He found Haty Colson cooking his dinner on the small stove there. Hatevil Colson was one of those simple-minded, harmless folk so often to be found in small towns. Mrs. Hollis called him ‘love-cracked.’ He lived an itinerant life, wandering across the countryside, eager to tell anyone who would listen how a girl named Spinny Goldthread—of whom no one had ever heard except from him—had jilted him. He was a petty thief, but since he seldom stole anything but food—which would have been gladly given him—he was tolerated and treated always with a kindly sympathy.
So, although Tim might have hustled another man brusquely out of doors, he spoke to Haty mildly now, telling him he ought to go cook his sausages somewhere else. Haty looked at him with shrewd, rolling eyes, and without responding to this suggestion said in a sly tone:
‘I see Moll Hager down’t Castine. Know her, do ye? Like to have some news of her?’
The British, having destroyed all possibility of attack by sea, had garrisoned Castine with a force under General Gosselin and sent their fleet back to Halifax. This much Tim knew, and now at Haty’s word a sudden hope stirred in his heart.
‘See her, did ye?’ he asked.
Haty laid his finger to his nose. ‘I’m a-telling you, ain’t I?’ He turned his sausages and chuckled to himself. ‘I went down there because I had something to say to that General,’ he boasted. ‘I made it up by myself, too, one day when I was to Belfast, and they told me what his name was. But I didn’t tell anybody what I was going to say to him. I just put for Castine, laughing to myself fit to kill when I thought how he’d look when I said it to him.’
Tim asked urgently: ‘What about Moll?’
‘I didn’t see her till after I’d seen the General.’ Haty assured him, and then with sudden, shrill impatience: ‘Drat it, man, I didn’t go there to see her! I went to see this General. Well and I got there and I made them take me right to him. They didn’t want to, but I made ’em, so they did.’ He began to laugh in anticipation. ‘So they did,’ he repeated. ‘He, he, he! So they did, and I says to him, “Be ye General Gosselin?” I says, and he says—he, he, he!—he says: “Yes, I be.’ he says. “What can I do for you?” So I says—he, he, he!—I says: “Well, if you’re the goslin’, then damn the goose that hatched ye!” ’
He shook with laughter, and picked up a hot sausage in his fingers and tossed it from hand to hand for a moment, then nibbled at it gingerly. Tim laughed politely and he asked again:
‘Did ye see Moll?’
‘Yup!’
Tim brushed his mouth with his hand. ‘How’d she look?’ he asked huskily.
‘Why, goodl’ Haty assured him. ‘She looked good!’ Then he chortled again. ‘Not what Elder Loomis would call “good”!’ he admitted. ‘But purtier’n I ever see her.’
‘What was she doing?’
‘Just getting into a boat,’ said Haty calmly. ‘Just getting into a boat and rowing out to a great ship and sailing off to Halifax! And that’s the last I see of her.’ He finished his sausages and rubbed his hands on his coat. ‘There, I’ve et,’ he said. ‘Much obliged for the use of the stove. Now I’ve got some business. I’ll have to go.’
III
Tim was not surprised by Haty’s news. Moll had said that day at Hampden wharf that she would go to Halifax. Nevertheless he did not even now give up all hope of her return; and when late that month Amos Patten, as the town’s emissary, departed for Halifax to seek from Sir John Sherbrooke some amelioration of the conditions of the bond Bangor had given to guarantee delivery of vessels that were building in the town when the British came to Bangor, Tim sought him out and asked him to tiy to find some news of Moll. Amos promised sympathetically to do so.
He returned in December—his mission had slight success—and told Tim what he had learned. News had come to Halifax while Amos was there of the death of young Lieutenant Carruthers when the Endymion’s boats attempted to capture the privateer Prince of Neufchatel off Nan- tuckct early in October. But as for Moll, Amos said Tim would be wise to forget her as quickly as possible.
‘She’s forgot you long ago,’ he said. ‘I saw her, Tim. She’s a bad one. She’s forgot you, and she’d already forgotten the Lieutenant before the news came he was dead. There’s a master’s mate she’s took up with now.’
