The Little Giant of Aberdeen County (25 page)

I shook my head. Half of what I’d just said was nonsense, but it sounded so good, even I half believed it. “Maybe, but I don’t think so. I think old Tabby was smarter than that.”

Bobbie nodded, emphatic. “You’re probably right. She probably put it somewhere no one would ever think to look.”

Just then, a slash of winter sun shot through the windows in my room, unexpected in its harsh brilliance, a needle of light pricking the triangular edges of the quilt’s inner border. Inside of it, appliquéd cloth leaves and flowers were lined up in assiduous rows, pieces of flora embroidered on a series of stitched white squares. Outside of the border, however, the blooms ran rampant in no sequence whatsoever, as if they were born wild right onto the cotton backing. How many hours had it taken one small woman to sew such a quantity? I wondered. I pictured a smooth-haired wife bent over her own lap, frowning as she threaded yet another needle in snowy gloom, the evening’s late fire dying, her fingertips raw from the cold but determined to set out in pictures what she couldn’t in words. I gasped and sat up, splashing a drop of coffee onto my sheet hem.

“Aunt Truly? Are you okay? Are you getting another migraine?”

How had I not seen it before? Here I had been sleeping under that damn quilt for coming up on six months, yet I never once thought of it as anything more than an extra layer of warmth. Of course, I had been attracted to its lively design, but only as a bright spot in an otherwise colorless room. It was more than that, though, I saw now. Much more. I ran my hand over the weft of the fabric, marveling at how clever Tabitha had been and how stupid the generations following her were. I glanced down at Bobbie.

“Think about it,” I muttered, my thumb lingering over a threaded stalk of what looked like a mint plant. “If you wanted to hide something very precious to you, where would you stick it? Some dark place where maybe it would get found and maybe it wouldn’t, or would you do something even trickier? Like put it right out under everyone’s noses in such an ordinary way that no one would even bother to look at it twice?”

Bobbie wrinkled his forehead. “What do you mean?”

Downstairs, the kitchen door scraped open and banged shut, forced by the wind. Bobbie and I fell silent as Robert Morgan’s stern footsteps rapped over the floorboards into the foyer. It had grown late, I suddenly realized. I kissed the top of Bobbie’s head. “Never mind. I’m just talking a foolish woman’s nonsense. We best get downstairs and get some supper on the stove.”

Bobbie reluctantly peeled back his nest of covers and withdrew his legs from the warm cocoon of the sheets. He paused for a moment, studying the quilt. “Why are the flowers so crazy on the edges and so straight in the middle? It’s almost like old Tabby couldn’t make up her mind.”

I cupped the warm dome of his head, smoothing his hair, reluctant to let him go for the evening. “Maybe. That’s a possibility. Or maybe she was saying there are two sides to every story. I guess it just depends on which way you look at it.”

That night after the dishes were wiped dry as whistles, and two loads of washing were sorted and folded, and the kitchen floor was swabbed with two parts water and one part vinegar, and after Bobbie had done his homework and washed behind his ears, I closed my door and spread the quilt out on the floor in the middle of my room. Bobbie had been right, I thought. The quilt did look like the work of the left hand and the work of the right attached together by the black inner border. I squinted. It reminded me of something—a place. Someplace where the chaos of life met stillness and order, a place I was all too familiar with. I sucked in my breath. Of course. The graveyard, with its spiky iron fence punctuated with weeds. And inside, squares of immortal stones set neat with flowers. My heart hammered. The quilt wasn’t just a piece of handiwork. It was a kind of map. But for what?

Breathing shallowly, I tipped the shade of my bedside light so it could better illuminate the fine web of needlework quilted across the expanse of the fabric. And there, so faint you’d never see them if you didn’t know to look, specific forms began to swim their way out of the play of light and shadow, slowly at first and then with more and more clarity. A bone. A flame. An eye. A heart. A set of lips. A single hand. And all along the wild edge of the border, repeated over and over again, what looked like the feathered spread of wings.

I exhaled and sat back on my heels. My hips ached from squatting, and my eyeballs felt used up, but my pulse was racing with the exhilaration of a horse in high gallop. Had Maureen, Robert Morgan’s mother, ever noticed this? I wondered. Or any of the other Morgan wives? Tabitha Morgan hadn’t had any daughters, I remembered. Only sons. And those sons had had only sons. But those boys had married, and each one of them had lived in this house with the quilt on the wall. Hadn’t any of them seen the designs?

