The Little Giant of Aberdeen County (26 page)

I had a choice, it seemed. The hand or the heart. The hand suggested touch, and therefore skin, to me, but the heart had to represent blood. I scowled, then decided to combine the two. But how? I wondered. In a tea? A pulp? Was I just meant to eat the leaves raw and whole? Tabby’s embroidery didn’t recommend a delivery system—just the raw ingredients. I studied the plants on the quilt some more. I didn’t know all of them yet but could pick out comfrey, chickweed, and prickly ash underneath the heart and hand. Well, that would have to do, I thought. And even better, I could find them anywhere. I wouldn’t have to go out to the cemetery. In fact, that was one of the remaining mysteries of the quilt for me. Why had Tabitha included the jagged fence of Aberdeen’s cemetery? Half the plants she’d sewn grew willy-nilly anywhere you could spit in Aberdeen. There was no need to trek all the way to the town graves. I tilted my head and stared at the quilt from a different angle.
Maybe
, I reasoned,
the graveyard is simply the one place where all the plants grow
. It was the answer I came back to again and again.

My eyes lingered on the tiny set of lips puckered over sprigs of peppermint and chamomile.
The mouth,
I thought. Gateway to the stomach. Peppermint was good for digestion. Almost everyone knew that. Then my heart leapt a little in my chest. What if Tabitha had known something more? I wondered. What if she could take away the appetite as well as cure it? I thought back to my humiliating examination with Robert Morgan. What if I could beat him at his own game? What would I need? Peppermint, the quilt suggested, and chamomile. Rosehips and dandelion greens. But would these make me hungrier? I had no idea. There was only one way to find out.

A pulp, I finally decided, would be the easiest thing to make for both my problems: the cut on my hand and the hunger rumbling in my stomach. I could mash up the respective stems and leaves, smearing one paste on my wound and infusing the other mixture into a sort of tea.

I waited until the household was asleep, then snuck into the garden by the light of the moon. I hadn’t been outside at night in longer than I could remember, and the wet air was a welcome shock along the walls of my throat. I inhaled in big, greedy gulps, my ears keening to the rollicking of crickets, letting my eyes get used to the dark. Up in the house, the doctor’s window was still illuminated, the curtains squeezed tight, so that the glass glowed in a muffled way. I moved quickly, hoping he would attribute all the noise I was making to the restless shenanigans of a skunk or opossum.

Back in the kitchen, I found the mortar and pestle and mashed up handfuls of twigs and leaves into a slick green mess. “Truly?” The doctor’s wooden voice floated down the stairs. “Is that you making all that ruckus?”

“Yes, Robert Morgan,” I called back, scooping the paste into a bowl. “I’m just fixing a little snack.”

I thought I heard him snigger, then the house fell silent again. The cut on my finger throbbed and oozed under its bandage, as if it were literally crying out for a poultice. I ripped off the bandage and applied a generous blob, wincing against the heat that started to build up. I smeared more on and then more again and even daubed the burn on my forearm, then wrapped my hand in a clean dish towel, setting the empty bowl in the sink for the morning.

I poured boiling water over the second mixture and watched it cloud. A pleasant steam rose up from the rim of the cup, redolent with mint. I inhaled the vapor and took a cautious sip, expecting to taste bitterness, but not so much of it. I pulled a face and tried another slurp, then poured the rest down my open throat.

That night I dreamed about my sister, but in my imagination she was all mixed up with Tabitha Morgan, her long hair tucked under a silk bonnet, her hips swathed in pleats of calico. She was laughing and spinning, and when I tried to reach out and touch her, she danced away from my grasp. “Wait,” I called, but she just spun faster and faster until the sprigs on her skirts turned into huge cabbage roses, and I woke to the cloying scent of their oils seeping under the crack in my window.

It was quite late. The sun was already up over the lilacs and headed toward the clouds. I sat up and unwound the dish towel from my hand. The green paste had hardened to a kind of glue, but when I rinsed it off in the bathroom sink, I found that the skin around my wound was puckered up as tight as a pair of lips for a kiss, and the place where the burn mark had been was pink and smooth once again. I flexed my hand and noted that the pain was gone as well. The cut would almost certainly leave a scar, but that didn’t bother me in the least. I could just add it to the list of all my body’s other indignities.

