The Little Giant of Aberdeen County Read online

  Robert Morgan fiddled with his clipboard. “It’s just a migraine,” he sniffed. “We’ll get to that in a minute. But how can I treat you if you won’t let me give you any information?”

  I set my jaw. “That’s the deal. Take it or leave it.”

  The doctor debated with himself for a moment, then threw up his hands in defeat. “Okay, fine, I won’t tell you anything. You’re as stubborn and stupid as the rest of those Dyersons, but I guess we just are what we are. Now, will you step on the damn scale?”

  I hesitated, wondering if he would keep his word, but then I climbed onto the little platform and let the doctor slide the weights all the way to the right. He let out a long, slow whistle. “Wow. That’s even more than I expected. You must be carrying a ton of hidden weight to come out that high.” I shot him a warning look, and he shut up and scribbled on his clipboard. “Have a seat.” He gestured to his examining table, and I sat on it reluctantly, hoping it would hold me while Robert Morgan rapped my knees with a rubber tomahawk, stuck a wooden stick down my gob, lit up my ears, eyes, nose, and throat like the Empire State Building, and shimmied the cold disk of a stethoscope all around my chest.

  “What does it sound like?” I asked. My heart was the one organ I did have some curiosity about, wondering if it was like everyone else’s on the inside, but the doctor just held a rigid finger straight up in the air as if he were testing the wind, and I knew that I’d broken some sort of medical commandment. He pulled the round circle of metal off my chest and slinked his fingers up and down my windpipe. “Swallow,” he ordered, before pulling a tape measure out of his pocket and winding it around my breasts, hips, and upper arms.

  “I’ve always been big. You know that.” I blushed, watching as he jotted down numbers on his chart. “Your father said it was something inside my brain. A little clock.” I remembered the way his father’s fingers had pressed into the base of my skull so gently, telling me about the mechanism inside of me that was ticking too fast, and I wondered if that’s what Robert Morgan heard when he slid that stethoscope against my skin. Or was it just the slow sludge of my blood, confirming everything he thought he already knew about me? “Maybe that’s why I have this headache.”

  Robert Morgan’s eyes swam into focus, as if he were reeling his thoughts up out of a very deep, very cold lake. “For now, just take some aspirin. You’ll get over it. Migraines happen to women sometimes. But in your case, I think it could be linked to something else.” He frowned.

  “What is this exam for,” I stuttered, “if you’re not going to help my headache?” Outside, I noticed, the day was growing darker, the trees shedding leaves and dead twigs, slimming down for snow and ice.

  Robert Morgan blinked and slid a needle into my arm for a blood sample. The pinch was sharp and familiar, just like all his thumbtacks I’d sat on years ago. I wondered if he was enjoying sticking me with a needle as much as he’d enjoyed tormenting me in the schoolroom. The little gleam in his eye told me yes, but it also spoke of a bigger, more adult anticipation.

  Suddenly, all the breath in my body seemed to stop. It was a spooky sensation, like God putting down His fury for five minutes in the middle of a storm to think up something even worse. “This isn’t about my headache,” I said. Maybe if I’d been better practiced in the art of anger, I would have recognized the symptoms of rage and would have released some right then on the doctor’s head, like hail dumping on a tin roof. But when you’re raised by Dyersons, you learn not to do that lest the whole damn house falls in and crushes you. I uncurled my palm and watched the test tube fill with blood.

  Robert Morgan slid the needle out of my vein and stuck a cotton ball in its spot. He pressed down, harder than he really needed to, I thought. “Did you really think I’d keep you in my house and not take the opportunity to examine you? You’re about as normal as a dog with two tails, Truly. To be honest, I don’t even know if I can cure whatever’s wrong with you.” He let my arm go.

  “Well,” I said, my cheeks burning, “you said it yourself. We are what we are in this world.” I dipped my chin and thought about my sister, who had been born beautiful, and then Amelia, predisposed to silence. I was strong and square, I knew, born to brush the horses down in the barn. But I liked August’s horses. I missed the comforting smells of their hay and dung. Even just the memory of the barn’s dusty air could make my breathing slow and all the muscles in my back relax. I looked back up at the doctor. “Anyway, what makes you think I want to be cured?”

