The Strange Woman

by Ben Ames Williams

  Yet even now, faithful to the last, she was a bulwark between them and the seas. Brock took the oars and headed for the beach; and the seas drove them headlong on. At the last the dory was lifted stern first and pitched over and over, throwing them all into the water. It came smashing down atop them as they floundered helpless there. Evered instinctively caught Jenny in his arms, swinging her aside, and they escaped that blow; but the gunwale of the heavy boat as it came down caught Brock in the back of the neck. When the others crawled and floundered to the shore, he did not follow. Evered saw his dark form in the breakers and dragged him out on hard clean sand; but the man’s head hung limp. His neck was Cracked, and it was clear that he was dead.

  Just as they were sure of this, a glare suddenly broke through the decks of the Mary Ann; and they stood a moment watching her. The mainmast had gone at last; the decks were breached; and for a moment leaping flames played high. The next sea turned them to steam, but they flared up again, as though the sea and the fire like hyenas over a corpse fought for the carcass of the schooner. Those on the beach watched that unholy combat in a dreadful fascination for long moments, till the wind and their wet garments began to suck warmth and life out of them and warned them to be moving.

  Without discussion they put the wind and the sea behind them, moving straight away from the water, not knowing where they were going, knowing only that this was land under their feet, that on this good land somewhere safety lay. They trudged through the wet packed snow, and the driven snow blinded them and the whiteness of the snow was the only light in the dark and storm-scourged world.

  They came presently to water skimmed with ice, saw the black of open water beyond. Here was a barrier they could not pass. They stopped in a huddled group; and Evered felt Jenny shivering beside him. Cap’n Obed Stood with bowed head, already crushed by the weight of the cold that tightened like a vise upon them all; but Evered looked right and left, and to the right, far away, dimly through the screen of the driving snow, he saw a radiance that was light.

  An instant later that light was gone, snow once more shutting in between; but he shouted the word and turned them all that way. He supported Jenny, his arm around her. Cap’n Obed and Willie, with the dumb patience of old age, came on their heels, their heads down, pressing mutely on. The wind off the water was not so cold as it would have been off land; but it was laden with snow that plastered itself upon their garments, against their checks, in their eyes. Their outer garments stiffened with it and crackled as they walked. The footing was uncertain and the way was long and their feet were slow; but the light, visible more and more often through the blackness of the storm, was a promise of warmth and security waiting at journey’s end.

  There was water on their left, and the sand spit lay between them and the sea; but the low land gave them no shelter, and the wind was an enemy with which they locked in a steady grapple. Strength failed fast, but the light with its promises lured them on.

  Then slowly the water on their left began to curve across their path. They followed the beach line till they encountered the first disturbed seas driving in from the Sound.

  They had landed on Coetue; but here the sand spit ended. The warm security of Nantucket town was so near, scarce half a mile away beyond the light; but in the darkness and the storm they could see no sign of the town yonder, and the channel was a barrier they could not cross to come to safety there. Through the open water between them and that security great seas charged like massed cavalry with white manes flying. Beyond lay the town and safety, but there was no way to reach that haven. Behind them lay the weary miles they had come; and on either side they were penned in by the sea. They were like men at the bottom of a pit, with grinning death for company.

  When John Evered turned from looking toward the light, he saw that they now were only three. Jenny was here, in the curve of his arm; and Cap’n Obed had sunk down on the beach and sat weakly at their feet. But Willie Small had fallen somewhere on the way, since they left the Mary Ann, quietly to die. Arthur, and then Squid, and then Brock, and now old Willie; these four were gone, and death rode the icy wind, hurrying hungrily to devour them all.

