The Little Giant of Aberdeen County Read online

  Marcus wouldn’t look at me. He’s mad, I thought, because he tried to say he loved me and I couldn’t say it back yet. But I was working on it. I thought I might be able to say it one day. Maybe even sooner rather than later.

  “I need to speak to Robert Morgan.”

  I shut the door. “I’ll go get him. But, Marcus . . .” Now I was the one who couldn’t look up. “About the things you said to me last—”

  Marcus waved a hand. “They’ll wait. Just go get Robert Morgan. Please. It’s important.”

  “What’s the matter? Is everything okay?”

  Marcus rubbed the bridge of his nose. “It’s about Bobbie. I found him out in the graveyard this morning, sitting on Serena Jane’s grave. What’s going on with him?”

  I put a hand to my heart, remembering how I’d needled him about his educational plans. In some ways, I thought, he really was still a boy. Even though his future was bearing down on him, he still had both feet in the past. Suddenly I felt guilty. I looked at Marcus’s patient but questioning eyes and found I couldn’t hold his gaze. “I’ll fetch the doctor. You wait in the kitchen,” I said, and bustled off to find Robert Morgan in his office.

  “What’s the problem?” Robert Morgan coolly examined me over the tops of his bifocals. They were new and made him look even more medicinal, I thought.

  “Something about Bobbie. Marcus is in the kitchen. He’ll explain.”

  Robert Morgan scowled, but he put down his pen, grabbed his doctor’s kit, and followed me across to where Marcus was waiting, tapping his good foot.

  “Don’t worry. He’s at my place. He’s fine,” Marcus began, “but I thought you should know, I found him sitting on his mother’s grave. He’d been out there all night.”

  The doctor cut right to the point. “Was he drunk?”

  “No. Not that I know of. In fact, I think he was clear as a bell.”

  “Well, thank goodness for that. Although, between you and me, it wouldn’t be the first time a Morgan man tied one on.” I could hear the wink and nudge in the doctor’s voice, but Marcus ignored it.

  “Listen, I don’t know how to tell you this, exactly, but Bobbie wasn’t—isn’t—himself.”

  All the humor left Robert Morgan. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, for one thing, when I found him, he was wearing a dress.”

  There was woolly silence for a moment, and when Robert Morgan finally spoke again, it was in such a low voice, I had trouble hearing him. “Did anyone else see him?”

  “No, it was too early. Just barely dawn.”

  “And where is he now?”

  “In my cottage. Sleeping.”

  Another pause, then, “Good, that’s good. I’ll give you some clothes to take back to him. And here . . .” Robert Morgan fumbled in his doctor’s bag and shook a series of pills out of a plastic bottle. “When he wakes up, give him two of these. Give him the pills first, then the clothes. Wait about twenty minutes in between.”

  There was a stretch of silence. My heart hammered in my chest as I wondered what Marcus would say. Would he stash the pills in his jacket pocket, no questions asked, or hesitate, his palm half- uncurled? I guessed right. Marcus shook his head firmly, his eyes cast down to his boots, but resolute. “No sir,” he said. “I don’t think that’s the right answer.”

  Robert Morgan glowered and closed his fingers tighter around the pills. “With all due respect, he’s my son. I get to call the shots here.”

  But Marcus wouldn’t be moved. “I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree, then. I’m not giving him those pills.”

  The doctor sputtered, “You can’t just let Bobbie stay with you. I’ll call the police.”

  Marcus folded his arms across his chest. “Didn’t Bobbie turn eighteen two months ago?”

  Robert Morgan sputtered again, and Marcus put his hat on his head. “Like I said, I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree.”

  Before he could open the door, however, Robert Morgan slammed his hand against it. “Know this. When you walk out that door, you are finished in this house. If you ever set foot on my property again, I’ll have you arrested.”

  Marcus shrugged. The doctor’s face turned a dangerous puce. “You were a little shit growing up, Thompson, and you’re still a little shit now. No war wound is going to change that.”

  I sucked in my breath. It was the worst, meanest thing Robert Morgan could possibly say. A gust of wind kicked up outside, rattling dead tree twigs, and it was a final sound, empty and dull. To his credit, Marcus kept his cool. “You can insult me all you want, Bob Bob, but it isn’t going to change the finer points of your son. I guess I’ll see myself out the front.” Marcus twirled his hat once more, glanced at me for a moment, and shook his head. It was enough for me to understand that he was saying good-bye.

