Sammy had arrived two years earlier, a note pinned to his coat. No one knew what it said, or even who had brought the child. According to the gossip, when Mrs. Stanley read the message the only words out of her mouth were, “Damn me.” She introduced the boy child as her daughter’s son and said his name was Sam Maskey, though he was known as Sammy Stanley.
No one knew Mrs. Stanley even had a daughter till that moment. About Mr. Stanley, she placed a well-tended hand over her heart and said, “Lost at sea.” No one questioned the claim though few believed it.
Sammy knew his grandmother wasn’t fond of him, even though he did as he was told and kept still, which was all that grown people seemed to want of children. The first time he sat in Granny Day’s grammar school, she’d had a devil of a time getting him to say his letters out loud and thought he might be deaf if not stupid. But then she spied him reading the Bible, and when she coaxed him discovered that he’d memorized all of Genesis and had started on Exodus. For that, she’d patted him on the head and given him a cracker too hard to chew.
Sammy felt Oliver Younger’s eyes on him. The older boy curled a strand of his lank, greasy hair around his finger and pouted his lips. That didn’t bother the boy. Mrs. Stanley had never shown him anything in the way of affection, but she’d taught him that you were more likely to get what you wanted if you were polite and smelled good, and Oliver was plainly filthy and rude.
After a moment, Oliver lost interest in the child and turned his glance away from that corner of the room. He didn’t want to have to meet Granny Day’s eyes; he’d quit her classroom long before Sammy arrived. He’d left the Gloucester grammar school as well, even though it had been warm and the girls would sometimes share their dinners. He just got tired of fighting for the good name of Dogtown, a place he hated yet felt required to defend.
Besides, Oliver didn’t put much stock in schooling. A man could go to sea or enlist in a war without book learning. A man could come back covered in glory and with enough pay to claim Judy Rhines as his own. She’d see him in uniform and recognize him as just the fellow to take her out of the ruin of Dogtown. She’d cook for him and keep him warm and smile at him sweeter than she smiled at that pretty boy. Oliver longed to speak to her, or just to gaze in her direction without worrying about being caught.
The room grew still as Mrs. Stanley took her seat, and for a moment the only sound was the hissing of the fire. Judy fancied that the sizzles and pops were whispering about the fate of poor Abraham’s soul, and she felt a sudden desire to get away from the sorrows and petty cruelties assembled in Easter’s smoky drawing room. There was no telling how long it would take for Abraham’s kin to make it up to Dogtown. Their cart might get stuck on the road, and February days ended fast: if an axle broke they might have to turn back altogether and try again tomorrow.
The sound of stamping feet outside gave Judy a moment’s hope that they had arrived and she would be able to leave. But it turned out to be John Morgan Stanwood, who surveyed the room as if everyone had been awaiting his arrival. A cold wind blew in, while his wife and their three grown daughters shivered behind him.
“Goddamn ye, Stanwood,” Tammy shouted. “Shut the goddamn door.”
Stanwood took his time, kicking the frost from his boots while his wife crept past him and hurried to comfort Widow Lurvey, her mother. When the old lady caught sight of her daughter, she set up another wail that startled the dogs in the back room and set off a chorus of woofs and whines.
“You woke the hounds of hell, Mother Lurvey,” scolded Stanwood. “Too bad you can’t wake Father Abraham over there.”
He winked at his daughters, who reddened and stared at the floor. The only one to laugh at the weak joke was Oliver, who reached for the deepest voice he could muster. With another male in the room, he held himself straighter and stood wide like Stanwood, who was bowlegged, which to Oliver looked like a proud announcement of his manhood.
Oliver scratched his chest and stole a look at the Stanwood girls, who were among the prettier females on Cape Ann, even without benefit of fine clothes or face powder. Rachel, the oldest, was already engaged to a fellow from Annisquam; Lydia and Hannah were busy seeking husbands to get them out of Dogtown, too, attending church on Sunday only to smile at everything in pants. Oliver overheard that bit of gossip from Tammy. But the Stanwood sisters were known to him in another way.
