The Little Giant of Aberdeen County

  Downstairs, Dr. Morgan took a seat on the lifeless sofa, his buttocks sinking deep in the cushions. A vaguely sour odor emanated from the kitchen. Dr. Morgan closed his throat up and breathed through his mouth, keeping his face carefully neutral, the way he’d learned to do in medical school. From my perch at the top of the stairs, I could just about peer into the room. I leaned forward for a better view.

  “Well, Earl, it’s been a long time,” Dr. Morgan said, avoiding any mention of my mother. In the years since her death, he’d become more and more introspective, brooding over the small handful of patients he’d lost during his career while Cody, his Labrador, followed him mournfully, snuffling at his heels, swiping the pink rag of his tongue over his chops. Dr. Morgan planted his hands on the bony corners of his knees and cleared his throat. “I don’t suppose it was you who sent Truly over to my office this morning.”

  My father snorted and opened another can of beer. “There ain’t nothing on the planet that could send me to you. Whatever I’ve got coming, I figure I’ll deal with on my own. But the girls”—he shrugged—“well, they’re getting big now. I guess they’ve got their own ideas.”

  Dr. Morgan placed a discreet fist over his mouth and coughed. “Actually, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Surely you must have noticed that Truly is bigger than other girls her age. She’s even bigger than Serena Jane, who’s two years older.”

  My father swallowed. “Yeah, she ain’t the prettiest.”

  I frowned. Even though I knew my sister was the beauty of the family, I secretly preferred my own pug features and familiar heft. They were so much more comfortable. Serena Jane was too porcelain, too painted up and satiny. I was always worried she would chip and break, like a temperamental china doll.

  Dr. Morgan shooed a fly away from his ear. “Pretty is as pretty does,” he said. “What I’m worried about is Truly’s growth. It’s way out of line for a normal five-year-old. She obviously has some kind of hormonal imbalance, probably stemming from her pituitary gland.”

  Across the room, my father continued to slouch. “Huh. How about that.”

  “If I could just run some more tests, do some bloodwork, I’m sure I could isolate the problem and—”

  “No.”

  “But—”

  My father stood up. In the half gloom, up this close, he was bigger than Dr. Morgan remembered, his chest still barreled, his cheeks sunken, but his shoulders still broad. “No tests,” my father said, the words coming out remarkably clear for a man on his fifth beer of the afternoon. “No bloodwork, no needles, no showing off for your medical buddies. No one’s making my daughter into a circus freak.”

  “Come on, Earl. It’s not like that. I’m only trying to help.”

  My father narrowed his eyes. It was the same expression he used in the barbershop, on the rare occasion right before he cut into someone’s hair. “I think you helped enough five years ago,” he said through his front teeth.

  Dr. Morgan hung his head. “She would have died anyway, Earl. There was really nothing I could do. She’d lost too much blood, but even so, the tumor would have had her sooner or later.”

  “You don’t know that. No one knows for sure. Maybe it would have shrunk. Or she could have had radiation or something.”

  Dr. Morgan stood up. “No. I don’t think so. You would have found that out sooner or later. In spite of what you wish to think, there are some things I do know for certain, and some things I can’t do anything about, no matter how painful they are. And, Earl, I’m telling you now, something is wrong with Truly. But you can do something about it. You can save her from what’s bound to be misery.”

  “The Lord helps those who help themselves,” my father said. “I ain’t too good at the saving aspect of things.”

  I am, Dr. Morgan wanted to say, but he realized it wasn’t true. He hadn’t saved my mother, after all. “What about Truly?” he finally asked.

  My father shrugged. “I guess she’ll get what the world has coming to her, like it or not, the way we all do.” He clumped over and slapped Dr. Morgan on the back. His touch stung slightly, the way it was meant to. He stumped into the hall and opened the front door wide. “Thanks for coming,” he said. “Now get the hell out of my house.”

