The Little Giant of Aberdeen County (32 page)

In the very worst of the cold, Marcus chose to argue his case with Robert Morgan about planting his vegetable garden in the spring. Robert Morgan received him, as always, in the kitchen, while I brewed up coffee and tried to hide how pleased I was by Marcus’s visit. It had been a long few months, and even Amelia hadn’t made it out from the farm for weeks. Anyone’s company was welcome. I peered over Marcus’s shoulder as he unrolled the set of plans he’d drawn. “Nothing too delicate, like lettuce, and nothing too exotic, either,” he was saying. “But some strawberries might be a nice touch. Or how about some Japanese cucumbers?”

Robert Morgan accepted the cup of coffee I handed him and shook his head. “Vegetables attract pests. They’re unsightly. And anyway, the last thing Truly needs is any more food around her. She’s already plump as a watermelon. Right?” He winked at Marcus, and I blushed. Marcus looked away, embarrassed, but the doctor continued, oblivious, then asked the same question I had. “If you want to grow a garden, why don’t you just do it out at the cemetery?”

Marcus frowned. “Municipal land. It’s not allowed.”

Robert Morgan rubbed his spindly hands together. “Well, Marcus, I don’t know what to tell you. I’m happy with the work you do on the flower beds, but I’m not ready for any changes at the present moment. Maybe one day you’ll find a little plot of your own, but until then”—he clapped Marcus on the back—“I guess you’re just stuck doing my bidding.” He stretched his lips back over his teeth, his version of smiling.

Marcus was quiet as a church mouse. If you didn’t know him well, you might think the insult had gone over his head, but I could see from the way he twisted his scroll of plans back up that he was angry. I opened my mouth to try to defend him, but Marcus shot me a warning glance and shook his head just the smallest bit, so I just sloshed more coffee in my cup. Maybe if Robert Morgan had shut up then and there, too, things would have been fine, but deep inside, Robert Morgan was still the boy who would poke a sleeping dog with a stick, still the boy who would throw stones at a bee’s nest just to see them swarm. He leaned all the way in to Marcus and spoke so softly that if I hadn’t been standing right there at the stove, I never would have believed it.

“Who’s the smart one now?” he whispered, then patted Marcus on the shoulder as if he were a child, rolled up his newspaper, and shuffled out to his office.

I turned the burner off under the pot of water I was boiling and turned around. My first impulse was to follow the doctor out and pound him, but then I saw Marcus’s flushed face, and I wanted to stroke it instead. “Don’t let him start on you,” I said. “You know he’s always been mean as a snake.”

Marcus shook his head. “Why do you put up with him, Truly? How do you stand it?”

I wiped my hands on the dishcloth. Marcus knew nothing about my medical condition, and neither did Amelia. I had made a point of keeping that news to myself, along with everything I’d learned about Tabitha’s quilt. I looked at Marcus now and was tempted to tell him everything, but I knew he’d be horrified if I confessed what I’d done for Priscilla, and I didn’t think I could live with his condemnation. Instead, I fibbed a little.

“Easy,” I said. “For Bobbie. Can you imagine what would happen to him if I weren’t here?”

Marcus shook his head again. “A boy like that, with a father like Robert Morgan. I guess the only thing those two have in common is their blood type.”

“No, not even that. Bobbie is O positive, like me and his mother. I know that because I personally held him down for stitches and a blood test when he sliced his arm open that time he was fixing the fence in the garden with you.”

Marcus nodded. “I remember. Bobbie was the only person Robert Morgan wasn’t able to treat.” He hesitated a moment and then went ahead and asked what he really wanted to. “But what about you? Is he still sticking you full of needles, Truly? Is he writing up files on you? I know how much you hate that.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Why did you let him start?” Marcus said. “Why don’t you just tell him no?”

Because if I did, I might die
, I wanted to say,
and I’m not ready to go yet
. I waved a hand. “It doesn’t matter. It gives the old coot something to do. Besides, it’s never good to cross him.” I didn’t know how to explain Robert Morgan’s temper to Marcus. It wasn’t the blustery, volatile kind that blew itself up like a thunderstorm, but more sinister and steady, the north wind trailing its ribbons of frost and ice. Once provoked, his rage might linger for days, chilling everything around him, dropping temperatures until it hurt to breathe. I’d seen him go after the patients who were late with payments, and he wasn’t kidding. The north wind always meant business.

