The Little Giant Of Aberdeen County Part 24

"That's not true." But even as I spoke, I could feel my heart hammering up a ruckus against 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 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 final y said. "We never talked much about his mother dying. Robert Morgan wouldn't let us dwel on it."

Marcus worked his tongue over his teeth.

"Wel , 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'l move back to the house now." My throat tightened with antic.i.p.ation 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 tel 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."

"Wel , it's not like the doctor was great company."

"No."

Marcus stared down at the dirt heaped in front of us on top of Priscil a Sparrow's grave. "Now there was a lonely woman. Do you remember how G.o.d-awful strict she was back in school?"

I nodded. "But inside, she wasn't as bad as you think. Especial y 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 al ," 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? Tel 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 al the people on earth, I'd never be able to lie to him. "It wasn't my idea," I croaked, "it was Priscil a Sparrow's. I found Tabitha's shadow book.

It turns out it's real y an old quilt that's been in the family for years. Maybe you noticed it? The one hung in the parlor with al the plants on it?"

Marcus furrowed his brow. "That thing with al 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 final y saw that he wasn't smal so much as compact.

Like a coil burrowed into itself. For such a slight man, he suddenly looked surprisingly tal . 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 al these rotten old tombstones?"

"Wel , you get the cottage for free, and-"

Marcus cut me off. "It has nothing to do with money. Nothing at al ." 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 mil ion bones, but look at al these rows of people here, tucked up beside each other like they're lying in a giant bed. That's al the earth real y is-a final resting place. But it's one we need to tend, because one day we'l be there, too. I learned that al too wel 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 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'l 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, unwil ing 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 al bottled up, dusty in the dark. "No one knows," I said. "No one wil ever know."

Marcus eased away from me. "You don't get it, Truly. I'll always know, and you wil , too. There wil always be ghosts between us. You'l 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 gra.s.s, leaving a ragged, vegetative trail I was sorry I could not fol ow.

Much has been doc.u.mented 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 al your records," Robert Morgan a.s.sured me a few weeks before he died, "and he knows al about your case. He can provide you with your medication, and oversee your symptoms. He'l even travel out to the house. Just cal him."

A few days after the doctor's funeral, I found the number and began to dial. I stil 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 b.u.t.ton on the phone, however, I caught a glimpse of myself in the foyer's oval mirror, but where a glimpse was al 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.

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, especial y 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 al the bal oonlike rayon dresses I'd worn over the years, bal ed 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 yel owed stacks of magazines from my room, the dried flowers off the parlor mantel-al 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 pul ing the line low. I took down the curtains to wash them, too, but decided the windows looked better without them, so I rol ed them into a bal , shoved them in the fireplace, and ignited them. I added the flattened needlepoint pil ows 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 final y 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 real y 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 smal er, until I felt so immune to the world's il s that I grew reckless. I fed the fires higher and higher until one afternoon a rogue ember burned a crescent into my palm.

Hissing with pain, I went to the dispensary, to see if the doctor had any old cream or balm. Away from the fire, my cheeks cooled and tingled, even though the air was moist. The center of my hand throbbed and beat-a rhythm my temples picked up and began to copy. With my good hand, I groped along the top of the doorjamb for the hidden key, then shoved open the screen door and unlocked the doctor's office. It was the one place I had avoided since his death, and even though it had been only about a week, the air inside was as thick and stale as old rubber. I groped my way to the light switch and flicked it on.

I opened the door to the medicine cabinet and found a sample tube of antibiotic cream and a rol of gauze. Winding the white fabric around my hand, I continued to inspect the room. The doctor and Amelia had pretty wel cleaned it out at the beginning of his il ness. His desk was bare of his usual files and folders, and he'd either destroyed al his old patient records or sent them on to the clinic in Hansen. I idly pul ed open one of the metal drawers and was surprised to see a few files remaining. One of them was Priscil a Sparrow's, and one of them was mine.

Mine was so thick that I had trouble holding the whole thing in one hand. I flipped it open and right away saw a decade's worth of blood test results, measurements, and other numbers. I scanned through this information quickly, not daring to let myself put an actual number to my weight and to let myself put an actual number to my weight and height after al these years. I stil didn't want to know.

