The Last Days of Dogtown (12 page)

It was their black servant, Nance, who’d done the work of caring for Ruth. The Smiths had set all of their slaves free, but Old Nance refused to go. She said her masters wanted to throw her out because she was too weak to lift the wash kettle. “She say they suck the marrow dry, and wants to throw the bone away.

“But then Old Nance passed on and them Smiths fostered you over to Queen Bernoon, that big-smart free African lady who sells oysters to eat.”

Ruth stayed with Queen and her large family of daughters and sons-in-law and grandchildren. For three years, Ruth ate, slept, and worked among the Bernoon children, picking through oysters and clams as soon as she was big enough to stand. But after the smallpox sickened all the little ones save Ruth, Queen got a spooky feeling about the quiet foundling, so she sold her to a fellow named Cuff, a half-breed African-Indian peddler who claimed his wife was pining for a little girl.

“Cuff was a bad ’un,” said Mimba. He took Ruth to Narragansett, where prices for slaves were higher and the law was distant. William Prescott bought the child for a large wheel of cheese and three silver dollars.

“You got a sad story, Ruth,” Mimba said. “But not sad-sad. You here with me and Cato and all us together now. You have a happy-sad story. Best you can get in this life is happy-sad. But you always gotta remember your own mamma that birthed you. Even though you only got a crumb of her story, you still got to say her name out loud. You always honor your dead, else you get trouble from them, sure.”

That story would keep Ruth awake at night; she had enough imagination to picture a sad-sad ending to her story, with her sold to some other master. The idea of a life without Mimba or Cato terrified her into nightmares, and Mimba finally stopped telling it to her. Meanwhile, Ruth did everything she could to ensure that she would never be parted from her Mimba. She was obedient, polite, and quick to learn the kitchen work from Mimba. She followed Cato into the fields and studied how he tended the cattle and fixed the long stone fences, too.

From the first, she preferred the outdoors to life in the house, where the white people kept her always on edge. Cato told her to be grateful for the kindness of owners who rarely struck them and had never sold anyone off. But she heard the false voices he and Mimba used when the master or mistress was near. And she knew that Mimba and Cato had jumped the broom in secret, so Prescott would not know they were husband and wife and hold the threat of separation against them.

But it wasn’t the master who pulled them apart. Mimba died when Ruth was seventeen, and she cried all the tears she hadn’t cried as a child. She refused to be separated from Cato after that, becoming what Mistress Prescott called “willful.” She refused to stay in the kitchen with Patricia, the other female slave who could not remember Mimba’s recipes as well as Ruth did. Master Prescott tried changing her mind with a switch; that didn’t do it, and neither did a real whipping with a belt. After he threatened to sell her, one of the wheels on the buggy fell off as the family was driving to church, and the cows kept escaping their pen. When the parlor curtains caught fire before dinner one day, Prescott realized what he was up against and told his wife she’d have to make do without Ruth.

She moved into the barn with Cato, who taught her everything he knew about stones and masonry, and then he told her all the bad-sad stories that Mimba had kept him from repeating to their broody girl. Mimba had been the noon to Cato’s midnight, and once she was gone, he recounted the bad-sad memories of his youth on a large Maryland plantation. And he told Ruth, “Your mamma didn’t just die borning you.” Cato whispered so that Mimba would not hear him from the other side. “She was killed by a white man. Murdered by her master in a cow pasture is the truth of it.

“I heard it from Queen Bernoon herself,” said Cato. “I’m only telling you so you stay clear of the men. White men are worst, but the Africans ain’t much better, like that Cuff who lied to Queen about wanting you when all he wanted was money.

“I didn’t tell you before ’cause Mimba didn’t want to break your heart,” he said. The taste of her name in his mouth always set him to grieving. “I miss her first thing in the morning. I miss how she used to heat up milk for my tea. I miss her in the bed every night.” Tears washed his cheeks. “I miss her on Sundays when we would sit together.” Finally he missed Mimba so much, he walked into the ocean, his pockets filled with stones.

