The Last Days of Dogtown Read online

  A loud groan startled Ruth, who watched as he commenced shaking his head back and forth, faster and faster, from side to side until his hat fell from his head and another moan escaped him. He pulled his shirt open and beat at his chest with clenched fists, hand over hand, until red marks blossomed on the pale flesh.

  A shudder ran through Ruth and released her from her hiding place. She sprang out and ran up behind him, taking him unaware. Grabbing his long hair with one hand, she placed the sharp edge of her chisel against his throat and said, “Murderer.”

  He gasped and struggled so that he pricked himself against the blade. At that, he dropped his hands and whispered, “Heavenly Father, Thy will be done.”

  “Who are you?” Ruth demanded, her voice a low growl.

  “If you accuse me of murder, you must know,” said Henry Brimfield, dropping polite address and speaking to his attacker as he would to a horse. He pointed to the great, tablelike boulder. “That is where I found her, weak and bleeding.”

  “You found her?” said Ruth, pulling his head back farther still. The stranger’s eyes were the color of water.

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  “You must think that I killed her. They all did. They believed that I was the father of the child, too. But I swear upon my eternal soul that it was not me. I did not kill the girl, nor did I . . . nor was that child mine.”

  Her lips at his ear, she said, “Liar.”

  “My father was the guilty one,” Brimfield said. “I have spent my life trying to puzzle out what happened here, how it came to murder. I have rehearsed it a hundred times and it must have been that she threatened to reveal him.

  “Pride was my father’s greatest sin,” he said, a brittle bitterness in his voice. “He treasured his good name above heaven itself, and if she would not swear to keep his secret, he might well have traded his soul for his reputation.”

  “You were there.”

  “It was my first day home from Harvard,” he said, rushing to complete his confession. “I was not yet one-and-twenty, a new physician, like my father. I hurried here, where I knew she pastured the cows. I wanted only to declare my love for her. Though now I doubt if it was love at all, or only lust.

  “This is where I found her,” he said, glancing over at the boulder. “The dueling sword—my sword—thick with her blood.”

  “Dead?” Ruth demanded.

  “Not quite,” said Brimfield. “Doomed. She begged me to save the child and once she died, I opened the womb with the sword that killed her and delivered my father’s bastard, my half-sister. No Greek drama was ever more perverse.”

  Ruth changed her grasp on Brimfield, twisting his arm behind him and putting the chisel between his shoulders.

  “Why did you come back?”

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  Brimfield closed his eyes. “I am old,” he said. “This memory has haunted me, and I hoped, well, if I might have spoken with Mrs. Wharf, there might have been some peace. But she is gone. Your vengeance is proof that my guilt is still current, hereabouts. But the murderer is gone, I tell you. Died in his own feather bed, eighty-seven years old, though there will be no repose for him in hell.”

  Sure the mortal blow would follow next, Brimfield struggled to keep his bowels within him. But the moments passed without any change in his attacker’s grasp.

  “What of the baby?” Ruth whispered, at last.

  “Mistress Wharf warmed it in her own shawl and gave it a cloth teat. She dressed me in her son’s coat and said to take the poor creature to her cousins in Providence. From there I went on to their brethren in Philadelphia, to the Society of Friends, where freeing the African has been my life’s work.”

  Ruth heard the expectation of thanks in his voice and knew him for a fool.

  But Brimfield sensed that something had changed; there was a loosening of the lock on his arm, and he no longer could feel the pressure of the blade on his back anymore. He changed his tone, speaking as he would to a child that might be coddled out of a bad temper. “I wanted to thank Anne Wharf,” Brimfield said. “Without her, I might well have left Phoebe’s child out in the woods, and for such a transgression I would have been doomed for eternity.”

  Ruth discovered that she could not draw a full breath as he continued. “I am convinced beyond argument that the African is endowed with a God-given soul. I will give Mistress Wharf my thanks in heaven.”

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  Sweat beaded on her face and the chisel fell from her fingers.

  Hearing the thud, Brimfield peeked behind him and saw the crude iron weapon on the ground; the black man’s eyes were squeezed shut. At that, Brimfield started to tiptoe away, slowly, tense as a cat. As soon as he had reached the trees, he broke into an awkward gallop and did not stop until he saw ships in the harbor.

  Blood pounded in Ruth’s ears. She had never felt weaker or more confused. This was the moment she’d been living for, but the only thought she could muster was that her mother had not been Phyllis, as she’d been told, but Phoebe.

  The only time she’d ever heard that name before was from Mimba. “The African names came with the mothers,”

  she said. “Cato is from Keta. Phoebe is from Phibbi. Most of them here don’t remember. The mothers be dead. But I remember.”

  “Phoebe,” Ruth whispered. “Phoebe,” as though

  Mimba were still there to hear. “Waking and dreaming, not big different,” Mimba used to tell her. “Now-days and times-past, not so different.”

  Brimfield had provided Ruth with one piece of the puzzle that had always eluded her. The slaying of Dr. Henry Brimfield’s slave girl was an old tale, but such a juicy story that it was repeated whenever any murder was mentioned.

