The Little Giant of Aberdeen County (2 page)
Even before I gained all the weight, my body pressing outward like a balloon getting ready to take flight, I was always huge.
Solid as granite,
my father used to say,
and twice as thick. Not like your sister, that’s for sure. Serena Jane takes after your mama. A real living doll.
Which was, after all, the whole reason Robert Morgan wanted my sister in the first place, even if he had to stalk her and steal her away like the wolf in a fairy tale. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if it had been the other way around—if Serena Jane had been the one pursuing Robert Morgan. Most likely he would have turned tail and run, his long, lupine teeth chattering in fear. Robert Morgan never liked a thing in his life unless he got to take the first bite out of it, and he never let a thing go, either, until it was chewed all the way down to skin and bone. Even his narrow, prowling walk told you he was a man of limitless appetite—hungry all the time and yet never filled all the way up. Not like Serena Jane, who was about as dense as spun sugar, who picked and pushed at her food and grew so light that she eventually flew away, and certainly not like me, who always ate what was given to me but who, anyone could see, always ended up paying double for it.
After the burial, I veered from the main path of the cemetery, headed deeper into the graveyard to pay my respects to other souls. If I’d turned around and looked, I would have noticed that the trail of my footsteps through the grass was growing lighter and less emphatic, but I just trudged with my nose pointing to the bulging wilderness of my abdomen, my chins tucked up tight against my neck, my thoughts lost in the familiar ocean of my own labored breathing. The other mourners gathered themselves, shaking the sound of dirt thudding on the doctor’s coffin from their ears, drifting back toward town and the wake.
The jagged iron gates of the cemetery glittered in the distance, the black spikes sticking up into the darkening afternoon like a row of rotten teeth. They reminded me how Robert Morgan’s breath had stunk right before he died, as if his body were cleaning house, sweeping out all its rank corners and dubious crannies before it gave up its ghost once and for all.
A bitter gust of wind skidded up behind me and lashed at the backs of my legs. I was wearing a black rayon dress I’d sewn myself—a sacklike, drooping shroud of a garment that did little to disguise my bumps and bulges—and no stockings because there just weren’t any that would fit. On my feet, I had the black workman’s boots I wore from October to April, and over everything I’d draped a moth-eaten greatcoat from the doctor’s attic, which still only barely gripped the plinths of my shoulders.
At the burial, I’d stood with Amelia. I knew that people were whispering and nudging one another, darting significant looks when I heaved myself right up to the grave’s edge, panting like a dying elephant.
At least we don’t need to worry about her falling in,
Vi Vickers had muttered to Sal Dunfry.
Sal had giggled behind her imported calfskin glove.
She’d get stuck halfway down.
I blushed, but Amelia, who’d cleaned the doctor’s office for the past ten years and probably had enough dirt on him to bury him herself, pointed out that I was an angel to have put up with Robert Morgan for so long and that no one, least of all decent people with good sense, should be mocking me. Sal shut up then but cast another dubious glance at my lank hair and fleshy limbs and concluded that Amelia Dyerson was blind as well as dumb. She gave a backward glance over her shoulder as she left the graveyard, watching as I lumbered away from her.
Truly’s no angel
, I heard Sal snicker to Vi, rearranging the buttery folds of her cashmere scarf closer against the unusual weather.
Why, for one thing, she’d take up half of heaven, and for another, she’s too big to get off the ground.
An irate crow flapped out of the nearby trees, squawking its displeasure, leaving its bare branch vibrating in the unseasonable cold. The noise made me look around at the world, the ground cosseted with a freak blanket of frost, the headstones stark as ancient relics. I peered up at the sky, the light dwindling to an echo of azure, and watched the crow flap its way to the horizon. And at that moment, the hard stone I’d been carrying around in my chest—the one that weighed as much as all of Aberdeen’s tombstones piled together, the one that kept me pinned inside Robert Morgan’s house, even on days when the town roses made the air into a honeyed liqueur—that stone began to melt, sending oily tears slicking down my cheeks. I wiped them away, ashamed to be blubbering over something as silly as a crow bobbing in a great big sky, but relieved, nonetheless, to be standing under something huge enough to contain me. You see, for the first time in longer than I could remember, I’d found something larger than me.
