The Little Giant of Aberdeen County (36 page)

Of course, this memory makes me sorrowful now, for if anyone ever knew the shape of me, it was Amelia—and not just the outer lines of me, either, but all my innards as well. She was as necessary as the sun to me. She was the quiet heat that shimmered inside my shadow and made it live, and without her, I am a little darker. Amelia stood up and gathered her bags and buckets. “I have to go,” she sniffed. “I need to get back and feed the chickens before dark. At least
they’re
some company.”

I rose with her. “Okay.” I walked her to the door and watched her climb into August’s old truck. She started the engine and drove off, pulling all the unspoken tension between us taut, then tauter still, until, like a rubber band stretched too thin, it went flying.

Chapter Twenty-six

T
he doctor warned me that he would grow sick quickly, but it was still hard to believe when the exact morning arrived that he couldn’t get out of bed. It was the middle of May—high spring—and the birds were chirping so loudly that I didn’t hear the small pewter bell the doctor was ringing, our prearranged signal for help. Soon, however, the metallic sound became hard to ignore. I followed it down the corridor and found the doctor half-covered and blushing all the way out to his ears.

“Truly, I need help going to the toilet,” he said with as much dignity as he could muster, which, given that it was Robert Morgan, was actually quite a lot.

“Why don’t you let me fetch Bobbie?” I asked as we shuffled down the hallway. “You must miss him. Wouldn’t you rather your own flesh and blood do this?”

Robert Morgan grappled with the bathroom doorknob and looked sour. “He made his choice. He gave up everything this family holds dear, and now he’s out of the circle.” He turned around. “I can manage from here.”

I blushed. “I’ll wait outside.”

“Thank you.”

I was far from ready to let the matter drop, though. As I plumped pillows and rearranged covers, I regaled the doctor with the latest news about Bobbie, straight from Amelia’s mouth. “He’s in love,” I crowed, tucking the doctor’s feet up tight in the sheets and figuring that it was best if he heard it from me first. “You’ll never guess with who.”

“Whom,” Robert Morgan corrected, but I ignored him.
He must know,
I told myself.
He must realize about Bobbie by now, even if he doesn’t want to admit it.
I took a deep breath and got ready to explain.

“Do you remember his friend Salvatore, who used to come by and spend time with him?”

Robert Morgan turned his face away from me. “No.”

“Of course you do. Tall boy with dark hair. A few years older.”
Not to mention Bobbie’s only friend,
I wanted to add but didn’t.

Still, the doctor refused to play along. “No,” he repeated.

I waved a hand. “Oh well. It doesn’t matter. But that’s who it is. That’s who Bobbie’s with.”

The doctor was so quiet, I thought I might have killed him right then and there, but then he spoke, and what he said shocked me all the way out to the hair on my head.

“Is he good to him, this Salvatore?” he asked, still not looking at me.

And then I shocked myself. Without thinking, I took the doctor’s hand and squeezed it, as if we were old friends instead of barely tolerable in-laws. “Very good,” I whispered, imagining Salvatore’s coffee-colored fingers intertwined with Bobbie’s white ones. “He’s the best.”

“Okay, then,” Robert Morgan rasped, “I guess I can live with that.” And he fell into a deep, rapturous sleep—the first one, I believe, that he had ever earned on his own.

As summer warmed, the doctor grew weaker. “Don’t we have more blankets?” he chattered one evening, a plaid wool wrap flung around his bony shoulders. “I’m freezing. I need another cover.” His eyes suddenly lit up, and he half sat. “What about the quilt in the parlor downstairs?” he croaked.

My heart flip-flopped as I shook a pair of his pills into the palm of my hand. I snapped the bottle lid back on tight and tried to sound casual. “Oh, you don’t want that old thing. It’s probably all musty.” The last thing I wanted was the doctor cozied up under the very catalog of spells that may have started him on this road in the first place.

But the sick have minds of their own. They want what they want. “I don’t care,” the doctor insisted. “Go fetch it for me.”

I tried again. “Here, take your pills.” I’m ashamed to admit that not all my appetite for vengeance had been quelled by Robert Morgan’s actual illness. Temptation sometimes triumphed over my contrition, and I would find myself withholding water from him or giving him only one pill when he could have had two. He was getting so addled, though, that he was starting not to notice. Today, hoping to distract him from the quilt, I gave him both pills, but it didn’t work. He swallowed them down, then immediately resumed pestering me.

