The Strange Woman

by Ben Ames Williams

  Tim nodded dumbly and went out into the street again, crushed and hopeless. He sought the purchasers of his lumber and humbly asked for payment in specie, but they hooted him down. He stayed in Boston long enough to attend that meeting in the Marlboro Hotel, but its proceedings only confused him; and at last, in a stupor of despair, his dreams shattered, he took passage for home to lick his wounds.

  The schooner made up the river as far as Hampden on the evening tide, and anchored there to wait for morning; but Tim landed and walked the rest of the way, remembering as he trudged through the gathering dusk another night, now eight years gone, when he had walked this road with Jenny in his arms. Then as now his head had been bowed and the world had seemed a dark and hopeless place.

  It was night before he came to Bangor, but he did not go directly home. He had to talk to someone. Isaiah Poster’s business ability had impressed Tim, and the big man stopped to see him and to ask his advice.

  He told Isaiah his story, but he got small comfort. Isaiah said scornfully: ‘Why, you were a damned fool to let them do you, Tim. Nobody’d take the bank’s bills as a gift!’ His shrill, rasping tones were like a file. ‘Your money’s gone, Tim. Tear up the damned bills and burn them. That’s all they’re good for.’ And he added: ‘Here, have a drink, man. You’re shaking like you had the fever!’

  Tim filled a cup and drained it. Since that shameful night at Hampden he had avoided rum, drinking sparingly or not at all; and the strong liquor burned his throat now and set him coughing and strangling.

  Take another,’ Isaiah advised, his old eyes masked. ‘To kill the taste of that one. Help yourself.’

  Tim obeyed him gratefully, and this drink went more easily. In the old days, hard liquor had made Tim feel good, warm and comfortable and sleepy; but this produced in him a submissive despair. Struggle and effort became futility. He asked other questions, but Isaiah assured him his case was a hopeless one, and when he was well fuddled, the older man said:

  ‘All the same, Tim, you’re a friend of mine. I hate to see things go hard for you. Maybe, give ’em time, the bank will redeem some of their bills—if you can wait long enough.’

  ‘Can’t do nothing but wait,’ Tim grunted, and poured himself another drink.

  ‘Well, I’ll tell you,’ Isaiah said largely, ‘I’ll take a gamble on it, Tim. If you say so, I’ll take the bills off your hands—at a discount.’ And he added hastily: ‘If it was anybody but you, I’d not touch ’em; but I’ll take ’em at ninety per cent off—give you ten cents on the dollar—if you want me to.’

  A crumb was better than no bread; and the rum had fuddled Tim. In the end he agreed.

  IV

  When Tim came out of doors to walk the short distance down Poplar Street to his own house, it was late. His head felt swollen and tremendous, and the sky was a confusion of whirling stars, and Doctor Rich’s house swayed back and forth like a ponderous inverted pendulum against the sky. Mrs. Hollis, during his absence, had used his bed, lodging with Jenny—who now had a larger version of the trundle bed which had served her as a baby—in the single bedroom the small house contained.

  They were both asleep when Tim came home, but he rattled the door and Mrs. Hollis hurried to lift the bar and let him in. She was scandalized at his condition; but Tim, ignoring her and her protests, pushed past her into the bedroom and kicked off his boots and lay down and almost instantly was snoring. When Mrs. Hollis realized that she could not even wake him, so that she was left without a bed, she dressed in a fuming indignation and went home through the dark streets of the sleeping town alone.

  Tim slept soddenly till morning, and he might have slept all day, but in his dreams he thought that he was smothering. He struggled against this, gasping for breath, and as his senses, bemused as much by sleep and by exhaustion after despairing days as by the liquor he had drunk, cleared a little, he realized that it was Jenny who was pressing her hands on his mouth and nose. He twisted his head away and growled:

  ‘Don’t do that, Jenny. What’s the matter?’

  She laughed and lay down beside him. ‘Wake up, poppy!’ she insisted. Tt’s daylight, and you’ve still got your clothes on, and you were making awful noises! What did you bring me from Boston?’

  He was suddenly at that question completely sober. What had he brought her from Boston? Why, failure, ruin, poverty! In a terrible and tormenting loneliness he drew her close in his arms. She wore a single garment, and the night had been warm, and since there were no open windows in the room, her nightgown was faintly moist with perspiration. She was small, so small that his arms wrapped completely around her, encircling her, and his hand touched her breast.

