The Last Days of Dogtown

Easter listened to her grievances, put a thumb inside her cheek, and pulled back her lip to reveal a long, dark gap.

“But it never happened to me before,” Tammy declared, outraged.

“Well, I suppose you just joined the rest of us,”

Easter said.

“Damn you,” Tammy said. “And damn the rest of your teeth, too.”

Tammy dosed herself with every remedy and recipe ever applied to toothache. She tried leaf poultices and chewed the bark from an ash tree that grew in Sandy Bay.

She traded a session of palm reading (she had a small following of women who swore by her predictions) for a measure of imported thyme, which was supposed to ease the throbbing. She sent Oliver out to hunt for rattlesnake plant to brew a tea so bitter Tammy had to pour half a cup of honey and some hard cider into the cup to get it down.

But none of the cures did her much good. After a few weeks of dosing herself, Tammy would pull a long face and say, “It’s nothing for me but them damned pliers.” She’d

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buy up all the hard liquor she could and, once she’d drunk it, send Oliver down the road to fetch John Hodgkins, the carpenter. Over the years, he had pulled half a dozen of Tammy’s teeth. “I’m going to have to put your name on these things,” he’d say.

To which Tammy replied, “Damn you to hell and hurry it up.”

She paid him in goose eggs or berries. Once he arrived to find she had nothing to give, for despite the rumors about Tammy’s secret cache of gold, she lived as hardscrabble a life as the rest of her Dogtown neighbors. When he complained that half a dozen turnips to be paid after harvest wasn’t enough, she swore at him so foully that he was happy enough to cause her a little pain on credit.

Tammy put off Hodgkins’s visits as long as she could, which meant there would be a week of heavy drinking and cursing as she worked herself up to face the agony. Oliver looked forward to those evenings when she was getting herself ready. It wasn’t that he enjoyed seeing her suffer; he’d never been the sort of boy who tortured bugs or threw rocks at squirrels. But when Tammy was hurting, he knew he wouldn’t go to bed hungry.

Most of the time, Oliver’s belly gnawed and ached for food, a feeling heightened by the unearthly good smell of Tammy’s cooking. No one suspected this unlikely talent, for she dined alone and late. But her recipes filled the house with aromas so rich and heady, there were times Oliver wept, knowing he’d never get more than a scrap from her plate, which often reached him wiped clean of all traces.

Even when she was miserable with toothache, Tammy took the time to flavor her corn mush with cooked mashed

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carrots and perfumy spices that turned even that humble fare into a treat.

When her head was softened by pain and drink,

Tammy’s appetite waned and she lost track of how much was left in the pot, so Oliver got to eat his fill. Those nights, she’d sit up drinking and after a while start telling one of her stories.

Oliver wasn’t sure she meant for him to listen to these drunken rambles; she’d probably jabber away even if she were by herself. Some of what she said was nothing more than petty town gossip, and she seemed to have a juicy story about everyone in Gloucester. Oliver didn’t know how much to believe of his aunt’s tittle-tattle, and some of it was so far-fetched, he wondered if she were trying to set him up to act the fool. But he wasn’t stupid enough to go and ask the Annisquam minister if his son was born with a corkscrew tail, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to try to kiss the great black birds that huddled over on the Bass Rocks for good luck.

The stories Tammy repeated most often were about her aunt Lucy George, and Oliver knew those word for word.

Lucy had studied the use of every plant and shrub on Cape Ann and the mainland, too. She knew what worked to cure, what could kill, and how to brew a spring potion that could wake the dead. She claimed some of her recipes came from Indians who once walked those parts in summer, steaming clams in a smoky pit down on the sand beaches.

“Everyone thought Lucy George was a witch,” Tammy said. “Lucy half believed it, herself. Her old tomcat lived to be twenty, nasty old thing. She’d talk to that bag of fleas like he knew her meaning. Like he would turn and answer back.

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