“Please, Truly, my bones feel like they’re going to grow ice. That quilt is just the thing to warm them.” I pretended not to hear him, which turned out to be a mistake. Next time I glanced over, the doctor was half out of bed, his stick legs dangling over the edge.

“What are you doing?” I cried. “You’ll break your dang hip, and that’s the last thing I need.”

He shot daggers at me. “If you’re not going to do what I want, then I’ll do it myself.”

He swayed a little, and I propped him up with one arm. “Okay, okay. For the love of the devil, I’ll bring you the quilt. Just get back into bed.” He allowed me to tuck the covers back over him, a cat-who-ate-the-cream smile tugging at his lips.

When I returned, he was already dozing, his mouth hung open like a puppet’s, and I was half in a mind to turn around and take the quilt back downstairs, but I didn’t. The doctor was sick all right, but he wasn’t putty in my hands. He still had his memory and his eyes intact, and if he woke up without that quilt, I knew, there’d be no end to it. I sighed and tucked the corners of it gently around him, folding it back on itself a little so the designs didn’t show quite as much. Robert Morgan snorted and opened one eye. “Thank you,” he grumbled, and nodded off again. I watched him sleep for a moment, unaccustomed to the ragged new arrangement of his face. He grimaced and moaned, fretful even in rest, and for a moment, I was tempted to soothe his brow the way I used to with Bobbie.

The doctor was going to get worse than this, I knew. He had warned me. “Toward the very end,” he had said, his jaw clenched, “I’m afraid you will have to do all the heavy lifting, and for that I apologize.”

“Good thing I have big arms, then,” I’d answered, but I was starting to question what I had gotten myself into—nursing a man who had tortured me for years, a man my sister and nephew had hated and from whom they had fled. When the time came, I wondered, shouldn’t I maybe just give him Tabby’s drink? Wouldn’t it be easier? And, if I was being totally honest, wouldn’t it also be a little bit gratifying? For once, I would beat the man at his own game. I could give him the cure he hadn’t been able to give me.

Stop it,
I told myself as I brought Robert Morgan yet another tray of chicken broth in bed.
You said you were done with the quilt. It’s just cotton and batting now, and a million little pieces of tangled threads.
Except it wasn’t, and I knew it. Tabitha’s quilt was more than pieces of fabric sewn together. It was a patchwork of souls. I gasped and almost dropped my soup. The phrase had jumped unbidden into my mind.
A patchwork of souls
. Suddenly I understood the significance of the angel wings. They were more than random symbols—they were markers, as clear as any in the graveyard. Tabitha Morgan had done the same thing I had done for Prissy.

The border had been a record of the deaths.

“What’s wrong?” The doctor peered up at me groggily.

“Nothing.” I spread a napkin out over the quilt, hoping the doctor would never see what was covering him and make me explain. What would I say? I wondered. What would I do if he asked? I didn’t know, but it turns out I didn’t have to. The day was soon coming when the doctor would make that decision for me.

To witness a conversion is not always to recognize it. In Robert Morgan’s case, it started with time. More than softening him, more than breaking him, the doctor’s leukemia gave him opportunity to pay attention to the seemingly insignificant details of Aberdeen. “I never noticed those yellow roses in the back corner of the garden,” he drawled, pumped as full of narcotics as a baby after a feed. “They’re just the color of butter. And that tree across the way over there. What kind of tree is that? An elm? Did you ever notice that the jays just love that tree?”

I peeped out the window at a pair of birds perched on the elm’s branches. “Why, yes, they surely do, Robert Morgan.”

His head lolled on the pillow. “Why did I never notice the jays, Truly? Why did I never walk out and smell those roses against the fence?”

Because you were a tight bastard,
I wanted to say but didn’t. “Because you had your mind on higher things,” I suggested instead.

The doctor nodded, emphatic. “That’s right. Higher things. My head was in the clouds. But no more. I’m putting my head down to the dirt now.”

“You mean you’re burying your head in the sand?” I smiled, but Robert Morgan scowled. It was an appropriate comment, I thought, considering denial was his main method of handling Bobbie.

“Laugh all you want to, woman. I’m serious. The little things—they’re all I have left.”

“I wouldn’t know about those,” I sniffed, “what with being a giant and all.”