  My father waited for Dr. Morgan’s black suit jacket to disappear around the corner before he closed the door. He stood for a moment in the hall, then smoothed his greasy hair over his skull, tucked in his shirt, and climbed the rickety stairs to our room. I was sitting hunched at the little desk. My father squinted, but it was no use. No matter how hard he tried, he never found a scrap of my mother in me. If I hadn’t been born right here in this house, he probably would have thought I was switched at birth.

  Hearing my father’s beery breathing, I looked up from my paper. The tips of my right forefinger and thumb were stained green, and I had emerald smudges dotting my nose and cheeks. My father leaned over me to see what I was doing. Underneath the span of my hand, a line of green ink cartwheeled across the paper.

  “Let me see.” He gathered up my script and held it to the window, where the light shone through the page, making my writing into a vine. Resembles a giant, it read. Clearly out of the bounds of normality. He sighed and put down the paper. It was that new, stuck-up teacher’s writing. Of course, I had no idea what any of it said. He put his hand on my head, wishing he were better at stories, wishing he could make up one now where the giant wasn’t bad, just misunderstood, where the princess was huge—the bigger the better—where beauty on the outside always matched beauty on the inside, wicked queens looked like the hags they were, and uppity schoolteachers were locked in towers for perpetuity.

  “Why don’t you come on down for something to eat?” he asked. “I think we got some tuna. I’ll make you a sandwich.”

  And I, always eager to fill the empty place squatting in the middle of me, followed him down, the green description of me fluttering between my fingers like the thorny stem of a fragrant, poisoned rose.

  Chapter Six

  Come here.” August Dyerson waved one of his veined arms in my direction.

  It was January and frigid in the Dyerson barn, but I was getting used to it. I made my home with the Dyersons now. Six months ago, just after my twelfth birthday, I’d gone downstairs for breakfast and found my father upright on the couch, his cheeks as hard as a piece of old sidewalk, his eyes two rounded buttons that did nothing when I hollered. Serena Jane had come hustling into the room, rubbing sleep out of her eyes, and it took her about two seconds to know what to do. She covered Dad with the ratty afghan and pushed me into the kitchen. “Try not to look,” she said, then called Dr. Morgan, who for the second time in his life had to stare us in the eyes and tell us we had lost a parent.

  Death is different when you can remember it. When my mother died, I was just a newborn—squinty and milk-drunk, half-asleep. This time around, however, I was old enough to notice that besides Mrs. Pickerton, Serena Jane and I were the only women at my father’s burial. The other attendees were his customers from the barbershop—all of whom had enjoyed a nip or two from the bottle with my father.

  Mrs. Pickerton, my sister, and I stood together in a small cluster, away from the men, our bare knees scoured by the humid Aberdeen wind. Next to us, the marble of my mother’s headstone glowed in the mist like a half-forgotten moon. I yearned to go lay my head on the soft grass of her grave, to weep on the black dirt until it turned to mud, but Amanda Pickerton jerked my hand hard and made me stare straight ahead. In that moment, I hated her more than ever, and I hated everyone around me, too—my vain, silly sister, who so far had refused to cry because she didn’t want her eyes puffy for the funeral, the barbershop customers with their hangdog lips and eyes, even my father for leaving me alone on the earth. I was tired of people dying and tired of standing at attention in my itchy clothes. I tried to extricate my hand, but Amanda closed her fingers tighter, like a claw. “Stand still,” she hissed, and gave my arm a vicious yank.
br />   “Poor Lily. Poor Earl,” Dick Crane muttered.

  “Well, he always had damn good whiskey,” Ebert Vickers drawled, stroking his stubble.

  “And now the whiskey has him,” added Roger Thompson.

  Amanda Pickerton cleared her throat in their direction and shuffled my sister and me closer against her. Earlier that day, she had arrived at the house bearing a pair of matching vinyl suitcases. “Whatever you want to keep, place in these valises,” she ordered in her drill sergeant contralto. “Everything else is going to the Salvation Army.” She opened the garment bag she carried so tenderly over her arm and laid out our funeral dresses on our beds and our shoes on the floor underneath them. Serena Jane’s were patent leather, new. Mine were brown boots, but Mrs. Pickerton had shined them, at least, and put in fresh laces. “I’ll be back at two o’clock.” She tipped her wristwatch to her face. “Two o’clock,” she said again, tapping its face, and clipped downstairs. Before the front door even slammed, I raced into my father’s room and took out the box of money he kept under his bed, splitting it even- steven for Serena Jane and me, then hesitated in front of my mother’s bureau, looking for her tortoiseshell mirror. I scooped it up, too, and returned to my room.

