The Bird Sisters (14 page)

“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.

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.”

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.

“I made you supper,” Milly said when she reached the front door of the barn. She knocked twice before her father appeared at the entrance.

“Let me just wash up,” he said, wiping grease from his hands onto his good trousers.

Usually, Milly left his plate on the tree stump next to the barn door and went back to the house. Today, she waited for him to rinse his hands and face at the water pump beside the barn because she knew what was coming. Even though she knew asking the favor of Asa had been the right thing to do, she didn’t want to see the look on Bett’s face when what she’d asked for finally arrived. She thought about her lips grazing Asa’s ear and touched them with the tip of her tongue. She was surprised to find that they tasted like salt.

When her father returned, the collar of his shirt was soaked through but his hands and his face were still black. He glanced at the container of turpentine just inside the door, but picked up the plate of food instead.

“This looks delicious,” he said.

Milly sat on the maple stump while her father worked at his piece of pie. The sun was beginning to set, stretching pink fingers of light across the sky. The air was hot and wet and unlikely to cool much overnight; they were beginning to reach the point in the summer where heat stopped leaving the walls at night. Theirs was one of the few houses that didn’t have a screened sleeping porch attached to the second floor. At least once every summer, Milly and Twiss would haul their blankets onto the regular porch, bed down, and be back in the house a minute later. Like the wolf spiders in Deadwater, by the end of June the mosquitoes in Spring Green were also as big and furry as birds. By August, their bites did as much damage to the flesh as the bites of beavers to logs. The people who used lemon oil to repel them had welts up and down their arms and legs. The people who used camphor did a little bit better.

Milly walked over to the pump and filled the tin cup hanging from it with water. “You won’t hurt my feelings if you say the truth,” she said, handing the cup to her father.

“The truth?” her father said in his old tone of voice. He scraped the last bit of kidney bean pie onto his fork and drew it to his mouth. When he finished, he laid his silverware across the plate horizontally and picked up the cup of water, which he drank from until it was empty.

“I’m miserable,” he said, wiping his mouth with the sleeve of his favorite golf shirt.

hen Twiss saw the goldfinch peeking out of her pocket, she remembered what she was doing in the meadow, but didn’t feel the kind of relief that one might expect from knowing where you are and where you’re going. Reorienting herself to the present moment, the ordinariness of it, felt to her a little like being robbed. According to her chore list, she was supposed to feed the chickens. Milly had already retrieved the eggs. She’d mentioned something about egg salad, if she could round up a jar of pickles in the cellar.

“A change might do us good,” she’d said, which had made Twiss laugh.

“Nothing like old pickles to oust us from routine.”

Twiss fed the chickens, each of whom she called Raoul because she couldn’t tell them apart, and swept up the droppings on the floor. Under the feed trough, she spotted a golf ball and slipped it into her pocket. Twiss had broken the main window so many times that neither she nor Milly saw the use in repairing it anymore. Twiss had covered it with plastic and secured the corners with electrical tape. The lattice of wood was the only element still in place, bisecting the frame like a crossword puzzle—another game Twiss had never possessed the patience for.

She’d flip through the newspaper until she got to the answers, which were positioned upside down on the last page to deter the person prone to cheating.