The Little Giant of Aberdeen County

by Tiffany Baker

  When she did, it was just me feeding the chickens, tossing out handfuls of corn without even really looking where they were falling, the noon sun bludgeoning my vision so that I didn’t see her walk up and then couldn’t see her clearly when she did. I stepped into a patch of shade and blinked. “Hello, sister mine,” she said, her words crisper than they used to be so that I wasn’t sure if she was being mocking or not. Her hair had grown darker. It was the color of honey now and cut a little shorter so that it no longer flowed over her shoulders like a mermaid’s. In fact, from what I could see, nothing much fluid was left of my sister anymore. She was buckled and belted, her slim legs safely encased in nylon, her hem dropped neatly to her knees. There were still some hippies rattling around the state in their death-trap vans, but fashions were starting to change. Serena Jane appeared to have weathered the era with the tired resignation of an old woman.

  “Well,” she said. Her eyes roved across the sky and caught on the outline of the rusted windmill. “Bob Bob and I are back in town now. We just got in last week.”

  “Oh.” I tried to picture my sister as the wife of the town doctor, essentially taking up where Maureen Morgan had left off. I tried to see her wrapped up in one of Maureen’s aprons or bent over Maureen’s flower beds, tending the roses, but I couldn’t do it. “It seems kind of strange that Dr. Morgan is moving away,” I finally said. “None of the other Dr. Morgans ever did that.”

  Serena Jane nodded. “They’re going down to Florida.”

  I scuffed my boot in the dirt, shooing a chicken. “That’s nice.”

  Serena Jane shrugged, as if after eight years in Buffalo, time and space had ceased to matter much. “I got your letter about August. I’m really sorry.” But she didn’t sound sorry. She sounded bored.

  “Thank you,” I mumbled.

  Serena Jane sniffed slightly, her nostrils flaring at the chicken stench like flower petals. “Not that much has changed around here. I suppose you know that Sal Dunfry and her husband are living in Papa’s old house now. They painted it yellow.”

  “I know. They planted daffodils out in the front yard. It looks real nice.”

  Serena Jane sniffed again. “I detest gardening. Do you remember Marcus Thompson? I’ve hired him to come and do the flowers.” I could feel my face grow hot down to the roots of my hair. “He’s wonderful with the garden,” Serena Jane said.

  “Is he?” I tried to keep my voice disinterested.

  Serena Jane snickered. “Anyone would think you’re still sweet on his little bones, Truly.”

  I scowled. “It’s not like that. He’s just my friend.”

  “Whatever.” She swatted at a fly.

  “How’s Bobbie? When can I meet him?” I pictured the puckered, newborn face in the one photograph I possessed of him. “Why have you never sent any photographs? Why haven’t you ever brought him home?”

  Serena Jane stared down at the dirt under her open-toed shoes. “It’s complicated,” she whispered, “but he’s fine, really. He’s good. Growing.” Motherhood had evidently become routine to her. Perhaps the idea that Bobbie would one day detach himself from her seemed like an unbelievable premise.

  I wondered if Maureen Morgan had felt that way when Bob Bob got married and moved off to Buffalo—as though a heavy weight had been cut from her body, freeing it from years of inadvertent torture. Probably she didn’t. Maureen was fundamentally opposite from Serena Jane in most things, curved and doughy while Serena Jane was angular and flat, sentimental while Serena Jane was practical, mousy and faded while Serena Jane was blonder than the sun. Or used to be, at any rate. I wondered if, after a life passed in Maureen’s house, sleeping in the same bed, eating from the same plates, Serena Jane would also start to develop plump calves and a small wattle under her chin. If she would list slightly from side to side when she walked, like a ship plowing a gentle and familiar sea. No, I decided. Those qualities—rotundity, a staid calmness in the face of advancing age—came only to contented people, and you just had to look at Serena Jane to tell she was about as far from that as Aberdeen was from the moon.

