The Last Days of Dogtown (24 page)

Refreshed by an hour of smiles, good news, and glowing health, Judy made her way back to her own Dogtown bed, where she slept soundly until midafternoon. When she finally woke up and looked around, she marveled at the perfect order and lack of dust. She would thank Polly for coming so far to do her this favor. Or perhaps it was Easter, who was not nearly such a good housekeeper in her own place.

In fact, it had been Cornelius. During Judy’s long stay at the Cooks’, he had taken it upon himself to wipe the table and sweep the floors, brush away the cobwebs, and even air the quilt. Long before that and for years on end, he’d been looking after Judy’s house from the outside, making sure that the roof was sound, the windows tight.

He had watched over her person as well, finding safe vantages where he could see her cooking at her own hearth, sitting in quiet communion with Martha, dandling Natty Younger.

One cold winter night when he’d had a clear view into the Dogtown cottage, she stopped in the middle of the room and raised her nose up in the air, like a dog picking up a scent. If she had seen him, if she had caught his eye and called to him, he might have walked in and stayed. But she turned away, smiling, and said something to the dog. Wherever Judy slept, the dog was with her.

Cornelius had hated Greyling at first, jealous of the dog’s constant presence. But he came to admire the animal’s loyalty to Judy, and he realized that she showed him a kind of allegiance as well. Greyling would bark when anyone came within twenty feet of Judy Rhines’s house, but she kept quiet when it was Cornelius, no matter how close he approached or how late he called. Perhaps she remembered him from the one night they’d both slept under Judy’s roof, long ago. Or maybe she recognized his scent, knowing him to be harmless as a rabbit. Indeed, he’d even begun to worry about the dog, now white around the muzzle and so stiff in the joints that Judy had to slow her pace as they walked to and from the harbor.

Greyling died on a brilliant October morning. Judy had let her out and watched the dog stretch and shake before padding into the woods, her tail wagging. It wasn’t until late in the day that Judy missed her.

She walked to Greyling’s favorite spot, where the sun would heat a low granite outcrop so it warmed the dog’s old bones from below as well as from above. When Judy saw red and golden leaves lying over the still, silver flank, she knew that her friend was gone.

She got a shovel and dug a grave beside her, rolling the not-quite-stiff body, suddenly so small, into the rocky hole. She laid a bouquet of autumn leaves and branches of orange bittersweet over her companion, and filled the grave, weeping.

That night in bed, Judy shivered, missing the shaggy heat and regular breathing of her closest friend. She was grateful that Greyling hadn’t retreated far into the woods to die, like the wilder dogs. She would have worried for days if Greyling had simply disappeared.

Judy remembered the first time she’d seen Greyling, not much more than a puppy, skinny and skittish. It had been an autumn day as well. The dog was in the middle of the Commons Road chasing a leaf that was caught in a stiff breeze. It was a yellow maple leaf capering in the air like a butterfly. The dog had snapped at it and jumped until she’d caught it, then danced and wagged her tail and chewed it to bits.

A birdsong split the night silence and Judy Rhines held her breath, listening to the torrent of melody. She wanted to turn and ask, “It’s too late for mockingbirds, isn’t it?”

Had she ever said as much to the dog? Judy wondered. Had she imagined Greyling’s reply in human speech, too? “Yes. But today was so warm, perhaps this one was fooled into thinking that summer’s come back.”

Was she that far gone?

“I will not take in another dog,” she said, and let the tears begin again. “I will move into Martha’s house. I will depend upon my friends, and if I’m fortunate I will die among them.

“I will not spend another winter here alone.” She said that in a voice so loud, it seemed like an oath. Or at least, that’s what it sounded like to Cornelius, who was keeping vigil by her window, mourning for Greyling, too, and for Judy’s departure, and for his own lost hopes.

