At that sharp pain his hold slackened and she tore free from him and darted toward the door. He tried to catch her, lumbering across the room; but a keener agony struck him, so that his chest and side and arm were a blaze of pain. As she fled she heard him fall. Then she caught the handle of the door and whipped it wide, and jerked it to behind her; and barefooted, in her torn shift, her nose streaming blood from his blow that had caught her in the facc, the taste of blood from her cut lips in her mouth, her legs welted by the goad, she ran blindly through the night, not knowing where.
III
Isaiah Poster
1
ISAIAH POSTER, when he
came back to Bangor from Ohio in 1817, found it a scattering village of perhaps a thousand people; but he foresaw the future of Maine pine and—since most of that pine would have to come downriver to be milled and shipped—of Bangor too. The town was sure to grow, so he began at once to buy pasture and farm land which would one day be salable as building lots, and to buy wild lands up the river, financing his purchases with the profits from his store and from his systematic thefts—through such agents as Tim and Ned Lawrence—of pine off public and private lands.
The habit of secrecy which he acquired in those early years grew upon him, and long after there was any need to do so he hid as many as possible of his operations behind a modest anonymity. He bought stumpage through straw men, and only the woods boss who cut his pine knew that Isaiah owned the stumpage and financed the winter’s cut and the spring drive. He owned—by private arrangement with the nominal owners—three mills at Old Town. Through Budd Parsons, and without letting his name appear, he participated in the organization of the Penobscot Boom Corporation, planned by a group of a dozen small operators to whom the Legislature was quick to grant a charter; but immediately afterward, as a silent partner of Rufus Dwinel, Isaiah bought the valuable charter from the original incorporators and thereafter, until he sold out to Mr. Dwinel, he shared in the profits it returned.
As his capital increased, so did his interests expand. One day in June, 1827, he counted sixty-four vessels anchored in the river to receive their cargoes of lumber, and he perceived a neglected opportunity and began to buy into the shipping industry, taking a share in bottoms built and building, scattering his risks with a shrewd discretion.
Thus like an octopus he extended his tentacles in every direction, taking his profit out of pine all the way from the stump to the Boston market, Isaiah Poster, when he came back to Bangor from Ohio in 1817, found it a scattering village of perhaps a thousand people; but he foresaw the future of Maine pine and—since most of that pine would have to come downriver to be milled and shipped—of Bangor too. The town was sure to grow, so he began at once to buy pasture and farm land which would one day be salable as building lots, and to buy wild lands up the river, financing his purchases with the profits from his store and from his systematic thefts—through such agents as Tim and Ned Lawrence—of pine off public and private lands.
The habit of secrecy which he acquired in those early years grew upon him, and long after there was any need to do so he hid as many as possible of his operations behind a modest anonymity. He bought stumpage through straw men, and only the woods boss who cut his pine knew that Isaiah owned the stumpage and financed the winter’s cut and the spring drive. He owned—by private arrangement with the nominal owners—three mills at Old Town. Through Budd Parsons, and without letting his name appear, he participated in the organization of the Penobscot Boom Corporation, planned by a group of a dozen small operators to whom the Legislature was quick to grant a charter; but immediately afterward, as a silent partner of Rufus Dwinel, Isaiah bought the valuable charter from the original incorporators and thereafter, until he sold out to Mr. Dwinel, he shared in the profits it returned.
As his capital increased, so did his interests expand. One day in June, 1827, he counted sixty-four vessels anchored in the river to receive their cargoes of lumber, and he perceived a neglected opportunity and began to buy into the shipping industry, taking a share in bottoms built and building, scattering his risks with a shrewd discretion.
Thus like an octopus he extended his tentacles in every direction, taking his profit out of pine all the way from the stump to the Boston market, till he must have been rated, by anyone who knew all his resources, as one of the dozen richest men of the town.
II
Isaiah was when he returned from Ohio a small man with a tight, narrow mouth and a rocky chin under which a half-moon of sandy whisker extended from ear to car. In the intervening years the whiskers had turned gray, and now in his early sixties he was except for a fringe of thin white hair completely bald, and he wore a black skull cap to protect his pate from drafts. As his teeth one by one disappeared, his jaws had clamped more tightly shut so that he gave the impression of putting a lock upon his tongue. This appearance did him no injustice. He was in fact as secret and furtive as he was greedy and shrewd.
