The Strange Woman

by Ben Ames Williams

  He knew he was forever lost, yet the question must be asked. ‘Why?’ he stammered pitifully. ‘Oh, Jenny, why?’

  She said, still unmoving: ‘Because, Ephraim, I want you to do something for me, and you are afraid, so I wished to make you more afraid not to do it than to do it. Do you know what it is I want?’

  He looked in terror toward the door, and she said evenly: ‘You are thinking of Isaiah. He is still asleep. I must go wake him. You’ll start soon.’

  Then she said: ‘I will not tell him about what you’ve done to me before you go, Ephraim. Yet you know what he’ll do when he knows.’ Her low voice, as much as her words, chilled him through and through. ‘When you come back, I’ll tell him what you’ve done to me, Ephraim. You know what to expect. I’ll tell him the day he returns. If he returns.’

  His eyes dilated and he covered them with his hands to shut out the sight of her. He turned and fled headlong down the stairs to his own room.

  8

  EPHRAIM and Isaiah were a

  long ten days on the way up-river, and that was for the younger man a weary time. They rode in one canoe, while Alex Duncan and Tom Irish took the other. Two Indians paddled each craft. The passengers sat facing forward, and the rolled tent, the bedding, the bags of cooking dishes and the covered wooden pails full of supplies served as back-rests to support them. The canoes glided secretly up the long deadwaters, between blank forest walls, and sometimes a half-grown brood of scurry ducks scuttered for miles ahead of them in repeated alarms. They poled up the quicker reaches or landed at the foot of the worst falls and rapids to portage around, and the trip up-river was not alarming.

  Nevertheless, Ephraim’s old terror of the water returned tenfold, and he was wretchedly afraid. His days were one long torment, and for thinking of Jenny he could not sleep of nights. He lost weight and strength and his nerves were frayed and torn. Despair as much as terror harried him. He had dreamed for months that he would one day hold Jenny in his arms; but now that dream was bitter ashes in his mouth. Even in the half- mad violence of those moments when he still thought her Ruth, there had been something infuriating in her cold submission; and his subsequent awakening to the truth was a nightmare from which there was no escape.

  But Isaiah was serenely unconscious of his son’s despair. He gained strength on the trip, thriving on the long days out of doors, the tented nights, the hearty food; and also, the reports his men eventually brought put him in high spirits. The township which Ephraim had bought proved to be well stocked with pine of the first grade. The eighty million feet of which Mr. Holbrook had boasted might be an exaggeration, but not a serious one; and there was a tributary stream flowing into the Penobscot which would facilitate lumbering the tract. Isaiah greedily calculated that he might sell the stumpage for at least a dollar the thousand. If he could do that, his potential profit was enormous.

  But to conclude such a transaction would take time. It might be years before lumbering operations reached so far into the wilderness. On the return trip down-river the old man thought aloud, calculating every possibility, weighing the advantages of the quick, sure profit to be derived from selling the bond Ephraim had bought against the long-term chances.

  Ephraim, sitting behind his father, hardly listened. They were bound back to Bangor now, and when they came home, Jenny would tell his father what had happened; and that prospect was appalling. So the future daunted him; but also, he lived the immediate hour in constant terror of his life. When they breasted the current coming up-river, his fears had been bad enough; but now they glided with it, and this seemed to him to increase their danger. Once they struck boldly across an open lake, and a squall of wind caught them and slopped solid water into the canoe so that they were near swamping before they came to the shore and could empty the frail craft of water again. Isaiah took the adventure gleefully; but Ephraim in his imaginings died a dozen deaths. In mid-lake they passed the floating, partially decomposed body of a buck deer; and to Ephraim’s fear-disordered mind that became his own body. He imagined the canoe overturning, felt the strangling water flood his laboring lungs, saw his body sinking with last spasmodic reflex jerkings of arms and legs to rest at last on the dark, slimed bottom of the lake till great sluggish fish with toothless mouths came to pluck and gulp at the soft, decaying flesh.

