The Little Giant Of Aberdeen County Part 20

"Wait!" I fol owed him into the foyer, the floorboards bowing under my feet. "Marcus! Don't go. Not like this. What about Bobbie?"

Marcus looked up at me. His eyes were wet at the corners. "He's just across town, Truly. We both are."

"You know it's not as simple as that." My voice came out rough and b.u.mpy.

Marcus reached up and cupped one of my cheeks the way he had before, and it felt like the sun kissing my skin. "I'l take good care of him, I promise."

I was trying hard not to cry. "I know. And maybe in a little while, Robert Morgan wil come around."

"I don't think that's too likely."

"No. I don't guess it is."

The thing about leavetakings, I've come to learn, is that they're harder to deal with when they're finished. It was only after Marcus closed the front door gently behind him that it occurred to me that my chances of tel ing him I loved him back were about as big as a flea and shrinking. For the first time since I'd arrived, I let myself dream about what it would be like to leave the doctor's house and not even take a suitcase or an extra pair of shoes, but simply to slam the door behind me with a good, hard shake and point my hips out of town and back toward the Dyerson farm. Or maybe toward the cemetery and Marcus.

Behind me, the dark shadow of Robert Morgan was a smudge across the wal , interrupting my thoughts. I sighed. It was useless to dream. No matter how far I went, I would never be free of Robert Morgan's bad temper, and I would never, ever outrun my own problems.

The doctor's voice swept across the room like an arm drawing a curtain. "I want you to clean out Bobbie's room by tonight. Then close the door and leave it that way."

I turned around. "He's stil a boy, you know. He's confused."

Robert Morgan held up the flat of one hand. "By tonight."

"What do you want me to do with his things?"

"Give them away or throw them away. I don't care."

The doctor could scatter Bobbie's possessions to the four winds as if they were bones, I thought, but the ghost of him would stil always be under his skin. I tried to put my thoughts in terms the doctor would understand. "He's stil your son," I said, "no matter what. Your flesh and blood. You can't change the fact of blood."

Robert Morgan blinked, and for the first time, I saw that his eyes reflected light the same way as Bobbie's. Maybe, I thought, there's some common thread still strung between them.

But I was wrong. When Robert Morgan opened his mouth to speak, his lips were set as solid as a gravestone, and I knew that the thread had snapped. "You're quite right," he said. "I can't change biology, but I can change history." He held out his hand as if to introduce himself. "Pleased to meet you," he said. "I'm the first Robert Morgan in five generations without a son."

As the weather began to change from hard snow and ice to the halfhearted slush of spring, I started to wonder if the past and the future were hinged together like a hip socket, one grinding up against the other until something wore out. I had tried so hard not to hate Robert Morgan. For most of my life I'd tried, and now that I saw that Bobbie had hated him, too, I regretted so much il wil . Or maybe not regretted. Regret might have been too strong a word. Repented was a better choice. It implied that while I was wil ing to atone for certain things, I might not be al that sorry about them.

I stil wasn't sorry for what I'd done for Prissy, for starters. The doctor had been livid when he'd found out Prissy had taken her own life, but he'd had no idea it was me who'd helped her do it. Prissy had been careful with the evidence. Now, he started bringing it up again more and more frequently, however, maybe because after my sister and Bobbie, it was one more thing that had gotten away from him or maybe because it was easier for him to focus on an event that didn't matter as much to him.

"I think someone in this town was working against me," he seethed. "Someone must have helped her die. She could have kept fighting. Old women don't just drop dead on their kitchen floor with their lips stained, even if they are sicker than a fish on land."

I shrugged, glad that the quilt was safe up in my room, away from the doctor's diagnostic eyes. "I guess. At least she found peace."

But the doctor continued to worry and fret over the problem until the topic was as frayed and ful of holes as one of August's horse blankets. Every night at supper, Robert Morgan hunched over his plate and ruminated, while I tried to stay as quiet as possible. Without Bobbie in the house, conversation had quickly been reduced to a running monologue on the doctor's part.

"It couldn't have been Reverend Pickerton. He's a G.o.dly man," Robert Morgan surmised, tapping his fork on his plate of roast beef.

"And it wasn't Sal Dunfry. She's so dumb, I doubt she could even mix her own p.i.s.s in water. Amelia's a possibility-she has al those cleaning solutions- but, no, she's too timid. My money's on that little s.h.i.+t gardener. He stil thinks he's so smart, even though I'm the one around here with the medical degree."

At the mention of Marcus, I sat up a little straighter. "That's ridiculous," I interrupted, daubing a smear of pan drippings from my lips. "Marcus was in a war. The last thing he'd want to do is take someone's life. Besides, he's a gardener. He makes things live." But wasn't it also true that gardeners were always wrestling with death, whether in the form of drought, or blight, or hungry insects? In a garden, Marcus always said, death was the first, last, and only fact of life.