  When Gloucester had first discovered that the younger Brimfield had disappeared on the very night the corpse was

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  discovered, covered in his coat, killed with his sword, the court of public opinion pronounced him guilty. That turned out to be the only form of justice ever meted out as Dr.

  Brimfield, the father, had friends in the law. No warrant was ever issued and no search ensued, a breach of fairness that remained a shocking and satisfying detail of the gruesome story. Long after the slave girl’s name was forgotten (she was “the slave wench” or “Brimfield’s girl”), the locals continued to tut-tut about the murder: “Respectable is as respectable does.”

  But of all the times Ruth had heard the tale repeated at Easter’s hearth, there was never any mention of a baby.

  That knot was unraveled for her, but there were new mysteries now, and there was no way any of them would be solved.

  She unfolded the paper packet again. The lock of hair was tied with a pink ribbon faded nearly white. Had he cut this from her head after she was dead? Did he use the saber that killed her to remove it as a souvenir?

  The silver ring would not pass over the first knuckle of her littlest finger. Were her mother’s fingers so small?

  Could a Yankee slave have owned such a thing? Was it a reward from her master, a gift from her mistress, a stolen secret? Did she wear it on her hand?

  The twist of fabric was tight as a nut and hard, the size of a thimble. Ruth pried it open carefully, but there was nothing inside but a pattern of yellow flowers. She put the scrap to her nose, but it held no scent. What was this? Why had it been saved?

  The questions buzzed like bees inside her head. She put her treasures away and laid her chisel on top of the boulder

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  where her mother had perished. And the
n she walked down the steep slope to the water’s edge.

  Ruth turned her face to the south and started along the banks of the ’Squam River, putting one foot in front of the other along the muddy shore. She kept her eyes on the ground ahead of her, with no thought to where she was headed. She saw nothing of the lingering golden sunset nor did she notice the rise of a nearly full moon. She succeeded in forgetting herself altogether until she found herself in Gloucester Harbor. Ruth crouched under the wharfs and hid behind pilings, hurrying silently between shadows to avoid detection, running from the fouled water and greasy smells until she reached the quiet of Wonson Point.

  From there, she scrambled over the Bass Rocks,

  trudged the white Good Harbor sand, and clattered across Pebblestone Beach. From dry granite to slick granite, skirting low tide and soaking her boots at high tide, she let her legs make the case against death.

  Only when she arrived at the farthest reach of Halibut Point did she stop and allow memory to have its way.

  Brimfield said he’d returned to Cape Ann to make peace with his past. She had come for the same reason, after all.

  And because of Mimba.

  The short, wiry, coal black woman had been Ruth’s mother from the moment Ruth had appeared in the Prescotts’

  kitchen. Mimba pulled the frightened four-year-old onto her lap and kissed her on both cheeks. “You gonna be my dearest-dearest?” she whispered. “You gonna be Mimba’s

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  apple-sweetie?” Her words bore the stamp of the West Indies, where she’d learned housekeeping and English, but she never forgot the African names for “milk” and

  “home,” for “honey” and “memory,” which found their way into her stories.

  Mimba was born to tell stories: old wives’ tales from Africa and Barbados, gossip about whites and blacks alike, family histories of all five of the slaves on the Prescott plantation on Narragansett Bay, in Rhode Island’s South County. Mimba told Ruth a story about her life, too, or as much of it as she could and would.

  She always began the same way. “Your poor-dear

  mother was called Phyllis Brimfield, as I heard it, and she got a sad-sad story, because she didn’t get to love you long-time like Mimba.” Standing between Mimba’s knees while her hair was brushed and braided, Ruth learned that her poor-dear mother had died giving her birth, “up there in the north, on a cold island with a lady name. There was a tall man fetched you to Mistress Naomi and Hiram Smith, Providence-way, and Mr. Hiram give you name of Ruth, to make honor on his wife, I heard.”

  It was their black servant, Nance, who’d done the work of caring for Ruth. The Smiths had set all of their slaves free, but Old Nance refused to go. She said her masters wanted to throw her out because she was too weak to lift the wash kettle. “She say they suck the marrow dry, and wants to throw the bone away.

  “But then Old Nance passed on and them Smiths

  fostered you over to Queen Bernoon, that big-smart free African lady who sells oysters to eat.”

  Ruth stayed with Queen and her large family of

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  daughters and sons-in-law and grandchildren. For three years, Ruth ate, slept, and worked among the Bernoon children, picking through oysters and clams as soon as she was big enough to stand. But after the smallpox sickened all the little ones save Ruth, Queen got a spooky feeling about the quiet foundling, so she sold her to a fellow named Cuff, a half-breed African-Indian peddler who claimed his wife was pining for a little girl.

  “Cuff was a bad ’un,” said Mimba. He took Ruth to Narragansett, where prices for slaves were higher and the law was distant. William Prescott bought the child for a large wheel of cheese and three silver dollars.

