The Little Giant of Aberdeen County by Tiffany Baker

Author:Tiffany Baker [Baker, Tiffany]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Scotland, Witches
ISBN: 9780446543347
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2009-01-08T06:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

At night, its blunt corners dulled by moonlight and shadows, the Morgan house let its ghosts out to roam. In the summer, racked by heat and insects, the interior walls of the house groaned like old dogs left to lie in the sun. And in winter, the radiators howled and clanged with the pent-up fury of banshees. It was during the winter, particularly, that I most felt the presence of the Morgan line. I would draw the curtains of my room tight against the cold and then lie tucked up in bed under the flowery quilt, watching the latest of late night TV and trying to ignore the sensation that the walls were watching me. The door to my room tapped gently against the threshold, pulled to and fro by licks of frigid air racing through the house, making a kind of mournful music.

There was little evidence of me in my room. My toothbrush, hairbrush, and a tube of lip balm sat on top of one bedside table, and a six-month-old People magazine was overturned on the other, its pages crinkled and turning to yellow. I took the magazines from Robert Morgan’s waiting room before he threw them out, digesting the outdated love affairs of movie stars and the antics of rock singers with sanguinity. I’d never flown on an airplane, never tasted champagne, and never even bothered to open a bank account. What little money I needed was provided in the household account, leaving me to keep my own savings in the box underneath my bed. Occasionally, I added a twenty-dollar bill here or a ten-dollar bill there, until the wad of cash was as thick as my wrist. If I were to unfurl it, I imagined, it would swell and expand like a sail filling with wind, ready to take me and maybe Bobbie across the sea.

I came to understand that life at Robert Morgan’s had its inside and its outside components. Inside, there was television, food, and the scraping tick of the grandfather clock, and outside, there was the world of other people. Whereas my size had been a useful benefit at the farm (and sometimes even unnoticeable among the horses), it suddenly made me all thumbs in the china doll setting of the Morgan residence. During my first year there, I think I broke half of Maureen’s old dishes, along with two of the spindly parlor chairs, an heirloom teapot, and an entire army’s worth of vacuum cleaner parts. Eventually, I just resorted to doing things the way we’d done them at the farm, by the most elemental means possible. A broom replaced the vacuum, and on sunny days I hung the rugs out to beat. I cooked exclusively with the cast-iron pots. Even so, my body still missed its old regimen of physical labor. Trapped indoors all day, I began to feel pangs and pains that I’d never noticed before. In colder weather, the ends of my fingers and the soles of my feet would go stinging numb, as though bees had been feeding on them.

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