The Last Days of Dogtown

“I’ll be seeing them,” said Cornelius, running his hands over their silken heads.

He moved into Judy Rhines’s cottage and returned to trapping and gathering whatever could be sold or bartered.

And he resumed his nighttime rounds, using a cane and walking carefully when he went out for a glimpse of Judy

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through lace curtains in Gloucester. He increased his circuit to include all the last of the Dogtown stragglers, down to Easter and Ruth, three creaky widows, and the sad crew at Mrs. Stanley’s house.

He looked in on the Youngers almost every day, and even got himself a spyglass so he could follow David’s progress as he learned to walk. Cornelius frowned and smiled to see how Natty teased his little brother and then helped, by turns. Wherever Cornelius went, he searched for little rustic oddities to scatter in the woods beside the Younger house. Sometimes, he’d hide nearby and wait for the excited shouts of the boys when they found the arrowhead or snakeskin, the outsize pinecone or tiny mouse skull. Natty brought the eggshells in to his mother, who exclaimed over the pretty colors. Polly collected a whole rainbow of them: pink, blue, gold, and tawny white, and arranged them in the perfect bird nest they’d also discovered. She set it out on a windowsill, so Cornelius could see that they remembered him, too.

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His Own Man

In the eight years since he’d left Dogtown, Sam had not been cold or hungry. Thanks to his well-earned reputation for politeness, sobriety, and diligence, a succession of widowed women gave him room and board in exchange for his assistance in caring for their homes and properties, and for his handsome companionship.

Over time, pretty little Sammy Stanley had become a striking man of twenty, blue-eyed and honey blond, with a fine, sharp nose and a chiseled jaw. He’d taken to calling himself Sam Maskey, which suited him. Years of hard work had thickened his neck and broadened his shoulders so that even a threadbare coat hung from him with military authority. The only shame, the ladies agreed, was that he’d not grown any taller than five feet. When he tried for a job at one of the new two-man quarries, he was turned away.

“You’re too damned short,” said the foreman, not unkindly.

“It’ll be a backache for anyone to bend down to you. Come back when you grow.” But he never did.

He might have married into a fortune or at least a good living. There were several willing maidens who would inherit farms or fishing vessels, but none of them tempted Sam enough to overcome his distaste for the grinding labor of the fields or the perils of the sea. The girls were

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impossibly boring, too, and the truth was that the idea of a bedmate repulsed him, a distaste that came of growing up among whores, he figured. Besides, he had no need of a housewife, as he preferred his own cooking and had yet to find anyone to iron a shirt as well as he did. And then there was the matter of being able to keep all his earnings, without any family obligations.

Sam managed to set aside a substantial pile of money over the years by “lending a hand,” as he called it. He had done everything from unloading wagons and shucking clams, to painting rooms and harvesting turnips. He carried letters to Gloucester and fetched back newspapers, bolts of fabric, musical instruments, and some packages whose contents he could not guess. He traveled as far as Salem once, to deliver a little boy to his grandmother after his mother died. On that trip, he was offered a good price on half a case of Crown’s Tonic, a favorite patent medicine among his elderly acquaintances. After selling all of those bottles for twice what he’d paid, Sam moved into the nostrum trade.

Every few months, he’d order a supply of the remedies advertised in the Boston newspapers, so that when a person in the northern reaches of Cape Ann wanted a dose of Fisher’s Spirits, she need not suffer two weeks or more waiting for her cure to arrive. For his thirty percent, Sam could provide a bottle of Hamilton’s Grand Restorative or Lee’s Genuine Essence and Extract of Mustard on the spot. He accumulated an efficient inventory of elixirs, bilious pills, and worm-destroying lozenges, and even recommended one remedy or another to his neighbors, who came to trust his suggestions.

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A N I T A D I A M A N T

Sam’s room at Widow Long’s house was large enough to accommodate the crates and boxes. His landlady was more than happy to tolerate the clutter in exchange for a dependable reserve of Dr. Cotton’s Soothing Syrup, a rather expensive potion imported from England.

“Without my syrup, I wouldn’t get a wink of sleep,”

said Mrs. Long. Sam poured her a nightly dram of the honey-flavored brew, which contained more alcohol than anything else. She snored like a sailor after taking her medicine, and was never troubled by the knocking of the customers who visited him after dark.

Late one night in March, the door rattled with three short raps.

“Damn,” Sam said. Three knocks meant it was Molly Jacobs, who came not to buy but to beg. “Hold your water,”