  But if the moment on the lake was bad, every hour on the river was worse; for when they came to quick water they ran it, the Indians guiding the canoe with strong paddle strokes, missing huge boulders by so scant a margin that a dozen times a day Ephraim thought their destruction sure; and he imagined the canoe broken against these ledges and saw his own helpless body caught by the current and whirled downstream, to smash against the toothed rocks with sodden, bruising blows, and he imagined the egglike crunch of a cracked skull or the hideous grating grind of breaking bones in his arms and legs.

  Sometimes the water was too heavy to be run, and then they portaged; and Ephraim thanked all the gods there were for those reprieves. But the Indians who paddled them were in a hurry to be home, and Isaiah urged them on, promising a bonus for every day saved. A rivalry developed between the two canoes, each daring the other on, so that they risked running rapids around which they might better have carried, and again and again they escaped catastrophe by inches.

  Ephraim usually sat behind his father, and since they both faced forward, Isaiah could not see his son’s tortured countenance. But the Indian in the stern at their nightly camps told his fellows that the young white man was afraid, and during the day’s run he was always alert to meet and counter any move Ephraim might make.

  II

  They were halfway home when disaster came. The pitch they were running was not particularly dangerous. There was a sharp drop at the top, but it was short, and then easier water ran for a dozen rods to descend through a strong sluice below. The first drop was sufficiently abrupt so that after the other canoe took it, Ephraim and Isaiah, a quarter-mile upstream, could no longer see even the heads of the paddlers.

  As he watched that dreadful brink approach, Ephraim’s hands tightened on the gunwale, and his lungs contracted and he could not breathe. The Indians chose their course to pass just to the left of a boulder that split the current at the head of the run. They came to it, and the bow of the canoe for a moment projected over nothingness before it dipped with a sickening sidewise lurch while the paddles swung it to take the angling current.

  At that lurch, Ephraim’s strained nerves snapped like tight wires. He screamed and tried to pull himself to his feet. The Indian in the stern shouted and struck him on the head with the paddle, thinking to stun him into passivity; but Ephraim saw the blow coming and tried to dodge, and lost his balance. Still holding to the gunwale, he fell overside, and the canoe turned over with him and swung sidewise and broke its back on a boulder in the way.

  The four men and all the gear were thrown into the water together, and the strong current rolled them on, but Ephraim’s desperate hold on the canoe was for a moment unbroken. When he too was torn away, his clutching hand caught the bail of one of the big wooden buckets still in the wrecked canoe, which had held flour and which was almost empty now.

  He was still holding fast to this when the current brought him to the foot of the run, into somewhat easier water there; and the bucket’s buoyancy fetched him to the surface. As soon as his mouth and nose were clear, he began to scream, and the naked, shameless fear-sound was terrible in the clean silence of the river and the forest. The current revolved him slowly. He tried to climb on the bucket, and forced it under, and came strangling to the surface a little farther downstream. Then someone clutched at the bucket with him, and under their combined weight it sank again, and again they drifted to the surface.

  Ephraim saw a face near his, a blurred face seen only dimly through his terror-blinded eyes. He felt hands clutching at his, fighting to tear the bucket away, and he shouted hoarsely:

  ‘Let go! God damn your soul, let go!’

  He pound
ed at that blurred face with a clawing fist. He bent his head and bit at the clutching hands. Under his blows the face disappeared and the hand he bit let go, and the other man was gone. The bucket kept Ephraim near the surface. A swirling eddy swept him shoreward and his feet touched bottom, and then his knees scraped a boulder; and hugging the bucket like life itself he scrabbled up the shingle, out of the water. He bolted away from the river into the safe and secret shelter of the woods.

  III

  When Ephraim came back to Bangor, it was by stage, in the silent company of big Alex Duncan, who had gone with them up the river. Alex treated Ephraim throughout that homeward journey with the gravest courtesy, but the younger man was harried by his own thoughts, and by his certain knowledge of what must be in Alex’s mind.

  When the second canoe overturned, Duncan and Tom Irish and the two Indians in the other craft were already far down-river, below the second run of quick water; so Duncan saw nothing that happened. But he and the others heard Ephraim’s screams and knew something was amiss; and they landed and ran back up the riverbank to the scene.

