The Bird Sisters (29 page)

“It’s more genuine now,” she said.

“Yes,” someone said. “They’re flawed by their nature.”

“I’ve never seen one without a scratch.”

“If you don’t count the red Farmall.”

“I don’t.”

“We won’t!”

The judges weren’t as interested in genuine replicas of farm equipment as everyone thought they’d be. Sitting on the panel were three of the top members of the Sewing Society, who were wearing their yellow hats, which were only remarkable because of the impression of exclusivity that they gave off, something like a No Trespassing sign fixed to a barbed-wire fence. Between tipping their hats to dab at their foreheads with matching yellow handkerchiefs, the three women waved away blackflies, which had been flying over from the livestock ring.

The prize went to a woman who’d made a crumble-top brown sugar apple pie that looked more like a pile of horse manure than a delectable dessert. When the judges handed her the oversized check, the woman displayed it long enough for the man from the
Gazette
to take a photograph and then handed it right back.

“For the Society,” she said, looking at Milly’s mother. “Not every one of us here’s a thief. Some of us think about the greater good of the town.”

“What’s she talking about?” Milly’s father said.

Her mother took his hand. “Just something you missed while you were in the barn.”

A pie isn’t the same thing as a cake
, Milly thought.
What have you done with my mother?

Although she didn’t win the cash prize, the panel decided Milly shouldn’t walk away without winning something, so she won the prize for the most unique cake. One of the judges walked over to the livestock arena and came back with an ancient, downtrodden-looking goat with a long white beard and white, foamy cataracts in both of his eyes.

“Here,” she said and handed Milly the lead rope. “We were going to sell him to the slaughterhouse, but, congratulations, he’s yours now.”

Normally, Milly’s mother would have stepped in, but today her mother just smiled girlishly. She said, “I don’t know how we’ll ever get him into the car,” when she usually would have said something like, “That’s all the snubbing you’re capable of?”

“What am I supposed to do with him?” Milly said.

“Whatever you want,” the panel reiterated. “He’s yours now.”

Milly never expected those three words—
He’s yours now
—to be the words she’d remember all of her life.

Bett started laughing a deep guttural laugh, a man’s laugh. “I’m sorry,” she said, when people turned their attention away from Milly and the goat to her. “I can’t help it. It’s just so obviously wrong. Milly won a goat. A
goat.
”

“And a fine goat he is,” Dr. Greene said.

“A real blue ribbon winner,” Mrs. Collier echoed.

“What do people want with a giant check, anyway?” Mr. Stewart said.

“When they can have parrots and goats,” Mrs. Bettle said.

“He’s not so bad,” Milly’s father said, clucking his tongue.

“A farm can always use a goat,” her mother said.

“You’ve all got a lot of nerve!” Milly said, raising her voice for the first time in her life. She yanked the lead rope harder than she intended to, which made both the goat and the thick white hairs on the back of his neck stand at attention. “I had plans for that money,” she said and started off in the opposite direction of the crowd. “Plans!”

Without any further yanking, the goat trotted along beside Milly as if she’d been his owner all along. She and the goat didn’t stop walking until they got to the edge of the fairground, where the waist-high weeds met up with the ones that had been mowed down to her ankles and she saw Twiss, who was dragging a case of tonic through the field on a creaky metal dolly. When Twiss waved, Milly let go of the lead rope, but the goat didn’t leave her side.

“Top of the morning!” Twiss said, as if she’d merely overslept and missed nothing more than breakfast. She was wearing a dress a handful of sizes too large for her with sunbursts of yellow lace embroidered from the hem to the neckline. Her cheeks were as pink as calamine.

“What’s with the goat?” she said.

“What’s with the dress?” Milly said.
Where were you?

“Isn’t it amazing?” Twiss said. “It’s like happiness can be sewn.”

She parked the dolly of tonic beside the goat. Where she’d come from and where she’d been, Milly didn’t know. All Milly knew was that when Twiss opened her arms to give her a hug, her anger—visions of someone besides Asa wearing the tractor cuff links, or worse, someone besides her giving them to Asa—came bubbling up.

“You ruined everything!” she said to Twiss. “I would’ve been paying more attention if you hadn’t run off like you always do when you want attention!”

Before she knew what she was doing, Milly had pushed her sister down to the ground, an action that, along with her parents’ imposters’ posturing, brought to mind a game called Opposites Day, which she and Twiss used to play.

The only person who seemed exactly like herself today was Bett—on the ride into town, Henry had avoided the used golf shirts and, instead, had defecated on the sleeve of her dress, and in retaliation, when Mrs. Bettle wasn’t looking, she’d plucked out one of his bright green feathers.

“What did you do that for?” Twiss said, brushing the dirt off her knees, which she’d skinned in the process of falling down. Tiny trickles of blood flowed down her legs.

“Everything,”
Milly said, taking up the lead rope again.

The fair went on with Milly and the goat lingering at the sidelines, watching the gravel parking lot so that she would be the first to see when Mr. Peterson and Asa arrived. Although the cake was ruined and she hadn’t won first prize, she was ready to tell Asa the whole of her feelings for him, to collapse in his arms.

“Take me away from here,” she imagined saying to him. Never mind that people only talked with that kind of false earnestness in the movies. Never mind.

“Where would you like to go?” she imagined him saying back.

“Nowhere. Anywhere.”

“How about the boat launch?”

“That sounds nice,” Milly would say.

It would be the great romantic moment of her life; they wouldn’t need cakes or cuff links or a pair of crystal shoes. At the boat launch, he’d park the car and run around to her side to open the door so that he could help her down. The two would walk to the end of the boat launch, with the sandstone cliffs looming above them and the water flowing below them.

“Glaciers came through here,” Asa might say.

