The Thunder of Giants Page 2

  Ann Swan laughed.

  “Get out of here,” said Alexander.

  “There would be money involved, of course.”

  Alexander swiped at the New Yorker with his hammer. “Get off my land.”

  “You write if you ever change your mind,” said H. P. Ingalls. Two cards appeared as if by magic in his hand. He gave one to Alexander; perhaps knowing it would be destroyed, he slipped the second to Ann Swan.

  Alexander indeed tore up the card. The next day, he changed the sign.

  ALL PILGRIMS AND NEW YORKERS WILL BE SHOT

  It was entirely true that the Swans were not rich. Alexander farmed in the warm weather and cut timber when it was cold. It was a humble life, and Anna’s appetite—for food, for clothes, for furniture—was growing all the time. Yet Alexander would never take money for something he believed to be a lie. To him, she was a girl, not a miracle. Anna’s mother wasn’t sure she agreed. She was already looking into the future, down the road toward all the days and years to come. Her daughter would always be the inadvertent flagship of an otherwise average armada. She’s a big boat in a small pond, thought Ann. Don’t we have a duty to let her set sail?

  It’s possible that Ann Swan would have swallowed these thoughts just as she had swallowed the pain of pregnancy. But that Christmas, during a spirit of celebration, Alexander finally cracked open those jugs of moonshine that had been donated after Anna’s birth. They had turned to rotgut, and a terrible sickness seized him just as the new year began. Burnt by fever, he was suddenly confined to bed. With him unable to work, the family found themselves spiraling closer to poverty. Now there was no choice; as the March frost clung to the fields, Ann Swan dabbed the sweat from her husband’s fevered brow with the complete understanding that the time had come. She may have lost her scream, but that didn’t mean she had lost her voice.

  “I’m taking Annie to Halifax” she declared.

  “Absolutely not!” her husband said.

  “I’ll bring the Reverend. The pilgrims won’t have to come to us. We can come to them.”

  “I forbid it!” spat Alexander.

  “Someone has to do something,” said his wife. “We’re all going to end up sleeping in the rain.”

  The next morning, Alexander woke to find himself being nursed by a neighbor; his newest daughter was asleep in the crib. As for Anna, Ann Swan, and the Reverend Blackwood, they had already left.

  They traveled across the snowy province wrapped in furs and pulled by a team of industrious dogs. Upon arriving in Halifax, the Reverend presented the Future Saint to the press, but the newspapermen didn’t like the name’s Catholic connection—anti-Catholic sentiment was far too ripe. And so it was that Anna Swan entered the historical record as the Infant Giantess. They said she was ninety-four pounds; they said she was four feet, seven inches tall. They assumed the Reverend Blackwood was Alexander Swan. They described Anna’s mother as a woman of small size and interesting appearance.

  That weekend, Haligonians filled Temperance Hall, a great meeting place near the center of town. While Ann Swan fussed with her daughter, the Reverend stood onstage and embellished the story of Anna’s birth, adding such colorful details as a biblical storm, a broken carriage, and a crippled horse. Here was another one of Anna’s encounters with revisionist history—but this time she, unlike the audience at Halifax, had the benefit of knowing the facts had been rearranged.

  “Why isn’t he telling the truth?” asked Anna.

  “The truth,” said her mother, “is rarely entertaining.”

  When she was at last brought to the stage, Anna clutched for the comfort of her mother’s hand. She was almost as tall as her mother, and a murmur shot through the crowd. Distracted by the true wonder of her size, people barely heard the formerly arthritic Reverend turn the topic toward his own hands and the possible miraculous properties of Anna’s touch. The price of admission, he announced, included an exhibit of Anna’s possessions: the swaddling clothes, the shoes, the crib that had buckled under her tremendous weight. But for an extra fee, they could also receive her healing touch.

  A dozen people came forward, including a tiny girl with brittle hair. Not yet twenty, she had a shoehorn face that was pinched tight, as if she held back some terrible pain. Anna wondered if she might collapse. But the girl with the brittle hair maintained her poise and paid her fee with the great dignity of one giving alms. She reached out and took Anna’s hand.

  “It’s very nice to meet you,” said the brittle girl.