Just then, I noticed that Marcus, who was so small that he never had to look anyone in the eye if he didn’t want to, was staring at me as if I were the sun come out after the Ice Age. Flustered, I smoothed a strand of hair behind one of my ears. Marcus reached up to my cheek and cupped it with his bad hand. I was surprised that I couldn’t feel his scars. His breath lingered between us. “What if it was just us here?” he asked, his voice low. “What would you do then?”

I shook my head.

“Come on, Truly, haven’t you ever wondered what it would be like?”

My skin was on fire. I cleared my throat. “That’s ridiculous. We’re polar opposites, for one thing. Salt and pepper. Water and dirt.”

Marcus sighed and took his fingers away from my cheek. Immediately, I missed them. “So? Who says all the lines of love are supposed to match up?” I’d never thought about it that way before—that maybe your perfect other wasn’t everything you already were, but everything you were never going to be. Marcus scuffed his boot on the floor. “You’re not ready to hear this.”

“No.”

He pulled his hat back on his head, then his gloves, hand by hand, not looking at me. “I’ll go, then. You know where I’ll be.” He opened the door, letting in flurries of snow.

After he left, I saw that he had left his plans on the table, so I unrolled them, carefully, tenderly, and stared at the penciled whorls and arcs. As far as I could tell, he wanted to plant vegetables in the beds by the back fence in an oddly beautiful, spiral pattern. He wanted to dig up a line of hedges and put in maize. He wanted to try cultivating a pear tree. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine the papery sound of corn leaves rustling messages in the dark. I pictured Marcus’s strong bare back bending over a bed of raw earth, and then I envisioned globes of fruit hanging on a branch at dusk, pale as moonstones, heavy as babies waiting to be born.

“What are you looking at?” Bobbie had come in the kitchen without me hearing him.

“Nothing.” I quickly rolled the plans back up. “Just something from Marcus.”

“Let me see.”

“No.” I pulled the plans closer to my chest. “They’re nothing. Just some ideas he had for the garden.” Marcus’s words were still shimmering in my head, however, like tentative bubbles.

“Come on, what’s the big deal?” Bobbie stuck out his arm. It was as stark as a pylon, with milky skin. Each month, it seemed, Bobbie was getting thinner and paler. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why Robert Morgan hadn’t hauled him into his office for a battery of tests and shots the way he did me, but for some reason, things were different with his own flesh and blood. Marcus was right. Robert Morgan never had been able to treat Bobbie. They went to see a doctor in Hansen instead.

I looked up and saw that Bobbie’s eyebrows had turned into two angry slants, just like his father’s, and for the first time, I was a little afraid of him. Maybe I’d made a mistake, I thought, never telling him no, always giving him what he wanted all these years, keeping the secret of what was going on in the attic for him.

His lips stretched over his teeth in perfect imitation of his father, and suddenly I realized where I’d gone wrong with him. It was something I should have known better, me of all people, something I didn’t see until right that moment, but it was plain as day: Bobbie was like a lopsided equation. The inside of him didn’t match the outside of him. He had Serena Jane’s nose, Serena Jane’s blue eyes, her lips, and her cheeks, but somehow, when you added all the features together, you still ended up with one more Robert Morgan. It was amazing, I thought. Maybe biology really was destiny.

I took a step back, still clutching the plans. “They’re really not very interesting. Why don’t you sit down, and I’ll make you some eggs?”

He snatched the scroll away from me before I had time to object and opened it. He blinked down at the plans, disappointed. “Oh, you’re right. They are boring. Everything’s boring.” He tossed the plans aside and slumped into a chair while I went to the stove and started his breakfast.

“Well, I expect all that will change next year when you’re studying medicine at Buffalo, like your father did. You’ll be too busy to be bored.”

Bobbie snorted. “Yeah, right, like they’ll accept me with my grades.”

“They’ll take you. They have to take you. Four generations of your family have gone there. Every Robert Morgan in this family has graduated a doctor, and you will, too.” In the pan, the eggs shimmered like giant knowing eyes. I broke the yolks and turned down the heat. “After all, your father won’t be around forever. He’ll need you to take his place one day.”

Bobbie shook his head. “That’s never going to happen.”

I considered Bobbie’s shadow-ringed eyes, his willowy neck and wrists, the bony shoulders hunched under his T-shirt. He looked as if he were half skeleton, like a specimen to be studied. I couldn’t imagine him sequestered in a morgue, puzzling over the contents of the human body, but I supposed he would do it. All the Morgan men did.