  “You got a sad story, Ruth,” Mimba said. “But not sad-sad. You here with me and Cato and all us together now.

  You have a happy-sad story. Best you can get in this life is happy-sad. But you always gotta remember your own mamma that birthed you. Even though you only got a crumb of her story, you still got to say her name out loud.

  You always honor your dead, else you get trouble from them, sure.”

  That story would keep Ruth awake at night; she had enough imagination to picture a sad-sad ending to her story, with her sold to some other master. The idea of a life without Mimba or Cato terrified her into nightmares, and Mimba finally stopped telling it to her. Meanwhile, Ruth did everything she could to ensure that she would never be parted from her Mimba. She was obedient, polite, and quick to learn the kitchen work from Mimba. She followed Cato into the fields and studied how he tended the cattle and fixed the long stone fences, too.

  From the first, she preferred the outdoors to life in the

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  house, where the white people kept her always on edge.

  Cato told her to be grateful for the kindness of owners who rarely struck them and had never sold anyone off. But she heard the false voices he and Mimba used when the master or mistress was near. And she knew that Mimba and Cato had jumped the broom in secret, so Prescott would not know they were husband and wife and hold the threat of separation against them.

  But it wasn’t the master who pulled them apart. Mimba died when Ruth was seventeen, and she cried all the tears she hadn’t cried as a child. She refused to be separated from Cato after that, becoming what Mistress Prescott called

  “willful.” She refused to stay in the kitchen with Patricia, the other female slave who could not remember Mimba’s recipes as well as Ruth did. Master Prescott tried changing her mind with a switch; that didn’t do it, and neither did a real whipping with a belt. After he threatened to sell her, one of the wheels on the buggy fell off as the family was driving to church, and the cows kept escaping their pen.

  When the parlor curtains caught fire before dinner one day, Prescott realized what he was up against and told his wife she’d have to make do without Ruth.

  She moved into the barn with Cato, who taught her everything he knew about stones and masonry, and then he told her all the bad-sad stories that Mimba had kept him from repeating to their broody girl. Mimba had been the noon to Cato’s midnight, and once she was gone, he recounted the bad-sad memories of his youth on a large Maryland plantation. And he told Ruth, “Your mamma didn’t just die borning you.” Cato whispered so that Mimba would not hear him from the other side. “She was killed by

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  a white man. Murdered by her master in a cow pasture is the truth of it.

  “I heard it from Queen Bernoon herself,” said Cato.

  “I’m only telling you so you stay clear of the men. White men are worst, but the Africans ain’t much better, like that Cuff who lied to Queen about wanting you when all he wanted was money.

  “I didn’t tell you before ’cause Mimba didn’t want to break your heart,” he said. The taste of her name in his mouth always set him to grieving. “I miss her first thing in the morning. I miss how she used to heat up milk for my tea. I miss her in the bed every night.” Tears washed his cheeks. “I miss her on Sundays when we would sit together.” Finally he missed Mimba so much, he walked into the ocean, his pockets filled with stones.

  When they found his body on the beach, Ruth had been shocked by the gray shards and rough slag he’d used to weigh himself down. Cato had taught her to look at stones the way other people looked at flowers, beautiful and varied. How could he have gone to Mimba without

  bringing her something pretty? Smooth white eggs, or the striped, sparkling “coins” that were his favorite?

  Once Cato was gone, Ruth cut off her hair, put on his trousers, and came inside the
house only for food. Prescott let her be, not only because she was his most able worker but also because as the youngest of his slaves, she would be his last.

  Word of emancipation had finally reached the Africans of the South County plantations. Ruth heard it in church, where the slaves were crowded into the narrow balcony called nigger heaven. “Newport is full of free Africans,”

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  someone behind her whispered. The man to Ruth’s left leaned over her and said he heard that all the Rhode Island–born slaves could claim their freedom if they were twenty-one, but a woman on her right warned that the masters were fighting it one by one, arguing how this man was born somewhere else, or that girl was too young to count. Worst of all, you needed a paper to prove it, and what master was going to put it on paper?

  The talk upstairs got so loud, the parson slapped his hand on the lectern to quiet the noise. Three times he pounded, but it did no good. Ruth saw proof that the news was true from the looks on the upturned white faces; some of them seemed scared, some sad, all of them plainly unsettled.

  That night, Ruth watched the full March moon rise over the bay and felt herself grow lighter. Until that morning, being a slave had seemed a lot like being a woman: something you got born into, hardships and all.

  Ruth knew that she was smarter than her mistress and that she could run the plantation better than her master. But now, the notion that they owned her was no longer merely cruel—it had always seemed cruel. Now, it was nonsense.

  The Prescotts might as well claim to own the sea or the sky as Ruth or anybody else.

  She hugged her knees to her chest and decided to leave as soon as the traveling got easier. She would head north to Cape Ann and visit her mother’s grave. Mimba used to sorrow over the way her own mamma’s bones were all the way across the sea in Africa, and she fretted that no one there would go to cheer her spirit with food and conversation.