The Strange Woman

by Ben Ames Williams

  ‘There’ll be a way found,’ Isaiah said strongly.

  ‘There has to be,’ she agreed. ‘What she needs is someone to love her and take care of her right. It’s a sin and a shame, her living down there anyway, with the women in the houses by the river, and sailors, and men as drunk as Tim walked up and down the street all night. It’s no lit place for her, growing up with that going on right under her eyes!’

  Isaiah nodded soberly. Jenny’s distress and the way she clung to him last night had awakened in him emotions he had thought dead forever. ‘Aye,’ he agreed. ‘Something must be done, but what’s to do?’ And he said cautiously, wondering what Mrs. Hollis’ reaction would be: ‘It’s a pity some good man wouldn’t come along and marry her.’

  Mrs. Hollis looked at him with quick, shrewd eyes. For a moment she did not speak, but then she said: ‘If it comes to that, there’s no man or boy in town she likes as well as you. Whenever I see her it’s Uncle Isaiah this and Uncle Isaiah that.’

  Isaiah shook his head. ‘I’m an old man,’ he reminded her, but his fingers twisted together.

  ‘Old or young, she could go farther and fare worse,’ Mrs. Hollis declared; and she added hearteningly: ‘But it’d be a burden on you, to be sure.’

  He cleared his throat, but he said no more. She kept her eye upon him watchfully till he rose at last and took his hat. ‘You stay here, be here when she wakes,’ he said. ‘She’ll want someone. I’ll be back.’

  ‘Are you going down to tell Tim Hager what you think of him?’

  ‘No. I’m done with him! And so is she! No, I’m going to talk to Deacon Adams and maybe Amos Patten.’ Amos that year was First Selectman, and he and Isaiah were old friends. ‘I’ll see if there isn’t something we can do to take care of her. It’s sure she can’t be let go back to live with him!’

  VII

  Isaiah, as he walked through the town, kept a sedate and sober countenance, but there was in him a pounding turbulence. Not till today had he thought of marrying Jenny—or of marrying anyone; yet he was an old, lonely man, and if he might borrow some of her youth for a while, he could repay her in worldly goods beyond the most avaricious dreams. But he was not lost in folly. For him simply and plainly to marry a girl forty- five years younger than himself would be to make himself ridiculous in the town—unless to do so could be made to appear a virtuous and altruistic action. But if Mrs. Hollis approved, as obviously she did, so would other women; and if now Deacon Adams, standing for the church, and Amos Patten, representing the town government, gave his plan their countenance, then he could risk the smiles of lesser men.

  He went first to Deacon Adams. The Deacon had visited Bangor in 1803, walking up from his then home in Bucksport to inspect the place with a view to settling; but he reported to his wife on his return: ‘The town’s no better than Sodom, with Lot living there in the person of Deacon Boyd.’ So he decided against a removal to Bangor at that time; but ten years later, when Mr. Loomis had been called to head the church, Mr. Adams came to town and became presently a Deacon. After the death of Elder Loomis he had assumed the leadership of the congregation; so it was natural for Isaiah to turn to the Deacon for advice today.

  He told Deacon Adams what had happened, and he said at last: ‘I’ll take the child into my own home, if that’s the only thing to do. She’s like my own daughter to me, calls me Uncle Isaiah any time she comes into the store.’

  The Deacon nodded soberly. ‘Someone must take her in, to be sure; but it wouldn’t be suitable, Isaiah, for her to be alone in the house with you.’ He added: ‘And I can’t take her. I would if I could, but my home is not a happy place. You and all my good friends know how it has been with Mrs. Adams since we first came to Bangor. It’s as if there were a cloud over her mind. She was unwilling to come to live here, saying it was a judgment on her for her sins; and since the day we came I have never been able to comfort her. Night after night I hear her beside me weeping, and whispering: “Would God it were morning!” And all day she whispers: “Would God it were evening!” She’s had no peace nor comfort these fifteen years, and I would not bring any young woman to look for happiness in such a home as mine.’

  Isaiah nodded in a sympathetic agreement. ‘But we must find some way,’ he said. ‘I thought you’d go along with me to talk to Amos Patten, see what he can say.’

  The good Deacon agreed. Amos heard Isaiah’s story with clucking, sympathetic sounds and a wagging head. ‘To be sure, she could come on the town,’ he said, when Isaiah was done. ‘But that would be a pity, too.’