Tim asked no more questions; but sometimes in the years that followed he wondered whether Moll were still alive, wondered to what wretched depths she had descended. He never heard of her in any way again.
3
THROUGH the ten years after
Moll left him, Jenny came to mean more than life to Tim. Not even the period when she was losing baby teeth and getting new ones—which seemed at first so much too large for her—made her less beautiful in his eyes. Till Moll went away, Tim had thought little of his daughter; but now they were thrown into an increasingly close communion, and from the first she lavished on him a generous affection which made Tim her slave. There was for him an indescribable delight in her caressing tendernesses. She had an amusing trick of climbing on his knee, circling his neck with her small arms, hugging him tight and kissing him and then sitting back to look at him, her head on one side, as though trying to read his mind; and at what she saw she might laugh and hug him again. There were times when she did not wish him to touch her at all; but there were other times when she lay in his arms and went to sleep, warm and soft and small, and the big man might sit for an hour holding her so before he carried her to her bed.
During her childhood they drew closer all the time; but at first Tim was sometimes away from home. Leaving Mrs. Hollis to care for Jenny during his absence, he and his ox teams hauled from Augusta, by rude wilderness roads, the printing press and types with which Peter Edes presently began to publish the Bangor Weekly Register, the first newspaper in town. With the end of the war, water freight to Boston took the place of the land journey; so Tim turned to business nearer home. Bangor’s best export crop was lumber. Farming promised so poorly that after the nearer forests were cleared there had been many migrants to Ohio; but those who stayed at home began to extend their lumbering up the river, and Tim’s ox teams were in demand. New mills were being built, and vessels came to carry loads of sawed lumber to the westward. The navigation of the river below Bangor was doubtful and uncertain, and Tim had a hand in making the first survey, checking depths of water and marking dangerous ledges. He owned shares in several vessels, and he prospered modestly.
But the heart of his life was always Jenny, and as she grew older he began to refuse to accept work that would take him long away from her. He ran a net in the mouth of the Stream to catch salmon for the market, and Jenny liked to go out with him to bring in his take. Once when a great sturgeon became entangled in the net he noosed a rope around its tail, and the sluggish fish towed the boat up and down the river for an hour, to Jenny’s shrill delight. After that—although sturgeon were a nuisance and were apt to tear the net—Tim was always glad to catch one. If Jenny were not with him, his shout would bring her running down to the bank for another ride. It was a game of which she was slow to tire, and Tim never wearied of watching her pleasure in it.
She had, even as she grew older, few playmates. Mrs. Hollis and Tim kept her at first close at home. Doctor Rich, who had tended most of the militiamen wounded at Hampden, later moved to Bangor and lived near them, and when Jenny was seven Isaiah Poster built a house and store just beyond Doctor Rich’s home; but there were not many residences in the immediate neighborhood. Mr. Poster had a son named Ephraim, a year or so younger than Jenny, and there were children in the Rich household; but with these exceptions Jenny had no friends her own age.
But older people knew her and liked her. She was regular in attendance at Miss Allen’s Sunday School, regularly in her place by Tim at church; and she had ingratiating ways. If she had faults too, the womenfolks agreed that this was because of her upbringing. Mrs. Hollis’ stories of Tim’s tender and scrupulous care of the little girl amused and touched them. They liked Jenny
, and Tim too.
II
Tim had, though he never realized this, one enemy. When Jenny was ten years old, Maine achieved statehood; and at the same time, with a developing self-consciousness, men began to predict the heights to which the new state might aspire. Isaiah Poster was one of these. He was New Hampshire born, and he had come to Bangor in 1804, foreseeing even then that the great pine forests of the province of Maine would make rich men out of those who knew how to exploit them.
But he was before his time. He found a wilderness village of three or four hundred people, scratching at rocky farms; and the glowing reports from the new state of Ohio lured him west. From there he wrote jocosely to Amos Patten: ‘The corn grows so tall out here it needs a ladder to pick it. Down near Chillicothe a farmer dug a big beet—he had to quarry it out in chunks—and his boy fell into the hole and the farmer had to let down a bed cord to pull him out. I never saw it myself, but they say that up Sandusky way the pigs are so big you can roast the outsides of ’em and the pigs never know it, so they run around with knives and forks stuck into ’em, and when a man wants a snack he just slices off a piece.’