I walked into the kitchen, whistling. The doctor was already at the table, legs crossed, sipping a glass of orange juice and perusing the morning paper. “What’s that in the sink?” he asked. He was either sneering or reacting to the lemon juice I’d mixed in with the orange juice—I couldn’t tell which.

I hustled over to the sink and quickly swabbed the remaining paste out of the bowl. “Nothing. Just my snack from last night. Remember?”

Robert Morgan snorted. He was definitely sneering, I decided. “What in heaven’s acres was it? Looks like something you would have fed August’s beat-up horses. Don’t tell me you’re on some kind of crazy diet. Because I doubt that much you do in that department will ever help.”

Anger crackled in my nostrils and ears like static. Inside my boots, I curled my toes, then did the same with my tongue. I would have liked nothing better than to tip the jug of juice over the doctor’s head and watch it ooze down his collar, but with a man like Robert Morgan, you were better off keeping your elbows close to your sides, your head down, and your feelings to yourself.

“A diet?” I echoed. “No, no. Nothing like that. Of course you’re right, Robert Morgan. I was just trying a recipe that didn’t work out, that’s all.”

But he was uninterested in my explanation. Already, he was folding the paper back into thirds and shrugging on his coat, his mind racing ahead of him to the appointment book on his desk.

“It’s going to be a hot one today, Truly,” he crowed as he opened the back door. “Make sure you open all the windows.”

I reached for the eggs. “Wait, don’t you want your breakfast?”

“You have it. I’m not hungry.” He swept across the porch, and I was alone once again save for the empty bowl in the sink and the odor of roses lingering like a sweet dare.

Chapter Eighteen

I
consider myself guilty of plenty of things, but probably not the crimes you’d assume. I don’t regret sending Robert Morgan to meet the Maker, for instance. I don’t regret it a bit. After all, it was his original idea. As for the other two souls I’ve doctored, well, each case came with its own dark face for me to stare down.

Is what I’ve done right? Maybe. Some people in Aberdeen call it a mercy. Some mutter that it’s the doing of witches and devils—the work of Tabitha Morgan and her infernal quilt all over again. And in a sense, they’re correct. It is, after all, her recipes that I use, both for giving comfort and for darker purposes. But here’s something I’ve never done—I’ve never made a decision for anyone one way or another. People come to me first and foremost, sometimes for healing, sometimes for more, but they are the ones who do the asking. Why don’t I refuse? you might wonder. Why don’t I just say, “No, I won’t, end of story”?

Believe me, I think about it sometimes, but there is this to consider: There is the unrivaled power of death to even out the past. In particular, my past. I used to think I couldn’t change my history, that the things that happened to me were as good as grooved in my bones, but each time I take a life, I find otherwise. I uncover another long-lost layer of my past, another strip of my soul.

Usually, it’s no mystery why someone wants life to end. Sickness, for the most part. Sometimes debt, although I won’t take those cases. It’s not my business to judge, only to determine. But I can’t discount the weight of the past on the present moment—it’s nothing I can see, but always there all the same, like an invisible stone sinking a ship. And it’s never the people I suspect of meddling with the past who are guilty of it, either. Friend or foe, anyone is capable of scuttling a few innocent details, omitting one or two facts, and changing a life forever. It’s another thing entirely whether they choose to admit it.

Before I moved in with the doctor, I wouldn’t have called myself vengeful, but the longer I was under his roof, the more I began to feel spite tugging on my sleeve like a fitful child. Mostly it was because of the absence of my sister, which lingered in the house like a rank odor we all tried to ignore. The doctor accomplished this by alternating vast periods of silence with harangues about my weight, my looks, my cooking, and my general existence.

“A big bird for a big woman,” he snickered when I brought out the turkey I’d roasted for Thanksgiving. “Your sister always made Cornish hens, but I guess that would be nothing more than a light snack for the likes of you, Truly. Son”—he lifted up a piece of breast meat and turned to Bobbie—“pass your plate and prepare to be stuffed!” He chuckled a little at his seasonal joke, disregarding the tears hanging in the corners of Bobbie’s eyes and completely overlooking the fact that Bobbie was still getting over the loss of his mother.

“Thanks,” Bobbie mumbled, his voice as dry as the meat on his plate, and then proceeded to eat nothing, not even the pumpkin pie or the fudge I’d made special for the day.

After every maddening meal, after every one of the doctor’s humiliating medical exams, I took the opportunity to retreat to the warmth of my bedroom and Tabitha’s quilt, studying its strange botanical whorls and lines while I tried to pound the malice inside me back down to a manageable ball.

