In Gloucester, there was wild talk about one hundred dogs roaming the hills, fierce and dangerous, in thrall to the witches. The truth was, there were never any more than twenty in the Dogtown pack, even at its largest. There were far more mongrels skulking beneath the Gloucester wharves, tearing one another’s ears over scraps of maggoty fish and dying of their wounds among the reeds. In town, they were killed by drunken seamen who kicked sleeping dogs for pure spite, and by boys who drowned puppies for sport.
Up in the hills, the dogs rarely growled at one another and people left them alone. On hot days, they hunted mice
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and munched on bugs and grass, keeping cool in shallow beds they dug in the dirt. A litter was born every year or two, and many of the pups survived. Back in the days when there were children in Dogtown, boys would scout out the whelping spot, but as children became scarcer than deer, that warren remained a secret.
The people gave the dogs names. Greyling was
christened in honor of her singular coloring, as the others all were shades of brown: Brindle, Coffee, Little Russet, Big Brown. There was always a Brindle and always a Bear, who was the biggest and thus the lead dog. His consort was always Marie, though no one knew how she came to get such an unlikely moniker. It was one of the lighter mysteries of the place.
The dogs had no need of names, of course, but they recognized them when it was useful. Greyling certainly knew hers. When she heard it in Judy Rhines’s mouth, her ears flattened with pleasure. She frequented the woman’s house from early on, and not only because of her open hand.
There was something about the voice, low and tranquil, that settled her. Greyling slept soundly near Judy Rhines, even on that one odd night when the man shared her bed.
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Tammy Younger’s
Toothache
The sound was animal: low, dangerous, and close
by. It was not quite a growl. Or perhaps it was.
Oliver’s eyes flew open. He was already sitting up, panting and afraid in the pale dawn hush.
There it was again. But now that he was out of the nightmare, he recognized it as nothing more than Tammy, groaning in her sleep. Oliver lay back on his pallet, letting his feet extend out onto the floor; in the two years since Abraham Wharf’s death, he’d grown a good six inches.
Tammy had been so drunk the night before, Oliver thought she’d be senseless till midday at least. He’d unloaded her from the chair to the bed, her swollen face wrapped with a red cord. The loops, tied on top, made her look like a rabbit. If rabbits could swear about their teeth.
There were two of them giving her trouble this time, one on each side, midway back on top.
For most of her sixty-four years, Tammy Younger had been nothing but healthy. She never suffered the ague, not even during the bitterest winter, not so much as a sneeze.
No weakness of limb or lung, no broken bone, no female trouble, no aching joints, no stoppages or flux in the bowels.
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When Oliver was six years old and racked with fever, she turned him out of his bed, flushed and glassy-eyed, to fetch her some water.
“You gotta be tough as me,” she said. “Too mean to get sick.”
Oliver had managed to get himself to his feet and promptly fainted to the floor, where Tammy left him.
But the day finally came, in her sixty-first year, when Tammy’s teeth started to go bad, and it made her furious.
Anyone who crossed her path was treated to a loud harangue, as though there had been some kind of mistake.