  As a town officer it was a part of his responsibility to keep expenses down. ‘Isaiah, it was to you the poor girl turned in her hour of need. Perhaps that’s like a sign that you are meant to take the responsibility.’

  ‘Deacon Adams thinks it would not be suitable for me to take her into my home, a young girl alone there with me.’ Isaiah hesitated, choosing his words, watching them both. ‘But I’d not shirk my duty,’ he said, ‘if you think it is my duty. I’m an old man, and it’s likely I won’t be here long; but as long as I live, I could see to it that she had a proper home. If having her in my house would scandalize the town, I’d even be willing to marry her—unless there’s some young man she prefers. To have a good home and an honorable name might mean much to her.’ He added: ‘And she’d be well fixed, too, when I died, and no need ever to turn to Tim Hager again.’

  When he had spoken, he waited apprehensively to hear what they would say. Amos rubbed his chin doubtfully. ‘Have you said anything of marriage to the girl?’ he asked.

  Isaiah shook his head. ‘I’ve said nought to her. Why, Amos, she came to me in the small hours of the night, beaten and bruised and bloody, holding on to me as if I was her father; and she’s no more to me than my own daughter might have been. I’m too old for the desires of the flesh. It’s just that marrying her might be the wisest way to give her the home she ought to have.’

  Deacon Adams nodded, as though assenting to his own thoughts. ‘And since she turned first of all to you, it must be that she has some liking for you, Isaiah,’ he commented. ‘Maybe this marriage is the Lord’s own will.’

  His head moved soberly up and down. ‘It must always be the part of the elders to bear the burden of guidance of the young. I have guided the lives of my own children since I became a father, praying and laboring for their conversion and repentance and faith in Christ, training them for usefulness here, and for Heaven hereafter. This child has been diligent in attendance at meeting, but there may well be waywardness in her. Her mother was a wanton, and her father is a drunkard. Perhaps this sacrifice may be required of you, Isaiah; that you undertake not only her protection but even her chastening. If you were her husband, your authority would outweigh her father’s. As our Lord battled with Satan, so you can battle with her drunken father for her soul!’

  Isaiah hesitated, as though in doubt, and Amos urged: ‘Yes, Isaiah. Jenny needs the firm hand of such a man as you.’

  ‘I don’t know as she’ll have me,’ Isaiah humbly confessed. ‘But when I saw the state she was in, her legs all cut and bruised from Tim Hager’s beating, I couldn’t turn her from my door. I bathed her hurts and put her to bed like a baby.’

  Deacon Adams rose. ‘You did well,’ he said strongly. ‘We will go home with you, to see if she is healed. It may be necessary to labor with her, to add our words to yours, till she sees the wisdom of our plan.’

  VIII

  When the three old men came to Isaiah’s house, they found that Jenny had not yet waked; but Mrs. Hollis was there on vigilant guard, and they talked to her in low tones for a while. Mrs. Hollis openly approved their project. ‘It’s the best way,’ she said, and added frankly: ‘I dunno as you’re the husband a girl like her would pick, Isaiah; but you’d be good to her, long as you lived, and she’d heir your prop’ty when you die.’

  ‘All the same,’ Isaiah confessed, ‘you can’t expect her to relish marrying an old curmudgeon like me.’

  Mrs.
Hollis tossed her head. ‘She will if she has the sense to skin a cat,’ she declared. ‘And I think she will. Outside of standing all she did from Tim Hager, Jenny’s got a head on her shoulders.’

  Amos Patten cleared his throat. ‘Suppose we talk to the girl herself,’ he said. ‘See what she has to say.’

  Mrs. Hollis agreed to that. ‘It’s high time she was waking, anyway,’ she said. She turned to the closed door of the room where Jenny lay. ‘You wait till I see how she is,’ she told them. ‘I haven’t been in to her yet.’

  She went into the other room, but almost at once they heard her cry of dismay at what she saw, and they followed her. Jenny was awake, lying quietly and very small in Mrs. Wetzel’s great bed, looking up at them. Her face was a mask of hurts. Her nose and her lips were swollen from Tim’s blows, and her lips were marked with red wounds where her teeth had cut them, and there was a bruise across her cheek that darkened one eye. When the old men came in, Mrs. Hollis was sitting on the bed with Jenny in her arms, crooning over her tenderly; and she bade Isaiah bring a lump of butter.