Thanks to Marcus, I had become familiar with the names of the herbs, but the overall design of the thing still puzzled me. The plants in the middle of the quilt were easy. Everything I expected to be there pretty much was. There was peppermint, and comfrey, sage, and lavender, borage, chamomile, and rosemary. Lined up in neat little rows, sewn demurely on neat white squares, they suggested a host of remedies. With Marcus’s help, I had dried a measure of herbs in individual jars and stored them in the pantry next to the spices. During my quiet evenings, I went over the lists of plants and body parts I had made, trying to decode the quilt.

The stitched eye stood for vision, I figured, so the herbs underneath it must have been good for sight. I wrote down bilberries, chrysanthemum, honeysuckle, and horsetail. And sure enough, when I developed a sty on my left eyelid, a poultice of these plants soon took down the swelling. Encouraged by my success, I used the mixture I’d made for the cut on my own finger to soothe Bobbie’s scraped knees, warning him not to tell his father. I hadn’t yet gotten a chance to try any of the remedies underneath the quilt’s bone, but I figured Tabitha had meant those plants to be used for fractures and breaks. Likewise, I was guessing that the heart stood for circulation and blood. The hand denoted skin to me, and the lips suggested eating and therefore the stomach. Every night before I went to sleep, I drank a cup of peppermint-chamomile tea, as the quilt suggested, and while my digestion was always just fine, I was sorry to find that the size of my appetite remained the same.

The only motif I couldn’t figure out were the wings that fluttered along the edges of the quilt. Maybe they were just a decoration, I reasoned. Or maybe they meant nothing at all. The plants on the outskirts of the quilt certainly weren’t as well behaved as the ones in the middle. Actually, they were more like weeds. They twisted and seethed, tangled their roots, seeds, and bulbs, and spread themselves into a snarl. Furthermore, not one of them could boast of anything but a bad reputation—like devil’s trumpet, a white scoop of flower whose seeds could pickle a hippo. And there were hemlock leaves, and belladonna, the oblong shapes of oleander leaves, and raggedy nightshade. Marcus had refused to dry any of these plants for me.

“I don’t know what you’re doing with all this stuff,” he said, dumping a long fistful of rosemary on the kitchen counter, “but there’s no way I’m bringing you a heap of hemlock leaves. Between you and the doctor, I don’t know, one of you just might take it in mind to kill the other one. That’s how Socrates committed suicide, you know, after the Athenians put him on trial.”

A fluttering started up at the base of my skull right then, and for a moment I thought I might be coming down with one of my migraines, but an image of the quilt’s unkempt border swam into my mind’s eye, along with the pale host of wings, and with it came a clarity of understanding so sharp, it was almost eye splitting. I knew that hemlock was fatal from reading one of the herbal guides Marcus had brought me from the library, but it was also sometimes used as a sedative. And belladonna and digitalis, just as deadly as hemlock, were also sometimes used for medicine. The art, of course, lay in getting the dose right. Or maybe not.

“Oh,” I breathed, and reached out for the edge of the counter. “Oh, my goodness.”

Marcus was immediately by my side, tender concern unfurling across his face. “What is it?” he asked, and lightly put one of his hands on the small of my back.

I straightened up, surprised by how simultaneously familiar and strange his touch was. Part of me wanted him to put his hand on my back again, but another piece of me was scared I would bust. I smoothed my apron over my hips. “Nothing. Sorry. I’m fine. I just remembered something, that’s all.”

Marcus looked at me quizzically but then shoved his hat back on his head. He hesitated as if he wanted to say something more, but the moment passed, and he flung the door open to the wind and the garden. A faint, moldy smell of compost trickled under my nose. It was the same smell I always caught out at the graveyard—an odor of burial and decay, but also of rejuvenation and life. A subject Tabitha Morgan had apparently known plenty about and which I was determined to learn.

We in Aberdeen are pure creatures of habit. Saturdays, for instance, are for gardening committee meetings and library outings. Fridays are street-sweeping days. Wednesday is garbage collection, and on Sunday mornings, while the rest of Aberdeen was praying, or sleeping, or loading leather bags of golf clubs into the trunks of their cars, I got a chance to reunite with Amelia. Sunday mornings were her hours to clean Robert Morgan’s clinic, but we always took the opportunity to flap our gums a little afterward and catch up.