The Little Giant of Aberdeen County (30 page)
My head snapped to attention.
Bobbie
. Towheaded, berry lipped, prettier than any of Aberdeen’s girls. But lonely and still carrying puddles of sadness in the depths of his eyes. A boy so different from his father, he might very well have been a gift from the angels. If for some reason I weren’t here, what would happen to him? Who would he talk to when he came dragging his heels home from school, his lip bust open again by the bullies at school? Who would fix him dinner, and fold his socks, and make sure he brushed his teeth?
“Aunt
Truly,
” Bobbie whined, “are you listening?”
I put my hand on my heart. In spite of what the doctor had just told me, it was throbbing just like always, regular and true under my breastbone. Maybe it was large, I thought—bigger than average—but that just meant it matched the rest of me. It was as tough and stringy as that twice-boiled ham hock still lying on the bottom of the pot on the stove. I reached up to my face and felt a streak of salty tear.
Turns out there’s some grit in me yet,
I thought, then I looked across the table at Robert Morgan. Evening had fully fallen, and shadows were descending on us like cobwebs. If we didn’t move soon, they’d eat us alive, and one thing I knew for sure was that I wasn’t going to let it happen to me. I stood up. For that night, at least, I wasn’t going anywhere.
“Of course I’m listening,” I said, beginning to collect the dishes. “I’ll be with you in a single minute. Your father and I were just talking, but we’re finished now. In fact, I just realized that we never even got around to dessert. Who wants peach cobbler?”
Bobbie smacked his lips, and the doctor looked up and blinked, mild and surprised as a child. “Why, thank you. That would be kind.”
I snorted. “That’s not kindness talking, mister. Just hunger.” I turned my back on him and flipped on the light.
Facts are facts,
I thought. None of us were built to last, but that didn’t mean we could ignore the here and now. After all, I had a stomach, and it had a mind of its own, and right then it was telling me to get up, stop feeling sorry for myself, and get to the work the good Lord had given me.
S
ometimes I think we’d all be better off if we took a cue from horses and treated our fellow humans accordingly. When a horse goes and breaks its neck, you don’t sit around debating the merits of keeping it alive. You go and get your shotgun, and you shoot it right between the eyes, hard. Anything else would be cruel. But when a man teeters on the brink, folks are apt to start philosophizing. They start asking questions that don’t have any answers, like What’s a life for? And what comes afterward? And how many of our actions are we supposed to answer for, anyway? Horses don’t have to live up to any of this, and if you ask me, they’re the luckier for it—free in their hearts and pure in the moment. Even August’s worst horse, the cockeyed Hitching Post, had a touch of the noble in his crooked old bones.
In the end, though, a man is different from a horse. You can’t get around it. For one thing, men talk back at you. They blather a lifetime of opinions. And they’re fickle, for another, always changing their mouths to change their minds. You can pretty much always guess what a horse is going to do, but don’t ever gamble on a man. There’s just no telling. August found that out the hard way during his life over and over again, and I found it out, too, when I decided to help Priscilla Sparrow die. I had watched Sentinel. I thought I understood what would come to pass, but the universe always holds a few tricks up its sleeve, even for a veteran card turner like me who’s used to getting the cruddy hand. I guess it’s the world’s way of making sure we never get so comfortable in our skins that we quit asking ourselves the hard questions. At least that’s how I explain things to myself.
When someone gives you bad news about the future, you basically have two choices in the matter. The first is to stew yourself a big pot of worry and despair, and the second is denial. In my experience, the first option just leads to bellyache. So, in order to take my own mind off my personal demise, I started focusing on Prissy’s instead.
After giving me the bad news, the doctor immediately started me on a new medical regimen, which involved swallowing fistfuls of pills and being stuck like a pincushion, as well as the taking of even more vials of blood and endless examinations. By the third week, I was starting to feel a little like a laying hen getting groomed for a new henhouse, but whenever I started to think that way, I just pictured Bobbie’s wan face moping over my grave, and remembered Priscilla’s situation, and it made it easy to choke down the next handful of bitter capsules.
Much as I hated my latest routine, even I couldn’t deny how much my body had changed in recent months. My words were coming slower and slower now, as if my tongue were growing—which, the doctor assured me, it was—and the gaps between my teeth had never been larger. Also, I sweated all the time, even if it was chilly, and my skin always had a fine sheen of oil slicking it.
