The Last Days of Dogtown (11 page)

A momentary panic passed over his face. “It’s Mr. Henry,” he stammered and got to his feet. “Thee have been a gracious hostess, Mistress Carter.”

“Nobody calls me anything but Easter, dearie. Stop by on your way back. I hope to have something stewing by then.”

“Good day, Mistress Carter,” he said. “God bless thee.”

Above stairs, Ruth lay on her bed. She had no work that day, which was just as well since her back ached all the way down both legs. She pocketed a long, narrow iron chisel, winced her way down the stairs, and was gone before Easter had a chance to call out to her.

She hurried until she got the black coat in her sight, then kept a safe distance as the man made his way to the old Wharf place. Ruth watched him wander the tall grass until he found the hole that had been the cellar. He removed his hat before he stepped down, as though there were still a difference between inside and out. Turning slowly, he shook his head and frowned.

After a few minutes of this, he stepped out of the hollow, replaced his hat, and began circling the overgrown boundaries of the house, thrashing at weeds and brambles with a stick until he found what he was looking for. He crouched and set to pulling the grass and saplings away from a thin slab of a headstone. He ran his fingers across a name still visible, clasped his hands, and bowed his head.

Ruth bit at the inside of her cheeks as she watched the Quaker finish clearing the grave. He took a small packet from his breast pocket, laid it near the marker, and piled some stones on top of it. Then he stood, brushed himself off, and walked away.

As soon as he was out of sight, Ruth sprang from her hiding place and ran to Anne Wharf’s grave. She tore the small cairn apart, tossing the stones aside like a digging dog, to reveal a square of brown paper, no more than three inches across. Unfolding it slowly and carefully, she found a twisted scrap of cloth, a lock of crisp, black hair, and a narrow silver band. Ruth stared at the three oddments for a long moment before replacing them in their paper, pocketing them, and rushing after the Quaker.

He was nearly to the Commons Road, but instead of heading back toward the harbor, he forged down an overgrown trail that was known only to locals. Ruth knew who she was following now, and where he was going.

Brimfield’s pasture overlooked blue water on three sides, with views of ’Squam River, Goose Cove, and Mill River. But the Quaker did not stop to admire the sparkling scene. With his head down, as though he were leaning into a strong wind, he made straight for a large, flat boulder, where he finally stopped.

A loud groan startled Ruth, who watched as he commenced shaking his head back and forth, faster and faster, from side to side until his hat fell from his head and another moan escaped him. He pulled his shirt open and beat at his chest with clenched fists, hand over hand, until red marks blossomed on the pale flesh.

A shudder ran through Ruth and released her from her hiding place. She sprang out and ran up behind him, taking him unaware. Grabbing his long hair with one hand, she placed the sharp edge of her chisel against his throat and said, “Murderer.”

He gasped and struggled so that he pricked himself against the blade. At that, he dropped his hands and whispered, “Heavenly Father, Thy will be done.”

“Who are you?” Ruth demanded, her voice a low growl.

“If you accuse me of murder, you must know,” said Henry Brimfield, dropping polite address and speaking to his attacker as he would to a horse. He pointed to the great, tablelike boulder. “That is where I found her, weak and bleeding.”

“You
found
her?” said Ruth, pulling his head back farther still. The stranger’s eyes were the color of water.

“You must think that I killed her. They all did. They believed that I was the father of the child, too. But I swear upon my eternal soul that it was not me. I did not kill the girl, nor did I…nor was that child mine.”

Her lips at his ear, she said, “Liar.”

“My father was the guilty one,” Brimfield said. “I have spent my life trying to puzzle out what happened here, how it came to murder. I have rehearsed it a hundred times and it must have been that she threatened to reveal him.

“Pride was my father’s greatest sin,” he said, a brittle bitterness in his voice. “He treasured his good name above heaven itself, and if she would not swear to keep his secret, he might well have traded his soul for his reputation.”

“You were there.”

“It was my first day home from Harvard,” he said, rushing to complete his confession. “I was not yet one-and-twenty, a new physician, like my father. I hurried here, where I knew she pastured the cows. I wanted only to declare my love for her. Though now I doubt if it was love at all, or only lust.

“This is where I found her,” he said, glancing over at the boulder. “The dueling sword — my sword — thick with her blood.”

“Dead?” Ruth demanded.

“Not quite,” said Brimfield. “Doomed. She begged me to save the child and once she died, I opened the womb with the sword that killed her and delivered my father’s bastard, my half-sister. No Greek drama was ever more perverse.”

Ruth changed her grasp on Brimfield, twisting his arm behind him and putting the chisel between his shoulders. “Why did you come back?”

Brimfield closed his eyes. “I am old,” he said. “This memory has haunted me, and I hoped, well, if I might have spoken with Mrs. Wharf, there might have been some peace. But she is gone. Your vengeance is proof that my guilt is still current, hereabouts. But the murderer is gone, I tell you. Died in his own feather bed, eighty-seven years old, though there will be no repose for him in hell.”

Sure the mortal blow would follow next, Brimfield struggled to keep his bowels within him. But the moments passed without any change in his attacker’s grasp.

“What of the baby?” Ruth whispered, at last.

“Mistress Wharf warmed it in her own shawl and gave it a cloth teat. She dressed me in her son’s coat and said to take the poor creature to her cousins in Providence. From there I went on to their brethren in Philadelphia, to the Society of Friends, where freeing the African has been my life’s work.”

Ruth heard the expectation of thanks in his voice and knew him for a fool.

