The Little Giant of Aberdeen County Page 14

  Two years later, I received my diploma, and I even had a little crowd come watch me. Amelia sat in the very back of the audience with Brenda and August, who was smacking his lips, anticipating the special roast beef supper waiting at home. Amanda Pickerton sat front and center, her lips pinched, a gift-wrapped dictionary in her lap. But it was Marcus I missed most of all. Everything felt wrong without him. He would have clapped the loudest, I knew, and whistled when Miss Sparrow handed me the scrolled diploma, her lips stretched tight across her gums. To this day, she is still the only woman I ever knew who could take the act of smiling and make it painful.

  “Two points lower, and you wouldn’t be receiving this,” she stated primly, referring to my final exams. I couldn’t tell if she was pleased about the outcome or not.

  “Thank you,” I whispered, and Priscilla Sparrow surprised me by grabbing my wrist with the sudden fury of a bird of prey.

  “Speak up for yourself,” she said, her little eyes glittering in the afternoon sun. “Always speak up for yourself, girl. Lord knows no one else is ever going to.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I whispered, somewhat louder, then snatched the rolled-up piece of paper and fled.

  Dear Serena Jane, I wrote later that evening, here is the diploma I got today. I wish you’d have been here to see me get it, but I know you’re real busy now with Bobbie. But Brenda and August were there, and Amelia, too. Mrs. Pickerton gave me a dictionary. When are you coming home? I want to see Bobbie. Can you send more pictures?

  Every week, I checked the mail religiously, waiting for some response, but there never was any. Who knows how long I would have kept running out to the rusty mailbox and peering into its empty mouth, convinced that it was my lucky day, if August hadn’t won the unluckiest horse of his life and taught me all over again that the world had different rules for the likes of us?

  At first, it didn’t look like an unlucky horse. It looked like a winner. It was a Thoroughbred, high-blooded and taut through its withers and neck. August led it into the barn on a worn lead and shut it into one of the stalls. “Name’s Lightning,” he drawled, pleased with the stunned expression on our faces. “I won him in a poker round.”

  Amelia’s eyes opened wider, and I knew what she was thinking. I said it for her. “You actually won?”

  August’s grin was as sleek as a fox’s tail. “This one’s going to change my luck for sure,” he said, patting Lightning’s flank, then snatching his hand back as Lightning whipped his head around and tried to bite him. Brenda snorted and headed back to the kitchen.

  For a few weeks, Lightning was the most honored, if also incredibly bad-tempered, creature in August’s stable. He got first dibs on the oats, the sweetest and longest carrots, and extra brush strokes. “As soon as he gets a little more comfortable, we’ll race him,” August promised, “and then we’ll see who’s laughing all the way to the bank.”

  I brushed down the more homely horses and said nothing. Just that morning, I’d risked amputation trying to get a bit into Lightning’s gob, and it seemed to me that his contrariness wasn’t necessarily going to translate into winning speed. And it turned out I was right, for not three days after that, August went out early in the morning to tend to the horses and made the fatal mistake of getting on the wrong side of Lightning.

  Startled out of sleep by the sharp smack of the barn door opening and a hubbub of horse hooves, I ran outside to find August slumped in a pile of straw, blue in the face, his chest kicked in. Brenda came running when she heard my cries, and between the two of us, we managed to get August into the house, where he fell back on the ragged blankets covering the sofa and struggled for breath.

  “Get in the truck and go for Dr. Morgan,” Brenda barked, but she knew as well as I did that it would be no use. Even as she spoke, August’s breathing was becoming slower and more labored, and the blue around his lips was darkening.

  “Daddy?” Amelia squeaked, and then fell quiet, for she had spotted before any of us that August’s chest had stopped sinking and rising and that he was peaceful at last.

  Brenda sank back on her heels and covered her face with her hands. “God damn it,” she said, and then again, slower, as if she wanted to make sure the Lord heard every syllable loud and clear. “God. Damn. It.”