  “Wait!” I followed him into the foyer, the floorboards bowing under my feet. “Marcus! Don’t go. Not like this. What about Bobbie?”

  Marcus looked up at me. His eyes were wet at the corners. “He’s just across town, Truly. We both are.”

  “You know it’s not as simple as that.” My voice came out rough and bumpy.

  Marcus reached up and cupped one of my cheeks the way he had before, and it felt like the sun kissing my skin. “I’ll take good care of him, I promise.”

  I was trying hard not to cry. “I know. And maybe in a little while, Robert Morgan will come around.”

  “I don’t think that’s too likely.”

  “No. I don’t guess it is.”

  The thing about leavetakings, I’ve come to learn, is that they’re harder to deal with when they’re finished. It was only after Marcus closed the front door gently behind him that it occurred to me that my chances of telling him I loved him back were about as big as a flea and shrinking. For the first time since I’d arrived, I let myself dream about what it would be like to leave the doctor’s house and not even take a suitcase or an extra pair of shoes, but simply to slam the door behind me with a good, hard shake and point my hips out of town and back toward the Dyerson farm. Or maybe toward the cemetery and Marcus.

  Behind me, the dark shadow of Robert Morgan was a smudge across the wall, interrupting my thoughts. I sighed. It was useless to dream. No matter how far I went, I would never be free of Robert Morgan’s bad temper, and I would never, ever outrun my own problems.

  The doctor’s voice swept across the room like an arm drawing a curtain. “I want you to clean out Bobbie’s room by tonight. Then close the door and leave it that way.”

  I turned around. “He’s still a boy, you know. He’s confused.”

  Robert Morgan held up the flat of one hand. “By tonight.”

  “What do you want me to do with his things?”

  “Give them away or throw them away. I don’t care.”

  The doctor could scatter Bobbie’s possessions to the four winds as if they were bones, I thought, but the ghost of him would still always be under his skin. I tried to put my thoughts in terms the doctor would understand. “He’s still your son,” I said, “no matter what. Your flesh and blood. You can’t change the fact of blood.”

  Robert Morgan blinked, and for the first time, I saw that his eyes reflected light the same way as Bobbie’s. Maybe, I thought, there’s some common thread still strung between them.

  But I was wrong. When Robert Morgan opened his mouth to speak, his lips were set as solid as a gravestone, and I knew that the thread had snapped. “You’re quite right,” he said. “I can’t change biology, but I can change history.” He held out his hand as if to introduce himself. “Pleased to meet you,” he said. “I’m the first Robert Morgan in five generations without a son.”

  As the weather began to change from hard snow and ice to the halfhearted slush of spring, I started to wonder if the past and the future were hinged together like a hip socket, one grinding up against the other until something wore out. I had tried so hard not to hate Robert Morgan. For most of my life I’d tried, and now that I
saw that Bobbie had hated him, too, I regretted so much ill will. Or maybe not regretted. Regret might have been too strong a word. Repented was a better choice. It implied that while I was willing to atone for certain things, I might not be all that sorry about them.

  I still wasn’t sorry for what I’d done for Prissy, for starters. The doctor had been livid when he’d found out Prissy had taken her own life, but he’d had no idea it was me who’d helped her do it. Prissy had been careful with the evidence. Now, he started bringing it up again more and more frequently, however, maybe because after my sister and Bobbie, it was one more thing that had gotten away from him or maybe because it was easier for him to focus on an event that didn’t matter as much to him. “I think someone in this town was working against me,” he seethed. “Someone must have helped her die. She could have kept fighting. Old women don’t just drop dead on their kitchen floor with their lips stained, even if they are sicker than a fish on land.”

  I shrugged, glad that the quilt was safe up in my room, away from the doctor’s diagnostic eyes. “I guess. At least she found peace.”

  But the doctor continued to worry and fret over the problem until the topic was as frayed and full of holes as one of August’s horse blankets. Every night at supper, Robert Morgan hunched over his plate and ruminated, while I tried to stay as quiet as possible. Without Bobbie in the house, conversation had quickly been reduced to a running monologue on the doctor’s part.

