Sister

by A. Manette Ansay

  I reach for the owl, but a slight shift in Lottie’s weight lets me know she will not release it. One magnificent wing stretches away from its limp body, pulled long by its own weight, longer still, until the tip brushes the floor. There is no response when I press my index finger to the cornea. “I’m afraid it’s already gone,” I say. I can smell the women’s coats, that stale church smell of hair spray and liniment and sweet, sweet perfume. “Sometimes we work with a vet in Binghamton, but there’d be no point calling her now.”

  “Fool thing flew up off the road, straight at us. Cracked the windshield,” the woman says. “Could have killed us both.” Her kerchief flutters beside her. “Oh, Lottie!” she says. “You got bugs all over you!”

  Lice are streaming over Lottie’s hands and wrists, disappearing underneath the sleeves of her coat. “Bird lice,” I explain, my own skin itching in sympathy. “You can shower them off with regular soap. This kind of lice doesn’t like people.”

  Again, I try to take the owl, but Lottie is staring into its crushed face, those liquid yellow eyes. I remember the time Auntie Thil hit a doe, driving us home from an ice-skating lesson—me and Sam, Monica and Harv. The doe was winter thin, ribs heaving, the tendons in her legs taut as string. She lay on the side of the highway and kicked, her body spinning around and around. We were in the back seat, looking and not looking as Auntie Thil got out of the car, hands outstretched in front of her the way you do when you’ve just said something unforgivable, when you just want to take it all back.

  “Let me find something to put it in,” I say, and by the time I return with a plastic trash bag, Lottie is ready to let go. In a low, rough voice, she asks if she can wash her hands, and I point her toward the rest rooms. As she walks, the bottoms of her boots skim the floor as if the weight of them is almost too much to carry. The owl is a large specimen, probably a female. I turn to carry her over to the gift shop counter, and my ankle pops. I wince, catch my balance. “Are you all right?” Lottie’s companion says, and then, without waiting for my answer, “When’s your baby due? Christmas?”

  “January,” I say, bracing myself; lately, I’ve found myself trapped in gruesome conversations about induced labor, cesarean sections, crib death. But this woman does not say anything more about it. She picks up one of our promotional mugs, on sale at $5.95. “Wild turkeys,” she says, examining the Turkey Hill logo. “They certainly are foolish-looking things.”

  Lottie comes out of the bathroom, her mouth bright with fresh lipstick. She wanders over to the winter mammal display and stares out the big glass windows at the sun setting over the heated pond. Canada geese form a tight raft at the center; others walk in slow, proud pairs across the frozen lawn. There is snow in the clouds, in the softness of the light that deepens the sadness in Lottie’s thin face. She’s been crying, and I can see that this owl is just one more thing to be added to a long list of small, private sadnesses. On her way out the door, she stops at the donation box and slips something into it with the furtive look of the perennial almsgiver, one who knows she can never give enough. A person like Harv, who has taken vows of chastity, humility, poverty, believing that somehow he can suffer for us all.

  I carry the owl down the narrow wooden steps to the basement. The walls are lined with snowshoes and cross-country skis, flashlights, NO TRESPASSING signs, an assortment of aging tools. On the back table, pinned to a piece of Styrofoam, is the Cooper’s hawk—found electrocuted on a fence—I finished preparing earlier today. People often bring us birds: a blue jay, a grosbeak, a waxwing. They open the shoe box, the paper bag, their own cupped hands, and it seems so wrong that even in death, the plumage is that same vivid blue or rust or ocher, soft to the touch, lifelike. Over the past few years, I’ve taught myself the fundamentals of taxidermy, keeping records of stomach contents and parasites, healed-over bones and half-formed eggs, reconstructing whatever moments I can from these small lost lives.