  He had not noticed any change in the lines of her figure of a girl child; but under his hand there was a faintly swelling softness. He knew with the blinding force of an overwhelming enlightenment that Jenny was no longer a child, that soon she would be a woman now.

  4

  ONE result of Tim’s drunken

  homecoming that night was the expulsion of Mrs. Hollis from his household. He and Jenny were still abed when- fuming at the indignity to which she had been subjected the night before—she appeared at the bedroom door. She saw them together and proceeded to give Tim a piece of her mind. Tim, still stupid from the dregs of rum, took this supinely; and he did not defend himself at all. But Jenny, seeing her father passive under Mrs. Hollis’ scolding, suddenly sprang out of bed and faced Mrs. Hollis, crying:

  ‘You stop that! You stop scolding my poppy!’

  Mrs. Hollis scarcely heard her. ‘You hulking ox!’ she said to Tim. ‘You guzzling, drunken clown! For sixpence I’d walk out of this house and never put foot inside it again, and then where’d you be?’

  Jenny, furious at being ignored, thrust at her, beating at her with small fists. ‘Go on, get out!’ she retorted. ‘Get out! We don’t want you here!’ She tried to push Mrs. Hollis toward the door. ‘Get out!’ she insisted, almost screaming. ‘Go away! I hate you!’

  Mrs. Hollis doubtfully—because she loved Jenny well—appealed to Tim. ‘Tim Hager, are you going to let that young one talk to me like that?’

  But before Tim could answer, Jenny ran to the hearth. She snatched up the warming pan, brandished it with both hands, charged at Mrs. Hollis. Her eyes were blazing and she was white with rage; and in the face of that charge, Mrs. Hollis picked up her skirts and fled.

  Jenny banged the door triumphantly behind her and went to comfort Tim, persuading him at last to lie down and sleep a longer while; and she kissed him and said in soft tenderness:

  ‘There! We don’t need any old Mrs. Hollis! I’m going to take care of you.’

  When an hour later Mrs. Hollis came hopefully to the door again, thinking the storm might have passed, it was to find Jenny busy by the cooking stove, one of the first to come to Bangor, which Tim had bought a year before. Tim was still asleep, and Jenny would not let her into the house. Mrs. Hollis tried to appease the child.

  ‘Why, Jenny, somebody’s got to take care of you two, cook and mend and tend!’

  ‘I’ll do it,’ Jenny told her. ‘I’ll do it myself.’

  ‘Where’s he gone now? Let me talk to him.’

  ‘I won’t either,’ Jenny insisted. ‘I put him back to sleep. He’s awful tired.’ Her face twisted and those faint lines on her cheekbones made her seem about to burst into tears. ‘I’m going to take good care of him. I want to! Please go away!’

  So Mrs. Hollis in the end reluctantly departed, and till Jenny left the small house on her wedding day, she and Tim lived there together and alone. He liked to watch her, busily absorbed in keeping house for him, and Jenny seemed to enjoy it. She made of it a game, pretending to be Moll, sometimes scolding him as Moll had scolded him, sometimes lavishing on him pretty and precocious caresses, coming into bed with him in the morning, demanding to be kissed; and sometimes she might complain: ‘That’s not the way you used to kiss mommy. Kiss me the way you did her!’ Then he would kiss her hard, and they
would laugh together at this make-believe.

  II

  Tim had gone into debt to finance his lumber enterprise, and the sum Isaiah paid him for the bank’s bills was not sufficient to satisfy his creditors. Only by the sale of his oxen and of his shares in small vessels built or building could he meet all claims. He was left with no occupation, but Isaiah put him to work in the store at a small wage. When in November the bank resumed redemption of its bills, Tim went hopefully to Isaiah. ‘I kind of thought you might want to do something about it,’ he explained.

  ‘Don’t see how I can,’ Isaiah demurred. They were in the comer of the Store that served him as office; and he drew the jug from under the counter and poured Tim a drink and passed it to the big man. ‘It wa’n’t rightly a business deal. ’Course, if it had been, you wouldn’t have any horse to shoe now at all; but as ’twas, I just the same as gave you the money, and it looks to me I’m entitled to keep what I got. Have another drink.’

