The Little Giant of Aberdeen County Read online

  My own heart lurched at being so near to Marcus. Up close, his skin smelled both familiar and exotic, like the stand of woods behind the Dyerson farm. I slammed my notebook shut and stepped away from him, surreptitiously wiping my sweaty palms on the rough wool of my dress. “Never you mind.”

  Marcus grinned and switched the spade in his hand for a pair of clippers off his tool belt. “Are you sure you’re not gunning for my job?”

  I blushed. In the time since he’d been home, Marcus had become a horticultural celebrity. Good on his word, he lived at the cemetery in the caretaker’s cottage that had been abandoned for the past forty years. At first, keeping up the cemetery was nothing more than a chore, but soon he found pleasure in the labor.

  Sal Dunfry found pleasure in it, too, as she watched him chopping weeds along the cemetery fence line one hot afternoon. “What do I do about my hydrangeas?” she asked him while laying flowers on her mother’s grave. “They used to be purple. Now they’re faded and dull.”

  “Coffee grounds,” Marcus told her. “Just around the stems.”

  Sal batted her eyelashes. “Maybe you’d better come take a look. I’ve got trouble with my tulips, too.”

  Is there anything more irresistible to a woman than a man who can get things to grow? From her kitchen window, Sal observed Marcus coaxing tomatoes, then chrysanthemums from the ground. She remembered that he’d once been the smartest boy in town, then she wondered if his current occupation was a sign of intelligence or stupidity, before concluding that she didn’t care. She watched him peel off his shirt to let the sun speckle his back and brown it and decided he was perfectly formed, even if he was tiny and lame in one leg.

  “Do you think it’s scarred?” Vi Vickers whispered to Sal as they spied on Marcus outside of Sal’s window the next week. “Do you think he’s lost sensation in it?”

  “Would it matter?”

  Sal giggled. “You wouldn’t think a man so small would be so strong.”

  Vi sighed. “Look at his hands. Look at the scars over his thumb.”

  “I don’t get it,” Sal sniffed. “Why is he always hanging around Truly at Dr. Morgan’s house? I see them sitting on the porch together like mismatched lovebirds. She’s always asking him about plants.”

  “They were always friends. Don’t you remember? We all used to tease him, and her, too. But he’s definitely changed, and Truly, well . . .” Val’s voice trailed off.

  Sal finished the thought for her. “She’ll never change. It’s the law of inertia. You just can’t alter something that big.”

  Vi giggled. “You mean someone.”

  Sal just shrugged, as if to say what’s the difference, and I guess she had a point, but she was wrong about the law of inertia. You can throw something huge off course, and it doesn’t always take something—or someone—big to do it. Interesting results can be achieved with very little effort. Sometimes, all it takes is the smallest push from a pair of damaged hands to make even the driest bulb burst.

  And Sal was wrong about me. I was changing in ways I didn’t recognize. My weight was continuing to climb, no matter how little I ate. After the incident with the migraine, I’d finally succumbed to Robert Morgan’s weekly examinations—not because I believed they would do any good, but because in the end, curiosity got me just as the doctor said it would. What if one day Robert Morgan did find a way to minimize me? I wondered. Wouldn’t I take him up on his offer? I thought of Marcus, and my pulse quickened. If I could make it so that he could reach out and not up for my hand, wouldn’t I do it? Of course I would.

  These days, all I had to do was step on the scale, and both lead weights toppled all the way to the right. Robert Morgan scribbled the numbers in a folder, still abiding by his agreement to keep the numbers to himself, and nodded. If I gained a pound or two, he would chuckle a little and write a line to himself, as if finally confirming some long-held suspicion. Then he always told me that stupid story about the hippo.

  He kept an eye on every inch of me, illuminated every pore with his flashlight, stroking it up and down my skin like a lighthouse beam seeking out shipwrecks. “But, my God, you’re ugly,” he once stated, clicking off the penlight and squeezing the glands in my neck. “And that’s a professional opinion. In fact, you’re so goddamn off the charts that I had to order this.” He produced a cardboard box and pulled a blood pressure cuff out of it. “It’s a leg cuff,” he explained, “but we’re going to just wrap it around here.” He fastened the material around my biceps, inflated the cuff, and noted down what the little dial said. Then he got out his needle, tied rubber tubing where the blood pressure cuff had been, and proceeded to jab at my veins.