When they found his body on the beach, Ruth had been shocked by the gray shards and rough slag he’d used to weigh himself down. Cato had taught her to look at stones the way other people looked at flowers, beautiful and varied. How could he have gone to Mimba without bringing her something pretty? Smooth white eggs, or the striped, sparkling “coins” that were his favorite?

Once Cato was gone, Ruth cut off her hair, put on his trousers, and came inside the house only for food. Prescott let her be, not only because she was his most able worker but also because as the youngest of his slaves, she would be his last.

Word of emancipation had finally reached the Africans of the South County plantations. Ruth heard it in church, where the slaves were crowded into the narrow balcony called nigger heaven. “Newport is full of free Africans,” someone behind her whispered. The man to Ruth’s left leaned over her and said he heard that all the Rhode Island–born slaves could claim their freedom if they were twenty-one, but a woman on her right warned that the masters were fighting it one by one, arguing how this man was born somewhere else, or that girl was too young to count. Worst of all, you needed a paper to prove it, and what master was going to put it on paper?

The talk upstairs got so loud, the parson slapped his hand on the lectern to quiet the noise. Three times he pounded, but it did no good. Ruth saw proof that the news was true from the looks on the upturned white faces; some of them seemed scared, some sad, all of them plainly unsettled.

That night, Ruth watched the full March moon rise over the bay and felt herself grow lighter. Until that morning, being a slave had seemed a lot like being a woman: something you got born into, hardships and all. Ruth knew that she was smarter than her mistress and that she could run the plantation better than her master. But now, the notion that they owned her was no longer merely cruel — it had always seemed cruel. Now, it was nonsense. The Prescotts might as well claim to own the sea or the sky as Ruth or anybody else.

She hugged her knees to her chest and decided to leave as soon as the traveling got easier. She would head north to Cape Ann and visit her mother’s grave. Mimba used to sorrow over the way her own mamma’s bones were all the way across the sea in Africa, and she fretted that no one there would go to cheer her spirit with food and conversation. Surely a murdered mother needed more consolation than most. Ruth knew that Mimba would have approved her plan, even though it meant her own grave would be lonely. She took a little comfort knowing that Mimba had Cato right next to her.

On a moonless May night, Ruth put Cato’s extra clothes into an old burlap sack, along with Prescott’s best stone chisels, wedges, and his good mallet. She left one of the four silver dollars she’d found sewed into the corners of Cato’s mattress by way of payment and never looked back.

She walked until dawn, when an old African man in a buggy stopped and offered her a ride. There was a paper pinned to his shirt; he pointed to it. “Says I own myself and this wagon and no one can take me.” Ruth slept in hayricks by day and traveled by night, eating whatever she could find, wearing out her shoes on the way to Cape Ann.

From a chilly granite perch on Halibut Point, Ruth held her head in her hands and measured her days since that long trek fourteen years ago, from Narragansett to her meeting with Henry Brimfield. In all that time, she had found neither comfort nor satisfaction. Even her freedom had provided her little more ease or consolation than the moon above warmed her tired bones. Ruth had come so far and lived so lonely only to learn that she was the daughter of a rapist and a murderer. She was half-sister to a smug fool who would probably have used Phoebe as ill as his father, had he been given the chance. And even though she finally knew where her mother’s blood had been spilled, Ruth still did not know where her bones were buried.

The sound of barking startled Ruth out of her reverie. A wet, hoarse bawl rose from the rocks not a hundred yards from her, where a dozen otters lay, their sleek pelts gleaming in the moonlight. One of them had rolled onto one of his fellows, who had made the loud, doggish complaint. The animals shook themselves and settled, much like the pack she knew so well. Ruth realized that there had been no sea monster in Gloucester Harbor, just flashes of these glossy backs in the water, tricking the eye into imagining one big creature that did not exist.