The doctor peered at me. "Look at you, al riled up. Don't tel me you're stil stuck on that little creep. Explain to me, exactly, how you think that would ever work out?"

I hung my head. "No, it wouldn't. Besides, it's nothing like that." But I couldn't help remembering the warm sensation of Marcus's hand cupping my cheek and the happy glow of his eyes when they met mine. What do you know about love, I wanted to ask the doctor, when everyone you've ever loved has left you? I laid my knife and fork side by side on my empty plate.

The next night, just to make the doctor shut up, I packed his meat loaf so ful of hot peppers, he couldn't get two words out before his eyes widened and his brow broke out in a sweat. "Sweet mother of the saints," he choked. "What the hel did you put in here?"

I blinked at him mildly. "Oh, is it too hot for you? It just has a little cayenne." Also some dried and powdered hyacinth bulb, but he'd find out about that later in the evening when his stomach started cramping.

The doctor gripped his fork tighter and clenched his teeth. "If you dished it out, I can surely eat it." And he did. Silently. Every last bite.

On his birthday, I laced his turkey roulade with cascara, causing him to spend another evening with cascara, causing him to spend another evening sequestered in his bathroom, and three weeks later, feverfew leaves (so helpful for my headaches) made his tongue swel when he ate them raw in salad. I distil ed borage oil into his coffee and watched his eyes turn a sickly yel ow in two flat weeks and then witnessed sores erupt on his lips after he spooned down a pudding rife with jack-in-the-pulpit.

He started eyeing my meals with some suspicion, sniffing at them the way a dog noses a handout. "What in tarnation has been wrong with your cooking lately, Truly?" he demanded. "Nothing you're putting on the table is agreeing with me."

I fluttered my hands in the air. "Oh, I'm sorry, Robert Morgan. Without Bobbie around, I've been so distracted lately. I guess I'm not good for anything."

The doctor snorted. "What else is new?"

But at the mention of Bobbie's name, his eyes narrowed. "You haven't been sneaking out to see him, have you?"

He popped another bite of meat in his mouth and chewed ponderously. Tonight, it was just plain meat. It occurred to me, however, that I stil had two jars of the deadly mixture left in the pantry. If I wanted to, I could just brew it into the doctor's coffee and end this charade at once. I could set Bobbie and myself free. I blinked, snapping myself out of my thoughts, hoping none of them showed on my face.

"No, of course not."

The doctor set his jaw. "Good. If he wants to be out there on his own, let him. But don't you give him any help from us. If I find you've gone out there"-he fixed his gla.s.sy eyes on me-"so help me G.o.d, Truly, you won't even be able to whisper your apologies. Understood?"

I pushed my chair away from the table.

"Understood." I thought about al the things I knew about Bobbie that Robert Morgan didn't, not to mention al the secrets I'd discovered about Tabitha Morgan, and then I decided that when everything was said and done, I wasn't sorry about keeping any of that information to myself. In fact, if Tabitha Morgan had provided a recipe for blissful ignorance, you couldn't have paid me to take it just then. I wasn't anywhere near through with the doctor yet. It was time to up the ante.

What started off as occasional experiments with Tabby's remedies on Robert Morgan turned into a regular onslaught. Soon I was trying out a new element on the doctor almost every day, incorporating Tabby's dangerous herbs into the doctor's meals the way you disguise medicine in horse feed. I gave him minuscule but repeated doses of oleander, nightshade, and even a little hemlock. At first, nothing seemed to happen. He slurped down his herb soups and scooped his berry pie with relish and then left the table whistling. One morning, though, about a month after I began fooling with his food in earnest, he appeared in the kitchen looking drawn and exhausted, the skin around his eyes pul ed into shadow, his neck a wrinkled sack of tired blood.

"I think I'm going to take the day off today, Truly," he rasped, wrapping his dressing gown tighter. "Cancel my appointments, if you please, and could you bring me up some tea?"

could you bring me up some tea?"

"What's the matter, Robert Morgan?" I asked, trying to hide my smirk behind an expression of concern. "Feeling under the weather?" I knew I was. Maybe it was al the pil s the doctor had me swal owing, but my stomach always felt sour these days. I tried brewing some of Tabitha's teas off the quilt, but even they were no help. My joints ached in spite of the arnica I took, and my eczema just persisted under the cream I'd made up for it. It was as if the more I used the quilt's ingredients for malice, the less they worked for the good.

He coughed into his fist. "Must have caught some sort of bug. Say"-he frowned-"does this porridge taste funny to you?" Moments before his appearance in the kitchen, I had personal y pounded a clutch of wormwood leaves-so renowned for their hal ucinogenic properties-into a pulp and sc.r.a.ped their juices into the cereal.

