There was something about the voice, low and tranquil, that settled her. Greyling slept soundly near Judy Rhines, even on that one odd night when the man shared her bed.
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Tammy Younger’s
Toothache
The sound was animal: low, dangerous, and close
by. It was not quite a growl. Or perhaps it was.
Oliver’s eyes flew open. He was already sitting up, panting and afraid in the pale dawn hush.
There it was again. But now that he was out of the nightmare, he recognized it as nothing more than Tammy, groaning in her sleep. Oliver lay back on his pallet, letting his feet extend out onto the floor; in the two years since Abraham Wharf’s death, he’d grown a good six inches.
Tammy had been so drunk the night before, Oliver thought she’d be senseless till midday at least. He’d unloaded her from the chair to the bed, her swollen face wrapped with a red cord. The loops, tied on top, made her look like a rabbit. If rabbits could swear about their teeth.
There were two of them giving her trouble this time, one on each side, midway back on top.
For most of her sixty-four years, Tammy Younger had been nothing but healthy. She never suffered the ague, not even during the bitterest winter, not so much as a sneeze.
No weakness of limb or lung, no broken bone, no female trouble, no aching joints, no stoppages or flux in the bowels.
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When Oliver was six years old and racked with fever, she turned him out of his bed, flushed and glassy-eyed, to fetch her some water.
“You gotta be tough as me,” she said. “Too mean to get sick.”
Oliver had managed to get himself to his feet and promptly fainted to the floor, where Tammy left him.
But the day finally came, in her sixty-first year, when Tammy’s teeth started to go bad, and it made her furious.
Anyone who crossed her path was treated to a loud harangue, as though there had been some kind of mistake.
Easter listened to her grievances, put a thumb inside her cheek, and pulled back her lip to reveal a long, dark gap.
“But it never happened to me before,” Tammy declared, outraged.
“Well, I suppose you just joined the rest of us,”
Easter said.
“Damn you,” Tammy said. “And damn the rest of your teeth, too.”
Tammy dosed herself with every remedy and recipe ever applied to toothache. She tried leaf poultices and chewed the bark from an ash tree that grew in Sandy Bay.
She traded a session of palm reading (she had a small following of women who swore by her predictions) for a measure of imported thyme, which was supposed to ease the throbbing. She sent Oliver out to hunt for rattlesnake plant to brew a tea so bitter Tammy had to pour half a cup of honey and some hard cider into the cup to get it down.
But none of the cures did her much good. After a few weeks of dosing herself, Tammy would pull a long face and say, “It’s nothing for me but them damned pliers.” She’d
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buy up all the hard liquor she could and, once she’d drunk it, send Oliver down the road to fetch John Hodgkins, the carpenter. Over the years, he had pulled half a dozen of Tammy’s teeth. “I’m going to have to put your name on these things,” he’d say.
To which Tammy replied, “Damn you to hell and hurry it up.”
She paid him in goose eggs or berries. Once he arrived to find she had nothing to give, for despite the rumors about Tammy’s secret cache of gold, she lived as hardscrabble a life as the rest of her Dogtown neighbors. When he complained that half a dozen turnips to be paid after harvest wasn’t enough, she swore at him so foully that he was happy enough to cause her a little pain on credit.
Tammy put off Hodgkins’s visits as long as she could, which meant there would be a week of heavy drinking and cursing as she worked herself up to face the agony. Oliver looked forward to those evenings when she was getting herself ready. It wasn’t that he enjoyed seeing her suffer; he’d never been the sort of boy who tortured bugs or threw rocks at squirrels. But when Tammy was hurting, he knew he wouldn’t go to bed hungry.
Most of the time, Oliver’s belly gnawed and ached for food, a feeling heightened by the unearthly good smell of Tammy’s cooking. No one suspected this unlikely talent, for she dined alone and late. But her recipes filled the house with aromas so rich and heady, there were times Oliver wept, knowing he’d never get more than a scrap from her plate, which often reached him wiped clean of all traces.
