The Last Days of Dogtown (27 page)

With shoulders squared and a crooked sort of smile fixed on her mouth, she returned to her friends and headed directly to the cot, where she had so often slept with Natty tucked under her arm.

“Polly,” she said, briskly. “Put on the kettle, won’t you, dear? I’ll make a tea to draw out the heat further. And then we’ll have some chamomile for compresses, with plenty of extra for your sachets, dear.”

Cornelius listened to Judy’s orders and Polly’s replies, to the sound of the water being poured, to Natty’s prattle and David’s gurgles, to Oliver’s footfalls on the uneven floor. He listened, waiting for Judy to speak his name.

When she gently laid the first cloth on his forehead, Cornelius released his breath and felt her startle. The next applications were more businesslike, with a quick pat, as though he were a dog.

“Cornelius,” she said, briskly. “Cornelius, you must sit up and drink the infusion while it is still hot enough to do you some good.”

He lifted his head to receive the scalding spoon. After a few mouthfuls, he felt the heat rise in him and kicked away the blanket.

“No,” she said, tucking it tightly around his legs. “You must sweat more, not less. The tea is doing its work. Lie still.”

Polly watched the two of them closely, but they had settled into their roles as nurse and patient and she doubted there would be any more clues forthcoming. Finally Polly’s hunger for company overwhelmed her curiosity and she began a detailed comparison of the differences between Natty and David as babies, wondering why one boy was such a good sleeper and the other such an easy feeder, and how it was that Natty turned out to be blond but David’s hair was darker than Oliver’s.

Polly had a dozen questions for Judy, too. When should she approach Mrs. Stiles about sewing her second daughter’s trousseau, and had everyone had a time with their beans that summer or had she done something wrong? Finally she dropped her voice and asked, “Is it true that Mrs. Cook is at death’s door?”

“Heavens, no. She is sick, but Martha is not dying. Is that the gossip? How awful,” Judy said. “She suffers terribly from the calomel, and I worry that the cure may be the death of her. But she is still very much with us.

“As for the rest of your questions, I am out of the house so little, I have no news to report about Mrs. Stiles or anyone else.” Polly’s disappointment prompted Judy to recount the tale of the Cooks’ new young serving girl who was so inconsolable about being separated from her mother and sisters that she had run away twice. Judge Cook himself had gone to fetch her the second time.

Cornelius heard the bile in Judy’s mouth whenever she mentioned the Judge, and wondered what he’d done to earn her enmity. Behind closed eyes, he waited for her to speak to him again, to say “Cornelius” as she used to. But now he would answer her. He would say, “Yes, Judy.” He would do anything she wished.

He lay on his back, swaddled and sweating, and imagined himself telling her all the stories he knew that she would have liked to hear from him. He remembered the way he’d said nothing when she told him about her motherless childhood. He was still ashamed about that. He should have set aside his pride, or whatever it was that kept him from confiding in her, and admitted that he was fortunate by comparison; after all, Cornelius did remember his mother’s love and care, and that was no small thing.

Their life had not been easy, but they had not lived so differently from their masters, with whom they had shared the same four rooms, eaten the same bland food at the same plank table, scratched at the same mosquitoes in the summer, and shivered in the same winter drafts.

Judy would have treated the stories about his mother like treasures. But Cornelius had not trusted Judy at first, and then he’d been afraid. Years of shame had followed, and now he was a poor, crippled, old black man. His boyhood stories would be burdens, not gifts.

Noticing his furrowed brow under the beading sweat, Judy applied one last compress.

“How fares the patient?” Oliver asked.

“I believe he will recover,” she said, gathering her things. “This is a passing fever. I doubt that it had anything to do with the knee. I’ve done as much as I can do for tonight.”

“Come back soon,” Polly whispered so as not to wake Natty, who was asleep on her lap.

“I promise.” Judy blew her a kiss.

Oliver and Judy walked out in the sunset.

“It’s getting dark much earlier these days,” she said. “There’s a touch of fall tonight.”