“Now that we have a better idea what we’re dealing with, the medication will start to ease those symptoms,” the doctor claimed, but he wasn’t the one enduring them. At night, when Bobbie and Robert Morgan were sleeping, I tiptoed down to the kitchen and cooked up a few of Tabby’s remedies. For the nausea the pills brought on, I boiled more peppermint and chamomile tea. For the eczema that broke out on the tops of my feet, I made a paste of calendula and elderberries and mixed it with soft beeswax; and for my headaches, I tried dried feverfew. After only a few days of my home remedies, the doctor squinted at the clean skin on my bare toes and beamed.
“I see the eczema is clearing up. Soon you’ll start to see results in other areas as well.”
I examined my feet, certain that it was Tabitha’s beeswax balm that was making them better. “I wonder what your great-great-grandmother would have prescribed?” I asked, flexing my arches.
The doctor snorted and clicked on a pen flashlight. “Eye of newt, probably. With a side of spiders. But I guess we’ll never know now that all her so-called spells have been lost. Turn your head this way.” He pointed the beam of light into my eye.
I blinked, then forced myself to keep my eyelid open. “Didn’t she come from a whole line of witches?”
The doctor moved the light into my other eye, then clicked the button again, satisfied. Spots swam before my eyes. “That’s what they say. Apparently one of her ancestors was burned at the stake in Massachusetts. But it’s all hogwash.”
“What, the burning?”
Robert Morgan frowned. “No, that probably really happened. But the rest of it is nonsense. For all we know, she could have just been making moonshine with her brother until my great-great-grandfather made her stop.”
“Hmm.” I crossed my ankles.
“You sound skeptical. Don’t tell me you believe in the poppycock of an old woman. Trust me, Truly. There is no shadow book, and I should know.” A blush swept across his face, and he scribbled something very fast on his clipboard. “Okay, okay,” he said, scowling, when he saw that I was still staring at him. “I might have searched for it once or twice when I was young. Purely out of scientific curiosity.”
I tried to keep a straight face. “Of course.” I was remembering a time shortly after my arrival, when I’d found him searching through the drawers of the little chest in the parlor and feeling the tiles around the fireplace. “Nothing,” he’d snapped when I’d asked him what he was doing. “Just checking the mortar, which is a job I should leave up to you, really.”
He ripped yet another prescription off his pad for me now. “This should help with your arthritis. You mentioned that the joints of your fingers are growing stiffer. I’ll fill it, and get it to you by the end of the week.”
Already, my mind was whirling through the lexicon of Tabby’s quilt. What cures were embroidered under the stitched bone? I tried to think. Horsetail, I thought I remembered. And arnica. I waited while the doctor stepped out of the room so I could retreat behind the screen in the corner and change into my baggy dress.
“What’s for dinner?” the doctor called through the doorway of his office just as I was about to leave. For such a thin man, he had an unaccountable appetite. Not that it couldn’t maybe be dampened down a notch with some of the herbs from Tabitha’s quilt, I suddenly thought—herbs that could bring either suffering or salvation or maybe just common misery.
“Eye of newt,” I called back, “with a side of spiders.” And I bustled off to see about ruining his supper, not to mention his stomach, with some lily-of-the-valley leaves.
Here’s what I know about small towns: People in them are either all-forgiving or intolerant as mules, and the way they choose very often comes down to the issue of what you’re willing to sacrifice. I think Tabitha Morgan understood this, and I think that’s why she married the first Robert Morgan and sewed her secrets into a quilt. After all, you don’t carry a burned ancestor around in your lineage without a certain amount of anxiety about future recurrences. No matter how friendly the people of Aberdeen were to her, no matter how grateful for healing their sick children, she still must have sensed an undercurrent of danger best remedied by the twin conventions of marriage and motherhood. After all, spinsters have always been a social problem all up and down history, and spinsters with spells are even more unappealing.
I have it easy in some ways. No one’s ever really expected much of anything out of me—certainly not snagging a husband or children of my own. My size makes me speak slowly and move slowly, and it’s also paradoxically enabled me to slip through cracks no one in Aberdeen would ever think possible. Like testing out Tabitha’s mixtures. Or killing off Prissy Sparrow right under Robert Morgan’s pointy nose.