T
echnically speaking, I guess you could say I killed Robert Morgan, but I did it only because he insisted on it, and because death had clearly already gotten its mealy hands on him, and because I knew the very act of asking must have made him madder than hell.
“Look at me,” he’d cackle from the foul nest of covers on his bed, “and then take a look at you. It just doesn’t seem right.” I knew what he meant. Let’s just say I had more than my fair share of resources shoring up my bones. “You could live through two winters back to back, Truly,” he rasped. “You could swallow the whole damn world, and no one would notice.”
He was lying under his great-grandmother’s famous quilt, the one embroidered all over with flowers and vines, some of them nice and neat inside a diamond-edged border and the rest running riot around the edges. It was a peculiar piece of work all right. In fact, if you looked at it hard enough, you might get to thinking it was almost two quilts—the tidy, inner square worked up all careful and the crazy border that looked like a floral explosion. That’s what I’d concluded, at least, after ten years of staring at the thing.
Soon enough, the doctor quit talking altogether. At first, I welcomed this development, banging into his room with trays of food I knew he couldn’t eat but tormented him with anyway. “That story about the dead lady in the hippo cage?” I asked, waving a spoonful of tapioca under his nose. “It’s the dumbest thing I ever heard. So what if it’s true?” I watched him shake his head, then popped the pudding into my own mouth and rolled the beads across my tongue, satisfied with their slick sweetness. “For one thing, what’d they do with the hippo? And for another, you don’t even know any of the details that would make the story really good. For instance, what kind of coffin did they put her in? Or did they just throw her body in the cage and pull her along to a giant hole in the ground?”
I leaned down so close, I knew he could see the tiny hairs that limned my upper lip. “Do you want to know the difference between a good story and the truth?” When he didn’t respond, I went ahead and gave him the answer. “The little bits, Robert Morgan. That’s all. If you get those right, you can get away with murder.” I smiled and patted his arm. Then I finished off the tapioca.
After a few days, however, I found myself unsettled by the silence between us. For twenty years, I’d endured his barbs and insults, but now I could feel his stony stare roving over my flesh, as if he wanted to devour me raw. I’d watch out of the corner of my eye as he cricked his jaw open and shut like a ventriloquist’s dummy, trying to make a noise and failing, and then I’d collect his untouched tray, half wishing he’d snarl at me like the old days and half hoping he wouldn’t.
In spite of their best intentions, death has always had a way of stalking the Morgan men, as far back as any of them could remember, at least as far back as the history of Aberdeen. The first Robert Morgan arrived in Aberdeen from the South, just as the Civil War was winding down. In the war, he’d served as a surgeon, up until the very end when Sherman’s hot swath of vengeance proved too much. Death, the first Robert Morgan decided as he followed lines of ghost-eyed soldiers through the fetid air of the South, was a perpetual motion machine—a spiked instrument of butchery that would roll on as long as there were men willing to feed it. He was not one of them.
He deserted just outside of Savannah, stowing himself in the wrecked husks of plantations and barns, making his way north via the coast, and then, when he hit Delaware, he turned inland and worked his way through the Tuscarora Mountains, all the way up to New York State. Everywhere he went, he inquired the same thing: Did anyone know a way to ward off death? He was shown crucifixes, amulets of twine and grass, rosary beads, and an eagle’s feather. He would examine each object politely, then hand it back to its owner and shoulder his pack, his mind already racing ahead of him.
By the time he got to New York State, the answer to his question started to change. “I don’t know ’bout scarin’ death away for good,” one gap-toothed farmer told him, his skin as wrinkled as linen, “but you might try askin’ the folks in Aberdeen. They’re all older than a bunch of mummies. If anyone’s gonna know, it’s them.”
Intrigued, Robert Morgan accepted the man’s offer of his barn for the evening, and that night, Robert Morgan slept peacefully and deep, awakening well before dawn to hoist his dwindling pack before heading the opposite direction of the sunset. He didn’t have the foggiest notion where he was, but it didn’t matter. For the first time since he’d deserted, Robert Morgan had a destination to get to.
When he arrived in Aberdeen at the onset of winter, he found the population of the village in the middle of an influenza epidemic, with just one woman treating them all. Her name was Tabitha Dyerson, and she was the relative of a famous witch.