  VI

  Evered for hours now had found release from thought in action; in action that was largely instinctive, just as a man knocked senseless into the water may without ever recovering his wits struggle to the surface and, paddling weakly, there sustain himself till rescue comes. So long as he could labor at the pumps or to cut away the fallen mast and rigging or to lead them all along the beach toward the light which beyond the open water mocked them now, he needed not to think. He fought for his own life and for the lives of all of them: for Jenny at first no more than for Arthur, the smiling and good-humored halfwit; no more than for Squid, the gangling, dumb and speechless boy; no more than for Mr. Brock who, because it was he who had let the Mary Ann break her back by falling off a wave, was directly responsible for this disaster; no more than for valiant Willie Small, choking in the smoky galley to heat coffee and beans that they might eat; no more than for Cap’n Obed himself. Life was a quality which all men fought to protect. Life was a treasure beyond price, and when life and death were at issue, a man did not stop to count costs. A king might risk his life—yes, and lose it, too—to save a wretched foundling fallen into some hidden pit or pool. A sheriff might risk his life to save for a while the life of the felon in his charge and bring him safely to the gallows in the end. Deep-rooted in mankind there was this instinct, if life were endangered, to interfere and at any cost to save. Evered himself, once upon a time, had seen a strange tragedy. Among the crew in winter camp and on his first log drive down the Connecticut there was an individual named Thisbeus, a besotted and visibly diseased wreck of a man with only half a nose and no teeth, old in vice and lost to shame. He had been hired to help the cook, but the men and the cook revolted, refusing to let him handle any food that humans were to eat. Thereafter he cut and fitted firewood all day long, his shaking limbs barely equal to the task, so that he could hardly meet the demands of the voracious stoves. On the drive he helped handle the wangan, the long double-ended boat in which the cook brought his stores and gear down-river; and one day he had the bad luck to fall overboard. He could not swim, but he managed to clutch the end of a straggling log at the tail of the drive and cling to it as it drifted at slowly increasing speed toward a horseshoe of falls and tumbling rapids half a mile below. There was not a man of those who saw him drifting toward the falls who did not wish old Thisbeus dead. He had too long been an affront to the eyes of the living. Nevertheless, three of the best of them, racing down the riverbank, found a boat drawn up on shore and set out to try to intercept him just above the falls. They were too late for that, but the log to which he clung hung crosswise on a ledge at the head of the falls, and—although they knew there was slight hope the manoeuvre would succeed—they let the boat gently down to him, holding her against the current by rowing hard upstream. They reached him, too; and the wretched man caught the boat’s stern and tried to climb in, while they redoubled their exertions to make way against the current. They gained two or three feet in an agonizing struggle that lasted almost a minute before an oar broke and they all went over the falls. Thisbeus alone drifted unhurt through the rapids and survived. The others died. Evered had been too late to take his place in that small boat, but he and twenty others, watching helplessly, saw the affair; and he remembered it now, thinking how blindly men fought to guard the flame of life and keep it burning.

  Of those who had been on the Mary Ann, four men were dead, and only he and Jenny and Cap’n Obed remained alive; but he would cling to life. He drew Jenny down on her knees beside Cap’n Obed; he sheltered her with his body against the wind and—shouting to be heard—he asked whether the Captain knew where they were.

  ‘Nantucket’s over there,’ the old man said haltingly, through chattering teeth. ‘You can’t see it, but it’s there. I was here once, twenty-two years ago. We’re on the tip end of the sand spit op
posite the town. They call it Coctue.’

  ‘Can we go back, get to the other end?’

  ‘It’d be too far for me-and nothing there but scrub and ma’sh meadows if we made it. We’d freeze as easy there as here.’

  ‘How far?’

  ‘Five-six miles, at a guess.’

  Evered judged it was almost three miles to where they had left the Mary Ann, and the thought of returning that weary way was dreadful. In the darkness, unbroken except by the light’s periodic flash, the town yonder might have been a thousand miles off. He stood up and shouted half a dozen times; but the wind caught the sound and shredded it, and Cap’n Obed said fretfully:

  ‘Save your breath! Save your stren’th!’

  Evered was too young to be passive. ‘We’ve got to do something.’

  ‘We’ll set till we get cold,’ the old man told him. ‘Then we’ll stomp around till we get warm again. We can last the night.’

  Jenny made no sound, and Evered wrapped her in his arms, opening his coat to draw her against his body half within its folds.