Even when she was miserable with toothache, Tammy took the time to flavor her corn mush with cooked mashed
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carrots and perfumy spices that turned even that humble fare into a treat.
When her head was softened by pain and drink,
Tammy’s appetite waned and she lost track of how much was left in the pot, so Oliver got to eat his fill. Those nights, she’d sit up drinking and after a while start telling one of her stories.
Oliver wasn’t sure she meant for him to listen to these drunken rambles; she’d probably jabber away even if she were by herself. Some of what she said was nothing more than petty town gossip, and she seemed to have a juicy story about everyone in Gloucester. Oliver didn’t know how much to believe of his aunt’s tittle-tattle, and some of it was so far-fetched, he wondered if she were trying to set him up to act the fool. But he wasn’t stupid enough to go and ask the Annisquam minister if his son was born with a corkscrew tail, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to try to kiss the great black birds that huddled over on the Bass Rocks for good luck.
The stories Tammy repeated most often were about her aunt Lucy George, and Oliver knew those word for word.
Lucy had studied the use of every plant and shrub on Cape Ann and the mainland, too. She knew what worked to cure, what could kill, and how to brew a spring potion that could wake the dead. She claimed some of her recipes came from Indians who once walked those parts in summer, steaming clams in a smoky pit down on the sand beaches.
“Everyone thought Lucy George was a witch,” Tammy said. “Lucy half believed it, herself. Her old tomcat lived to be twenty, nasty old thing. She’d talk to that bag of fleas like he knew her meaning. Like he would turn and answer back.
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“She did hear voices,” Tammy nodded at the fire.
“They got louder in winter, telling her which paths to take and which to let alone. Lucy said the voices told her how to charm animals and how to sour milk, how to frighten men into leaving her be.” Tammy laughed about that. “Lucy was ugly as a flounder. Uglier! And no smile ever crossed that face, neither. Not that I saw. And why should it, eh? She ate no meat and drank nothing stronger than water. Why smile, indeed.”
Lucy had little use for human company. She hated men most and children only a little less. When the constable knocked on Lucy’s door with Tammy—orphaned by smallpox—Lucy thought long and hard about dropping
the toddling girl into the millpond and having done with the bother. That’s what Lucy used to say any time little Tammy asked for a bite to eat or a blanket or anything at all.
“I should’ve drowned you then,” said Lucy. “I’ll throw you down there, yet.”
Tammy soon discovered that Lucy wasn’t going to
drown her, or lock her in the root cellar, or hang her by her thumbs for taking an apple from the barrel. The girl took her share of beatings before she figured out how to sneak what she needed without getting caught, but after that, weeks could pass without Lucy saying a word to her.
Eventually
her aunt’s threats were the only way that Tammy was sure Lucy remembered she was still there.
There was no mention of school, so Tammy never did learn to read or figure on paper, though she knew how to count what was hers. She studied the way Lucy took care of herself, and no one ever cheated Tammy Younger on a trade, either.
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In those days, the main road from Gloucester to
Riverview and Annisquam crossed over a bridge on Lucy’s property. Her house was so close to the crossing, passersby could count the hairs on Lucy’s chin through the window she’d cut into the wall so she could keep a watch over the traffic. Whenever she heard footsteps, she’d fling the shutter open so hard, it made a sound as loud as gunshot, startling the animals and rattling the men. If she spied a loaded wagon, she’d jump right through the window, quick as a fox. Crossing her arms, she’d stand with her chin out staring down the horse or ox, face-to-face, till she got what she wanted.
“Once, I watched her put a hex on old man Babcock’s prize ox team,” Tammy slurred one night, when she was deep into her cups. “They stood there, tongues hanging out like they might up and die. Babcock nearly shit himself, I tell you. Then he commenced to begging like a little girl.
‘Oh please, oh please, Miss Lucy, let me go and I’ll keep you in firewood all winter.’