  I didn’t say anything. I had experienced the aftermath of death plenty but had never stared it in the face before, and I was struck dumb by the simple mystery of the process. One minute, life had been coursing through August’s body, and the next, he was as still and somber as snow. I stared at his open mouth and his familiar, rotten stumps of teeth, and I found it hard to believe that he wouldn’t rise up in a minute or two, brush off his trousers, and wink at us all.

  “What should we do?” I finally asked, my eyes wet, and Brenda took her hands away from her face. Her eyes were dry and hard.

  “Well, for starters, we can shoot that foul horse,” she said, and went to fetch August’s rifle herself.

  I thought my father’s death had been a bare-bones affair, but at the Dyersons’ I learned just how elemental death could be. There was no funeral, no burial in the cemetery, just a deep hole in the far field and the three of us shivering together in the wind. Brenda refused to say anything, and Amelia, traumatized by grief, couldn’t, so I whispered the Lord’s Prayer, and Brenda nailed together a simple cross, which we stuck on the mound of earth before turning our backs on it and giving the place up to the crows. For the rest of the season, we ate horsemeat, our heads bowed in silence over our plates, the stubborn gristle clumped in between our teeth.

  After that, I took over many of August’s old jobs—hoeing Brenda’s vegetable garden into submission, the backbreaking repetition of splitting logs, and, of course, feeding and cleaning the horses. Neither Amelia nor Brenda wanted anything to do with them, but that job was by far my favorite. With horses, I found, there were never any judgments, no sly remarks about my size or appearance. In fact, with horses, my heft was an advantage. A horse could lean its entire weight against my flank and know I would hold.

  I sent a short message to my sister explaining that August had died and that I was working on the farm, that I sometimes missed town and school, but that I had the horses to look to now. Love, Truly, I penned in the handwriting I’d learned from Miss Sparrow and which couldn’t begin to express how big and empty the sky looked to me every night or how, when the wind rattled over the shingles of the farmhouse, I sometimes wished I could blow away with it to Buffalo, where Serena Jane and Bobbie were swaddled together in a cozy embrace.

  “Why don’t you go see her?” Amelia whispered one night in the dark before sleep. It was shortly after August’s death, and her voice was returning in shaky fits and starts. Sometimes she spoke; sometimes she didn’t. Neither Brenda nor I ever pushed her. And even though Amelia and I were both officially women, we still shared a room like the girls we’d once been. I didn’t reply. Amelia didn’t know it, but I’d tried to go see my sister once. I’d peeled the appropriate layers of bills off the money roll from under my bed and walked all the way to the depot, where I’d stepped up and bought myself a ticket. But when the time came to board the bus, I saw how the other passengers were gaping at me and how the ladies nudged their handbags into the empty seats, hoping I wouldn’t come and collapse next to them.

  “On or off?” the driver asked, irritated.

  The bus wheezed. I stepped down. “Off.”

  The driver put the engine into gear. “Suit yourself.”

  “If I was Serena Jane, I bet I’d be real lonely,” Amelia said in the dark. “I don’t know why she doesn’t at least write.”

  But I knew why. It was because I was an object stuck in Serena Jane’s past, marooned down a dusty lane, on a rack-and-ruin farm, and Serena Jane was a person who had no use whatsoever for the past. No bus ride was going to fix that.

  “Go to sleep,” I told Amelia, and then quickly followed my own advice, my brain muddled with tinfoil tiaras, a cracked looking glass, and
the dusty row of my mother’s dresses—all punctuated by the faint lost ring of that silver charm bracelet that used to hang from my sister’s wrist.

  Of course, time has a way of biting people in the ankle when they least expect it, and that’s exactly what happened to me when Serena Jane and Marcus came home.

  It took eight years, about four years longer than I thought. Bob Bob graduated college, and we all expected he’d return home for the summer before he started his medical training, but he and Serena Jane and Bobbie stayed in Buffalo, and before I knew it, another four years had passed. The war in Asia ended, and boys began making their way home in disappointed trickles, the beards on their chins scruffy, the set of their lips twisting their faces into unrecognizable masks. Marcus was never among them. “Do you think he’s okay?” I whispered to Amelia in our beds at night. “Do you think he remembers us?” But the only answer she ever gave me was a squeeze of the hand.