Cornelius

I
T WAS THE
middle of the night, but it might have been noon the way Cornelius was sweating. He’d woken out of a drowning dream into the sickening sense of being boiled alive. His shirt was drenched and the sour smell of his own bed made him queasy.

The window in his attic room faced away from the harbor, but Cornelius found no relief in the street either. The air was heavy and still: no halyard clanged, no wave lapped. The darkness seemed complete, too, without a moon or even a single candle flickering behind any window.

He set out to walk and decided to head to Dogtown for a change. Since Judy had left it two years ago, his old haunts provided little pleasure. Still, he went from time to time, just for the change of air and to have a look at her old house. He’d hammered over the broken windows, though he wasn’t entirely sure why he bothered.

Walking past gloomy storefronts and dim houses, it seemed like the whole town had died in its sleep. Or that he was a ghost, haunting the town. Not that Cornelius held much with spirits. He had been ten years old when his mother died, and for years after that he had tried to believe that her soul lingered on to look after him. He’d poured pitchers of fresh water beside her bones every day and waited for a sign of her presence. But now he hadn’t been to the grave in so long, he doubted he could even find the spot; the stones he’d piled there must have been scattered.

Cornelius followed Washington Street out of town, away from the harbor and its old reproaches. For years, he’d watched the black-skinned sailors wearing bright scarves and golden earrings, bold and relaxed even among their white shipmates. When they’d asked why a strong man like him didn’t ship out, he had shrugged and said that the pitching of the waves made him sick as a dog.

It might have been true, too, but the fact was he’d never set foot on any vessel larger than a canoe. He could not beat back a suffocating fear of dying belowdecks, which he’d gotten from his mother on her deathbed. Her young body had survived the middle passage, and she had lived in the new world for twenty years: ten in Virginia and ten more on Cape Ann. But Cornelius knew that she died on the boat that had borne her over the sea.

When she grew ill, Mistress Finson brought fresh water and broth to her slave girl whenever she found a minute. The mistress changed her shift and bedding, but with her household to run and family to feed, it was Cornelius who sat beside the bed, holding his mother’s hand and trying to understand her fevered gibberish. By the time he realized that “Senegambia” was a name, she was long past answering his questions.

In her mind, she was a child again, lying in chains in the dark hold of a slave ship. A storm rose up and turned the stifled, groaning misery of the journey into an even worse nightmare. As the belly of the ship pitched steeply from side to side, the suffering Africans believed themselves doomed not only to die but to capsize, which would have made it impossible for their spirits to find a way home.

“Don’t cry, Senegambia,” she wailed, trying to comfort some man or woman long dead. “It ain’t your fault.”

When she quieted down, Cornelius kept watch over the rise and fall of his mother’s narrow chest, certain that his attention would somehow help keep her alive. He studied her face, so frightfully thin. He’d once heard Mistress say, “Our Maydee is good as gold, but homelier than dirt.” What did she mean? he wondered. His mother’s skin — a smooth, rich mahogany brown — made the whites look ugly as old cheese. Her smile was a crescent moon in a dark sky.

He stroked her bony hand as she whimpered in her sleep. Her face twisted in disgust. “The smell,” she croaked. “Please, sir, some air.”

He opened the windows and the door, and when that gave her no ease he washed the floor with vinegar-water. He brought pine boughs and broke the needles beneath her nose. Still, she wailed that the stench was choking her and Cornelius had to cover her mouth with a towel, lest Mistress Finson make good on her threat to fetch the doctor, who always brought death with him.

In her last hours, Maydee’s skin burned to ash. She thrashed on the cot and would have tipped it over if Cornelius hadn’t sat on it with her. “Maggots,” she moaned, raking her fingers through her scalp and over her eyes. When Cornelius saw that she was drawing blood, he tied her hands down with soft rags. He was as gentle as he could be, but it set her to weeping, and he was ashamed.

