The Strange Woman

by Ben Ames Williams

  ‘This practice of secretly depredating on lands to which you have no claim is in the eye of Heaven no less than stealing! How can you answer to your wives and children’—his eye turned from Tim to Jenny—‘who must be left without protection, and deprived of ordinary comforts, during that imprisonment which you must suffer for your misconduct? I sentence you to pay the costs of this proceeding and to serve twenty-five days in jail. Let this be a warning to you!’

  The jail was not a strong place, and prisoners escaped from it almost at will; but Tim was crushed by the disgrace of his sentence. Sitting long days in silence, he served his time. Jenny stayed alone in the small house during his imprisonment, refusing Mrs. Hollis’ offer to keep her company, declining Uncle Isaiah’s sympathetic invitation to live with him. She won new respect in the town by coming every day to see Tim and to bring his meals, and to try in teasing, laughing ways to make him smile.

  But after that term in jail, there was no longer any sound fibre in Tim at all.

  V

  Jenny had been for years now a regular church-goer. At first she went with her father, sitting demurely through the long services; but of late she usually went alone. Her regularity and her devotion were a part of the virtuous part which in the town’s eyes she played, and they won for her the loyal approval of all the congregation.

  After Tim’s imprisonment she persuaded him to a more regular attendance than had been his recent habit. Tim yielded more to please her than for any other reason; but Elder Loomis, the first time Tim appeared in the congregation, preached directly at the big man in burning and unmistakable terms, and Tim, with Jenny’s hand pressing his arm and many eyes upon him, found a perverted pleasure in his own sudden eminence. That summer and fall he came regularly to meetings; and the town became accustomed to see him and Jenny trudging through the streets side by side.

  Sunday, the second of January, a snowstorm swept the town; and they ploughed through deep drifts on the way to church. Through the same storm Elder Loomis walked up from his home on Union Street, and they overtook him, and Tim broke a way for him to the door. The older man was tired, panting heavily from the hard climb. They took their seats, and a moment later the old minister stepped into the pulpit and sat down.

  But at once Tim saw his head droop and he sagged sidewise, and Jenny at Tim’s side cried:

  ‘Oh, he’s sick! Help him!’

  Tim came uncertainly to his feet, following others who rushed to the pulpit. He picked up the old man in his arms and carried him into the entry; but the minister did not recover consciousness and presently he died.

  When Tim and Jenny turned homeward, she was convulsed with grief, weeping, with streaming tears. It was her first experience of death, and the effect was overwhelming. Before they reached the house she was near hysteria, wringing her hands, wailing helplessly; and once indoors she flung herself across the bed in a rising paroxysm, writhing and twisting as though she were herself in torment. Tim tried clumsily to comfort her. He himself was shaken by what had happened, and he was bewildered and helpless in the face of her tears; and when he could not quiet her, his own helplessness made him angry, so that he passed from soothing urgencies to harsh commands, bidding her be still and cease her cries.

  ‘Stop that caterwauling!’ he commanded furiously. ‘Or I’ll give you something to howl about!’

  ‘Oh, he’s dead, he’s dead!’ she wailed.

  ‘Well, what of it? I guess other men have died before now, and will from now on! You don’t have to carry on like a spleeny cat having kittens! Get some sense into you, Jenny!’

  She flamed at him. ‘You’re a fine one to talk! He was a good man, but you’re just a great, drunken, stealing loafer! Oh, I wish you were dead! I hate you!’ She scrambled off the bed and ran at him, pounding him with small fists. ‘I’ve worked and slaved for you!’ she screamed. ‘I ought to have run away from you long ago. Uncle Isaiah says so, and everybody! You’re a no-good, lying, thieving, useless man!’

  He stood helpless before her storming rage, and she struck him hard in the face. Instinctively he cuffed her, slapping her cheek so that she was knocked sidewise and fell; and she lay on the floor, screaming monotonously, with long, hollow, rasping cries.

  ‘Hush up!’ he shouted hoarsely, maddened by her tears. ‘Hush up before the whole town hears you! Folks’ll think I’m killing you!’