“Don’t be silly.” I poured out two glasses of orange juice. “Here, a toast to the bright path of the future Dr. Morgan.” Bobbie sullenly clinked glasses with me and sulked, not looking at all certain that such a road led anywhere he was willing to follow.

That night, Bobbie woke with an erection so powerful, it was almost painful. He hobbled out of bed, grasping at himself, but his penis refused to deflate. He released it, and it sprang upright again, defying him. He removed his boxer shorts and stared at himself in his dresser mirror. Everything else on him—his hips, his long slender thighs, the dips and hollows in his chest—was supple and smooth, until he got to the nest of hair between his legs and the cylinder of flesh throbbing out of it. It wasn’t that he was particularly well endowed (at least, he didn’t think he was); it was merely the fact that the thing existed at all.

He ran his hands through his hair and sighed. In the spring, he would be required to walk down aisles of folding chairs with a silly cap on his head and collect a rolled-up diploma—an event for which he was none too eager. Robert Morgan and I would arrive late, he knew, and shove into the back of the auditorium, where his father would glower at Bobbie, pissed that he hadn’t even come close to being valedictorian, and I would heave myself to half standing, waving. We would take posed photographs and mill around, and then we would all come back to the house and eat platters of food that had gone half-cold. Without warning, as quickly as it arrived, his erection disappeared, and Bobbie sighed with relief.

Still naked, he ruffled his hair. Over the past few weeks, to his father’s intense annoyance, he’d been growing it. Little tendrils were starting to sprout down over his ears, fluffing around his jaw, softening it. It looked almost gamine. But not over the stern lapels of a blue blazer. Not over the regulated stripes of the necktie he would be required to wear at fraternity mixers in college.

He pulled his boxers back on, then a T-shirt, and opened his closet. There, nestled in the very back against his winter coat, was his mother’s blue dress. He pushed the other clothing aside and stroked the silky fabric of the skirt, ran a thumb along the sweetheart neckline. If he put his nose to the material and breathed deeply enough, he knew, he would still find a musty scent buried in the threads. He slipped the dress off its hanger and slid it on over his head, savoring the cool lick of the garment against his bare skin. He turned back to the mirror, and his cheeks flushed with pleasure. If only he could prolong this moment, Bobbie thought, stretching the secret hours of night out long and thin enough that a few tendrils might remain with him in the day. So often, we believe we are alone in the privacy of our fantasies, but that is a delusion as well—and perhaps the most dangerous kind. For in letting ourselves forget about the common threads of our innermost wishes, we erode our foundations and lose the keystone of our souls.

Bobbie remembered only fragments of his mother. Her dusky hair tickling his cheek. The press of her lips against his neck when she tucked him into bed. The musical clicking that the heels of her shoes made on the parquet floors, a sound he could never reproduce no matter how hard he tried. At the edge of the cemetery, in a little clearing by the west fence, her square granite headstone squatted—a deliberately ugly memorial chosen by Robert Morgan, carved with the bluntest letters possible, plain in the extreme. On the afternoon of Serena Jane’s burial, the sun was high and bright, Bobbie remembered, but the wind was already filled with a bitterness so mean, it dried his tears before they formed.

“May she rest in peace,” the Reverend Pickerton had whispered, ashen around the lips.

“Amen,” Robert Morgan had spat through gritted teeth.

After that afternoon, we rarely visited, but I can only give you the reason for my own absence. Even when we were supposedly laying my sister in the ground, her grave seemed anonymous to me—a rectangular hollow that would still be empty after it was filled. Once a year, I went to lay flowers on my mother’s and father’s graves, but I avoided Serena Jane’s altogether. I simply missed her too much. Marcus told me he weeded around the stone regularly and that noisy crows liked to perch on the top of it. “I don’t know why,” he reported, “but they always go for that one spot. You don’t normally see them do that.”

Maybe it was the image of his mother’s dress clinging around his shoulders, or maybe it was the culmination of years of missing his mother, but at that moment, Bobbie suddenly determined that Serena Jane’s grave was the one and only spot in the world he wanted to be. He slipped out of the house without anyone hearing him—his overcoat bundled over his mother’s dress, boots still unlaced. The frosty air stung his bare calves and thighs, but he didn’t notice. The anemic moon illuminated his trail of footsteps, lonely little cavities chipped in the snow, close together at first and then strung out farther and farther apart until they lost their form completely. In the tottering house on Conifer Street—the house of his father and all the Dr. Morgans before him—Robert Morgan and I slept, gnashing our teeth, unaware that the chain of history had just been broken and a new thread of events, one we couldn’t control, had begun.