But I wanted air and light. I was brutalizing her with my impatient head. "I can't," my mother whispered, her voice crushed. She pictured al the cel s of her body neatly ironed and creased, ready to be folded up and put back on a shelf. Al the cel s, that is, except for the stubborn ones in her breast. Nothing, she knew, would stamp them out. In the past four weeks, the lump had grown from a minuscule egg to a child's fist. She hid it from my father with the padding of her maternity bra, turning her back to him when she dressed in the morning.

"Yes, you can," Bob insisted, and by saying it, he made it so. My mother felt Bob Morgan's hands palpating the gap between her legs and winced as he inserted gloved fingers into the doughy depths of her. She knew he had delivered twelve babies in Aberdeen, including his own son and Serena Jane, but she stil felt shy in front of him.

"Lily..." Bob anch.o.r.ed her with his eyes again. "I'm going to prop you up with pil ows and then you can push." He tucked pil ows and a blanket behind her and pushed up the hem of her nightdress farther. A pain arrived that was so enormous, my mother ceased to care what Bob Morgan saw, was grateful, even, for his gaze, which was needle-sharp and capable of remembering who she was before the layers of pregnancy camouflaged her.

"I have blue eyes," she muttered to remind herself of herself, high-pitched, feverish words. "I like the color green," and then her tongue loosened and gave way to an unbroken wailing pouring from her throat, a noise like a cat bleeding in the rain.

She was stil lost in the delirium of her mental catalog-a letter to her son she would write down when the pain was finished with her-when Bob Morgan pul ed me out of her, using no smal amount of muscle and marveling at my hefty shoulders, the Neanderthal sprawl of my cranium.

Corned beef, my mother thought, her favorite supper. "Amazing Grace," her favorite hymn.

Dear Son, she thought, her fingers stretching for a pencil, eager to begin composing the details of herself. She wanted her boy to know these things about her before she forgot or was no longer there.

Christmas, her favorite holiday. Dahlia, the flower she loved best.

She missed Bob Morgan's squawk when he final y pul ed me free from Lily and saw that I was a girl. His hands slipped under my slimy head. He almost dropped me.

"Lily," he whispered, moving up beside her. "Look, it's a girl, not a boy. You have another girl." Then he saw the indiscriminate puddle of red seeping into the bedclothes. "Lily?" he rasped again, just as I began to squal . He glanced from my mother's pal id cheeks to my pug-nosed face. He put me down on the soaked sheets, the umbilical cord stil attached, and when he reached to my mother's neck to feel for a pulse, his fingers left a bright red smear on her throat. A faint throb beat under his fingers, but not, Bob Morgan knew, for much longer.

He didn't bother with the afterbirth, merely cut the He didn't bother with the afterbirth, merely cut the cord from my stomach and knotted it, ignoring my furious cries.

"Lily," he demanded again, shaking my mother's shoulder and leaving more red smudges on her chest so that she resembled a savage painted for war. He laid me on top of her. "Lily, you have to give your baby a name."

But my mother's head lol ed, and her eyes stared back at him, jel y in their sockets. Inside the cage of her skul , her mind was stil wheeling through its marvelous inventory of herself, the list she would present to her child-favorite pastries, films.

Little Women, the book she loved more than any other. Not that a boy would want to read such a tale -the smal dramas of burned dresses and chopped-off hair, the stuff of sisters. She tried to think of a book for boys, couldn't, and so decided to end her letter. Yours truly, she whispered into the swampy air of the room, but it was hard. There was an animal sitting on her chest, plucking at the lump in her breast. Take it, she thought. I never wanted it in the first place.

"Truly?" Bob Morgan puzzled, wiping his hands with a cloth, glistening finger by glistening finger. "Lily, what the heck kind of a name is that?"

But he never received an answer. By the time he removed me from my mother's breast, cupping my enormous head with the spread palm of his hand, my mother's lips had gone as blue as the sky outside.

"Wel ," Bob Morgan said, looking into my eyes, "you may be ugly as sin and heavy as an ox, but I guess your mama loved you truly." Wide-eyed, I suckled my fist and took in the doctor's words with a look of gravity, as if I knew that for the next three decades, it would be the only direct reference I would have to the word love.

Chapter Three.