Based on what the doctor had told me about my own condition, I thought the chances were pretty good that I might one day require the same grace I was about to extend to Prissy. It gave me comfort to know that if Robert Morgan’s medicines didn’t work, and if I couldn’t find cures in the quilt, I still would have a more comfortable option than the smoking end of a pistol or the long drop of the train trestle outside of town. But the real reason I took so much time poring over the scattered wings and vines of the quilt almost pains me to admit now. Much as I would like to think so, my intentions weren’t totally altruistic. In fact, they were the absolute opposite. They arose from pure, unadulterated revenge.
I knew Priscilla Sparrow was sick and aging, and I knew she’d gotten down on her knees in front of me to beg, but I can’t lie. There was a tiny part of me that thrilled to see those things. It was as if the child inside of me were standing with arms akimbo, bottom lip stuck out, sulking. I was glad that the woman who’d first labeled me a giant, and had stolen the one thing left belonging to my mother, and had never given me a drop of praise, was ill. I was happy to watch her die heartbroken and in solitude. In fact, I was happy to see that even dying wasn’t working out for Miss Sparrow.
Finally,
I thought,
she’s getting a taste of what it’s like to have your body betray you
.
Well, that lasted all of about a week. The problem was that I couldn’t reconcile the ferocious Miss Sparrow of the past with the turbaned lady propped on her bony knees in front of me. If I were better at holding on to a grudge, I’m sure I could have managed to pin down her ghost, but, as it tends to do, the present won out, and I let my school memories dissolve like tarnish in a vinegar bath.
Release,
the wings on the quilt seemed to urge, the edges of them so faint that they shifted when I tried to trace them.
Release
. And so, on a Saturday in early summer, I found myself scouring roadsides, empty fields, fence lines, and even the weedy thickets of the town green. Any neglected spot where deadly plants might happen to grow, all the way out to the fence of the cemetery.
It was the kind of day that asked you to take off your shoes and go creek walking or wriggle your toes in the grass, not a day for collecting the ingredients like these. I had made a list. Oleander and nightshade. Foxglove, and thorn apple, and devil’s trumpet. Nettles for sting and bite. All the herbs that Marcus had warned me against. All the ones I’d used on Sentinel—and more. That night, it took me four hours to cook them into a kind of sludge. I made some of my own improvements, adding peppermint to ease the bitterness, and chamomile to make the drink gentle, and then some sugar to make what I was about to do go down a little sweeter. I let the mixture cool and then strained the liquid into three small jars, capping them tight and setting them on the table. How much would it take to do Prissy in? I wondered. A spoonful? An entire cup? The whole jar? When it came to questions of dosage, I was beginning to realize, Tabitha’s quilt was more a blueprint than a handbook. It didn’t have all the answers.
In the morning, I woke early and made sure Bobbie and the doctor were still sleeping before I stole back down to the kitchen and fetched a basket from the pantry. I wrapped one of the jars in a clean tea towel and laid it inside the basket, then I sat down and wrote a quick note.
This is what you’ve been waiting for,
I wrote.
Drink it all at once. Don’t hesitate. God bless.
I shoved the note into an envelope and tied it to the basket handle with red ribbon. There were two jars left. I put them in the pantry, where the liquid shimmered and glowed with an unsettling light. Two jars left for me just in case the doctor’s worst-case scenario came true. Or maybe not just in case. Maybe for when it did.
Priscilla’s newspaper—folded into thirds like the doctor’s—was sitting on her stoop when I arrived, along with a bottle of milk. I glanced up and down the sidewalk, but all I could see were ticking sprinklers, her neighbor’s newspaper stuck in his hedge, and a calico cat. I nudged the basket up against her door, then turned and walked away.
On the way back to the doctor’s, I imagined Prissy tearing open the envelope, reading my note, and then tossing it away. Then I pictured her uncapping the jar and inhaling the grassy concoction before leaning her head back and pouring it straight down her gullet. Summer would fizz along the back of her tongue, I hoped—fresh hay, and the nip of lemonade, and the smoky blare of fireworks. A time when everything in the world was youthful and plump and full of lazy grace. Maybe the faces of her students—every one of them, right from the beginning—would swirl before her eyes, rising up to meet her. I like to think so. I like to think I was even marching at the front of them, leading the show, my stocky legs scissoring, my hair flying, my hands clapping out the joyous overdue music of the seraphs.