“I know,” Milly might say back. “About twenty thousand years ago.”

“Right, and the sandstone’s even older than that.”

“Five hundred million years or so,” Milly would say and smile. She’d just happen to have Mr. Stewart’s fossil in her pocket, which she’d pull out to illustrate what the words
five hundred million years
couldn’t illustrate. “Did you know that fish can drown?”

Asa would pull out the little purple flower Bett said he had in his front pocket the other day when he walked into the bridal shop and look at Milly for a long moment before he took her in his arms, and even though Twiss would have thrown up or climbed into a tree, Milly would yield to the weight of his body and the downy hairs at the back of his neck.

But Mr. Peterson’s shiny black car never arrived.

Milly stood in the same place for as long as she could, but eventually the goat got hungry and she was forced away from the weeds, which the goat had rejected for nourishment in favor of the scent of melted butter that was infusing the air. Milly walked past the drops of Twiss’s dried blood, back into the crowd.

She was careful to avoid Twiss, who was standing in front of her stall of purple tonic, belting out false promises of all the ailments it would take care of and waving a miniature American flag stapled to a stick. Milly lingered behind Twiss’s stand, petting the goat and letting him lick the palm of her hand.

“Step right up!” she heard Twiss say. “Tell me what you’re suffering from. Whether it’s a goiter or your gallbladder, the key to happiness is only a nickel away!”

A small crowd had gathered around her, although Milly didn’t see anyone pulling nickels, lint covered or otherwise, out of their pockets.

“Only yesterday,” Twiss said, “I had the ache of a lifetime. But as you can see, after drinking my tonic, I am well as well can be. Have you ever seen such rosy cheeks, such a healthy youthful glow?”

“No, I haven’t,” someone said. “But you’re young, and I’m old.”

“No matter,” Twiss said. “Purple Prairie Tonic is one hundred percent guaranteed. You’ll look and feel better or I’ll put your nickel back in your pocket. That’s a promise.”

“Aren’t you that dairyman’s girl?”

“Wasn’t he a golfer?”

“Aren’t you the troublemaker who sprays everyone’s daughters with hoses?”

“I used to be,” Twiss said, curtsying, although she was careful to cover the scrapes on her knees with the hem of her dress. “But I drank Purple Prairie Tonic, and now I’m as ladylike as any other proper Spring Green girl.”

Then came the
oohing
and the
aahing
, and the jingle of one nickel and then another clinking against the empty Mason jar on the table.

“It’s a miracle!” someone said.

“How did you do it?” another said.

“Well, I have to admit,” Twiss said, taking the first of many successive bows, “it was truly difficult to squeeze happiness into a jar.”

When Twiss became too busy handing out jars of her tonic to notice her sister passing by the front of her stand, Milly skirted the crowd with the goat in tow to get closer to the roasted corn; although a goat was the last thing she wanted to be responsible for, it didn’t occur to her that she could let go of the rope at any time.

After the first wave of happiness purchasers had come and gone, Milly looked back at Twiss’s stand and at Twiss, who was arranging what was left of the tonic into the shape of a pyramid, carefully balancing glass upon glass and then gauging the speed of the wind with her finger, the force it would take for the whole thing to fall.

“Egyptians drank this tonic in the times of AD and BC and CCD,” she said to a new group of onlookers, the scrapes on her knees concealed beneath her dress. “How do you think they had enough strength to build the pyramids? How else would they have ascended into heaven? With Purple Prairie Tonic in their stomachs, they didn’t have to wait for the Lord to accept them. They walked all the way up by themselves.”

By noon, all of the bottles of tonic were gone.

Milly bought an ear of roasted corn for the goat and one for herself. The two found a place tucked away beneath the wooden bleachers.

“I guess you should have a name,” Milly said to the goat, to distract herself from the fact that she was behaving eerily like Twiss in that she was sulking.

When he’d finished his ear of corn, Milly gave him hers. She’d never named a goat before, and her track record for naming things wasn’t exactly spectacular; although Hammer really was a hammer, utility wasn’t the point of a nickname. Affection was. Milly thought of mixing up the letters in Asa’s name, but his name was a palindrome.

Twiss would have been able to think of a name without even seeing the goat, just as she could make fun of someone without seeing his or her face, which brought to Milly’s mind the vision of Twiss yelping from a tree the day that Milly made owl cookies, and she and Asa walked through the meadow together. The vision clicked.

The goat would be therein and forever called Hoo-Hoo.

“You’re lucky,” Milly said, when he
maaed
. “I could have just called you Goat.”

Milly and Hoo-Hoo ended up staying under the wooden bleachers all day long, gladly and gratefully missing whatever was going on outside and above them (she’d heard the roar of an engine: the propellers of a biplane, a crop duster?). She’d thought of walking home, but home, even though she knew the route, seemed unreachable now.

When the first signs of night came, and the first stars peeped through the high feathery clouds fanning out across the sky, she and Hoo-Hoo came out from under the bleachers to stretch a little and to walk around. Even though Milly hadn’t slept, it felt like she had. The back of her dress was soiled and her hair had come unpinned.

“How do you like that?” she said to Hoo-Hoo, who
maaed
.

Although Milly could have made amends with Twiss or gone to the square dance to look for her parents or seen the last of Henry’s “Ave Maria” performances, miniature top hat and all, Milly paid two nickels, one for herself and one for Hoo-Hoo, to the man who ran the Ferris wheel and who didn’t like the idea of a goat counting as a person, but submitted when Milly smiled at him. She and Hoo-Hoo climbed into the red bucket seat, just as the Ferris wheel lights came on. When the man in coveralls started the ride, he waved at Milly and told her to hold on. Milly tied Hoo-Hoo’s lead rope around her waist so that if he fell she would fall, too.