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Oliver had never seen her look worse than on that clear spring morning when Tammy faced up to the loss of two teeth at the same time. Her cheeks hung loose over the hollowed-out spaces in her mouth, and her skin was yellow.
The hair escaping from under her dirty cap was white, and her mottled hands shook.
“Go fetch me that damned carpenter,” she said. “And if you know what’s good for you, you’ll do it in the devil’s own time.”
The sun had begun to burn off the early chill and the woods were filled with a fine mist steaming up toward the light. Oliver stood near a bare bush to do his morning business, and then set off down the road, stewing over why he was still doing what Tammy told him.
Who was she to treat him like her slave? She couldn’t really make him do anything or force him to go anywhere, anymore.
He was fourteen years old now, after all. Boys half his age had shipped out of Gloucester and returned with stories about the sights of New York and the whores of London.
The sober ones returned with enough money to buy a few tools and get married. Not that he was in any rush for that anymore: he was mortified to remember how he used to pine after Judy Rhines, who faded quickly after Abraham Wharf killed himself.
There was nothing to stop him from staying down in Gloucester either, where he might find work on the docks.
Or he could make his way to Salem or even Boston and learn a trade.
He kicked at stones as he walked, nearly tripping in front of the old Haskell place, where he stopped to have a
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look in the cellar. A shard from a green-edged plate poked up like an early crocus in the soggy char left by last summer’s picnickers. Oliver spied a bit of metal in the mess and stepped down, hoping for a coin.
“Blast,” he muttered, digging out a rusted buckle.
The ache in his belly set him back on the path. Maybe Mrs. Hodgkins would give him something for breakfast.
Oliver worried that there was something wrong with him, the way he was always hungry. It seemed everyone else in Dogtown could go for days without food. Not him. He’d been nearly full the night before, finishing Tammy’s mush and some dried apples stewed in cider. And here he was, ready to swallow a whole plate of biscuits and eggs, if anyone offered. Mrs. Hodgkins’s biscuits were nearly as good as Tammy’s; just the idea of warm bread set his mouth to watering.
Maybe his being hungry all the time had something to do with the difference between women and men. He’d spent so little time around others of his sex, he didn’t much know about what they ate or talked about or thought. He longed to know more about the world of men, but he was shy of them, especially boys his age. He feared saying something that would give him away as womanish. He knew his looks put him in a bad light, too: skinny and dressed in rags. Some of the boys called him “Toothache”
because he’d taken to selling Tammy’s cures on his own. He let the insult pass, as it was those herbs and simples that bought him the clothes on his back. Without the toothache recipes, he’d be naked as a dog.
Worst of all, he dreaded being called a Dogtown puss.
Last summer a gang of men outside Haskell’s tavern had
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howled over that one, and Oliver had felt the sting of the insult even though he wasn’t quite sure what it meant.
When he got to Hodgkins’s place, seven-year-old
Elizabeth answered the door. “Pa ain’t here,” said the miniature version of the mousy Mrs. Hodgkins, her narrow-set eyes beside the long, skinny nose. Elizabeth let Oliver into the warm house, which smelled of baking.
“He went to Salem to buy some nails and fancy lumber for a coffin ordered up by Mr. Sergeant. He said it was the best job he ever got. He took Johnny with him. I don’t think it’s fair to take him and not me. Do you think it’s fair?”