He stayed ten years in Ohio, but in 1817 he returned to Bangor and built a house and a store on Poplar Street opposite the distillery. Bangor men had begun to be farm-conscious, and Jacob Chick and Will Thompson vied with each other to see which would be the first to serve green peas to patrons of their taverns; but at the same time, men dreamed of fortunes in pine; and one group—Judge Kinsley; former Congressman Francis Carr, who despite his record as a supporter of the war had signed the submission when the British were in Bangor; Amos and Moses Patten who had been ruined by the depredations of the British in 1814 but who were now on the way to recoup their losses; Isaiah Poster, John Barker, and Mr. Williamson, who would be in turn Postmaster, Senator from Penobscot County, the second Governor of the new state, and finally a Congressman, and who was then already engaged on his monumental history of Maine—bought jointly twenty thousand acres of wild lands as a speculation against the future.
But Isaiah also made scattering purchases on his own account. He preferred to buy selected tracts rather than to acquire land at random; and the year Jenny was eleven, he persuaded Tim Hager to go up-river and look out good pieces of pine for him. Tim did not want to go, preferring to stay at home with Jenny; but Isaiah persisted till Tim’s resistance was at last worn down. He was six weeks gone, and he missed Jenny, missed her prettily affectionate ways, and her trick of sitting on his lap for a while after supper, and of coming into his bed in the morning. He was as lonely for her as an uxorious husband for his wife, and he thought more of her than of what he had come to do.
On his return Mrs. Hollis gave a good account of her. ‘She’s better off with you away than with you here,’ she told Tim, mocking his solicitude.
Tim held Jenny on his knee. ‘Did you get lonesome for me?’ he asked her, and she hugged him and said she had been awful lonesome.
‘But I played with Eph lots,’ she said. ‘And Uncle Isaiah let me eat gingersnaps at the store.’
He felt a momentary jealous resentment. ‘Call Isaiah “Uncle,” do you?’ Jenny nodded. ‘He wants me to,’ she said. ‘And he’s nice.’
Mrs. Hollis explained that Isaiah—since it was he who had sent Tim away—had felt responsible for Jenny’s well-being during her father’s absence; and that reminded Tim to go and report to his employer. But he had little of value to tell Isaiah. The vastness of the untouched forests up-river had confused him. ‘There’s big pine everywhere,’ he told Isaiah. ‘Millions of trees. I dunno as I saw any one place that was better than another.’
Isaiah felt himself cheated by this vague report and said so; and he berated Tim with a violence which increased when the big man sat passive under his reproaches.
‘Well,’ Tim said at last, ‘I c’n see how you might feel that way, but I dunno how I c’n help it. I done the best I could, but if you didn’t get your money’s worth, I’ll make it up to you.’
‘You’ve wasted my money and my time!’ Isaiah told him stormily. ‘I’d have been a year ahead of myself if you’d done what I told you to do. Why, damn it, Hager, you’ve cost me a lot of money!’
There was, his tone implied, no higher crime than this; and Tim felt guilty about it. He considered himself bound to repay Isaiah; and the result was that he became in small ways Isaiah’s man, fetching and carrying as Isaiah required—and without pay.
But Tim, happy to be at home with Jenny again, did not greatly mind this. She seemed to understand, with the uncanny intuition which children so often possess, that she had taken her mother’s place in his life; and sometimes, as though she saw how it moved him, she pretended to be Moll. Coming into his bed in the morning, waking him with the caressing touch of her small hands, she might say: ‘Now you hold me and hug me like you did mommy.’ Or, thrusting her small arm under his neck: ‘Now I’ll be mommy and hold your head on my shoulder!’ She began to rule him absolutely; and when she scolded him, Tim stood abashed before her, and Mrs. Hollis shook with amusement at them both and told her friends it was a sight to see that young one make her father stand around. In spite of her sharp tongue, she was as proud of Jenny as Tim was, devoted to the child.