  Serena Jane brushed a strand of hair away from her cheek. “You’re staring at me.” She scowled and put one hand up to block the sunlight.

  I blushed. “You look different.”

  “So do you.”

  I had still been half-girl when she got married, but I knew there was no trace left of that person now. Instead, everything on me was square and solid—my cheeks, my eye sockets, even the suggestion of my breasts underneath my baggy man’s shirt. I was taller than most of the men in town, but there was no telling if I’d topped out, and anyway, it wasn’t so much my height that startled folks. It was more my solidity, the way my larger joints bulged like boulders. Serena Jane must have forgotten all that about me.

  She made an O with her mouth—a pretty round shape full of promise, full of all the things she could think to say but didn’t—then she choked out an apology and turned and stumbled back to the dirt road where she had left her car. All the other routes in Aberdeen had gradually been sealed up and paved, but not this stretch. After all, it didn’t lead anywhere. Serena Jane slammed the door of Bob Bob’s new Buick and turned the engine over, her delicate ankle working the gas pedal with an energetic fury. In the rearview mirror, she could see that I’d followed her and was standing next to the farm’s single rusted mailbox, my jaw as slack as the hinges. I waved to her, flapping my beefy hands, but Serena Jane ignored me and shifted the car into drive. She put her foot down harder on the accelerator, relishing the hazy dust the car kicked up.

  Serena Jane narrowed her eyes, wheels spinning over the road and wheels spinning in her head. Maybe it was no accident that she’d ended up stuck back in Aberdeen, it occurred to me, but maybe she wasn’t meant to stay, either. If she’d made a quick check of the mirror, she would have seen my outline wavering in the dust, still there, always there. The bulk of me would follow her wherever she went. But she didn’t look. She drove faster, leaving me alone, but not for too much longer. Serena Jane was spinning a plan that would change all that.

  Part Two

  Chapter Twelve

  The morning my sister left him, Bob Bob woke up and knew it without opening his eyes. It was the absence of the usual odors in the house—the cottony scent of her breath captured in hollow of the pillow next to him, the slightly acrid aroma of coffee wafting up the stairs, followed by the grease of bacon frying. He lay perfectly still in the bed, his nose twitching, but there was nothing.

  His first thoughts should have perhaps been for seven-year-old Bobbie sleeping two rooms down, or even for himself, but they weren’t. Instead, he immediately pictured the expectant plains of Maureen’s face crumpling in disbelief, then the stern angles of his father’s mouth. His parents were all the way down in Florida, but when you were a Morgan man in Aberdeen, you never fully escaped the tidal pull of familial influence. No one in his lineage had ever died in a war, been anything other than a physician, or gotten divorced. Marriage was a lifelong glue.

  Bitch, he thought, even as he stretched his legs wider underneath the covers, savoring the extra space in the rumpled bed. He opened his eyes and scanned the room. Evidently, she hadn’t taken much. Her pale silk dressing gown still hung over the latticing of the chair in the corner, its edges pooled on the floor. The random collection of vials and little pots of face cream on the vanity appeared to be untouched, and even her customary shoes—a pair of low-heeled black pumps—were right where she’d left them. Bob Bob hitched himself onto his elbows. The blankets fell around his midsection. He snorted and threw the fabric off his legs, sliding his feet over the edge of the bed, searching for his slippers.

  Then he waited.

  The house seemed very dull to him, like pond water congealed on a sluggish summer day. He couldn’t imagine living with that sensation for long, and it occurred to him that maybe he would miss Serena Jane after all. Perhaps he’d been wrong, he thought. Maybe Serena Jane was simply in the g
arden with an early cup of tea. Perhaps she’d gone to see one of her old school friends. Perhaps she was downstairs, balancing her checkbook before she started breakfast, or hunched over the sink, working a stain out of one of Bobbie’s shirts. Then he spied the envelope.

