The Bird Sisters (20 page)

When they were young, she and Milly would take turns pumping for water on days when the temperature crested into the triple digits. The pump was rusty even then, which made the coaxing of water all the more difficult and yet all the more rewarding. One of them would pump until the other one got tired or until the water sputtered yellow drops then ran clear. After they’d quenched their thirsts, they’d run around the pump, filling up the tin coffee mug that hung from the pump’s handle and splashing each other in the face.

“For the love of water!” they’d say, and go round and round.

Twiss began the slow business of working the water pump now. Though her arms were puckered with age, they were still strong from swinging a golf club nearly every day of her life. As the pump rose, she could almost feel Milly standing by her side when they were young, both of them anticipating the first drops of water that would fall into the cup.

That was one of the few marvelous things about aging—Twiss could travel from here to there without having to go anywhere at all. Her memories were her suitcases, and her mind her passport, only she didn’t need to leave Spring Green to see one of the world’s seven wonders; all the wonders that she needed were located in the Wisconsin River valley. True, she’d wanted to see the Taj Mahal and the Great Wall of China, Machu Picchu and the Egyptian pyramids (what were the others?); she just must not have wanted to see them enough.

Standing on the Continental Divide was the only experience she felt she’d missed out on by staying in Spring Green. When she was young, she’d planned on positioning herself astride it and taking a photograph. She liked the idea of being in the exact middle of two watersheds. She’d planned on sending a postcard to Milly.

From the Divide with Love, Your Sister, Twiss
.

While Twiss was on her trip, Milly would have been snugged into her life with the two children and the husband she’d always wanted to have. She’d be engaged in the time-consuming activity of darning socks or preserving jam when the postcard arrived. And for a moment, just a moment, amid the shrieks and tugs of her children on her shirtsleeves—Milly would be making chicken and dumplings for supper: their favorite—and the press of her husband’s boots on the porch steps, she’d wish she were standing on the Divide with Twiss.

From Spring Green with Love (and a smidge of envy), Your Sister, Milly
.

When they were kids, Milly used to draw pictures of her future family. There was a son named Jacob and a long-haired daughter named Molly Blue.

“Why blue?” Twiss would ask her.

“Because it’s pretty,” Milly would say. Her future husband, tall and pencil-line thin, didn’t have a name.

“Why didn’t you pick a name for the daddy?” Twiss would ask.

“Because he hasn’t told it to me yet,” Milly would say.

Twiss would draw pictures of the species she’d captured on the golf course. She had the idea that she would not only become a great explorer like Lewis or Clark, but that she’d also write textbooks filled with her own kind of science.

While I was digging for a pot of gold in the Amazon
, she’d written as the opening of her first textbook,
I came upon the world’s first flying beetle. It has one hundred three and a half legs and uses them to fly to the sun to gather sunspots. This explains the shiny yellow dots all over its body!

Although Twiss didn’t become a scientist or an explorer like she’d planned, rescuing birds was a little like being both at the same time. In order to repair a wing properly, she believed you had to understand what it was like to have one, which led to much mental soaring around the countryside, much unskilled flapping in the bathroom. A bird’s wing, though it contained several distinct bones, functioned as though it contained only one. You couldn’t fiddle with even the tiniest bone without repercussions in the larger ones.

Twiss’s bird books said as much about avian anatomy, though the authors didn’t suggest that ornithologists take up flight as a mode of diagnosis. “Take up your disinfected stainless-steel scalpels,” the books said. “Your impermeable latex surgical gloves.”

What words for restoration!

Sometimes, Twiss wished she could be the one making vanilla drop biscuits in the kitchen, while Milly was in the bathroom guessing at the steps that would bring a bird back to full chirping life. Sometimes, she’d have rather been responsible for fixing breakfast than fixing what often, with her skill set, could not be fixed. There was nothing quite as depressing as running up against your limitations before you had your morning tea.

That had happened with Father Rice—Twiss had believed she could save him. What she didn’t understand when she was fourteen, but understood very well now, was that not everyone in the world could be saved or, for that matter, wanted to be.

forgive you
, Twiss wrote in the first of the batch of letters she addressed to 6 1/3 Steele Street during the month of July, because that’s what she thought Father Rice wanted to hear. Twiss expected Father Rice to say “thank you,” which he did, and be back to his old, fish-eating, tarnished-silverware-accepting self, which he wasn’t.
Dear Twiss
,
I was greatly cheered when I came home to find your letter beneath my door this evening. I can almost see you skipping along the long dusty road into town to mail it, although you might be too old for skipping now. Perhaps you’ve always been too old
.
When I left Spring Green, you and your sister, Milly, were the last people I saw. Your sister looked frightened from the pew where you two were sitting that morning, but you …
All I can advise is read your Bible, my dear. If I remember right, you were quite a fast runner. As you know, it’s impossible to run without a leg
.                
Sincerely
,

                
Edward Rice

Father Rice’s letter prompted Twiss to write a second letter, which began indignantly, even for her.
Dear Father Rice
,
I’m not a child! Please tell me what comes after these three dots … and before the words “All I can advise.” I can handle it. I’m fourteen now
.                
Sincerely, Twiss
P.S. I don’t read the Bible anymore, but I do still skip
.
Not because I’m young, but because I’m me
.

Dear Twiss
, Father Rice wrote back,
You caught me
.
What I meant was that you have a certain spark of life, which I would hate to see go out because of your own stupidity (which, in this case, is really my stupidity since you have not done anything to endanger your general well-being, yet)
.
What I love and appreciate about you—what I’ve always loved and appreciated about you—is your ability to be truthful. Forgive me?
                
Sincerely
,

                
Father Rice
Not because I am trying

                to be conciliatory
.
P.S. Well, maybe a little. The truth is writing this letter has been the first activity in months during which I’ve temporarily forgotten to feel sorry for myself. Thank you
.

I forgive you
, Twiss wrote, among other things. Again.

She hadn’t received a letter back from Father Rice yet, which she was a little disappointed about since he’d already sent another letter and another payment to Father Stone, which Father Stone had handed over to the Society without the payment, and which her mother had attempted to steal during another emergency meeting, this time about the blight of Back Bend on the river landscape.

Mrs. Merrykind, the president of the Society, had caught her mother with the letter and had smacked the back of her hand. When Twiss’s mother attempted to defend herself—
Father Stone is the real thief!
she said—Mrs. Merrykind called her a liar of the worst sort. Instead of voting to evict the people of Back Bend, the Society voted to evict Twiss’s mother.

“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?