The Little Giant of Aberdeen County (11 page)

“How come you never wear this?” I asked, extracting a green plaid kilt. I liked the way it looked with its brutal safety pin—like something for a Celtic warrior. Serena Jane didn’t even look up from her movie magazine.

“I don’t know.” It was raining, and we hadn’t felt like going to Hinkleman’s.

I reached into my hip pocket. “Want to see a card trick?” But the only sound was Serena Jane turning a page. I hung the kilt back in the closet. “If it was me, I’d about wear this every day.”

Amanda Pickerton knocked, then stuck her head around the door. Sentinel—stouter and slower, but no less obnoxious—mewed violently at her heels. Instinctively, I edged away from him. “Serena Jane? Chicken pot pie for dinner.” My mouth began watering, but Amanda curdled her lips into a smile for me. “Don’t worry, dear. August knows to come get you. He’ll be here shortly.” She noticed my hand on the kilt in the closet and shook her head. “Oh no,” she said. “No, no, no. You would be a disaster in plaid. Absolutely.” She shut the door behind her as if she were locking a reptile in a cage.

I went and flopped on the bed next to Serena Jane, causing the mattress to lurch. She didn’t even know how lucky she was. She had chicken pot pie—hot and bubbling, straight from the oven—whenever she wanted it and a ruffled bedspread that was flecked with snooty primroses. She had pocket money every week, whether she deserved it or not. I nudged my sister with my shoulder, sending the mattress lurching again. “Do you ever miss me?” I kept my eyes pointed straight down, my gaze swimming among the bedspread’s primroses.
If anything,
I thought,
she should be the lonely one.
After all, I had Amelia in the bed next to me at night, snoring her funny, snuffly snore. Serena Jane had no one here.

Serena Jane tossed her magazine on the floor and flipped over to her back. “Sometimes, when I go to sleep. It’s weird without you.” She blinked up at the ceiling, and I pictured her doing that in the middle of the night, her arms raised over her head like wings. I reminded myself that nothing came for free. My sister’s piano lessons and new wardrobe had a price. Maybe it seemed steeper in the dark. Serena Jane rolled back over to her stomach and brushed the hair off her cheeks. “In the morning, everything is fine, though. I’m getting used to it.”

I pictured her drinking coffee and milk out of Amanda Pickerton’s basket-weave wedding china, spooning fresh fruit out of the crystal bowl, and tolerating the Reverend Pickerton’s rapturous gaze. Whenever I came over, I noticed that he spent a lot of time hiding behind his paper if Serena Jane was in the room. When he was done with the front page, he busied himself with drafts of his sermon and budget forms until Serena Jane left, wafting behind her the unusual scent of tuberose. Once, I watched him sniff the air tentatively, like a dog investigating a new bone, allowing himself one sharp inhalation, one perfumed blast of sin—his rapture for the day.

If he had been a gambling man—and he wasn’t, not by any means—I bet the Reverend Pickerton would have laid his entire fortune out in front of Serena Jane’s fairy feet just for the pleasure of it, just to watch her lithe arms scoop it all up to her bosom. He was a man of the spirit, but he wasn’t totally ignorant of the ways of the flesh. I bet he would have paid to put himself on Serena Jane’s side of the stakes any day of the week. He wasn’t a fool. He knew that in this world, beauty always comes out on top.

Chapter Seven

A
s the days after my father’s death turned into months, and as January led into February’s dreaded chill, I refused to return to school. Nothing Brenda said to me made any difference, either. “Don’t you miss Serena Jane?” she asked. “Don’t you want to spend more time with her?” I shook my head. At school, Serena Jane had always made it a point to sit as far away from me as possible, and she’d consistently ignored me in recess, flocking instead to the more pleasingly proportioned girls.

Brenda tried a different tack. “Don’t you want to see your friends?” I snorted.

“Suit yourself.” She shrugged. “Saves us on gas. You can stay out here with Amelia.” Because of Amelia’s mute spells, Brenda taught her at home. Amelia had never set foot in that schoolroom, and I intended to follow her lead. At the sound of her name, the muscles in my throat slackened as though they’d been given a balm.
Amelia
. My main companion now. Amelia, who bubbled like a soup kettle when she tried to speak to anyone but me, who glided unseen in the edges of shadows, whose skin was so pale, it seemed as if the daylight might break her in half.

