The Last Days of Dogtown (4 page)

“Don’t mind me, Grey,” Judy said softly. “And here we are.”

Her house was as old as any in Dogtown but by no means the worst off. The pitched shake roof did not leak, nor did the windows rattle. Reaching for the latch she whispered, “God bless Cornelius Finson.” The door opened, and there he was, as though she’d summoned him. Crouched at her hearth, he was poking at a piece of peat that had begun to banish the chill from the one-room hut.

Judy gasped. “I was just thinking of you.”

Greyling held back and stood by the door for a moment. She had never seen the man inside the house, but his scent was not unfamiliar and the woman showed no fear, so she went to her usual place by the fire.

Cornelius was broad-shouldered, thick-necked, and pure African in his face. Nearly six feet, his height frightened most people who saw him. Too bad none of them got a good look at his eyes, Judy thought, which were dark as the new moon and ringed with a tight curling of petal-like lashes.

“I was thinking that this place would be a sorry sight without your help,” Judy said.

He nodded and got to his feet, his eyes still fixed on the fire.

“I’ve been at Easter’s all day.”

The fire hissed.

“It was good of you to fetch the Wharf boys from town,” she said, as a dark suspicion entered her mind. “I know you didn’t like Abraham all that much.”

“The old man never had a good word for me,” Cornelius said, his deep voice vibrating through her.

“Abraham was all bluster. Nothing so bad as John Stanwood.”

“Stanwood would like nothing more than to make a dollar turning me over to some sheriff from Alabam’.”

“He can’t do that,” Judy objected. “Mrs. Finson gave you your freedom, didn’t she? And it’s law now, too, so no one can do any such a thing to you.”

“Don’t put it past him,” Cornelius said. “For a Spanish dollar, he’d set a bounty hunter on me in a tick. They got their own rules, those devils.”

“Abraham wouldn’t have done anything like that,” Judy said firmly.

“Huh,” Cornelius snorted, and he sat down to poke at the fire again.

“You didn’t want to go home tonight?” she said. “To your books?”

The African had been sleeping in a corner at Widow Lurvey’s for some months. Every time he brought her a rabbit or a pail of clams, the old woman doled out a book from her husband’s moldering collection of histories.

“Stanwood is over there,” Cornelius said.

“I’ll thank him for that.”

“You’ll thank him for nothing,” he snapped.

“I don’t mean anything by it. But if it’s true you’re here because of him, I’m glad of it.” She took a breath. “You don’t visit me anymore, Cornelius.”

He went back to staring at the flames.

“Nobody ever knew,” she whispered.

“It was too dangerous,” he said.

“I can take care of myself.”

“Dangerous for me,” Cornelius said. “You’re just another crazy Dogtown witch. I’m the one who’d catch it. Especially with the likes of Stanwood around.”

“You credit him with too much courage.”

“Nothin’ to do with courage. He’s a liar, bred in the bone. Letting all those people call him Captain? He never served a thing but himself. One tankard of ale and he claims to have bedded every woman in sight. You among ’em.”

Judy thought about the way the men stared after her in town and joined Cornelius’s study of the fire.

“Ruth was there,” Judy said.

Cornelius shrugged.

“She didn’t seem worried about Stanwood,” she said.

For the first time that night, Cornelius looked her in the face and said sadly, “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Judy blushed at the rebuke.

“It’s late,” he said. “I’ll bring the bed over.”

He took the four posts from their corner and set them standing in the notches he’d cut in the floor long ago. Then he got the key from its nail on the wall and turned it until the ropes were taut and tight between the posts. Judy carried the mattress and together they unfolded it over the webbing. Without a word, he reached for the quilt and together they laid it out. The dog woofed softly in her sleep by the fire, and Judy felt a ripple of gratitude for having two extra souls in her little house. The moment passed as Cornelius stepped outside, coatless.

She removed her dress quickly and got into bed, holding her breath. Would he come back for his coat and leave? Would he sleep on the floor? Would he join her in the bed and turn his back to her? Or would he reach for her as he used to?

