“Because,” my father told her, “I don’t think Mrs. Pickerton wants your sister around. I got to take her somewhere else.” He expected Serena Jane to be a little anxious, at the very least disappointed, but she exhibited no remorse that he could see. Instead, she shifted under my bulk and crossed her ankles neatly.
“Oh,” she remarked. “That’s okay, then. Mrs. Pickerton will give the clothes to
me
.”
My father glanced down at his two daughters—me jam-smeared and epically proportioned and Serena Jane dainty as a tea cake—and had to concede that she had a point. A girl like me was probably better off in overalls and dirty sneakers than buckled shoes and a crimped dress, he thought, no matter what people said. He wondered what our mother would have done. He told himself it didn’t matter, but then he remembered the miles of fabric she’d adorned during all their nights together and felt a pain in his heart so sharp, it was like being pierced with a silver-edged embroidery needle—the kind you might use to decorate a baby’s pillow so that when it slept, it dreamed only of you.
Besides her impressive quilt, the other legacy of Tabitha Dyerson Morgan in Aberdeen was her family’s farm, passed down through generations of hapless Dyerson men—a trait reflected in the farm’s general appearance. Although the Dyerson farm was no more than two centuries old, it looked to be Jurassic. All of its structures lumbered and leaned. Scraggly weeds tufted up like witch’s hair around the farmhouse’s foundations, and the windows were rendered moot by fixed layers of sediment and grime. A little ways behind the main house, a defunct windmill hulked, its blades frozen like rusted wings.
“Bird!” I cried, stretching my arms up in the back of the car.
Dad switched off the engine and shook his head. “That’s a windmill, Truly,” he explained. “See, its blades go around and around.” He squinted at the rusted planes of metal and corrected himself. “Sometimes.”
A small child was squatting in the grass in front of the main house, poking at earthworms with a stick. She stood up when she saw my father approaching and pulled down the grubby hem of her dress, one of her legs winding around the other. When we got close, we could smell urine and see two pea-sized tears shimmering on the girl’s cheeks. Her bottom lip wobbled as she fluttered her hands, but before she could burst into full song, a stringy woman strode across the yard to her and scooped her up close, urine or no. She smoothed the girl’s ratty hair. Even though the woman’s fingers looked as rough as tree twigs, they were also surprisingly limber.
“It’s okay, Amelia,” she soothed, one eye on us. “We’ll clean you up. I have pound cake inside.” Amelia laid her head on her mother’s shoulder and tucked two fingers in her mouth. The woman turned slightly so she could see my father over Amelia’s head. “Earl. What can I do for you?” Her words were pleasant enough, but years of ravenous creditors had honed a guarded edge in her voice.
My father dropped me at his feet and pursed his lips. “Morning, Brenda. Gus in?”
She jerked her head to the barn and set her jaw. “Messing with the horses. There’s another race this week.” August’s horses had never once come in anything other than dead last in any race— a fact that had, of late, proved very lucrative. Certain well-connected gentlemen were making a mint off Gus Dyerson’s predictable losers, and they weren’t hoarding all the winnings, either.
“Thanks,” my father said, and shuffled across the unruly grass, me stumbling at his heels. He heard the rickety screen door of the house slap, then Brenda humming inside. “
That’s a good sign
,” my father mumbled. According to him, only happy people hummed.
Dad found Gus sandwiched between a mottled mare and the splintery wall of her stall, brushing the beast’s tired-looking flanks. When my father approached, both horse and man looked over at him with myopic eyes, but then Gus smiled, and it was as if the sun had just bloomed across his face. The sags and pouches of his skin reconvened into more amenable wrinkles, and his jaw tilted forward. “Earl Plaice!” he cried, and gave the woeful horse a smack on the haunch for emphasis. The animal snorted and shifted her weight.
I suppose it was a testament to Gus’s character that he was able to greet visitors with any measure of decency, much less delight, for no one ever came to the Dyersons’ farm unless it was to collect on a debt. Even the mail didn’t travel that far. It stopped just after the Dunfrys’ place, right before the road turned to dirt and all hell.
My father kept a sharp eye on me as I headed for a mangy cur curled up in a pile of hay, but then he saw that the dog was as weary and worn down as everything else in the place and not much of a threat. He folded his hands in front of his belly. “I need to ask you a favor,” he rasped, expecting Gus’s shoulders to hoist themselves straight or at the very least for his jaw to harden. But the man’s features remained as open and loose as the barn’s weathered doors.
