The Little Giant of Aberdeen County Read online

  “We don’t go to the doctor,” Serena Jane told Miss Sparrow, her voice as sweet as a dulcimer, but flat, too, as if the notes hit were just slightly the wrong ones for the music.

  Miss Sparrow shook her head, as if trying to dislodge water from her ears. “Why, what do you mean you don’t go to the doctor? What happens if you get sick?”

  Serena Jane shrugged. “We don’t.”

  “You don’t get sick?”

  Serena Jane shrugged again. “Not real bad.”

  Miss Sparrow smoothed a nonexistent wrinkle out of her lap and took a deep breath. “But surely you must have noticed that something is, ah, not right with your younger sister. Surely your mother must have wanted to know what was wrong with her.” Miss Sparrow’s eyes flitted from the fairy child to the ugly duckling. I shuffled my feet and bowed my head farther.

  “Our mother’s dead.” This time, Serena Jane’s eyes went flat to match her voice.

  “Oh, I see.” Miss Sparrow squinted at me, as if by reducing the size of her gaze, she could also shrink me. I could tell she still found it hard to believe that Serena Jane was related to me. She reached into her desk for a piece of paper and her enamel fountain pen, which showed to very best advantage her prize-winning penmanship. She looped her hand across the page, making elaborate dips and swirls, then blew on the ink to dry it and folded the note into an envelope.

  “Here,” she said, giving it to Serena Jane. “Take this home to your father tonight. It says that you have to see the doctor if you want to come to school this year. You need your shots, and a hearing test, and a checkup. The board of education has its rules, and we can’t just ignore things like that, can we?” She eyeballed my fantastic bulk again. Clearly, I was out of the bounds of normality. Why, I was an absolute giant, and although Miss Sparrow was more than expert at cutting people down to size, she was also certain that anything of my magnitude just wasn’t in her job description.

  What’s this?” my father asked when Serena Jane handed him the note over supper that night. He unfolded the paper slowly, as if unwrapping an ancient map, and squinted to decipher Miss Sparrow’s florid script.

  In the years since my mother’s death, my father had melted and spread around his edges like an ice-cream cone halfway through consumption. Everything about him seemed to be dripping, heading straight back to the ground—an impression only reinforced by his lamentable personal hygiene. His wrinkled trousers sagged over his backside and dipped beneath his buttery belly. His shirttails hung defeated. The cracked tongues of his shoes lolled. Even his shoelaces straggled on the ground in perpetual surrender. Customers in the barbershop were reluctant to let him near their hair, choosing instead one of the more youthful employees who had found their way into the shop. My father didn’t mind. He had grown weary of pompadours, and ducktails, and handlebar mustaches. He was like a baker who never ate sweets, or a goldsmith who wore only silver. He spent most of the day hunched in the corner of the shop, reading the papers and checking the racing reports. He’d made a small bundle betting against August Dyerson’s woeful horses, but he never told anyone his secret. He simply took the money home and shoved it in a shoebox under his bed.

  He placed Miss Sparrow’s note on the table in front of him, where the corner came to rest in an ignoble drop of tomato sauce. Most nights, I made the dinner and ate it alone. I just opened whatever jars I found in the cupboards and poured the contents onto plates. Then I sat at the table by myself, sucking olives off my fingertips or swirling a pinkie around the rim of a tapioca pudding can, while my father lolled on the busted sofa across the room. On the nights he did come to the table, it always left me feeling a little uneasy, as if I were faced with a volatile, uninvited guest. He burped once, lightly, and leaned over closer to Serena Jane.

  “Did you tell this teacher we don’t see the doctor?” he asked, blinking at her in the room’s squalid light, as if she were an angel descended in the wrong location—an assessment of herself that Serena Jane seemed to share. She nodded.

  “And did you tell her why?” he persisted.

  “I told her Mama was dead.”

  Small reserves of spittle gathered in the corners of my father’s mouth. Two of his teeth were broken. The rest were as yellow as old socks. “Did you tell her it’s because the doctor stood by while your mama was dying and didn’t do a damn thing to help her?” He smoothed his fingers over the surface of the teacher’s letter. Watching him, I had the urge to cover his hand with mine, trapping his battered knuckles in the cage of my palm and holding them tight until they smoothed again into the reasonable knobs I remembered. My father pounded his fist on the table.

