The Little Giant of Aberdeen County Read online

  “Why are you wearing a nightgown? And why is it so dark?” Bobbie asked, his mouth half-full of cereal. Bobbie loved color, much to Robert Morgan’s dismay. He thought that boys should pass their lives attired in the sensible, manly hues of khaki, gray flannel, navy blue, and polished leather.

  “It’s a dress,” I stammered.

  “What happened to your other clothes?”

  I blushed the hard, deep color of a plum. “They’re getting too small. I guess I must be getting bigger.”

  “Cool!” Bobbie shouted, his mouth half-full of toast. “When I grow up, can I be as big as you, Aunt Truly?”

  Robert Morgan scowled and put down his newspaper. “You wouldn’t want that, son. You have a hard enough time as it is.”

  It was true. Bobbie was still having problems fitting in with Aberdeen’s other boys. During recess, he hung out with the girls his age near the swing or just moped around the schoolyard by himself. He never had any friends over. So I could understand why a boy like Bobbie would want to be as big as me. I could understand it very well. I leaned over his chair. “Maybe one day,” I whispered in his ear, and saw his face light up.

  “Don’t put ideas in his head,” Robert Morgan barked, and laid his coffee spoon on his saucer. I glowered at him and swept the dishes into the sink, aware of the doctor’s stare on me. I turned around. “You are putting on too much weight, though,” he said. “You should let me examine you.” His eyes narrowed, as if he were already dreaming of some fancy medical report he could publish to wild acclaim. The Habits of an American Giantess, perhaps, with hand-inked illustrations, charts, graphs, and all manner of pictorial data. No wonder my father had chosen whiskey for his cure-all, I thought.

  “I feel fine, really.” The last thing I needed was the doctor’s bony fingers prodding me like a Thanksgiving turkey. But it was too late. I could tell the idea was pinging around in Robert Morgan’s head, and once he dreamed up a plan, you had about as much chance of getting him to give it up as you would growing wings out of your back and flying to the moon.

  “It’s irresponsible not to take care of your health. How much do you weigh now? Do you even know?”

  I did not. It was probably a lot—I’d grant Robert Morgan that—but as far as I was concerned, that was my business. Except for my single visit to Robert Morgan’s father, no one had ever measured me or weighed me, and I liked this freedom. It allowed me to think of my size with some relativity. With August’s horses, for instance, I had been an equal; with Amelia, I was simply solid; and with Bobbie, I knew, I was larger than life.

  The doctor’s voice broke into my daydream. “One of us is going to lose this argument, Truly, and it’s not going to be me. When you come to your senses, I’ll be in my office. We can begin an exam whenever you’re ready.”

  I snorted. “The day I walk myself out there will be the day hell has a rainbow hanging over it.”

  I looked out the window and was reassured to spy Marcus bent into the far hedges, his clippers scattering leaves and twigs. I wasn’t sure what I was to him anymore, but I still liked having him near me. Every other day, rain or shine, he showed up to garden, but we interacted little. He was much more heavily muscled now—taut in the cheeks and broad across his shoulders, possessing the body of a man, not a boy. In spite of myself, I remembered all his letters and then thought back to all the kisses I’d had to give him over the years on Valentine’s Day, and I wondered if he remembered them, too. I half wanted him to and half didn’t, and that indecision made me shy.

  I knew that Marcus and I were something deeper and more primal than friends, but we spoke so rarely, we could have been mere recent acquaintances. As a result, I think we were reduced back down to our physical peculiarities. The way I saw it, he’d become a little man whose life had never gotten off the ground, who preferred plants to people, who fussed over his roses as if they were babies. And if I’m being honest, then I have to say that I probably didn’t look like a prize myself. I was someone who towered over others but had forgotten about life’s smaller blessings. Two or three times during the September hot spell, I’d gone out and offered Marcus lemonade, but it didn’t lead to any conversation. None at all. He’d just taken the glass and gulped the liquid fast, and I’d stood there dumb, my cheeks redder than a rooster’s comb.