  When two o’clock arrived, Serena Jane and I were standing combed and dressed by the front door, our two suitcases side by side in the front hall. Her case was heavier than mine—as if her life had more about it worth keeping—but you couldn’t tell just by looking at them. Instead, you’d have thought they were a perfect set, en route to a common destination. Which was why I was surprised to hear the awful wheeze of the Dyersons’ truck outside the cemetery gate just as my father’s funeral was ending.

  “Hurry,” Amanda Pickerton urged, closing my fingers around a hard clod of Aberdeen dirt. She jutted out her chin toward the grave. “Go on. Throw it down and make your peace. You don’t want to keep him waiting.”

  At first, I thought she meant my father, but as I brushed the loam from my skin, I began to have a sinking feeling in my gut. I peered through the cemetery gate, and in the back of August’s truck, I saw my suitcase strapped down with a piece of frayed rope. “No,” I whispered to Amanda. It was one thing to spend all day at the Dyerson farm, hauling oats to the horses and thrashing through hip-high weeds, but it would be another thing entirely to wake up there every morning to the strangled cries of their anemic rooster. “Let me stay with Serena Jane,” I pleaded, but at that suggestion, Amanda drew back, dismayed. I tried to find my sister’s eyes, but Serena Jane was turned away from me, still bent over our father’s grave in a world of her own, not even one of her ears taking in our conversation. I wondered where her suitcase was, then realized it was probably already at the Pickertons’—unpacked and shoved in a closet, its journey completed. And if I envied my sister anything, it was that—not her looks, not her placid ability to accept what the world gave her, just the fact that she was clearly never going to need to use that ugly suitcase again.

  Amanda pasted a sickly smile across her face. “My dear, staying with us is simply impossible. We don’t have room for the likes of you. You’ll be better off with Brenda and August, believe me. They’re just your sort.” She began steering me toward the truck. “Go on,” she urged, nudging me in the small of my back. “You’ll be fine.”

  August helped me climb in the cab, and Amanda slammed the door. August leaned over and patted my cheek. His fingers scraped like twigs in a high wind, trying to be as gentle as they could. I turned around and checked my suitcase through the back window. “Don’t worry,” August said. “I got it tied down good.”

  “Thanks,” I murmured, but that wasn’t what I was worried about. Not at all. It had simply occurred to me that except for the suitcases, nothing about my sister and me would ever be the same again.

  The Dyersons were the most genuine of upstaters. Weedlike, they had long, complicated roots that stretched back to Tabitha’s drunken brother, James. A veteran of the Civil War, he hadn’t weathered the fighting as well as the first Robert Morgan, having lost a leg in battle along with the livelier portions of his soul. He returned home to Aberdeen on crutches, a wooden leg strapped onto his thigh, his gait unsteady not just from the unfamiliar appendage, but also from the moonshine he’d learned to distill in the hollers of Appalachia. After his sister married Robert Morgan and moved into town, he kept company with the foxes and crows that haunted his farm, growing pale, ragged rows of corn with which to brew more hooch. When he died, the town was astonished to learn not only that James had been keeping a half Oneida woman he’d startled in the woods one afternoon as she was raiding his still, but that he’d also fathered her child.

  “That was Amelia’s great-great-grandfather Jeremy Blood Moon Dyerson,” August drawled with pride out in the barn, patting one of his horses on its tragically bony flank, then reaching over to smooth the dark tangles of his daughter’s hair. “He’s the one we get our powers of intuition from. It’s what makes us so popular around here.” He tapped his forehead and winked, and I stifled a laugh behind my mitten. Whether it was because of their mixed blood or the tangy whiff of grain alcohol that always clung to their clothes, the Dyersons were anything but popular in Aberdeen, and the same went for their unlucky horses.