“Judith Dyerson. Burned at the stake,” Ebert Pickerton, the proprietor of Aberdeen’s alehouse, told Robert with a wink. “A heretic. The whole family upped and left Massachusetts after that. But some say”—and here the innkeeper leaned conspiratorially close to Robert Morgan—“they brought her shadow book with ’em. That’s where Tabitha gets the healing touch from.”
Robert Morgan tilted back and took a blessed breath of neutral air. “Is that why everyone here lives so long? Because of old Judith’s secrets?”
Ebert Pickerton’s belly danced with laughter. “Hell no, son,” he brayed, smacking his palm down on the counter. “That’s on account of our bad tempers. The good Lord won’t have us.” His face fell, a balloon caving in on itself. “Lately, though, seems people in this town are dropping off like anyone else. You can go out and see for yourself.” So Robert Morgan went to Mass on Sunday, toting the medical instruments he’d stolen from the army, to offer his services as a physician.
The first patient he attended was a child, a girl about nine years old. She screamed when he approached her. To the delirious child, Robert Morgan, gaunt from seven months of walking, his beard too wild for any scissors to tame, was an evil Father Christmas.
“You’d best go,” the girl’s father told Robert Morgan, his hand clamped firmly on the doctor’s elbow. “We’ll call for Tabitha.”
Robert Morgan raised his eyebrows. “Your daughter needs proper medical supervision.”
The man just shrugged, opened the door, and ushered Robert Morgan into the miserable November cold. “Tabby has herbs,” he said. “They’ve worked before.”
Robert Morgan acquired his second patient after a thorough session with Aberdeen’s barber. This time it was an ailing grandmother, down with the flu. Seventy-three and prune-faced, she lay stoutly in a brass bedstead—the bed she’d been born in and the bed she was prepared to die in—watching as Robert Morgan unwrapped his instruments. Her beady eyes roved over him like a chicken guarding an egg. “Please,” she whimpered. “I want Tabitha.” Robert Morgan sighed deeply—a great defeated wind sinking to his boot tips—and wrapped his instruments back in their chamois. Her hulking son gave an apologetic half-smile. Tabitha, at least, wouldn’t charge anything expect maybe a pumpkin or two or a loaf of his wife’s molasses bread.
Robert Morgan retreated to the shadow-shrouded back room he had taken at Widow Dunfry’s house with a small bottle of whiskey wrapped neatly in plain brown paper. So far, Aberdeen had stonewalled his search for longevity, refused his good-intentioned attempts to cure, and even its weather was foul.
Robert Morgan took another, bitter swill of Ebert’s homemade whiskey and sank farther into the widow’s mildewed armchair, reviewing the afternoon’s case.
Tabby has herbs,
he recalled the little girl’s father saying. Robert Morgan snorted, expelling a small plug of snot. Skullduggery, that’s what it was. He tipped the bottle back to his lips, upending it. The liquid ignited in his throat like a firecracker. He pursed his lips, the sear ghost of rye singeing the insides of his cheeks, his nose, and the secret canals of his ears.
When he woke, he found himself in bed. He hitched himself onto his elbows, feeling his eyes swim in his head, losing his balance. Then he realized he wasn’t alone.
The diminutive woman sitting in the corner sighed, put down her knitting, and walked over to him. She reached under his wrist to test his pulse with lily-stalk fingers. “You’re over the worst,” she told him, sweeping back to her place in the corner, her skirts whispering like contrary angels. “When you can, you should bathe.” She began to leave.
“Wait,” Robert Morgan cried, his voice muted by phlegm. “How ill have I been?”
The woman cocked her head. “You’re over the worst,” she said again. “You’ll soon be better.”
Robert Morgan hitched himself onto his elbows again, wavering. “You’re the witch.”
Tabitha Dyerson drew herself straight, narrowing her eyes like a snake getting ready to strike. “I’m as Christian as you are, sir,” she snapped. “Possibly even more so. You owe me your life.”
It wasn’t until hours later that Robert Morgan realized she’d taken the last of Ebert Pickerton’s whiskey with her.
She lived on a farm on the outskirts of town, Robert Morgan learned, with her father and brother, the father swimming in the mad sea of old age, the brother a recluse since he’d returned from the war. Robert Morgan trudged over the rough track of mud that served as a road, announcing his presence at her door with three harsh knocks, the only kind he knew how to give anymore. His bare knuckles stung from the cold.