The Strange Woman

by Ben Ames Williams

  Write to me as soon as you get this, before I leave here. I want to hear from all. Write me who are going ahead in war matters there. This war makes me miserable. I hate it and should like to help close it.

  Your loving son and bro—

  WILL

  John read this aloud at supper that night, and when he was done, Jenny took it to read over and over to herself. Dan wrote to Will that night to say that he had volunteered—he was commissioned Captain—and that he would soon leave Bangor to join his regiment at the front; but Jenny did not write to her son that day or the next. Then at supper on the third evening she said:

  ‘Dan, I’ve written a letter to Will. I want to read it to you after supper, because I want to say the same thing to you.’

  Something hard and cruel in her level tones disturbed him; and he saw concern in his father’s eyes. There was often this spring a hint of controlled pain in Jenny’s countenance and in her voice; a tightening of her lips, an aching hollowness in the way she spoke. Once or twice Dan had asked her if she were all right, but she always said indifferently: ‘Just my back. It gives me a twist sometimes.’ The long excitement of the campaign which led to Lincoln’s election, and the suspense all this past winter while they waited for the inauguration and what would follow it, had seemed to make her forgetful of her own distress; and while she was thus less mindful of herself she had been happier.

  But tonight Dan thought there was a change in her; and he half-guessed what she might have written Will, guessed its tenor if not its actual content, before in her quiet and precise tones she read to him and to his father the letter.

  Dear Will—

  I am proud to know that you are taking arms to destroy the cruel, brutish beasts who have so long held under the lash millions of their fellow human beings. I hope to see the South conquered and I hope to see every man who has owned slaves himself reduced to slavery, forced to bitter labor in the fields under a baking sun, with a whip across his shoulders when he lags; and may the wives and the daughters of those men be debauched as they have debauched the wives and daughters of others, and may their sons be born in bondage and never know freedom. For this I pray.

  Dan knew then that his guess was correct. He met his father’s eyes and saw that John too foresaw what was to come. Jenny, her low voice dry and burning in the quiet room, read on.

  I am proud that you and Dan, my true and only sons, will help to bring these things to pass. Dan will be fighting. I do not know whether you will be a fighter or a surgeon. If you are a fighter, kill and kill and kill. If you are a surgeon, save our men when you can.

  But Will, for my sake, never give a wounded Rebel so much as a drink of water to wet his parched lips while he dies in screaming pain! For my sake, Will, remember this.

  She paused a moment then, to meet Dan’s eyes, as though bidding him pay attention to what she was about to read.

  There are two young men from Bangor, two young men you know, who chose to go to the slave South and mingle their blood with that of the slave-masters, and forget their birth and their upbringing here. No one knows what will happen in this war that is beginning; but it may be that, if your are in the fighting lines, some day in a Rebel soldier you will recognize one of these two traitors. If you do, aim straight, Will. Kill him. Or it may be that when our armies ravage the South you will come to a house where one of these men lived. Burn it.

  Lay waste the lands around it. Spare nothing that is theirs, except the helpless slaves they have abused. Or if you become a surgeon and they come wounded into your hands, leave them to die, or rub salt into their wounds. Do this for me!

  Her eyes met Dan’s again in a bleak insistence; they even turned to John, as though warning him not to interfere. Then she went on:

  You may think me an unnatural mother. It is true that I am the mother of unnatural and alien sons, who have betrayed us all. I have cast them out of my life and out of my heart together; and I wish I had pluckcd them still-born from my womb. Kill them, Will. Kill them if you can. You and Dan are my only sons.

  Your loving

  MOTHER

  She read this letter through with no variation of emphasis, letting the blazing words speak for themselves. Dan while she read watched his father; but John sat with his eyes lowered, his hands resting on his knees. Dan thought how firm those hands were and how strong, and he wished suddenly to hold to them, to feel his father’s handclasp, to draw strength from the older man. His mother as she read seemed to him no longer human; not even like a beast, but like some sentient horror of a sort man had never seen and should not see. Perspiration beaded his forehead and ran coldly down his cheeks and he was sick at his stomach so that he wished to retch and vomit, and he shook with terror and thought to run, to escape from her low tones which beat upon his cars.

  Then suddenly she was done and she spoke to him, forcing him to look at her, saying:

  ‘So, Dan! You heard me?’ He made some miserable sound, and she said: To you I give the same bidding. The chance may never come; or if you meet these two, they may kill you by some treachery before you can destroy them. I know they will if they can. That is the habit of traitors and murderers. But if you can, kill them, Dan. Kill them, if you love me.’

  Dan could not speak, but John said gravely: ‘Jenny, you say more than you mean.’

  ‘I say not half of all I mean!’ she insisted in her dreadful soft voice. ‘Killing is too easy for them. I want them to suffer a long time before they die!’

  John shook his head. ‘You’ve lost yourself in anger. This isn’t your heart, Jenny, speaking so of brother killing brother. It’s anger, brooding anger like madness. Please believe me.’