"No," I said around my teeth as I made a show of swal owing one tiny bite. "Tastes regular to me."

"My tongue's been feeling funny lately."

The doctor scowled. "Like it's swol en or something.

Maybe it's just this infection."

"Maybe," I agreed, "but you never know, do you? Maybe it's witchcraft." I winked.

Robert Morgan appeared stupefied for a moment, then he snickered. "And maybe fairies frolic on the lawn at night. Stil ..." His smile faded. "A checkup wouldn't hurt. I have a col eague over in Hansen. Maybe I'l give him a cal . I haven't been feeling myself lately."

I smiled, the picture of ignorance. "Sure, Robert Morgan. Sounds like a good idea. You medical men should stick together."

He gave me an odd look, but then another coughing spasm rattled his bones. He'd lost so much weight over the past three weeks that even his bedroom slippers looked too big. If I wanted to, now would be the time to finish him off, I thought. Half a jar of Tabby's potion would probably do it.

But what would happen to me if I did that? For one thing, whether I liked it or not, he was the only one who knew what was wrong with my body, the only one with half a chance of curing me, and I wanted to get better, I decided. Marcus had given me a reason to hope. And there was always Bobbie.

I rinsed the pulped wormwood leaves out of their bowl and then emptied the doctor's half-eaten cereal into the sink. Maybe I would ease up on using Tabitha's cures, I mused. It was true that I stil had a kettle of resentment against the doctor set on hard boil in my heart, but fanning the flames of it hadn't real y made me feel any better. It hadn't changed anything at al , in fact. I was stil stuck in Robert Morgan's house, stil big as a barn, and for al they were worth, Tabby's herbs were lately proving about as useful to me as a dram of water pul ed up from a tainted wel . Maybe it was time to come clean again.

Chapter Twenty-four.

When it was clear that Bobbie real y wasn't coming home, I knew it was time to do what Robert Morgan was urging and pack up his belongings as neatly as I could in cardboard boxes. Amelia came over to help me take them to the farm for safekeeping. I promised myself that one day Bobbie would get them back, but as we b.u.mped along the road to the open fields and weather-eaten barn, I temporarily forgot al about Bobbie and stared around me in amazement.

This was the first time I'd been back since I'd left. Two years before, Brenda had married one of her creditors and moved to Saratoga Springs, where she drove a Cadil ac, learned to drink wine, and routinely tried to convince Amelia to sel off the farm. Amelia wasn't likely to, though, not while August's bones were stil sunk in the fal ow fields. There are some things in life too painful to let go of, much as we want to. Instead, Amelia had somehow found the means to mend the fences, patch the chicken coop, repair the windmil , and patch the chicken coop, repair the windmil , and rewire, repaint, and refurbish the house. The only thing that looked remotely similar was the old barn. In August's time, it had already been an open proposition for owls and mice, but now I found the sight of its rotten beams and exhausted roof too melancholy to bear.

"How much longer do you think before it tumbles back to the ground?" I asked, unloading one of Bobbie's boxes from the truck bed.

Amelia glanced over her shoulder and shrugged. Out here, away from the scrutiny of town, her lungs fil ed easily with air, and her voice rang true. "It's leaning al right, but it won't fal . Daddy's ghost is stil in there some."

I saw what she meant. Just like August, the barn wasn't quite ready to throw in its hand, even when al the odds looked to be bad. I set Bobbie's box on the front porch. "Wel , the place looks great.

You must have worked so hard."

Amelia blushed. "I didn't do it al on my own. I had some help."

"What do you mean?" Besides me, I couldn't think of any of Amelia's friends. There were her clients, of course-most of them people, like Vi Vickers, that we'd both known forever-but I don't think any of them thought of Amelia as anything more than someone who scoured their homes and then slipped away for another week.

"Come on, I'l show you."

She took my hand and led me around the back of the house. As we rounded the corner, I sucked in my breath. Gone were the rusted auto parts that no longer fit any specific machinery.

Likewise the rotten picket fence, the hil ocks of weeds, and the bald patches of scratched-up dirt.

Instead, a garden was just beginning to poke through the early spring ground-planted in a round, gentle spiral. I instantly recognized the design.

"It's Marcus's garden," I breathed, and Amelia blushed again.

"He's only been working on it a few weeks, but he's sure got a lot done. He said he's been scratching around for a place to plant, so I told him I had more than enough room. Look..." She walked in between a narrow row of sprouts. "We're going to have peppers, and beans, and eggplant, I think." In spite of the chil y air, her cheeks were a vivid pink, and her eyes were aglow. I thought I could suddenly see what had attracted Marcus to gardening out here besides a free plot of land.

Seething with jealousy, I turned my back on the plants. "Can we put these boxes inside now?