  Well, shoot, I thought now, wiping my hands on the dishrag and turning around to check that the doctor really had skulked away. He tended to do that—disappear as soon as my back was turned—and it kind of gave me the creeps. On the other hand, it also left me plenty of time to attend to my own thoughts, and right now I thought that I could use the company of a trusted friend. Before I could think twice about it, I grabbed an old scarf off the coat pegs by the kitchen door, wrapped my throat warm, and trudged outside.

  The leaves were half changed, and as a result the air looked dappled. I breathed in, appreciating the chilly edge on the breeze. I’d been living with the doctor only some two months, but in that time my lungs seemed to have forgotten the pleasure of raw air. I scuffed my boots in the grass, crunching a few leaves, relishing the sound. As I neared the back hedge, Marcus heard me swishing through the long grass and straightened up, wiping a streak of sweat off his brow with his bad hand. Today, his gloves were off, and I clearly could see the damage that had been done. He was missing his third finger, and his thumb was fibrous and woody, like a stump of gingerroot. The skin puckered and pulled. It looked painful, but I suppose it wasn’t too bad if Marcus was able to work the clippers.

  He saw me staring, cleared his throat, and shoved his hands in his pockets. “Hello. This is a surprise.”

  I hugged my arms around myself, still unsettled by how much weight I’d recently gained. “I’m just taking some air. It’s supposed to rain a little later.” I coughed a little. “I guess when the weather changes, we won’t be seeing you so much.”

  A tiny smile twitched around Marcus’s lips. “I don’t know about that. I prefer the sun, sure, but I’m happy to carry on in the rain, too. Water’s useful in its own way.”

  I ran my hand along the neat border of the hedge and tried to keep my voice casual. “Brings out the worms, right? And the spiderwebs?” I blushed, remembering how he had schooled me so long ago in the science of Spider-Man’s amazing abilities.

  Marcus fingered a leaf. “Yes, but don’t say it like they’re so unsavory. Most folks tend to overlook the dark, stinking parts of gardening, but that’s where they go wrong. People think of gardening as a pastime, a hobby, but it’s really more than that.” He buttoned up his jacket and glanced at the sky. “A garden is where you can find the whole spectrum of life, birth, and death. It’s where poisons meet nectars, where sustenance challenges rot. A garden, in short, is a theater for war.” At the word war, he stopped short and bent over to pick up the clippers again.

  I pinched a pair of the hedge leaves together for courage and kept my voice low and smooth, like a mellow river rock. “Marcus,” I urged, “I know we haven’t talked in a long time, but I need to know what happened to you overseas. What happened to us?” I suppose the doctor’s needling me about my weight over breakfast had made me brave. It just seemed to be the morning for uncomfortable topics. I didn’t really expect an answer, and in any case, I wasn’t sure I was ready to hear one, but Marcus hefted the clippers from hand to hand and surprised me.

  “Close your eyes,” he said, and after a beat of silence, I did. When he started speaking again, his voice had a sour tinge in it that unsettled my stomach. He sounded almost like a stranger, and I found myself wondering if his letters (had he bothered to send them) would have been this bitter. “Now, picture a palm-frond village—the prettiest place you ever did see. Bananas hanging in bunches and rice paddies all around. Friendly people decked in the most beautiful colors of cloth you could ever imagine. Chickens everywhere. Can you see it?”

  I nodded, and Marcus continued, his voice a little softer. “Good. Now picture it all going up in flames. The rice paddies
swimming with napalm, and a ten-year-old boy whose legs are in ribbons because of a grenade you threw.” I heard the blade of the clippers snap, and I opened my eyes. Marcus was chopping at the hedge again, savagely this time, and not looking at me.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

  Marcus shrugged. “You and the rest of America. But, you know, when I got hit in my own leg, I was pretty relieved. Not because I got sent home, but because of that kid. I figured we were even.”

