The Last Days of Dogtown

“I suppose you can,” Easter said, glancing at Ruth’s hardened hands. “But I got nothing worth keeping inside a

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wall, and I don’t want to keep no one out, so that’s no use to me.”

“My walls hold for good,” Ruth said.

“Most folks do their own fencing round here,” said Easter. “But there’s a cover for every pot, I always say. We’ll just have to see what cover fits yours, won’t we?” Easter stepped forward and reached for the burlap.

Ruth grabbed the bag and turned her glance to the ground to hide the anger on her face. Easter laughed. “I ain’t stealing your pretties.” Then she looked up and smiled right into Ruth’s eyes. “You come with me. I got room upstairs, and I sure could use a man around the house.” That set her to chuckling again.

Ruth kept her eyes on the tiny woman’s back as they walked inside, past the couple dimly visible in a corner of the parlor, and up a flight of stairs to a long attic room that was too low for Ruth to stand up in. Sunlight filtered through spaces between the timbers and mouse droppings littered the floor. Still, it was as big as the whole house, and it smelled of pine.

Easter went back downstairs to her guests, leaving Ruth to shake her head. She felt as if she’d walked into one of the legends that Mimba used to tell by the fire, though in those stories characters like Easter always turned out to be flesh-eating witches, and Ruth was certain that Easter was harmless.

Within a week, Ruth had scrubbed the floor of her aerie with sand. She mixed ground clamshells with clay to caulk the ceiling and stuffed her sack with sweet straw for a pillow. Easter crept up the steps when Ruth went out, curious to see what all the hauling and scuffling overhead

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had been about, and found that the African had hung bunches of sedge and wild peppermint to dry from the rafters. She’d woven a floor mat from river reeds.

“Right cozy,” she told Judy, who wondered if her friend hadn’t acted hastily in inviting such a peculiar stranger to live in her house.

Easter did not notice the white, oval-shaped stones in the four corners of her attic, set out to protect the house against evil spirits. Ruth polished and repositioned them from season to season, and she checked them whenever there was a bad luck sign, like an owl calling during daylight or a night when a full moon was swallowed by its dark twin. On the day she saw the sea serpent breach and dive into the dark waters of the harbor, she moved the stones as close to the walls as they’d go without touching.

Ruth had never seen a worse or clearer omen of coming evil, and it had rattled her bad enough that she’d gone and flapped her gums, like a foolish old woman, in front of Easter and Judy Rhines. She wondered if Judy would pass her words around; no doubt she’d make something of the way that Ruth, silent as a post most of the day, had rattled on.

Easter’s good opinion of Judy counted for something in Ruth’s eyes, but she knew how much the woman liked to chew over the workings of other people’s hearts. From her pallet, she’d heard Judy tease apart the motives and morals of everyone who crossed her path; not maliciously, but with an avid attention that Ruth found unsettling.

She lay back and listened to Judy tell about all the young boys camped on the beaches to catch a glimpse of the sea monster, and how some of the preachers were using it as an

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example of the devil’s power. Finally they turned to other topics, laughing about a crop of new babies born to the residents around Sandy Bay on the northeastern limits of Cape Ann. Exactly nine months before, the area had been pounded by a three-day storm that kept fishermen ashore and farmers indoors. Ruth knew those hamlets well, having recently built a large paddock there for Tom Fletcher, who had decided he’d try breeding horses for the rich men of Cape Ann. He’d given up on farming, he said. There was no money to be made from a small place like his anymore.

Fletcher was the only white man who had ever shaken Ruth’s hand, and the first person on Cape Ann to hire her on as a stonemason. She’d spent her first years there walking from one farm to the next, offering to build or mend any kind of wall, for a pittance or even in trade for food. But no one would take her on to haul rocks, much less build. Money was scarce then, and when sugar and coffee are luxuries, people don’t pay for any work that can wait.

Ruth was told no with shrugs, stares, and plain rudeness.

She paid Easter for her lodgings with fish and berries, and laid a handsome path to the door, just for the practice.

Fletcher had said yes only as a last resort. He’d hurt himself trying to get a fallen tree off the fence around his cornfield: With sheep in the next pasture, harvesting about to begin, the neighbors busy with their own farms, and a bad back, he hired Ruth at fifty cents a day to finish clearing the tree and mending the wall. It was robbery, but Ruth threw herself into the job with such energy and skill that

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