“Shoot,” he said, one distracted finger probing a sore patch in his mouth.
“I wonder if Brenda could keep an eye on Truly for me. Just during the week. I wouldn’t ask, but things aren’t working out too well with Amanda Pickerton.”
Gus extracted his finger and examined something yellowish on the end of it. “What about Serena Jane? You want us to take her, too?”
My father shifted. “She’s not the problem.”
Gus’s gaze drifted over to me, curled up now with the flea-bitten dog, and took in my attire for the first time. “Why’s she dressed like that?” he asked.
My father sighed. “She won’t fit into anything I’ve got for her, and she won’t wear Amanda’s girl’s clothes.”
At that, Gus chuckled and hocked a wad of phlegm into the muck beside him. “A real live wire, eh?” He grinned, and my father finally relaxed, seeing that maybe this was a good place for me after all. I couldn’t possibly make more of a mess than already existed, for one thing, and even if I spent my days naked as the Lord God made me, no one would care. August walked over to me and smiled down like a shabby but benevolent god. “You’ll be all right, little one,” he said, and I stared right back at him, stupefied by the erroneous prediction.
When my father returned that evening, he found that Brenda’s solution to my clothing dilemma had been to dress me in boys’ clothes. Where they came from, my father had no idea, but there were so many odd pieces and bits around the place—the rusted bugle abandoned under the kitchen table, the frying pan lurking on the porch steps, stacks of newspapers and racing reports spread over a chair—that he didn’t bother to ask. All he knew was that when he walked into Brenda’s kitchen, I was alive, well, and buckled into a pair of black-and-white denim overalls like a train engineer, the sorrowful dog curled loyally by my side in a corner, Amelia crouched next to me, watching with savage interest as I wielded a pink plastic doll leg. My father glanced around, but there was no evidence of the rest of the figure. Side by side on the floor, Amelia and I seemed to be not so much companions as individual islands—Amelia silent and half-feral, me spilling over my edges. Amelia made a lunge for the doll leg, but I wasn’t ready to give it over to her yet. She stuffed her mouth full with her fingers and waited, making odd, off-key noises, halfway between grunting and music. I looked up at my father and held out my arms, babbling a string of nonsense. Amelia quickly reached out and snatched the doll leg for herself with a snarl before retreating under the table.
“What’s the matter with that one?” my father asked, jutting his chin toward Amelia. “Doesn’t she talk right?”
Brenda shrugged over the biscuits she was mixing. “She will when she’s up and ready.”
My father bent down and hoisted me onto his hip. “Has she been good?”
Brenda sighed. “Good enough.” She whacked her wooden spoon on the side of the bowl, then passed it to Amelia, who abandoned the doll’s appendage and began licking the buttermilk batter in long, enthusiastic slurps.
My father sidled to the door. The heat from the oven was making him sweat. “Well, okay, then. Thanks for everything. Especially the clothes.”
Brenda didn’t miss a beat in the punishment of her dough. “You’ll have to buy her more,” she said from behind a piece of fallen hair.
My father paused. “More clothes for a girl, or more clothes for a boy?”
Brenda stopped kneading for a moment, and it was long enough for my father to remember that she used to be pretty. “What do you want her to be?”
My father considered. “Well, she is a girl.”
“So?”
My father thought back to those perfectly round and expectant days just before my mother gave birth, a memory that shimmered for him now, frail as a soap bubble. He remembered the football he’d brought home and tossed gently to my mother, the new pigskin slapping in her hands as if it belonged in them. He remembered my mother finishing matching blue booties and cap, holding up the cobwebbed yarn for inspection on a knitting needle. My parents had liked names that began with the letter
C.
Caleb. Christopher. Clive. It must have seemed impossible to my father that there had once existed a period in his life so ripe with optimism and hope. But why shouldn’t I be what suited me best? If he sped, my father bet, he could get to Hinkleman’s department store before it closed. He reached for the screen door and saw that it was torn in several places.
“Thank you,” he said again, but Brenda just shrugged and turned back to her baking, scooping round moons out of the dough with the rim of a glass and the heel of her hand, then pushing the leftover pieces back together. If there was one thing Brenda Dyerson was good at, she knew, it was cooking up the scraps destiny had laid out on its plate for her.