  “I’m sorry?” Robert Morgan seemed distracted, probably by all the collaborations with big-city doctors he was no doubt imagining. A case like mine, I realized, would do wonders to help broadcast his name in the world beyond Aberdeen—a world he probably missed, a world my sister and Bobbie had yanked him out of before he’d gotten to taste of it.

  I crossed my arms. “What makes you think I have any intention of letting you try to fix me?” It seemed ridiculous to be locking horns with the doctor when one of us was all but naked, but if there was anything I’d learned so far in life, it was that you didn’t get to pick your moments.

  Robert Morgan stared at me as if I had just grown an extra toe in the middle of my forehead. “Of course you’re going to try to let me fix you.” He leaned down close, his voice a snake hiss slithering into the tight chambers of my heart. “Admit it. You want it as much as I do. You’d let me turn you inside out and back again if you thought I could make you as pretty—or even as small—as your sister.”

  I didn’t bother to respond, just left his office with hunger pains erupting in my belly with the ferocity of fireworks, my headache all but vanquished. I scuttled from his clinic door to the kitchen as quickly as I could, and flung open the icebox, soothed by its electric hum and the blast of cold air. Hot dog relish, leftover chicken, parsley leaves—I tamped my mouth as full as a cannon. It didn’t matter with what as long as my gullet got filled. I suppose I might have appeared greedy, but my gorging offered no relief, no reprieve. I spread my hands wide on the table’s yellow oilcloth and swallowed with difficulty, tears budding in my eyes, and then, because there was nothing else left to eat in the immediate vicinity, I swallowed those down, too.

  One day, I vowed, Robert Morgan would know what it felt like to be pricked, and prodded, squeezed, and studied. He would know what it felt like to be one of his own experiments. Of course, the difference between the doctor and me was that Robert Morgan would always be divining for some cure, whereas I knew better. And so there you have it. Long before I ever did it, I’ll admit that I thought about killing Robert Morgan. Right then and there I promised myself that if I ever found the occasion, I’d give him such a good dose of his own medicine, he’d never have the backbone to survive it.

  Chapter Sixteen

  That February, the line of hedges around the doctor’s fields transformed into huddled heaps of snow, and the blue air was so frosty, the jays were preening ice out of their wings. Even the feral cats gave up and took shelter in the nooks and crannies of people’s woodpiles, and still, Bobbie hadn’t made any friends. After school, I watched the town children knot together and run shrieking to one another’s houses, but Bobbie always trudged home alone, his chin resolute in spite of himself. I’d fix him cocoa, and he’d head up to my room, where he’d climb under the quilt on my bed and snuggle back against my pillows. “Tell me a story,” he’d demand. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  “Do you want to hear more about Princess Bugaboo?” I stuck my coffee cup under my nose, comforted by its steam. It had been Amelia’s suggestion to tell the stories to Bobbie, and he seemed to like them, but I wondered if he was perhaps getting too old for Princess Bugaboo. Recently, I’d stumbled on to him washing in the bath. The door had been half-cracked, and over and over again, he’d stubbornly pushed the single finger of flesh between his thighs down into the water. No matter what he did, however, out it popped, bobbing like a marine specimen—a puzzling cadence that both was and was not part of him.


  I’d darted down the hallway before he could spot me, then immediately regretted my cowardice. I thought about sneaking back, knocking, even, and having a sit-down talk with him, but life doesn’t give us the option to remake our decisions, only the power to reconceive them. I knew that better than anyone. All I had to do was look down at the blubbery columns of my thighs and the wilderness of my abdomen, or think about Marcus’s scarred hand and limp, and I was reminded of how his body wouldn’t let him forget what it used to be or the things it had done, and how my body wouldn’t let me forget what it was always going to be. And now, it seemed, Bobbie’s bones were beginning to write a complicated story of their own.

  “No Bugaboo,” Bobbie said. “Tell me something else today.”

