The Little Giant of Aberdeen County (20 page)

“Hello,” I croaked back, but it came out as a question. When we were growing up, I realized, the only times Robert Morgan had ever spoken to me were when he was trying to get with my sister or when he was teasing me. I didn’t see why anything should be different now.

Robert Morgan stepped directly in front of me and rubbed his palms together. It was the month of August, and even though it was still early, the day was getting hot. Robert Morgan cleared his throat as if he were nervous, but I knew better than that. Reptiles didn’t feel fear.

“Well,” he began, his voice surprisingly conciliatory, “I guess it’s been some years.” I said nothing. It was a statement I couldn’t argue with, so Robert Morgan continued, folding his lean fingers together into a little temple. “I guess I should just cut to the chase,” he said.

Indeed,
I thought. The chase was something I knew he relished. It was how he’d caught Serena Jane, after all, stealing her away for eight years and bringing her back all wrong.

“Shoot,” I mumbled. It was what August always used to say when his creditors came calling.
Go ahead and shoot
.

Robert Morgan stared down at his impeccable shoes, then took a deep breath. “Your sister is gone. I don’t know where. She left a note suggesting I come find you.” He glanced up from underneath his eyebrows—a gesture that would have been coquettish on anyone else but appeared calculating on him. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the note, rescued from the waste bin. “See,” he said.

It’s not going to work,
I told myself. It wasn’t my problem that Serena Jane had taken off. Then I remembered Bobbie. I reached out and took the note.

Robert scuffled one shoe back and forth over a warped board, waiting while I read the brief words. After so many years, it was a shock to see how like my own handwriting Serena Jane’s penmanship was, how she flared out the bottom of her
f
’s and looped the
y
back in on itself, just the way Miss Sparrow had taught us. I wondered if Miss Sparrow had planned this unintended legacy all along—an entire generation of children who formed their letters like hers. I carefully folded my sister’s note back up, following the creases, and handed it to Robert Morgan.

“I see,” I said. Robert Morgan pinched the bridge of his nose with his fingers. He closed his eyes and sighed. In his stall, Hitching Post responded in kind.

“I don’t know what to do,” Robert Morgan confessed. “I’ve got the clinic to run, and Bobbie—he’s only seven. A boy that age needs his mother. What do I know about taking care of a house and child?”

About as much as me,
I thought. And not everyone was lucky enough to have a mother. I hadn’t been. But I remained silent. “No.” I shook my head and turned back to Hitching Post. Robert Morgan narrowed his eyes. He cast his gaze up and down the splintering rafters, considering.

“I suppose this place is really like home to you.” He turned his neck to take in the sorry picture of the farmhouse framed in the barn’s open doors. “It’s been with the Dyersons for, what, close to two hundred years?”

I shrugged. Robert Morgan continued, persistent as a wasp. “And yet, it doesn’t look like you all are doing too well out here. I guess it’s been a little rough since August died. You know…” He paused, forming the temple with his fingers again, a smile lurking at the corners of his mouth. “It would be a real shame if all the credit was called in at once, now, wouldn’t it? Why, you all might lose everything.”

The muscles in my back stiffened. “What do you mean?”

“I’m the town doctor, Truly. I know almost everyone, and they’ll listen to me, whether it’s advice regarding an ear infection or, say, something more esoteric, like recouping one’s debts in a timely fashion. You know, as a matter of policy, I never extend credit to my patients. Everyone pays up front, or they don’t get care.”

That figures,
I thought. “What do you want me to do?”

Robert Morgan’s lips curled, as satisfied as two snakes in the sun. He took Serena Jane’s note out of his pocket again and dangled it in front of me. “It’s not what
I
want. It’s what your sister wanted. Surely you wouldn’t refuse a request from your own family?”

You’re not family,
I thought, then I remembered Bobbie again. I put my hands on Hitching Post’s back, the uneven bones of him a tonic under my fingers. I worked my tongue around my mouth, careful before I answered. “It won’t be before Tuesday.”

Robert Morgan nodded. “That’s fine. We can make do until then.”

“And I want a television in my room.”

Robert Morgan’s eyes flickered, but he nodded again. “I’ll see what I can do.”

“A color one. Not too little.”

He was edging back toward the door now. Along his hairline, tiny beads of sweat blossomed. “Yes, yes. A color TV.”