  “How can you handle dead things like that?” my mother asks. But I’m fascinated by the way we live beyond ourselves, how our very bones can tell our stories. I lug the owl to the freezer, stacking and restacking the other, smaller birds like so many bundles of kindling, making room. Already, death is filling its body with a heaviness that doesn’t register on any scale. Poor Lottie, I think. How awful to drive home peering through that cracked windshield, wondering, What if I’d swerved, what if I’d gone a different route? What if. I unsnag my coat from its hook, dig a pocket’s worth of pellets from the storage barrel, and begin the long climb back up the stairs. My mother believes, the way my grandmother believed, that each tragic thing we suffer is a spiritual lesson, something we bring upon ourselves, something we deserve. My refusal to baptize the baby terrifies her, and it’s this last, blasphemous straw that has broken her determination to see the past decade of my life as simply a temporary lapse of faith. Our most recent fight was a week ago; we have not spoken since.

  I lock the front doors, and the geese, hearing the chime of my keys, begin their slow migration out of the water. Their white cheeks shine like double moons. I spill the pellets from my pockets and they eat—snapping, hissing. The clouds descend, snuffing a sunset that looks like fire running wild along the horizon, and I remember the cannery fire, the same dark, cold November day that my grandmother remembered whenever she saw a rosy winter sky. “That’s just what it looked like in the distance,” she’d say, “like the sun going down at noon, like the end of the world had come.” She’d told me over and over how she’d known all along that the cannery was no place for girls. The dusty air gave them coughs that lasted through the summer; the noise left them cocking their heads—What did you say?; there were rumors that the foremen used bad language. But my grandmother wanted money to buy sugar and seed, cloth and fertilizer, all the things that had run low since my grandfather’s death, and so, each day, she sent Mary and Elise to meet the cannery truck that lurched from farm to farm at dawn, collecting workers.

  The morning of the fire, the wind froze the air in people’s noses and sealed the eyes of the cattle, grinding its way through scarves and cloaks and wool stockings, speaking in the white voice of static, making it hard to hear. There was half a foot of hard-crusted snow on the ground. Zero degrees in November! the mothers cried, hurrying their daughters off to work. Zero degrees in November! the fathers cursed, out in the barns already, hands so cold they’d become weak. Zero degrees! the girls crowed as they greeted one another at the cannery, hurrying toward the hum of the machines.

  The first oily belch of smoke was torn into loose ribbons, wavering on the horizon like the shadows of large birds. Children pressed up against windows to stare; mothers and fathers finishing chores, crossing at a run from barn to shed, from shed to house, from house to henhouse, now paused and danced in place, refusing to understand. Then they dropped the eggs, the bales of straw, the tins of milk, hollering against the wind, running for trucks and cars. The smoke was thickening, funneling into the clouds, a slanted black arrow with a blazing root. People came from Oneisha and Farbenplatz, Ooston, Horton, Holly’s Field, and by the time the fire truck arrived from Fall Creek, a line had formed to pass buckets of snow, which liquefied in midair. Men and women flung off their coats, rolled up their sleeves as if preparing to fight, danced forward with their buckets until their faces browned like pork and the hair on their arms turned to ash and blew away. But the heat forced them back, the water splashed short. The wind roared, feeding the fire, snatching the words out of people’s throats, though behind the sound of the wind were the other cries, fierce at first, then fading like smoke. My grandmother never stopped believing my young aunts’ deaths had been her fault, the result of her lack of faith that God Himself would provide.

  “Watch out what you want or you’ll get it,” she’d say whenever I began a sentence with I wish or I want or Wouldn’t it be nice. To want was to take the reins from God’s hand. To want was to suggest that you yourself presumed to know what was best. When she started to work outside
the home, my mother began to want, to wish and dream. A career woman, people said, and when Sam disappeared and never came back, they consoled her with the cruel, fevered look of the righteous. When I went away to college and then stayed away for good, it was clear my mother had gotten what she had been foolish enough to ask for. Watch out what you want. I toss the last handful of pellets to the geese, and the wind unwinds the scarf from my neck. The air smells faintly of wood smoke; the trees are scorched black and bare. How much longer will I find myself remembering pain that is not my own, raw and undigested hurts belonging to the communities of Oneisha, Ooston, Farbenplatz, Horton, Holly’s Field? Stories told again and again until they belong to us all. My grandmother’s grief becomes my mother’s. My mother’s fear becomes my own.