I'm freezing." It was a lie- nothing made me cold- but I didn't want Amelia to see the envious set of my mouth.

She looked confused, then hurt. "Okay."

What I real y wanted to do was linger in the tidy lines that Marcus had scored into the earth. I wanted to sit in the exact center of the spiral and wait for the plants to unfurl themselves. I wanted them to climb and rove over my limbs until I burst into bloom with them. But it was Amelia who was going to get to harvest the thick-skinned peppers and gather up baskets of waxy beans. It was Amelia who would be waving to Marcus through the kitchen window, inviting him in for a plate of her fresh-cooked succotash and smoked ham. A column of bile rose in my throat.

"Truly, what's the matter?" Amelia put a hand on my forearm, but I shook it off.

"I have to get back soon. I've got the doctor's dinner to fix."

Amelia looked as though she wanted to say something, but a lifetime of swal owing words is a hard sea to swim against. I wonder now if she recognized jealousy in my glare or if she chalked my mean mood up to some flaw in herself; but knowing Amelia, I figured it was the latter. She may have had a whole lovely garden spread out at her feet, but in her heart, she stil thought of herself as a weed- unlovely, uncultivated, un- welcome even in her own backyard. Everything in the world has its two faces, however. Weeds sometimes blossom into artful flowers. Beauty walks hand in hand with ugliness, sickness with health, and life tiptoes around in the horned shadow of death. The trick is to recognize which is which and to recognize what you're dealing with at the time. At any given moment, you can tip the balance just a little, one way or the other, if you're paying attention, but that afternoon I wasn't. I was too preoccupied with the hard stones rol ing around inside my own heart.

"Come on," I sighed. "Let's go inside."

After ten years away, the bra.s.s handle of the Dyersons' back door stil felt familiar in my palm.

the Dyersons' back door stil felt familiar in my palm.

I wondered if the house stil smel ed like beeswax and vanil a, and the icebox stil made a whining noise like a mosquito. I so badly wanted to take in one more gulp of Marcus's garden before I entered, but I didn't want to give Amelia the satisfaction, and truth be told, I didn't want to give it to myself, either.

For years I'd been caught up in my memory of the place, and now here it was in front of me, real, and I wasn't sure what to think.

Amelia deserved an explanation for my mood, I knew, so I screwed up my courage and attempted to provide her with one. "It's the garden," I choked. "It's the same one Marcus wanted to plant at the doctor's. I thought-it's just that... wel , I thought it was supposed to be special."

Amelia's eyes fil ed with comprehension.

"Special for you, you mean."

I ducked my head. "Something like that."

She smiled. "But it is special. Don't you see that? Just because it's planted here doesn't make it any different. He stil planted it. He stil brought it into being."

I raised up my head, stil slightly dizzy with the swirling design of Marcus's garden. "Oh," I breathed. A tiny pulse of hope began to throb in my chest.

Amelia stepped closer across the porch to me. "Truly, he cares for you. It's obvious. He always has. Why don't you do something about it?

Bobbie's gone now. He's not coming back-you know he's not. What do you have left to stay at the doctor's for? Why don't you move back out here with me? It'l be like the old days. Come home."

Home. The word reverberated down my bones. Most people had one definite place they cal ed home, but for me, it was different. Did I choose the doctor's house, where Bobbie used to be and where I'd lived so long? Or the Dyerson farm, where August's bones lay and where there was enough s.p.a.ce to make me feel smal ; or was it the cramped wooden house of my childhood, where my mother and father had both died? I reached again for the bra.s.s doork.n.o.b, antic.i.p.ating the familiar wave of aromas that would envelop me when I opened the door. I thought one last time of Marcus's garden, sorry to leave it behind me.

The only thing holding me at the doctor's house now was the addictive bite of revenge, but its teeth were long and hooked, and I wasn't at al sure anymore how to extricate myself from them. I was dependent on the doctor for the medicine he gave me, but I was also finding that I had sprouted unexpected roots under his roof, and the thought of tearing them up to move-even somewhere as familiar as the farm-gave me pause. I guess I was like a creeper strangling a tree with slow determination. Now that I had reached the very top branch, I saw, there was nowhere left to go but back the way I'd come.

When I arrived back at the doctor's, Robert Morgan was sitting in the kitchen-unusual enough for him, but doubly so because al the lights were turned off.

He was sitting so stil , I almost didn't see him. He waited until I had my coat off, and then his voice sc.r.a.ped the air with the precision of a razor. "You've been out a long time."

been out a long time."

I shook my black coat off my shoulders and laid it over the back of a chair before sitting down. Predictably, the wood groaned beneath me. I wanted to shout, to spit sparks and brimstone, but I was so tired, I managed only gruff irritation. "I took Bobbie's stuff away."