The Little Giant of Aberdeen County

by Tiffany Baker

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2009 by Tiffany Baker

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Grand Central Publishing

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBrookGroup.com.

  First eBook Edition: January 2009

  ISBN: 978-0-446-54334-7

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Part One

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Part Two

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Part Three

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Epilogue

  For Edward

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you first and foremost to Dan Lazar, my champion agent at Writers House, who always believed in this novel. And then to my sterling editor, Caryn Karmatz Rudy at Grand Central Publishing, for making my vision come true. Words aren’t enough.

  Thanks to everyone in the Drever clan, especially Jan, Papo, and Lala for taking the pictures and amusing the kiddies. Thanks to my own tribe: Ned, Willow, Raine, and Auden. You all are the reason for everything.

  And a special remembrance for some souls who have traveled on ahead: Joe, Tommy, Mimi, Wyby, and Wendy. Peace.

  Part One

  Prologue

  The day I laid Robert Morgan to rest was remarkable for two reasons. First, even though it was August, the sky overhead was as rough and cold as a January lake; and second, it was the day I started to shrink.

  I remember standing by the open grave, the muddy earth clotted like wet dung, waiting for Robert Morgan’s body to be lowered into the hole. The other, scattered mourners had begun to take chill and leave, but I wasn’t cold. There were layers and layers of me folded together like an accordion. So many that I would be warm in a blizzard. I could stand naked at the North Pole and be just fine.

  I watched the coffin drop slowly into the ground, the supporting velvet ropes sliding under its belly like devious snakes. Before his death, the doctor had chosen a mahogany casket trimmed with brass and lined with a somber maroon satin. He brought a picture of it home to show me, and I examined it with suspicion. It looked phony somehow, like something you would find at Disneyland or a waxworks museum. All of it was too perfect. Now, however, as it settled with a lonely thump at what seemed like the bottom of the world, I saw that it would rot as soon as anything else down there, brass scrolls or no. I pictured Robert Morgan laid out in the elaborate box, his hair slicked down over his scalp like an otter’s, his spindly fingers gnarled together in a knot over his heart, awaiting judgment.

  I had chosen the doctor’s favorite black suit for his burial, had brushed the cloth carefully before delivering it to the undertaker’s with a striped tie curled in one of the pockets, socks and underwear stuffed in another. I didn’t know why a dead man needed underpants, but there you had it. If Robert Morgan had been giving the directives, he would have insisted on aftershave, a belt, and cuff links, but since he wasn’t calling the shots anymore, I left these items home. Now that the doctor was shut up in his box and I would never see him again, I wondered what the undertaker had done to close the cuffs on his shirt. Did he keep a spare pair for such an occasion? Had he used wire or thread? The plastic twist ties from a garbage bag?

  I threw a fistful of earth onto the coffin and held my breath for the accompanying thud. I thought of all the patients Robert Morgan had buried and wondered if any of them were down there, waiting to meet him. If so, were they a polite ensemble with decorously folded hands or a nasty throng, eager to anoint him with the press of rotten flesh? I thought of all the other Dr. Robert Morgans scattered around the cemetery—four of them in total—and imagined one subsuming the other like those cannibalistic Russian nesting dolls, the parts of them mixed together into a Frankenstein monster of local history.

  I shifted my bulk, kicking more dirt and pebbles down on the casket. Along the sides of the grave, the exposed roots of weeds and trees dangled their anemic arms, as if pleading for clemency. I was reminded of Robert Morgan’s dying patients who would come to the house and beg the doctor to do something—anything—to end their pain. They used metaphors of burning, of hot steel, or of blades carving a mysterious alphabet into their bones, rewriting the familiar language of the senses until they were desperate and confused. That’s how Dr. Morgan saw them, at least. “Pay them no mind, Truly,” he’d say, shaking his head as a son would lead a mother down the sagging porch steps or a hunched woman would teeter down them on her last strength, her fiery hands wrung in despair. “They are no longer themselves.”

  But I thought differently. Robert Morgan might have rolled the naked flesh of his patients under his palms, probed their organs with his skeleton fingers, but he never paid a whit of attention to their souls. If one ever did emerge, slit free of the body by an incandescent blade of pain, Robert Morgan simply would have had no reference point for it. He prescribed morphine, suggested supplements, provided balms and creams, but he had no answer for the naked yearning to get it all over and done with. In his mind, the body was a self-regulating clock. It would wind down on its own volition and in its own time, and the soul would just have to accept it.

  Of course, toward the end of his own life, the doctor had really not been himself at all. Swaddled in the famous Morgan family quilt in his bedroom, he’d howled, and thrashed, and finally just whimpered, his whole body coated in a fine sheen of sweat that lent him a radiance I didn’t think he deserved. I brought him chicken broth on a tray and ice cubes to suck, cold compresses for his head. And when Robert Morgan grew delirious, crying out for his estranged wife and the son who’d left him, I took the doctor’s own advice to heart and paid him no mind. “Robert Morgan, you’re not yourself,” I’d say, gently dabbing the new crevasses in his lips with petroleum jelly.