  She screamed monotonously, without words; and Tim jerked her to her feet. In a desperate rage, feeling himself stripped naked before the eyes of the town by those screams which everyone must hear, he carried her to the bed and threw her there face down, pressing her mouth into the pillow to silence her.

  ‘Hush up!’ he bawled, and when she twisted her head sidewise and screamed again, he cried: ‘Oh, God damn you, stop that yelling!’

  And he began to beat her with the flat of his hand, holding her head with one hand, slapping at her as she squirmed and twisted. Her struggles, the vibrations of her small body, the sight of her slim legs when by her own twistings and kickings her petticoats were thrown into disorder, woke in him something dark and hideous. He beat her till she lay bruised and exhausted, weeping with long, racking sobs.

  5

  THAT emotional convulsion

  into which Jenny had been thrust by the death of Elder Loomis marked a change in the relationship between her and her father. Tim himself was full of shame for his violence; but Jenny forgave him with a generous sweetness, and she seemed thereafter, instead of hating him, to seek out new and charming ways to please him and to make him love her more. She kept him much at home, rueful when he must go to his work at Isaiah’s store, kissing him when he departed and when he returned; and for a time that dreadful moment was not mentioned between them.

  It was Tim who spoke of it at last. Jenny had come one morning to sit on the side of his bed and to wake him, tickling his lips with a broom straw while he pretended to be asleep and tried not to grin; till at last she laughed and leaned down to kiss him.

  ‘Wake up, sleepy bear!’ she said.

  He threw his arm around her neck and held her for a moment and kissed her again. ‘You’re mighty good to me, Jenny,’ he told her.

  ‘Of course I am. Why shouldn’t I be?’ Her voice was beginning to have a maturer quality, deeper than it had used to be. She spoke softly always, so softly that unless he were attentive he might not hear her; and yet there was warmth and beauty in her tones.

  ‘After the way I mauled you that day, I didn’t know as you’d have any more use for me.’

  ‘I deserved it,’ she said. ‘I needed it.’ She laughed. ‘Besides, I never did mind being spanked! Remember? I guess it’s good for me. You ought to do it oftener!’

  He shook his head. ‘I’ll never lay a hand on you again.’

  ‘Don’t be too sure! I may do something terrible, any time! I’ll bet I could make you spank me if I wanted to.’

  ‘I never will,’ he insisted.

  She slid off the bed and stood up. ‘Well, I won’t try now!’ she promised. ‘You’d best get dressed. It’s high time.’

  He basked in her forgiveness, happier than he had ever been. Yet to be always near her, though it was bliss, was torment too. Sometimes after they were abed and she was asleep, Tim would lie long awake, conscious of her near, listening for her quiet breathing; and a turbulence was in him, strange and terrible.

  II

  Yet she was not always thus agreeable, and occasionally he was bewildered and confused by a determination in her which he could not resist. Early in February there was to be a hanging at Castine. A man named Seth Elliot, drunkenly chastising his child, had beaten it till it died; and for this he was to pay with his neck. From all the nearer towns, people proposed to gather for the spectacle. Tim would never have thought of going. He had no stomach for horrors. But Jenny heard of the hanging and she begged him to take her to Castine.

  ‘It ain’t a thing for a girl to see,’ he protested. ‘It’ll be sickening and awful, Jenny.�
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  She laughed at him in a teasing gaiety. ‘I want to go,’ she urged. ‘And you ought to see it, poppy, so you’ll remember next time and not spank me too hard! Why, if I told folks the way you beat me that day, they’d all say you ought to be hung yourself.’

  This was, Tim thought, true enough. It had seemed incredible to him that no one had heard her screams; and the thought that she might tell the town what he had done alarmed him now. There was no threat in her tone, nothing but laughter; but he saw a shrewd calculation in her eyes.

  ‘I felt awful about that after, Jenny.’ he told her. ‘I was so mad I didn’t rightly know what I was doing.’