  “Hello,” mumbled Anna.

  There was an awkward pause as she continued to cling to Anna’s hand, as if hoping to draw as much of the giant’s strength as she could. “Is it working?” asked the girl. “Please: how do I know if it worked?”

  She spoke with such earnestness that Anna felt a duty to respond. But while she was smart enough to know she needed to be comforting, she was ill equipped to think of a comforting thing to say. She looked to her mother, who sighed.

  “You’ll know soon enough,” said Ann to the brittle girl.

  It was as close to the truth as they could come. Ann didn’t know if her daughter had miraculous powers; Anna didn’t know either. They would know soon enough, too.

  The visit was a great success, and they left Halifax with their pockets full of coin. The Reverend offered to invest their share of the money, and Ann Swan agreed, allowing herself to become steeped in the fantasy of wealth.

  They returned to Tatamagouche to find themselves faced with a furious storm. Incensed that his will had been defied, Alexander had whipped the people into a frenzy. In a rage, he had told his neighbors the Reverend had stolen his wife and child away. He told them the man was a fraud; he told them that, far from being guided by God, the formerly arthritic Reverend had nearly killed Ann Swan on the night of Anna’s birth.

  If not exactly driven from the town, the Reverend found himself quietly pushed in the direction of anywhere else. He was gone by the end of the summer. He left behind all of his sermons; he also took every dollar he had promised to invest on behalf of the Swans.

  “Good riddance,” said Alexander. “Nothing but fruit of the poisoned tree.”

  “Poison or not, we needed it,” Ann Swan moaned.

  That night she conscripted her enormous daughter to help her tear down Alexander’s sign. If pilgrims returned, they would be more than welcome. And if that New Yorker returns, said Ann Swan, he will be welcome, too.

  The New Yorker would return, but not for many years. In the meantime the pilgrims, fearing Alexander’s rage, stopped coming. As life returned to some new brand of normal, Anna’s parents made an unspoken agreement to rewrite the story of her earliest days. It was just one more encounter with revisionist history; and since no one spoke of her past, Anna came of age remembering events that might have been part of a fevered dream.

  TWO

  A Shame Before God

  Sant Julià de Lòria, 1900

  AS FOR ANDORRA, she was born in the afternoon less than two months after her pregnant mother stumbled into the parish of Sant Julià de Lòria, the southernmost settlement of that principality that so neatly divides France and Spain. Newly nineteen, Andorra’s mother arrived on foot with her younger sister, a bottle-shaped girl who many mistook for a mule; she arrived bearing all their luggage on her back. This was typical of a girl who had decided that loyalty would be her eternal trait. It had been this loyal girl who had helped her beautiful sister hide her scandalous condition from their family. Their various ruses had been truly clever, but no farce lasts forever; one morning their grandmother walked into the ornate bathroom just as Andorra’s mother was stepping from the bath. Only recently, a man in America had learned to weld porcelain to iron, and because of this genius, the girl’s olive body was a sharp contrast to the stark white of this imported claw-foot tub. With her grandmother at the door, nothing could save her. Elionor Noguerra did not even have a towel; there was nowhere for her protruding belly to hide.

 
Elionor made no attempt to hide the name of the father. Until recently, she and her loyal sister had been tutored by an intelligent youth who had been called home to attend to his father’s death. Everyone had seen the attraction between the tutor and his eldest pupil. No one was surprised when, on the day he left, Elionor flooded her pillow with tears. But now, just weeks later, that protruding belly had proved the tears had not been the sorrow of unrequited love.

  Her father was a captain in the Spanish Armada. Obsessed with the new—that claw-foot tub was only one of many wondrous imports from around the world—he was still a man of certain traditions. As she prepared for dinner on the day of her discovery, Elionor trembled at the thought of her father’s wrath. Yet she was determined to endure it; the Captain had taught his daughters the value of sailing through storms. She went down to dinner with her chin held high. But her father barely met her gaze. Dinner was held in an opulent dining room that boasted several tall windows overlooking the garden. Elionor had barely stepped into the room when her father pointed through the glass to where the dogs tore at their mutton by the base of a mint-colored hedge.

  “You have acted like a dog,” he said. “Now you can eat with them.”