Of course, in the end, it really wouldn’t have mattered. Tabby was dust in the ground, and her shadow book was a silly legend. No one would have believed it. The legend had to have come from somewhere, however, and, looking at Tabitha’s quilt, I thought I knew where. It sprang from a secret squeezed inside a rib cage for too many centuries, like a long, deep breath. And the thing about secrets is that they multiply. Once you have one tucked under your belt, it’s easy to add a couple more. I found that out, too. In fact, I only ran into trouble when I forgot that everyone around me might have been doing exactly the same thing.

Chapter Seventeen

I
t took me until the tail end of spring to figure out the quilt. At night, my bedside lamp tilted at an angle, I studied the ghostly outlines stitched across the floral surface, wondering what they could mean. Bones, and lips, and hearts, disembodied and floating. They, too, must be a kind of map, I finally decided, a topography of the body overlaid on top of specific leaves and blossoms, indicating a relationship. Viewed like that, the quilt began to make perfect sense. Tabitha was showing what herbs worked on what parts of the body, and the jagged border, which so recalled the cemetery’s iron fence, said where to go to get the ingredients for her cures.

Next, I had the guesswork of identifying all the plants. For two weeks, I copied stems and flowers into a notebook in the evenings, making sure I’d drawn all the lines right, double-checking the proportions. With the darkness sucking up against my windows and the sound of late ice melting off the eaves in the roof, I thought I could taste a little of the awful loneliness that Tabitha must have felt as she sat sewing with the moon eyeing her up like a big bald baby. During the day, I put Marcus to work, pestering him in the garden with my pictures and questions, but, truth be told, I think he enjoyed the distraction. It gave him a chance to return to his former role as a know-it-all.

“How about this one?” I demanded on a particularly balmy spring afternoon. “What do you call this flower?”

Marcus squinted at the sprig of blue blooms I’d scribbled on my notebook page and bent over closer to me. “Foxglove.
Digitalis
. It’s Latin for ‘fingerlike,’ because you can slip a blossom on the end of your finger so easily.” Then he frowned. “But it’s not much more than a weed, and you don’t want to mess with it, anyway. It’s toxic. I don’t plant it in the flower beds. What are you asking me all this stuff for, anyway?”

My own heart lurched at being so near to Marcus. Up close, his skin smelled both familiar and exotic, like the stand of woods behind the Dyerson farm. I slammed my notebook shut and stepped away from him, surreptitiously wiping my sweaty palms on the rough wool of my dress. “Never you mind.”

Marcus grinned and switched the spade in his hand for a pair of clippers off his tool belt. “Are you sure you’re not gunning for my job?”

I blushed. In the time since he’d been home, Marcus had become a horticultural celebrity. Good on his word, he lived at the cemetery in the caretaker’s cottage that had been abandoned for the past forty years. At first, keeping up the cemetery was nothing more than a chore, but soon he found pleasure in the labor.

Sal Dunfry found pleasure in it, too, as she watched him chopping weeds along the cemetery fence line one hot afternoon. “What do I do about my hydrangeas?” she asked him while laying flowers on her mother’s grave. “They used to be purple. Now they’re faded and dull.”

“Coffee grounds,” Marcus told her. “Just around the stems.”

Sal batted her eyelashes. “Maybe you’d better come take a look. I’ve got trouble with my tulips, too.”

Is there anything more irresistible to a woman than a man who can get things to grow? From her kitchen window, Sal observed Marcus coaxing tomatoes, then chrysanthemums from the ground. She remembered that he’d once been the smartest boy in town, then she wondered if his current occupation was a sign of intelligence or stupidity, before concluding that she didn’t care. She watched him peel off his shirt to let the sun speckle his back and brown it and decided he was perfectly formed, even if he was tiny and lame in one leg.

“Do you think it’s scarred?” Vi Vickers whispered to Sal as they spied on Marcus outside of Sal’s window the next week. “Do you think he’s lost sensation in it?”

“Would it matter?”

Sal giggled. “You wouldn’t think a man so small would be so strong.”

Vi sighed. “Look at his hands. Look at the scars over his thumb.”

“I don’t get it,” Sal sniffed. “Why is he always hanging around Truly at Dr. Morgan’s house? I see them sitting on the porch together like mismatched lovebirds. She’s always asking him about plants.”

“They were always friends. Don’t you remember? We all used to tease him, and her, too. But he’s definitely changed, and Truly, well…” Val’s voice trailed off.