He took her bag and, on impulse, offered her his arm. “Allow me.”

Judy took it and leaned against him, wrung out by the evening.

“You knew Cornelius in Dogtown, then?” Oliver asked, after they’d been walking for a while.

“Yes.”

“Yes?”

“It was a long time ago,” Judy said firmly, and Oliver heard the door close on any further conversation about the African.

Oliver patted her hand, and they continued for a long way without saying a word.

Judy had a headache, and she longed to lie down and sort out the anguish and anger and desire that had roiled up in her when she heard her name in Cornelius’s mouth.

Oliver tried to reconcile his liking for Cornelius with queasy outrage over the way he had moaned for Judy. Her name in his mouth seemed obscene, and yet he was not sure why. Cornelius was a man, same as him, or Everett Mansfield, or every Wharf or Tarr, Tom or William, who ever walked Cape Ann.

The African question was too complicated for Oliver to fathom on his own. He would try to discuss it with Polly, he decided, and turned his attention back to Judy, who seemed to need cheering up.

He leaned toward his friend and, in a tone of lighthearted conspiracy, said, “I haven’t told Polly yet, but I’m starting to look around for a new situation,” and filled the rest of the journey with his plan for an escape from the stink of fish, which Polly could no longer wash out of his clothes.

Judy warmed to his plans and before they knew it, they had arrived. Judy clucked at the lights blazing from every window in the house. “That girl.”

“I’ll come by and tell you how he’s faring,” said Oliver, as he opened the garden gate for her.

“Thank you, my dear boy,” she whispered. Before letting go of his arm, she reached up and kissed him lightly on the cheek, and wondered why she had never done that before.

By morning, Cornelius’s fever was nearly gone and he was able to rise and limp outside. But overnight, something had changed in the household. Polly was as pleasant as ever, but she looked at him with obvious pity. Oliver did nothing out of the ordinary, but he would not meet his eye.

He left a few days later, his knee stiff but tolerable. “I’ll be thanking you the rest of my days,” he said.

Oliver shook his hand firmly.

“Will you come by and visit the boys?” Polly asked.

“I’ll be seeing them,” said Cornelius, running his hands over their silken heads.

He moved into Judy Rhines’s cottage and returned to trapping and gathering whatever could be sold or bartered. And he resumed his nighttime rounds, using a cane and walking carefully when he went out for a glimpse of Judy through lace curtains in Gloucester. He increased his circuit to include all the last of the Dogtown stragglers, down to Easter and Ruth, three creaky widows, and the sad crew at Mrs. Stanley’s house.

He looked in on the Youngers almost every day, and even got himself a spyglass so he could follow David’s progress as he learned to walk. Cornelius frowned and smiled to see how Natty teased his little brother and then helped, by turns. Wherever Cornelius went, he searched for little rustic oddities to scatter in the woods beside the Younger house. Sometimes, he’d hide nearby and wait for the excited shouts of the boys when they found the arrowhead or snakeskin, the outsize pinecone or tiny mouse skull. Natty brought the eggshells in to his mother, who exclaimed over the pretty colors. Polly collected a whole rainbow of them: pink, blue, gold, and tawny white, and arranged them in the perfect bird nest they’d also discovered. She set it out on a windowsill, so Cornelius could see that they remembered him, too.

His Own Man

I
N THE EIGHT
years since he’d left Dogtown, Sam had not been cold or hungry. Thanks to his well-earned reputation for politeness, sobriety, and diligence, a succession of widowed women gave him room and board in exchange for his assistance in caring for their homes and properties, and for his handsome companionship.

Over time, pretty little Sammy Stanley had become a striking man of twenty, blue-eyed and honey blond, with a fine, sharp nose and a chiseled jaw. He’d taken to calling himself Sam Maskey, which suited him. Years of hard work had thickened his neck and broadened his shoulders so that even a threadbare coat hung from him with military authority. The only shame, the ladies agreed, was that he’d not grown any taller than five feet. When he tried for a job at one of the new two-man quarries, he was turned away. “You’re too damned short,” said the foreman, not unkindly. “It’ll be a backache for anyone to bend down to you. Come back when you grow.” But he never did.

