he barked. The old baggage had been coming at him with her hand out ever since he’d left Mrs. Stanley’s place. She only came after midnight, announced by that tap-tap-tapp ing, like a timid woodpecker.
But when he opened the door, he found it was Alice Ives, who’d come looking for medicine to ease her father’s cough. Sam sold her a bottle of Crown’s Tonic, which would help the old man to sleep at the very least, ignoring Alice’s blushes, cow eyes, and the way she touched his sleeve when she paid.
After she left, it occurred to Sam that Molly had not been begging for months. Had there been snow on the ground the last time she’d come? He couldn’t remember.
Whenever Sam heard Molly’s three taps, he swore an oath and got a few coins ready so he could press them into her hand quickly, before she could put a foot across the
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threshold. If it was raining hard or freezing cold, he’d let her in to warm herself for a moment, but he never offered her a seat or anything to eat or drink.
“Sall
y’s thin as a rail these days, Sammy,” said Molly, who never asked for herself. “She ain’t had a cup of tea in a fortnight.” It was always for Sally. “Her dress is in tatters,”
she sighed. “It’s so awful for her, and it just about breaks my heart.”
What he gave her was hardly worth the walk from
Dogtown. Sam used to justify his stinginess by thinking some of it might find its way into John Stanwood’s hands, but Sam didn’t get any more generous after Stanwood’s death, which was either the result of a barroom brawl or from drowning in a shallow ditch, depending on who told the story.
Molly would thank Sam for his pittance with a
dignified curtsy and a set speech. “Me and Sally are real proud of you,” she’d say. “Sally just about busts when I tell her how nice you’re living, so respectable and clean. And so handsome! And I tell her that you’re as good-hearted as you are good-looking. And she says she knows that’s so.”
It was the lying that kept him from giving her more money, or that’s what Sam told himself. He owed them nothing. Molly and Sally were not kin, and although neither of them had ever smacked him or even scolded him, neither of them had ever made a move to help him in all those years of heavy chores. He’d never seen either woman show a lick of interest in anybody or anything but each other. They had no claim on him.
Still, Sam secretly hoped that his charity, which was regular if not openhanded, would serve as a kind of
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investment in his salvation. Sam wasn’t sure he believed that God paid close attention to what he did with his money, but he noticed that the better sort of people at church let it be known that they gave to the support of orphans and widows.
Sam had become a fixture at Sunday worship, sitting in the same pew every week. After the service, Reverend Jewett shook his hand firmly as he gripped his shoulder, which Sam took as a public signal of approval.
A sermon that touched upon Jesus’ attention to the fallen Magdalene had made Sam feel so right with the world, he resolved to give Molly a silver dollar the next time she came tapping. Pondering why it had been such a long time between her visits, Sam reasoned that it had been an especially wet winter, with heavy snows that froze and left big, icy snowbanks everywhere, so walking would have been even more difficult than usual.
But that notion brought on a vision of Molly’s body half-eaten by the awful yellow-eyed dogs in the woods. If they were dead—either of them or both—he would be expected to go up there and clean things up, one way or another. “Damn it to hell,” he said.
He’d been back to Mrs. Stanley’s house only three times in the years since Stanwood had chased him out. The first time was a few weeks after his escape, just to see if he might be able to sneak in and get his extra shirt and stockings. He had crept up to the window on a Tuesday afternoon, which was the only time that the house was ever deserted, and then only on the rare days when all three of them went into town, or for a visit with Easter. But both Sally and Molly were there, still in bed, wearing stained shifts he was sure had not been washed since he left.
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He went a second time, on a whim, a few years later.
Making his way into Gloucester on an errand, he stopped just to see if his childhood home was truly as awful as his memory of the place. The house was even more decrepit than he remembered it. The roof sagged and the path was overgrown with weeds right up to the door, which hung off its hinges so he could peek inside. The table was piled with dirty clothes and dishes, and the floor was littered with dry leaves. The mess gave Sam a kind of bitter pleasure, and when he got to town, he bought himself a new leather belt, not because he needed it but because he could have whatever he wanted.