“Not too small.” I turned my back on him first. I didn’t think it was an unreasonable request—a television. If I was going to shut myself up in that man’s house like a battery hen, I figured, then the least I could ask for was a little window on the world.

“You’ll need it,” Amelia predicted when I told her I was moving into the doctor’s house to take care of Bobbie. We were gathering eggs from the hens.

“Will you and your mother be okay out here, all by yourselves?” I palmed one of the eggs, letting its faint warmth seep into my hand, and wished I could take it with me when I left.

“We’ll be fine,” Amelia said matter-of-factly, and then shut her mouth to any other conversation.

I looked at her face, hoping I would see a sign of sadness, but I knew I would not. She was too schooled in sorrow to let it show and too familiar with hard times to let them get her down. For once, though, I wished that her exterior were a little softer, a little doughier, like mine. I put the egg in my basket and pictured her alone out here with the creaking windmill and the squabbling hens. “I’ll miss you something awful,” I said. “You’ve been like a sister to me.”

Amelia didn’t crack. She handed me another egg, but I could see the beginning of a tear swelling in her eye. “Better than a sister,” I insisted. “Serena Jane only put up with me because we were born in the same house.” I looped the basket over my other arm. “What’s been your excuse?”

Amelia looked at me, and this time she didn’t even try to hide the grief in her face. I put down the basket and hugged her tight, bundling her in my arms as if she were a rare bird. “Don’t worry,” I reassured her. “My heart will always be here.”

Her voice, when she finally spoke, was muffled and confused, as it had been in childhood. “Make sure you don’t lose your heart living with Robert Morgan. Make sure he doesn’t use up all the very best parts of you.”

Like he did with Serena Jane,
I knew she meant. But then I thought about Bobbie and how sad and confused he would be, missing his mother, and I knew I had to go. “I won’t,” I promised. “You know me best, Amelia. You’ll keep me all in a piece.” She nodded and put her hand on her chest, as if to pledge fidelity.

It was one Dyerson debt, I thought, that would absolutely get paid in full.

Four days later, Robert Morgan watched as I climbed the front porch steps of my new home. I was remembering how once, in boyhood, his parents had taken him on an automobile trip to see the president’s heads carved into Mount Rushmore. From a distance, he’d told everyone at school, they were immense, but he didn’t know how huge until he got up close and nothing about them made sense anymore. I figured I was probably exactly like that. Up close to me, Robert Morgan no doubt found it hard to fathom why God made a woman so ugly. My globular nose clashed with my doughy cheeks, which fought a little battle with my inner-tube lips, and so on. I wasn’t fat, but I was so solid, I resembled a tree. Feeling my hips shift from side to side as I hauled a cardboard suitcase up the four steps, I found myself wondering how much I weighed. Scales weren’t something the Dyersons worried about. In fact, thin was everything that was wrong with the Dyersons: thin clothes, thin meals, thin luck. As for height, I had no accurate idea about that, either. I had a good two inches on Robert Morgan—that much was clear. If it weren’t for the way I blinked at everything, or my habit of working my lips before I spoke, I thought that he might even have been slightly afraid of me.

We passed through the front door and into the entry hall of the house, where there was nothing to greet a visitor except a round, empty table with a water stain in the middle of it, a staircase wriggling its way up to a second story, and four closed doors. Robert Morgan dropped my suitcase in the middle of the floor and opened one of the doors. “Kitchen’s this way,” he said, jutting his chin. “We eat in there. Dining room’s in here, this is the den, and this”—he crossed the hall and opened the last door—“is the parlor. No one ever uses it, but if you’re so inclined, you’re welcome to sit a spell come an evening.”

I wedged myself through the door of the little room, blinking in the shuttered gloom. A threadbare sofa was pushed up against one wall, facing a fireplace, and a pair of tattered chairs occupied the corners. Dust balls hunkered on the floorboards, and the hooked rug was moth-eaten. The only object of any beauty in the room was the floral quilt hung on the wall above the sofa. I walked closer to it, amazed at all the tiny stitches holding the whole thing together. The pattern was one I’d never seen before. The center looked reasonable enough—flowers and leaves in neat rows up and down—but outside the black diamond border, it looked as though the quilt maker had just given up and started sewing vines and plants willy-nilly until she plain ran out of thread. I was so absorbed in my inspection of the quilt that I’d almost forgotten Robert Morgan was standing right behind me.