  The two Indians had reached the shore near the foot of the relatively quiet water between the two rapids, letting themselves go with the current instead of fighting it while they angled toward the bank; but they had looked back and seen Ephraim batter at his father’s head in that fight for possession of the wooden pail which would support one man but not two; so when Duncan and the others joined them they were able to describe what had happened.

  Ephraim, plunging in blind panic into the forest, had disappeared, but there was still a chance Isaiah might be saved or his body found; so the men moved down-river, scanning the surface of the water for any sign of him. They put out in the other canoe to salvage some odd bits of gear which floated soddenly; but they saw no trace of Isaiah. His drowned body must have come down through the lower rips to settle to the bottom in the quieter water there. It would drag sluggishly along the bottom for days, till the processes of decomposition brought it to the surface, perhaps miles downstream.

  When they were satisfied that Isaiah was gone, they turned back to find Ephraim. He had had time to recover from stark panic, and they met him, coming down-river along the bank. The Indians whose canoe he had wrecked were quietly angry because his frightened clumsiness had marred their reputation as good canoemen; but Alex Duncan had already silenced them before they came face to face with Ephraim.

  They all met him gravely. He asked where his father was, and Duncan told him the truth. Ephraim sat down wretchedly on a boulder by the shore while the others decided what should now be done. They could not all continue their journey in one canoe; so it was decided that Duncan and Ephraim and two Indians should go on in the sound craft while Tom Irish and the other two canoemen followed more slowly on foot, watching for Isaiah’s body along the way.

  So Duncan and Ephraim pushed on. From Mattawamkeag to Bangor they travelled by stage, and it was a little past four in the afternoon when the stage set them down at the house on Main Street.

  Duncan went directly to the door, Ephraim reluctant at his heels. Jenny had seen the stage stop and she opened the door to them. She said at once, speaking to Duncan:

  ‘Where’s Mr. Poster?’

  The man tugged off his cap. ‘Drowned, ma’am,’ he told her ruefully.

  Her cheeks suddenly flamed. ‘What happened?’ she whispered, not looking at Ephraim.

  Duncan said in slow tones: ‘Why, the canoe with them in it tipped over. I was downstream, didn’t see it myself. Mr. Poster here was with his father. He can tell you.’

  She looked at Ephraim, then back at Alex Duncan again. ‘So he’s dead,’ she repeated.

  ‘Yes, ma’am, he’s dead,’ he said. ‘We didn’t find him yet. I’m sorry. We hunted all we could.’

  ‘I’m sure you did.’

  Duncan pulled on his cap again. ‘Well, ma’am, that’s the whole of it. If they find him, they’ll let you know.’

  She nodded, and he turned to walk away; but he paused when he heard her speak, paused and turned. Ephraim, as though to hide from the naked light of day, had tried to pass her, to creep indoors. She pushed him so strongly back that he staggered and almost fell.

  ‘You can’t come into this house,’ she said in even tones. ‘You wretched coward—you killed your father.’

  She shut the blank door in his face. Ephraim stood helpless for a moment. Duncan spat and turned and walked away, and Ephraim was left on the doorsill there alone.

  V

  John Evered

  1

  JOHN EVERED was born in

  the winter of 1808, in a one-room log cabin with a lean-to shed, on the ridge west of the Whitcher Swamp in what was later to become the town of Fraternity, Maine. He was the third son in a family of nine children, and the first to be born after his father moved to Maine from New Hampshire. Almost at once after his birth his father removed again, this time to Freeport; and the Freeport house was the first home John remembered.

  The heart of that house was the dining room, which was also the kitchen. The great fireplace at one end, with an oven built in at the side, was armed with cranes and with a clockwork jack actuated by weights to turn the spit, and it was equipped with pothooks and kettles for baking and for boiling, and with long-legged spiders and long-handled skillets and all necessary forks and spoons. The drop-leaf table, big enough to accommodate the growing family, was except at meal times pushed back out of the way. From hooks in the beams which supported the ceiling strings of apples cut to dry were hung in the fall, and sections of squash and pumpkin; and field corn and strings of onions were suspended around the walls.