But Brimfield sensed that something had changed; there was a loosening of the lock on his arm, and he no longer could feel the pressure of the blade on his back anymore. He changed his tone, speaking as he would to a child that might be coddled out of a bad temper. “I wanted to thank Anne Wharf,” Brimfield said. “Without her, I might well have left Phoebe’s child out in the woods, and for such a transgression I would have been doomed for eternity.”

Ruth discovered that she could not draw a full breath as he continued. “I am convinced beyond argument that the African is endowed with a God-given soul. I will give Mistress Wharf my thanks in heaven.”

Sweat beaded on her face and the chisel fell from her fingers.

Hearing the thud, Brimfield peeked behind him and saw the crude iron weapon on the ground; the black man’s eyes were squeezed shut. At that, Brimfield started to tiptoe away, slowly, tense as a cat. As soon as he had reached the trees, he broke into an awkward gallop and did not stop until he saw ships in the harbor.

Blood pounded in Ruth’s ears. She had never felt weaker or more confused. This was the moment she’d been living for, but the only thought she could muster was that her mother had not been Phyllis, as she’d been told, but Phoebe.

The only time she’d ever heard that name before was from Mimba. “The African names came with the mothers,” she said. “Cato is from Keta. Phoebe is from Phibbi. Most of them here don’t remember. The mothers be dead. But I remember.”

“Phoebe,” Ruth whispered. “Phoebe,” as though Mimba were still there to hear. “Waking and dreaming, not big different,” Mimba used to tell her. “Now-days and times-past, not so different.”

Brimfield had provided Ruth with one piece of the puzzle that had always eluded her. The slaying of Dr. Henry Brimfield’s slave girl was an old tale, but such a juicy story that it was repeated whenever any murder was mentioned. When Gloucester had first discovered that the younger Brimfield had disappeared on the very night the corpse was discovered, covered in his coat, killed with his sword, the court of public opinion pronounced him guilty. That turned out to be the only form of justice ever meted out as Dr. Brimfield, the father, had friends in the law. No warrant was ever issued and no search ensued, a breach of fairness that remained a shocking and satisfying detail of the gruesome story. Long after the slave girl’s name was forgotten (she was “the slave wench” or “Brimfield’s girl”), the locals continued to tut-tut about the murder: “Respectable is as respectable does.”

But of all the times Ruth had heard the tale repeated at Easter’s hearth, there was never any mention of a baby. That knot was unraveled for her, but there were new mysteries now, and there was no way any of them would be solved.

She unfolded the paper packet again. The lock of hair was tied with a pink ribbon faded nearly white. Had he cut this from her head after she was dead? Did he use the saber that killed her to remove it as a souvenir?

The silver ring would not pass over the first knuckle of her littlest finger. Were her mother’s fingers so small? Could a Yankee slave have owned such a thing? Was it a reward from her master, a gift from her mistress, a stolen secret? Did she wear it on her hand?

The twist of fabric was tight as a nut and hard, the size of a thimble. Ruth pried it open carefully, but there was nothing inside but a pattern of yellow flowers. She put the scrap to her nose, but it held no scent. What was this? Why had it been saved?

The questions buzzed like bees inside her head. She put her treasures away and laid her chisel on top of the boulder where her mother had perished. And then she walked down the steep slope to the water’s edge.

Ruth turned her face to the south and started along the banks of the ’Squam River, putting one foot in front of the other along the muddy shore. She kept her eyes on the ground ahead of her, with no thought to where she was headed. She saw nothing of the lingering golden sunset nor did she notice the rise of a nearly full moon. She succeeded in forgetting herself altogether until she found herself in Gloucester Harbor. Ruth crouched under the wharfs and hid behind pilings, hurrying silently between shadows to avoid detection, running from the fouled water and greasy smells until she reached the quiet of Wonson Point.

From there, she scrambled over the Bass Rocks, trudged the white Good Harbor sand, and clattered across Pebblestone Beach. From dry granite to slick granite, skirting low tide and soaking her boots at high tide, she let her legs make the case against death.

Only when she arrived at the farthest reach of Halibut Point did she stop and allow memory to have its way. Brimfield said he’d returned to Cape Ann to make peace with his past. She had come for the same reason, after all. And because of Mimba.

The short, wiry, coal black woman had been Ruth’s mother from the moment Ruth had appeared in the Prescotts’ kitchen. Mimba pulled the frightened four-year-old onto her lap and kissed her on both cheeks. “You gonna be my dearest-dearest?” she whispered. “You gonna be Mimba’s apple-sweetie?” Her words bore the stamp of the West Indies, where she’d learned housekeeping and English, but she never forgot the African names for “milk” and “home,” for “honey” and “memory,” which found their way into her stories.

Mimba was born to tell stories: old wives’ tales from Africa and Barbados, gossip about whites and blacks alike, family histories of all five of the slaves on the Prescott plantation on Narragansett Bay, in Rhode Island’s South County. Mimba told Ruth a story about her life, too, or as much of it as she could and would.

She always began the same way. “Your poor-dear mother was called Phyllis Brimfield, as I heard it, and she got a sad-sad story, because she didn’t get to love you long-time like Mimba.” Standing between Mimba’s knees while her hair was brushed and braided, Ruth learned that her poor-dear mother had died giving her birth, “up there in the north, on a cold island with a lady name. There was a tall man fetched you to Mistress Naomi and Hiram Smith, Providence-way, and Mr. Hiram give you name of Ruth, to make honor on his wife, I heard.”