He put up a store on Poplar Street and built a house beside it, his household consisting of his son Ephraim and a woman named Mrs. Wetzel. She was twelve years younger than Isaiah, with the buxom cheeks and full figure which bespoke a tremendous vitality. She had become Isaiah’s housekeeper soon after his wife died in Ohio, and her enemies there were quick to put the worst construction on the relationship between them. It was rather to defy their slanderous tongues than from any fondness for him that she presently invited him to her bed. ‘I might as well have the game as the name,’ she said sharply. When in her later forties she became more querulous than generous, he welcomed the curtailment of their relationship, yet habit still led him sometimes to her arms until she died.
One Friday morning a few years after they came to Bangor she complained of a cold, and it was worse next day. Isaiah suggested calling in Doctor Rich, but Mrs. Wetzel insisted on sending instead for a man named Nathaniel Oak, who had recently come to town and set himself up as a steam doctor, attracting an astonishing number of feminine patients. When Doctor Oak had examined Mrs. Wetzel he wagged his head in a doleful way and administered an emetic. He stayed with her all Saturday night, repeating the emetic at intervals of an hour, and by daylight Sunday morning Mrs. Wetzel was in a state of physical collapse.
Isaiah protested with some violence: ‘You keep on, and you’ll kill her! She can’t stand it, Doctor. She’ll vomit up her insides!’
But the quack told him wisely: ‘It’s necessary, Mr. Poster. At some time in her life Mrs. Wetzel has taken opium, and it’s still in her system, and the medicine I’ve given her has to fight to get rid of that poison. Once we get it out of her, she’ll be all right.’
Isaiah, as helpless as most men where feminine ailments are concerned, was silenced; and Doctor Oak gave Mrs. Wetzel another emetic. Then he subjected her to his steam treatment. He and Isaiah swathed her in blankets, upon which, a little at a time, the Doctor poured scalding water until the blankets were saturated, careful to do this so slowly that she was not actually blistered. He continued this until Mrs. Wetzel’s face and head, which protruded from the cocoon of blankets in which he had wrapped her, were streaming perspiration; and her breathing had become so labored and painful that it seemed ready to stop altogether. Then he whipped the blankets away and dashed cold water over her.
Immediately afterward, he poured capsicum down her throat. ‘We have to do this,’ he told Isaiah, ‘in order to keep up the internal that while we cool her off outside; but we can’t leave the capsicum in her too long or it’ll burn her up.’
So he gave the moribund woman another emetic, and then repeated the steam treatment. He labored with her along these vigorous lines until Monday night, when she died. Isaiah was dazed, not so much by his loss as by the emotional experience of witnessing, and even participating in, this ghastly procedure; and it was weeks before he was able completely to forget it.
III
When Isaiah came to Bangor, Jenny was seven years old; and since his store was so near her home, she and I
saiah’s son Ephraim—a few months younger than herself—soon became acquainted. The store fascinated her, and Isaiah first became conscious of her as a young one who was almost as much of a nuisance as Eph, forever underfoot there. He might drive them both out of the store with angry hoots; but Mrs. Wetzel liked Jenny, as did most women, so when they were banished from the store the little girl and Ephraim fled to Mrs. Wetzel, and Jenny came to think of the Poster house as almost a second home.
Isaiah’s impatience with her, however, did not long persist. The old man, even then well into his fifties, began to find that Jenny held his eye. Since he was small, standing no more than two inches over five feet, while Tim Hager was big and physically powerful, he would have disliked Tim in any ease; but his early interest in Jenny, who so patently adored her father, perversely accentuated this feeling. He hired Tim to work for him, largely because to be able to give Tim orders and see them obeyed and to be able to scold Tim as a shrewish wife scolds her hulking husband, without fear of physical repraisals, gave him a profound and almost sensuous satisfaction. When the chance came to strip Tim penniless, he seized it with a relish; and thereafter, to furnish Tim with rum and watch the big man degenerate into a shaking, maudlin hulk gave Isaiah a pleasing sense of virtuous power.