  Dan, staring at her, praying for some yielding in her, saw for a moment something in her eyes at once mocking and truculent, naked as a skull. Then she said gently, in a way that burned, half-smiling as she spoke: ‘But John darling, you know Pm quite capable of—thoughts of death and pain.’

  Her words hinted of dark things, hideous and unspeakable and frightening; and Dan saw that even his father was shaken, A gust of panic seized him. Unable to endure this moment longer, he came to his feet and fled. Behind him he heard his father rise and stride grimly toward his mother’s chair, as though to lay a hard hand on her. He rushed out of doors, blundered through the darkness, hurrying away.

  5

  DAN, commanding a detach-

  ment of seventy-five men, left Bangor on the third of July to join his regiment; and for more than two years he saw neither Jenny nor his father again. The Second Maine had reached Washington on the thirty-first of May. Dan joined it at Falls Church, Virginia, in time to face the Confederates at Bull Run. The regiment lost almost fifty men in killed and wounded and a hundred missing in that disaster. They wintered at Hall’s Hill, had a share in the siege of Yorktown, fought at Hanover Court House, and during the dreadful Seven Days and at Malvern Hill they learned their trade and learned it well—only to suffer with others at Second Manassas when the command was put into Pope’s unskilful hands. Back in Washington again they welcomed McClellan’s reappointment to command, and under his leadership had a part in that miracle of reorganization which culminated at Antietam. There the Second was held in reserve; but at Shepherdstown soon afterward they were badly shot up in an attempt to ford the Potomac, and at Fredericksburg in December their losses were again heavy. Their last great battle was Chancellorsville, in May of ’63.

  Through these long months Dan had at irregular intervals letters from home; from his father and his mother, from Aunt Meg and Beth and from others too. Jenny’s letters were full of a dark rancor against the South which Dan, who by fighting Southerners had learned to respect them, could not share. Aunt Meg’s were straightforward and cheerful and heartening, rarely mentioning the war at all; and Beth’s, written in the stilted unnatural style taught her in school, packed with long words and polished phrases, completely unlike her straightforward self and by their very perfection suggesting that they had been la
boriously written and rewritten before the final fair copy, made him chuckle. She began them: ‘Dear Friend,’ and signed herself: ‘Your Sincere Friend, Beth.’ She said his father was well and his mother seemed better and that her mother and she herself were well and that she hoped he was well. She spoke of her piano lessons and her singing; of how much sewing she and her mother did for the soldiers; of the weather; of his friends whom she had seen and who were, she assured him, well; and rarely she spoke of the war—never of battles that were past—saying that everyone hoped it would soon be over, and that she hoped he was well. What she wrote was nothing, but the faithfulness with which she continued to write pleased him; and once when she confessed: ‘I very much fear that my poor merits as a correspondent cannot hope to interest one so absorbed in more important matters as yourself,’ he replied: ‘Your letters are grand, Beth. I eat them up, every word. I wish I could have a fresh one every day.’

  He became conscious as the months passed that a change in her letters marked the change which must be taking place in her, and he realized that she was growing out of girlhood and wished he had kept her earlier letters for comparison. Toward the end of 1862 he began to keep every line he had from her.

  His father’s letters he had from the first preserved, reading them over and over, not so much for what they said as because they brought his father close to him. John wrote meticulously about whatever Bangor happening he thought would interest his son. In a letter which John received when after Bull Run the regiment was in garrison at Fort Corcoran, John enclosed a clipping from a Western paper criticizing the Bangor Democrat for its opposition to the war, and another which quoted a Southern paper as applauding the Democrat for speaking out ‘against the damnable usurpations of Abe Lincoln and his cowardly abettors’; and he explained:

  These clippings will tell you that the Democrat did not change its tune after you went away. Mr. Emery continued to sing a song of treason until the natural result followed. Mayor Stetson saw trouble coming and tried to prevent it, but one day a crowd of men got together and when Mr. Emery and everyone in the office were gone to dinner they went in and threw his presses, his paper and types and cases and everything out of the window into the street. That was four stories and that wrecked the presses, but then they burned everything that would burn and threw everything else into the Stream. Mr. Emery came along and tried to stop them and it looked for a while as if he’d get hurt, but they got him away from the crowd. I hear he’s left town. Mr. Lebbeus has sung low in the Star since then. I don’t like violence; but in war you’ve got to be on one side or the other, and Mr. Emery was on the wrong side to suit most of us here. I didn’t want to see this war start; but it wasn’t our fault that started it, and now it’s started I want to see it won.

  John wrote, then and in his later letters, of many things. The races at the Trotting Park the day after Dan’s departure had drawn a big crowd. The Whig and Courier had printed in full President Lincoln’s message calling for 400,000 men and $400,000,000 to finance the war. ‘Your mother and Aunt Meg and Beth and I went to hear Madame Charlotte Varian James sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” and other songs at Norombega Hall,’ he reported. ‘Beth said she didn’t sing very well, but your mother enjoyed it, and the people clapped so hard she had a time of it to finish ‘The Whig and Courier’ thought there ought to be defenses against Confederate privateers along the coast and down the Bay. Letters from soldiers were being printed in the papers, but they were mostly brag and blow. There were claims of Confederate cruelties to prisoners after Manassas, but John did not believe them. Most people blamed the Union generals for letting forty thousand Northern troops attack anywhere from sixty to ninety thousand entrenched Confederates, but John guessed there weren’t quite that many Southerners. ‘It looks to me they outfought us,’ he commented. ‘Sounds to me like a boy I used to know in Freeport who got licked in a fight once and said: “Well, maybe I can’t lick you but I can make faces at your sister!”