Later, though, when he was sleeping, I went outside and cut some blossoms for him, propping them up in a bowl of water by his bedside so that when he woke he would be able to catch their sweetness.
They’re as much for me as they are for him,
I told myself. After all, I was in there about twenty times a day. I thought I deserved a little burst of summer where I could see it.

Men can regress when they’re desperately ill, and this certainly happened with the doctor. First he quit moving, then he quit speaking much, and finally, with his mind snipped free like a bone cut from a rigid cast, he slipped back and forth in time, careening from childhood to the present with awful frequency. Sometimes he called me by Serena Jane’s name, which always made me laugh to myself, and other times, like the rainy afternoon he grabbed me by the forearm and forced me to sit on the bed beside him, he thought I was his mother. “Please,” he begged, tugging on my hand, “stay awhile, Mother.”

I tried to free myself from his grip. “I’m not Maureen. I’m Truly, remember?”

Robert Morgan blinked and released my hand, his face turning cross. “Of course you are. Why are you telling me?”

“No reason.”

He shifted under the covers. “But while you’re here, maybe you could get me a fresh pajama top.” I had to strain to hear him. His voice was as hollowed out as a termite tunnel.

“Of course.” I reached into the bureau and pulled out a striped pajama set.

“Just the top.”

“Right.”

“Now look away.”

“But don’t you want me to help you—”

“Look away!”

“Okay, fine.” I turned around and busied myself with the teapot I’d brought up. “But it’s not like the view is outstanding, trust me.”

I waited a beat for him to shoot a barb back to me, but silence ruled the room. Curious, I turned around, and what I saw froze me to the core. The doctor was inspecting the folds of the quilt, his mouth stretched as flat as a pin, and I knew in an instant that he had discovered its secret. I quickly tried to shake out the quilt, but I was too late. In his eyes, I recognized a gleam of comprehension.

“My God,” he wheezed, “it’s Tabitha’s shadow book! After all these years, I’ve found it. It’s real!” He leaned his head back against his pillows momentarily and closed his eyes, breathing deeply and evenly, the balance of his life’s convictions wavering inside of him.

What could I say? I picked up his teacup and added hot water, and as I did, Robert Morgan rasped and pointed. I looked over my shoulder to see what he was indicating, but it was nothing. The air had filled with steam. That was all. I nodded to show that I could see it, too—a weightless alphabet, the language of the soul. Silently, we watched it rise heavenward in loops and curls.

The doctor spent the better part of the next two hours muttering over the quilt, studying each stitched sign and determining its meaning. He lingered on the wings, as puzzled as I’d been by them, but his knowledge of medical botany was better than mine, and he quickly figured out the relationship between the wings and the clutch of deadly herbs that they covered. His eyes narrowed, and he slapped his hand on the mattress. He couldn’t shout anymore, but he could still smack up a ruckus, and just now he looked as mean as he used to when he was teasing me in the schoolroom all those years ago.

“Priscilla Sparrow,” he spat. “How did you do it?”

Hoping to distract him, I went over the various emblems on the quilt with him: the hand, the bone, the little set of lips. And finally the wings, spread like broken hearts across the tangle of plants on the border. He wasn’t dissuaded.

“How?” he insisted, so I gave in and told him about the drink and how I’d walked it over to Prissy’s in the cool of the early morning and laid it on her doorstep in a basket as if I were depositing the baby Moses. I didn’t say anything about the extra liquid I’d stored in the pantry, though. That was my secret. Nor did I bring up the various concoctions I’d snuck into his food over the past few months. I saw him eyeing me cautiously, however, and I could tell he was calculating up all those odd-tasting meals on his own.

I think I knew at that moment that he was going to ask me to make the drink for him. I could see the idea spinning all crooked in his eyes like the sails going round on the Dyerson windmill. Not sure they wanted to, but doing it anyway. “Truly,” he gasped, “promise me you’ll listen carefully, and do exactly as I say, no matter what.”

I had more than a hundred reasons not to. Prissy had been a sick woman, for starters, to whom no one had paid much attention. The risk of anyone being suspicious of her dying had been slim. Plus, she’d been careful. She’d thrown away the note and then the jar before succumbing. The doctor was a different story, however. He was ill, it was true, but he was also a force to be reckoned with. Anyone who knew him knew how much he was fighting his demise. No one would expect his death to be short and quick.