It was seven years ago, on a bright April afternoon, that Cornelius had walked past her door with a couple of mallards over his shoulder.

Like everyone else on Cape Ann, Judy knew who Cornelius was by sight. “You’ve had good luck,” Judy said.

Cornelius stopped. “Luck had no part in it.”

“You’re a fine hunter, then.”

“A better cook.”

She laughed at the thought. “That would be a matter of taste.”

“You got salt?”

She nodded.

“Fiddleheads?”

“A basketful,” said Judy. “Early ones, the best. I found a big stand down by the creek today.”

“Get some water, then,” and he added, “if you please.”

She brought him water, salt, and the basket of greens she’d planned to sell in town the following morning. Meanwhile, Cornelius had plucked and gutted the birds. He melted little bits of fat from under the skin, rolled the ducks in salt, and lay them on to fry, and then added every last one of the ’heads to the pan. Judy was put out at that; she wanted a needle and thread badly and that wild crop was to have paid for them. Nor did she much fancy tasting the mess simmering in her pot. Still, she had to smile at the sight of the large man sniffing over her fire, and she set to making a pan of long rolls so there’d be something tolerable for supper.

But the duck turned out to be the best she’d ever eaten. It was different from anything she’d ever put in her mouth, more salted, and more…she searched for a word. More flavorish was the only way she could put it.

“How’d you learn this?”

“My mother, she showed me. Back home, they cook this way.”

“Virginia?” asked Judy, remembering a story about how Cornelius’s mother had been bought from there.

His pressed his lips together for a moment, then said, “Virginia ain’t home. My mother told me to never call that place home. She said my home is over in Africa, where she was born. She said we would go home after this life. She said not to fret about that.”

Judy hoped Cornelius was a Christian. It seemed awfully unfair for his soul to be doomed to eternal misery considering how well he cooked. She had stopped going to First Parish to avoid hearing any more about burning pits and damnation.

“You’re lucky to remember your mother’s cooking,” Judy said.

“There is no luck for the African man,” he said.

“Well, at least you remember your mother. Mine died bearing me. My father put me out for bond when I was but seven and I never saw him or my sister again.”

Cornelius looked down at his plate for a moment and then reached over to her. He touched the side of her face with one finger, running it from her forehead to her cheek to her chin. So startled by the unexpected tenderness of his touch and so moved by the unmistakable sympathy in his eyes, Judy dropped her fork with a clatter that made them both jump.

He spent that night in her bed and returned after sunset the next, and the next, all that spring and summer, into fall. Sometimes he arrived so late that Judy would have fallen asleep waiting for him, naked under her skirt.

Startling awake, she would find him staring at her. On moonless nights, his eyes were the only light in the pitch-dark room. And then he would kiss her, and she saw nothing more.

Cornelius taught her how to kiss. Lip on lip, teeth on teeth, mouth on ears, neck, wrist, thigh. With velvet tongue, gently, urgently, slowly, hungrily. He presented her with bouquets of kisses, some heavy with need, some light as dandelion fluff.

She had been with a man before. She knew a little of the unnamed release and rush between her legs, the odd sense of power in getting a man to cry out in spite of himself. But not kissing. She had known nothing of kissing.

The fullness of Cornelius’s lips was her delight, a silken press that calmed her, then roused her, then freed her to try and return the pleasure. He repaired her roof, dug her root cellar, built and set the bedposts, but none of those gifts compared to Cornelius’s kiss, the memory of which made Judy weep and fume during the long winter months when he visited no more.

For after the first freeze, Cornelius disappeared. Judy worried that he might be sick or injured, but soon learned that he was healthy and working odd jobs here and there. Then she wondered if she’d given him some offense and tramped the main roads in and out of Gloucester hoping to find him and ask. But their paths never crossed. When she learned that he was sleeping on Ned Crawford’s floor, she stopped by with an extra potato or to ask for a pinch of tea. But she never found him in. Judy shivered all that winter, unable to get warm.

