and though he came out plenty, Twiss and Milly felt a zip of unbridled electricity whenever they stood outside the utility door; don’t go in, the zip said, unless you want to be shocked.
All they knew was that he’d taken their tree house materials and their dreams of scatter rugs and evenings alone under the stars. The pile of sand and the ground bees at the far end of the pond had been disappearing, too.
“What do you think he’s doing in the barn?” Milly said.
Twiss emerged from beneath her covers but didn’t open her mouth.
“You can talk,” Milly said. “I won’t tell.”
“I don’t know,” Twiss said, exhaling as though it was her breath she’d been holding.
Milly hugged her pillow. “Neither do I.”
Though Bett was gone, they kept looking at her bed as if she would pop out from beneath her covers at any moment and ask another question—Would you drink your own blood if you were starving?—or scold them for feeling sorry for themselves by telling another one of her stories. Twiss was still excited to go to Deadwater, but now she was afraid she wouldn’t want to come home. Or that while she was gone, she’d start to hate the very things she loved about Spring Green, the things that made home home.
That’s what happened in her adventure books. Once the boys became men and the men became cowboys, they couldn’t go back to their old ranching lives. They couldn’t be happy with three ho
me-cooked meals a day, foursquare lives. Always, they had an itch to gallop away on their horses and shoot off their guns. Always, the horizon line pulled them to it.
As much as Twiss craved adventures in other places, she didn’t want those places to change how she felt about home. Travel, she’d noticed, had a profound effect on people in Spring Green. When they came back from weekend trips even to places as close as Lake Geneva or Mill Valley, suddenly the colors of their houses were all wrong, or the style of their curtains. What had satisfied them before now offended their sensibilities.
Every house in Lake Geneva is steeple-white, they’d say, or, You should have seen the striped valances on their windows. Breathtaking!
Although Deadwater wasn’t a place people seemed to choose for their vacations, and curtains were a waste of money when you lived where there was no one to see you, Twiss was afraid she’d come back home thinking How absolutely insignificant the pond looks! How ridiculously small! Would the snapping turtles hold up against a live-dead bird, a dead-live man in a closet?
Of course Twiss would want to come home, but she was worried that home wouldn’t be what it was before she’d left. When her parents were still merely annoyed with each other, sometimes her mother would look around the house and say, I wonder where I’d be if I weren’t here.
Father Rice was the only person Twiss knew who’d left Spring Green for more than a weekend or a weeklong vacation, and he was also the only one she knew who’d left the state of Wisconsin proper. Twiss longed for another letter from him, so that she could send another letter too. She wanted to ask him about Mexico, and his leg, although she didn’t want to be predictable or rude. Nearly every person he’d encountered on his travels must have stopped to stare at the one-legged man from Wisconsin, and nearly every one of these people must have eventually broken down and asked the question that had come into their minds the moment they saw him: How did you lose your leg? Maybe it was easier to tell your life to someone you didn’t know than to tell it to someone you did.
Twiss and Father Rice weren’t strangers, but she did wonder about his leg. While she and Milly waited for Bett to come back from the barn, Twiss imagined him losing it in a hand of high-stakes poker, which seemed as likely as any other scenario she’d been able to think of.
Because Father Rice had bet the Sewing Society’s money and lost it, Twiss imagined that he’d been forced to make a deal with a man who sported a thick black mustache that curled at the ends, a man who carried a machete instead of a gun.
Twiss called the man Carlos Vidales of Rosarie. She imagined him looking out over the length of his hacienda (Twiss’s history teacher said that hacienda was a fancy way of saying plantation, which was a polite way of saying indentured servitude, which was a more acceptable way of saying slavery), content in the knowledge that his land rolled on for miles, but also not so content since people didn’t hold on to such estates by forgiving debts.
“Pick the part you want to lose,” Twiss imagined him saying to Father Rice.
“Take my heart,” she imagined Father Rice pleading.
“If you were still a priest, Señor Rice. Then it would be worth its weight in gold.”
Twiss imagined Father Rice kneeling before one of the women standing on the periphery of the poker table, the one who was the most covered up despite the hot weather and the one who also looked the most like the Virgin Mary.
“I am still a priest,” she imagined him saying, growing more certain of himself.
(This, Twiss thought, must have been the moment Father Rice regained his Faith, although, as he said in his letter, it would have been an altered form of Faith, but Faith nonetheless. As he looked out onto the orchards of fruit trees and coffee fields—here Twiss imagined neat rows of porcelain cups filled with the warm, brown liquid—he wouldn’t have been able to stop thinking about the slow curve of the river, the black earth smell of home.)
“Then you won’t mind if I take your leg,” she imagined Carlos Vidales of Rosarie saying, wielding his machete like a sling blade. “Tus Dios will grow you another one.”
Twiss pictured Father Rice drinking down his margarita and sucking his wedge of lime and licking the salt sprinkled around the rim of his glass.
