The Little Giant of Aberdeen County Page 24

  “Eye of newt,” I called back, “with a side of spiders.” And I bustled off to see about ruining his supper, not to mention his stomach, with some lily-of-the-valley leaves.

  Here’s what I know about small towns: People in them are either all-forgiving or intolerant as mules, and the way they choose very often comes down to the issue of what you’re willing to sacrifice. I think Tabitha Morgan understood this, and I think that’s why she married the first Robert Morgan and sewed her secrets into a quilt. After all, you don’t carry a burned ancestor around in your lineage without a certain amount of anxiety about future recurrences. No matter how friendly the people of Aberdeen were to her, no matter how grateful for healing their sick children, she still must have sensed an undercurrent of danger best remedied by the twin conventions of marriage and motherhood. After all, spinsters have always been a social problem all up and down history, and spinsters with spells are even more unappealing.

  I have it easy in some ways. No one’s ever really expected much of anything out of me—certainly not snagging a husband or children of my own. My size makes me speak slowly and move slowly, and it’s also paradoxically enabled me to slip through cracks no one in Aberdeen would ever think possible. Like testing out Tabitha’s mixtures. Or killing off Prissy Sparrow right under Robert Morgan’s pointy nose.

  Based on what the doctor had told me about my own condition, I thought the chances were pretty good that I might one day require the same grace I was about to extend to Prissy. It gave me comfort to know that if Robert Morgan’s medicines didn’t work, and if I couldn’t find cures in the quilt, I still would have a more comfortable option than the smoking end of a pistol or the long drop of the train trestle outside of town. But the real reason I took so much time poring over the scattered wings and vines of the quilt almost pains me to admit now. Much as I would like to think so, my intentions weren’t totally altruistic. In fact, they were the absolute opposite. They arose from pure, unadulterated revenge.

  I knew Priscilla Sparrow was sick and aging, and I knew she’d gotten down on her knees in front of me to beg, but I can’t lie. There was a tiny part of me that thrilled to see those things. It was as if the child inside of me were standing with arms akimbo, bottom lip stuck out, sulking. I was glad that the woman who’d first labeled me a giant, and had stolen the one thing left belonging to my mother, and had never given me a drop of praise, was ill. I was happy to watch her die heartbroken and in solitude. In fact, I was happy to see that even dying wasn’t working out for Miss Sparrow. Finally, I thought, she’s getting a taste of what it’s like to have your body betray you.

  Well, that lasted all of about a week. The problem was that I couldn’t reconcile the ferocious Miss Sparrow of the past with the turbaned lady propped on her bony knees in front of me. If I were better at holding on to a grudge, I’m sure I could have managed to pin down her ghost, but, as it tends to do, the present won out, and I let my school memories dissolve like tarnish in a vinegar bath. Release, the wings on the quilt seemed to urge, the edges of them so faint that they shifted when I tried to trace them. Release. And so, on a Saturday in early summer, I found myself scouring roadsides, empty fields, fence lines, and even the weedy thickets of the town green. Any neglected spot where deadly plants might happen to grow, all the way out to the fence of the cemetery.

  It was the kind of day that asked you to take off your shoes and go creek walking or wriggle your toes in the grass, not a day for collecting the ingredients like these. I had made a list. Oleander and nightshade. Foxglove, and thorn apple, and devil’s trumpet. Nettles for sting and bite. All the herbs that Marcus had warned me against. All the ones I’d used on Sentinel—and more. That night, it took me four hours to cook them into a kind of sludge. I made some of my own improvements, adding peppermint to ease the bitterness, and chamomile to make the drink gentle, and then some sugar to make what I was about to do go down a little sweeter. I let the mixture cool and then strained the liquid into three small jars, capping them tight and setting them on the table. How much would it take to do Prissy in? I wondered. A spoonful? An entire cup? The whole jar? When it came to questions of dosage, I was beginning to realize, Tabitha’s quilt was more a blueprint than a handbook. It didn’t have all the answers.