  I smoothed the quilt over our bodies and pulled Bobbie closer. “Make sure you’re warm enough.” I reached behind me and re- arranged the pillows, and after a moment, Bobbie let himself sag against them. His child’s weight barely registered on the mattress, and as he nestled against the bulk of me, I could feel the sinews of his body held taut. It was like sheltering a spooked horse, and I thought back to all the days I’d spent combing down August’s nervous animals. The trick had been to move slow and speak easy, avoiding the quick spike of a hoof or the sudden pinch of teeth. You had to maneuver as if you were carrying a secret you were just about ready to let spill.

  “You know,” I began, smoothing my hand along the jagged inner border of Tabitha’s quilt, “time was when the only doctor fifty miles around was your great-great-great-grandmama Tabitha.”

  Bobbie didn’t move a muscle, but his breathing lightened, as if he were waiting for me to continue. Probably, I thought, he’s never even heard these stories. Robert Morgan certainly wouldn’t have told them, and Serena Jane never had any interest in anything as plain sewn as Aberdeen’s folklore. I hitched my elbow up a little so Bobbie could rest even closer.

  “Time was when the people of this town found their health in spells and in the jars of Tabby’s balms. That all changed, though, with your great-great-great-granddaddy. He was this town’s first real medical man.

  “Some folks said he was a blessing with his black bag of instruments and powders, but others insisted they were better off with Tabby’s elemental cures. They’d worked for decades. Why stop now? But stop she did. No one knows why. And when she died, still so young and pretty that bees made honey on her grave, everything she knew died with her. No one’s ever found that spell book of hers, and the good Lord knows more than one Morgan man’s spun this house into a heap looking for it.”

  Bobbie’s eyes widened. “Do you think it’s really still here, Aunt Truly, do you? Maybe up in the attic? There’s tons of stuff up there.”

  I shook my head. Half of what I’d just said was nonsense, but it sounded so good, even I half believed it. “Maybe, but I don’t think so. I think old Tabby was smarter than that.”

  Bobbie nodded, emphatic. “You’re probably right. She probably put it somewhere no one would ever think to look.”

  Just then, a slash of winter sun shot through the windows in my room, unexpected in its harsh brilliance, a needle of light pricking the triangular edges of the quilt’s inner border. Inside of it, appliquéd cloth leaves and flowers were lined up in assiduous rows, pieces of flora embroidered on a series of stitched white squares. Outside of the border, however, the blooms ran rampant in no sequence whatsoever, as if they were born wild right onto the cotton backing. How many hours had it taken one small woman to sew such a quantity? I wondered. I pictured a smooth-haired wife bent over her own lap, frowning as she threaded yet another needle in snowy gloom, the evening’s late fire dying, her fingertips raw from the cold but determined to set out in pictures what she couldn’t in words. I gasped and sat up, splashing a drop of coffee onto my sheet hem.

  “Aunt Truly? Are you okay? Are you getting another migraine?”

  How had I not seen it before? Here I had been sleeping under that damn quilt for coming up on six months, yet I never once thought of it as anything more than an extra layer of warmth. Of course, I had been attracted to its lively design, but only as a bright spot in an otherwise colorless room. It was more than that, though, I saw now. Much more. I ran my hand over the weft of the fabric, marveling at how clever Tabitha had been and how stupid the generations following her were. I glanced down at Bobbie.

  “Think about it,” I muttered, my thumb lingering over a threaded stalk of what looked like a mint plant. “If you wanted to hide something very precious to you, where would you stick it? Some dark place where maybe it would get found and maybe it wouldn’t, or would you do something even trickier? Like put it right out under everyone’s noses in such an ordinary way that no one would even bother to look at it twice?”

  Bobbie wrinkled his forehead. “What do you mean?”

  Downstairs, the kitchen door scraped open and banged shut, forced by the wind. Bobbie and I fell silent as Robert Morgan’s stern footsteps rapped over the floorboards into the foyer. It had grown late, I suddenly realized. I kissed the top of Bobbie’s head. “Never mind. I’m just talking a foolish woman’s nonsense. We best get downstairs and get some supper on the stove.”

  Bobbie reluctantly peeled back his nest of covers and withdrew his legs from the warm cocoon of the sheets. He paused for a moment, studying the quilt. “Why are the flowers so crazy on the edges and so straight in the middle? It’s almost like old Tabby couldn’t make up her mind.”