  “We don’t need no witch doctor. We’ve been just fine without him.” His gaze ricocheted back and forth between the miracle of physical arrangement that was Serena Jane and the mystery that was me.

  “Not a lick of your mother in you,” he said, then chuckled. “More like three licks. No wonder Lily died pushing you out. Hell, you’d block a barn door.” He doubled over, coughing, then remained that way, his beer can balanced on his knee, halfway between upright and spilling over. I had an urge to kick it and watch the liquid go flying. After one of my father’s harangues, I always felt like one of our sour-smelling, holey dishrags thrown in the corner of the sink. I thought about the X-ray glasses advertised on the back of the cereal box we’d bought last week. Right then, I wished my father could have put them on. Then maybe he would have seen that I was more like my mother than it appeared. Instead, he burped and wiped his lips with the back of his hand.

  “Just fine,” he repeated into the empty air, ignoring the tiny razor teeth that were nibbling at my soul and quietly eliminating it, making me small in spite of my heft. Making me less than half the girl I wanted to be.

  Dr. Robert Morgan’s office smelled of rubbing alcohol, and peppermint, and dispenser soap. It was the way I imagined the tops of mountains would smell—rarefied, antiseptic, frosted. Everything in the office was cold. The stainless-steel sink, where chilly beads of water clustered and shook like frightened fairies. The linoleum floor, which numbed my feet through my socks. The row of callipered instruments lined up on a metal tray according to shape and size. Even the leather examining table was cold. I shifted my weight on it, and the paper underneath my buttocks and thighs crinkled. I tried to pull my thin cotton gown together around my midsection, but the fabric resisted, gaping open like a laughing mouth all the way down the back of me. Embarrassed, I put my hands in my lap and waited. Across the room, the door flew open.

  Above the thick black rims of his glasses, Dr. Robert Morgan had the complicated eyebrows of a fairy-tale huntsman. I stared at his eyes—watery, bloodshot around their edges, but gentle—and decided I didn’t mind. That man in the stories was always kind. He saved Snow White from the evil Queen. He rescued Red Riding Hood from the moist jaws of the Wolf. If a huntsman brandished his ax, I knew, you should stay still and let him do his work. Dr. Morgan lifted the hinged metal cover of his clipboard and peered at the papers underneath it, as if peeking at a script to remind himself how to start a conversation. He paced over to the little counter and balanced the clipboard on its edge. I waited to see if it would fall, but it didn’t.

  “Hello, Truly.” He stretched one of his long-fingered hands in my general direction. “We haven’t met in a very long time. Since you were born, in fact. You’ve grown up quite a lot since then.”

  I ducked my head. “Mrs. Pickerton says I’m growing too much. She said I’m even too big to wear the devil’s britches. She makes my school clothes.” I could feel my cheeks flush scarlet, which made them mottle and blotch. When Serena Jane blushed, it just made her more beautiful.

  Dr. Morgan wiggled his stethoscope into his ears and lifted the disk. “Mrs. Pickerton is an old nanny goat,” he said, and pressed the circle to my chest. He listened as I took careful breaths, but after a few minutes, his smile turned into a slight frown. He moved the disk of the stethoscope down a few inches. “Interest
ing,” he said, snapping the earpieces back down around his collarbone. “I’d like to weigh you.” He led me over to the upright scale in the corner and showed me how the metal balance slid back and forth on its incremental metal bar, smallest to biggest. I pinched my gown together behind me and stepped on the scale. The balance stopped halfway.

  “Very good,” Dr. Morgan said again, scribbling something on the clipboard. “Just stay there, please. I’m going to measure you.” He slid another steel bar along a vertical ruler until it rested flat against my head. “Uh-huh,” he said, squinting and scribbling. “Interesting,” he repeated. I liked the way he said it, chopping up the syllables—in-te-rest-ing—so that I felt like a puzzle he was slotting together in his mind.