  “It couldn’t have been Reverend Pickerton. He’s a godly man,” Robert Morgan surmised, tapping his fork on his plate of roast beef. “And it wasn’t Sal Dunfry. She’s so dumb, I doubt she could even mix her own piss in water. Amelia’s a possibility—she has all those cleaning solutions—but, no, she’s too timid. My money’s on that little shit gardener. He still thinks he’s so smart, even though I’m the one around here with the medical degree.”

  At the mention of Marcus, I sat up a little straighter. “That’s ridiculous,” I interrupted, daubing a smear of pan drippings from my lips. “Marcus was in a war. The last thing he’d want to do is take someone’s life. Besides, he’s a gardener. He makes things live.” But wasn’t it also true that gardeners were always wrestling with death, whether in the form of drought, or blight, or hungry insects? In a garden, Marcus always said, death was the first, last, and only fact of life.

  The doctor peered at me. “Look at you, all riled up. Don’t tell me you’re still stuck on that little creep. Explain to me, exactly, how you think that would ever work out?”

  I hung my head. “No, it wouldn’t. Besides, it’s nothing like that.” But I couldn’t help remembering the warm sensation of Marcus’s hand cupping my cheek and the happy glow of his eyes when they met mine. What do you know about love, I wanted to ask the doctor, when everyone you’ve ever loved has left you? I laid my knife and fork side by side on my empty plate.

  The next night, just to make the doctor shut up, I packed his meat loaf so full of hot peppers, he couldn’t get two words out before his eyes widened and his brow broke out in a sweat. “Sweet mother of the saints,” he choked. “What the hell did you put in here?”

  I blinked at him mildly. “Oh, is it too hot for you? It just has a little cayenne.” Also some dried and powdered hyacinth bulb, but he’d find out about that later in the evening when his stomach started cramping.

  The doctor gripped his fork tighter and clenched his teeth. “If you dished it out, I can surely eat it.” And he did. Silently. Every last bite.

  On his birthday, I laced his turkey roulade with cascara, causing him to spend another evening sequestered in his bathroom, and three weeks later, feverfew leaves (so helpful for my headaches) made his tongue swell when he ate them raw in salad. I distilled borage oil into his coffee and watched his eyes turn a sickly yellow in two flat weeks and then witnessed sores erupt on his lips after he spooned down a pudding rife with jack-in-the-pulpit.

  He started eyeing my meals with some suspicion, sniffing at them the way a dog noses a handout. “What in tarnation has been wrong with your cooking lately, Truly?” he demanded. “Nothing you’re putting on the table is agreeing with me.”

  I fluttered my hands in the air. “Oh, I’m sorry, Robert Morgan. Without Bobbie around, I’ve been so distracted lately. I guess I’m not good for anything.”

  The doctor snorted. “What else is new?” But at the mention of Bobbie’s name, his eyes narrowed. “You haven’t been sneaking out to see him, have you?”

  He popped another bite of meat in his mouth and chewed ponderously. Tonight, it was just plain meat. It occurred to me, however, that I still had two jars of the deadly mixture left in the pantry. If I wanted to, I could just brew it into the doctor’s coffee and end this charade at once. I could set Bobbie and myself free. I blinked, snapping myself out of my thoughts, hoping none of them showed on my face. “No, of course not.”

  The doctor set his jaw. “Good. If he wants to be out there on his own, let him. But don’t you give him any help from us. If I find you’ve gone out there”—he fixed his glassy eyes on me—“so help me God, Truly, you won’t even be able to whisper your apologies. Understood?”

  I pushed my chair away from the table. “Understood.” I thought about all the things I knew about Bobbie that Robert Morgan didn’t, not to mention all the secrets I’d discovered about Tabitha Morgan, and then I decided that when everything was said and done, I wasn’t sorry about keeping any of that information to myself. In fact, if Tabitha Morgan had provided a recipe for blissful ignorance, you couldn’t have paid me to take it just then. I wasn’t anywhere near through with the doctor yet. It was time to up the ante.

