The Little Giant of Aberdeen County (7 page)

All that morning, I learned how much I didn’t know. The alphabet for starters—a string of crazy angles and curves with a lilting, singsong tune. How to write my name. The numbers from ten to twenty. How many sides a pentagon had. My head swelled with facts like a gutter after a rainstorm. The bell clanged again, and the children started filing outside for morning recess. Once again, I followed my sister. Through the open door I could spy the generous leaves of the chestnut tree fluttering, and I yearned to go and stand under it, listening to its chatter. Serena Jane and I were almost through the door when the teacher’s voice snapped through the air like a crocodile tail sweeping for prey.

“Girls. A moment, if you please.”

Serena Jane sighed and watched the other girls huddle into groups. She took me by the wrist again and returned to the front of the classroom. When my sister and I stood side by side like that, her chin was level with my shoulder. “Yes, ma’am,” we said.

The teacher sniffed. Her lips bunched themselves up like bees. “Which one of you is Truly?”

Serena Jane pointed at me. “She is.”

“And how old are you, child?”

I half raised my hand. The teacher flicked her eyes down to the roster in her hand, then back to me again. I held my palm up higher, all five of my fingers extended, eager as soldiers before a battle. The teacher squeezed her eyes open and shut. “But this can’t be right. You’re a little
giant
!”

I blushed. It was a word I’d heard before in Brenda Dyerson’s fairy stories, wherein magic stalks grew out of regular dried beans, ordinary geese laid jewel-encrusted eggs, and enchanted harps sung of their own accord. To me, it was a word that swirled with extraordinary promises of castle spires and treasure chests. That’s not how the teacher said it, though. She spat the word through the front of her teeth, as if she were expelling used toothpaste. “Huge!” she elaborated. “Surely it’s not normal.”

Serena Jane and I blinked at her. It wasn’t normal not to have a mother, either, or to have a father who drank beer at breakfast, but we did, and we put up with those things, just as we put up with hand-me-down clothes, and no birthday parties, and Christmas without a tree. The bell rang again, and the teacher put the roster back down on her desk. “Recess is over,” she said, as if she were flicking a fly off her shoulder. “But this discussion is not. Please come and see me when the school day is over.”

My sister and I shuffled back to our desks in the center of the room. Maybe Serena Jane managed to learn something that afternoon, but I didn’t. My mind was stuck on a single phrase, like a shoe in gum, and I knew that no matter how hard I tried, I’d never be able to pull it loose.
Little giant
. The words rolled around and around in my empty head, my education stalled before it got started.

The teacher was named Miss Sparrow. Fresh-faced out of a ladies’ seminary, she was new in town and thus unfamiliar with the peculiarities lurking among some of Aberdeen’s children. Which was unfortunate because she was exposed to them all at once. Aberdeen’s population was so small that its children were educated together in one classroom, with the older pupils helping the younger ones. Miss Sparrow, who hailed from the comparative metropolis of Albany, found the entire concept charming when Dick Crane, Aberdeen’s youthful mayor, described it to her in a job interview in the seminary’s chintz tearoom.

“How adorable!” she’d exclaimed, inhaling her Darjeeling and fluttering her long eyelashes at a man she guessed was at least eight years younger. “How very basic!” And Dick Crane, charmed himself by the length of Miss Sparrow’s delicate legs (whose allure belied her thirty-five years), sipped his tea and neglected to correct her vision of a rural Arcadia.

In 1958, Aberdeen was stuck somewhere between a village and a town. Its sidewalks had weedy cracks that gaped bigger every winter. The bells at the firehouse sometimes locked when the weather was damp, and the newspaper had quit printing its Saturday edition. There was still a recreational softball team, a ladies’ gardening committee, and a brick library, but the team never won, the collective age of the gardening committee was four hundred and seven, and the print in half the books in the library was so faded and smeared, it was no longer legible.

Even the town trees were looking a little stunted. Starting in early autumn, their leaves merely mottled and dropped instead of igniting into the traditional yellows and reds. On the first day of school, the steps leading into the school hall were already so slimy with desiccated foliage that Miss Sparrow had to stop and scrape the smooth bottoms of her spectator pumps back and forth across the door lintel. When she looked up, she discovered Marcus Thompson, the smartest and smallest boy in school, skulking behind the globe on her desk.