III
Jenny began her formal education in Aunt Betty Minot’s school, and when she was twelve Mr. Baldwin opened his Young Ladies’ Academy—for boys as well as girls—and she became a regular attendant. The classes met in a room on the third floor of the brick store building Joe Leavitt had built on Washington Street, near the river; but later the Academy moved into the one-story, hip-roofed building where Aunt Betty Minot had formerly presided. Jenny was at first almost the youngest of the children there. She had a quick, acquisitive mind and she easily achieved equality with her immediate elders. The tuition was twenty cents a week, but Jenny, since she lived at home, had not to pay the nine shillings a week board which was the standard figure charged by Judge Kinsley and others who provided lodging for students from the towns down the river.
Through her new contact with older girls, Jenny acquired a sudden interest in clothes, and Tim realized that as she grew older her demands would increase. Once he had been an enterprising man, full of plans and projects; but Moll’s going left him for a while with no real ambition. Now, in the perception of Jenny’s increasing needs, he wanted to make money.
It was natural that he should turn to the lumber business, for talk of pine was in the air. The fact that he himself owned no timber land was not an obstacle. Benjamin Bussey of Roxbury and such outsiders had bought lands north of Bangor, but a man who wanted a few trees cut them where he would. None thought the theft of standing timber a crime. Pine on the stump was so nearly valueless that to steal it was like taking a breath of air, and could hurt no one. Maine, on achieving statehood two or three years before, had refused to pay Massachusetts four cents an acre for eight million acres of wild lands within her borders, because the price was held to be too high; so when Tim that winter hired a crew of men to lumber off a vein of big pines west of the horseback a few miles above Old Town, and set his oxen to haul them to the river so that they could be floated down to the mills in the spring, it did not occur to him to seek out the owner of the land, whoever he might be, and offer to buy it.
He put all the financial resources he could muster into this project, borrowing heavily; and he arranged by correspondence to sell his lumber, when it should be cut and sawed, in Boston. The bargain was concluded before he set axe to the first tree. When in the early summer he saw the lumber loaded on the Little Cherub schooner, which Joseph Leavitt had built three years before, he went with his cargo to Boston to consummate his bargain. His cut had been a big one, and he was jubilantly sure of a handsome profit.
The market, since he made his dicker, had advanced; but Tim—having already agreed with the purchaser upon a price for “merchantable lumber”—did not expect to be able to take advantage of this fact. Sharp dealing by his Boston c
orrespondent gave him the opportunity. Bangor lumber merchants had suffered for years from unfair classification of their cargoes after they were delivered in Boston; and the surveyor there, after inspecting Tim’s cargo, set aside a full half of it as ‘refuse’ The purchaser paid for the ‘merchantable lumber’ and then proposed to take the refuse at a lower price; but Tim laughed at him.
‘I’ll be damned if you will!’ he retorted, his voice booming in its old way. ‘I didn’t contract to sell you refuse. If this is refuse, I’ll just keep it myself and see if I can’t get a price for it.’
He readily found a purchaser at a figure higher than that which had been paid for the rest of his shipment, and he was exultant, but not for long. He took payment, in both cases, in bills of the Bangor Bank; but when he went to the New England Bank to redeem the bills at the current discount, he found that redemption had been stopped—and there was a report that the bank had failed.
‘Why, there can’t be a thing wrong with the Bangor Bank!’ Tim protested. ‘Not with the men that’s back of it! Sam Dutton’s a good man, and so’s John Barker, and Joe Leavitt’s got money enough to buy the whole bank if he was a mind to, and Deacon Adams never done a crooked piece of business in his life!’ He pounded his big fist on the counter in a sort of desperation, and his brow was dripping.
The cashier smiled drily. ‘They’re too big for their britches,’ he said. ‘Why, man, the bills they’ve got in circulation you’d think they had all the specie in the United States in their vaults! Now some of their debtors have failed, and if you ask me, their bills aren’t worth what it cost to print them.’
Tim wiped his mouth with his hand. ‘Then what am I going to do to get my money?’ he protested.
‘Well, I understand there’s going to be a meeting at the Marlboro Hotel of the others like you who hold the bills. But they can’t do anything but talk. My advice to you is to forget it, cross it out, go home.’
The Strange Woman Page 6