The Little Giant of Aberdeen County Read online

  I tipped my head back, gazed at the spangled sky, and wondered if people’s souls ended up there or stayed sunk down in the earth with their bones. I squinted, and the stars blurred until they looked almost calcified. Maybe the heavens were a kind of celestial grave, I thought, the way the earth is a repository for our flesh, and when we stared at the stars, we were really beholding a million lives twinkling back at us, asking us not to forget. I sat forward and cleared my throat.

  “Is there anything you want me to remember, in particular?” I asked. I tried to think about the things I carried around with me from my mother, my father, August, and my sister. My name, I decided. Certainly the genes that made me bigger than everyone else. From August I could say I’d gotten the ability to spot the losing horse at the racetrack and a winning hand of cards, and Serena Jane had entrusted me with Bobbie. I wondered what the doctor’s legacy would be, then reflected that maybe he’d already given it to me. He’d told me the truth, after all, about why I was so big and what it meant for my existence, and he’d shared the secret of Tabitha’s quilt with me. It sounds funny now, but in a nutshell, I guess you could say he’d granted me the secret of death and, by extension, life.

  The half-empty jar in Robert Morgan’s hand quivered, and I reached out and steadied it. “Don’t worry, I’m right here,” I said. There was a weak moon overhead, and it cast enough of a glow that I could just make out Robert Morgan’s profile. Even sideways, you could tell how much weight had fallen off him. Now, all the angles and lines of his body were even clearer than before, as if the Maker had wanted to whittle him down to his absolute essence before He let him into the afterlife.

  Something strange happened then. At the time, I thought it was just delirium. Men have been known to do all kinds of bizarre things before they pass to the other side, and it’s a busy fool who would sit around trying to unknit them. But the doctor wasn’t mad, and he wasn’t desperate, either. He was confessing.

  “California,” he wheezed.

  I patted his shoulder. “No one’s going to California,” I assured him. “Everyone’s right here where they’ve always been.” Even Bobbie, I wanted to add, but I held my tongue. A dying man should be able to spout off whatever nonsense he wants.

  “No . . .” He lifted his head off the chair and half rolled toward me. “California.”

  “Hush.” I pushed him back down, and with that, he seemed to give up. I can’t say exactly how much longer we sat together—half an hour or half the night—but it seemed more like the latter. Every now and then, the doctor’s head would loll, and he would murmur a name: my sister’s, Bobbie’s, once or twice even mine. For my part, I didn’t say much. I figured anything I did would come out sounding either petty or dumb. Instead, I just sat there and let the stars do all the talking for me until they, too, started to fade, and the red fingers of dawn started crawling across the sky, and I realized that the night really had gone for good and taken Robert Morgan with it.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Two deaths under similar circumstances, and then two funerals in the same town, and yet Priscilla Sparrow had had exactly zero attendees at hers, while the doctor’s was oversubscribed. I can’t explain the dearth of mourners at Priscilla Sparrow’s grave, only perhaps to suggest that habitual bitterness reaps emptiness in this life. Of course, the doctor had his own emotional issues, but he still had plenty of folks flocking around his grave at the end. Somehow, he managed to have it all the way he wanted, exerting influence from the grave. I guess death changes less about a body than you’d imagine.

  One thing it didn’t change was Robert Morgan’s relationship with Bobbie. The whole time the town was muttering its prayers and dabbing its eyes, I was searching and searching for a sign of Bobbie, but in the end, I had to concede that he wasn’t coming.

  “He knows Robert Morgan passed away, doesn’t he?” I asked Amelia.

  She scowled, and I corrected myself. “Of course he knows. Marcus wouldn’t keep something like that from him. Besides”—I jutted my chin toward the grave—“I think it’s pretty obvious.” I fell silent. The air between us had been chilly ever since our falling- out on her last cleaning day, and I shifted, uncomfortable and unsure about how to clear it.

  “The doctor said some mighty odd things the night he died,” I finally mused, at a loss for what else to talk about.

  Next to me, Amelia stiffened and stretched her neck.