Had August Dyerson insisted on sticking with his bet of Girl, he would have won a substantial sum of money off the men of Aberdeen, but as it was, no one profited from my birth because I outweighed even the highest estimate. There was mirth and much laughter when Dr. Morgan announced the official figure and then silence when he explained how al of that was irrelevant owing to my mother's death. Chastened, people shut up their picnic hampers and cl.u.s.tered empty bottles to their chests in clumsy bouquets. The next morning, Ebert Vickers returned limp dol ar bil s to their rightful owners, making a door-to-door town circuit on foot, his hat held over his heart in sympathy for my poor, dead mother and her monstrous newborn babe. No one in Aberdeen said so, but it was clear they al believed I had kil ed my mother. A baby as big as me was just not natural.

Bob Morgan took careful pains to explain to my father that the birth had been messy, yes, but that my mother didn't have much time left anyway. He that my mother didn't have much time left anyway. He described the lump riddling her breast, lurking in her body like a spy, ready to send out emissaries. "It would have been a losing battle in the end, Earl,"

Bob said, "a fight she never would have won. You wouldn't have wanted her to go through that now, would you?"

My father, muted by grief and stuck with two motherless daughters, stared at the lank body of his wife stretched out on their bed and felt as though the wal s of his throat were about to gum closed. It was unacceptable, he decided-the brown clots of blood seeping into the mattress, the metal ic sour smel s in the air, al of it. Like a meal left half-finished on the table, the candles stil burning, someone's fork poised at the edge of a plate. He looked at my mother's body-a sc.r.a.p, a leftover from life-and then at Robert Morgan IV, and he intuited that the man was asking to be let off the hook. His black medical bag gaped in his hands like a dumbfounded mouth trying to explain.

My father didn't want to hear it. He almost pushed Bob out the door, away from his house and girls, right down his porch steps. "You go on," he said. "Get. I'l take it from here."

Stil shamed from the ruinous carnival of my birth, n.o.body in town wanted to attend my mother's funeral, so it was just my father, my sister, and I who cl.u.s.tered at the lip of her grave to watch her disappear into Aberdeen dirt. Reverend Pickerton read a few hasty Bible verses, then beat a quick retreat, dabbing his forehead with the immaculate and rea.s.suring corner of his handkerchief.

"My condolences, Earl," he muttered, squeezing my father's biceps with crablike fingers and studiously avoiding the moonscape of my newborn face. My father, stunned by the weight of his grief, blinked. Reverend Pickerton hesitated, then squeezed my father's arm again and jutted his chin in my direction. "I'm sorry the baby was a girl," he said, and squeezed once more before fleeing.

The afternoon thickened around my father. In front of him, my mother's grave leered like a jester's laughing mouth. Next to him, my sister snuffled, her head bowed like a bluebel , the bow of her upper lip only enhanced by al the snot. And then there was me-more of a boulder than a baby, rough-skinned and bug-eyed, impervious to the significance of the chasm yawning in front of me. My father tilted me toward it. "That's your mother in there. Tel her good-bye."

My father watched in horror as I gummed my pacifier, broke the teat in half, and spat the remaining plastic down on top of my mother's crude pine coffin, where it clattered and spun like a lost top. Later, much as he wished to chalk it up to the stupidity of infancy or to a soul trapped in the primitive and clumsy cage of the body, it stil seemed to my father that I knew exactly what I was doing. And in a way, he was right. Even back then, I guess, I suspected that sometimes the only available choice in life is to spit on death and run.

My life as a girl came to an abrupt halt at the age of one and a half, when I suddenly outgrew al of my sister's old clothes. Trying to shove my head into one of the fril y bonnets my mother had sewn, my father quickly concluded, was like attempting to stuff a watermelon through a keyhole. No matter which way he tugged, how much he heaved and pul ed, the bonnet strings would not tie. The bonnet would not even cover half of my red scalp.

My father stepped back and examined me. Whereas Serena Jane possessed the limbs and features of a vain little pixie, my physiognomy brought to mind the heaviest and roundest of objects -a cannonbal , perhaps. Something impervious to smashes and col isions. Since I began walking at the unprecedented age of seven months, I had fal en down the stairs twice, plunged unharmed into the flower beds from the front porch, and survived being pushed into oncoming traffic by Serena Jane in our rusted red wagon.