“Oh—but—my goodness,” she gasped, for Marcus had the general appearance of a garden gnome.

“Hello,” he spat through a gap in his buckteeth. “I came to clap erasers.”

Miss Sparrow smoothed a manicured hand over her abdomen and sucked herself a little taller. “Of course.” She smiled, her Satin Primrose lips blooming into a harsh curve like a sickle. “How sweet. I’m Miss Sparrow, the new teacher.” She stepped behind the desk to escape Marcus, but he was not to be thwarted. He enthusiastically began to bang the felt erasers, releasing a maelstrom of chalk and dust.

“It’s like intergalactic dust,” he crowed, screwing up his face to watch the white particles fly. “Maybe this is what Laika saw out the window of her capsule.”

Miss Sparrow put a fist to her mouth and coughed. “Who?”

Marcus increased his pounding. “Laika. You know. The Russian space dog. I read all about her in the paper.”

Miss Sparrow put down her fist. “You can read?”

“Oh sure! Laika was on
Sputnik Two,
which orbited the earth two thousand five hundred and seventy times.” His brow furrowed, and he momentarily halted the erasers. “All the scientists are always talking about sending a man into space, but I think Laika is the real hero. She died, though, you know.”

Miss Sparrow frowned and brushed dust from her hair and camel skirt. “The Russians are not our friends, young man.”

Marcus considered this. “Does that mean we should be glad when their space dogs die?”

Miss Sparrow did not get a chance to answer, for the rest of the children tumbled into the schoolroom in a noisy knot. Marcus’s dust set off a towheaded boy’s asthma. Immediately he began gasping and wheezing, his poor lungs squeezing themselves like faulty bellows, his aspirin-colored face blooming into a dusky pink.

“Marcus Thompson!” Vi Vickers scolded, holding the gasping child by the elbow. “Stop it! You know you’re supposed to do that outside!”

Miss Sparrow looked at Vi and saw a strawberry-sized birthmark ringing her left eye, giving her a surprised expression. But Vi Vickers was one of the older students in the class. Almost nothing surprised her anymore. She escorted the coughing boy outside, her left eye startled and amazed, her mouth caved into a bored sulk.

When Marcus’s genie cloud of dust settled, Miss Sparrow got a good look at the rest of her class and was relieved to see that several of the girls were even very pretty. She noted with pleasure which of them had on smocked dresses for the first day of school and which of them had new ribbons braided into their hair, which of the boys’ cowlicks had been pasted down with Brylcreem so their heads shone like angels. All in all, she surmised to herself, running her red-tipped fingers down the tiny shell buttons of her cardigan, they were workable. Hope began beating again in the birdcage of her breast. Then the door flew open, and the prettiest child Miss Sparrow had ever seen descended upon her, holding the hand of the ugliest.

But surely your family must have seen a doctor,” Miss Sparrow said to my sister as we continued our conversation after school, giving my bulk the same critical eye the judges used on the heifers at a county fair. I shifted, adding to Miss Sparrow’s bovine assessment of me.

It didn’t help that, for once, I was dressed as a girl. In a fit of compassion, Mrs. Pickerton had sewn me a school wardrobe of dull brown pinafores, army green skirts with suspenders, and tan blouses. As attire went, it was a prison sentence—a solitary confinement of the soul. On me, the pleated skirt and Peter Pan collar looked cartoonish, almost freakish, the product of a sewing pattern gone terribly wrong. In fact, Mrs. Pickerton had had to increase the measurements by four, resulting in circuslike proportions that did nothing to hide my lumps and bumps. I hung my head and let my sister do all the talking.

“We don’t go to the doctor,” Serena Jane told Miss Sparrow, her voice as sweet as a dulcimer, but flat, too, as if the notes hit were just slightly the wrong ones for the music.

Miss Sparrow shook her head, as if trying to dislodge water from her ears. “Why, what do you mean you don’t go to the doctor? What happens if you get sick?”

Serena Jane shrugged. “We don’t.”

“You don’t get sick?”

Serena Jane shrugged again. “Not real bad.”

Miss Sparrow smoothed a nonexistent wrinkle out of her lap and took a deep breath. “But surely you must have noticed that something is, ah,
not right
with your younger sister. Surely your mother must have wanted to know what was wrong with her.” Miss Sparrow’s eyes flitted from the fairy child to the ugly duckling. I shuffled my feet and bowed my head farther.