  “Harv called,” Adam says as he lets me into the house. It’s good to find him here, warm cooking smells wafting in from the kitchen. “He said he’d call back later.”

  “What did he want?”

  “He wouldn’t say, but I can guess.” Adam’s voice holds the same weariness I feel. “What will your mother try next? A call from the Pope? Crusades?”

  “Harv wouldn’t get involved in this,” I say, but Harv doesn’t call without a reason. Our relationship has been cautious ever since I left the Church. The last time we talked, I was still in Baltimore, living in sin with Adam; he’d been nervous, awkward, reluctant to speak. “Your mother,” he finally said, “wants me to let you know that I’m here in case you ever want to talk about your faith.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “Well,” Harv said, “I told her I’d say that, even though I knew you’d just tell me to mind my own business.”

  “Mind your own business,” I said, but I had started laughing because he sounded so foolish and shy.

  “And it’s another success for the good father,” he said in his dry, self-deprecating way. “Another lost sheep returned safely to the fold. My God, they should have me canonized.”

  I was still laughing. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Promise you’ll tell your mother I argued with you for hours. Tell her I quoted Scripture. Tell her I threatened to have God strike you dead.”

  “I’ll tell her,” I said, and then we both relaxed and talked about other things. But before we hung up, he said, “I can’t imagine what it would be like to lose my faith.”

  I didn’t say anything. Was he going to make some sort of religious pitch after all?

  “Well?” he said.

  “Well what?”

  “What’s it like? I mean, as a kid you were just as devout as I was. You were even praying for a vocation for a while.”

  I told him the truth. “It’s lonely.”

  There was a pause as he thought this over; I could almost see him shaking his head. “I can’t imagine,” he said again.

  As I wash my hands for supper, I tell Adam about the ranch house where Harv and Monica grew up, the pond in the back, which Olaf decorated with floating plastic ducks. How, in winter, he set the temperature to sixty before locking the thermostat controls back inside their plexiglass box. How even the toilet paper was rationed: one square for number 1, two squares for number 2. Adam listens to me with the expression of someone who’s waiting for the punch line. “I’ve told you all this before,” I insist, but he shakes his head.

  “You never talk about your family.”

  “Well, now you see why.”

  We are laughing as we sit down to the supper he has made: meat loaf and green beans, potatoes with gravy. “Watch him call again right now,” Adam says, and with that the phone starts to ring.

  “Let me get it,” he says. “I’ll tell him you’ll call back when we’re done eating.”

  He goes down the hall and picks up the phone. I play connect the dots with his responses, and the picture I come up with isn’t a friendly one. Steam rises from the meat loaf, and I hear Adam say, “Look, you can just tell me. Did Therese ask you to call?”

  “Adam, don’t! Let me talk to him,” I yell, but before I can get up, Adam’s standing in the doorway.

  “Great,” I say. “All I need is a fight with Harv too.”

  I push past him to the phone. “Harv?” I say. “Hi, Harvard. Look—”

  “When have I ever pushed my beliefs on you?” It takes me a moment to recognize Harv’s voice; I can’t remember ever hear ing him angry. Adam is standing beside me, too close. “Your mother asked me to call you,” Harv says, “because they found the remains of your brother in a dry well on the Luchterhand’s old property. The ID came back positive this morning.”

  For over ten years, I have imagined this phone call, expected it, dreaded it, wished for it. But what Harv has just said cannot be true. I shrug Adam’s hand off my shoulder; I’m so relieved I start to laugh. “That’s crazy,” I say, almost smugly.

  “The developers found him. They were digging a foundation for those condos going in. There must have been an old home-stead along the bluff. Even the Luchterhands didn’t know about it.”

  “Mom told me about that subdivision,” I say. “She says the Luchterhands made out like bandits when they sold that land. She’s thinking she could sell our place for some serious bucks.”