There had been no portent of Brimfield’s arrival, or of anything menacing. Otters were uncommon visitors in those waters, but nothing unnatural or ill-omened and they would disappear back into the sea, without explanation or consequence. The way of the world, she thought. Whales breach and vanish. One slave girl is killed and another is born, and both are forgotten.

The wind cut through Ruth’s spray-soaked shirt. With numb feet and aching knees, she suffered the last miles back to where she’d started out the day before.

The boulder seemed insignificant in the dawning light. It was just a large rock, flat as a table, but nothing as grand as the natural monuments considered odd enough to be christened. “Peter’s Pulpit” and “Whale’s Jaw” lured the tourists who speculated about visits by ancient Viking travelers or some other nonsense.

The rocky altar where her mother died was nothing but one more of the countless stones that gave rise to the hoary joke that Cape Ann was the last place that God created, since it was where He dumped all the rocks that were of no use elsewhere.

Ruth lay her cheek on that granite table and shivered. She was ashamed of herself for letting Brimfield go. He might have been lying about the murder, but even if he’d been telling the truth, what difference did that make? Father or son, an act of vengeance might have provided a fitting end to her mother’s tale and her own. But it was out of her hands now. She’d lost the chance to make him tell her what Phoebe looked like, what her voice sounded like, what she cared for. She would never unlock the riddle of the lock of hair, the ring, and the scrap of yellow cloth.

She would wait for death, whenever it came for her. She would live day to day. She would not wonder anymore. Ruth closed her eyes and slept.

When Ruth had rushed out of her house in pursuit of Brimfield, Easter sat down by the door to wait. She’d kept her vigil there long after dark, feeding scraps to Brindle so she wouldn’t have to sit alone.

“She should be here by now,” Easter said as the moon started to set. The dog pricked up his ears. “She likes that room upstairs. She’s walked miles in the snow rather than sleep somewheres else. Even if there was a dry barn or a warm kitchen floor, she’d make it back.” Brindle snorted and put his head on his paws.

The following evening, Oliver Younger had stopped by to tell Easter about Henry Brimfield’s visit. One of the old-timers in town had recognized him getting back on the Boston-bound coach, and within hours the taverns were buzzing as though the slave girl’s blood was still fresh. It didn’t take long for word to filter up to the parlors on High Street. “Guilty as sin,” “bold as brass,” and phrases less genteel were passed from mouth to ear as news of “young” Brimfield’s visit made the rounds.

Easter didn’t let on. “The rogue,” she said. After Oliver left, she patted Brindle and muttered, “Good riddance and thank goodness.”

Ruth returned midmorning the next day, wet and limping. She did not even nod at Easter, still sitting by the door, and made straight for the attic without a word. For the first time in all the years they had shared a roof, Easter followed her up the stairs.

Ruth was on the bed, her face to the wall.

“It’s good that you let him go,” Easter said gently. “Not that he don’t deserve a horse-whipping,” she added. “The Brimfields were a rotten lot. The men, I mean. The women were just ninnies.”

Ruth lifted her head and stared.

“I had a feeling when you first showed your face at my door, all those years back,” Easter said, sitting on the floor in a weary heap. “When Henry poked his head in yesterday, I was sure.”

“Did you know her?” Ruth asked.

“Brimfield’s Phoebe? No, can’t say that I did. Though I caught sight of her, from time to time. But I never had cause to speak to her. A little twig of a girl. Fourteen she was at the time. Far too young for, well, for…”

“Was it the son?” Ruth asked.

“No, dearie. You can put your mind at rest on that score. It was the old man, for true. I had the story from Anne Wharf herself. Young Dr. Henry brought the baby to her, all bloody and squalling, poor thing. Anne sent that baby off to her people before anyone tried to sell her. Or drown her, more’n likely. If Abraham found out what she’d done, he’d have, well, I don’t know what. He loved his Anne, but he hated the Africans. Don’t know where that poison came from, but lordy, he had it in for ’em all.” Easter shook her head.