After each disaster, my father patiently checked me for signs of concussion, broken bones, or ravaged flesh but observed nothing. I never had any welts or bruises-I never even cried. In fact, the only way he ever even knew about any of my early calamities was the unholy noise I made when I fel . It was, he told his customers in the barbershop, like an asteroid col iding with the Earth. Except for that, I could have been made of rubber.

He sighed now and reached for one of the lace-trimmed chemises my mother had made before she died and which I could stil fit into until a few months ago. But he was again unsuccessful. He held the shirt up to my robust chest. Next to me, the shirt looked comical, like a dol 's. It came to a halt a ful inch above my hips. My father rummaged in one of Serena Jane's bureau drawers and pul ed out a smocked dress-brand spanking new, a gift from the reverend's wife. Stil no luck. Final y, in desperation because he was late for his shift at the barbershop and because there didn't seem to be anything else to do, he put me in one of his own shirts, the sleeves rol ed over and over on themselves, peeled back like banana skins, the hem scraggling at my feet.

Fatherhood had become a series of negotiations he suspected he was losing. Without my mother, my father simply had no precedent for raising two daughters, especial y when they differed as much as Serena Jane and I did. The things that made Serena Jane happy-tea sets, and baby dol clothes, and the leftover bottles of my mother's nail varnish-made me howl in misery. My father learned quickly enough to give me plainer toys: empty cans to rattle and tower into pyramids; lengths of scratchy rope to coil and knot; a cardboard box with a hole cut in it for a window.

And then there was my appet.i.te. My father couldn't keep up. He cracked open tin after tin of formula, heating it careful y on the stove the way he'd seen my mother do, then pouring it into a series of sterilized bottles I gulped down as if they were milk-fil ed thimbles. I cut teeth at three months, and soon after that, my father gave up on the bottles, spooning piles of tapioca pudding into me instead.

"You can't feed a child that young solid food yet!" Amanda Pickerton scolded during one of her early mercy visits, and my father, his eyes glazed with exhaustion, hunched his shoulders and agreed with her.

"I can't do any of it," he admitted, and that's how Amanda Pickerton came to be briefly in charge of my existence.

Every weekday morning, before he went to cut hair in the barbershop, my father delivered my sister and me to the better judgment of Amanda. The arrangement suited my father (he didn't care who took us off his hands as long as he actual y got to use them), and it suited Amanda, whose children were grown and gone. She was one of those women who needed to hold dominion over something smal er than her, and that was always the whole problem between us. I was never minute enough to squeeze through the cracks of her world.

The morning my father left me on her porch wearing his old shirt, Amanda knit her brows and pul ed the corners of her mouth down like sickles. My father shoved us into the house without speaking, his jaw clamped tight, his eyes already focused on the rea.s.suring world of male hair.

Serena Jane, highly verbal, did his talking for him.

"Look, Mrs. Pickerton! Truly's busting at the seams!" she crowed, delighting in my clownish attire.

Amanda stared at Serena Jane and discovered nothing wrong with her, at least. As always, Serena Jane's hair held its braids perfectly, the ribbons at the ends of them a little crooked, maybe, her skirt not real y pleated as stiffly as it could be, but that wasn't our poor father's fault. He was just a man, after al , doing his blessed best. It was me who was giving him a run for his money.

That morning, to add insult to the injury of the floppy shirt, I had crumbs clinging to my ample chin and, Amanda noted, a smear of b.u.t.ter glistening on one of my wobbly cheeks. My father put me down next to the placid Serena Jane, and Amanda noticed for the first time that I was getting to be bigger than my sister. Serena Jane's legs and arms were tender stalks, feminine in their every curve, but my limbs hung awkwardly from my torso as if I were wearing padding. Even my lips looked as though they were squeezed onto my face. Amanda sighed deeply and held an unenthusiastic hand out to me.

"Come on with me, darling," she cooed.

"Let's see if we can get you fixed up." She made cow eyes at my father, who was shuffling his feet on the other side of the screen door, eager to get going.

"Don't you worry about a thing," she simpered, smiling at Serena Jane and gripping my fist a little harder than she needed to. "I've got some old clothes of Gina's upstairs that should do the trick.

Why, you won't even recognize her when you get back!" My father flashed a grin, relief making his jaw relax, and turned and lurched down the Pickertons'

steps, blind to how white Amanda's knuckles were around my hand.

