Tiffany Baker - The Little Giant of Aberdeen County

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the authors 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

For Edward

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 arent 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.

T he 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 Morgans body to be lowered into the hole. The other, scattered mourners had begun to take chill and leave, but I wasnt 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 otters, his spindly fingers gnarled together in a knot over his heart, awaiting judgment.

I had chosen the doctors favorite black suit for his burial, had brushed the cloth carefully before delivering it to the undertakers with a striped tie curled in one of the pockets, socks and underwear stuffed in another. I didnt 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 wasnt 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 cemeteryfour of them in totaland 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 Morgans dying patients who would come to the house and beg the doctor to do somethinganythingto 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. Thats how Dr. Morgan saw them, at least. Pay them no mind, Truly, hed 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, hed howled, and thrashed, and finally just whimpered, his whole body coated in a fine sheen of sweat that lent him a radiance I didnt 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 whod left him, I took the doctors own advice to heart and paid him no mind. Robert Morgan, youre not yourself, Id say, gently dabbing the new crevasses in his lips with petroleum jelly.

Now all that was over, shut up forever in Robert Morgans 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 Id 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 wasnt hungry.

I didnt normally leave the doctors white-gabled house unless I could help it. My childhood companion, Amelia Dyerson, came to clean the doctors 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 visitsMarcus slurping lemonade on the back porch, a sodden bandanna slung around his neck; Amelia muttering over her feather dusterconstituted enough society for me. There had also been Robert Morgans patients, of course, but they werent 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 Morgans 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.