  You don’t sail through a storm by turning back at the first crack of thunder, thought Elionor. As calmly as she could, she claimed her usual seat and asked her father to pass the salt.

  Captain Noguerra did, but not in the way she would have liked. He flung salt in her eye and struck her across the face. “It will be a great miracle if I don’t strangle you in your sleep,” he said. “And it wouldn’t be a crime. You are a shame before God.”

  Elionor looked across the table, where her grandmother was slurping her soup. The woman’s expression announced she was forever on the Captain’s side. She had exorcised all maternal instinct when it came to her granddaughters, for they both reminded her of their mother, who had abandoned the family shortly after giving birth to Elionor’s loyal sister. The story was that she had fallen in love with a famed aviator who had whisked her away in a hot-air balloon.

  “The sins of the father pass to the son for three generations,” her grandmother said. “But the sins of the mother pass on as well.”

  With four months left to her pregnancy, Andorra’s mother was locked inside the house, and everyone knew that if she survived the birth, she would be sent to a convent. Everyone also knew that if the baby survived the birth, it would certainly be drowned. The Captain suffered his little children. But he brooked no bastards.

  Fortunately, the young tutor had not disappeared. He had continued to write to Elionor ever since he had returned to his home in the southernmost settlement of that principality that so neatly divides France and Spain. Each letter was poorly disguised as a lesson in literature; in fact, they were lessons on love. As an intellect, he had the poetry of Petrarch and Shakespeare on his side; he could also quote at length from the many novels and plays of Lope de Vega. Using their words, he wove his heart into dozens of paragraphs, each written in his scrawling script. He sent them to Madrid in the satchels of the smugglers who favored the principality’s roads. Exactly how he had access to these rough men was not something Andorra’s mother would learn for many months; Andorra herself would not learn it for years. At the time, it hardly mattered to Elionor, who found the letters as intoxicating as the wine, tobacco, and opium that had been in the smuggler’s bags.

  For safety, the letters were written in code and sent to Manuela Sofia Noguerra, that loyal sister, who fooled everyone into thinking the letters came from a female friend. This put the loyal girl at the center of the lovers’ affair. It was Manuela who first dreamed of the marriage between Elionor and her tutor. At fifteen, Manuela Noguerra had the incurable optimism of youth and easily believed every pretty word the tutor had ever written.

  Intoxicated as she was, Elionor was much more realistic. Men are very good at loving women, she said. But only until they have to marry them. “He may not accept me. What if I go all that way only to be exiled again?”

  “He’ll marry you.” Manuela assured her. “He’ll give us both a home.”

  “Men don’t like to be surprised,” said Elionor.

  “He won’t be,” said Manuela. “I’ve already told him the two of you are on your way.”

  “The two of us!” Elionor Noguerra flew into a rage. “He might not want to be a father! He might already be a father!”

  “I wanted to give him time to prepare,” said Manuela.

  “All you did was give him time to escape.”

  But Elionor reluctantly packed a bag, on the sole condition that Manuela pack one as well. Though four years apart, the two sisters might as well have been Siamese twins. It was Manuela that gave Elionor the courage to leave. If I am exiled, she thought, at least I won’t endure it alone.

  Their adventure was cursed from the moment it began. The roads were hardly safe for women, and they were forced to disguise themselves as men, just like the women in so many Shakespearian plays. But where Shakespeare might have given them comical circumstances, God authored much more serious events. Either their disguises were too convincing or not convincing enough; either they came up against thieves or ran the risk of blackmail and rape. Years later, Andorra would wish that she knew more of these adventures, but no one ever spoke of them; it became known in the family as the Most Interesting Story Never Told. What was known was that the women avoided public places, dealt with inclement weather, and were forced to kill their donkey after it became lame. They ate the carcass and continued on foot. They crossed into the Principality of Andorra on a blustery afternoon, completely unaware that during their travels the nineteenth century had ended and a new era had begun.

  Their sluggish pace allowed them ample time to study the armies of sheep and the dominating outline of the Pyrenees before, at long last, they staggered into Sant Julià de Lòria. Spread through the trees, the parish was built entirely around sprawling farms of tobacco. There was a small square used for festivals, and this was flanked by the church to the north and the general store to the south. The girls stopped at one to thank God for their safety before crossing to the other to obtain directions.

