The Little Giant of Aberdeen County
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2009 by Tiffany Baker
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Grand Central Publishing
Hachette Book Group
237 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10017
Visit our Web site at
www.HachetteBrookGroup.com
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First eBook Edition: January 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-54334-7
Contents
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Epilogue
For Edward
Thank you first and foremost to Dan Lazar, my champion agent at Writers House, who always believed in this novel. And then to my sterling editor, Caryn Karmatz Rudy at Grand Central Publishing, for making my vision come true. Words aren’t enough.
Thanks to everyone in the Drever clan, especially Jan, Papo, and Lala for taking the pictures and amusing the kiddies. Thanks to my own tribe: Ned, Willow, Raine, and Auden. You all are the reason for everything.
And a special remembrance for some souls who have traveled on ahead: Joe, Tommy, Mimi, Wyby, and Wendy. Peace.
T
he day I laid Robert Morgan to rest was remarkable for two reasons. First, even though it was August, the sky overhead was as rough and cold as a January lake; and second, it was the day I started to shrink.
I remember standing by the open grave, the muddy earth clotted like wet dung, waiting for Robert Morgan’s body to be lowered into the hole. The other, scattered mourners had begun to take chill and leave, but I wasn’t cold. There were layers and layers of me folded together like an accordion. So many that I would be warm in a blizzard. I could stand naked at the North Pole and be just fine.
I watched the coffin drop slowly into the ground, the supporting velvet ropes sliding under its belly like devious snakes. Before his death, the doctor had chosen a mahogany casket trimmed with brass and lined with a somber maroon satin. He brought a picture of it home to show me, and I examined it with suspicion. It looked phony somehow, like something you would find at Disneyland or a waxworks museum. All of it was too perfect. Now, however, as it settled with a lonely thump at what seemed like the bottom of the world, I saw that it would rot as soon as anything else down there, brass scrolls or no. I pictured Robert Morgan laid out in the elaborate box, his hair slicked down over his scalp like an otter’s, his spindly fingers gnarled together in a knot over his heart, awaiting judgment.
I had chosen the doctor’s favorite black suit for his burial, had brushed the cloth carefully before delivering it to the undertaker’s with a striped tie curled in one of the pockets, socks and underwear stuffed in another. I didn’t know why a dead man needed underpants, but there you had it. If Robert Morgan had been giving the directives, he would have insisted on aftershave, a belt, and cuff links, but since he wasn’t calling the shots anymore, I left these items home. Now that the doctor was shut up in his box and I would never see him again, I wondered what the undertaker had done to close the cuffs on his shirt. Did he keep a spare pair for such an occasion? Had he used wire or thread? The plastic twist ties from a garbage bag?
I threw a fistful of earth onto the coffin and held my breath for the accompanying thud. I thought of all the patients Robert Morgan had buried and wondered if any of them were down there, waiting to meet him. If so, were they a polite ensemble with decorously folded hands or a nasty throng, eager to anoint him with the press of rotten flesh? I thought of all the other Dr. Robert Morgans scattered around the cemetery—four of them in total—and imagined one subsuming the other like those cannibalistic Russian nesting dolls, the parts of them mixed together into a Frankenstein monster of local history.
I shifted my bulk, kicking more dirt and pebbles down on the casket. Along the sides of the grave, the exposed roots of weeds and trees dangled their anemic arms, as if pleading for clemency. I was reminded of Robert Morgan’s dying patients who would come to the house and beg the doctor to do something—anything—to end their pain. They used metaphors of burning, of hot steel, or of blades carving a mysterious alphabet into their bones, rewriting the familiar language of the senses until they were desperate and confused. That’s how Dr. Morgan saw them, at least. “Pay them no mind, Truly,” he’d say, shaking his head as a son would lead a mother down the sagging porch steps or a hunched woman would teeter down them on her last strength, her fiery hands wrung in despair. “They are no longer themselves.”
But I thought differently. Robert Morgan might have rolled the naked flesh of his patients under his palms, probed their organs with his skeleton fingers, but he never paid a whit of attention to their souls. If one ever did emerge, slit free of the body by an incandescent blade of pain, Robert Morgan simply would have had no reference point for it. He prescribed morphine, suggested supplements, provided balms and creams, but he had no answer for the naked yearning to get it all over and done with. In his mind, the body was a self-regulating clock. It would wind down on its own volition and in its own time, and the soul would just have to accept it.