  Tim passed his cup, silenced once for all. He never found the courage to speak of the matter to Isaiah again.

  III

  In the months that followed, the big man almost visibly disintegrated. There was in Tim a humble yearning to play a fine part in the world, to do what he worthily should. His own cowardice at Hampden, although others as craven as he excused it and forgot it, remained in his memory to taunt him. He had tried there to be brave and strong, and to give strength and courage to other men; but he had failed, and he could not forget that failure. In the same way he had tried to be a good husband to Moll. The fact that his neighbors gave him, after Moll’s departure, a full and kindly sympathy rather than the derision he expected softened the blow of her desertion, but it could not make Tim forget that he had failed as a husband as completely as he had failed to play a brave man’s part.

  And now as a man of business he was a failure too. Others might excuse him, and blame Isaiah—who boasted of his bargain—but Tim did not excuse himself, even to himself.

  And there was worse. More than his sense of past failures, it was his shamed recognition of the nature of his feeling for Jenny which as she grew older speeded the swift process of decay in him. He fought against it, but Jenny by her every action made his fight the harder. She delighted in provoking him to gusty caresses, laughing gleefully when he caught her close in a rib-cracking cmbrace. She bemused him with pretty tricks of coquetry; and she had always that trick of watching him, her head on one side in a speculative way, as though she were appraising the storms she could arouse in him.

  Thus, once when she had come to wake him in the morning, sitting on the side of his bed, leaning down to kiss him, she said with warm eyes:

  ‘I love you, poppy. Do you love me?’

  ‘Yes, certain.’

  ‘A lot?’

  He put a strong check upon himself, and this effort at restraint made his voice sullen. ‘Certain I do!’

  Her head cocked and she smiled mischievously. ‘As much as I love you?’ she challenged; and then: ‘As much as you loved mommy?’

  Till suddenly he could not meet her eyes, and he sat up, pushing her angrily away. ‘Be off with you!’ he shouted. ‘Let a man be!’

  She laughed, and pulled his hair and kissed his cheek, and then fled into the other room. He dressed in a morose and grumbling humor, and when he emerged from the bedroom he was still scowling. Jenny came to him, looking at him curiously.

  ‘Poppy,’ she asked, ‘why do you get mad when Pm sort of love-making with you?’ There was no reproach in her tones, but an intent inquiry. ‘Don’t you like me to?’

  He stared at her, baffled and helpless, and then with no word at all bolted out of the house. Behind him he heard her laugh a little as he fled.

  He came as time passed to be more often thus defensively angry. Sometimes his rages faintly frightened Jenny; but as though trying to understand them, she provoked them again and again. Tim found no way to ease the thirst in him except with rum, till he became a scandal to the town, and people spoke of how much Jenny endured, and how loyally she served her father. It was at once a wonder and a pity to everyone that a thirteen-year-old girl should have to spend her days taking care of a drunken no-good like Tim, and Jenny had many offers of help and counsel; but she declined them all, and as her devotion persisted, so did her stature grow in the public mind.

  That winter, the Selectmen included Tim’s name in the list of those intemperate drinkers to whom storekeepers were warned not to sell rum; but Tim had no need to buy liquor. There was always a convenient supply in Isaiah’s store.

  IV

  The day came when Tim’s last vestiges of self-respect suffered a final blow. The market for good sawed lumber—despite the larcenous Boston surveyors who by their classifications frequently reduced the value of a shipment by a third or a half—was showing a steady improvement. Isaiah owned an increasing acreage of timber lands, but his holdings were far up-river. There was, however, an ample supply of good pine within easy distance of Bangor, and though the owners began to engage caretakers to guard their property, stealing lumber was still a common and a profitable pursuit.

  Isaiah, hiring men to do his thieving, dabbled in this petty larceny; and in the early spring of 1824 he set Tim and Ned Lawrence to fell a number of trees on a fine tract above Old Town. Tim objected. He said he couldn’t go off into the woods and leave Jenny alone; but Isaiah said Jenny could sleep at his house while Tim was gone, and Jenny agreed to this. So Tim and Ned spent a fortnight in the forest, working along the banks of a brook large enough to float the logs down to the river. They were far enough from the river itself to escape easy discovery; but they would need oxen to move the logs to the brook, and when they had felled as many trees as they could hope to handle, they came back to Bangor to get a team.

