potential grooms.
Stanwood hiked his pants up and announced, “Don’t worry, Mother Lurvey. We’ll get you down in plenty of time for the funeral. The ground is harder’n Tammy Younger’s heart, so they can’t plant him too quick. Family has to stick together in times like these.”
Judy Rhines waited for Tammy to turn her tongue on Stanwood for that, but she only threw her head back and laughed, blowing contempt all over the room. Stanwood’s face was a map of murder, but he held his tongue and led the Wharf boys to the corpse. The two of them hoisted their grandfather with so little effort, Judy thought she might weep. In that moment, it seemed as though the whole of Abraham’s life amounted to nothing more weighty or lasting than a sack of turnips.
This new commotion roused the dogs, who gathered to watch. Bear let out a sneeze and then commenced a howl that raised hairs on the back of every neck in the house. The
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women got to their feet—slowly and stiffly—as the body passed from the room with the dogs following after, padding out in single file like mourners leaving a church.
It was over. An unfamiliar look of misery stole over Easter’s face. There would be no going to Abraham Wharf’s funeral. The winter roads were too hard to make it there and back in one short winter’s day, and no one but the Wharfs had any relations to stay with in Gloucester. A gloomy silence settled over the room as they all listened to the receding chorus of barking and howling that followed the wagon as it bumped down the road all the way to Fox Hill, past Tammy Younger’s house, and into the world.
It was time for them to return to their crumbling houses, to sleep off the effects of the drink and revisit the taste of Easter’s cabbage, to mull over the bitter day that Abraham Wharf turned up dead, and Dogtown turned out to tell him a sorry farewell.
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Judy stayed to help Easter collect the assortment of chipped crockery and battered tankards that littered the room. It didn’t take long to tidy up in a parlor that held but three chairs, some rough benches, and a table too small for the old man’s bier. But the empty room was no shame to Easter. “You don’t need a sideboard to hoist a glass” was how Easter greeted newcomers who, finding their way to her house, were disappointed by the absence of physical comforts.
After the last cup was rinsed and set aside, Easter yawned. “Why don’t you stay the night with me, Judy Rhines?” she said. “We’ll both sleep warmer, and it’s dark out there.”
But Judy was already putting on her cloak. “I’ll be fine.”
“You’re getting to be a hermit,” Easter grumbled.
“No more than Granny Day.”
“I suppose,” Easter laughed and kissed her cheek.
“Keep safe,” she called as Judy walked into the freezing night, where Greyling had been waiting.
“You coming home with me, girl?”
The dog set out, trotting a few paces ahead of her, stopping when they reached the path that cut across the field to see which way the woman would go.
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Judy decided against the short cut, not that her other choice was much better. On a night as cold as this, a broken ankle could be just as fatal on a main road: no one would find her until morning, if then.
The wind sliced through Judy’s clothes and burned her cheeks. She tightened the strips of homespun wrapped around her fingers and dug her hands into her armpits for warmth. Head down against the wind, she kept her eyes trained before her feet and stepped slowly. Had a traveler been abroad, he might have carried back a tale of a twisted ghoul crawling along the Dogtown road, with a fiendish familiar in the shape of a dog at its side.
Judy’s thoughts turned back to Abraham. Something about his hands had bothered her: clutched, almost birdlike, as though he’d been trying to grasp at something. The last time she’d seen Abraham alive, not even a month earlier, he had been sour and complaining, but no more so than any other time. What had turned inside him? And why had there been so little blood?
The tip of her nose started to burn. Drawing the folds of her cloak tight to her face, she caught the lingering smell of tobacco from the old ladies’ pipes. Soon enough, those women would be following the path into everlasting darkness or everlasting life—or wherever it was that Abraham had gone. She smiled at herself and decided that she was getting peculiar. Down in the harbor, “peculiar”
was probably the kindest word they used. Crazy, fantastical, foolish. Witches and whores. Well, damn ’em to hell, she thought, and let out a short bark of a laugh.