Of course, toward the end of his own life, the doctor had really not been himself at all. Swaddled in the famous Morgan family quilt in his bedroom, he’d howled, and thrashed, and finally just whimpered, his whole body coated in a fine sheen of sweat that lent him a radiance I didn’t think he deserved. I brought him chicken broth on a tray and ice cubes to suck, cold compresses for his head. And when Robert Morgan grew delirious, crying out for his estranged wife and the son who’d left him, I took the doctor’s own advice to heart and paid him no mind. “Robert Morgan, you’re not yourself,” I’d say, gently dabbing the new crevasses in his lips with petroleum jelly.
Now all that was over, shut up forever in Robert Morgan’s brass-studded box. For the first time in a hundred and fifty years, Aberdeen was left with neither a Robert Morgan in it nor a doctor, but rather than feeling as raw as the open grave in front of me, I was surprised to find myself completely numb. I thought about returning to the house I’d lived in with Robert Morgan for the past decade, a dinner of roast beef and green beans covered and waiting for me on the stove, a table setting for one laid out in the kitchen, television later. But for the first time in my life, I wasn’t hungry.
I didn’t normally leave the doctor’s white-gabled house unless I could help it. My childhood companion, Amelia Dyerson, came to clean the doctor’s premises once a week, bringing groceries, and in the spring, summer, and early fall, Marcus Thompson, another childhood friend, clipped the garden to kingdom come. These visits—Marcus slurping lemonade on the back porch, a sodden bandanna slung around his neck; Amelia muttering over her feather duster—constituted enough society for me. There had also been Robert Morgan’s patients, of course, but they weren’t always in the mood to chat. They entered a different part of the house, anyway, and departed with their heads bowed, locked into themselves, chastened by the disobedience of their own bodies.
If anyone ever asked, I could have told them all about that feeling. How it felt, for instance, to watch as my limbs stretched and spread of their own volition, as if I were some sort of mutating lizard. What it was like to sit on the Morgan family furniture and hear it creak and complain, threatening to split for good if I eased back any farther. How, when I stepped on the scale in Robert Morgan’s examining room, the weights never wanted to balance but slid all the way to the ends of their metal strips, as if giving up in the monumental task of measuring me.
“Any bigger and you could get work in a sideshow, Truly,” Robert Morgan chuckled during the last exam he gave me, and noted my weight on one of the endless charts he kept. Somewhere in his filing cabinet, a growing library of papers told a thousand and one versions of the strange story of my body. The doctor exhaled on his stethoscope to warm it, then slipped the metal disk in between the complicated folds of my breasts. “You’re like the fat lady who died in the circus, and who was so big, she could only be moved by the hippo cart.” I sighed. I knew the story. He told it to me every time he examined me—as a kind of parable, I suppose, a fable about the laughable indignities of excess.
He moved the metal circle to the other side of my chest and arched his eyebrows. “It’s true. I promise you that. One hundred percent. Good thing you’re not in the circus, eh, Truly? By the way, how’s the heart? Any pangs or pains you want to share?” I shook my head and said nothing about the melancholic roots that were spreading through my body like willow reeds. Robert Morgan didn’t need to know anything about those, I thought, especially since he’d caused most of them.
Some people in this world are born bigger than life, and some grow to be that way, but I know it’s not a matter you can pick and choose. If it were, then I would opt to be doll-sized. Maybe even a dwarf. Then I’d have to be carried everywhere I went, ceremonially, in a sedan chair borne on the oiled shoulders of nubile young men. I would pick out a seat of gold with scrollwork of its own, maybe even a dragon or two, and hire children with clashing cymbals to accompany me, singing out my name. My life would be like a parade. As it happens, however, my feet are bigger than most men’s, along with my hands, my hips, my neck, and the vast expanse of my shoulders and back. And the only parade I’ve ever attended is the defunct May Day festival, where the mayor used to drive a gaggle of the town’s prettiest girls down Main Street in his convertible. Every year, it was the same. Dick Crane, senile in the end but still able to perform this one civic task, beeped the horn of his classic Caddy, and the girls all screamed and waved, hysterical with their own beauty.