  August loved the beasts regardless. “They’re winners in their own way,” he said. “The math’s just a little different, is all,” and Amelia nodded in rapt agreement. I stared at the withers of the nearest horse and then at the saggy flanks of August Dyerson and decided that if the world hated its losers, it must loathe its winners even more. What else would explain the rusted windmill decaying in the Dyersons’ yard, I wondered, and the stubborn stones that bloomed in all the farm’s fields, and most of all, the melancholy stare of Amelia, who, with her ink-pot eyes and ability to creep silently into a room, seemed to have inherited some of Jeremy Blood Moon’s gifts of secrecy?

  In my new life with the Dyersons, Amelia and I shared a room, all our meals, and even some clothing (Amelia wore what I outgrew), but I could never overlook the fact that she was the utter antithesis of my sister—dark where Serena Jane was golden, skinny where Serena Jane was plump, and, most important, mute when Serena Jane was busting with opinions about everything from the sorry state of my stick straight hair to the proper angle of the safety pin on her kilt.

  It was Amelia’s silence that was the hardest thing for me to adjust to. For the first time in my life, I was the one doing the bossing, and it was a lonely business, I was discovering, especially given a subject as sleepy-eyed and reticent as Amelia. “Do you want to go outside and play?” I would ask after Brenda had slid some eggs across the beat-up table to us. “Let’s go into the woods behind the barn and look for arrowheads.” But Amelia, absorbed in trailing her fork tines through the runny yolks, wouldn’t answer. I would shovel down my food and stomp outdoors on my own, missing the brashness of Serena Jane, who was always telling me to hurry. The woods, alive with the chattering of insects and the furtive rustling of thousands of leaves, were always a relief after the cavernous weight of Amelia’s quietude.

  One day, however, about six weeks after I’d arrived, she surprised me, slipping up on me so quietly that she reminded me of a deer trying to sneak past a bear. “Play now,” she announced, and handed me a rooster feather.

  My mouth fell slack. “You’re talking.” In all my time spent with the Dyersons, both before and after my father’s death, I’d never heard her utter a solitary word. When she wanted something, she usually pointed or described the object with her hands, and Brenda and Gus obliged.

  “Why doesn’t Amelia ever say anything?” I’d asked Brenda.

  She’d just smiled her slow smile, wiped her hands on her apron, and shrugged. “Does it make any difference?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Well, then, there you go.” And she’d turned back to her oven.

  In the fresh air of the woods, Amelia’s voice emerged rougher than I thought it would, like a curl of tree bark.
“Play now,” she repeated. She had a hard time pronouncing the “l” in play.

  I twirled the feather in my hands, trying to hide my surprise. “What do you want to do?”

  Amelia plopped herself down right there in the dirt and blinked at me. “Story,” she rasped, then closed her lips again, retreating back into her eerie calm. I ran the feather back and forth under my chin. It tickled like velvet. Amelia sat patiently at my feet, staring at me. I stared back. I marveled at the bravery it had taken Amelia to utter those few words and wondered how best to honor it. Amelia became impatient, however, and pounded her little fist in the dirt, so I opened my own mouth and just started saying whatever popped into my head.

  “Once upon a time,” I began, “there was a beautiful princess with an ugly name—Bugaboo. All she ever wanted was for folks to like her, but as soon as she opened her mouth and introduced herself, they about busted their seams laughing. Not only did she have a real silly name, but her voice was about as croaky as an old bullfrog courting in a pond.

  “No one believed Bugaboo was a princess until one day, she found a magic feather, kind of like this here rooster feather.” I held it up. “She thought it was real pretty, and she tucked it in her hair, but it was cursed, and it took away her voice.

  “At first, Bugaboo thought that was a bad thing, but then she realized that no one could laugh at her anymore. And so, she grew up to be the wisest, best, most beautiful princess in the whole world, and she never even needed to speak again, for people just naturally figured out what she wanted before she said it, and she lived happily ever after.”