  ‘You weren’t really mad,’ she assured him, speaking half to herself as though thinking aloud. ‘You were just sort of crazy, because I was yelling so; and you were hating me and kind of loving me at the same time.’

  He stared at her in a stark realization that what she said was true. There had been as much desire as wrath in him that day, and that she should know this before he did was startling. Half-frightened, he made no new objection, and they went to Castine together, joining with others who drove down the road in sleighs till they came to the foot of the ice that clogged the river, crossing the head of the bay by boat. It was an unpleasant company of drunken men and noisy women, shrill and loud, and in Castine a full two thousand people gathered around the scaffold; but Tim’s bulk and Jenny’s zeal edged them through the crowd to the front ranks. Tim was made sick by what he saw, but Jenny watched with a pale intentness, wetting her lips with the tip of her tongue, her fingers like wires on his arm, shaking with some strange excitement and turning away at last with a sigh as though of appeasement and satiety; and on the weary trip back to Bangor she was relaxed and drowsy at his side.

  After that day, for no reason he could put in words, Tim insisted that she should have the bedroom to herself. ‘You’re getting to be a big girl now,’ he said awkwardly. ‘It ain’t fitten for you to go on sleeping in the same room with me.’ She protested that they were more comfortable so, but for once he had his way. He gave over his big bed to her, took for himself the one she had been using and moved it out into the room where they lived and cooked and ate. But Jenny insisted that the door between the two rooms should stand open still.

  III

  By the time Jenny was sixteen, she was as tall as she would ever be, slenderly and beautifully formed, with warm cheeks and masses of dark hair and eyes of a clear and shaking purity. Her countenance, which was in repose like a still pool where a man could find reflected anything he chose, became when she smiled alive and entrancing. Those delicate lines like dimples, just below the cheekbone, visible only when she smiled, gave her expression a peculiar poignancy, suggesting always the imminence of tears.

  And there was always in her that thin, vibrating wire whose keen note Lieutenant Carruthers had been the first to hear. The Lieutenant had tried in his thoughts to define it; but Tim, as now when she approached womanhood he heard it more and more plainly, could not begin to put it in words. Yet he heard it as clearly as the Lieutenant, and he was even more strongly moved. There are certain musical resonances, single notes or chords, which will provoke a dog to utter lugubrious howls of grief or pain. Tim with Jenny was like a dog hearing these notes played upon an instrument. He did not tip back his head and howl as a dog does; but his nerves were thrummed so that their vibration shook him and he was possessed by a hunger and longing that was almost insupportable.

  He tried to fight it down, tried to drown it; but the rum he drank gave him no ease. The harsh liquor was like a thin stream of water poured on a raging fire, dissipating itself in steam at the instant it meets the flames. Yet there was seldom a day that he was not befuddled and he came to be of little use around the store. When the great forest fire which burned over the whole wilderness from Passadumkeag to Lincoln consumed the standing timber on some wild lands to which Isaiah had acquired a title, Isaiah felt himself robbed and ruined; and in a fit of economy, he discharged Tim. The big man, driven to earn a living as he could, turned back to his old love for netting in the river. He and Jenny made a net together. Tim whittled out the shuttles, and taught Jenny the simple knot that must be tied, and they worked long hours, sitting facing each other, the finished net rising in a soft pile between them. Jenny was able, after she learned the trick, to accomplish half again as much as he. Too often he forgot his work in watching her hands, in watching the way her arms and wrists moved, and the shadows in her hair; and she caught him at this, and laughed and told him he must work harder, and came to kiss him and to tug at his hair teasingly, and Tim trembled at her touch as a nervous colt trembles under the trainer’s hands.

  When the net was finished, she often went with him to drift for salmon or for shad. One night in October he and she were astonished to take almost two hundred shad. Some people claimed these were run-down fish, outward bound after spawning; but the fish were in fine condition and brought a good price in the markets of the town.

  One result of their success was that Isaiah Poster hired Tim back again and set the big man to fish for him; and in the following summer Tim and others who followed his example made tremendous catches. Some of them began using seines, and in May one record haul took seven thousand shad and a hundred barrels of alewives. But the effect was to break the price. Shad were worth no better than fifty cents a hundred, and ale- wives were more often used for fertilizer than for food.