  This big room—the only room in the house where in winter there was any direct heat—was the focus of the family life; and John’s mother might be busy at her cooking with two or three children from the cradle to the toddling age almost underfoot. The bedrooms were cold, so no one lingered long there on a winter morning, and the first move out of bed was to dash for the hearth. John’s father before breakfast and again at night read a passage from the Bible, and made a short prayer; and John, kneeling during the prayer, used to feel shivers of warm happiness run up and down his spine as he listened to his father’s sonorous and majestic tones.

  These prayers were not necessarily solemn. John’s father and mother believed—and taught their children—that religion, which to them meant kindliness and truth and courage and cheerfulness and simple decency, was not only a part of daily life, but a fine and heartening and merry part. John’s father’s cheerful prayers often made them all smile happily, or even chuckle; and John came to think of God as a friendly and an understanding older brother from whom in any emergency help could be expected for the asking—or even without it. He was a little puzzled by some of the things he heard at church, for the preacher spoke more of hellfire and eternal damnation than he did of friendliness and cheerfulness and tolerance; but John’s father explained that that was just the minister’s way of trying to scare cowards into behaving themselves.

  ‘Some want their religion hot and smoking,’ he told his sons. ‘But I’ll take mine just warm enough to taste good as it goes down. There’d be more folks go to church if the preachers didn’t give them religion that was too hot to swallow. A man likes a steaming cup on a cold day; but he don’t want to scald the rafters out of his mouth.’

  John as a boy thought his father a fine man, and he never found reason to change that opinion.

  Bedrooms opened off the big dining room where they spent most of their time indoors, and each was equipped with one and sometimes two huge beds; stout wooden frames through which cords were laced, with a tick of wheat or oat straw atop and then a feather bed filled with down from their own geese. When the frame worked loose, the screws which held it at the corners could be tightened with a bed key. John as a youngster never had a bed to himself, sharing his with one and sometimes with two of his brothers.

  Cornbread and salt pork, with hasty pudding and
milk—or, as he grew older, crust coffee—were winter staples, with potatoes as long as they lasted. Dried apples and jams and jellies and preserves supplemented this fare. Sometimes there was a crock or even a barrel of corned beef in the cellar beside the bins of roots—parsnips, turnips, beets and potatoes—that could be cooked with it. The cabbage seldom lasted beyond late fall; and fresh beef, even though frozen, had to be eaten promptly for fear of a thaw. Alewives salted down in the spring, and haddie and cod helped load the board.

  John’s clothes while he was a boy were made for him by his mother, and the big spinning wheel and the little one, as well as the loom on which she wove cloth or tow, had their place in the room that was the focus of their lives. She was a strong, clean, wise and frugal woman, deeply appreciative of the luxury which her husband provided—in such matters for instance as needles, of which she had seven, in different sizes. Her mother, John’s grandmother, who lived with them, often said that times had changed since her day, when she used one needle for twenty-four years. John’s mother taught him to knit before he was old enough to do any serious work around the farm; and although at first she turned the heels for him, he knitted his first complete pair of socks before he was eight years old.

  II

  John’s father kept store in Freeport, but this was not his only interest. Freeport was a shipbuilding town, with yards forever active at Mast Landing and at Porter’s. When John was nine, he began to show that he had a head for figures, and he often helped his father in the store. Most of the customers were on a barter basis, and this meant keeping for each one a running account of purchases, to be balanced when the customer brought in a load of hay, or some axe helves made in spare time on a rainy day, or a hay cart piled high with lime casks to be shipped to Thomaston. John learned to manage the entries in these accounts well enough. Also, his father taught him—and all the boys—the coopering trade. ‘A man can make money and then lose it,’ he used to say, ‘or he can buy a farm and have it go back on him, or his store can burn down. But there’ll always be a market for barrels, and a man that knows how to make ’em can always get along.’