  Now all that was over, shut up forever in Robert Morgan’s brass-studded box. For the first time in a hundred and fifty years, Aberdeen was left with neither a Robert Morgan in it nor a doctor, but rather than feeling as raw as the open grave in front of me, I was surprised to find myself completely numb. I thought about returning to the house I’d lived in with Robert Morgan for the past decade, a dinner of roast beef and green beans covered and waiting for me on the stove, a table setting for one laid out in the kitchen, television later. But for the first time in my life, I wasn’t hungry
.

  I didn’t normally leave the doctor’s white-gabled house unless I could help it. My childhood companion, Amelia Dyerson, came to clean the doctor’s premises once a week, bringing groceries, and in the spring, summer, and early fall, Marcus Thompson, another childhood friend, clipped the garden to kingdom come. These visits—Marcus slurping lemonade on the back porch, a sodden bandanna slung around his neck; Amelia muttering over her feather duster—constituted enough society for me. There had also been Robert Morgan’s patients, of course, but they weren’t always in the mood to chat. They entered a different part of the house, anyway, and departed with their heads bowed, locked into themselves, chastened by the disobedience of their own bodies.

  If anyone ever asked, I could have told them all about that feeling. How it felt, for instance, to watch as my limbs stretched and spread of their own volition, as if I were some sort of mutating lizard. What it was like to sit on the Morgan family furniture and hear it creak and complain, threatening to split for good if I eased back any farther. How, when I stepped on the scale in Robert Morgan’s examining room, the weights never wanted to balance but slid all the way to the ends of their metal strips, as if giving up in the monumental task of measuring me.

  “Any bigger and you could get work in a sideshow, Truly,” Robert Morgan chuckled during the last exam he gave me, and noted my weight on one of the endless charts he kept. Somewhere in his filing cabinet, a growing library of papers told a thousand and one versions of the strange story of my body. The doctor exhaled on his stethoscope to warm it, then slipped the metal disk in between the complicated folds of my breasts. “You’re like the fat lady who died in the circus, and who was so big, she could only be moved by the hippo cart.” I sighed. I knew the story. He told it to me every time he examined me—as a kind of parable, I suppose, a fable about the laughable indignities of excess.

  He moved the metal circle to the other side of my chest and arched his eyebrows. “It’s true. I promise you that. One hundred percent. Good thing you’re not in the circus, eh, Truly? By the way, how’s the heart? Any pangs or pains you want to share?” I shook my head and said nothing about the melancholic roots that were spreading through my body like willow reeds. Robert Morgan didn’t need to know anything about those, I thought, especially since he’d caused most of them.

  Some people in this world are born bigger than life, and some grow to be that way, but I know it’s not a matter you can pick and choose. If it were, then I would opt to be doll-sized. Maybe even a dwarf. Then I’d have to be carried everywhere I went, ceremonially, in a sedan chair borne on the oiled shoulders of nubile young men. I would pick out a seat of gold with scrollwork of its own, maybe even a dragon or two, and hire children with clashing cymbals to accompany me, singing out my name. My life would be like a parade. As it happens, however, my feet are bigger than most men’s, along with my hands, my hips, my neck, and the vast expanse of my shoulders and back. And the only parade I’ve ever attended is the defunct May Day festival, where the mayor used to drive a gaggle of the town’s prettiest girls down Main Street in his convertible. Every year, it was the same. Dick Crane, senile in the end but still able to perform this one civic task, beeped the horn of his classic Caddy, and the girls all screamed and waved, hysterical with their own beauty.

  Even before I gained all the weight, my body pressing outward like a balloon getting ready to take flight, I was always huge. Solid as granite, my father used to say, and twice as thick. Not like your sister, that’s for sure. Serena Jane takes after your mama. A real living doll. Which was, after all, the whole reason Robert Morgan wanted my sister in the first place, even if he had to stalk her and steal her away like the wolf in a fairy tale. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if it had been the other way around—if Serena Jane had been the one pursuing Robert Morgan. Most likely he would have turned tail and run, his long, lupine teeth chattering in fear. Robert Morgan never liked a thing in his life unless he got to take the first bite out of it, and he never let a thing go, either, until it was chewed all the way down to skin and bone. Even his narrow, prowling walk told you he was a man of limitless appetite—hungry all the time and yet never filled all the way up. Not like Serena Jane, who was about as dense as spun sugar, who picked and pushed at her food and grew so light that she eventually flew away, and certainly not like me, who always ate what was given to me but who, anyone could see, always ended up paying double for it.