Oliver ducked his head, remembering the August night last summer when the air stayed steamy even after sunset and the only relief from the heat and the bugs was the creek. He had been taking off his trousers when Hannah’s giggle gave them away. He waded silently to near where they were bathing, and from behind the bushes watched Lydia Stanwood’s plump breasts float on the water. The other sisters joined her, and four more breasts winked at him. Oliver’s member was instantly hard as stone, and as the girls splashed and whispered, he put his hand there and answered the urgent, unspoken questions his body had been putting to him the past year.
After that, Oliver felt a profound respect for John Stanwood as the sire of so many breasts. Indeed, Oliver was so smitten with his swaggering presence, he didn’t notice how Judy Rhines’s lip curled when Stanwood asked where that damned nigger had got to anyway.
Stanwood pinched Easter Carter’s leg as she brought him a cup of beer. “You got something nice for me, old girl?” he asked.
“I got the cabbage for you,” she said. “I got the cabbage and beer for everyone in honor of Abraham Wharf. But don’t you have a word for your poor mother-in-law over there?”
Stanwood shrugged and walked over to Mary, who hadn’t let go of his wife’s hand. He whispered something in her ear and then stood behind her chair, where he winked at Molly and Sally and blew a kiss to Mrs. Stanley, who clucked and wagged a finger in his direction. Stanwood tried to catch Judy Rhines’s eye, too. He was a black-haired, dark-eyed rake accustomed to having women flutter at his attentions, but Judy would not even look his way.
By then, Mrs. Stanley’s rum had made its way around the room and the grannies were chewing over their stories about Abraham Wharf: how he used to brag about a cousin who was a judge in Boston. How his sheep had been the living envy of every farmer up and down the Cape.
“Didn’t I hear about Wharf killing an Indian for touching one of his animals?” said Granny Day. Her friends pshawed that tale to nothing: no one could recall seeing an Indian anywhere near Dogtown. But they outdid one another in recalling how loud and long he’d wept at Anne’s grave, twenty years ago. Heartbroken, he was, and angry.
After she died, the four Wharf boys had moved down to the city one after the other, but the old man wouldn’t budge. “As I recollect, none of them pressed their father to join them,” said Easter.
Tammy snorted. “That reeking know-it-all son-of-a-bitch? Where’s the wonder in that?”
Judy was still puzzling over Abraham’s death. In his last year, he’d taken to spending more and more time near Whale’s Jaw. “It’s like God Himself put them there” was how he described the rocks to Judy Rhines. “Like a statue that God Himself had a hand in.”
He also told her that, as far as he was concerned, the Whale’s Jaw was the only proof of God that ever made sense to him. The fact that Cornelius had found Wharf dead beneath those giant stones made Judy wonder if he had lost even that little shred of faith.
Why had he sharpened the blade and killed himself? Did he suffer from some hidden illness or awful pain? Was there something she might have done to lessen his despair? She wasn’t sure why Wharf’s death had unsettled her so. He was neither a relation nor really a friend: a neighbor, an acquaintance at most. Perhaps it was just the fact of his suicide that gnawed at her. To choose death seemed a terrible insult to everyone who carried on with the lonely business of living.
As Judy pondered, the conversation ebbed to a quiet mutter and mumble. The voices lapped against Easter’s walls like water against a wooden hull. Sammy Stanley dozed, his shining curls against Granny Day’s knee.
The lull came to an abrupt end with an argument between Easter and Stanwood about money he’d borrowed from her. It wasn’t easy to provoke Easter Carter, but there was no stopping her once she got riled. Between Stanwood’s cussing and Easter’s hollering, no one heard the wagon pull up, and everyone gasped as the door opened on two of Abraham’s grown grandsons, their faces wearing matching expressions of annoyance and disdain.
“We’re come for our grandfather,” said the shorter of the two.
Easter invited them to warm up and take a drop in his memory. “Nah,” said the elder, who favored Abraham in the shape of his eyes and the way he held his shoulders, one slightly ahead of the other. “We aim to be home before dark, and our only chance is to leave now. These damned roads.”
“You’ll be taking me, too,” said Mary Lurvey, rising stiffly.
The Wharf boys stared at her.
Stanwood smiled at their confusion and explained. “This is your great-aunt Mary. Your grandpa was her brother.”
“We don’t have room for no old lady,” said the shorter Wharf, as though she wasn’t standing right there.
“Two real gentlemen,” Tammy smirked.