  In the morning, I woke early and made sure Bobbie and the doctor were still sleeping before I stole back down to the kitchen and fetched a basket from the pantry. I wrapped one of the jars in a clean tea towel and laid it inside the basket, then I sat down and wrote a quick note. This is what you’ve been waiting for, I wrote. Drink it all at once. Don’t hesitate. God bless. I shoved the note into an envelope and tied it to the basket handle with red ribbon. There were two jars left. I put them in the pantry, where the liquid shimmered and glowed with an unsettling light. Two jars left for me just in case the doctor’s worst-case scenario came true. Or maybe not just in case. Maybe for when it did.

  Priscilla’s newspaper—folded into thirds like the doctor’s—was sitting on her stoop when I arrived, along with a bottle of milk. I glanced up and down the sidewalk, but all I could see were ticking sprinklers, her neighbor’s newspaper stuck in his hedge, and a calico cat. I nudged the basket up against her door, then turned and walked away.

  On the way back to the doctor’s, I imagined Prissy tearing open the envelope, reading my note, and then tossing it away. Then I pictured her uncapping the jar and inhaling the grassy concoction before leaning her head back and pouring it straight down her gullet. Summer would fizz along the back of her tongue, I hoped—fresh hay, and the nip of lemonade, and the smoky blare of fireworks. A time when everything in the world was youthful and plump and full of lazy grace. Maybe the faces of her students—every one of them, right from the beginning—would swirl before her eyes, rising up to meet her. I like to think so. I like to think I was even marching at the front of them, leading the show, my stocky legs scissoring, my hair flying, my hands clapping out the joyous overdue music of the seraphs.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  After Prissy’s death, I fell into a kind of limbo where it seemed time went on without me, like a river bending its way around a mountain. For one thing, I stopped growing. I don’t know if it was the doctor’s pills or maybe the cures from the quilt, but something halted my increases so that for the first time in my existence, I knew the suffocating equilibrium of absolute stillness. A series of winters came and went in Aberdeen, snows piling deep and then melting away again, the lilac hedges on the side of the house creeping higher and higher until Marcus arrived to hack them back, but through it all, I was just a bored observer, my viewpoint perfectly fixed, the world around me so distant and small, I felt as if I were looking through the wrong end of a telescope all the time.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Marcus asked as I was hanging out the washing one afternoon. We had all the modern conveniences, but I loved the way the sunshine made the sheets smell, so I used the chance of good weather to air the household linens. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d done it.

  “What do you mean?” I mumbled, my mouth full of pegs.

  Marcus reached up gently and removed them, then held his hand open so I could pluck them from his palm, one by one. “This is the first time I’ve seen you outside in weeks this year. You mope around the kitchen all day, but you barely cook anything anymore. You’ve gotten pasty as a ghost. You’re avoiding Amelia’s and my company, and Bobbie says you can go whole days without even speaking. I think he misses you.”

  I missed him, too. A full-blown adolescent now, he was like a leaky bucket getting emptier by the day, the soul dribbling out of him in a steady stream. Over the past few years, his voice had cracked and deepened, and he had sprouted wisps of hair under his arms and in his groin, but I was pretty sure the normal path of his development had ended there.

  The truth was, Bobbie was more like a teenage girl than a teenage boy, and I wasn’t sure what to do about it. He spent hours in the bathroom tweezing and grooming, relishin
g the sting of each and every pluck, and I knew he kept a stash of stolen makeup hidden under a loose floorboard in his room. On rainy afternoons, when his father had appointments in the clinic, Bobbie would sweep an arc of Tangerine Dream over his bottom lip before anointing his eyelids with the glittery mystery of Midnight Blue. Holding a mirror so close to his face that his breath fogged the glass, he would watch as his real self emerged—the willowy one with sooty eyelashes. The one whose hips swung like a delicate bell. The one he kept trapped in a fairy-tale tower, awaiting a handsome prince.

  “Am I as glamorous as Princess Bugaboo?” he’d ask, peeking his head around my door and fluttering his eyelashes with the efficiency of a harem vixen. The first time I caught him painted up, I have to confess, I was just the tiniest bit revolted. Not shocked. Not outraged or even embarrassed, just a little repulsed—the way I would have been if I’d come across weevils frolicking in the flour bin.