  Here the tutor’s lessons came in handy. He had taught them Catalan, a subject in which both had excelled. Elionor Noguerra held her breath as Manuela spoke to the clerk. This was the moment. They would be told the tutor had mysteriously disappeared. They would not even be offered a place to spend the night.

  The clerk checked his watch. “You might as well wait. He should be here any moment.”

  “You know him?” said Manuela.

  “Everyone knows him,” said the clerk. “He’s the richest man in town.”

  “How do you know he’s coming by?” asked Manuela.

  “He comes every day. He waits for the mail like a Jew waits for the Messiah.”

  To Manuela, this proved that her faith in the tutor had not been misplaced. But Andorra’s mother would not be lifted from her dismay. “If he’s the richest man in town, he probably has an army of lovers,” she said. “If he’s the richest man in town, a different woman probably writes him every day.”

  “We’ll know soon enough,” said Manuela.

  They took a seat on a stone that rested outside the store. Ten minutes later, a dusty and familiar face appeared on the road. The richest man in town did not look like the richest man in town. Unshaven and shabbily dressed, he still looked like a tutor. He even had books under his arm.

  He froze when he saw them.

  “Now watch,” whispered Elionor. “He’ll turn like the fox and run.”

  She held the air tight in her lungs, hoping it might protect her heart. There was no need. A moment later, Geoffrey del Alandra sprang toward her. Manuela beamed with pride. As for Elionor, she exhaled a long breath, perfumed with relief.

  * * *

  THE WEDDING HAPPENED with great speed, and though everyone in the parish attended, few knew it for what it really was. The town believed t
hey were celebrating a marriage that had happened months before. This lie had been spread by Geoffrey’s twin sister, the hideously stunted Noria Blanco. The twins’ mother had died giving birth, and in her absence Noria had become the great matriarch of the house. On receiving Manuela’s letter, Geoffrey had warned his sister of Elionor’s approach—and her condition. Noria Blanco had no objections to the way the child had been conceived; like all great matriarchs, she had viewed the matter in purely practical terms.

  “A baby is a legacy,” she said. “And all great legacies have to claw their way into the world.”

  Noria Blanco immediately began to tell people that Geoffrey had married a girl in Madrid. Forced to abandon her after their father’s death, he had been in agony due to the conviction that he would never see his wife again. This was easily believed, for the richest man in town had kept to himself ever since his return. He had buried his father with great pomp and dutifully taken over the business of running the farms of tobacco. Throwing himself into his work, he had shunned all festivals and had not stepped within spitting distance of an eligible girl. The townspeople had believed him to be mourning his father; now they saw he had been mourning his absent wife, too. The tale made for a heartbreaking scenario. Thanks to Noria Blanco, the richest man in town was now applauded for his loyalty and lauded for his romantic disposition.

  The cost of the priest’s silence was five gold coins, a pound of barley, and a case of imported wine. In exchange, he married Andorra’s parents in secret and casually forgot to include the incident in the church’s registrar. The next day, the celebration was held. It came as a great relief to the other young lovers of the parish. As was tradition at the time, betrothed couples could only announce their engagement during another marriage feast. Until Elionor’s arrival, there had not been a wedding in Sant Julià de Lòria for several months, a circumstance that had caused more than a dozen romances to stop dead. It was with great joy that the bridal party marched to Geoffrey’s elegant manor, a cathedral of stone built on the crest of a hill. They adorned Andorra’s father with a wreath of Adonis vernalis, otherwise known as pheasant’s-eyes, otherwise known as the official flower of the principality. The flowers were poisonous, and their traditional presence was said to be a bittersweet reminder of all those who could not be there to join in the celebration. With this wreath of poison flowers around his neck, Geoffrey del Alandra was hoisted onto a donkey’s back and paraded through the streets. The march ended at the church, where, in lieu of a religious ceremony, the couple was blessed by the same priest who had quietly taken their bribe the day before. His poker face was exquisite: no one ever suspected that he knew the baby about to burst from Elionor’s belly had been conceived in mortal sin.