“I once saw her jinx a whole load of pumpkins,”
Tammy said. “Fell right off a wagon and rolled against the house in a line, neat as you please. That farmer lit out of there fast as a bat.
“But the real truth is that Lucy didn’t need magic to get her way.” Tammy drew her shawl around her. “She would swear the dirtiest oaths and shame the men into giving her what she wanted. And for the women, well, she knew the stories that no one wanted told, like who was having a six-month baby and who was seen walking with a married man in the dark of the moon. Everyone knew to bring a few apples or a twist of tobacco if they wanted speedy passage and their secrets kept close.”
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When Lucy died in her sleep, peaceful as a parson, Tammy took over the spot at the window and let it be known that there was still a price to pay for crossing the bridge. And while no one ever saw Tammy charm a
pumpkin or hex an ox, she inherited her aunt’s foul mouth and taste for blackmail, and nobody cared to test her powers.
By the time Oliver came along, the shore road had opened.
There were few travelers over the bridge and Tammy found it much more difficult to extort enough to live on and rarely got the chance to scare little girls, whom she liked to grab by the wrist and invite inside “for tea.”
Tammy was bred to be a mean old woman, but unlike Lucy, she did have one passion: she lived for her meals, and sweets most of all. Maple sugar or molasses, she licked the spoon, the bowl, her fingers, gurgling like a baby. A cup of chocolate sent Tammy’s heart racing, and she would hold the mug upside down and lick the dregs, tears of happiness at the corners of her small, round, bluebonnet eyes.
The nights when she was in the worst agonies from her toothaches, she’d swallow four glasses of rum and talk about the first time she had sugar in her mouth. Anne Wharf had set a cup on her table, getting ready to make a pie, when Tammy walked in, grabbed it, and ran for the woods. She’d stuck her finger into the white powder and then into her mouth, again and again, until it was gone. It was her first memory of any sort of happiness. Even when her teeth were rotting and sugar caused them to throb, she would not stop.
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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?”
All Oliver could think about was that Tammy would throw something at him if he returned without the carpenter. “When’s he coming back?”
“Mamma says tomorrow
if we’re lucky. Mamma says
he’s liable to find himself a tavern and forget all about us for a week. That’s why Johnny went, to try to keep him on the straight path. But if he strays, to get him home as quick as he can.
“Mamma says Pa isn’t so bad, that’s just his nature and most of them are far worse, and I’m to give thanks to my Heavenly Father for having such a good provider in my father here on earth.” Elizabeth barely took a breath. This was just the kind of talk that Tammy would love to hear, Oliver thought. Maybe he could postpone her anger with this scrap of gossip.
Then he saw the biscuits, piled like a heap of miniature gold bricks on a pearly white plate, set on the edge of the table to cool.
“Isn’t your ma here?” he asked.
“She’s over to Mrs. Pulcifer’s house to borrow some
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syrup. She said I could stay here on my own ’cause I’m getting to be a big girl, and she says I can keep myself out of trouble long enough for her to have a cup of tea with Mrs.
Pulcifer in peace.”
Oliver took off his hat and started making his way across the room. Elizabeth set her thin lips in a line and didn’t take her eyes off him.
“Think I can take a biscuit?”
“No.”
“Your ma always gives me something.”
Elizabeth thought about this for a moment. “My
mamma says you are a half-starved wild ’un and that Tammy Younger is a skim-flint and a sinner to treat you the way she does. She says it’s a shame and a scandal, too, because you have the air.”
Oliver nodded but he was only half listening. He made it to the table and quick-as-he-could snatched a biscuit and stuffed the whole thing into his mouth.
Elizabeth frowned, but kept on talking. “Mrs. Pulcifer said it wouldn’t be so much longer before they put her in the ground and then you’ll get what’s yours.
“I think Aunt Tam is terrible mean to you, whatever she says. Aren’t you ’feared she’s going to carve you up while you’re sleeping in your bed and eat you for breakfast?”