  “Something about California,” I continued. “You think he could know anyone in California?” Amelia looked white. I waited to see if she would answer, but she didn’t, so I shook my head. “I didn’t think you would. I guess some things about Robert Morgan will always stay a mystery.”

  I moved up to the gaping hole that contained Robert Morgan, Amelia staying by my side, and we stood silently for a moment, sunk in our own private thoughts. Amelia took a deep breath and almost started to say something, then closed her mouth.

  “Were you going to ask if I’m going to the wake?” I filled in for her. It was as though we were back to our early days together, I thought, where I carried all the conversational burden. “Because the answer is no.” It was going to be at Sal Dunfry’s house—my old childhood home—but the thought of crushing together with the whole town in those familiar rooms was too much. Besides, I had some other, unfinished business to which I wanted to attend. Amelia suddenly grabbed my elbow, however, her words falling out pell-mell, her tongue so thick, I had trouble understanding her.

  “Truly, I’m sorry for what I did. I let years go by when I should have said something.”

  I wrinkled my forehead. “Why, Amelia, whatever are you talking about?”

  Amelia was about to continue, but Vi Vickers’s loud voice interrupted her. “At least we don’t need to worry about her falling in,” Vi was snickering to Sal.

  Sal giggled and rolled her eyes toward me. “She’d get stuck halfway down.”

  Amelia sucked in her gut, and for the first time in her life, she looked prepared to make a mess instead of clean one up. “I wouldn’t talk like that, Vi,” she said loudly and distinctly. “I know some ugly things about you, too.”

  Vi gasped when she heard Amelia speak and then blushed about a hundred different shades of red, but before I could thank Amelia, she disappeared into the trees. Having her stick up for me like that was so against her nature that it melted something in me. I realized how constant Amelia had been in my life, from the first day she’d snatched the doll leg from me in Brenda’s kitchen, to all the times she’d tagged home from school behind Marcus and me, to our coffee-fueled chats in the doctor’s kitchen. I’ll catch her later, I thought. I’ll tell her everything, from what the doctor said would happen to me to what I did for him and Priscilla. We had a whole summer’s worth of talking to do, me and Amelia. First, though, I wanted to pay my respects to Priscilla Sparrow. In the years since her death, I had resisted visiting her grave, figuring what was over was over, but the doctor’s dying had brought Prissy back up in my memory again strong, and I knew that it was time to lay her down to rest in my own mind, along with the doctor.

  Her grave was on the opposite end of the cemetery from Robert Morgan’s, but you had to know where to look. There wasn’t even a headstone—just a painted wooden cross—and I wasn’t sure if that was because stone had cost too much or because she had no one to do those things for her. I plucked a clutch of Queen Anne’s lace—a weedy flower, true, but also prim and mannered as Miss Sparrow had been—and laid it on top of the grass under the cross. I crossed my hands and bowed my head, and then, because I was pretty sure no one else had said it, I started whispering the Lord’s Prayer.

  “It’s a little late for that.” Marcus’s voice floated through the air to me. I opened my eyes.

  “Marcus. You scared me.”

  “Seems your natural reaction to me these days.” He grinned, but his eyes remained sad.

  “That’s not true.” But even as I spoke, I could feel my heart hammering up a ruckus a
gainst my ribs, as if it wanted to be let out into the wide blue world. I put a hand on my chest. “How did Bobbie take the news about his father? I didn’t see him today.”

  “He hasn’t said much the last few days. Just goes to work, or out to meet Salvatore. He helped me dig the grave, though, if you can believe that. Just grabbed an extra shovel, put his neck down, and set to work. You never saw anyone dig so hard.”

  I was silent for a moment, remembering my first weeks in Robert Morgan’s house with Bobbie and how fiercely he’d clung to his mother’s blue dress. “We were never very good with death,” I finally said. “We never talked much about his mother dying. Robert Morgan wouldn’t let us dwell on it.”

  Marcus worked his tongue over his teeth. “Well, now he’s got two dead parents locked up in that head of his. One of these days, something’s got to give.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe he’ll move back to the house now.” My throat tightened with anticipation of how good it would be to have him under the roof again, to hear his footsteps clattering up and down the attic steps.