“It was my great-great-grandmother’s,” he said. “You know the stories about her. Tabitha Morgan. She made it.”

“The whole thing?” I breathed. It seemed impossible to me that one woman’s fingers could loop and stitch with such abundance. How many years had it taken her? I wondered. And what kind of fury had she harbored inside of her to make a kaleidoscope like this? In the parlor’s gloom, the colors seemed to vibrate, inviting conspiracies and legends. Everyone in town knew about Tabitha Morgan, of course. An old maid at the tender age of twenty-six, she was Aberdeen’s primary healer until the first Dr. Morgan loped into town and married her. It was an unhappy union, though, and Tabitha died young—some said by her own hand, and others said by her husband’s. And no one had ever found her shadow book.

“Do you think her spell book really exists?” I asked the doctor now, stretching out a finger to tap the old fabric.

Robert Morgan snorted like one of August’s horses and bared his long teeth. “That’s just a heap of women’s gossip—a sin I hope you don’t indulge. If you’re going to get along in this house, Truly, you will keep what you see to yourself. My patients expect it.”

“Of course,” I stammered.

He spun on his heel. “You can go on upstairs, then. Your room is the third door on the left. I’ll leave you to manage. It doesn’t look like you brought much. Oh, and if you want to”—he glanced over his shoulder at the quilt—“you can take that old thing up with you. I have no use for it.” He paused. “We generally like to eat around six. Bobbie’s around here somewhere. I imagine he’ll be along to say hello. He’ll tell you what he likes for supper.” And before I could say anything else, he backed out of the room and squeezed the door firmly shut behind him, leaving me alone with the puzzling quilt, whistling as he walked away, as pleased with himself as if he had just sealed a genie into a bottle.

He’d given me the guest room, with its windows overlooking the back garden and fields and a four-poster bed I wasn’t sure would hold me. I spread the quilt over it, pleased with the cheer it injected into the room. Come winter, I thought, when Aberdeen’s colors ran together into muck, I’d be glad of the embroidered red-and blue-tipped blooms and faded green stems. They would be a reminder that the world outside wasn’t gone, just sleeping.

I trudged over to the window and pulled the curtains back a little. The glass in the window was old and streaked, but I still had a pleasant view out over the flower beds Maureen had planted aeons ago. Kneeling in them, his head bowed as if he were praying, I saw Marcus, his hands sunk amid the stalks. Aware that someone was looking at him, he glanced up to the window, his almond eyes startled wide. I half raised a hand to wave at him, and he lifted his chin up at me and squinted. It wasn’t exactly a hero’s welcome, but it was nice to see at least one familiar face. Just then, I heard a scuttling outside the door. Curious, I walked across the room and cracked the door, only to have it strike against something soft and yielding.

“Ow!” a child’s voice cried, and my nephew, Bobbie Morgan, popped his blond head into the room. I caught my breath and took a step back. It was as if Serena Jane had been shrunk into a child again—but a boy this time, with elfin ears and a gravity about him that must have come from the Morgan side of the family.

“Oh,” I stammered, “I didn’t know anyone was there.”

The rest of Bobbie appeared in the doorway—a lanky body clothed in a faded T-shirt, no shoes, and, tipped back in his arms, a vase overloaded with flowers. “Marcus let me pick them for your room,” he said shyly, casting his eyes down to the petals. “I thought you might like yellow and blue.”

I reached down and took the vase. “They’re real pretty. Thank you.” I set the vase on one of the night tables.

Liberated from the flowers, Bobbie looked even skinnier, the bones in his arms as brittle as two kindling sticks. He scowled. “What’s that doing in here? That goes in the parlor.” He jerked his chin toward the bed and Tabitha’s quilt.

I turned back to Bobbie. “I’m sorry. Would you like to have it in your room instead?”

Bobbie considered, his eyebrows slanted fiercely in toward each other. “No. My father wouldn’t like it.” Underneath the hem of his shorts, his knees stuck out like overturned bowls. They glowed as white as spilled sugar. I didn’t have any experience with children, but I knew plenty about not having a mother. I remembered all the afternoons I’d spent in my mother’s closet, inhaling the diminishing scent off of her coats, her shoes—an odor unlike anything I’d ever known. I patted the quilt.