  “What have you got on your gob?” I cried, my reflection rearing up behind his in the bathroom mirror like a mountain hogging the sky. My own hair was threaded with gray, I saw, and there was no definition left in my face anymore. My cheeks melted into my neck, which rolled and spilled onto the butts of my shoulders, which rounded into my arms and wrists. My breath scuttled around inside me like a ragged animal trapped in a cage.

  Bobbie cringed. “Don’t be mad, Aunt Truly. Please. I think I’m supposed to look like this.”

  I was about to make him wash it off, but I looked again and saw that he was right. He did look better—more alive. I reached out and cupped his chin. “It’s okay,” I said, gazing into his adorned eyes. “Let’s just keep this quiet, though. I don’t think your dad needs to know. It’ll be our little secret.”

  And it was, until Robert Morgan came stomping in from work early one afternoon and ruined everything. Panicked, Bobbie tried to smudge the blush off his cheeks, but when he descended the front steps, he saw his father gaping at him.

  “What the hell is on your face?” Robert Morgan demanded, and Bobbie, with a quick wit I didn’t know he possessed, told him it was pink highlighter.

  “I fell asleep on my books and smeared ink on my face,” he said, which made no sense but seemed to satisfy his father.

  “Go and wash it off,” Robert Morgan ordered, and then added, “And why don’t you use blue ink, like a normal boy?”

  “Hinkleman’s was out of blue,” Bobbie mumbled, slinking back upstairs, sweat slicking him like spring rain. He stepped into the bathroom and washed his face, then picked up one of the rough towels, rubbing his eyelids and lips raw, rubbing that side of him out of existence.

  I know how that feels, I wanted to tell him, but lately if I tried to talk to him, tapping on his door gently or luring him into the kitchen with cookies, he always rebuffed me, saying he had too much homework or that he just wasn’t in the mood.

  “It’s not like you’re my mom,” he sneered once, grabbing a fistful of the fudge I’d set out on the kitchen table. I sucked in my breath as if I’d been slapped.

  “I’m the closest thing you’ve got left,” I snapped, and then it was Bobbie’s turn to look stunned. “Wait, I’m sorry,” I called after him as he stormed out of the room. I’d never before spoken harshly to him, but it was too late. The damage was done. After that, he grew even more distant and sulky, avoiding eye contact with me at dinner, giving one-word answers to his father’s questions about his day.

  “What’s going on with him?” Robert Morgan wanted to know. “Does he talk to you? Is he on drugs?” His face clouded.

  I looked up, startled. Was Bobbie? I didn’t think so—at least not on a regular basis. But what could I tell Robert Morgan about Bobbie’s particular brand of heartache? That his son was more comfortable in lipstick than jeans? That he wasn’t growing out of his pretty stage? And why should I have to say anything at all, I wondered, when the truth was right in front of all our eyes?

  Marcus saw it, as he saw all facts. “The boy’s just different,” he said, shrugging, when I tracked him down by the lilacs to ask him his opinion. “It’s hard in a town like this, the size of a cricket wing. Anything the least bit out of the ordinary seems about five times worse than it really is.” Amen to that, I thought.

  He squinted. “You know, in Vietnam, they had these bars in the cities, where the boys dressed up like girls and danced and sang and everything.” I tried to picture Marcus in a place like that, his fist unscarred and curled around a dirty bottle of whiskey, but I couldn’t. His eyes were too peaceful these days, and the strongest thing he ever touched was hot tea. He shrugged. “After a while, the fellas kind of forgot who was who and just enjoyed the show.”

  I twirled a leaf. “So what are you suggesting?”

  Marcus smiled. “Enjoy the show, Truly. Don’t try to direct it.” His hand brushed mine, and I blushed and jerked backward a few inches. He ignored my reaction, his gaze focused on the middle distance. “Say, what would you think about putting in a proper garden out here? I’ve been studying some old designs from the nineteenth century that would really complement the house. You and the doctor could have your own vegetables.”

  I looked around at the stretch of lawn, hedges, and the borders of perennials. As long as I could remember, these things had always been the same. Every spring, daffodils and irises shot up in alternating bands, and every summer, primroses lazed along the back fence.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “The doctor won’t even let me change my brand of shoe polish. And these were all his mother’s plants.”