“Witch,” he muttered.
“Now, now,” said Mrs. Stanley. “If a person saws a barrel in two and makes two tubs, they call her a witch.”
Hannah Stanwood giggled at the proximity of two potential grooms.
Stanwood hiked his pants up and announced, “Don’t worry, Mother Lurvey. We’ll get you down in plenty of time for the funeral. The ground is harder’n Tammy Younger’s heart, so they can’t plant him too quick. Family has to stick together in times like these.”
Judy Rhines waited for Tammy to turn her tongue on Stanwood for that, but she only threw her head back and laughed, blowing contempt all over the room. Stanwood’s face was a map of murder, but he held his tongue and led the Wharf boys to the corpse. The two of them hoisted their grandfather with so little effort, Judy thought she might weep. In that moment, it seemed as though the whole of Abraham’s life amounted to nothing more weighty or lasting than a sack of turnips.
This new commotion roused the dogs, who gathered to watch. Bear let out a sneeze and then commenced a howl that raised hairs on the back of every neck in the house. The women got to their feet — slowly and stiffly — as the body passed from the room with the dogs following after, padding out in single file like mourners leaving a church.
It was over. An unfamiliar look of misery stole over Easter’s face. There would be no going to Abraham Wharf’s funeral. The winter roads were too hard to make it there and back in one short winter’s day, and no one but the Wharfs had any relations to stay with in Gloucester. A gloomy silence settled over the room as they all listened to the receding chorus of barking and howling that followed the wagon as it bumped down the road all the way to Fox Hill, past Tammy Younger’s house, and into the world.
It was time for them to return to their crumbling houses, to sleep off the effects of the drink and revisit the taste of Easter’s cabbage, to mull over the bitter day that Abraham Wharf turned up dead, and Dogtown turned out to tell him a sorry farewell.
An Unexpected Visit
J
UDY STAYED
to help Easter collect the assortment of chipped crockery and battered tankards that littered the room. It didn’t take long to tidy up in a parlor that held but three chairs, some rough benches, and a table too small for the old man’s bier. But the empty room was no shame to Easter. “You don’t need a sideboard to hoist a glass” was how Easter greeted newcomers who, finding their way to her house, were disappointed by the absence of physical comforts.
After the last cup was rinsed and set aside, Easter yawned. “Why don’t you stay the night with me, Judy Rhines?” she said. “We’ll both sleep warmer, and it’s dark out there.”
But Judy was already putting on her cloak. “I’ll be fine.”
“You’re getting to be a hermit,” Easter grumbled.
“No more than Granny Day.”
“I suppose,” Easter laughed and kissed her cheek. “Keep safe,” she called as Judy walked into the freezing night, where Greyling had been waiting.
“You coming home with me, girl?”
The dog set out, trotting a few paces ahead of her, stopping when they reached the path that cut across the field to see which way the woman would go.
Judy decided against the short cut, not that her other choice was much better. On a night as cold as this, a broken ankle could be just as fatal on a main road: no one would find her until morning, if then.
The wind sliced through Judy’s clothes and burned her cheeks. She tightened the strips of homespun wrapped around her fingers and dug her hands into her armpits for warmth. Head down against the wind, she kept her eyes trained before her feet and stepped slowly. Had a traveler been abroad, he might have carried back a tale of a twisted ghoul crawling along the Dogtown road, with a fiendish familiar in the shape of a dog at its side.
Judy’s thoughts turned back to Abraham. Something about his hands had bothered her: clutched, almost birdlike, as though he’d been trying to grasp at something. The last time she’d seen Abraham alive, not even a month earlier, he had been sour and complaining, but no more so than any other time. What had turned inside him? And why had there been so little blood?
The tip of her nose started to burn. Drawing the folds of her cloak tight to her face, she caught the lingering smell of tobacco from the old ladies’ pipes. Soon enough, those women would be following the path into everlasting darkness or everlasting life — or wherever it was that Abraham had gone. She smiled at herself and decided that she was getting peculiar. Down in the harbor, “peculiar” was probably the kindest word they used. Crazy, fantastical, foolish. Witches and whores. Well, damn ’em to hell, she thought, and let out a short bark of a laugh.
Greyling startled at the sound, stopped, and looked back at her.