Sister (21 page)

It seems to me now that the past belongs to those who have the self-possession, or the arrogance, or enough sheer determined
longing, to stamp their own particular imagination
history
. It was no use wondering what I would have put in this room were it mine to fill, because it was not mine, it never would be. I remembered Phoebe telling me, People believe what they want. But there was also this: People want to believe. And somewhere in between wanting to believe and believing what we want, there is the story we call the truth.

I walked outside into the humid air and followed the path toward the canal and the sleepy sound of the gulls. My sneakers crunched the shells and stones that made up the path, and it was a brittle sound, a bitter sound, the sound of many small things breaking.

M
y job at Turkey Hill consists of many jobs: running the information kiosk, preparing the displays, mowing the small front lawn in summer, helping to clear the nature trails of debris each spring. Today has been a quiet day, but as I'm getting ready to close the kiosk for the night, the bells on the front door jingle merrily and two women come inside. They're wearing identical neat black coats, boots trimmed with stiff fake fur, and they stand beside the winter mammal display as if they are posing for a photograph already labeled and pasted in an imaginary scrap-book. Gloves bulge from their pockets, and the mouths of the purses they carry are sealed with scalloped clasps. One of the women is holding something; the other tugs off her kerchief, and the ripple of fabric, the blue and green and gold diamond pattern, reminds me of the sheer scarves my grandmother used to wear.

“We close in five minutes,” I say, and I continue sweeping the floor around the pellet dispensers, where, for a quarter, you can purchase a handful of food for the Canada geese outside. “Our winter hours started this week.” But I know I'll let them poke around for a while. It's my favorite time of day, no longer afternoon, not yet twilight, the feeling like the moment between
wakefulness and sleep. Overhead, beyond the skylights, the dull shapes of clouds pass like coils of smoke, making the bird skeletons suspended from the high ceiling beams appear to be moving through the air. Only the golden eagle, posed on the ledge above the winter mammal display, keeps perfectly still. Its glass eyes shine the color of cracked corn, watching the small dry mice and slender quail, watching my progress with the broom, watching the women, who, I realize, haven't moved since they first came inside. “Lottie thinks it's her fault,” the woman with the kerchief calls to me, and as I cross the room, I see that her companion is cradling a great horned owl. Blood drools from its nares. “I told her maybe someone here could fix it.”

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.