The back of the folder held his notes, and I read these more thoroughly. Subject recalcitrant, one sentence read. Refuses to follow dietary advice. I turned the page. Subject's bone structure more in keeping with a male's. Subject shows increased musculature. Subject's heart shows evidence of gross enlargement. Prognosis poor. I sighed and shoved the papers back into the folder, then set the folder on top of the filing cabinet. The doctor's history of me was like a faulty, oversized shadow. One more thing to be burned.

On the wal above the doctor's desk, his books stil held al their old posts on the shelf.

Anatomy texts, drug indexes-there were enough words, I thought, to write the human body into existence ten times over, a hundred different ways. I ran my fingers down the spines of the books then back again. Each time, my fingers kept hooking on the last book in the row. It was slightly out of kilter with the other volumes, as if someone had recently taken it off the shelf. I peered at it more closely.

Someone had taken it down. I scowled. Who could it have been? The doctor? But he hadn't left his bed before his death. Bobbie had keys to the house, but as far as I knew, he hadn't been back. That left only Amelia. But she hadn't been in the doctor's office since he'd died, I didn't think, and it would have been total y unlike her to move only one item in a room and then not clean it up properly.

Curious, I fanned the pages open in my hand. Pen-and-ink drawings-precise and delicate as spiderwebs-wavered, depicting al the mysteries of the body. The beefy heart. Cl.u.s.ters of cauliflower buds on the lungs. Blood vessels that narrowed into fronds of capil aries, looking more like ferns than part of the flesh. But then something stuck in between the pages caught my eye. A smal bit of paper-the corner of an envelope. I plucked it out and held it up, and then gasped. It was a return address, and the name I was reading, in very familiar handwriting, was my sister's.

What was a letter from my sister doing in Robert Morgan's bookcase, I wondered, and when would she have had the occasion to send him a letter? As far as I could remember, they'd never been apart after their marriage until she'd left him. I took down the next book and flipped through it, but there was nothing-just pages of ink. I did the same with al the other books, until the desk behind me was ful , but there was no other sign of any correspondence from my sister. Bewildered, I stared down at the sc.r.a.p of paper again and saw what I hadn't before. The envelope had been torn so that half the address was missing, but there was enough left for me to make out some of the words- 11 Palm something-and the state that the letter had been sent from. California.

Al the air left my body, and I slumped against the desk. I remembered what the doctor had said the night he died. Had he real y been talking about Serena Jane? It didn't make any sense, though. My sister lay in the Aberdeen cemetery, boxed, buried, and weighted down right next to al the other Morgans. I could go there anytime I wanted and touch the heavy block of stone with her name on it. But the grieving mind is an irrational thing. It tricks us, overlooks details, stops paying attention halfway through the story, and thus ignores al other potential endings.

Seized with curiosity, I yanked open the center drawer of the doctor's desk and dug around.

Except for a few yel owed receipts, it was empty.

Same with al the other drawers, except the last one.

There, underneath a copy of his wil , which I'd already gone over, was something I never even knew existed-the deed to the Dyerson farm. I pul ed it out and examined it. What I was holding was a copy, I surmised, and it had been amended several times.

At one point, the doctor had possessed the farm, I saw with surprise, but now, under Owner, there was a new name, one I never real y expected to see scrawled on a Morgan doc.u.ment. Amelia Ann Dyerson.

Like a frame stil ed from a moving picture, an image of Amelia frozen halfway up the stepladder in the doctor's office with a bundle of papers in her hand suddenly stuck in the reel of my mind. I remembered al her recent stop-and-start, partial confessions, her paleness when I'd brought up the topic of California at the doctor's graveside, and instead of the anger I expected, I felt the blood run as cool and calculating through my veins as Robert Morgan's had done in his life. Amelia had had something to do with the disappearance of my had something to do with the disappearance of my sister's letters and the secret of her existence-the only thing I didn't know was why, and I wasn't sure I cared to, either. Some betrayals are so huge, nothing can ever whittle them down.