  And then one day, he simply came back. I was up on the Dyerson windmill, normally a superior place to see things coming. Perched halfway up its tower, I could easily take in the messy sprawl of the farm—the well, the crazy patching of scrap material I’d put on the roof last winter, and the sagging withers of the barn. I could also see buttercups colonizing the side of the garden fence—a pleasant yellow smear in the afternoon. The household laundry was bright in spite of itself, fluttering on the washing line, and, up high above everything, like a beneficial angel, the pristine trail of a jet feathered. But I didn’t see Marcus. He just appeared underneath me, squinting up as if no time had passed.

  I dug the hobnails of my boots harder onto the latticing of the windmill, unsure whether to climb down and embrace him or to stay aloft. It was an unfamiliar dilemma. In spite of my size, I wasn’t used to having people at my feet. That was definitely a side effect of living with the Dyersons. The world had gone on growing without us, while we’d gotten smaller and smaller, taking up less of people’s imaginations until we were like the litter that blew all over the green after the May Day celebration—a part of things, but not the part that anyone wanted to look at. Marcus placed a hand on the windmill.

  “Hello, Truly,” he called, but it was a stranger’s voice—deeper, huskier, with little currents running through it that weren’t there before. When he moved, I could see him limping. His hair had grown longer, and his eyes were deeper set than before. As I climbed down the windmill, I could see how the shadow of a beard was starting to creep around the corners of his mouth, mapping new terrain. I put one boot down in the dust, then the other, smacking the dirt off my hands. Marcus twitched, as if he were about to embrace me, then restrained the impulse. He kept the hand that had been injured shoved in his pocket.

  “When did you get home?” I asked.

  “Last night.” There was an awkward beat of silence, and then he elaborated a bit more. “I’ve just been wandering since I got out of the hospital. Places you’ve never even dreamed. Did you know that the catacombs in Paris hold the bones of five million people? And a hundred and eighty-six miles of tunnels, lined with eighteenth-century graffiti. Some of them are flooded, though.”

  “Oh.” On the one hand, I was reassured to find that Marcus’s old compulsion for facts had survived his injuries intact, while on the other, I was wondering what he was doing roaming around musty old tombs full of bones. I decided to take a tack toward the future, hoping the outlook would be better. “What are you planning on now?” My vowels twanged in my mouth, and I smoothed a lock of my thick hair behind my ear. Now that I was a little older, my hair was possibly my one nice feature, but it always smelled like hay and the dust from the horses, so I wasn’t vain about it.

  “I’m going to stay out at the cemetery,” Marcus answered. “You know that run-down cottage?” I did. No one had lived in it for two generations. “Dick Crane said I can live there for free if I fix it up and do some work around the place.”

  “You mean tend the graves?” I wondered if his interest in crypts and bones was perhaps something more problematic.

  Marcus shrugged. “Guess so.”

  “You don’t want to stay at your mother’s house?”

  Marcus stared off into the middle distance. “I think I’ve been gone a little too long to go back into my mama’s house. Besides, she’s leaving town soon. Moving with my brother, Dukey, out to Texas.”

  “Oh.” I vaguely recalled hearing something to that effect, although I didn’t know that Dukey would have any better luck holding a job in the wide-open state of Texas than he did in tiny Aberdeen. Probably, I thought, he would discover honky-tonk music, Lone Star whiskey, and big-haired women (in that order), and that would be that. A lot of people were jumping town, it seemed, either retiring to warmer climates or relocating for better jobs. Aberdeen was like a party that had gone on a little too long. The people who were left were bleary and half-asleep on their feet. I suppose that included me. I took a deep breath. “Did you—did you ever get that letter I sent you?” My voice wavered, high and unsure, as jittery as the windmill behind me.

  I don’t know what kind of answer I was expecting, but it certainly wasn’t the one Marcus gave me. He merely smiled and said, “Sure, Truly. I read all your letters. Thanks.”