“To the Glory of God!” she imagined him saying heartily, just before Carlos Vidales of Rosarie took from him what he owed. “To happiness in all its forms!”
“I have an idea of how we could raise money at the fair,” Twiss said to Milly, who’d opened a gardening book but had failed to turn a page since Bett left the room. It was too late in the season to plant anything anyway—the garden was beginning to look like a jungle.
“How?” Milly said.
“What does everyone want?” Twiss said.
“I have a feeling you’re going to tell me,” Milly said, closing her book.
“Happiness,” Twiss said.
Milly raised her eyebrows. “You’re going to give that to people?”
“No,” Twiss said, visualizing the meadow, a place she couldn’t remember being unhappy in. The sound of it in the summer—of the crickets and the frogs, the blades of grass and weeds brushing against each other—felt holy somehow. Although Twiss didn’t pray in church, she’d pray in the meadow. She’d listen for the sound of the earth in acorns the way people listened for the sound of the sea in shells.
Twiss jumped up so that she was standing on her bed.
“I’m going to give them Twiss’s wonderfully stupendous momentous illustrious unforgettable Purple Prairie Tonic!”
She imitated the announcer who rattled off prices and particulars about cattle and sheep at the livestock auction with a speed that most people’s voices couldn’t achieve.
“You don’t have money? You don’t have health? You don’t have love? You don’t have a leg? An arm? A child? A parrot named Henry? Any of the aforementioned materials? Try Twiss’s wonderfully stupendous momentous illustrious unforgettable Purple Prairie Tonic. Drink it down, drink it up, drink it sideways, if you like. It’s genuine goodness in a bottle. That’s Twiss’s wonderfully stupendous momentous illustrious unforgettable Purple Prairie Tonic. One hundred percent guaranteed to cure what ails you!”
“Purple Prairie?” Milly said.
“It sounds better than Purple Meadow,” Twiss said.
“How much is it?” Milly said.
“A nickel,” Twiss said. “Remember, that’s Twiss’s wonderfully stupendous—”
“You can stop saying that,” Milly said. “I’ll buy some of your tonic. So will everyone else if you badger them.”
“I bet Dr. Greene will help me make it,” Twiss said. “He still has a whole cabinet of cure-alls. I’m pretty sure he already gave one to Mrs. Collier. Mold-Be-Gone.”
Milly tossed her pillow at Twiss. “You have the eyes of a crazy person.”
“What would your home economics teacher say about your behavior?” Twiss said.
“Pillow throwing shows too much independence on the part of a young woman!”
“You sound like me,” Twiss said.
“You sound like Bett,” Milly said.
“That’s only because Bett sounds like me.”
“Then you must be easy to sound like.”
After that, the two of them lost their laughter.
What had Bett been doing in the barn all this time?
Milly stood up on her bed and draped her sheet over the buck’s head on the wall the way people did after the first snow, when they closed off entire sections of their houses to conserve heat, and money, for the winter.
“I don’t like how this thing looks at me,” she said. “Sometimes I swear it winks.”
“Sometimes I think it does too,” Twiss said.
When they heard the screen door open and close, the two of them stopped speaking. This time, they didn’t toss pillows at each other or pretend to be asleep. Milly opened her gardening book again and Twiss reread Father Rice’s letter.
Dear Twiss, You caught me …
You caught me …
As if Father Rice were a fish and her letter a lure.
When Bett came in, she took off her robe and placed her slippers at the side of her bed. “Neither of you told me how funny your dad was. I thought he’d be the bitter type. The life-isn’t-a-bowl-of-cherries kind of man after that stunt in the kitchen the other day. But he wasn’t. He invited me right in and set out a milk pail for me to sit on. He was charming.”
My milk pail? Twiss thought. Charming?
“He told me a story,” Bett said to Twiss. “About the day you were born. He wasn’t playing golf like your mother thinks.”
Twiss covered her ears.
“Don’t be such a baby,” Bett said, gently pulling Twiss’s hands away from her ears. “Your father was at the river, helping a group of other volunteers look for a man who was thought to have drowned.”
The man, Jester Johnson, had disappeared the night before—willfully, Bett said, because he’d spent an entire month’s earnings on a bronze compass and was shamed by his lack of willpower to walk past the shopwindow where it was displayed and continue on to the general store like he was supposed to. Jester had promised to bring home a bottle of milk and a loaf of bread for supper and had brought home the compass instead.
When Jester showed her the compass, his wife didn’t look mad like she usually did, nor did she place her hands on her hips. As if she’d known the outcome of his trip to town before it came out, she’d gone ahead and scraped together enough flour for a miniature loaf of bread, which she’d baked into the shape of a heart.
“Sit,” she said to Jester. “Put your feet up.”
Jester pulled off his boots and sat in the chair at the head of the table.
“Tell me about your day,” his wife said.
Jester was waiting for his wife to ask about the milk and the bread—she always asked about the milk and the bread. “It was all right,” he said.
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