  Sam Stetson was guardian of the tract upon which they had trespassed; and he had enlisted the services of two Indian boys to help him keep an eye on the holdings for which he was responsible. Before Tim and Ned came to Bangor, one of the Indians discovered them at work in the forest and subsequently trailed them to town, where he reported to Sam Stetson.

  Tim by his great size was easily identified; and Sam went to Isaiah’s store, knowing he would find Tim there. He did not flatly accuse the big man of the depredations; but in Tim’s hearing he said cheerfully to Isaiah: ‘Well, I been saved some work, up-river.’

  ‘So?’ Isaiah spoke warily. ‘How’s that?’

  ‘Why, I figured to get out a few logs this month to pay me for watching the timber, the way I do every year, but somebody’s saved me the trouble of falling the trees.’ He laughed. ‘I aim to keep an eye on them till they get the logs to the river, and then take over. Let them do the work and I’ll take the logs.’

  Isaiah cackled in due appreciation. ‘Smart work, Sam,’ he agreed, with a side glance at Tim. ‘Be a joke on them, all right.’

  Sam elaborated his story, sure that by so doing he would warn off the thieves and that the logs would be left where they were till he could handle them; but when he left the store, Isaiah turned on Tim in a storm of reproaches.

  ‘A fine hand you turned out to be!’ he cried. ‘Cutting lumber for Sam Stetson on my time! You and Ned get along up there and get them logs to the mills, or you don’t get a shilling pay out of me.’

  Tim was doubtful. ‘If Sam’s watching for us, I dunno as I want to get into any trouble,’ he confessed. ‘Seems like Sam’ll just grab the logs, even if we do get them to water. Looks to me we’d best leave them lay.’

  ‘By Godfrey mighty, you’ll not!’ Isaiah raged. ‘Them’s my logs, cut on my time, by men I’d ’greed to pay. You turn ’em over to Sam Stetson and I’ll charge the lot of them to your account, Tim! You can’t do me! You try it and you’ll find I’m a hard man!’

  Tim grumbled: ‘Dunno what we can do?’

  ‘You going to let a little half-pint of a man tell you what to do? If you’ve got the backbone of a jellyfish you’ll go get them logs. Yes, and if Sam bother
s you, you’ll learn him manners. If you don’t, you ain’t no use at all, and you can just keep out of my sight from now on!’

  So Tim and Lawrence drove an ox team out of town along the Old Town road that night; but Sam Stetson was not asleep, and he saw them go and followed them. Isaiah had goaded Tim to a sullen truculence, and Ned Lawrence was by instinct a combative man. Also, Isaiah made sure before they started that they were well supplied with rum. In these months, as Tim drank more and more heavily, rum produced in him a dangerous and violent humor; and his own doubts of the wisdom of this current enterprise turned, after he had drunk enough, into a reckless and cruel rage against Sam.

  He and Ned were in the act of hauling the logs to the brook, next afternoon, when they discovered that Sam was watching them. Tim was handling the ox team, Ned Lawrence barking the logs so that they would slide more easily. It was Ned who spied Stetson slipping through the thinleaved underbrush; and he told Tim, in a whisper, his discovery.

  ‘You go along t’the brook,’ he said. ‘If he trails after you, I’ll sneak up on him and lay for him. We’ll teach the lousy spy some manners, Tim!’

  Tim, scowling sullenly, agreed; and Sam fell into the trap. He had no warning till, as he was watching Tim drag the great log down to the brook- side, Ned fell on him from behind. Their scuffling cries brought Tim in haste, and he found them rolling on the ground, Sam for the moment uppermost.

  Tim brought his ox goad, a well-seasoned staff six feet long and an inch thick, hissing down on Sam’s shoulders; and Sam bawled with pain and released his hold on Lawrence, and Tim pinned him and held him while Ned took the goad and beat him to a sobbing helplessness. If Ned had been as much inflamed with drink as Tim, they might have killed the man; but Ned had wit enough to stop in time. They left Sam moaning on the ground, and proceeded calmly with their labors.

  Sam crawled away and limped back to Bangor town; and when they presently returned, they were arrested and at the June term of court they were tried on charges of aggravated assault. Their guilt was plain enough, and Chief Justice Mellen, since stealing timber was an increasingly common offense, took the opportunity to make an example of them. Jenny was in court and heard his stern words.