  Marcus shook his head. “No. I already asked him about that. Says he’s not ready.”

  “Oh.” I tried to keep the disappointment from coating my voice, but Marcus picked up on it.

  “Solitude can be a blessing, Truly. You just haven’t tried it. It might do you some good. It did me good after the war, I can tell you. Just me, and a backpack, and the open road.”

  Not when your body is a ticking time bomb, I thought. Solitude is not good then. I bowed my head. “I guess. Seems like I might be a touch lonely, though.”

  “Well, it’s not like the doctor was great company.”

  “No.”

  Marcus stared down at the dirt heaped in front of us on top of Priscilla Sparrow’s grave. “Now there was a lonely woman. Do you remember how god-awful strict she was back in school?”

  I nodded. “But inside, she wasn’t as bad as you think. Especially later, when she got so sick. Why, when she came to see me last—” I clapped a hand over my mouth, realizing too late what I had just said.

  Marcus narrowed his eyes. “Go on,” he said.

  “I was just going to say that she was tender inside, that’s all,” I stammered, but it was too late. The wheels and dials were turning lickety-split in Marcus’s head. “Truly, what was in your basket that day you and I met in the cemetery? Tell me you weren’t gathering the kinds of plants I think you were.”

  I opened my mouth, prepared to deny everything, but one look at Marcus and I knew that among all the people on earth, I’d never be able to lie to him. “It wasn’t my idea,” I croaked, “it was Priscilla Sparrow’s. I found Tabitha’s shadow book. It turns out it’s really an old quilt that’s been in the family for years. Maybe you noticed it? The one hung in the parlor with all the plants on it?”

  Marcus furrowed his brow. “That thing with all the twisting vines?”

  I nodded. “They were sewn there for a reason.”

  Marcus frowned. “So the legends about Tabby are true, eh?”

  “Maybe. Who knows?”

  Marcus kept his face pointed to the ground. “You gave the drink to the doctor, too, didn’t you?” He squeezed his lips tight.

  Miserable, I nodded. Marcus put his hands flat down at his sides, and in that moment I finally saw that he wasn’t small so much as compact. Like a coil burrowed into itself. For such a slight man, he suddenly looked surprisingly tall. He glanced up, startling me. “Do you know why I became a gardener?” he asked, white around the lips. “Do you even know why I choose to live out here among all these rotten old tombstones?”

  “Well, you get the cottage for free, and—”

  Marcus cut me off. “It has nothing to do with money. Nothing at all.” He stared over the graves. “I know when I came home you thought I was nuts, going on about the catacombs of Paris and their five million bones, but look at all these rows of people here, tucked up beside each other like they’re lying in a giant bed. That’s all the earth really is—a final resting place. But it’s one we need to tend, because one day we’ll be there, too. I learned that all too well in Vietnam. You know, once I had to make the same choice you made for the doctor. I think I did the right thing, but it’s something I never want to do again. I can’t imagine why you would even do it once.”

  I set my jaw. “It’ll have to be live and let live, I guess.”

  Marcus screwed up his mouth. “I don’t think that’s quite the correct terminology for this discussion.”

  I took a step toward him, unwilling to let the subject turn into a swamp between us. “But it’s over now.” I remembered the extra jars I’d stored in the pantry for myself—just in case—but figured I didn’t need to say anything about them. It wasn’t as though I were planning on giving out the potion to anyone besides myself, and it wasn’t doing any harm all bottled up, dusty in the dark. “No one knows,” I said. “No one will ever know.”

  Marcus eased away from me. “You don’t get it, Truly. I’ll always know, and you will, too. There will always be ghosts between us. You’ll see.” Isn’t that part of love, I wanted to ask, carrying someone else’s ghosts for them? But before I could, he wheeled around on his good leg and hobbled across the grass, leaving a ragged, vegetative trail I was sorry I could not follow.

  Much has been documented about the soul’s response to death, but I think the human body’s reaction is just as inscrutable. Is it such an outlandish concept, I wonder, to imagine that the body has its own rituals and protocols for loss and that those rites remain mysterious and distant from what goes on in our minds? And maybe it’s necessary and proper that they should be so, for without that gap, we would probably never let ourselves be transformed. I know I wouldn’t have, but I didn’t get to make that choice—or maybe I should say I didn’t have to make it. Either way, something began happening to me right after the doctor died.