  ‘So I can rub this black and blue mark,’ she said, ‘and keep it from getting any worse.’

  He obeyed her, the Deacon and Amos staying by the bed; and when Isaiah returned, while Mrs. Hollis applied the unguent, she poured out upon Jenny a flood of comforting solicitudes. Yet her curiosity, even in this moment, was alive, and she had questions, too. What had happened? Why had Tim done this dreadful thing?

  Jenny said warily, watching them all: ‘I don’t know. He just came home and I was asleep, and he was drunk.’

  Her eyes shifted from one face to the other. ‘He tried to hold me down on the bed, and I fought and got away from him, but he caught me and he took a stick and beat me till I bit his hand and he let go and I got away.’ Then when they shook their heads in grave sympathy, as innocently as a child she pushed down the bedclothes and extended one bare leg for them to see the angry marks upon it. ‘He beat me awful,’ she said, in low, still tones. ‘I guess he’d have killed me if I hadn’t got away.’

  Amos Patten, staring at the marks on her tender flesh, asked hoarsely: ‘Did he chase you?’

  ‘I don’t know. I ran out of doors, and it was dark and I just kept running, and the only place I could think to come to was you, Uncle Isaiah.’

  ‘He ought to be birched,’ Mrs. Hollis declared. ‘It’d take six men to do it, him as big as he is, but I’d like to see it done.’

  Deacon Adams cleared his throat. ‘Did he ever beat you before, child?’

  Jenny looked at him. ‘Yes. Lots of times. He beat me the day Elder Loomis died, because I cried.’

  ‘You mean he whipped you because you grieved for that good man?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The Deacon shook his head as though unable to credit such depravity. ‘Was that the only other time?’

  ‘Oh, no!’ Jenny assured them. ‘Whenever he came home drunk, if I didn’t suit him he’d take a stick to me. The time he wanted to take me to Castine to see the man hung, I didn’t want to go and he beat me then till I had to. He beat me lots of times.’ She twisted as though in a spasm of terror and cried: ‘Don’t let him get me again! He’ll kill me, next time!’ Isaiah touched her hand. ‘I’ll take care of you, Jenny. We’ve decided you’re to stay here and live with me.’ He smiled. ‘Would you like that?’ She looked at him for a long moment. ‘He won’t let me,’ she said. ‘Once I told him if he hit me I’d come to live with you, and he said he’d kill me if I did. He said he’s my father and I have to live with him.’

  Deacon Adams stepped nearer. ‘When a woman marries, my child,’ he said, ‘she leaves all others and leaves to her husband and he to her. Isaiah says that if you are willing, he will marry you. If you marry Isaiah, your father can never touch you again.’

  Jenny’s eyes held his, and seconds ran to minutes before she stirred or seemed to breathe. Then she turned her head slowly, as though dreadfully weary, to look at Isaiah; and he said huskily:

  ‘I don’t know as you’d want to, Jenny, but I’d be good to you.’

  She looked at Mrs. Hollis, appealing for an understanding word; and Mrs. Hollis suddenly gathered the girl in her arms. ‘You men go in the other worn,’ she said. ‘The poor lamb doesn’t know what to make of it, and her so hurt and all. You just let me talk to her, till she knows what she wants to do.’

  IX

  Jenny and Isaiah were married late that afternoon. She was still too weak and shaken, aching with the stale pain of the hurts which at first had left her numb, to rise from bed; and she lay very small and still, more like a child than a woman, while Isaiah stood by the bedside and the words were spoken.

  Afterward he and Deacon Adams and Amos Patten and John Barker walked down to Tim Hager’s house to deal sternly with that man, to tell Tim that Jenny would not come home to him again. They found the door a little ajar, and since no one answered their knock, Dcacon Adams pushed it open and went in.

  Tim lay with his great shoulders and arms and head across the bed, his legs along the floor, as though he might have crawled this far after he fell. They needed not to touch him to know the truth. The big man was dead.