  “What do you do with all of it, anyway?” I asked when he was done. He had six vials lined up in front of him. I daubed my forearm with cotton.

  Robert Morgan capped the last tube. “Not that you need to know, but it goes to a university lab. I’m starting to see some interesting results.” I was tempted to ask what they were but didn’t bother, for we had our agreement, and anyway, Robert Morgan was about as forthcoming with information as August had been when you asked him for the location of his favorite fishing hole.

  “You’d tell me if I was dying, right?” I joked, turning my back and starting to gather my shapeless clothes. I stepped behind the three-part screen in the corner and threw my dress over my head, waiting for his reply.

  When he finally answered, it was with all the humor of a corpse. “Why would I end a study just as it was getting good?”

  My mouth fell open, and I stepped back around the screen. “Out of concern for the subject?” I suggested, my cheeks flaming with anger. “Because it would be the right thing to do? Because you’re dealing with people, not rocks?”

  Robert Morgan shook his head and stuck his pen in his breast pocket. “Don’t worry, Truly—yet.” He leaned forward, mouth agape in a jack-o’-lantern grin, and patted my arm before retreating to the safe harbor of his desk, leaving me sputtering mad.

  “Damn doctors,” I murmured, and stomped across the porch to the kitchen to char his Wednesday roast until it became one with the pan. Hacking apart tomatoes for a sauce, I blinked back tears. It was hard to hurt me. Robert Morgan’s needles didn’t do it, and neither did the hot iron I’d singed my forearm along last week. Once, in August’s barn, Hitching Post had reared up and landed square on my forefoot, but all I’d ended up with was a pretty, purple bruise and a broken toenail. I was even getting used to my migraines. My body, it seemed, sponged up the world’s pain like bread in the bottom of a gravy tray.

  But I was unfamiliar with the kind of ache I was feeling now. It seemed to start in the center of me and steam outward until even the ends of my fingers tingled. I looked down and saw that I’d sliced my finger. A line of blood spurted out and mingled with the tomato pulp on the board. That explained the stinging. I glanced through the window and thought about going out to the doctor, but the thought of his fingers crawling on my flesh again gave me chills. Besides, I had a very different kind of remedy waiting for me in my own room, I realized. Without thinking twice, I swept the tomatoes—blood and all—in a pan and set them on the stove to stew. Then I threw down my knife and stomped upstairs to read Tabitha’s quilt.

  I had a choice, it seemed. The hand or the heart. The hand suggested touch, and therefore skin, to me, but the heart had to represent blood. I scowled, then decided to combine the two. But how? I wondered. In a tea? A pulp? Was I just meant to eat the leaves raw and whole? Tabby’s embroidery didn’t recommend a delivery system—just the raw ingredients. I studied the plants on the quilt some more. I didn’t know all of them yet but could pick out comfrey, chickweed, and prickly ash underneath the heart and hand. Well, that would have to do, I thought. And even better, I could find them anywhere. I wouldn’t have to go out to the cemetery. In fact, that was one of the remaining mysteries of the quilt for me. Why had Tabitha included the jagged fence of Aberdeen’s cemetery? Half the plants she’d sewn grew willy-ni
lly anywhere you could spit in Aberdeen. There was no need to trek all the way to the town graves. I tilted my head and stared at the quilt from a different angle. Maybe, I reasoned, the graveyard is simply the one place where all the plants grow. It was the answer I came back to again and again.

  My eyes lingered on the tiny set of lips puckered over sprigs of peppermint and chamomile. The mouth, I thought. Gateway to the stomach. Peppermint was good for digestion. Almost everyone knew that. Then my heart leapt a little in my chest. What if Tabitha had known something more? I wondered. What if she could take away the appetite as well as cure it? I thought back to my humiliating examination with Robert Morgan. What if I could beat him at his own game? What would I need? Peppermint, the quilt suggested, and chamomile. Rosehips and dandelion greens. But would these make me hungrier? I had no idea. There was only one way to find out.

  A pulp, I finally decided, would be the easiest thing to make for both my problems: the cut on my hand and the hunger rumbling in my stomach. I could mash up the respective stems and leaves, smearing one paste on my wound and infusing the other mixture into a sort of tea.

