The Little Giant of Aberdeen County (38 page)
“Robert Morgan, you should just rest. Let me handle this,” I told him, but he wasn’t having any of that. He made me sit on the quilt next to him while he pointed at all the different plants, double-checking what I put in the drink.
Finally, on the last night of July, I helped him to one of the lawn chairs in the garden and covered him with Tabitha’s quilt. He’d chosen nighttime, I knew, because he wanted the stars to be the last thing he looked at. “Ready?” I asked. In my hands, the jar of green liquid sloshed and rippled like a dangerous emerald sea. I uncapped it and released the mossy aroma. The doctor was so weak that he could almost not lift his own arms. He merely nodded and gazed at me with sunken eyes. I took one of his stringy hands and wrapped his fingers tight around the jar. “Hold on,” I told him. “You don’t want to spill any. Here—” I pulled out a napkin. “For under your chin.”
It was a perfect twilight—the kind that tickles you with the promise of autumn lurking right around the corner, when the crickets are alive and yakking and the day’s heat lingers in the flowers and trees, scenting the air. It could have been an evening for almost anything—eloping, birthing a child, a simple, good rest—but instead, here I was killing a man, and not just any man, either, but Robert Morgan, who’d housed me for the past ten years, doctored me, riled me, and who, nevertheless, I’d strangely come to love a little bit lately.
I tipped my head back, gazed at the spangled sky, and wondered if people’s souls ended up there or stayed sunk down in the earth with their bones. I squinted, and the stars blurred until they looked almost calcified. Maybe the heavens were a kind of celestial grave, I thought, the way the earth is a repository for our flesh, and when we stared at the stars, we were really beholding a million lives twinkling back at us, asking us not to forget. I sat forward and cleared my throat.
“Is there anything you want me to remember, in particular?” I asked. I tried to think about the things I carried around with me from my mother, my father, August, and my sister. My name, I decided. Certainly the genes that made me bigger than everyone else. From August I could say I’d gotten the ability to spot the losing horse at the racetrack and a winning hand of cards, and Serena Jane had entrusted me with Bobbie. I wondered what the doctor’s legacy would be, then reflected that maybe he’d already given it to me. He’d told me the truth, after all, about why I was so big and what it meant for my existence, and he’d shared the secret of Tabitha’s quilt with me. It sounds funny now, but in a nutshell, I guess you could say he’d granted me the secret of death and, by extension, life.
The half-empty jar in Robert Morgan’s hand quivered, and I reached out and steadied it. “Don’t worry, I’m right here,” I said. There was a weak moon overhead, and it cast enough of a glow that I could just make out Robert Morgan’s profile. Even sideways, you could tell how much weight had fallen off him. Now, all the angles and lines of his body were even clearer than before, as if the Maker had wanted to whittle him down to his absolute essence before He let him into the afterlife.
Something strange happened then. At the time, I thought it was just delirium. Men have been known to do all kinds of bizarre things before they pass to the other side, and it’s a busy fool who would sit around trying to unknit them. But the doctor wasn’t mad, and he wasn’t desperate, either. He was confessing.
“California,” he wheezed.
I patted his shoulder. “No one’s going to California,” I assured him. “Everyone’s right here where they’ve always been.”
Even Bobbie,
I wanted to add, but I held my tongue. A dying man should be able to spout off whatever nonsense he wants.
“No…” He lifted his head off the chair and half rolled toward me.
“California.”
“Hush.” I pushed him back down, and with that, he seemed to give up. I can’t say exactly how much longer we sat together—half an hour or half the night—but it seemed more like the latter. Every now and then, the doctor’s head would loll, and he would murmur a name: my sister’s, Bobbie’s, once or twice even mine. For my part, I didn’t say much. I figured anything I did would come out sounding either petty or dumb. Instead, I just sat there and let the stars do all the talking for me until they, too, started to fade, and the red fingers of dawn started crawling across the sky, and I realized that the night really had gone for good and taken Robert Morgan with it.
T
wo deaths under similar circumstances, and then two funerals in the same town, and yet Priscilla Sparrow had had exactly zero attendees at hers, while the doctor’s was oversubscribed. I can’t explain the dearth of mourners at Priscilla Sparrow’s grave, only perhaps to suggest that habitual bitterness reaps emptiness in this life. Of course, the doctor had his own emotional issues, but he still had plenty of folks flocking around his grave at the end. Somehow, he managed to have it all the way he wanted, exerting influence from the grave. I guess death changes less about a body than you’d imagine.
One thing it didn’t change was Robert Morgan’s relationship with Bobbie. The whole time the town was muttering its prayers and dabbing its eyes, I was searching and searching for a sign of Bobbie, but in the end, I had to concede that he wasn’t coming.
“He knows Robert Morgan passed away, doesn’t he?” I asked Amelia.
She scowled, and I corrected myself. “Of course he knows. Marcus wouldn’t keep something like that from him. Besides”—I jutted my chin toward the grave—“I think it’s pretty obvious.” I fell silent. The air between us had been chilly ever since our falling- out on her last cleaning day, and I shifted, uncomfortable and unsure about how to clear it.