  She’d left it where she was sure he would find it—right on top of his medical bag, which he always stood at the foot of the bed. He tore open the envelope and slid out a sheet of unlined paper. In the middle, scrawled in shaky letters made either in haste or from nerves, were two simple sentences: Don’t come look for me. Just find Truly. That was it. Nothing about Bobbie. No explanations or reasons. Not even a signature.

  Bob Bob crumpled his fist with the note in it, then threw the wad of paper in the bedside wastebasket. So she’s gone, he thought. Good for her. Good for him, even. They’d never really been suited, he thought. First, Serena Jane had been a mystery—luminous and aloof—then an obsession, and, more and more lately, she was just a lump of flesh he’d had to coexist with. Every night, they’d brushed their teeth in tandem, taking turns spitting into the enamel sink, then crawled under the rough cotton sheets together, smacking their respective pillows into submission, before turning their backs on each other. He couldn’t remember the last time they’d made love, if he was going to call it that. Ever since the first time, she’d always been a cold fish, nothing like the glamorous, hot-blooded mermaid he’d always expected. In fact, that was the whole problem. Serena Jane had always been a goddamn ice princess.

  Don’t come look for me, her note said. Maybe he wouldn’t, but he wasn’t going to sit back and do nothing, either, and that’s where Serena Jane had made her biggest mistake. If she thought he was going to let her go like rainwater down a drain, she had another think coming. No one walked out on Robert Morgan. At least, no one ever had so far.

  Find Truly. As loath as he was to admit it, Bob Bob finally conceded that this was a fine idea. It was even better than fine. The oxen sister with no future to speak of. The lost cause. Why, Bob Bob bet, I would be more than happy to step into my pretty sister’s shoes. He figured I’d be thrilled.

  And best of all, he reasoned, I was so big, there was absolutely no danger I’d take flight.

  If I was surprised to look through the barn door and spy Robert Morgan (since becoming the town doctor, he’d forbidden anyone from calling him Bob Bob) dragging through Dyerson mud in my direction the morning after my sister left, I’m proud to say that my face didn’t show it. The farm had been getting a lot of visitors lately—most of them men of a certain age who found themselves captivated by the sparkling eyes of the widowed Brenda and were more than happy to prove their gallantry by doing a few chores around the place.

  It had been years since August’s death, and the farm still had a claptrap air hanging over it, but there were cautious signs of optimism in the fresh curtains Brenda had hung in the kitchen windows and in the recently patched steps. The weeds around the porch had been hacked into submission, and someone had taken it upon himself to remove any intact engine parts from the back of the house. Even the marigolds at the end of the tomato bed seemed to stand straighter.

  I was in Hitching Post’s stall, brushing his mangy coat, when the thin outline of Robert Morgan appeared in the door. Hitching Post—the last of the losing racehorses—gave a defeated sigh and shifted his weight.

  “Hush,” I whispered in his ear. In spite of all his physiological flaws, Hitching Post was an excellent judge of character. With unerring instinct, he could ferret out the vainest jockeys on the track and run them into the fence. He always stamped on the crooked veterinarian’s instep, and he absolutely disallowed any of Brenda’s new suitors near him, sensing, perhaps, the dollar signs they had tattooed on their hearts. Now, he flared his nostrils in Robert Morgan’s direction and pulled his ears close to his head. In the dry air of the barn, his breath scuttled like an unsettled breeze.

  “Whoa,” I whispered again in his ear, and Hitching Post relaxed, leaning his weight against me. I tipped my own head down to him, glad to have the horse’s flank between me and Robert Morgan.

  “Hello.” Under the half-rotten rafters of the barn, Robert Morgan’s voice was like a blast of winter. It ate down into my bones and made my breath catch. I peered over Hitching Post’s neck and took a good look at my sister’s husband. He’d grown a little heavier in the torso and legs, and his hair was cut shorter, but his face still had the same angles. I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that he howled at every full moon.

  “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.