  I waited until the household was asleep, then snuck into the garden by the light of the moon. I hadn’t been outside at night in longer than I could remember, and the wet air was a welcome shock along the walls of my throat. I inhaled in big, greedy gulps, my ears keening to the rollicking of crickets, letting my eyes get used to the dark. Up in the house, the doctor’s window was still illuminated, the curtains squeezed tight, so that the glass glowed in a muffled way. I moved quickly, hoping he would attribute all the noise I was making to the restless shenanigans of a skunk or opossum.

  Back in the kitchen, I found the mortar and pestle and mashed up handfuls of twigs and leaves into a slick green mess. “Truly?” The doctor’s wooden voice floated down the stairs. “Is that you making all that ruckus?”

  “Yes, Robert Morgan,” I called back, scooping the paste into a bowl. “I’m just fixing a little snack.”

  I thought I heard him snigger, then the house fell silent again. The cut on my finger throbbed and oozed under its bandage, as if it were literally crying out for a poultice. I ripped off the bandage and applied a generous blob, wincing against the heat that started to build up. I smeared more on and then more again and even daubed the burn on my forearm, then wrapped my hand in a clean dish towel, setting the empty bowl in the sink for the morning.

  I poured boiling water over the second mixture and watched it cloud. A pleasant steam rose up from the rim of the cup, redolent with mint. I inhaled the vapor and took a cautious sip, expecting to taste bitterness, but not so much of it. I pulled a face and tried another slurp, then poured the rest down my open throat.

  That night I dreamed about my sister, but in my imagination she was all mixed up with Tabitha Morgan, her long hair tucked under a silk bonnet, her hips swathed in pleats of calico. She was laughing and spinning, and when I tried to reach out and touch her, she danced away from my grasp. “Wait,” I called, but she just spun faster and faster until the sprigs on her skirts turned into huge cabbage roses, and I woke to the cloying scent of their oils seeping under the crack in my window.

  It was quite late. The sun was already up over the lilacs and headed toward the clouds. I sat up and unwound the dish towel from my hand. The green paste had hardened to a kind of glue, but when I rinsed it off in the bathroom sink, I found that the skin around my wound was puckered up as tight as a pair of lips for a kiss, and the place where the burn mark had been was pink and smooth once again. I flexed my hand and noted that the pain was gone as well. The cut would almost certainly leave a scar, but that didn’t bother me in the least. I could just add it to the list of all my body’s other indignities.

  I walked into the kitchen, whistling. The doctor was already at the table, legs crossed, sipping a glass of orange juice and perusing the morning paper. “What’s that in the sink?” he asked. He was either sneering or reacting to the lemon juice I’d mixed in with the orange juice—I couldn’t tell which.

  I hustled over to the sink and quickly swabbed the remaining paste out of the bowl. “Nothing. Just my snack from last night. Remember?”

  Robert Morgan snorted. He was definitely sneering, I decided. “What in heaven’s acres was it? Looks like something you would have fed August’s beat-up horses. Don’t tell me you’re on some kind of crazy diet. Because I doubt that much you do in that department will ever help.”

  Anger crackled in my nostrils and ears like static. Inside my boots, I curled my toes, then did the same with my tongue. I would have liked nothing better than to tip the jug of juice over the doctor’s head and watch it ooze down his collar, but with a man like Robert Morgan, you were better off keeping your elbows close to your sides, your head down, and your feelings to yourself.

  “A diet?” I echoed. “No, no. Nothing like that. Of course you’re right, Robert Morgan. I was just trying a recipe that didn’t work out, that’s all.”

  But he was uninterested in my explanation. Already, he was folding the paper back into thirds and shrugging on his coat, his mind racing ahead of him to the appointment book on his desk.

  “It’s going to be a hot one today, Truly,” he crowed as he opened the back door. “Make sure you open all the windows.”

  I reached for the eggs. “Wait, don’t you want your breakfast?”

  “You have it. I’m not hungry.” He swept across the porch, and I was alone once again save for the empty bowl in the sink and the odor of roses lingering like a sweet dare.

  Chapter Eighteen

  I consider myself guilty of plenty of things, but probably not the crimes you’d assume. I don’t regret sending Robert Morgan to meet the Maker, for instance. I don’t regret it a bit. After all, it was his original idea. As for the other two souls I’ve doctored, well, each case came with its own dark face for me to stare down.