  The list of the Second Regiment’s killed and wounded had been printed, and Bangor people felt pretty bad about that, but steady too. The state was paying twenty-two dollars for recruits. Wambold and Company’s Great Double Show was in town early in September, but not many went to see it. In 1861, for the first time, more spruce than pine had come down-river. They were asking for three-year enlistments now, and John guessed that judging by what happened at Manassas a soldier had to learn his trade like anyone else.

  Dan found these letters had the very flavor of his father’s talk, wise and tolerant and cheerful. In the spring of 1862 John wrote that business was slack. The arrivals of vessels had fallen the year before to a scant seventeen hundred, about half the figure for i860. There was no demand for lumber. Two pine logs, one fourteen feet long and the other ten feet long, had sawed up into 2541 feet of boards. The ice went out on April 18, and there was quite a freshet, so that the bridges were weighted down to keep them from floating away. The young ladies of Rescue Division, Sons of Temperance, had held a levee with tableaux and music to raise money for a melodeon, and Beth sang and there was a collation of oysters, ice cream and coffee. Beth was getting to be a young lady and a mighty pretty one. One tableau called ‘How Jemima Took Him Down a Peg’ was funny. The latest joke in Bangor was that if you wanted your clocks never to stop running you could oil them with oil out of a Rebel’s heel, but John hadn’t noticed that the Rebels were any quicker to run than some others he could mention. There were a lot of fires being set and the city had offered a reward of five hundred dollars for anyone who would catch the guilty party.

  In each letter, too, there was some word of Jenny. She was more cheerful than she had been—or less so. She was better-or worse. Her back bothered her more—or less. In the winter of 1862 John wrote that she was badly off. ‘I don’t think she’ll ever be well again,’ he confessed. ‘She has dreadful pain, and keeps her bed, and it is terrible to see her. She speaks much of you.’ He added further word of business conditions. In July of that year, the ship S. E. Smith sailed from Bangor to Liverpool with over a million feet of lumber, the largest cargo ever shipped from Bangor. Jenny had refused to let her ships be used in the ice trade because fresh water rotted them. The sudden closing of the river on the fifth of December caught twenty vessels and froze them in for the winter. There was talk of building a Soldiers’ Monument. Not much first-class pine remained uncut anywhere on the river, certainly not south of Medway. The labor shortage was worse all the time as more men went to war.

  Dan drew strength from these long, cheerful letters; but he began to look forward to the end of his enlistment. The Second had been mustered in for two years, and after Chancellorsville their time was almost up. The regiment, that originally numbered close to a thousand men, was by service losses and despite replacements reduced to about half that number. Some of the replacements had been three-year men, but the rest of the regiment would return to Bangor to be mustered out.

  Dan expected to go with them, but a day or two before his time expired, something happened to change his mind. A letter came through from his father saying that Jenny was better; and it enclosed one from Will.

  Dear Father—

  I read between the lines of your letters your trouble, but I know the strength of your honest mind which has always been true to itself, to yourself and to us, and I know you can support everything.

  As for me, I am at last to take my part in this war. You remember I meant to go first as a Lieutenant in a company I helped to raise; but Colonel Thomas said there was plenty of time, that the war would be a long one and surgeons would be needed, and recommended me to finish my medical course. I came out this spring with my diploma and honors. I then went before the military board of the State and passed successfully and was appointed Assistant Surgeon to the Sixth Regiment, Wisconsin Volunteers, which is now at or near Belle Plaine, Va. I am starting at once for Washington and then to join my regiment.

  Dan read this with a sudden quickening of attention. Will’
s letter was dated in mid-April. He must be with the Sixth Wisconsin now, and Dan longed to see him again if only for an hour. He read on:

  I do not know what to say as to mother. I know she is not right in her mind, so all we can do is not pay attention to what she says or does. It is a form of insanity which it is doubtful if she will ever recover from; but you have strength to stand it. I know you have had trouble enough to kill any ordinary man. I can understand now things that happened when we were boys that did not mean anything to me then. Mother can’t help herself, and I think she is more unhappy than she ever makes anyone else. Tell her not to be discouraged. I don’t think she is sick so much as her disposition, and now in the spring she will probably get better.

  There was more about Will’s hopes and plans. He expected to be married when the war was over, and he wrote:

  The young lady wished to be married now, but I have told her it is better to wait till I come back, and I think I have persuaded her to wait. If not I will just have to bear it. Her name is Miss Margaret Wellcome, and she is very sweet. I have told her all about you, which made her like me.