Cornelius returned to her early in the spring, bearing four scrawny rabbits but no explanation for his absence. Judy had been too grateful for the sight of him to ask why he had left her or what had brought him back.

For five years that was his pattern. Cornelius would vanish for the winter, like a bear, returning to her with the spring. The cold months were hard to endure, but the prospect of April kept Judy alive.

And then came a spring without him. She waited night after night, startling at the hooting of owls, wakened by the scamperings of mice. She mended her quilt and scrubbed her floor until the knots in the boards were bleached white. She asked Easter if she’d heard any news of Cornelius Finson and learned that he was working in a Gloucester fishery and sleeping in a warehouse there.

May passed and Judy grew thin. Easter Carter made her drink a double dose of her lively tonic, thinking she was just springish. But Judy got so skinny and pale, Easter began to suspect something else was afoot and started to ask questions.

In September, Judy finally found Cornelius on the Hutting farm, where he’d been hired to butcher a hog. But there was no talking to him, not with Silas standing by, his two sons watching as well.

“Don’t you go witching on our property,” said the younger one, a boy of seven or so.

“We’ll throw you in the water, and you’ll melt,” said the other, who had a harelip and was never seen in town. Silas crossed his arms and nodded at his boys’ nasty fun. Judy walked away, furious. Carrying herself as tall as she could, she muttered aloud how much she’d like to shrivel their tongues with a spell, or send a bat to blind their eyes. “What makes them think a real witch would tolerate that kind of meanness without a punishment. I’d turn them into toads if I could,” she said. “And then I’d run them all through with a sharp stick.”

Cornelius hadn’t even looked up from his bloody work when she arrived. Had he felt her humiliation? she wondered. Did he notice? Did he ever think of her?

She walked back to her house and sat in a chair, too injured to sleep, too angry to weep. In the dark of the night, she decided to put Cornelius behind her. Exhausted and enraged, she pounded the table and let the tears come. Her life was hard enough without pining for something as unnecessary as a man. “He can go to hell,” she said, not meaning it in the least.

By the next spring, Judy had tamped down her hopes and wore herself out putting in the biggest garden she could manage. She weeded ferociously and carried so much water that her carrots grew sweet as sugar, her potatoes large and creamy. She set plenty by for winter and grew calmer as the days shortened: it was easier to wean her heart when the leaves fell, and the evenings grew chill. Judy had stopped hoping for his return by then, and she prayed only that the longing for him would decrease more with every change of the season.

His sudden presence on the icy winter night of Abraham Wharf’s laying out seemed like a childhood dream sprung to life. Judy lay beneath the quilts, waiting for the door to open, her jaw clamped, her hands clenched, and she willed herself not to hope for anything.

The bed shuddered as Cornelius sat on it. His boots thudded to the floor and then he lay down with his back to her, slowed his breathing, and pretended to sleep.

I should not be here, he thought, eyes wide. Even though he had covered his tracks so no one would ever know he’d come. Even though the old man’s death made it safer. It was a mistake, even if it was the last time.

He had stopped seeing Judy Rhines because of Abraham Wharf. The old man had been waiting for him outside Lurvey’s house one night before he left for her bed. Wharf had grabbed him by the back of his arm, like he was a child. “You stay off Judy Rhines, you hear me?” he said. “You black bastard, you touch that girl again and I’m going to see to it you’re killed. Or worse.

“I oughter do it now,” he hissed. “I oughter tell some of the boys in town and have ’em cut you to pieces or sell you down South. But I ain’t going to, ’cause she wouldn’t like it. Not yet, anyhow. But I’m going to be watching and I will see you dead before I let this go on. An abomination, that’s what it is.”

So Cornelius had stayed away. He told himself it was to protect Judy as much as himself: after all, she’d be ruined if word got out. But that was a lie to cover up his own wretched fear. He knew how easy it was to kill a black man. And he knew that Judy Rhines was lost to him, no matter what he did or did not do.