She was saying Vina’s love had made them sisters, but my artist’s eyes saw that they were sisters twice over. Sisters in their hearts and in their histories, two halves clasped together in a tangle of good love and bad history.
I’d thought that every human secret must eventually get too old to matter, but the echoes of this one filled the room. They wept in each other’s arms, and I was crying, too. They became a single thing in my blurred vision, smashed together, leaning on each other. They turned their heart-shaped faces toward me, their very different features painted on the same-shaped canvas, and now that I had seen it, I would always see. This was the past rising up alive to eat us. History breathing. Alive in their bodies, mirrored in mine.
24
Emily Birch was firmly on the shelf when she was twenty-nine, but it was a shelf of her own making. She was the rising Birch in Birchville, and the boys who came a-courting in her girlhood were overdiffident, cringing like dogs before her father. She knew it without being told: They would not do.
It was plain in the amused, pitying way Ellis Birch invited them in when they showed up in fresh collars with combed-back hair. They sweated through their half hours in the parlor, and no vase of cool water could stop their field daisies and Queen Anne’s lace from wilting in his presence.
Clayton Mack took a different route. He joined Emily when she walked out alone, cocksure and overly familiar, coming up behind her to tug on her braid. He made her laugh. He did not come by the house, properly, to genuflect, and he soon found himself invited to pursue opportunities elsewhere. In Georgia, say, or Mississippi. As Alabama sealed itself shut behind him, the already sour blood between the families curdled thoroughly.
Emily was too beloved and too busy to be lonely, especially since her father practiced what he preached; she was the only person in Birchville he found worthy of his love. He was an early, wealthy widower, so maidens and spinsters and widows alike took solid runs at him. He was immune to casseroles and sympathetic ears and mothery dabbings at his baby, marching unscathed through a hundred honey traps with the same amused condescension that he gave Emily’s suitors.
This very public attitude meant Ellis Birch was revered far more than he was liked. His father had been “Ethan” to quite a few families, but Ellis was “Mr. Birch,” always, to everyone. To Emily, however, he was “Daddy,” and she basked in every bit of his scant sunshine. It was rare, and all for her.
Lord, he loves his girl, though, folks in Birchville said, like a refrain, like a forgiving chorus, when his pride had chilled the room. Their small, cold god had been big enough to carry Birchville through the Great Depression and beyond. He never treated Emily as decorative either. From birth on, she was told her life had higher purpose, sleeping on his knee through deacon and town-council meetings before she could talk. By twenty she was running all the ladycentric clubs her mother would have managed, had she lived: Library Friends, Garden Club, the Mary-Marthas.
Floyd Briggs didn’t start out as a suitor. He was only friendly and funny and kind when she went to his shop to supplement her garden with his fresh produce, and she noticed he’d sit out on the park benches in fine weather, reading poetry and novels by Austen, E. M. Forster, any Bront?. All her favorites. Soon they were trading books back and forth at church. He began slipping his own poems, handwritten and unsigned, into the pages. They were quite good, and one day Emily found herself at his shop buying spring onions when she knew very well the ones in her own garden were ready.
She also knew, before he asked, that Floyd Briggs would not pass muster with her daddy. Ellis had dismissed boys with finer pedigrees, better prospects, older names. Ellis was the One True Birch and Emily his rising, only heir. But when the question came, she was tempted enough to talk it over with her father. He did not rail or forbid—these things might have tipped his strong-willed child into Floyd’s arms.
He was cool and thoughtful, questioning Floyd’s motives. After all, Emily would be quite wealthy. He didn’t try to guilt her with the knowledge that if she married, he would be alone in his big house up on the hill. She knew that already. He himself had not remarried, and the unspoken message was that she was enough. In the end it felt too much like betrayal to tell him he was not enough back. She kept her name and let Floyd go.
That was when her girlish figure started getting away from her. It was only Emily and her father, eating the good suppers Vina left behind for them each evening. One day Emily would be the Last Birch in Birchville, and at that thought she’d have another fried tomato, another slice of pie.
At twenty-nine, had her name been anything but Birch, she would have been pitied. Another old maid sitting in the small row of the passed-over, running to fat. Instead she married the town. She cleaved to Birchville, carrying it forward as Birches always had, and the town honored every vow she made to it. She moved past ladylike committee work, becoming the fund-raiser and planner who rebuilt the town’s library. Jesus had clearly stated in some unfindable verse somewhere that women could not be church leadership, but the deaconate elected her to be their secretary. Then they rewrote the bylaws to give the “secretary” the right to speak in meetings and to vote.
She loved the town, and she loved her father. She loved Vina and Wattie, and she loved the Reverend “Big Bear” Price when Wattie married him. She loved Wattie’s babies when they came. Everything she loved loved her right back. It was a good life. Her father told her by example that it was good, and filling, and enough. She believed him.
She believes him until the day she comes home from Garden Club early with the beginnings of a sick headache. She goes back to her father’s office to tell him she will nap until supper. The door is open, and she sees. To see, in this case, is to unbelieve.
She understands what is happening. Of course she does. Birchville is a small town, a country town, full of dogs and horses and barn cats. The Partridges keep goats, and Birchie herself has chickens and a strutting banty rooster. She has seen animals stacked this way, their eyebrowless faces blank, muzzles incapable of grimaces or smiles. Animal faces stay passive, strangely disinterested even when they are making other animals.