  ‘We’ll freeze here,’ he said.

  The Captain cackled. ‘Not me. I w’on’t. You young ones might.’ He seemed as his strength failed full of words. ‘You’re a fine pair of critters, young and full of sap; but where it’s just a business of setting still and taking it, old men can stand more than young ones. An old man can go into his shell like a turtle, like a denned bear. He’ll quit thinking and feeling, quit everything except just staying alive. Young ones think too much, and that scares ’em, wears ’em down.’ He appeared to realize for the first time that they were but three, and he muttered: ‘Where’s Willie?’ When Evered did not answer, he said wearily: ‘We been shipmates long as I c’n remember, always stuck together.’

  Jenny was shivering in Evered’s arms, her body shaking in a long crescendo, still for a moment and then beginning again; and he thought how a dog shivers in its sleep. There was 110 surrender in him, yet for a while he remained passive, deliberately waiting to see whether in their wet garments the cold could be endured. He sat on the ground with Jenny between his legs, his feet crossed over hers, his arms around her, bowing forward over her so that she was bowed forward too. Cap’n Obed was lying down, curled in a ball, completely passive, no longer curious to know where Willie was.

  They stayed thus for a long time, not speaking. Evered found that he grew colder till he was in torment. He spoke in Jenny’s ear.

  ‘Can you stand it?’

  ‘I’m not—very cold,’ she said as steadily as possible.

  After a while he thought that he suffered less, and he realized suddenly that he was drowsy, ready to fall asleep. The realization brought him wide awake enough. He had heard all his life that before freezing to death a man went to sleep. He stirred, and the slightest movement was agony; so he knew that to stay here meant that before morning they would die.

  When he spoke to Jenny, she was asleep. He climbed painfully to his feet, and lifted her by the shoulders and shook her and made her stand. He shouted at her and walked her up and down till she came back to life again, and she said—not complainingly:

  ‘It hurts to move.’

  ‘We’re half-frozen,’ he admitted. ‘We’ve got to get to shelter somewhere.’

  Back up the long spit of Coetue—past the wreck of the Mary Ann, five miles or six or a dozen, it did not matter—they must go, must at least begin the journey. For to stay here was to die, and that must not happen. The life in them, a part of the great treasure shared by all the world, must be preserved. It was not themselves who must be saved, but the spark of life which was in their custody.

  When Jenny could stand alone, Evered tried to rouse Cap’n Obed; but he could not. The old man’s sleep—if it were sleep—was so profound that Evered could not break through its barrier. He turned to Jenny again, his arm around her waist, and led her along the beach, retracing the way they had come an hour or two before.

  VII

  That journey up the beach on the inner shore of Coetue was an ordeal without end. The snow began to ease, but the wind was bitter, bringing from the northwest a desperate cold which would be remembered for a hundred years, when Boston Harbor froze solidly over, and up in Bangor the thermometers registered forty-two below. It was already well below freezing, even here on Coetue with open water on two sides, and it was colder all the time. Their wetted garments, stiff with ice, crackled when they moved.

  As the snow thinned, they could distinguish the whiteness of the land and the shore ice from the darkness of the water. Evered, leading Jenny with his arm around her, found that the beach was not straight. It was a series of shallow crescents with projecting points between. He began to cut across these points as he came to them, saving every foot of the way.

  Jenny for a while walked as well as he. They did not hurry, but they did keep moving; and the exercise stirred their circulation enough so that they were no longer cold, but the wind drained their strength and quickly wearied them.

  Jenny faltered at last. ‘My limbs are so heavy I can scarcely move them,’ she confessed, and there was almost mirth in her tones. ‘I have on so many petticoats! It’s hard to walk.’

  ‘Take them off,’ he said.

  She tried, but her fingers were clumsy with cold, and he sought to help her. Fumbling under her outer skirt in the darkness he could not find the buttons at her waist, and in the end he compromised by ripping her petticoats and her skirt short off just below the knee. Less encumbered, she was able for a while to proceed; and when she lagged again, he took her on his shoulders, her arms around his neck, his hands under her knees; and she rode thus pickaback awhile, till he was staggering with fatigue and had to put her down, and she walked with him.