  I plucked a stray leaf off my shapeless homemade dress. Nothing in the world, it seemed, was where it was supposed to be. My sister was cold in the ground. I was living with her husband in his house, and Marcus was still trapped in a fiery hell in Asia. “I didn’t think it would turn out like this,” I murmured, choking back tears. “For one thing, I think I’m about two times bigger than when you left. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

  Marcus stopped clipping for a minute. “You look fine to me. In fact, better than fine. Sometimes there’s nothing wrong with being big. That’s one thing you find out when you’re small.”

  My breath swelled in my throat. “Thanks,” I stammered, and turned bright red. I wanted to hug Marcus, but he looked just as embarrassed as I was, so I readjusted my scarf instead and started to inch back toward the house. “Maybe I’ll come visit you next time you’re here. I’ll bring pie.”

  Marcus straightened up and smiled a little. “I’d like that. Oh, mind the asters,” he called as I bumped into a riot of flowers intersecting the hedge bottom. “They’re only in bloom another week or so. Here—” He reached over, plucked several of the purple stars, and handed them to me. “Take them inside. They’ll cheer the place up, and they’re going to die anyway.”

  I hesitated. What he was offering wasn’t a return to what we’d had, I knew, or even picking up where we’d left off. It was more like the line of the thin white scar curling over his blistered thumb—something new laid over something old. I reached out to accept the flowers.

  “Thanks.” I tucked them safely inside my fist and sniffed their grassy odor on the way back to the house. Once inside, their purple would wither and leach, I knew, but out here, for the time being, it glowed as bright as the bluebells stitched on Tabitha Morgan’s quilt. Maybe moments like these were like the threads running over those scraps of cotton, I thought, turning the ordinary fabric of life into something wholly unexpected. And maybe if I wasn’t finding new material at hand, it was because I wasn’t supposed to. Maybe I was supposed to sow from the seed that was already under my fingertips.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Who knows how long the doctor and I would have played cat and mouse, but early that December, I opened my eyes to a pain so fierce marauding across the top of my skull that I knew immediately I needed more than the aspirin I usually swallowed. When I sat up in bed, my vision blurred and twisted like the picture on a failing television, making me squint. I realized I was staring at the cloth buds on Tabitha’s quilt. They seemed to vibrate and whisper. I cocked my head, trying to catch their song, but a wave of nausea crashed over me, and I let myself flop back down on the mattress, grateful to close my eyes again. A few moments later, I opened them again to find Bobbie’s face hovering anxiously over mine.

  “Aunt Truly?” His voice seemed to be coming from someplace far away. He shook my shoulder. “Are you okay? What’s wrong? Dad sent me in here to see what was taking you so long.”

  I fumbled for the alarm clock on my bedside table. “What time is it?” My words came out woody and dry.

  “Seven-thirty. School starts in half an hour. And Dad wants his breakfast.”

  At the mention of food, my stomach roiled and lurched. I let out a burp and hauled myself upright again. I waited, but I felt a little better this time. Well enough, maybe, to fry up an egg or two and pour some coffee. I looked again at Bobbie, whose outline was still imprecise and fuzzy. Two weeks ago, I’d walked with him to lay some flowers on Serena Jane’s grave, and he had bowed his head in a similar solemn pose, like a leaf curling into itself for the winter. I’d had the urge to wrap him tight in the wing of my coat and kiss him warm, but instinct told me he would only pull away if I tried. He was accustomed to me, but not yet attached. He let me read him stories and peck him good night on the cheek, but he still stiffened when I went to embrace him, and when he left for school, he only waved briefly through the rectangle of the kitchen door before turning around and plodding glumly down the street.

  But maybe he was fonder of me than I realized. I recognized an expression of concern colonizing his face now, as if he were contemplating the idea of all the adults in his life shriveling up and blowing away like corn husks. He’d just turned eight, but he was already hovering on the dark threshold of adult cynicism, I saw. One more push from the world, I suspected, and he’d shoot all the way through to the other side of mean, just like his father. Unless I could figure out a way to keep that from happening. I swung my feet onto the floor.