  Is what I’ve done right? Maybe. Some people in Aberdeen call it a mercy. Some mutter that it’s the doing of witches and devils—the work of Tabitha Morgan and her infernal quilt all over again. And in a sense, they’re correct. It is, after all, her recipes that I use, both for giving comfort and for darker purposes. But here’s something I’ve never done—I’ve never made a decision for anyone one way or another. People come to me first and foremost, sometimes for healing, sometimes for more, but they are the ones who do the asking. Why don’t I refuse? you might wonder. Why don’t I just say, “No, I won’t, end of story”?

  Believe me, I think about it sometimes, but there is this to consider: There is the unrivaled power of death to even out the past. In particular, my past. I used to think I couldn’t change my history, that the things that happened to me were as good as grooved in my bones, but each time I take a life, I find otherwise. I uncover another long-lost layer of my past, another strip of my soul.

  Usually, it’s no mystery why someone wants life to end. Sickness, for the most part. Sometimes debt, although I won’t take those cases. It’s not my business to judge, only to determine. But I can’t discount the weight of the past on the present moment—it’s nothing I can see, but always there all the same, like an invisible stone sinking a ship. And it’s never the people I suspect of meddling with the past who are guilty of it, either. Friend or foe, anyone is capable of scuttling a few innocent details, omitting one or two facts, and changing a life forever. It’s another thing entirely whether they choose to admit it.

  Before I moved in with the doctor, I wouldn’t have called myself vengeful, but the longer I was under his roof, the more I began to feel spite tugging on my sleeve like a fitful child. Mostly it was because of the absence of my sister, which lingered in the house like a rank odor we all tried to ignore. The doctor accomplished this by alternating vast periods of silence with harangues about my weight, my looks, my cooking, and my general existence.

  “A big bird for a big woman,” he snickered when I brought out the turkey I’d roasted for Thanksgiving. “Your sister always mad
e Cornish hens, but I guess that would be nothing more than a light snack for the likes of you, Truly. Son”—he lifted up a piece of breast meat and turned to Bobbie—“pass your plate and prepare to be stuffed!” He chuckled a little at his seasonal joke, disregarding the tears hanging in the corners of Bobbie’s eyes and completely overlooking the fact that Bobbie was still getting over the loss of his mother.

  “Thanks,” Bobbie mumbled, his voice as dry as the meat on his plate, and then proceeded to eat nothing, not even the pumpkin pie or the fudge I’d made special for the day.

  After every maddening meal, after every one of the doctor’s humiliating medical exams, I took the opportunity to retreat to the warmth of my bedroom and Tabitha’s quilt, studying its strange botanical whorls and lines while I tried to pound the malice inside me back down to a manageable ball.

  Thanks to Marcus, I had become familiar with the names of the herbs, but the overall design of the thing still puzzled me. The plants in the middle of the quilt were easy. Everything I expected to be there pretty much was. There was peppermint, and comfrey, sage, and lavender, borage, chamomile, and rosemary. Lined up in neat little rows, sewn demurely on neat white squares, they suggested a host of remedies. With Marcus’s help, I had dried a measure of herbs in individual jars and stored them in the pantry next to the spices. During my quiet evenings, I went over the lists of plants and body parts I had made, trying to decode the quilt.

  The stitched eye stood for vision, I figured, so the herbs underneath it must have been good for sight. I wrote down bilberries, chrysanthemum, honeysuckle, and horsetail. And sure enough, when I developed a sty on my left eyelid, a poultice of these plants soon took down the swelling. Encouraged by my success, I used the mixture I’d made for the cut on my own finger to soothe Bobbie’s scraped knees, warning him not to tell his father. I hadn’t yet gotten a chance to try any of the remedies underneath the quilt’s bone, but I figured Tabitha had meant those plants to be used for fractures and breaks. Likewise, I was guessing that the heart stood for circulation and blood. The hand denoted skin to me, and the lips suggested eating and therefore the stomach. Every night before I went to sleep, I drank a cup of peppermint-chamomile tea, as the quilt suggested, and while my digestion was always just fine, I was sorry to find that the size of my appetite remained the same.