  After the burial, I veered from the main path of the cemetery, headed deeper into the graveyard to pay my respects to other souls. If I’d turned around and looked, I would have noticed that the trail of my footsteps through the grass was growing lighter and less emphatic, but I just trudged with my nose pointing to the bulging wilderness of my abdomen, my chins tucked up tight against my neck, my thoughts lost in the familiar ocean of my own labored breathing. The other mourners gathered themselves, shaking the sound of dirt thudding on the doctor’s coffin from their ears, drifting back toward town and the wake.

  The jagged iron gates of the cemetery glittered in the distance, the black spikes sticking up into the darkening afternoon like a row of rotten teeth. They reminded me how Robert Morgan’s breath had stunk right before he died, as if his body were cleaning house, sweeping out all its rank corners and dubious crannies before it gave up its ghost once and for all.

  A bitter gust of wind skidded up behind me and lashed at the backs of my legs. I was wearing a black rayon dress I’d sewn myself—a sacklike, drooping shroud of a garment that did little to disguise my bumps and bulges—and no stockings because there just weren’t any that would fit. On my feet, I had the black workman’s boots I wore from October to April, and over everything I’d draped a moth-eaten greatcoat from the doctor’s attic, which still only barely gripped the plinths of my shoulders.

  At the burial, I’d stood with Amelia. I knew that people were whispering and nudging one another, darting significant looks when I heaved myself right up to the grave’s edge, panting like a dying elephant. At least we don’t need to worry about her falling in, Vi Vickers had muttered to Sal Dunfry.

  Sal had giggled behind her imported calfskin glove. She’d get stuck halfway down. I blushed, but Amelia, who’d cleaned the doctor’s office for the past ten years and probably had enough dirt on him to bury him herself, pointed out that I was an angel to have put up with Robert Morgan for so long and that no one, least of all decent people with good sense, should be mocking me. Sal shut up then but cast another dubious glance at my lank hair and fleshy limbs and concluded that Amelia Dyerson was blind as well as dumb. She gave a backward glance over her shoulder as she left the graveyard, watching as I lumbered away from her. Truly’s no angel, I heard Sal snicker to Vi, rearranging the buttery folds of her cashmere scarf closer against the unusual weather. Why, for one thing, she’d take up half of heaven, and for another, she’s too big to get off the ground.

  An irate crow flapped out of the nearby trees, squawking its displeasure, leaving its bare branch vibrating in the unseasonable cold. The noise made me look around at the world, the ground cosseted with a freak blanket of frost, the headstones stark as ancient relics. I peered up at the sky, the light dwindling to an echo of azure, and watched the crow flap its way to the horizon. And at that moment, the hard stone I’d been carrying around in my chest—the one that weighed as much as all of Aberdeen’s tombstones piled together, the one that kept me pinned inside Robert Morgan’s house, even on days when the town roses made the air into a honeyed liqueur—that stone began to melt, sending oily tears slicking down my cheeks. I wiped them away, ashamed to be blubbering over something as silly as a crow bobbing in a great big sky, but relieved, nonetheless, to be standing under something huge enough to contain me. You see, for the first time in longer than I could remember, I’d found something larger than me.

  Chapter One

  Technically speaking, I guess you could say I killed Robert Morgan, but I did it only because he insisted on it, and because
death had clearly already gotten its mealy hands on him, and because I knew the very act of asking must have made him madder than hell.

  “Look at me,” he’d cackle from the foul nest of covers on his bed, “and then take a look at you. It just doesn’t seem right.” I knew what he meant. Let’s just say I had more than my fair share of resources shoring up my bones. “You could live through two winters back to back, Truly,” he rasped. “You could swallow the whole damn world, and no one would notice.”

  He was lying under his great-grandmother’s famous quilt, the one embroidered all over with flowers and vines, some of them nice and neat inside a diamond-edged border and the rest running riot around the edges. It was a peculiar piece of work all right. In fact, if you looked at it hard enough, you might get to thinking it was almost two quilts—the tidy, inner square worked up all careful and the crazy border that looked like a floral explosion. That’s what I’d concluded, at least, after ten years of staring at the thing.

  Soon enough, the doctor quit talking altogether. At first, I welcomed this development, banging into his room with trays of food I knew he couldn’t eat but tormented him with anyway. “That story about the dead lady in the hippo cage?” I asked, waving a spoonful of tapioca under his nose. “It’s the dumbest thing I ever heard. So what if it’s true?” I watched him shake his head, then popped the pudding into my own mouth and rolled the beads across my tongue, satisfied with their slick sweetness. “For one thing, what’d they do with the hippo? And for another, you don’t even know any of the details that would make the story really good. For instance, what kind of coffin did they put her in? Or did they just throw her body in the cage and pull her along to a giant hole in the ground?”

  I leaned down so close, I knew he could see the tiny hairs that limned my upper lip. “Do you want to know the difference between a good story and the truth?” When he didn’t respond, I went ahead and gave him the answer. “The little bits, Robert Morgan. That’s all. If you get those right, you can get away with murder.” I smiled and patted his arm. Then I finished off the tapioca.