  What started off as occasional experiments with Tabby’s remedies on Robert Morgan turned into a regular onslaught. Soon I was trying out a new element on the doctor almost every day, incorporating Tabby’s dangerous herbs into the doctor’s meals the way you disguise medicine in horse feed. I gave him minuscule but repeated doses of oleander, nightshade, and even a little hemlock. At first, nothing seemed to happen. He slurped down his herb soups and scooped his berry pie with relish and then left the table whistling. One morning, though, about a month after I began fooling with his food in earnest, he appeared in the kitchen looking drawn and exhausted, the skin around his eyes pulled into shadow, his neck a wrinkled sack of tired blood.

  “I think I’m going to take the day off today, Truly,” he rasped, wrapping his dressing gown tighter. “Cancel my appointments, if you please, and could you bring me up some tea?”

  “What’s the matter, Robert Morgan?” I asked, trying to hide my smirk behind an expression of concern. “Feeling under the weather?” I knew I was. Maybe it was all the pills the doctor had me swallowing, but my stomach always felt sour these days. I tried brewing some of Tabitha’s teas off the quilt, but even they were no help. My joints ached in spite of the arnica I took, and my eczema just persisted under the cream I’d made up for it. It was as if the more I used the quilt’s ingredients for malice, the less they worked for the good.

  He coughed into his fist. “Must have caught some sort of bug. Say”—he frowned—“does this porridge taste funny to you?” Moments before his appearance in the kitchen, I had personally pounded a clutch of wormwood leaves—so renowned for their hallucinogenic properties—into a pulp and scraped their juices into the cereal.

  “No,” I said around my teeth as I made a show of swallowing one tiny bite. “Tastes regular to me.”

  “My tongue’s been feeling funny lately.” The doctor scowled. “Like it’s swollen or something. Maybe it’s just this infection.”

  “Maybe,” I agreed, “but you never know, do you? Maybe it’s witchcraft.” I winked.

  Robert Morgan appeared stupefied for a moment, then he snickered. “And maybe fairies frolic on the lawn at night. Still . . .” His smile faded. “A checkup wouldn’t hurt. I have a colleague over in Hansen. Maybe I’ll give him a call. I haven’t been feeling myself lately.”

  I smiled, the pictur
e of ignorance. “Sure, Robert Morgan. Sounds like a good idea. You medical men should stick together.”

  He gave me an odd look, but then another coughing spasm rattled his bones. He’d lost so much weight over the past three weeks that even his bedroom slippers looked too big. If I wanted to, now would be the time to finish him off, I thought. Half a jar of Tabby’s potion would probably do it.

  But what would happen to me if I did that? For one thing, whether I liked it or not, he was the only one who knew what was wrong with my body, the only one with half a chance of curing me, and I wanted to get better, I decided. Marcus had given me a reason to hope. And there was always Bobbie.

  I rinsed the pulped wormwood leaves out of their bowl and then emptied the doctor’s half-eaten cereal into the sink. Maybe I would ease up on using Tabitha’s cures, I mused. It was true that I still had a kettle of resentment against the doctor set on hard boil in my heart, but fanning the flames of it hadn’t really made me feel any better. It hadn’t changed anything at all, in fact. I was still stuck in Robert Morgan’s house, still big as a barn, and for all they were worth, Tabby’s herbs were lately proving about as useful to me as a dram of water pulled up from a tainted well. Maybe it was time to come clean again.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  When it was clear that Bobbie really wasn’t coming home, I knew it was time to do what Robert Morgan was urging and pack up his belongings as neatly as I could in cardboard boxes. Amelia came over to help me take them to the farm for safekeeping. I promised myself that one day Bobbie would get them back, but as we bumped along the road to the open fields and weather-eaten barn, I temporarily forgot all about Bobbie and stared around me in amazement.

  This was the first time I’d been back since I’d left. Two years before, Brenda had married one of her creditors and moved to Saratoga Springs, where she drove a Cadillac, learned to drink wine, and routinely tried to convince Amelia to sell off the farm. Amelia wasn’t likely to, though, not while August’s bones were still sunk in the fallow fields. There are some things in life too painful to let go of, much as we want to. Instead, Amelia had somehow found the means to mend the fences, patch the chicken coop, repair the windmill, and rewire, repaint, and refurbish the house. The only thing that looked remotely similar was the old barn. In August’s time, it had already been an open proposition for owls and mice, but now I found the sight of its rotten beams and exhausted roof too melancholy to bear.