The Last Days of Dogtown (7 page)

He was fourteen years old now, after all. Boys half his age had shipped out of Gloucester and returned with stories about the sights of New York and the whores of London. The sober ones returned with enough money to buy a few tools and get married. Not that he was in any rush for that anymore: he was mortified to remember how he used to pine after Judy Rhines, who faded quickly after Abraham Wharf killed himself.

There was nothing to stop him from staying down in Gloucester either, where he might find work on the docks. Or he could make his way to Salem or even Boston and learn a trade.

He kicked at stones as he walked, nearly tripping in front of the old Haskell place, where he stopped to have a look in the cellar. A shard from a green-edged plate poked up like an early crocus in the soggy char left by last summer’s picnickers. Oliver spied a bit of metal in the mess and stepped down, hoping for a coin.

“Blast,” he muttered, digging out a rusted buckle.

The ache in his belly set him back on the path. Maybe Mrs. Hodgkins would give him something for breakfast. Oliver worried that there was something wrong with him, the way he was always hungry. It seemed everyone else in Dogtown could go for days without food. Not him. He’d been nearly full the night before, finishing Tammy’s mush and some dried apples stewed in cider. And here he was, ready to swallow a whole plate of biscuits and eggs, if anyone offered. Mrs. Hodgkins’s biscuits were nearly as good as Tammy’s; just the idea of warm bread set his mouth to watering.

Maybe his being hungry all the time had something to do with the difference between women and men. He’d spent so little time around others of his sex, he didn’t much know about what they ate or talked about or thought. He longed to know more about the world of men, but he was shy of them, especially boys his age. He feared saying something that would give him away as womanish. He knew his looks put him in a bad light, too: skinny and dressed in rags. Some of the boys called him “Toothache” because he’d taken to selling Tammy’s cures on his own. He let the insult pass, as it was those herbs and simples that bought him the clothes on his back. Without the toothache recipes, he’d be naked as a dog.

Worst of all, he dreaded being called a Dogtown puss. Last summer a gang of men outside Haskell’s tavern had howled over that one, and Oliver had felt the sting of the insult even though he wasn’t quite sure what it meant.

When he got to Hodgkins’s place, seven-year-old Elizabeth answered the door. “Pa ain’t here,” said the miniature version of the mousy Mrs. Hodgkins, her narrow-set eyes beside the long, skinny nose. Elizabeth let Oliver into the warm house, which smelled of baking.

“He went to Salem to buy some nails and fancy lumber for a coffin ordered up by Mr. Sergeant. He said it was the best job he ever got. He took Johnny with him. I don’t think it’s fair to take him and not me. Do you think it’s fair?”

All Oliver could think about was that Tammy would throw something at him if he returned without the carpenter. “When’s he coming back?”

“Mamma says tomorrow if we’re lucky. Mamma says he’s liable to find himself a tavern and forget all about us for a week. That’s why Johnny went, to try to keep him on the straight path. But if he strays, to get him home as quick as he can.

“Mamma says Pa isn’t so bad, that’s just his nature and most of them are far worse, and I’m to give thanks to my Heavenly Father for having such a good provider in my father here on earth.” Elizabeth barely took a breath. This was just the kind of talk that Tammy would love to hear, Oliver thought. Maybe he could postpone her anger with this scrap of gossip.

Then he saw the biscuits, piled like a heap of miniature gold bricks on a pearly white plate, set on the edge of the table to cool.

“Isn’t your ma here?” he asked.

“She’s over to Mrs. Pulcifer’s house to borrow some syrup. She said I could stay here on my own ’cause I’m getting to be a big girl, and she says I can keep myself out of trouble long enough for her to have a cup of tea with Mrs. Pulcifer in peace.”

Oliver took off his hat and started making his way across the room. Elizabeth set her thin lips in a line and didn’t take her eyes off him.

“Think I can take a biscuit?”

“No.”

“Your ma always gives me something.”

Elizabeth thought about this for a moment. “My mamma says you are a half-starved wild ’un and that Tammy Younger is a skim-flint and a sinner to treat you the way she does. She says it’s a shame and a scandal, too, because you have the air.”

Oliver nodded but he was only half listening. He made it to the table and quick-as-he-could snatched a biscuit and stuffed the whole thing into his mouth.

Elizabeth frowned, but kept on talking. “Mrs. Pulcifer said it wouldn’t be so much longer before they put her in the ground and then you’ll get what’s yours.

