Cooks’ wagon. It was April, but rainy and raw, a miserable day for moving the piles of clothes, bedding, pots, dishes, and everything else Easter had collected. There wasn’t much she’d discarded over the years, or much she wanted to leave behind. When a paper box of rusty keys broke and spilled into a muddy puddle, Judy Rhines actually showed a little irritation. “A whole heap of useless,” she muttered, loud enough for Oliver to overhear. He spent the rest of the day teasing his famously patient friend about her “evil temper,” which helped him shrug off the discomfort of getting soaked to the skin when he ought to be cozy at home with Polly and the boys.
When the last bundle was tied and secure, Easter said,
“Hold up a minute,” and started rummaging through sacks already lashed tight, loosening the ropes, and making a mess of Oliver’s careful work.
“I know it’s a bother, my dears,” Easter said, scurrying back inside with a large pot, a ladle, a blanket, a plate, cups, forks, one more knife, and a few other housekeeping oddments. “I’m sorry to hold you up, but she’s got nothing in there, and, well, I was thinking how I don’t need more than one ladle, do I? And she might as well have this pan as well.”
Ruth heard the sadness in Easter’s voice. She’d lain upstairs in the attic all morning, listening to the comings and goings, the orders and laughter, the unspoken regret.
She told herself that she should get up and help. She should have offered her hand to Easter, too. She should have found some way to say good-bye and thank you.
Mimba’s words had bubbled back to her all that day.
She could hear the island cadence that sounded like singing to her. Mimba would have said, “You are a good old soul,
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you, Easter, you. I was born lucky to share a roof with you.
Go you now in peace.”
But it had been too many years for Ruth to say such a thing out loud, so she lay still on her pallet, her stomach aching, her breath shallow, and hoped that Easter knew that she would care for her house with thankful hands for as long as she was able. Easter had been a better friend than she deserved.
The horse snorted and shook off the rain as it pulled away from the house. A few minutes later, the storm gained force and pounded the roof like a thousand hammers. They would have a rough time on the road, Ruth thought. She went out and stood in the gray downpour, letting the rain serve as her tears.
The next morning, she woke shivering in the damp house. Bundled in her blanket, she checked the position of her four protecting stones and found all of them off-kilter.
She carried her bedding downstairs, where the parlor seemed empty as a church, echoing her steps. All but one of the rag rugs were gone. A big pile of castoffs cluttered one end of the table: a few dishrags, a coverlet, a ragged shawl, jumbled cutlery and dishes enough for a family of four, a pitcher. Easter had left her best cauldron, too, a great black pot with a solid handle and feet. Ruth saw it for the generous gift it was meant to be.
She sank into the armchair and listened to the rain, which filled her head with a relentless drumming that relaxed her nearly to dozing. Until she heard a change, a small shift, a different pitch of the splash near the window.
Someone was outside. Her eyes glittered in the dimness.
She rushed to see who or what it might be, but there was
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nothing and no one. Just sheets of rain washing new grooves into the gullies, pounding the grasses flat.
It could have been Cornelius, she thought. Or even one of the dogs. Ruth remembered how she had been taken by surprise on her first day in Dogtown by a brown cur on the road. The raw girl who had walked hundreds of miles in search of her mother’s grave seemed like a complete stranger to her now, which made yesterday’s vivid memory of Mimba even more of a puzzle. Ruth lived day to day, without thoughts of the future or of her past. Her dreams were timeless, too: in one, she was a bird with wings so big, it took only three strong thrusts to send her soaring from Folly Cove all the way to Good Harbor.
She had another dream about being a large black dog, very much like the shaggy cur named Bear, who had been the pack’s leader when she first arrived. Had there been a successor anything like him, Ruth would never have been able to get as close to his descendants as she had.
Ruth had begun visiting the dogs in their high meadow two years after Henry Brimfield’s appearance on Cape Ann, which was also the last time Bear was seen. Ruth had kept her distance at first, no closer than fifty feet. She crept to within forty feet the next summer, twenty the following year, until she was close enough to stretch out her hand and touch them. Not that she ever did any such thing, nor did she make any sudden moves or speak a single word, thus proving herself trustworthy. Or at least tolerable.
Studying the dogs, she had learned how to live within herself entirely: to sit without expectation, to rest, eyes half-closed, and panting through the stifling heat, sniffing subtle changes in the air, succumbing to sleep when it came.
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