  I was used to plenty of people staring at me, but no one had ever paid such deliberate attention to me before. My father saw me only through the haze of his evening beers. Serena Jane mostly ignored me. Brenda Dyerson, busy with a hundred things in her falling-down house, kept me pinned firmly in her peripheral vision, along with Amelia, who was always so close to me that we could touch hands without blinking but who never said a word, just smiled from time to time, offering me her broken toys when she was done playing with them. And while it was true that Mrs. Pickerton focused on certain bits of me with the ferocity of an enraged wolverine, they only ever seemed to be the bad bits. Until then, no one had ever bothered to scrutinize the whole mass of me, connecting neckbone to backbone, shinbone to anklebone, in an entire picture. I felt as if I were a rare and beautiful insect being inspected through a magnifying glass. Maybe, I thought, Dr. Morgan will give me a name for what makes me different. Maybe if he could classify me, I would know what to make of myself and know what to say when people gawped at me as if I were the prize exhibit in the county fair. My heart beat a little faster with anticipation.

  I climbed back on the table and let Dr. Morgan whack me in the knees and elbows with a small, rubber tomahawk, as if we were playing Indian chief—a game the taciturn Amelia and I sometimes played in the woods at the Dyerson farm. Amelia was always the princess, subdued and in mortal peril, and I was the Indian brave—barreling through shrubbery and trees, arriving in a huff of wobbling arms and legs. The husk of Amelia was so light, I could carry her with one arm, and I greatly enjoyed this. It made me feel competent and gave me the illusion of capability. Don’t worry, I’d pant, dragging Amelia toward the barn, I’ll keep the both of us safe forever and ever. Amelia would close her eyes and giggle, but when I looked at her face, she always still managed to look worried, as if all her life experience as a Dyerson had taught her better than to hope for even an ounce of salvation.

  Dr. Robert Morgan wound a tape measure around my forehead, my chest, and my thighs. More numbers flew from his pencil into the clipboard. He shone a penlight and watched my pupils contract and expand—twin universes being born and dying right in the center of me. He peered into my nostrils and ears. He thumped, and prodded, and poked. He had me cover one eye and read nonsense letters off a chart. When I switched hands, the letters scattered and wheeled like magpies in a field.

  “Do you ever feel dizzy or faint?” Dr. Morgan ran his thumbs down the sides of my neck. I shook my head. “Short of breath? Tired? Extremely thirsty?” I shook my head again. No, no, and no, although it wasn’t true. My heart did sometimes heave and thump in my chest as if it had a mind of its own, but I didn’t know how to explain that to the doctor. Also, I wanted him to write that everything was fine with me for Miss Sparrow. A wild animal heart and regular dizzy spells weren’t going to get me the correct diagnosis.

  Dr. Morgan slammed down the cover of the clipboard. “Okay, Truly.” He patted my knee and gazed at me over the black rims of his glasses. “We’re all done here.” They were scientist’s spectacles —square and thick and utterly reasonable. If I put them on, I wondered, would I see everything in angles and perfect straight lines? Would the world fall in order? Dr. Morgan handed me my limp pile of clothes. “You can get dressed. I’ll just wait outside, and then I want to talk to your father.”

  I took my clothes. They were my weekend boy clothes: dungarees, a plaid shirt, wool hunting socks. They hung in my hand like a shed skin. I looked up at Dr. Morgan and took a deep breath. “Am I a giant?”

  Dr. Morgan turned back to me, his hand on the doorknob. “A giant? Why, wherever did you hear that?”

  “Miss Sparrow. She said there must be something wrong with me. She said I’m too big to believe.”

  Dr. Morgan crossed back over to me. He took off his glasses and wiped them carefully, swirling the corner of his white coat around and around each pane of glass, clearing it, making it shine. “Is that why she sent you here?” he finally asked. My bottom lip quivered. I nodded. Dr. Morgan patted my shoulder with the absentminded rhythm of a mother soothing a child.

  “You shouldn’t listen to people like Miss Sparrow, or Mrs. Pickerton, either. They don’t have medical degrees. They have no idea what they’re saying.” He tipped my chin up and wiped my tears away with the pad of his thumb. His fingers were surprisingly warm. “Have you ever heard of the pituitary gland?” I shook my head. He moved his fingers to the base of my skull and tapped, marking the spot as if he were going on a treasure hunt.

  “It’s like a little clock in your brain. It sends out messages to your body about when to grow and how fast. Some people have a slow clock, so they don’t grow very much. Those are the little people in the world. And some people, like you, are in a hurry to get as big as you can as fast as you can. It’s like your body is in a race against everyone else’s, and it’s determined to win. The regular people in the world, all the ones in the middle who aren’t special in any way, well, some of them don’t like it, that’s all. They’re jealous, Truly. They don’t know what to make of you.”