“I think Aunt Tam is terrible mean to you, whatever she says. Aren’t you ’feared she’s going to carve you up while you’re sleeping in your bed and eat you for breakfast?”

“What are you going on about?” Oliver said.

Elizabeth grew uneasy. “I never know what Mrs. Pulcifer means,” she whined. “Mamma says Mrs. Pulcifer likes to hear herself talk, but Mamma likes to hear her talk, too. They talk all the time, my ma and her. Pa says that Mrs. Pulcifer…”

“I gotta go,” said Oliver.

“I’m telling Mamma about the biscuit,” she called after him.

Oliver stood in the middle of the road and tried to decide what to do next. He did not want to go back and face Tammy without some kind of cure for her pain. Maybe the time had come for him to go down to the harbor and sign up for a berth on the next ship out. On his way, he could go past Mrs. Pulcifer’s house, though he’d never had any luck cadging food from that tightfisted lady. As he stood and considered his poor choices, he noticed the big yellow cat lying in the morning sun, stretched out on the neatly swept pathway between the house and the carpenter’s shed.

Hodgkins’s spread was not even half a mile from Tammy’s place, and yet it seemed like a different world. There were no cats where Oliver lived. Cats belonged to a world with barns and garden plots laid out in rows, where lilac bushes got trimmed back beside stone walls that weren’t tumbling into piles. Suddenly, the carpenter’s garden seemed the prettiest place on earth. Nothing like his house or the rest of Dogtown, which was a graveyard by comparison. What Hodgkins had was modest in every detail and more than a little worn for wear, but it belonged to the world where people had carpets on the floor and meals were served at the same time every day. That was where his future lay. He was as sure of that as he was sure he could have eaten every last one of those biscuits and still had room for more.

But he wouldn’t be going after his future that day. There were holes in both knees of his too-short trousers, his shirt barely covered his belly, and one of his shoes was ripped at the seam. That day belonged to Dogtown and to Tammy’s damn teeth. Oliver picked up a rock and chucked it at a sapling, missing it three times before he hit the slender trunk.

Then it came to him: Stanwood had tools.

There was a shed out behind his house, a little bit of a lean-to where Stanwood had once cobbled shoes and mended the odd barrel. Surely he’d have pliers. Oliver hadn’t noticed much skill in Hodgkins’s surgeries: the carpenter yanked till Tammy yelled, then yanked some more until Tammy screamed, and out came the tooth, bloody root and all. Surely Stanwood, who was a far cleverer man, could do that.

Oliver set out at a brisk pace and reached the back road in no time, his step quickened by the thought that he might also get a look at Hannah Stanwood, the last unmarried daughter, though he’d overheard Tammy say she’d been seen sitting on the knee of a certain sea captain’s son, and it was only a matter of time.

He left the road in favor of a shortcut that led past the Muzzy house, another Dogtown ruin, where nothing remained but a broken grindstone and a sinkhole. The sun, high overhead, warmed the brushy landscape that Oliver knew from years of berrying.

Oliver pushed his shirtsleeves up over his elbows and congratulated himself on his new plan, which not only solved his problem with Tammy but also gave him the chance to spend some time with Stanwood. He imagined them tramping back to the Younger place together, man to man. Stanwood would tell him tales of his adventures in the navy, and they would share a laugh. He might even offer some fatherly advice about Oliver’s next step. Had there been anyone around to see Oliver’s smile and rushing steps, he might have imagined him on his way to see his sweetheart.

The sight of the Stanwood homestead pulled him up short. The house was about the same size as the carpenter’s, but that was the only comparison. The path to the door was littered with leaves and fallen branches. Clapboards hung loose, and an old brown rug was stuffed into a broken window. Off to the side of the main house, a sorry-looking pile of weathered boards leaned up against a six-foot outcrop of granite. And beside it sat John Stanwood, tipped up on two legs of a three-legged stool, eyes closed in the springtime sun like the yellow cat down the road.

Stanwood was unshaven and his greasy hair hung down his neck, though his boots were polished to a high sheen and his breeches, worn as they were, looked clean. Oliver remembered hearing something about Stanwood’s undeserved good fortune in his wife.

He peered into the dim booth, which was certainly not in Mrs. Stanwood’s care. The workbench clutter was covered with a layer of thick dust. Only the empty bottles, scattered about the bench and floor, looked like they’d seen any recent use. He could smell the liquor on Stanwood, even from five feet away.

