The Little Giant of Aberdeen County Read online

  “How much longer do you think before it tumbles back to the ground?” I asked, unloading one of Bobbie’s boxes from the truck bed.

  Amelia glanced over her shoulder and shrugged. Out here, away from the scrutiny of town, her lungs filled easily with air, and her voice rang true. “It’s leaning all right, but it won’t fall. Daddy’s ghost is still in there some.”

  I saw what she meant. Just like August, the barn wasn’t quite ready to throw in its hand, even when all the odds looked to be bad. I set Bobbie’s box on the front porch. “Well, the place looks great. You must have worked so hard.”

  Amelia blushed. “I didn’t do it all on my own. I had some help.”

  “What do you mean?” Besides me, I couldn’t think of any of Amelia’s friends. There were her clients, of course—most of them people, like Vi Vickers, that we’d both known forever—but I don’t think any of them thought of Amelia as anything more than someone who scoured their homes and then slipped away for another week.

  “Come on, I’ll show you.”

  She took my hand and led me around the back of the house. As we rounded the corner, I sucked in my breath. Gone were the rusted auto parts that no longer fit any specific machinery. Likewise the rotten picket fence, the hillocks of weeds, and the bald patches of scratched-up dirt. Instead, a garden was just beginning to poke through the early spring ground—planted in a round, gentle spiral. I instantly recognized the design.

  “It’s Marcus’s garden,” I breathed, and Amelia blushed again.

  “He’s only been working on it a few weeks, but he’s sure got a lot done. He said he’s been scratching around for a place to plant, so I told him I had more than enough room. Look . . .” She walked in between a narrow row of sprouts. “We’re going to have peppers, and beans, and eggplant, I think.” In spite of the chilly air, her cheeks were a vivid pink, and her eyes were aglow. I thought I could suddenly see what had attracted Marcus to gardening out here besides a free plot of land.

  Seething with jealousy, I turned my back on the plants. “Can we put these boxes inside now? I’m freezing.” It was a lie— nothing made me cold—but I didn’t want Amelia to see the envious set of my mouth.

  She looked confused, then hurt. “Okay.”

  What I really wanted to do was linger in the tidy lines that Marcus had scored into the earth. I wanted to sit in the exact center of the spiral and wait for the plants to unfurl themselves. I wanted them to climb and rove over my limbs until I burst into bloom with them. But it was Amelia who was going to get to harvest the thick-skinned peppers and gather up baskets of waxy beans. It was Amelia who would be waving to Marcus through the kitchen window, inviting him in for a plate of her fresh-cooked succotash and smoked ham. A column of bile rose in my throat.

  “Truly, what’s the matter?” Amelia put a hand on my forearm, but I shook it off.

  “I have to get back soon. I’ve got the doctor’s dinner to fix.”

  Amelia looked as though she wanted to say something, but a lifetime of swallowing words is a hard sea to swim against. I wonder now if she recognized jealousy in my glare or if she chalked my mean mood up to some flaw in herself; but knowing Amelia, I figured it was the latter. She may have had a whole lovely garden spread out at her feet, but in her heart, she still thought of herself as a weed—unlovely, uncultivated, un- welcome even in her own backyard. Everything in the world has its two faces, however. Weeds sometimes blossom into artful flowers. Beauty walks hand in hand with ugliness, sickness with health, and life tiptoes around in the horned shadow of death. The trick is to recognize which is which and to recognize what you’re dealing with at the time. At any given moment, you can tip the balance just a little, one way or the other, if you’re paying attention, but that afternoon I wasn’t. I was too preoccupied with the hard stones rolling around inside my own heart.

  “Come on,” I sighed. “Let’s go inside.”

  After ten years away, the brass handle of the Dyersons’ back door still felt familiar in my palm. I wondered if the house still smelled like beeswax and vanilla, and the icebox still made a whining noise like a mosquito. I so badly wanted to take in one more gulp of Marcus’s garden before I entered, but I didn’t want to give Amelia the satisfaction, and truth be told, I didn’t want to give it to myself, either. For years I’d been caught up in my memory of the place, and now here it was in front of me, real, and I wasn’t sure what to think.