  “I’m a bit lopsided this morning,” I reassured him while the room righted itself and lurched again, “but I bet your daddy is a genius when it comes to healing. I bet he can make anyone better, even me.”

  Bobbie frowned and sat next to me on the bed. “I thought you said you’d be hell-bent before you let Dad lay a hand on you.”

  I scowled. That was true. Over the past month, all through the lead-up to Thanksgiving, Robert Morgan had kept up his pressure to examine me, and so far I’d resisted him step for step, a fact that left him practically frothing at the mouth. He’d wheedled, and reasoned, and finally resorted to out-and-out insults. “You’re as pigheaded and mean-minded as your father was, Truly,” he pronounced at the table one awful night. “You should be grateful you’re living with a person of science and reason, and not still stuck on that mudflat the Dyersons call a farm.”

  “I liked it there,” I replied calmly. “They were good to me.”

  “If they were so good to you, then why did they let you grow into a behemoth? Why didn’t they ever bring you in to see my father when something could have been done?”

  I put down my fork. “And pay with what? A good tip at the track? Besides, when I was out there, I wasn’t this heavy. It’s only since I’ve moved in with you that I’ve gained all this weight.”

  That shut the doctor up for a minute, but it still didn’t dissuade him from trying to guess how much I’d put on. He eyeballed me. “I’d say it’s thirty, maybe forty pounds. In just a few months. Do you pay attention to how much you’re eating?”

  I looked down at my plate. The remains of half the roast chicken were piled in a little pyramid, next to a muddy puddle of gravy and a smear of mashed potato. I’d had thirds, but I couldn’t help it. As soon as the food melted off my tongue, my stomach screamed for more.

  The doctor sat back in his chair and wrinkled up his napkin, confident he’d won his point. “One visit to my office, and I’m telling you we could figure out what to do about your appetite. Besides, you’d be doing me a favor. I’ve got a bet going with John Hinkleman that you weigh over four hundred.” He snickered. “All you have to do is step on the scale and the money’s mine.”

  I threw my own napkin on the table and stood up, my cheeks blazing. “I’ll be a baboon’s butt before I give you that satisfaction.” Bobbie put his hands over his mouth and giggled. I looked at him and winked. “With cherries and whipped cream.” Then I’d stomped off to my room and left the dishes to rot, not caring if we got bugs and not caring if the doctor shouted at me all night long.

  Bobbie wasn’t laughing as he sat next to me on the bed now, though. He looked worried, his narrow face even more pinched than usual. Another jolt of pain arrived, and I clenched my teeth, made weak by pain. “All right,” I whispered. “You can run out and tell your father he won this round. Today is his lucky day. I’ll be down to his office directly.”

  “I’ll tell him,” Bobbie cried, rushing into the hallway. “I’ll tell him to get his medicines ready.”


  “Make it double dose,” I murmured to myself, squeezing my temples. “I’m going to need the extra to drown my pride.”

  To his credit, the doctor didn’t outright throw his hands in the air and stomp out a victory dance when I knocked on his door, but it wasn’t far off. He certainly didn’t waste any time on niceties, just handed me a starched sheet, directed me behind a screen, and told me to strip and then wrap up. “I apologize for the sheet,” he said as I emerged. “I just didn’t think my regular gowns were up to the task.” He rubbed his hands together, not even trying to hide his triumphant grin as he ushered me over to the scale. “At last! Are you ready to see if my bet with John Hinkleman is good?”

  I scowled and folded my arms. “On one condition.”

  The doctor’s smile faded. “What?”

  “I don’t want to know what the scale says.”

  “What do you mean?” The doctor’s face fell, and just then I thought he looked a little like a boy who’d had his football taken away.

  “Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. And I don’t want to know how tall I am, either, or what my blood type is, or how big around my hips are. You can keep all that to yourself. I’m just here because my head is about to blow a gasket.”