The Last Days of Dogtown (5 page)

Cornelius had been born on Cape Ann under Nicholas Finson’s roof. The Finsons were not entirely pleased when they discovered their new-bought slave girl, Maydee, was carrying a baby. Their farmhouse was already crowded with their own three children, but they named the slave baby and kept him, after he could walk and talk. They kept him even after his mother died, when he might have fetched them a good price. Cornelius was only ten years old when Maydee perished of fever, so Mrs. Finson had looked after him from then on and even taught him to read and figure, alongside her own little girls.

He was not quite eighteen when Mr. Finson died. A month after that, the mistress sold the farm and prepared to join her eldest daughter in Portland. Cornelius had his clothes in a sack on the day the wagon pulled up to fetch her, but after he’d helped load the trunks, she asked him to sit down and handed him her husband’s belt, boots, and good hat. “These are for you, Cornelius,” she said.

“Thank you, Missus.”

“These are parting gifts,” she said. “I cannot take you with me, but don’t worry. I mean for you to be free.” Mrs. Finson reached for her reticule. “The town clerk wrote it down so there’d be a record. And I have your paper for you.” She got to her feet and pressed the document and ten dollars into his hand. “I wish you good fortune, Cornelius. I wish you the best of luck.”

As he listened to the wagon pull away he thought he ought to be feeling happy. He was a free man, free to go wherever he wished, do whatever he wanted.

But all he felt was empty. He was a free man, but he had no idea what to do with himself or where to go. He had lost the only people who shared any memory of his mother. He laid his cheek to the table where he’d eaten every meal of his life, in the room where Maydee had coddled him and combed his hair, where he’d learned to read and to write his name. And he wept.

The next day, he left for Boston to see for himself if there were African men who owned their own shops and wore waistcoats and carried silver-tipped canes. He walked the city streets until he found the hill where there were more black faces than white, and he stared at the dark women sporting crisp bonnets and leather slippers. They looked right through him, rough country boy that he was, so he made his way to the docks, where there were others just like him working hard. The stevedores took note of his broad shoulders and agreed to try him out on the night watch, when darkness and damp made the job even more dangerous.

Cornelius was sure-footed as well as strong and was rehired night after night, but he found no fellowship there. He was just one more of too many black men jostling for a scarce job. Competition for women was even fiercer, for there were barely any of their complexion and few respectable ones, especially not in that neighborhood.

With his first wages, Cornelius followed a mustee whore down a dark alley, where fear and need overwhelmed him, and he was unmanned in a matter of moments. The heavy-lidded girl — half-black, half-Indian — would have laughed and walked away with his money, but she heard his ragged breath and, putting her hand to his perfectly smooth face, felt the tears.

“Poor thing,” she said. “Follow me.”

In her narrow room, she made him slow down enough to follow his own pleasure, and then she taught him how to control himself to increase it. And because Cornelius was so young and clean-smelling, she kissed him on the mouth. They slept on her cot most of the next day. As evening approached, she told him that he could come back after work, to sleep again.

She took every cent he earned that week, and in return she shared her supper as well as her bed. She took his hand and showed him the simple secret of delighting a woman, and she gave him a lesson on the proper use of the tongue. But when he returned to her room at the end of the seventh day, there was a skinny white woman in the bed.

“Where’s the other one?” he asked.

The tart’s face was covered with smallpox scars. She looked him up and down and said, “She’s gone, but I’m just as good as her.”

Cornelius left. With nowhere to sleep, he wandered the streets, glassy-eyed, until he found himself outside Tobias Smith’s barbershop window, fascinated by the sight of four well-fed black men, smiling easily.

Smith spied Cornelius through the glass and motioned him to come in.

“Look at that nappy head,” he said to his friends, not unkindly. “You want a trim?”

Cornelius looked at his shoes.

“No money, eh?” Smith said. “We’ll put it on your account. Or you can sweep up to pay it off.”

Just then, his daughter walked in. Twelve years old but tall, her eyes were bright and quick.

The barber turned to Cornelius and asked, “Young man, do you know your letters?”

“Yes, sir,” answered Cornelius from the barber chair, though he addressed his words to the girl. “And my numbers.”

“Well, well,” said Smith. “Perhaps I should hire the boy as my assistant. Can you cut hair?”

“I could learn,” Cornelius said, showing far too much eagerness and need.

Smith considered. “Maybe you should come by tomorrow, and we’ll see what you can do.”

As soon as the barber pronounced him done, Cornelius grabbed the broom and swept up a storm of dust and hair. After ten minutes, Smith reached for the handle. “No need to wear it out, son.”

As he left the shop, hurrying to reach the docks in time to be hired, Cornelius looked around him and realized that Boston was a beautiful place. The windows had all turned gold in the sunset, and a fresh wind out of the harbor sweetened the air. He had never been in the presence of a free African girl, so clean and bright and close to his own age. He wondered what her name was and if he’d get to meet the girl’s mother, and whether the daughter favored her. He was so suddenly full of hope, he thought he’d never last until the following morning.

When he arrived, though, the door was locked and the windows were shuttered. A man wearing the white jacket of a porter saw him waiting across the narrow street and told him that Tobias had been attacked the night before. A gang of white thugs had clubbed him, robbed him, and left him bleeding.