Finally Oliver could wait no longer, and said, “Good morning, Captain.”

“I was wondering when you’d get around to saying something.” Stanwood opened his eyes to a slit and looked the boy over.

“You admiring my little boo’?” He glanced back at the dim wreck behind him. “My refuge from the hens.” He winked and the effort nearly knocked him off his seat.

Oliver began to doubt his plan in asking Stanwood for help, but before he realized it, the man was on his feet with the front of Oliver’s shirt bunched in his fist. “What’s your business?” he said. “Or is it the old bitch?”

“You got any pliers?” Oliver blurted.

“What for?”

“Never mind.”

“Damnation. You come all this way, ask me if I have pliers, and say never mind?” He took Oliver’s arm in his other hand and squeezed hard.

“Tammy needs a tooth yanked.”

Stanwood let go and sat down again. “She’ll pay something for that, I expect.”

Oliver recalled the time Tammy had nothing to give the carpenter for his efforts, but said, “Sure. She’s got some nice honey.”

“How about rum?” Stanwood said. “Or some of that hard cider?”

Oliver shrugged. “She don’t tell me everything she’s got.”

“Time you grew yourself some balls.” He tipped his chair back against the rock. “You go tell Tammy I’ll be there shortly.”

“You don’t want to come with me now?”

“I’ll be by shortly.”

“Today?”

“Today.”

“Soon?”

“I’ll be there!” Stanwood grabbed a long twig from the ground and said, “Get out of here, or I’ll thrash you and then leave that old horror to suffer like she deserves.”

Oliver rushed back to the path. But as he had no desire to see Tammy before Stanwood showed up, he slowed down, shuffling and kicking at pebbles. He stopped at a pile of rubble that used to be a well, picked up a rock the size of his fist, and dropped it down the hole, listening to the quick, sad click as it landed on other long-dry stones.

God, he was hungry.

When Tammy finally died, he thought, and the property came to him, as surely it must, he’d sell it to the first bidder and eat until he could hold no more. Chicken and biscuits and a whole damned cake.

The next house he passed was still occupied, and only a little better off than Stanwood’s. It belonged to John Wharf, a distant relation of Abraham’s and the last of the line left in Dogtown. The Gloucester Wharfs had never tired of telling John what a born embarrassment he was — a failed cooper, a failed fisherman, and a failed farmer. So after his wife died and his daughter married, he’d retreated to the hills, where no one would remind him of his disappointments.

The door to the cottage was open. Oliver peered in and smiled.

“Why, hello, Polly,” he said, and ducked his head, remembering that she was Mrs. Boynton now, and that he had no right to be so familiar. Oliver had spent part of one winter in school with her. Four years his senior, she’d helped him with his letters and numbers, and she hadn’t forgotten her manners around him. He’d heard that she married a widower from Riverview last summer. “You back for a visit?” he asked.

Polly shook her head.

“No?”

“Mr. Boynton died last week,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” said Oliver, and took off his hat.

“I’m not.”

She was much changed from the pretty, well-dressed girl he remembered. This Polly was pale, her eyes swollen, and her blonde hair lay lank and tangled on a dirty collar.

“You staying here now?” Oliver asked.

“Nowhere else for me to go.”

Oliver knew that wasn’t so. There were plenty of Wharfs living near the harbor, even a few rich ones with daughters close to Polly’s age.

“I’m better off here,” she said.

“Aw, now.”

They both studied their shoes for a while.

Unable to think of anything else to say, Oliver shrugged. “I better go.”

She nodded.

“Would it be…I mean,” he stammered, “could I come by to see you sometime?”

Polly’s red-rimmed eyes were so full of gratitude, Oliver thought he’d bawl if he didn’t take off.

“All right then,” he said and hurried off, trying to remember everything he could about Polly. She used to blush crimson whenever the teacher had asked her to recite. And she’d been gentle in correcting Oliver’s mistakes on the slate. Once she’d given him a whole biscuit, cold and hard, but smeared with enough bacon fat to make it eat like a whole meal.

He’d only learned about her marriage to Caleb Boynton after it happened, as had everyone else: not even Tammy knew about it in advance. She’d bet on December for the baby, Easter chose January, but neither of them turned out to be right. In fact, Polly had grown thinner, and now Boynton was dead. A man of fifty years or more, he was almost old enough to be Polly’s grandfather, but not quite old enough to be dead. Oliver puzzled over Polly all the way home, where everything seemed quiet.