“Our mother’s dead.” This time, Serena Jane’s eyes went flat to match her voice.

“Oh, I see.” Miss Sparrow squinted at me, as if by reducing the size of her gaze, she could also shrink me. I could tell she still found it hard to believe that Serena Jane was related to me. She reached into her desk for a piece of paper and her enamel fountain pen, which showed to very best advantage her prize-winning penmanship. She looped her hand across the page, making elaborate dips and swirls, then blew on the ink to dry it and folded the note into an envelope.

“Here,” she said, giving it to Serena Jane. “Take this home to your father tonight. It says that you have to see the doctor if you want to come to school this year. You need your shots, and a hearing test, and a checkup. The board of education has its rules, and we can’t just ignore things like that, can we?” She eyeballed my fantastic bulk again. Clearly, I was out of the bounds of normality. Why, I was an absolute giant, and although Miss Sparrow was more than expert at cutting people down to size, she was also certain that anything of my magnitude just wasn’t in her job description.

What’s this?” my father asked when Serena Jane handed him the note over supper that night. He unfolded the paper slowly, as if unwrapping an ancient map, and squinted to decipher Miss Sparrow’s florid script.

In the years since my mother’s death, my father had melted and spread around his edges like an ice-cream cone halfway through consumption. Everything about him seemed to be dripping, heading straight back to the ground—an impression only reinforced by his lamentable personal hygiene. His wrinkled trousers sagged over his backside and dipped beneath his buttery belly. His shirttails hung defeated. The cracked tongues of his shoes lolled. Even his shoelaces straggled on the ground in perpetual surrender. Customers in the barbershop were reluctant to let him near their hair, choosing instead one of the more youthful employees who had found their way into the shop. My father didn’t mind. He had grown weary of pompadours, and ducktails, and handlebar mustaches. He was like a baker who never ate sweets, or a goldsmith who wore only silver. He spent most of the day hunched in the corner of the shop, reading the papers and checking the racing reports. He’d made a small bundle betting against August Dyerson’s woeful horses, but he never told anyone his secret. He simply took the money home and shoved it in a shoebox under his bed.

He placed Miss Sparrow’s note on the table in front of him, where the corner came to rest in an ignoble drop of tomato sauce. Most nights, I made the dinner and ate it alone. I just opened whatever jars I found in the cupboards and poured the contents onto plates. Then I sat at the table by myself, sucking olives off my fingertips or swirling a pinkie around the rim of a tapioca pudding can, while my father lolled on the busted sofa across the room. On the nights he did come to the table, it always left me feeling a little uneasy, as if I were faced with a volatile, uninvited guest. He burped once, lightly, and leaned over closer to Serena Jane.

“Did you tell this teacher we don’t see the doctor?” he asked, blinking at her in the room’s squalid light, as if she were an angel descended in the wrong location—an assessment of herself that Serena Jane seemed to share. She nodded.

“And did you tell her why?” he persisted.

“I told her Mama was dead.”

Small reserves of spittle gathered in the corners of my father’s mouth. Two of his teeth were broken. The rest were as yellow as old socks. “Did you tell her it’s because the doctor stood by while your mama was dying and didn’t do a damn thing to help her?” He smoothed his fingers over the surface of the teacher’s letter. Watching him, I had the urge to cover his hand with mine, trapping his battered knuckles in the cage of my palm and holding them tight until they smoothed again into the reasonable knobs I remembered. My father pounded his fist on the table.

“We don’t need no witch doctor. We’ve been just fine without him.” His gaze ricocheted back and forth between the miracle of physical arrangement that was Serena Jane and the mystery that was me.

“Not a lick of your mother in you,” he said, then chuckled. “More like three licks. No wonder Lily died pushing you out. Hell, you’d block a barn door.” He doubled over, coughing, then remained that way, his beer can balanced on his knee, halfway between upright and spilling over. I had an urge to kick it and watch the liquid go flying. After one of my father’s harangues, I always felt like one of our sour-smelling, holey dishrags thrown in the corner of the sink. I thought about the X-ray glasses advertised on the back of the cereal box we’d bought last week. Right then, I wished my father could have put them on. Then maybe he would have seen that I was more like my mother than it appeared. Instead, he burped and wiped his lips with the back of his hand.