Locking up the doctor's office and sliding the key back into its hiding place, the mysterious sc.r.a.p of paper tucked safely in my pocket, I began racing through a mental slew of wild possibilities.

What if my sister was stil alive? What if I could find her again? What if Bobbie could have his mother back? Was there such a thing as redemption?

Outside, evening had begun to come on.

The first bats were tickling the pale sky, and the fireflies were getting ready to light themselves up and dance. It was stil hot, though. Across the yard, my fire had mel owed but gave out an occasional crackle, like something alive. The burn on my palm throbbed, keeping time with the blood pounding in my temples, my ears, and I knew for certainty that my heart was shrinking and that I would take Amelia down with it.

Chapter Twenty-nine.

Some people, when confronted with a mystery, wil go forth immediately and scour the earth for answers, overturning furniture, comparing the angles of doors and windows, checking under flower pots, certain they're on the right path. Maybe they're impatient, or maybe they've read too many detective stories. They've gotten so accustomed to getting the solution that they think it's their natural-born right. It never occurs to them there might not be one-not a good one, at least. Not one that makes any sense.

Me, I've never been a big reader. I figure that if a secret has an answer, it'l out on its own if it's meant to, and if it doesn't, then maybe providence has a better reason for keeping it hidden than you think.

But some mysteries are too big for one person to hold on to for long, and some are too tantalizing to let lie fal ow, and those are the worst kind of al , for they end up being the real heartbreakers. They are the ones where once you know the story, you wish you didn't.

I didn't go chasing after the truth right I didn't go chasing after the truth right away-it was like the burn on my hand. Too recent, too raw, stil oozing and sore. It needed time to set and heal before I went digging in the coals again. I needed to grow a second skin. To compensate, to keep my mind tethered to the present, I continued my efforts of cleaning out the doctor's house. I ventured into the attic and dug through al the boxes and trunks, setting aside any treasures I thought might be valuable. I polished the banister and the mahogany dining table and chairs. I even got out a toolbox and tightened up the washers on al the sinks.

The burned spot on my palm gradual y turned into a congealed, red lump of a scar, but it itched like the d.i.c.kens. Nothing I put on it-the doctor's cream, petroleum jel y-helped. So one afternoon, I threw whatever calming herbs I could think of-chamomile, mint, comfrey-into a pot and brewed out the oils, catching them with one of the doctor's gla.s.s beakers. Then I mixed al of that into some softened beeswax, and spread it on my hand.

Immediately, my skin settled down and felt cool and regular, and in a week, the scar was beginning to fade. I'd promised myself that I was done with the quilt, but this wasn't technical y going back on my word, I figured. I had made up this mixture on my own. Stil , it was close enough to Tabby's cures for me to fold up the quilt and put it away in the back of the linen closet. You've been enough trouble, I said to it. History's done with you now.

Who knows if I would have left it there, but Vi Vickers dropped by with a case of hives the next day, wanting to see if the doctor had anything left over in his office she could use. "Please," she howled, her eyelids crusted and swol en. "I can't drive al the way out to Hansen like this, and Art's out golfing for the afternoon. Besides, it's Sunday.

Everything's closed."

She was right. She did look awful. So what I did next, I did without thinking-grabbed the tin of balm I'd made and held it out like an offering.

"Here-" I pried off the lid. "Try this. Maybe it wil work." Vi smeared some on her cheeks and tried to give back the container, but I shook my head. "Keep it." I closed the door, smiling, understanding that where I had hidden the quilt didn't real y matter because it was already mapped in my mind. It was up to me, I realized, to decide how I would navigate it. History didn't just happen. It was made.

The next day, I decided that if I was final y going to bring everything on the quilt out into the light, I was going to do it whole hog, in front of G.o.d, the town, and everyone. I went upstairs to fetch Tabby's handiwork out of the closet. It could use some more sunlight, I decided-an entire day hung on the line.

As I stepped out onto the porch, I found a potted geranium propped on the boards with a note attached: Thanks for the balm, Truly. It also cures circles under the eyes! Love, Vi. I smiled and nudged the container with my foot, happy to see something growing after al the weeks I'd just spent staring at ash.