  I blinked at him. “Are you a witch doctor?”

  He threw back his head and laughed, the rough sounds rolling out of him like bark off a log. “Who told you that?”

  “My daddy. He said we don’t need no witch doctor. But you don’t look like a witch to me. Besides, I thought witches were girls.”

  Dr. Morgan smiled. “So they are, Truly. So they are. And one day, you, too, might grow up to be enchanting. You and that pretty sister of yours. Now get dressed and I’ll take you home.” He crossed the room and closed the door behind him, taking his clipboard and pencil away, along with whatever kind of conclusion he’d drawn about me.

  Chapter Five

  From the outside, our house looked almost like the other homes on Maple Street. It had a shallow front porch with a swing on it, a white picket fence, and lace curtains in all the windows. Daisies sprouted by the bottom stoop. In the winter, the stocky chimney belched puffs of smoke. But our house also had some features the other homes didn’t have. Weeds grew in the mouth of the porch’s loose drainpipe. Paint flakes riddled the clapboards. The mailbox teetered on its support like the head of an unruly drunk. The mailman had taken to leaving the few pieces of our correspondence tucked under the edge of the door, where Dad would find them and kick them into the corner of the front hall until the pile grew big enough for him to do something about. Waiting for my father to answer the doorbell, Dr. Morgan peered down between his black wingtips and noticed two envelopes wedged in between them. Behind the door, there was a crashing sound, then footsteps padded closer, and my father appeared, blinking in the afternoon light. In front of him, he saw me standing on the porch holding the hand of Dr. Robert Morgan IV.

  “Get in the house,” he barked. “Brenda Dyerson called over to the barbershop. She’s been wondering where you are.”

  It was Saturday, the busiest day for my father at the barbershop. Serena Jane was at the Pickertons’. I was supposed to have waited for August to pick me up at my house that morning and take me to the farm, but I’d struck out for Dr. Morgan’s instead, clutching Miss Sparrow’s note, which babbled about giants, and medical records, and vaccinations, albeit in very beautiful script. I gave a quick squee
ze to the reassuring hand of Dr. Robert Morgan and scampered upstairs to the room I shared with my sister. Downstairs, I could hear footsteps shuffling—the clumsy, halfhearted ones of my father mixed together with the precise sounds of Dr. Morgan’s wingtips. His feet sounded the way a father’s feet were supposed to, I thought. Solid, decisive. The kind of footsteps I wanted to hear climbing the stairs to tuck me into bed at night, instead of my father’s stumbling ones.

  I sat on my bed, elbows planted on knees, and faced the mirror that was glued to the back of the door. Already, I almost filled the whole narrow span of it, edge to edge, my body lumpier than any monster I could imagine. I tilted my head in the mirror, grimacing, then put my hand to the back of my skull, to the place where Dr. Morgan had told me there was a little clock. I moved my fingers around but didn’t feel anything, then listened, holding my breath, but didn’t hear ticking. I arched my neck and spread my arms, copying one of Serena Jane’s ballerina poses, but I didn’t transform into a swan princess the way Serena Jane did. I just stayed myself—goggle-eyed, pucker-lipped, chin upon chin upon chin. I returned my arms to my sides and slumped back on the bed. I wasn’t a dancing bird-girl. Apparently, I wasn’t anything as exotic as a giant, but neither was I ordinary-sized. I sighed and fished in my pocket for Miss Sparrow’s note— tattered and sweat-stained now, but still lovely for all that.

  I scooted off the edge of the bed and tottered to the room’s single desk, the drawers of which I’d filled with crayons, and pens, and paper, the surface of which Serena Jane had cluttered with hair ribbons, lip glosses, magazines, and a jar of cold cream. I cleared a small space in the detritus and smoothed Miss Sparrow’s note as best I could, then I took a blank sheet of paper from one of the drawers and uncapped a green felt-tip pen. After laying the blank sheet of paper over the top of Miss Sparrow’s writing, I began to trace the whirlwind of her lettering, letting my wrist relax in order to better copy the eddies and flourishes of her words. I finished the first row of the note, then sat back and admired my handiwork. Not bad. I hunched over and set back to work again, determined to master the linear vocabulary of elegance, determined to make one thing about me as beautiful as possible.