When she finally fell asleep, Cornelius put his ear to her mouth to make sure that she was still breathing, and lay his head on his arms to rest beside her. He woke to see Maydee’s head and shoulders lifted off the bed, straining every muscle upward, like she was trying to fly. She stared intently at the ceiling, her eyes hollow as teacups. Cornelius tried to push her down into the bed, but she was rigid and would not budge, until suddenly, she relented and fell back. Supple and light as a falling leaf, dead.

He rarely thought of his mother, but the memory of her death walked beside him on that sultry night, past the last few houses attached to the city, up to the spot where he turned back, out of habit, to make certain no one saw him step onto the old path into Dogtown.

Cornelius felt the familiar twinge in his left knee. He was sixty-one years old, and although his back was still straight and there were only a few strands of gray on his head, his legs were not what they used to be. He couldn’t help but envy men of his years who spent their afternoons smoking pipes and recalling better times. Those were white men, of course. White men with generous daughters.

Cornelius was altogether alone. He touched no one and spoke to the people around him as little as possible. He had stopped butchering hogs mostly so he wouldn’t have to talk to the likes of Silas Hutting and his vile neighbor, Eben Crowley. Both of them had taken to paying less than what they promised, daring him to dispute it, and calling him “Nigger Neal” into the bargain.

His one piece of luck was his job as bookkeeper for Jacob Somes, a fish wholesaler, who paid Cornelius a few dollars a week, plus room and board. Somes was pleased with Cornelius’s steadiness and knew the man worked hard. But no one saw how much Cornelius cherished his position and labored over his rows of numbers, rechecking every calculation three times not only for accuracy but for appearance as well. He wanted every digit to be perfectly square and lined in exact rows, which required his total concentration. At the end of every day, he would set down the pen and run his weary eyes up and down the pages, savoring the order he’d created.

Numbers were forthright, definite, and reassuring, entirely unlike words, which were slippery and sharp. To Cornelius, language had come to seem untrustworthy, double-edged as a plow that could just as easily sever a foot as cut through sod.

He had quit reading some years back, dismayed by the half-truths and contradictions he found in print. One volume argued for the power of faith, another claimed that the works of man were ascendant. One newspaper article claimed the governor was a great man; another on the very next page called him a thief. The Bible was the worst of all, riddled with impossibilities, opposing accounts of the same story, and hideous acts of cruelty. If the Bible had been at all mathematical, he might have become a Christian.

Had Mrs. Somes known anything about Cornelius’s theology, she would have had her excuse to throw him out of the attic. She had never wanted him there; he was too big, too black, too reticent, and she refused to believe her husband’s reassurances that he was more civilized than half the fishermen in town. Somes withstood his wife’s complaints in this matter as in little else because Cornelius was the only honest bookkeeper he’d ever hired. He thought him a good man, too, and at Christmas, shook his hand, presented him with a silver dollar, and insisted he take a cup of cider and a biscuit — when his wife’s back was turned.

But Mrs. Somes never reconciled herself to having the African under her roof and festered at having to wash his meager linen and feed him. She would grumble and drop his plate on the table with a rude grunt. Cornelius ate what she served as quickly as he could, which ruined his digestion and confirmed his landlady’s opinion that he was not entirely human.

Cornelius usually breathed better out from under her roof, but he found little ease on that hot, dark summer night. It was barely cooler under the trees, where the crickets shrilled, loud as crows. He stared at Judy’s dark house for a moment and turned back, feeling as though he were still caught in the nightmare that had started him on this pointless ramble.

He hurried back to the main road and lengthened his stride, suddenly wanting nothing but his own bed. But Cornelius lost his footing and then he heard someone scream.

He had no way of knowing how long it was before he regained his senses and found himself lying on his side, clutching his knee, which felt like a harpoon had pierced the joint and was still lodged inside. Panting, he waited for the pain to subside before he tried to stand again, but the throbbing only grew stronger and faster. The longer he lay there, the more it seemed that the pounding in his leg was keeping time with the high-pitched thrum of the crickets.