  “Did you hear what I just told you?”

  A strange thought is occurring to me: This is real.

  “Abby,” Harv says. “Listen. They also found the knife Geena Baumbach described, which means Sam was one of those boys who…” I pass the phone to Adam and go back into the kitchen. Everything looks delicious. Should I wait for Adam, or should I eat now? I can hear him asking questions about Sam, and it annoys me to hear him speak my brother’s name. You never even met him, I want to say. I help myself to a slice of the meat loaf. He’s mixed the meat with chopped sweet onions, the way I like it best, then baked it with bread and egg and dried tomatoes from our garden. I spread my slice with mashed potatoes, thick as sour cream, and drizzle gravy on top. It’s hot, but I’m greedy, I swallow it down. Next I ladle green beans onto my plate; I pop them into my mouth with my fingers.

  “Did he fall down there by accident or did someone…” I can’t hear the rest. Then, “How can they know what really happened?”

  I cut another slice of meat loaf, cover it with ketchup. Adam hates it when I do this; ketchup, he says, is an insult to meat. I fill my glass with milk and drink it down in long, aching gulps. I’ve drifted through this pregnancy on a shallow wave of nausea that leaves everything around me dull, unappealing. But tonight the food has color again; I taste salt, sweet, the richness of beef. Adam comes back into the kitchen, stops, stares at the collage of food on my plate.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I should have waited. I was just so hungry.”

  “It’s OK,” Adam says. “Harv says you should call him back when you can. Your mother is staying with his mother, and she doesn’t want to talk to anybody.”

  “I think I’d like dessert,” I say. “Do we have anything sweet in the house?”

  “We’ll come up with something,” Adam says. He himself doesn’t seem to have much of an appetite, but he sits with me as I finish my meal, and afterward he makes baked apples for dessert. When I start to get up to clear the dishes, he puts his hand on mine, holding me in place. Then he tells me everything he’s learned about my brother—tells me over and over until I hear him, until I understand.

  Sam wouldn’t do a think like that. My mother’s voice, a fragment of a dream I can’t remember, awakens me in the gray hour before true dawn. I get up to go to the bathroom, marveling at the way familiar things look unfamiliar at this time of day: the toothbrush, the soap, the long, limp slope of the bath towels. The sound of my mother’s voice winds around me like the refrain of a simple-minded song. A thing like that—her euphemism. I put on my bathrobe and creep to the kitchen, the cold floorboards biting the balls of my feet, and I sit in the rocking chair beside the French doors as light spills over the tops of the trees like a slow, persistent leak. The baby awaken
s, and for the first time I feel its conscious presence. It knows me, I think with amazement. And I don’t know whether to feel comforted or afraid.

  A thing like that. My mother and I heard Geena Baumbach’s story from my grandmother, and it’s not hard to imagine how it was. What woman hasn’t awakened in the night to a noise that shapes itself into a man’s heavy footstep? What woman cannot hear of a break-in and see that same shadow fall across her own bed? Mrs. Baumbach remembered it had been a long day of tornado warnings, the sky above the swollen lake purple as the underside of a tongue. Twice, a peculiar twisting finger bled through the cloud cover to touch the fields the way a child might slip a sly finger into a bowl of cake batter—just to taste. Late in the afternoon, Father Van Dan came over at a run. The wind flapped his black skirts into a frenzy, and when he leapt up onto her porch, his hair was standing on end. “Don’t go taking chances, Geena,” he said. Lightning shattered the sky like an omen. “Come on over with the rest of us.” But Mrs. Baumbach was unwilling to spend a day in the basement of the church, making small talk, playing cards, drinking lukewarm coffee with the group of nervous parishioners who lived in the trailer park west of Oneisha. She had work to do: a sinkful of dishes humming with flies, that tacky kitchen floor she’d been meaning to wash for days, the set of matching pot holders she wanted to finish on time for her niece’s wedding shower. She showed Father the pattern—two pale yellow geese, their long lovers’ necks entwined, a sprinkle of daisies beneath them.