  Amelia deserved an explanation for my mood, I knew, so I screwed up my courage and attempted to provide her with one. “It’s the garden,” I choked. “It’s the same one Marcus wanted to plant at the doctor’s. I thought—it’s just that . . . well, I thought it was supposed to be special.”

  Amelia’s eyes filled with comprehension. “Special for you, you mean.”

  I ducked my head. “Something like that.”

  She smiled. “But it is special. Don’t you see that? Just because it’s planted here doesn’t make it any different. He still planted it. He still brought it into being.”

  I raised up my head, still slightly dizzy with the swirling design of Marcus’s garden. “Oh,” I breathed. A tiny pulse of hope began to throb in my chest.

  Amelia stepped closer across the porch to me. “Truly, he cares for you. It’s obvious. He always has. Why don’t you do something about it? Bobbie’s gone now. He’s not coming back—you know he’s not. What do you have left to stay at the doctor’s for? Why don’t you move back out here with me? It’ll be like the old days. Come home.”

  Home. The word reverberated down my bones. Most people had one definite place they called home, but for me, it was different. Did I choose the doctor’s house, where Bobbie used to be and where I’d lived so long? Or the Dyerson farm, where August’s bones lay and where there was enough space to make me feel small; or was it the cramped wooden house of my childhood, where my mother and father had both died? I reached again for the brass doorknob, anticipating the familiar wave of aromas that would envelop me when I opened the door. I thought one last time of Marcus’s garden, sorry to leave it behind me.

  The only thing holding me at the doctor’s house now was the addictive bite of revenge, but its teeth were long and hooked, and I wasn’t at all sure anymore how to extricate myself from them. I was dependent on the doctor for the medicine he gave me, but I was also finding that I had sprouted unexpected roots under his roof, and the thought of tearing them up to move—even somewhere as familiar as the farm—gave me pause. I guess I was like a creeper strangling a tree with slow determination. Now that I had reached the very top branch, I saw, there was nowhere left to go but back the way I’d come.

  When I arrived back at the doctor’s, Robert Morgan was sitting in the kitchen—unusual enough for him, but doubly so because all the lights were turned off. He was sitting so still, I almost didn’t see him. He waited until I had my coat off, and then his voice scraped the air with the precision of a razor. “You’ve been out a long time.”

  I shook my black coat off my shoulders and laid it over the back of a chair before sitting down. Predictably, the wood groaned beneath me. I wanted to shout, to spit sparks and brimstone, but I was so tired, I managed only gruff irritation. “I took Bobbie’s stuff away.”

  Robert Morgan didn’t reply, and I shifted my weight to my other hip. I still wasn’t used to the house in its new incarnation. Without Bobbie, the rooms felt positively funereal. I yearned to flip on some lights and start cooking, filling the kitchen with good smells and the happy sound of pots bubbling, but there was no need. The doctor had helped himself to a plate of cold beef, crackers, cheese, and celery.

  I stared at the desiccated stalks on the doctor’s plate and thought again of the garden Marcus had planted, imagining how lush it would look when it was ripe and how good the tomatoes and peppers would taste straight off the vines. I imagined him feeding me sweet peas, pulled from their shells one by one. I thought about the rest of the farm, too—how there weren’t any horses left now, but maybe come
spring I could raise a graceful foal I would train to gentleness. Nothing like the buckle-kneed animals I used to care for, though. I wanted a little elegance for a change. I flattened my hands on the table and looked the doctor in the eyes. Amelia was dead right, I decided. Perhaps it really was time for me to open the door to my own future. There was nothing keeping me here anymore but the ugly lure of comeuppance. It was time to leave. But informing the doctor was a different matter.

  I thought about it and decided it was best to do it sideways. Butting your brains up against the doctor’s iron will was never a good idea. Better first to parrot what he wanted to hear. I took a breath and repeated, “Well, I did it. I took Bobbie’s things away like you wanted.” I didn’t mention what I’d done with them, and Robert Morgan didn’t ask, so I continued, throwing out more and more words as if I were filling up a pot for stew. “They’re gone now all right. His room’s empty. But, you know, he’s still right here in town.”