“Is he dead?” asked Cornelius.

“Not yet,” he said. “The black man takes his life in his hands walking these streets. You best be careful.”

Cornelius kept watch as people came and went. A white man carrying a black leather bag spent a few minutes inside and then hurried away. After noon, he heard the sounds of wailing from inside and started back for Cape Ann.

He worked on the docks in Gloucester Harbor for a little while, but he felt ill at ease close to so many other men. He trusted none of them and grew weary of looking over his shoulder. His only pleasure came from long Sunday tramps along the shore or through the deserted hills surrounding Dogtown’s fading common, where he finally took shelter in one of the half-wrecked houses, which he made habitable. He’d lived in one hovel after another or flopped with some other poor souls, moving into Mary Lurvey’s house after one freezing winter that nearly cost him his toes. In Dogtown, he was able to sleep through the night and if he was not happy, at least he was not always afraid.

But after he’d been with Judy Rhines, he was more frightened than he could remember. Cornelius had no illusions: failure would always conquer hope and loss would always devour possibility. Every autumn, Cornelius decided to leave Judy before she could be taken away from him. There was more dignity in ending it himself. But with the return of the spring, his heart got the better of him, and he returned to her. Until Wharf had found him out, and fear won out.

Cornelius felt the warmth of Judy’s body behind him, reproaching him. This is the last time I will be so close to her, he reminded himself.

Judy stared at Cornelius’s back, a dark hill in the firelight. Her throat was raw with swallowed tears. She wished he’d never come, wished he’d never shared her bed in the first place. Better not to miss him the way she would have missed her right arm.

She should have thrown him out when she first walked in from Easter’s. She should have shown some pride. Even now she should shake him and demand an explanation, an answer, something. But she said nothing. She inhaled the familiar woody smell of him and took comfort from the warmth of his body under her blanket.

Judy stared at the back of his head and willed him to turn and face her.

She had survived without him, of course. She had fed herself and cleaned her house, earned enough money to get by, and even acquired some new acquaintances in Gloucester. She showed herself to be self-possessed and self-sufficient, so no one would suspect how her heart beat only half the time, waiting for Cornelius. If he had turned to face her, she would have begged him to return the next night and the next. She would have wept and pleaded.

But Cornelius remained still. She knew that they had no future together and that his presence in her bed was a fluke of some sort. And finally, she preferred his silence to hearing him say good-bye.

Judy tried not to fall asleep. She thought of small things she had wanted to tell Cornelius, like how she’d begun cooking in his mother’s fashion, putting blackberries and ramps into squirrel stew. And how the cellar he’d dug for her was so dry and cool, she could store butter as well as turnips down there. And that she’d made him a pair of stockings years ago and still hadn’t unraveled the yarn for another purpose.

Worn out at last by her long day, Judy slipped into a shallow pool of a dream. She walked with Cornelius, barefoot, through the warm water of a low tide on the beach at Little Good Harbor. It was a sunny day, and other people were strolling there, too. Ruth walked arm in arm with Easter, and the Dogtown pups chased one another.

Judy woke up at dawn, shivering. The heat from the fire that Cornelius had carefully banked did nothing to warm her. She was alone. Even Greyling was gone. She turned her face to the mattress and pulled the blanket over her head and tried to think of a reason to get out of bed.

Greyling

G
REYLING HAD
stayed on the floor rather than take her usual spot behind the woman’s knees, unsure of her place with the man on the bed. She watched him rise before first light, keeping perfectly still as he ran his hands over the chair and table. When he put her cloak to his nose, he caught the dog’s eye and held her gaze long enough to show her that he belonged there, even if he never returned.

She slipped out the door behind him as he left, and stood beside the house while he hurried away. Greyling shook herself head to tail and raised her nose to sniff the new day. The frozen ground was painful beneath her feet as she padded in the direction of the smallest of the pack’s many warrens, a tunnel dug below a rocky outcropping near the now-frozen swamp.

She would stop at certain houses if she caught the scent of cooking, but there were others where she did not bother. Generous or indifferent, gentle or cruel, people were features of the landscape, as important as the location of fresh water. One by one, men and women represented either a threat or a meal; survival required that she remember which was which.

Greyling spent most of her days outdoors, like the other dogs. But she was not fully a member of the Dogtown pack, and never would be. She had not been born there. She held no rank. She would never bear a litter, and she was not even permitted inside the oldest burrows, which had been dug by a generation of dogs long dead.

When food was plentiful, the grey dog ate what they left for her. On summer days when all of them lay together in the high pasture, basking and panting in the sun, she positioned herself a little distance away. There was no shame in being the lowest among them. That was simply the order of things.

Greyling had turned up in Dogtown not quite fully grown, starved and skittish. She found her way up from the harbor to the hills and hid in the woods, watching the way of things, learning her manners. The dogs rarely went inside a house in the summer, but when it grew cold, they scratched softly at doors. They did not show their teeth and took what was given to them with a soft mouth. They left no droppings near the houses, nor did one dog enter when another was inside, except on the bitterest days, when all animals huddled together as a matter of life or death.