Noy Holland - What begins with bird

“Do you think so?”

“Rose.”

“He called the hospital, too. Isn’t that good? He sent a big bunch of flowers.”

Libby went back to digging, piling up the iris. A cluster of low, unimpressive clouds was being blown across the plains. A truck turned off the asphalt road and began to throw, from the slope of sage, a powdery veil of dust.

“Ah,” Rose said, “the man of the house.”

She walked out onto the driveway and waved at him as he came.

Libby threw together an easy meal while her husband played with the baby. He passed brightly colored rings above the baby’s face, nudgled it under its chin. The baby’s eyes were barely open. Its skull was still a funny shape, squeezed into a pointy hump at the top of the baby’s head.

Libby’s husband put the baby in a wicker basket and he set the basket on the floor at his feet when it was time to come to the table. The dog lay down near the basket, watching the baby, lifting up its head from between its paws whenever the baby moved at all or made the slightest sound.

“What a good dog,” Rose said.

It lifted its head to let her pat it.

Libby’s husband ate without speaking. When Rose twisted around to re-tie the robe she had come to dinner in, Libby’s husband kept his eyes on his plate. When he had finished eating all the food on his plate, he picked the plate up and licked it, and when he put the plate down again, there were pieces of food in his beard. He had a sprawling, sunburnt beard and a lumpy, porous nose. His mouth was completely grown over. When he spoke to the baby, all they saw of his mouth was a neat row of tiny teeth and the tip of his tongue between them.

“Bloawgh,” he said, “goochy goo. Talk to Big Bear, Baby.”

He rocked the basket roughly and the baby sloshed side to side.

“Go easy,” Libby told him.

The baby had to wear a harness — webbing and Velero, shoulder to toe — to brace its leg. The leg had caught on something, some bone or cord or who knew what; it had been twisted around and broken in Libby long before the baby was born. The tendons and ligaments of the knee were torn so that the leg, the foot — it was better now, Libby knew it was getting better but it was still something to see, the way it flopped around when the harness was off. With the harness off, the leg looked detachable, like the limb of a plastic doll.

Libby cleared the table. She came around behind her husband and knocked bits of food from his beard.

Rose brushed the dander from his shirt sleeve. The dog got up, whining, and walked underneath the table. Rose listened to it sniffing. It rubbed against her leg. She unwrapped the piece of chewed-up meat she had spat out into her napkin and held the meat in her hand.

“You better quit that,” Libby’s husband said. “I asked her not to do that.”

“Do what?” Libby said.

Libby’s husband kicked at the dog underneath the table.

“I’m just sitting here,” Rose said.

“You’re not,” said the husband. “Goddamnit. I asked you not to do that.”

“Do what?” Libby said.

Rose pushed away from the table. She held the meat out between the slats of her chair where the dog could see it behind her. The dog took a step, slowly, as though stepping hurt its paws. It was looking up at the husband.

“Do you want that?” the husband said to the dog.

Rose dropped the meat into the pocket of her robe.

The husband stood up.

“You want that?”

The dog sat down behind Rose’s chair, pretending to be yawning.

“I thought so,” the husband said.

“That’s a good dog,” he said, and walked over to the dog to pat it. He walked to the basket, the baby in the basket, and he carried it away from the table.

“Here you go,” he said to his wife.

Libby saw, from his eyes, that he was grinning, and from his ears, which had moved a little way up the sides of his head.

He went out of the house with a hammer and saw, and with nails poking out of his pockets. He cut a few boards for the soffit, and stepped up the ladder with one of the boards and with nails sticking out of his mouth. He held the board against the joists with his shoulder.

Swallows built nests in the eaves. Clots of mud from the nests they built were spattered against the side of the house; mud was dried on the screens of the windows.

When he banged on the house, the dog barked.

Rose broke a glass on the faucet. She picked the pieces up, dropped them into the bottom of the glass, dropped the glass in the garbage. She rinsed the sink out, and filled it up again.

The wind was quitting. The boat was bottom-up in the yard.

Libby turned the water on in the bathroom. The dog went into the bathroom and lapped water from the toilet bowl.

Rose didn’t wash the husband’s she did not wash Big Bear’s plate. Instead, she wiped off the flowery rim where Big Bear had not quite licked it clean and she set the plate down in the dish rack. The rest of the plates, she scraped and stacked and left in the soapy water. Rose walked down the hall to the bathroom. The dog was curled up on the bathmat.

Libby took her clothes off. She took the baby’s little jumpsuit off, the baby’s pilly harness. The baby’s skin was chaffed underneath the harness, and flaking. Libby scraped off some of” the flaked-up skin with the squarish nail of her thumb. She shut the faucet off and stepped into the tub, holding the baby against her. Its thin, bowed legs, when she sat down, hung between Libby’s legs. She dipped the baby into the water.

Rose swung the top down on the toilet bowl and sat on it to watch. She scratched behind the dog’s ears as she watched. The mirror rattled, and little ripples came up in the water in the tub whenever Big Bear drove a nail into the eaves with his hammer. He was working his way toward the bathroom, stopping to cut the soffit boards and then hitting in nails again.

“Here,” Rose said, “I can help you.”

Rose washed her sister’s back for her, soaping it up and rinsing it with a cup she had brought from the kitchen.

Her sister’s skin had gotten smoother. Libby’s hair had gotten thicker, shinier than it used to be. Her breasts were bigger than Rose’s now.

Rose slipped her hand under her sister’s arm, turning the soap in her armpit. She moved the soap over her sister’s ribs, which used to show underneath her skin. Libby lifted the baby away from her chest and held it propped against her legs, holding her arms away from her sides to let her sister wash her. Rose soaped up Libby’s belly, her breasts, her nipples split and raw. She pushed into a nipple with the ball of her thumb. A little milk came out.

Libby felt her sister’s hands shake.

“Rose, Rose,” Libby said.

Rose had started very quietly crying. “I kept on letting the days pass so I could feel it move,” she said. “I wanted to feel it, what that feels like. I know it’s stupid.”

Libby kissed her sister’s fingertips. She handed her sister the baby.

Libby let Rose wash the baby — its bottom, its skinny legs, its little curling feet. She let Rose lather the dark hair whorled on the baby’s funny head, Rose keeping the soap away from its face the way Libby had shown her. The baby jerked its little arms around. It poked out the little white callus on its lip it already had from sucking.

“Look,” Libby said. “She likes it.”

She stepped out of the tub to give them room to move and pulled a towel off the towel rack.

Libby’s husband ran a saw through a board. He stepped up onto the ladder. With the claw of his hammer, he scraped at the mud that was left of the nests the swallows made.

Libby swung her hair up over her head to dry it.

Rose dipped the baby’s head into the water. She turned the baby onto its belly, held it there, let go. The dog got up, barking. The baby started to swim. Only its little bottom, and the misshapen plate at the back of its head, stuck up out of the water. The baby lunged — jerky, froggish — paused, trailing its little crooked leg; it swam over half the length of the tub before Libby saw what her sister had done and knocked past her, screaming, and snatched the baby out of the water.