Not everyone was pleased with my new arrangement, however. Miss Sparrow, for one, was starting to stew in her classroom. What was it about me? she wondered. Why couldn’t I be fenced within the reasonable bounds of educational authority? According to her view of the universe, if ever a creature needed institutional shaping, it was I. And even though she found me absolutely grotesque and personally repugnant, she was still more than willing to have a whack at whittling down the bulk of me.

She waited until after Valentine’s Day before she paid her first visit to the farm, sparing me the usual flurry of construction paper hearts passing in and out of everyone’s hands but mine. Through the grime of a frosted upstairs window, Amelia and I watched her mince her way from her car toward the rickety front door, her rabbit-skin boots leaving a refined calligraphy in the snow. There was a series of machine-gun raps on the door, and then Brenda answered. Priscilla Sparrow’s eyes raked over Brenda’s thin shoulders and paisley head scarf, and Brenda’s jaw tightened like a bow. Then Brenda’s lips moved and released all the arrows she was hiding in her mouth, piercing Miss Sparrow’s armor of nail lacquer, and hairspray, and Coral Gables lipstick. The nicked wooden door swung closed in Miss Sparrow’s face. Upstairs, I dug a single fingernail into my palm, scratching a line into my flesh to keep score. Downstairs, I could hear Brenda banging pots and pans in the kitchen.

“Girls,” she crowed, “come on down here and help me set this table.” She clattered a handful of forks together like sabers. “That damn fool woman,” she muttered, slamming bowls of Irish stew onto the table. “Thinks she knows it all.” She ran her eyes over the bumps of my body, then over Amelia’s skinny cheeks, and paused. “She doesn’t know the first thing about us.”

The sentiment proved to be equally true on Brenda’s part when it came to underestimating Miss Sparrow. For in spite of her carefully limned makeup, and clattery high heels, and fancy words, Priscilla Sparrow was a warrior at heart. In her opinion, she had right on her side, and she had no intention whatsoever of letting an illiterate like Brenda Dyerson call the shots. She tromped back to her car, the heels of her furry boots leaving a trail of cruel crescents, and drove home, where she brewed herself a strong cup of tea, spiked it with a splash of sherry, and regrouped.

The day of Miss Sparrow’s second visit, the snow was up to her knees. She had to abandon her car on the main road and stumble down the dirt lane to the farm, but it didn’t deter her from reaching the farmhouse door and pounding on it like a refugee. This time, I was in the kitchen, drinking cocoa at the scabbed table with Amelia, and I could see large wet flakes staining Miss Sparrow’s painted cheeks. Once again, Brenda blocked the doorway with her meager body and cocked her jaw, resenting the heat that was curling around her ankles and out into the air. Priscilla Sparrow might have been good at math, but she wasn’t even aware of the calculations we went through in deciding whether or not to put another log on the fire.

“What is it?” Brenda spat.

Miss Sparrow didn’t waste precious words. She scrabbled in her pocket with her finely gloved fingers and produced an envelope.

“From the superintendent of the board of education. It states that, by law, you’re required to send any children in your care to school, and that if you don’t, you can be found negligent and have the children removed.” She glanced over Brenda’s broom-handle shoulder and took in my bulk and Amelia’s greasy hair and sleepy eyes. Unattractive girls, both of us, she thought, but that wasn’t her concern. She was merely here to see that the rules were followed, that justice was done, that no one fell through the cracks on her watch.

Brenda accepted the envelope, stuffing it into her apron pocket without looking at it. She was an expert in receiving unwelcome news. In her experience, bad correspondence always arrived dressed up—splashed with red ink, embossed with seals and a lot of stamps, as if written threats needed extra muscle the way loan sharks needed heavies. She knew all about them, and they knew about her.

Brenda shivered with a blast of icy air and scuttled her shoes on the floorboards. On the other side of the door, Priscilla Sparrow was still craning her neck, trying to get a good look us.

“Is that all?” Brenda closed the door a fraction of an inch.

In the cold, the tip of Miss Sparrow’s nose was turning bulbous and red. Nevertheless, she managed a sickly smile. “Unless you have any special circumstances of which I’m unaware.” Her teeth hung in her mouth like icicles.

Brenda produced a sickly smile of her own. “No special circumstances. Truly will be back at school in the morning.”

Priscilla Sparrow’s stained lips retreated even farther over the ridges of her teeth. “Oh, but this letter stands for
all
the children at this residence. I believe you and your husband have a child of your own? A girl? Whom you’ve never sent to school?”