  Robert Morgan scowled, and I backed off, guessing he wasn’t ready to entertain the possibility of reconciling yet. Time to get on with my own concerns, then. “Speaking of moving on, I’ve been thinking. You won’t really be needing me anymore, and this afternoon, Amelia offered to take me back at the farm. Not”—I raised a finger—“that I couldn’t still come in once a week or so to cook up some dinners for you, or tidy up. That kind of thing. And, of course, I’ll need to come back for my medicine.” I folded my finger back into my hand, wishing I could just make a clean break and leave the way Bobbie had but knowing that was impossible. I sat back and waited for the storm I was sure was coming, but it never arrived.

  Resigned silence widened around us in arcs like pond ripples. Through the gloom, I noticed that the dark smears under the doctor’s eyes had grown more purple, the cracks in his lips deeper. He appeared as worn out as an old front porch, and this suddenly alarmed me. Maybe using Tabby’s recipes on him hadn’t been a good idea, I reflected. It hadn’t made me feel any better. It was a good thing I’d stopped. I leaned forward and put out a conciliatory hand across the table. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Please try to understand.”

  “I always thought you’d go before me,” he whispered.

  I squinted at him. “I know. It’s time for me to leave.”

  “No, that’s not what I meant.” He shook his head.

  “What are you talking about?” I pulled my hand back.

  He closed his eyes. “I finally got around to seeing the doctor, and he finally got his tests back. I have acute myeloid leukemia.”

  There was a beat of silence. Even I could tell that sounded bad, but I asked the obvious question anyway. “What is that?”

  “A type of cancer. My white blood cells are multiplying too quickly. They’re choking out the red ones.” I hadn’t realized you could divide blood into opposing colors, but I supposed if anyone could turn something as elemental as his own blood into something that seethed and fought, it would be Robert Morgan. It seemed that after all these years, he was finally finding out what the rest of the human race already knew—that he was a man at serious odds with himself.

  I let out my breath in a long, slow stream. “How long have you got?”

  “Weeks. Maybe months. It’s highly individual.” He avoided my gaze. “There’s really nothing anyone can do. Nothing I want them to.”

  I thought about Priscilla Sparrow’s last visit and seriously doubted that. When the sick got sick enough, I’d learned, there’s nothing they wouldn’t let you do for them. But the doctor was going to find that out for himself sooner rather than later, it seemed. And when he did, I wanted to be around to witness it. My future would have to wait—again.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  A body can bear anything for a few months, which is the only explanation I can give for the uneasy and unexpected peace the doctor and I managed to forge in the final weeks of his life. On the surface, it was as if nothing between us had changed. He spent hours in his office, sorting files and cleaning out a years’ worth of prescriptions and medicines, and I busied myself in the house. Even without Bobbie, I had plenty to keep me occupied, and though Robert Morgan’s natural pace might have been winding down, he seemed determined not to act like it. He still stuck his shoes out in the hallway for a spit polish, and demanded knife-sharp creases ironed into his trousers, and wanted extra starch on all his shirts. He chastised me when the water at the bottom of the flower vase in the foyer got cloudy, reprimanded me for accidentally buying salted butter, and found the new brand of hand soap I’d switched to less than satisfying.

  “I just don’t like the smell of it,” he snapped when I asked him what was wrong with it, and then he watched as I dumped all the new bars in the trash and replaced them with the old cakes.

  I suppose that if there was anything different between us during this time, it emanated from me instead of him. I wasn’t exactly done hating him, but I couldn’t muster up quite the same amount of ire as before. It would have been too much like taking a swing at a scarecrow when what I was really after were the crows.