  Isaiah, since fish were no longer worth the catching, took Tim back into the store; but at night Tim and Jenny might still go drifting, and for Tim these nights when they were together on the river were one long intoxication. Whenever he was with his daughter there was a beating in his veins like the drumming of a cock partridge on a hollow log, dimly heard in the still forest in the spring. He thought Jenny guessed this, for she took an impish delight in plaguing him, practicing upon him a thousand coquetries, leaving him at last dazed and helpless, just as a bull in the arena is dazed by the passes of the matador and made ready for the death stroke at the end.

  IV

  That summer the circus came to Bangor; a Grand Caravan of Living Animals that included an elephant, an assortment of monkeys and baboons, lions, tigers and an ichneumon, a display of wax statues and a troupe of tumblers, Tim took Jenny to see the sights. The elephant was the particular attraction, and when they reached the ground, a crowd had gathered around him at his picket and were feeding him indiscriminate tidbits, gleefully watching the gravity with which he received each offering, reaching out his wrinkled trunk with the appendix so like a human fingertip at the end. Jenny and Tim came near, and a sailor from one of the vessels which were anchored in the river, and who was already unsteady on his feet from too frequent potations, saw Jenny and with the instinct of all young males to do something conspicuous under feminine eyes, drew from his pocket a twist of Black Jack and offered it to the great beast.

  The elephant reached for it, and the sailor snatched it away, holding it just out of reach, tantalizing the huge creature till it shuffled and blew an angry blast. The sailor protracted the game, spurred by the cheers and laughter of the crowd, and one of the circus men came to find out what was irritating the elephant and without seeing what the sailor offered said harshly:

  ‘Hey, rube! Give it to him if you’re going to!’

  So the sailor allowed the elephant to take the tobacco. ‘Now let’s see if he can spit!’ he said, and everyone watched with a lively interest.

  The elephant, having tucked the Black Jack into its triangular mouth, for a moment gave no sign. Then, without warning, it lunged forward against the chain which held its hind leg to a picket stake, and at full reach whipped its trunk around the sailor’s arm. The man, dragged off his feet, bawled with pain and fright; and the elephant swung him high and brought him crashing down. The man’s legs struck the great beast’s tusks, and the bones snapped like matches, before the sailor’s body slapped the ground. He lay senseless, and the elephant lurched forwar
d to kneel on him; hut by that time the attendant was there to beat the animal back and drag the man away.

  The crowd had scattered in every direction, and Tim had turned to run, tugging at Jenny; but her arm slipped from his grasp, and when he swung back he saw her watching, and shivering in a sort of ecstasy, staring at the broken man upon the ground. She was pale and still and yet somehow transfigured too, her swimming eyes half-closed.

  By that time the sailor had been lifted to safety, and men were tending him; but Jenny did not move, and at what he saw in her inflamed eyes Tim was more afraid of her than he had been of the elephant a moment before.

  Then the crowd returned, to praise Jenny because she had stood her ground, to laugh at their own fright and say how brave she was. But Tim knew better. She had not been brave. She had watched the breaking of that sailor man with a dreadful delight; and next morning she came to wake Tim, sitting on the edge of his bed in her thin shift, appearing to be serenely unconscious of the scant garb of which his every sense took notice, and made him tell her over again all that had happened, as though she had not seen it for herself.

  ‘Did it break his legs?’ she asked. ‘Both of them?’

  ‘Yes,’ Tim said uneasily. ‘One of them, the bone stuck out through.’

  ‘Did it break his arm too?’

  ‘Just pulled it out of the socket, they said.’

  ‘Was it going to kneel on him?’

  ‘Why, it tried to,’ Tim admitted. ‘But the man drive it back. Gosh, Jenny, what do you want to talk about it for?’

  ‘What if it had?’ she insisted, in a dreaming tone, her hand absently stroking his cheek.