As soon as he turned the corner from the house, Amanda's smile disappeared.

The transformation was remarkable, like a house reverting back to plainness once its holiday baubles were stripped. Without her church face, Amanda Pickerton looked almost like a fox. "Now, dear," she said to Serena Jane, tidying one of her pigtails'

wilted ribbons, "why don't you go and play in the sunroom? I've set the dol s out for you, and there are some books as wel ."

Serena Jane cast an uncertain glance in my direction. "But my sister-"

Amanda cut her off. "Don't worry your pretty little head about Truly. I'l take care of her."

Serena Jane walked over to me and planted a dry kiss on my cheek. I made a grab for her waist, but she held me off. She didn't like my sticky fingers on her clothes. "Truly likes dol s, too,"

she noted to Mrs. Pickerton, and then wandered to the back of the house, where an absorbing array of molded plastic figurines with realistic eyelashes awaited.

Upstairs, in her grown daughter Gina's old room, Amanda roughly divested me of the offending shirt, then sat me nearly naked in a hard chair with wicker caning. The straw dug into the tender backs of my legs, and I tried to wriggle free, but Amanda caught me and pushed al her weight on my shoulders. "You stay there!" she commanded, her red, red nails digging into my skin. "You sit until you're told." Even though I couldn't form words yet, I was perfectly cognizant of the message. I stopped wriggling and stared at Amanda. On my shoulders, wriggling and stared at Amanda. On my shoulders, half-mooned welts bloomed.

I watched Amanda sift through several boxes stowed at the back of the closet. Whenever she pul ed out another item of clothing, the scent of mothbal s bil owed through the air. I sneezed, and Amanda looked once sharply over her shoulder but then went back to her task of rooting through the closet. The mothbal s didn't seem to bother her.

Sentinel, Amanda's orange kitten, appeared out of nowhere and began batting at my calves with his claws. I tried to shoo him away, but he refused to go.

Amanda turned around and smiled, then gave him a shove with her foot, and he disappeared under the bed. "Good kitty," she purred at the animal.

She dug up a number of child's dresses, some of them flowered, some of them smocked with Peter Pan col ars, a few pinafores and white lace blouses to go underneath them, and a pair of black patent-leather shoes with straps that circled the ankle. To the top of the pile she added a pair of fril y pantaloons and some ruffled socks. I watched, breathing through my mouth, making unpleasant sucking noises in the stale air of the room. Amanda marched over to me and hooked two fingers under my chin.

"Stop that," she said, her eyes shining like mean jewels. She lifted me to standing with considerable effort. "You sound like a hog yard. Now, put this on." Her hands parted the frothy layers of a pink striped dress with embroidered ducks cavorting on its bib. She bal ooned open the fabric and tried to shove it over my head. The neck was plenty wide enough-if anything, the dress might even have been too big-but no matter what Amanda Pickerton tried, there was no way to pul the garment over me.

"Sit stil !" she barked, but I wriggled and lurched like a fish on a line. In one swift movement, Amanda lifted me onto her lap, taking my place on the chair and clamping her knees tightly around my waist, squeezing until my eyes goggled with surprise and my lips fel slack. Amanda dug one elbow into the back of my ribs, pinning me in place, and wrestled again with the dress.

"If I didn't know any better," she spat between clamped teeth, heaving the pink stripes backward over my hair, "I'd say, child, you have got the makings of Satan in you." As if in protest, I flapped my baby arms, but Amanda laid her own forearm down over my torso and pushed up into my windpipe with one of her knees, gagging me. She spun the dress around and sat me up, forcing my arms into the puffed sleeves, then final y deposited me on the floor.

"There!" Amanda chirped, trying to put her mussed hair back in place with one hand and do the b.u.t.tons on the dress with the other. "You're stil not pretty, but at least you're decent." I ogled her for a moment, and then, with what Amanda would always recal as uncanny adult resolve, I tore the candy-stripe dress from hemline al the way up to col ar. Sentinel leapt from under the bed and began batting at the strips.

"Oh!" Amanda gasped, as if someone had punched her in the stomach, and placed a fist in her mouth, biting so hard that she tasted the sour tang of her own blood.