Even before Mrs. Wetzel died, Isaiah began to make friends with Jenny, welcoming her at the store, giving her sweetmeats, taking her on his knee, teaching her to call him ‘Uncle Isaiah’. When he proposed to Tim to go up-river on that lumber-stealing expedition, and the big man objected to leaving Jenny alone, Isaiah suggested that she stay at his house; and she did so, taking Mrs. Wetzel’s old room, eating her meals with him and Ephraim—Isaiah had engaged Mrs. Hollis to come in by the day after Mrs. Wetzel died—while Tim was gone; and to have the child under his roof gave the old man an astonishing pleasure. Through Tim’s progressive degeneration afterward, on occasions when the big man had drunk himself into a stupor and Jenny came to the store to take him home, Isaiah might walk down Poplar Street with her, propping Tim on one side while she supported him on the other, and help her put her father to bed. He derived a curiously exciting pleasure from these intimate moments when they worked together, pulling off Tim’s boots and removing his clothing while he lay helpless.
As Jenny ripened into young maturity, she was in Isaiah’s thoughts more and more, and he watched her with a jealous eye. When he saw that his son Ephraim had likewise become conscious of her increasing beauty, he decided that it was high time the boy saw something of the world; and he sent Eph away to Harvard College in Cambridge.
Afterward—since Mrs. Hollis slept at home—Isaiah was at night alone in the house; and he sometimes thought, as one dreams of the impossible, that it would be fine to have Jenny under his roof again.
IV
On that Friday night which marked the last day of the stay of the three companies of soldiers in Bangor before they proceeded to Houlton, Isaiah walked up to their encampment to listen to the band concert. He saw Jenny in the crowd, and spoke to her and she to him; but because he was afraid that to do so would provoke smiles from those who saw them together, he made no effort to keep her by his side. Yet when she moved away he followed her, since it was happiness to him to watch her, to see the way she moved and the turn of her head and the rich shadows of her hair; and when Lieutenant Bloodgood spoke to her, an astonishing storm of jealous anger shook the old man. His reaction was completely instinctive. There was a bitter taste in his mouth and a dryness in his nostrils and a nervous twitching of his hands. He watched them, hating the Lieutenant—and Jenny, too—with a curdling violence. Jenny seemed to him, suddenly and with the force of revelation, to be somehow sacred; and for any man to touch her was like a profanation of which she, since she permitted it, was as guilty as the officer who now held her hand in the crook of his arm. Isaiah blamed her even more violently than he blamed the Lieutenant.
He saw them draw apart into the cover of a clump of trees near the encampment ground. In that retreat the Lieutenant tried to kiss her. Jenny, though she laughed, fought free and darted away; but Isaiah moved angrily forward and intercepted the young officer with a scolding violence of shrill rage which startled the Lieutenant and held him in his tracks long enough so that Jenny escaped. Isaiah himself, still angry, tried then to find her, searching once more through the crowd, but without success.
When he went back to the store, he was torn by the jealous passion which shook him. He blamed Jenny for her dallying and told himself she should be punished for it; and when he found Tim sunk in a drunken stupor in the store, he seized on opportunity, telling Tim what he had seen, leaving Jenny’s chastisement in her father’s hands.
V
After Tim was gone, Isaiah was for a while so weakened by his own emotion that he could not stand; and he sat down limply in the chair which Tim had left and stayed there, imagining Tim finding Jenny, imagining the big man’s rage at his daughter, mumbling in an avid relish of his own thoughts. When he left the store and went to his house and to bed, he did not sleep; and he was still wide awake when he heard running steps outside the house and then the thud of bare heels on his stoop, and hands beating at the door, and Jenny crying his name:
‘Uncle Isaiah! Uncle Isaiah!’