  2

  JENNY had come to Isaiah’s

  house almost naked, and she never sought to bring any of her own belongings from her former home. Mrs. Hollis assembled a wardrobe for her in time for Tim’s funeral, which Jenny insisted on attending, rising from bed to do so; and she bore herself there with a grave, sweet composure which made Isaiah tenderly proud, and won the sympathetic approval of everyone who saw her. Tim’s death was so flagrant an example of the evils of intemperance that it had shocked the town, and even at his funeral this was pointed out and a moral lesson drawn. Jenny, her head bowed, heard herself held up as an example of the suffering and of the fortitude demanded of a drunkard’s family.

  For a few days afterward she stayed abed, seeming dazed and half-stupefied by her experience and by her father’s death; but then her strength began to return, and Isaiah looked forward to her recovery with an eagerness which he had not thought himself capable. If when she was well again she accepted his laborious ardors with no more than a kindly tolerance, he did not complain. Certainly she seemed to like him, she was dutiful, and she was pleasingly grateful for his steady thoughtfulness and solicitude.

  He was delighted with her, and the possession of what he had so long almost unwittingly desired changed his outlook on the world. He found in himself a new expansiveness; and forgetting for her sake his thrifty ways, he began a few weeks after their marriage to build a new house, a fine brick house with a chimney on each end, on Main Street near the home of Deacon Adams. Increasing business congestion in the Poplar Street neighborhood, and the nightly disorders there, made the house by the store no longer a desirable location; but also that house was small, and Isaiah wanted a home more in keeping with his place in the community and better worthy of his bride. John Hamm was the builder. Isaiah spared no expense, and the house was among the handsomest in town. It was shaped like a T, the top facing the street, with the storerooms, the woodshed and the stables in the wing behind; and Isaiah in the exuberance of his new happiness ordered furnishings sent from Boston, so that some of the things he acquired became the envy and the wonder of his friends.

  His possession of Jenny brought him a sense of permanence and peace. His temper as the weeks passed assumed an equable balance that was rarely shaken, and he found a warming happiness in all she did and in all she was. Their life together, as well privately as publicly, was decorous and seemly. He had always been a regular church-goer and Jenny now sat beside him in his pew. Deacon Adams one day spoke approvingly to Isaiah of the mysterious providence of God, which had arranged matters so well.

  II

  Jenny, as Mrs. Isaiah Poster, had a position in the community which she filled admirably. The dramatic circumstances of her marriage, and her sudden elevation from the daughter of the town drunkard to be the wife of Isaiah Poster, ma
de her a notable figure. Those who already knew her liked her, and those who now came to know her soon shared that liking.

  Isaiah was proud to see that she rose to her responsibilities. It pleased him that when, after Tim’s death had served as a horrible example of the evils of drink, the project of forming a county temperance society began to gather strength, she had a part in it; and he was quick to yield when she worked upon him to discontinue the sale of liquor in his store. When Bert Chick, under his patronage, opened a new establishment, she made Isaiah insist that Bert advertise for sale ‘refreshments of every kind with the exception of spirituous liquors, which by the way are no refreshment and will not be kept either on the counter or under the counter.’

  He took her proudly with him to the meeting in the Court House where a committee was appointed to draft a plan for the organization of the county temperance society, and to the subsequent meeting when the society was organized. He spoke at the meeting, unctuously referring to Jenny’s life and to her sufferings as an example of the evils the society was formed to remedy; and Jenny beside him sat with her head demurely bowed while many eyes turned her way.

  When it was possible, he took her with him everywhere. Once he had business in Old Town; and he showed Jenny the Indian village on an island in the river, and enjoyed her fastidious distaste for the squalor and dirt she saw everywhere, smiled at her surprise at the fact that the Indians lived not in huts of bark and boughs but in actual small houses set with the gable ends toward the street that crossed the island, and chuckled at her doubtful approval of the Catholic chapel and of the image of the Virgin set in the wood of the cross planted in the cemetery. When he and she returned from the Indian village to Old Town, three itinerant musicians were giving an entertainment there. Jenny suggested that she and Isaiah hear the singers, and they did so. The most popular performer was a man named Cruta, with a repertoire of popular if faintly ribald songs: ‘The King and Countrymen,’ ‘Down in Fly Market,’ ‘Sitting on a Rail’ and a dozen others. Isaiah cackled at them, but afterward-to his secret delight—Jenny chided him for this; and when the performers a few days later moved on to Bangor and set up a theatre of rough boards on the corner of Main Street and Union, she made him report to the congregation that the performance was not one which self-respecting folk should attend.