“The doctor said some mighty odd things the night he died,” I finally mused, at a loss for what else to talk about.
Next to me, Amelia stiffened and stretched her neck.
“Something about California,” I continued. “You think he could know anyone in California?” Amelia looked white. I waited to see if she would answer, but she didn’t, so I shook my head. “I didn’t think you would. I guess some things about Robert Morgan will always stay a mystery.”
I moved up to the gaping hole that contained Robert Morgan, Amelia staying by my side, and we stood silently for a moment, sunk in our own private thoughts. Amelia took a deep breath and almost started to say something, then closed her mouth.
“Were you going to ask if I’m going to the wake?” I filled in for her. It was as though we were back to our early days together, I thought, where I carried all the conversational burden. “Because the answer is no.” It was going to be at Sal Dunfry’s house—my old childhood home—but the thought of crushing together with the whole town in those familiar rooms was too much. Besides, I had some other, unfinished business to which I wanted to attend. Amelia suddenly grabbed my elbow, however, her words falling out pell-mell, her tongue so thick, I had trouble understanding her.
“Truly, I’m sorry for what I did. I let years go by when I should have said something.”
I wrinkled my forehead. “Why, Amelia, whatever are you talking about?”
Amelia was about to continue, but Vi Vickers’s loud voice interrupted her. “At least we don’t need to worry about her falling in,” Vi was snickering to Sal.
Sal giggled and rolled her eyes toward me. “She’d get stuck halfway down.”
Amelia sucked in her gut, and for the first time in her life, she looked prepared to make a mess instead of clean one up. “I wouldn’t talk like that, Vi,” she said loudly and distinctly. “I know some ugly things about you, too.”
Vi gasped when she heard Amelia speak and then blushed about a hundred different shades of red, but before I could thank Amelia, she disappeared into the trees. Having her stick up for me like that was so against her nature that it melted something in me. I realized how constant Amelia had been in my life, from the first day she’d snatched the doll leg from me in Brenda’s kitchen, to all the times she’d tagged home from school behind Marcus and me, to our coffee-fueled chats in the doctor’s kitchen.
I’ll catch her later
, I thought.
I’ll tell her everything, from what the doctor said would happen to me to what I did for him and Priscilla.
We had a whole summer’s worth of talking to do, me and Amelia. First, though, I wanted to pay my respects to Priscilla Sparrow. In the years since her death, I had resisted visiting her grave, figuring what was over was over, but the doctor’s dying had brought Prissy back up in my memory again strong, and I knew that it was time to lay her down to rest in my own mind, along with the doctor.
Her grave was on the opposite end of the cemetery from Robert Morgan’s, but you had to know where to look. There wasn’t even a headstone—just a painted wooden cross—and I wasn’t sure if that was because stone had cost too much or because she had no one to do those things for her. I plucked a clutch of Queen Anne’s lace—a weedy flower, true, but also prim and mannered as Miss Sparrow had been—and laid it on top of the grass under the cross. I crossed my hands and bowed my head, and then, because I was pretty sure no one else had said it, I started whispering the Lord’s Prayer.
“It’s a little late for that.” Marcus’s voice floated through the air to me. I opened my eyes.
“Marcus. You scared me.”
“Seems your natural reaction to me these days.” He grinned, but his eyes remained sad.
“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 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 finally said. “We never talked much about his mother dying. Robert Morgan wouldn’t let us dwell on it.”
Marcus worked his tongue over his teeth. “Well, 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’ll move back to the house now.” My throat tightened with anticipation 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 tell 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.”
“Well, it’s not like the doctor was great company.”
“No.”
Marcus stared down at the dirt heaped in front of us on top of Priscilla Sparrow’s grave. “Now there was a lonely woman. Do you remember how god-awful strict she was back in school?”
I nodded. “But inside, she wasn’t as bad as you think. Especially 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 all,” 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? Tell 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 all the people on earth, I’d never be able to lie to him. “It wasn’t my idea,” I croaked, “it was Priscilla Sparrow’s. I found Tabitha’s shadow book. It turns out it’s really an old quilt that’s been in the family for years. Maybe you noticed it? The one hung in the parlor with all the plants on it?”
Marcus furrowed his brow. “That thing with all 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 finally saw that he wasn’t small so much as compact. Like a coil burrowed into itself. For such a slight man, he suddenly looked surprisingly tall. 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 all these rotten old tombstones?”
“Well, you get the cottage for free, and—”
Marcus cut me off. “It has nothing to do with money. Nothing at all.” 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 million bones, but look at all these rows of people here, tucked up beside each other like they’re lying in a giant bed. That’s all the earth really is—a final resting place. But it’s one we need to tend, because one day we’ll be there, too. I learned that all too well 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 want to do again. I can’t imagine why you would even do it once.”
I set my jaw. “It’ll 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, unwilling 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 all bottled up, dusty in the dark. “No one knows,” I said. “No one will ever know.”