“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.”
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“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
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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.
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Judy 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.
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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.
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“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.
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“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 A
labam’.”
“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
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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
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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 simmer-ing 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,
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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
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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 her
e 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.
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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,
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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.”