“I teach Amelia here at home. She’s shy. She has a hard time with her speech.”

The corners of Priscilla Sparrow’s eyes narrowed into poison- tipped darts. “And what makes you think you’re qualified to meet that responsibility? Do you have any kind of formal training in pedagogy? Any familiarity with child development and psychology?”

At that moment, Amelia snuck up behind her mother and peeked around her apron. A life passed amid gangsters, horse thieves, smugglers, and gamblers had granted Amelia an unerring nose for greed, vanity, and other assorted venal characteristics, and in Miss Sparrow, she smelled rancid pride combined with the bitter char of unrequited love. She smelled the lemon tang of loneliness mingling with despair. Just under Priscilla Sparrow’s skin, Amelia could tell, a rosemary blast of judiciousness rippled, followed by the musty decay of jealousy and a lingering note of envy—in short (and in spite of all of Miss Sparrow’s better attempts with Dick Crane), the odors of a lifelong spinster.

I didn’t think a person like Priscilla Sparrow was going to have any more luck getting Amelia to speak up than her mother did, and even if she succeeded, it wouldn’t change anything. At the end of the day, Amelia would always still be a Dyerson—soft-spined, down at the heels, patchworked. She was what she was, and she didn’t mind, either. Not like me, who would have given anything to shed my cumbersome skin and bones, stripping myself down to marrow, to nothing more than a gambler’s heart, which beat fast and true and still believed that somewhere out there, a deck was stacked entirely in my favor.

I was correct about school. Miss Sparrow hated me, but she hated Amelia even more. It turned out Amelia was unable to make any progress whatsoever with elocution, dictation, repetition, or any form of memorization. For an entire month, Amelia was kept so late after class that the moon would begin to rise in the schoolroom’s paneled window, but it did no good. No matter how many chalky columns of letters and words Miss Sparrow tallied up, no matter how much she banged on the blackboard, Amelia simply couldn’t force out a sound. She did better with her numbers, having a firm grasp on the concept of zero. She knew, for instance, that nothing divided by nothing was still nothing. “Things are what they are,” she muttered to me on the long cold walk home, her tongue loosened after the confines of school. “You can’t change them.”

Not that Miss Sparrow didn’t try. First, she punished Amelia for being unwilling to speak, sticking her in the coat closet, then she tried coddling, intimidation, and, finally, wheedling. “Come on, darling,” she’d say, hooking a finger under Amelia’s chin and tipping it up to her for better eye contact. “The other children find recitation easy. You should, too.” When Amelia merely blinked at her, silent as an owl, Miss Sparrow dug her finger harder into Amelia’s skin. Her teeth seemed to grow a little longer in her mouth. “You know, don’t you, that children who refuse to repeat their lessons don’t get visits from Santa? You wouldn’t like that, would you?” Amelia, for whom Santa was an abstract concept, merely blinked again.

In the end, Miss Sparrow gave up, ignoring the listless presence of Amelia in the back row and contriving to have her miss school on the day the state assessment exams were held. Amelia didn’t mind. She spent the afternoon at home, curled in a nest of blankets, reading the Sears catalog, and helping Brenda bake.

My reentry to school was hardly smoother than Amelia’s. The day she skipped the test, I muddled through the pages of questions, my tongue trapped between my teeth, my ankles squeezed together under my desk, as if by tightening all the screws of my body, I would summon up the answers. I gave a glance over to the seat next to me, where Marcus Thompson scratched his pencil across his paper as fast as he could, his lips whispering the answers to himself as he scribbled, adding extra facts and explanations in the margins as he saw fit. I leaned forward, hoping to overhear an answer or two, but it was all mumbo-jumbo to me. “Smarty pants,” I hissed, and he jerked his head up, startled. Then he grinned.

“Big bones,” he snapped back, but his eyes twinkled as he said it.

Ever since my return to school, Marcus had been the only pupil with any kind words for me. Even my sister was as distant as a ghost, gliding past me at recess like an unattainable spirit, and it was this canyon of strangeness between us that pained me even more than my troubles with numbers and letters or the rude comments I got from everyone else.

“Hey, Truly,” the kids taunted, “come sit on this here rock. You’ll crush it, and we’ll have us some marbles.” Or, “Truly, Truly, two-by-four, couldn’t get through a barnyard door.” Always, I searched for my sister, but she was usually too far away to do any good, as flickering and unreliable as a lightning bug.