He lighted a candle and without waiting to dress went to the door, a grotesque figure in his nightcap, his shirt flapping around his shins. He lifted the latch and Jenny came stumbling in. Blood had stained her cheeks and throat and had dripped down on the shift which was her only garment. One of her sleeves was tom half away where Tim’s great hand had gripped her, and her shift was ripped down the side so that Isaiah saw angry weals across her bare white legs, and long scratches where Tim had dragged her across the floor. He stared at her for an instant in an almost triumphant satisfaction, relishing these evidences of what she had suffered. Then she flung herself into his arms, sobbing without tears, the sobs shaking and convulsing her whole body, clinging to him, hiding her face against his breast, crying:
‘Don’t let him in! Don’t let him in, Uncle Isaiah! He’ll kill me! Don’t let him in!’
Isaiah, one arm around her, closed the door and barred it. That Jenny should have come to him in her distress filled him with a greedy excitement and with satisfaction too; but also he was embarrassed, thinking what the town would say if anyone saw Jenny here half-naked 111 his arms. When she would not let him go, holding him fast as though in him her only safety lay, and crying out in an hysterical terror which he could not soothe, he began to be frightened. He wished Mrs. Hollis were here, to help him take care of the hurt girl and to wrap the mantle of her respectability about them both. That good woman’s home on Hancock Street was not far away. She was accustomed to come to Isaiah’s house by a path which cut directly from her door to his; and Isaiah thought if he could leave Jenny for a moment he might fetch her. But when he spoke of this, Jenny would not let him go.
‘No, no!’ she cried. ‘Don’t leave me alone! Please, Uncle Isaiah! He’ll come after me!’
So, as the next best thing, he led Jenny into what had been Mrs. Wetzel’s room. She was so wretched that a gentle tenderness began to supplant in him every other feeling, and he persuaded her to lie down on the bed there, and as she grew quieter, he went to put water to heat. When it was warm he bathed her bloody face, and while she lay with closed eyes, still shuddering with sobs and seeming to be unconscious of his attentions, he washed her feet and wiped the scratches and weals on her legs, tending her as gently and as impersonally as a woman.
When she was clean and her hurts were soothed, he covered her over; and without speaking again of Mrs. Hollis, for fear to do so might wake Jenny’s fears again, he sat with her until at last, clinging to his hand, she fell asleep. Dawn by that time was near. The night had been long, but now there was light in the eastern skies, and the windows were pale rectangles, even though here in the room the candle still burned. As day brightened she seemed to sleep more heavily; and at last he went to dress, and looked
in at her again, and then hurried to summon Mrs. Hollis.
VI
Jenny slept for hours. Isaiah was uneasy at this, and thought perhaps she had been hurt in some way not apparent and should have a doctor’s attention, but Mrs. Hollis would not let him rouse her, refusing even to open Jenny’s door.
‘The poor lamb needs all the rest she can get,’ she said. ‘We’ll let her sleep as long as she can.’ They heard distinctly the strains of the military band as the three companies of regulars took the Old Town road on their march to Houlton. ‘Did she tell you what happened?’ she asked.
Isaiah shook his head. ‘No, she didn’t tell me anything; just came crying at the door for me to let her in, and saying he’d kill her.’
‘Did he come after her?’
‘No.’ Isaiah’s jaw set. ‘If he had, I’d have put a slug through him! The town’s stood too much from Tim Hager already.’ He forgot that it was he who had set Tim on her, swelled now with a virtuous indignation at the big man.
‘No one ever will know what that poor baby had to stand from him.’
‘He’ll never touch her again!’ Isaiah swore. The sight of Jenny’s hurts and the fact that she had turned to him in her extremity had aroused in him a passionate and possessive tenderness, and he wished now to cherish her and to protect her in every possible way. ‘If the town can’t deal with him, I can. I’m not going to have such goings on, right next door as you might say.’
Mrs. Hollis nodded with an almost unctuous satisfaction. ‘He’s been a hard man to her, ever since Moll Hager left him. There was some that thought Moll was wrong to go, but they didn’t know him as well as I do. Oh, I’ve seen what this poor darling went through! She was as scared of him as a mouse is of a cat, and always trying to make him like her; making up to him till your heart would turn over to watch them together, and him so sour and grumbling, yelling at her all the time.’ She wagged her head. ‘What’s to be done about her I don’t know. After all, he’s her father. You can’t just take her away from him.’
The Strange Woman Page 10