  He’d given me the name of a new doctor in Hansen—a Dr. Redfield. He was a man about the same age as Robert Morgan who’d worked in Albany for years but liked country life better. “I’ve given him copies of all your records,” Robert Morgan assured me a few weeks before he died, “and he knows all about your case. He can provide you with your medication, and oversee your symptoms. He’ll even travel out to the house. Just call him.”

  A few days after the doctor’s funeral, I found the number and began to dial. I still had about a week’s worth of medicine, but I would need to get more, and sometimes it could take a few days. As I was about to push the last button on the phone, however, I caught a glimpse of myself in the foyer’s oval mirror, but where a glimpse was all I could ever catch of myself before, this time I found that the narrow frame was able to hold my entire reflection. I examined the newly bared planes of my cheeks, tilting my face first one way, then the other, then lifting my chin to see how much more neck I had. The fresh summer air licked and tickled my throat, and I shivered. Is this how it is for everyone, I wondered, to be so plain to the world? I remembered when Marcus had comforted me after Miss Sparrow had taken my mother’s mirror. What was it he had said? That reflections were just little particles of light? I liked that idea—that even I consisted of tiny fragments that could be rearranged.

  As if in a trance, I slowly lowered the receiver back into its cradle and dropped the paper with Dr. Redfield’s number. I turned my face from side to side, but every angle confirmed what I suspected. I had shrunk a little. I couldn’t imagine how it was possible, especially since the doctor had told me I would keep increasing in size, but the mirror wasn’t lying. Instead of spreading as wide and thick as the chestnut tree outside of the schoolhouse, here I was with the flesh on me limning the general shape of my bones. I rushed upstairs and dug the farm clothes from my youth out of the back of my closet, and for some inscrutable reason, they fit again, the plaid flannel and soft denim nestling against my skin like old, familiar sheets.

  To celebrate, I gathered up all the balloonlike rayon dresses I’d worn over th
e years, balled them together in the downstairs fireplace, and watched them singe and cinder. It was so satisfying watching them burn that before I half knew it, I’d gathered up a whole other load of junk and set fire to it, too. Recipe cards, the yellowed stacks of magazines from my room, the dried flowers off the parlor mantel—all of them went up in smoke. The next morning, I washed the quilt in lavender soap and hung it in the sun to dry, its wet batting pulling the line low. I took down the curtains to wash them, too, but decided the windows looked better without them, so I rolled them into a ball, shoved them in the fireplace, and ignited them. I added the flattened needlepoint pillows off the sofa—grungy from years of dust—and the doilies off the backs of the chairs and then ran for dear life when the room erupted in a choking cloud of noxious smoke. When I finally got up the courage to reenter the parlor, the fire had gentled down to a glowing heap of ash, and the floorboards in front of the hearth were pitted and scarred from live embers.

  By week’s end, I had burned the oilskin from off the kitchen table, the ancient pack of playing cards August had given me in childhood, and most of the doctor’s clothes. My fires grew too noxious and large for the little hearth in the parlor, so I moved my operation outside and set off my blazes in Marcus’s flower beds, pleased to see them scorch, too. Serves him right, I thought, though for what, I couldn’t really say. Every day, I came up with a different reason.

  Who knows how much more I would have burned if I hadn’t burned myself first? Again, it’s the old lesson of bitterness eliciting like. To anyone else, I would have looked like a larger-than- average woman clearing the detritus of decades out of a house no one had much use for anymore, but if you’d come closer, you might have been disturbed by the way the reflected flames danced and leapt in my eyes. You would have noticed me standing smoke side to the fires when I didn’t have to, just so I could gulp in one more acrid taste of the past before it floated upward without me. With every crackle and snap of heat, I could feel myself getting tighter and smaller, until I felt so immune to the world’s ills that I grew reckless. I fed the fires higher and higher until one afternoon a rogue ember burned a crescent into my palm.