The Last Days of Dogtown

Pouring the liquor made it easier for him to be in that house. He liked people thinking of him as a spendthrift if only to prove that he was an entirely different sort of Younger than his awful aunt. A dozen people were gathered around Tammy’s wooden table for the funeral tea: Oliver and Polly were there with their three boys—baby Isaac having only recently joined the family; Easter Carter and Judy Rhines helped to serve and clear. Mrs. Pulcifer wouldn’t have missed it for the world, of course. Finally, there were John and Betsy Hodgkins, who brought their balky nine-year-old twins.

There wasn’t much conversation beyond small talk about the weather and the newspaper that had begun publishing in Gloucester. Even those paltry exchanges ebbed into silence quickly and Judy noticed that everyone, even the children, was staring into their cups or mugs, wondering how long before they would be released.

“The service was just awful,” Mrs. Pulcifer said, as she had several times that afternoon. At the cemetery, the pastor had read a single psalm over the casket, remanded dust to dust, and left it at that. “It was an insult to the dead. I’ve a mind to say something to that Reverend Lionel.”

“For goodness sake, Hester,” Easter said. “It was Tammy Younger, after all. Did you expect the man to lie about her with a Bible in his hands?”

Judy Rhines decided it was time to leave. She’d felt poorly all day, somehow overwrought and sleepy at the same time. She was there only because Oliver had come right out and begged her to help him “muddle through the day.”

She hadn’t seen Tammy since the day she helped Oliver retrieve his birthright; she counted back and discovered that

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it had been eight years. Judy probably hated Tammy Younger as much as Polly or anyone else on Cape Ann, not that she could explain what riled her so deeply. Not even her dreadful treatment of Oliver explained the way that Judy had wanted to beat her with a hot poker. Attending her funeral seemed a way to make amends for those unspeakable feelings, but it also made her feel like the worst sort of hypocrite.

Judy wanted only to be back in her room, where she could drink tea and finish her book; an American novel this time, about a colonial maid who loses her British fiancé to the sea and finds herself in love with a noble-minded savage.

“We’re all pegging out, eh, Judy Rhines?” asked Easter, taking her friend’s bitten lip as a sign of sadness. “There’s so few of us left from Dogtown days.”

“I’m ready to go home,” Judy said.

Easter had wanted to ask Judy to accompany her into Dogtown; she’d wanted to take a look at her house—and Ruth. But she could see that Judy was determined, and she didn’t want to go by herself. “I’ll walk back with you, then.”

Overhearing them, the wine-fuddled Pulcifer trilled,

“But no one’s so much as raised a glass to Tammy Younger.

Someone should say something. Wooon’t be proper.”

Hodgkins, who had drunk the most, raised his glass.

“I’ll do it. Here’s to the sorry end of that old bitch and baggage. The last witch of Dogtown.”

“Now, John,” Betsy sniffed. “No need to speak ill of the dead.”

“You were whistling a different tune last night,” he shot back.

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Betsy Hodgkins was a sharp-elbowed woman, greatly

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relieved to be rid of her notorious neighbor, whose proximity had always seemed an insult. Her whole life, she’d dismissed all talk of witchcraft as so much stuff and nonsense. But the night before the funeral, when Hodgkins had brought her coffin into the kitchen for a quick coat of wax, Betsy had gotten a strange chill up her back. Such skittishness wasn’t like her; her husband had brought many coffins indoors without any effect on her.

But then, both of the twins had startled up in bed with nightmares, screaming and sweating so that she’d had to slap them before they recognized their own mother. After that, she dropped her favorite china teacup with the hand-painted yellow rose on the bottom. What finally unnerved her was the heavy thud of a bird flinging itself against the kitchen window, again and again. She made John go outside with a broom to chase it off and when he returned, ordered, “Get that thing of evil out of my house.”

“Don’t be a fool,” he snapped. “I need to wax the top and I’ll be done.”

Betsy folded her arms and clamped her mouth so that her lips disappeared—a portent of a long sulk—so he put his coat back on and took the coffin back to the barn, where he consoled himself with a long pull from a hidden bottle.