  But there was just the one, I wanted to say. I remembered my promise to him that we would spend a night in the fields together and blushed, feeling foolish. Marcus surprised me, though. “Your words were beautiful,” he whispered, his voice hoarse, his eyes pointed down at his boots. I wanted to answer back, but my breath snared in my chest.

  Marcus cleared his throat. “Well, I’ve got to be going. I want to get back to the cottage and get some work done before it gets dark. I just wanted you to know I’m in town again.”

  I didn’t dare look up as he sauntered off, whistling a tune I half remembered, his bad leg leaving a funny mark in the dirt. Behind me, the windmill thwacked out the rest of his melody. I closed my eyes and listened to it. If I pretended hard enough, I thought, it could almost have been a love song.

  People were washing in and out of Aberdeen all right, and after Marcus it was Bob’s Bob’s turn to make a grand entrance. After a lifetime of tending to the folks in town, Robert Morgan IV was finally retiring, and Bob Bob was all set to take over. He’d passed his medical exams, received whatever qualifications he needed, and was evidently looking forward to becoming Aberdeen’s newest Dr. Morgan. In town, it was all anyone talked about.

  “I wonder if he’s still got that ornery streak,” Amanda Pickerton said to Cally Hind while lunching at the counter in Hinkleman’s.

  “Oh, I reckon not,” answered Cally. “He’s all grown now. A father and everything. I’m sure he’s a fine young man.”

  “Serena Jane says Bobbie is smart as a whip. He’s seven now. I can’t wait to see him. Apparently, he looks just like her.”

  I finished gathering my purchases and took them to the cash register. It bruised me some that Amanda Pickerton knew more about my nephew than I did. She spun around on her stool. “Oh, hello, Truly.” I could hear how hard she was trying to inject a note of surprise in her voice, though I was hard to miss.

  “Hello,” I replied.

  “So your sister is finally coming home after all these years. You must be thrilled.”

  It occurred to me that Serena Jane had left home long before she ever left Aberdeen, but I made myself smile and nod. “Sure,” I said.

  “I mean, eight years is an awfully long time, isn’t it?” Amanda continued. “Why, you two won’t hardly even know each other, will you?” Her upper lip sneered a little, and I noticed a smudge of lipstick on one of her teeth. I didn’t bother to point it out.

  “I guess we’ll have to see.”

  “Well, I imagine so. I mean, Serena Jane is a mother now, and a doctor’s wife, and you’re”—here she paused, as if for effect—“well, you’re still out there with the Dyersons, aren’t you?” She sniffed a tiny bit and glanced me up and down, taking in my mud-spattered overalls, flannel shi
rt, and boots.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Indeed.”

  We appeared to have reached an impasse in conversation, and I realized that no matter how big I ever got, Amanda Pickerton would always see me as the awkward, pigtailed child who’d stared her in the eye and defied her judgment about what was good for me. We said our good-byes politely, baring teeth and squeezing hands, and even though I hated to admit it, I couldn’t shake what she’d said about Serena Jane and me becoming strangers to each other. It was the truth, I knew, but it was like a flea bite—itchy, annoying, so tiny that I would have liked to ignore it but couldn’t. That night, I tossed and thrashed the thought around my mind until it was as addled and whipped up as a batch of butter.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Amelia asked when we were feeding the hens the next morning. She scattered a wide handful of grain like snow.

  “It’s Serena Jane coming home. I don’t know how I’m supposed to act with her anymore. I’ve missed her, but I feel like the sister I had is gone, and I don’t know who all’s coming home in her place.”

  Amelia threw down her last handful of feed. “In that case, why don’t you leave all the introductions up to her?” She put down her bucket and smacked her hands together. It was simple and sound advice, I thought, typical for Amelia. A life spent dodging the bullets of creditors had taught her how to get straight to the root of a problem and solve it quick. So I kept my distance, letting my sister sweep back into town with all the glory of a somewhat faded matinee idol. “She’ll come out here, don’t you wonder,” Amelia reassured me. “She won’t be able to resist.” And after a week, that’s exactly what happened.