Sal finished the thought for her. “She’ll never change. It’s the law of inertia. You just can’t alter something that big.”

Vi giggled. “You mean someone.”

Sal just shrugged, as if to say what’s the difference, and I guess she had a point, but she was wrong about the law of inertia. You can throw something huge off course, and it doesn’t always take something—or someone—big to do it. Interesting results can be achieved with very little effort. Sometimes, all it takes is the smallest push from a pair of damaged hands to make even the driest bulb burst.

And Sal was wrong about me. I was changing in ways I didn’t recognize. My weight was continuing to climb, no matter how little I ate. After the incident with the migraine, I’d finally succumbed to Robert Morgan’s weekly examinations—not because I believed they would do any good, but because in the end, curiosity got me just as the doctor said it would. What if one day Robert Morgan
did
find a way to minimize me? I wondered. Wouldn’t I take him up on his offer? I thought of Marcus, and my pulse quickened. If I could make it so that he could reach out and not up for my hand, wouldn’t I do it? Of course I would.

These days, all I had to do was step on the scale, and both lead weights toppled all the way to the right. Robert Morgan scribbled the numbers in a folder, still abiding by his agreement to keep the numbers to himself, and nodded. If I gained a pound or two, he would chuckle a little and write a line to himself, as if finally confirming some long-held suspicion. Then he always told me that stupid story about the hippo.

He kept an eye on every inch of me, illuminated every pore with his flashlight, stroking it up and down my skin like a lighthouse beam seeking out shipwrecks. “But, my God, you’re ugly,” he once stated, clicking off the penlight and squeezing the glands in my neck. “And that’s a professional opinion. In fact, you’re so goddamn off the charts that I had to order this.” He produced a cardboard box and pulled a blood pressure cuff out of it. “It’s a leg cuff,” he explained, “but we’re going to just wrap it around here.” He fastened the material around my biceps, inflated the cuff, and noted down what the little dial said. Then he got out his needle, tied rubber tubing where the blood pressure cuff had been, and proceeded to jab at my veins.

“What do you do with all of it, anyway?” I asked when he was done. He had six vials lined up in front of him. I daubed my forearm with cotton.

Robert Morgan capped the last tube. “Not that you need to know, but it goes to a university lab. I’m starting to see some interesting results.” I was tempted to ask what they were but didn’t bother, for we had our agreement, and anyway, Robert Morgan was about as forthcoming with information as August had been when you asked him for the location of his favorite fishing hole.

“You’d tell me if I was dying, right?” I joked, turning my back and starting to gather my shapeless clothes. I stepped behind the three-part screen in the corner and threw my dress over my head, waiting for his reply.

When he finally answered, it was with all the humor of a corpse. “Why would I end a study just as it was getting good?”

My mouth fell open, and I stepped back around the screen. “Out of concern for the subject?” I suggested, my cheeks flaming with anger. “Because it would be the right thing to do? Because you’re dealing with people, not rocks?”

Robert Morgan shook his head and stuck his pen in his breast pocket. “Don’t worry, Truly—yet.” He leaned forward, mouth agape in a jack-o’-lantern grin, and patted my arm before retreating to the safe harbor of his desk, leaving me sputtering mad.

“Damn doctors,” I murmured, and stomped across the porch to the kitchen to char his Wednesday roast until it became one with the pan. Hacking apart tomatoes for a sauce, I blinked back tears. It was hard to hurt me. Robert Morgan’s needles didn’t do it, and neither did the hot iron I’d singed my forearm along last week. Once, in August’s barn, Hitching Post had reared up and landed square on my forefoot, but all I’d ended up with was a pretty, purple bruise and a broken toenail. I was even getting used to my migraines. My body, it seemed, sponged up the world’s pain like bread in the bottom of a gravy tray.

But I was unfamiliar with the kind of ache I was feeling now. It seemed to start in the center of me and steam outward until even the ends of my fingers tingled. I looked down and saw that I’d sliced my finger. A line of blood spurted out and mingled with the tomato pulp on the board. That explained the stinging. I glanced through the window and thought about going out to the doctor, but the thought of his fingers crawling on my flesh again gave me chills. Besides, I had a very different kind of remedy waiting for me in my own room, I realized. Without thinking twice, I swept the tomatoes—blood and all—in a pan and set them on the stove to stew. Then I threw down my knife and stomped upstairs to read Tabitha’s quilt.