  Marcus’s face darkened. “I suppose you’re right. It’s just that, well, damn it, I really want to do a little something more than clip other people’s boxwoods.”

  Suddenly, I could see how important building a garden was to him, how maybe he actually wanted to put down some roots rather than just dig at them. I wondered if he ever got frustrated knowing all the fancy Latin names for the bushes around him, not to mention the complicated biology of photosynthesis, but in the end being just a kind of janitor for other people’s yards. “Why don’t you plant yourself a garden at the cemetery?” I suggested. “There’s acres of space out that way.”

  Marcus shook his head. “Municipal land. It’s not allowed. Besides”—he cast an eye across the grass, avoiding my gaze—“I also sort of wanted to do it for you.”

  I looked down at my hands—swollen, mottled, the fingers clumped like sausages. Hands no man in his right mind, even Marcus, could ever love. “Thanks,” I choked, “but you’re probably better off trying someone else’s yard.” I sidled another few inches away. It was almost noon. Time to see the doctor for another injection. Two sets of pills and one needle a day were apparently all that was keeping me from floating away like a hot-air balloon. “I have to get back inside now. The doctor needs to see me for something.”

  Marcus looked as though he wanted to say something else, to add a thought, but I didn’t give him the chance. Frankly, I didn’t want to hear it. At that precise moment, I didn’t think I had any more room inside me for the weight of anyone else’s secrets.

  During Bobbie’s last year of high school, he finally made a friend. Salvatore was a year or two older than Bobbie but was struggling to graduate. He lived in Hansen but started coming home with Bobbie in the afternoons, and where Bobbie was fair and flighty, Salvatore was all lean muscle and bulk, sleek as a bull and about as proud. Right away, I didn’t like him.

  “He refused to shake hands when he met me. He doesn’t eat any of the food I fix for you boys, and his eyes are shifty,” I complained to Bobbie. “He looks nervous all the time, like he’s just stolen something, or he’s thinking about it.”

  Bobbie sneered. “Salvatore’s never stolen anything in his life. You just don’t like him because you know how much I like him.”

  I wanted to argue with Bobbie, but he had a point. You couldn’t watch them together and not see it. When they sat at the table, their feet always got to touching underneath it, and when Salvatore w
alked through the back door to go home, it was with Bobbie’s hand nestled in the small of his back.

  “What are you going to do if your father sees?” I asked Bobbie, and he frowned.

  “He won’t.”

  “But what if he does?”

  The attic fixed all that. During a freak autumn hailstorm, Bobbie and Salvatore went looking for a place to smoke a joint. Bobbie’s room was out. I was barricaded in my room down the hall, watching TV, and he didn’t want to risk it. The rest of the house was out for obvious reasons, and Bobbie was just about to suggest they give it up when Salvatore asked, “Don’t you, like, have an attic in this place, man?”

  When he and Bobbie emerged into the peaked room, he lit the joint, sucked in a plume of sweet smoke, and surveyed the jumble of wooden steamer trunks, pyramids of boxes, garbage sacks, and a pile of what looked to be gardening implements. “Very cool,” he declared. “I bet some of this shit is valuable, man. You should try to sell it.”

  But Bobbie had no interest in making a profit. Instead, he was concentrating on the lace edge of a parasol peeking from underneath a roll of carpet. He took the joint from his friend’s hands and lifted it to his lips, inhaling with a glee that far exceeded the thrill of pot. He picked up the parasol and spun it over his head.

  “Beautiful,” Salvatore said grinning. Then he leaned forward and kissed Bobbie. Shocked, Bobbie dropped the parasol, then quickly leaned in for another kiss, his mouth broken open like an egg, everything inside him oozing out. Next to him, the smoke rose and broke apart, turning to wisps that were fragile as cobwebs.

  After that, every afternoon I heard Bobbie and Salvatore sneaking up to the attic, where they would lose themselves in a world of chiffon and satin, velvet, and fur. Tucked away in trunk after trunk, folded into frail squares of tissue paper, and buried under camphor were flounced petticoats and plunging tea gowns, plumed satin hats, and corsets with ribbons so slippery, they kissed Bobbie’s skin like a mermaid’s scales.