  After he told me about his illness, I’d crept back up to my room, my stomach lurching, where Tabby’s quilt draped my bed, the orbs of its blossoms pointing at me like dozens of accusing eyes. What if I’m the one who caused his illness? I wondered. Fighting off a wave of nausea, I tugged and pulled at the quilt until I’d made a ball of it, and then I carried it downstairs and restored it to its original place on the wall in the parlor. There would be no more mixtures, I vowed. No more steeping herbs for hours—not even for myself. No more blending foul-smelling pastes. I was done with Tabby’s spells. From here on out, all the doctor would be getting out of me was sweet charity.

  But no matter how solicitous I was, no matter how many times I refilled his hot-water bottle or changed his sheets, no matter how many times I emptied the basin of vomit next to his bed, the question of Robert Morgan’s sickness wouldn’t leave my mind. It rubbed and irritated me like a grain of sand stuck in my shoe, until I finally couldn’t take it anymore and flat-out asked him.

  “Why do you think you got sick?” I put a cup of tea—just a cup of tea, plain and simple—on his bedside table and folded my hands, awaiting an accusation or, at the very least, some kind of suspicion.

  But Robert Morgan just blinked, sorrowful as an owl. He had lost more weight than I thought he had on him in the first place, and his cheekbones had gone from stark to skeletal. I turned my eyes away. “I thought I explained it,” he answered. “It’s a disorder of the white blood cells.”

  “No. I know that. I mean, why do you think you have it? Did something cause it? Like something you ate, maybe?”

  The doctor peered up at me. “Why do you ask?”

  “No reason.” I shifted.

  “No, Truly. It’s not because of something I ate. It’s not because of Bobbie leaving. It’s just because some of the cells in my body have decided to reproduce too quickly. That’s it. If I knew more than that, I wouldn’t be sitting in this chair right now. I’d be sitting in front of the Nobel Prize committee.”

  “But, that can’t be it,” I replied. “There has to be more to it than that. There has to be some kind of reason.”

  The doctor shook his head. “I’m afraid there isn’t. The body is just the body. It has its own structure, its own laws. It’s a thing unto itself. When it breaks down, that’s it.”

  I breathed out and glanced out the window at the blue, blank sky. “Is that what you think? We simply are the way we are?” I remembered him speaking those words so long ago, the first time he ever examined me. “What about me? Will I ever change?”

  He waved his hand vaguely. “You—you’re a thing of exception, Truly. I don’t know what to tell you.” The doctor closed his eyes and took a sip of tea. Outside, wind rustled the leaves. “Sickness doesn’t mean anything,” he finally said. “It’s either something you can fix or it’s not. All I’ve ever tried to do is to give people a way to live with it.”

  I pictu
red Marcus’s garden, planted in a slow spiral that would leaf and bud into sustenance. “What do you think happens when we die?” I asked. “Do you think we go back to the earth?”

  The doctor frowned. “You mean ashes to ashes, dust to dust?”

  “I guess.”

  “Biologically speaking, yes. I’m not sure about anything else.”

  But I was. All of a sudden, without doubt, I knew that everything and everyone on earth was one and the same. I thought about Priscilla Sparrow, and what I’d done for her, and how one day I might need the same favor myself. And though Robert Morgan and I had radically different casings, we were still stuck together by Bobbie and my sister, and there wasn’t a damn thing we could do about it. But still, for all that, we weren’t exactly alike, the doctor and I. He was wasting away while I’d gotten a double helping of what the universe was serving, and it hadn’t killed me yet.

  Instead, it was teaching me to live.

  Amelia didn’t share my newfound grace. “He’s got a house full of medicine, let him dose himself,” she said when I told her I wasn’t moving to the farm and why. “He’s a mean so-and-so, and always has been. Let him get what’s coming.”

  Her venom shocked me. “That’s not very Christian,” I responded, and Amelia snorted.

  “Tell me what the Lord has ever done for us.”

  I stared at her. She was spring cleaning, and she’d been acting strange all morning, like a snake about to shed its skin. Now that the doctor was confined, and there was no one around to hear her but me, she often hummed while she worked and sometimes even had conversations, like now. Irritated with my lack of an answer, she wiped a layer of dust from one of the kitchen shelves and began swabbing the floor.