When my father returned at five o'clock, he was met by a glowering Amanda Pickerton. Amanda, he noticed, had a bandage tied around her right thumb, a single spot of blood decorating the gauze like a ruby. I was stil wearing the same shirt he'd deposited me in that morning. Before he had even finished crossing halfway over the porch, Amanda lunged toward him and shoved me into his arms as if returning a particularly offensive gift. My father noticed tiny spider lines twitching around the corners of Amanda's mouth.

"Didn't she fit in the clothes?" he asked hopeful y, casting an eye over the threadbare shirt shrouding me. His heart sank a little. He didn't earn much from his job cutting hair, and without my mother's gift with a needle and thread, he didn't know how he would manage two feminine wardrobes. Amanda growled, her voice as bitter as snake venom.

"Nothing about that child wil ever fit anything, Earl. You mark my words. She's little better than a wild beast, and I, for one, am through."

My father blinked at her, confused. In his arms, my weight was as familiar and rea.s.suring as an old stone. He looked me over but saw no bruises, no scabs or signs of tumbles or spil s. Neither was there any evidence of the belt Amanda had taken to my bottom before she'd used it to buckle me to the chair for the rest of the day.

"She didn't fal out a window again, did she?" he inquired, squinting, and Amanda Pickerton snorted.

"She'l do worse than that before she's grown and gone, you mark my words. That girl's got the devil running right through her bones." She glanced down at Serena Jane, who was planted next to her on the porch. She ran a hand over Serena's glossy hair. "This one, however, is a piece of heaven. I'm always happy to look after her."

She gave Serena Jane a quick kiss on the cheek, then went inside and slammed the front door. In the semidarkness of the hal , surrounded by the respectable scents of furniture polish and a roast in the oven, she paused to examine the gauze on her thumb- a single darkening drop marring the white -before ripping off the bandage and sucking greedily, opening the wound deeper to get a good, long taste of herself.

As my father clumped down State Street back toward home that evening, me asleep over his shoulder and Serena Jane burbling on about tea sets and dol s, he was grateful that it was the weekend. It meant he would have at least two days to sort something out for me, though he couldn't think what. At home, he heated up a halfhearted can of soup for himself and Serena Jane and warmed a pan of tapioca for me. The shirttails rode up my thighs as he lowered me onto the sofa, but the skin there was rosy and plump-al signs of Amanda's sharp nails, her pinching fingers, absorbed.

After we were in bed-Serena Jane angelic, her winglike arms spread wide; myself bunched in a bal -my father poured an emergency measure of whiskey and set to thinking. He ran through the women my mother used to know, but sympathetic as they may have been, they al had sympathetic as they may have been, they al had children and worries of their own-too little time, too little money, too few hands. He sighed and knocked back the rest of the whiskey. That left just one option, even though he wasn't fond of it. Stil , it was better than nothing: oddbal August Dyerson. Everyone's last resort.

The next morning, my father dressed Serena Jane in one of her few remaining dresses and tied a pair of stained pink ribbons into her hair.

Serena Jane frowned when she saw the oily marks but said nothing as our father looped the lengths of satin, his clumsy thumbs digging into her scalp. She knew Mrs. Pickerton would do them over right. She always did. My father dumped me into another one of his old shirts, a plaid one this time, and once again rol ed up the sleeves over my wrists. I squealed and waved my arms with vigor. I looked like a miniature maestro conducting a crowd.

"That's good, Truly," my father told me.

"You go on giving 'em hel ."

"Daddy," Serena Jane asked when he buckled her into the front seat of the Ford and plunked me on her lap, "why are we taking the car?"

Usual y we walked to the Reverend and Mrs.

Pickerton's.

"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 wil give the clothes to me."

My father glanced down at his two daughters-me jam-smeared and epical y 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 overal s 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 al 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 pil ow 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, pa.s.sed 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 Jura.s.sic. Al 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 windmil 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 windmil , Truly," he explained.

"See, its blades go around and around." He squinted at the rusted planes of metal and corrected himself.

at the rusted planes of metal and corrected himself.

"Sometimes."

A smal child was squatting in the gra.s.s in front of the main house, poking at earthworms with a stick. She stood up when she saw my father approaching and pul ed down the grubby hem of her dress, one of her legs winding around the other.

When we got close, we could smel 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 ful 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'l 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?"