He might have married into a fortune or at least a good living. There were several willing maidens who would inherit farms or fishing vessels, but none of them tempted Sam enough to overcome his distaste for the grinding labor of the fields or the perils of the sea. The girls were impossibly boring, too, and the truth was that the idea of a bedmate repulsed him, a distaste that came of growing up among whores, he figured. Besides, he had no need of a housewife, as he preferred his own cooking and had yet to find anyone to iron a shirt as well as he did. And then there was the matter of being able to keep all his earnings, without any family obligations.

Sam managed to set aside a substantial pile of money over the years by “lending a hand,” as he called it. He had done everything from unloading wagons and shucking clams, to painting rooms and harvesting turnips. He carried letters to Gloucester and fetched back newspapers, bolts of fabric, musical instruments, and some packages whose contents he could not guess. He traveled as far as Salem once, to deliver a little boy to his grandmother after his mother died. On that trip, he was offered a good price on half a case of Crown’s Tonic, a favorite patent medicine among his elderly acquaintances. After selling all of those bottles for twice what he’d paid, Sam moved into the nostrum trade.

Every few months, he’d order a supply of the remedies advertised in the Boston newspapers, so that when a person in the northern reaches of Cape Ann wanted a dose of Fisher’s Spirits, she need not suffer two weeks or more waiting for her cure to arrive. For his thirty percent, Sam could provide a bottle of Hamilton’s Grand Restorative or Lee’s Genuine Essence and Extract of Mustard on the spot. He accumulated an efficient inventory of elixirs, bilious pills, and worm-destroying lozenges, and even recommended one remedy or another to his neighbors, who came to trust his suggestions.

Sam’s room at Widow Long’s house was large enough to accommodate the crates and boxes. His landlady was more than happy to tolerate the clutter in exchange for a dependable reserve of Dr. Cotton’s Soothing Syrup, a rather expensive potion imported from England.

“Without my syrup, I wouldn’t get a wink of sleep,” said Mrs. Long. Sam poured her a nightly dram of the honey-flavored brew, which contained more alcohol than anything else. She snored like a sailor after taking her medicine, and was never troubled by the knocking of the customers who visited him after dark.

Late one night in March, the door rattled with three short raps.

“Damn,” Sam said. Three knocks meant it was Molly Jacobs, who came not to buy but to beg. “Hold your water,” he barked. The old baggage had been coming at him with her hand out ever since he’d left Mrs. Stanley’s place. She only came after midnight, announced by that
tap-tap-tapp
ing, like a timid woodpecker.

But when he opened the door, he found it was Alice Ives, who’d come looking for medicine to ease her father’s cough. Sam sold her a bottle of Crown’s Tonic, which would help the old man to sleep at the very least, ignoring Alice’s blushes, cow eyes, and the way she touched his sleeve when she paid.

After she left, it occurred to Sam that Molly had not been begging for months. Had there been snow on the ground the last time she’d come? He couldn’t remember.

Whenever Sam heard Molly’s three taps, he swore an oath and got a few coins ready so he could press them into her hand quickly, before she could put a foot across the threshold. If it was raining hard or freezing cold, he’d let her in to warm herself for a moment, but he never offered her a seat or anything to eat or drink.

“Sally’s thin as a rail these days, Sammy,” said Molly, who never asked for herself. “She ain’t had a cup of tea in a fortnight.” It was always for Sally. “Her dress is in tatters,” she sighed. “It’s so awful for her, and it just about breaks my heart.”

What he gave her was hardly worth the walk from Dogtown. Sam used to justify his stinginess by thinking some of it might find its way into John Stanwood’s hands, but Sam didn’t get any more generous after Stanwood’s death, which was either the result of a barroom brawl or from drowning in a shallow ditch, depending on who told the story.