  I cupped the warm dome of his head, smoothing his hair, reluctant to let him go for the evening. “Maybe. That’s a possibility. Or maybe she was saying there are two sides to every story. I guess it just depends on which way you look at it.”

  That night after the dishes were wiped dry as whistles, and two loads of washing were sorted and folded, and the kitchen floor was swabbed with two parts water and one part vinegar, and after Bobbie had done his homework and washed behind his ears, I closed my door and spread the quilt out on the floor in the middle of my room. Bobbie had been right, I thought. The quilt did look like the work of the left hand and the work of the right attached together by the black inner border. I squinted. It reminded me of something—a place. Someplace where the chaos of life met stillness and order, a place I was all too familiar with. I sucked in my breath. Of course. The graveyard, with its spiky iron fence punctuated with weeds. And inside, squares of immortal stones set neat with flowers. My heart hammered. The quilt wasn’t just a piece of handiwork. It was a kind of map. But for what?

  Breathing shallowly, I tipped the shade of my bedside light so it could better illuminate the fine web of needlework quilted across the expanse of the fabric. And there, so faint you’d never see them if you didn’t know to look, specific forms began to swim their way out of the play of light and shadow, slowly at first and then with more and more clarity. A bone. A flame. An eye. A heart. A set of lips. A single hand. And all along the wild edge of the border, repeated over and over again, what looked like the feathered spread of wings.

  I exhaled and sat back on my heels. My hips ached from squatting, and my eyeballs felt used up, but my pulse was racing with the exhilaration of a horse in high gallop. Had Maureen, Robert Morgan’s mother, ever noticed this? I wondered. Or any of the other Morgan wives? Tabitha Morgan hadn’t had any daughters, I remembered. Only sons. And those sons had had only sons. But those boys had married, and each one of them had lived in this house with the quilt on the wall. Hadn’t any of them seen the designs?

  Of course, in the end, it really wouldn’t have mattered. Tabby was dust in the ground, and her shadow book was a silly legend. No one would have believed it. The legend had to have come from somewhere, however, and, looking at Tabitha’s quilt, I thought I knew where. It sprang from a secret squeezed inside a rib cage for too many centuries, like a long, deep breath. And the thing about secrets is that they multiply. Once you have one tucked under your belt, it’s easy to add a couple more. I found that out, too. In fact, I only ran into trouble wh
en I forgot that everyone around me might have been doing exactly the same thing.

  Chapter Seventeen

  It took me until the tail end of spring to figure out the quilt. At night, my bedside lamp tilted at an angle, I studied the ghostly outlines stitched across the floral surface, wondering what they could mean. Bones, and lips, and hearts, disembodied and floating. They, too, must be a kind of map, I finally decided, a topography of the body overlaid on top of specific leaves and blossoms, indicating a relationship. Viewed like that, the quilt began to make perfect sense. Tabitha was showing what herbs worked on what parts of the body, and the jagged border, which so recalled the cemetery’s iron fence, said where to go to get the ingredients for her cures.

  Next, I had the guesswork of identifying all the plants. For two weeks, I copied stems and flowers into a notebook in the evenings, making sure I’d drawn all the lines right, double-checking the proportions. With the darkness sucking up against my windows and the sound of late ice melting off the eaves in the roof, I thought I could taste a little of the awful loneliness that Tabitha must have felt as she sat sewing with the moon eyeing her up like a big bald baby. During the day, I put Marcus to work, pestering him in the garden with my pictures and questions, but, truth be told, I think he enjoyed the distraction. It gave him a chance to return to his former role as a know-it-all.

  “How about this one?” I demanded on a particularly balmy spring afternoon. “What do you call this flower?”

  Marcus squinted at the sprig of blue blooms I’d scribbled on my notebook page and bent over closer to me. “Foxglove. Digitalis. It’s Latin for ‘fingerlike,’ because you can slip a blossom on the end of your finger so easily.” Then he frowned. “But it’s not much more than a weed, and you don’t want to mess with it, anyway. It’s toxic. I don’t plant it in the flower beds. What are you asking me all this stuff for, anyway?”