Vi must have a big mouth, because word got around, and soon I had people dropping in for al manner of minor aches and pains, asking if I could do something about indigestion or if I knew any way to get rid of three-week cough. "I'm not a doctor," I protested. "I real y don't even know the first thing about this stuff."

"I know," Sal insisted, seeking to cure a patch of eczema on the back of her hand, "but you worked wonders on everyone else. Couldn't you just give it a try?"

I studied the quilt and made up another balm-the same as Vi's but with more comfrey- and dropped it off at her house, which was real y my old house. "Why don't you come in?" she asked, swinging the front door open wide to reveal glossy floorboards and the rich smel of something with cinnamon in it baking. I peeked around her and saw gingham-checked chairs in the living room and a porcelain umbrel a stand next to a chest of drawers. I remembered the dingy wal paper we'd had when I lived there with my father and the way a week's worth of letters used to cover the floor, and I shook my head. Time had gone by, it was true, just not nearly enough.

"Maybe another day." I waved. "I have to go."

"Wel , thanks again," Sal cal ed after me.

"And you look good, Truly. Are you losing weight?"

"Nah." I grinned. "You're just getting used to me big."

Sal shrugged and closed her door. But I went home and looked in the mirror again, not daring to believe what I saw. I hadn't had any medication for to believe what I saw. I hadn't had any medication for days, but I could tel I hadn't grown. I certainly wasn't any tal er, and my hands hadn't become the size of basebal mitts. In fact, I was cinching my belt one hole tighter and then one more, and none of my b.u.t.tons ever busted open anymore.

That was al guesswork, though. To definitively test my ma.s.s, I knew there was only one way. I would have to step on the scale in the doctor's office, and so I did, moving the bar for myself for the first time ever, astonished when the weights didn't slide al the way to the end. I peeked at the number, then compared it with the ones I remembered from the doctor's chart and found a smal difference. Don't get me wrong. I was stil the same old me, but what the doctor had predicted-my bones getting so big that I'd just sink my way into the earth-not only wasn't happening, it was al going the other way.

How would Robert Morgan have explained what was happening to me? I wondered. He no doubt would have had some fancy medical theory for my shrinking, but as far as I was concerned, the lightening of my body came as much from being free of him as anything else. At last, with no one measuring me or sizing me up, I was final y free to be whatever size I wanted.

During this time, I saw Amelia. Of course I did. In a town the size of Aberdeen, people are as like to stick in your craw as not, even when you don't want them there. Even Marcus couldn't keep from running into me from time to time, though when he did he would just tip his hat and move to the other side of the street. I accepted his coolness, understanding the reason for it, but with Amelia I was more calculating, drawing her in closer and closer while I considered how and when I would confront her.

She began visiting me more and more regularly, amused by al the concoctions I was making and impressed by the gifts folks left on the back porch. Baskets of peaches. A loaf of fresh bread. A hand-knit scarf with a note that said it would match my eyes. In the house, jewel-colored bottles of tinctures lined the windowsil s, and the air continual y smel ed like wet gra.s.s and peppermint.

She seemed amazed by the quilt. Now that my secret was out, I always had it on display.

She paused in her dusting now to regard Tabby's handiwork, draped over the back of a kitchen chair, then she drifted into the pantry and began tipping bottles up to the light. I glanced over to see what she was holding. "That's for headache."

Her fingers roamed to another bottle.

"I'm not sure yet about that tonic. Maybe for sore muscles."

She reached up to the top shelf and hefted one of the emerald jars of Tabby's potion in her hand. The liquid was dusty now, dul ed down but no less potent for al that.

"Put that one back," I snapped. "It's for no one." It was like the sc.r.a.p of letter that I'd put in my bedside drawer upstairs, I thought. It was merely a relic, a fragment of something I didn't want to think about. Amelia looked hurt but set the jar back in its place. Good, I thought. Now we both have our secrets.

"Did you hear about Bobbie?" I final y asked, keeping my voice matter-of-fact. "He got asked, keeping my voice matter-of-fact. "He got some write-up in the local paper about his cooking.

Apparently, he's got a real gift."

Amelia's eyes swel ed with pride, and she nodded.