“Bring her back tomorrow if you want,” she spat, sliding the tray of biscuits in the oven. “Amelia likes the company, and I ain’t got nothing but time on my hands, anyway.”
My father put a hand to his temple, tipping an imaginary hat. Time, he figured, was better than nothing. We would take it.
I
f the purpose of education is to reshape the self, carving and digging like a whittler’s blade, then my education surely began on a glimmering autumn morning in 1958 when I heard myself called “giant” for the first time.
As a special treat, Serena Jane woke me up early that morning and fixed me a proper breakfast—cereal, toast, and a glass of milk. “Be glad Dad remembered groceries,” she said, sliding the food across the table to me. “Half the time I go to school with a rumbling belly, but I’ve learned to live with it.”
I nodded and tried to chew my food slowly. I knew what she was talking about. The more I grew, the hungrier I got, and we never had much food in the house. The Dyersons didn’t, either. They ate straight out of the ground from their wilted garden and off food vouchers the rest of the time.
Serena Jane brushed toast crumbs from her lips and stood up, holding out her hand. She was being so nice to me this morning, it was almost as if she were a different girl. “Come on, I’ll brush your hair before we go, but we have to hurry.” When it came to the issue of being on time, Serena Jane was as tightly wound as the steel hand of a stopwatch. She rushed me everywhere we went, but I tried not to mind. It was just her way of saying she was the boss of us in life.
She whipped a comb through my hair, rubbed my shoes with some spit and a tissue, and then I let her propel me out the front door, waiting while she dutifully turned the key and locked it. We trundled down the sidewalk past Sal Dunfry’s house and then past the Pickertons’, but when we passed the cemetery, I dug in my heels and stopped cold, as immovable as a mule.
I almost never came by my mother’s grave, but now, in the early morning’s golden sunlight, I could see the white square of her headstone winking at me, and before Serena Jane could say boo, I’d torn my hand from hers and dashed through the iron gates. “Truly, wait!” Serena Jane called, her voice a hollow reed in the distance, but I kept going to the corner plot where our mother was buried. I couldn’t say why I needed to kneel on the grass, brushing my hands along the tops of weeds, but the action calmed me. If I closed my eyes, it was almost as though my mother were alive, stroking my hands and telling me things would be fine, that I would love school.
I felt a sharp yank on the back of my collar, and then Serena Jane was leaning over me like an impatient crow, asking me what on earth I thought I was doing. “You do realize that there’s a whole living world waiting on us, don’t you, Truly? I swear, sometimes I think that head of yours is really a pumpkin or something.” Sadly, I patted the grass one last time, then got up and followed her.
Eventually, we arrived at the one-room schoolhouse, and Serena Jane ushered me up the steps by the hand but dropped my wrist as soon as we were inside. Even though my sister was two years older than me, I was taller. Over the past year, I had shot up so fast, I was two inches bigger and pounds heavier. It seemed that the nearer I came to Serena Jane in size, the more distant and unlike me she grew. She hung her sweater on one of the coat pegs and smoothed her collar, her eyes scanning the yard through the open door for the friends I’d heard about but whom she never brought home. “Stay here,” she said, turning her back. “I’ll come back and tell you what to do soon.”
“But I want to come with you.” I wanted to follow my sister but knew I would be banished. I felt tears fill my eyes.
Serena Jane pursed her lips, considering. More than anything, I knew, she hated it when I cried, not because she felt pity, but because she hated the sensation of guilt. It was the one weapon I had over her, but I used it only in times of duress. Serena Jane sighed and held out her hand again. “Oh, for goodness’ sake, all right, if you’re going to be like that about it. Just don’t say anything, and you have to do exactly what I tell you.”
Just then, however, a bell rang, sending the raspy scent of chalk dust, glue, and freshly sharpened pencils deep into my cortex. A hawk-eyed woman in a sweater set marched to the front of the room. Serena Jane guided me to a row of desks. “Sit here,” she whispered, and pointed to the desk next to her. It was nicked and so old that it still had an inkwell. I squeezed my thighs into the seat as best I could and folded my hands up like a tent. I looked over to my sister, but she was staring straight ahead, her ankles crossed, her fingers all lined up evenly, the model student.