  He knew when they passed the broken wreck of the Mary Ann by the smell of smoke and of charred wet timbers on the wind; but they did not cross the spit to look at her. He remembered that they had seen no trace of Willie Small. Perhaps the snow had covered Willie, or perhaps they had missed him when they cut across the low points. They trudged slowly on, and it was as though theirs were the only two lives in the world, as though the night and the storm combined to crush the whole human race of which they were the last survivors.

  When Jenny could go no farther, Evered took her on his back again; but she had not even strength to cling to him, and he knelt and lifted her laboriously in his arms and came painfully to his feet and stumbled on. He walked until his legs gave way and he fell; and he drew her close and lay still awhile, gasping for breath till his laboring lungs were at peace. When the bitter cold began to stiffen them again, he picked her up once more, once more went on.

  He had no sense of distance nor of time, knew only that this life which was in their keeping must be preserved. It was not one life alone which he sought to save, nor two. In his disordered thoughts he and Jenny were the only survivors of an universal catastrophe. If they died, the world would be left tenantless; but if they lived, their two lives blending could populate the earth again. She ceased to be for him an individual, became to him the embodiment of woman, the mother of all life as man is its father. When his weariness betrayed him and he fell, sometimes atop her, he held her in a strong embrace, pressed between him and the earth; and there was in this close union of their half-frozen bodies a sort of sacrament that filled him with peace and with assuagement as though already their life fires had joined to give off other lives like sparks to light the world. When he picked her up and labored on, his arms supporting her embraced her too; and his heart yearned for her, and all the loves that man has known for women were alight in him for her.

  He thought she felt this too. When they fell and rose, twice or thrice she walked awhile. ‘You can’t do it, John,’ she said, clinging to him. ‘You can’t carry me always. You will wear yourself out. Let me do what I can.’ So though the time came when she could not stand at all, it was still as partners that they went on. Together they kept the waning fires of life alive.

&nb
sp; VIII

  When Evered saw at last that the line of the beach swung to the right in an extended curve, he thought this was a deeper cove than any they had passed; and he left the water, holding a straight line, thinking to cross a projecting point of land as he had done before. But no water showed ahead, for they had come to the end of the upper harbor, where Coetue widens into Coskata; and when John was sure of this, strength for a while came into him.

  He never knew how long he walked after he left the water before he came to the haystack. This was hummocky hay, marsh hay which some farmer had scythed the summer before and stacked here to be sent for during the winter and boated home. The stack stood up as a black shape against the snow-covered ground, and Evered veered toward it and came into its lee, and the blessed relief from the wind was so great that for a moment he was sick with gladness. He laid Jenny down, and he began to tear at the sheltered side of the haystack, dragging out great handfuls till he had a pile which would protect her from the snow on which she lay. He lifted her on it and piled more hay on top of her. He had by that time dug a shallow recess in the stack, and on a sudden thought he continued to dig deeper and deeper, throwing the hay on the ground beside him, tunnelling into the close-packed stuff, tearing and bloodying his hands, splintering his nails. When he remembered the stout knife in his pocket and began to use it he made more rapid progress, and his tunnel grew deeper. He burrowed like an animal. The dust of the hay filled his nostrils and made him sneeze, and as he dug deeper and deeper, he had to shove the loosened hay down past his body to the opening.

  He dug until he could lie at length, his knees a little bent, and still be completely within the stack. Then he roused Jenny and set her on her feet and—since her dress was wet and stiff with ice—he stripped off her outer garments and her sodden shoes, and helped her slide feet-first into the den he had made. He pulled off his boots and coat and trousers and edged in beside her. He drew his coat in after them and turned it inside out to make a pillow that would protect them from the prickly stubble ends of the hay. Then he reached out again and gathered armfuls of the hay and—backing into the tunnel he had dug—wadded with it the opening, building the plug higher and higher, till at last the entrance to their refuge was sealed and the outer cold was completely shut away.