Paul's Wife

by Robert Frost

TO drive Paul out of any lumber camp

All that was needed was to say to him,

"How is the wife, Paul? " — and he'd disappear.

Some said it was because he had no wife,

And hated to be twitted on the subject.

Others because he'd come within a day

Or so of having one, and then been jilted.

Others because he'd had one once, a good one,

Who'd run away with some one else and left him.

And others still because he had one now

He only had to be reminded of, —

He was all duty to her in a minute:

He had to run right off to look her up,

As if to say, "That's so, how is my wife?

I hope she isn't getting into mischief."

No one was anxious to get rid of Paul.

He'd been the hero of the mountain camps

Ever since, just to show them, he had slipped

The bark of a whole tamarack off whole,

As clean as boys do off a willow twig

To make a willow whistle on a Sunday

In April by subsiding meadow brooks.

They seemed to ask him just to see him go,

"How is the wife, Paul?" and he always went.

He never stopped to murder anyone

Who asked the question.  He just disappeared —

Nobody knew in what direction,

Although it wasn't usually long

Before they heard of him in some new camp,

The same Paul at the same old feats of logging.

The question everywhere was why should Paul

Object to being asked a civil question —

A man you could say almost anything to

Short of a fighting word.  You have the answers.

And there was one more not so fair to Paul:

That Paul had married a wife not his equal.

Paul was ashamed of her.  To match a hero,

She would have had to be a heroine;

Instead of which she was some half-breed squaw.

But if the story Murphy told was true,

She wasn't anything to be ashamed of.

You know Paul could do wonders.  Everyone's

Heard how he thrashed the horses on a load

That wouldn't budge until they simply stretched

Their rawhide harness from the load to camp.

Paul told the boss the load would be all right,

"The sun will bring your load in" — and it did —

By shrinking the rawhide to natural length.

That's what is called a stretcher.  But I guess

The one about his jumping so's to land

With both his feet at once against the ceiling,

And then land safely right side up again,

Back on the floor, is fact or pretty near fact.

Well this is such a yarn.  Paul sawed his wife

Out of a white-pine log.  Murphy was there,

And, as you might say, saw the lady born.

Paul worked at anything in lumbering.

He'd been hard at it taking boards away

For — I forget — the last ambitious sawyer

To want to find out if he couldn't pile

The lumber on Paul till Paul begged for mercy.

They'd sliced the first slab off a big butt log,

And the sawyer had slammed the carriage back

To slam end on again against the saw teeth.

To judge them by the way they caught themselves

When they saw what had happened to the log,

They must have had a guilty expectation

Something was going to go with their slambanging.

Something had left a broad black streak of grease

On the new wood the whole length of the log

Except, perhaps, a foot at either end.

But when Paul put his finger in the grease,

It wasn't grease at all, but a long slot.

The log was hollow.  They were sawing pine.

"First time I ever saw a hollow pine.

That comes of having Paul around the place.

Take it to hell for me," the sawyer said.

Everyone had to have a look at it,

And tell Paul what he ought to do about it.

(They treated it as his.)  "You take a jack-knife,

And spread the opening, and you've got a dug-out

All dug to go a-fishing in."  To Paul

The hollow looked too sound and clean and empty

Ever to have housed birds or beasts or bees.

There was no entrance for them to get in by.

It looked to him like some new kind of hollow

He thought he'd better take his jack-knife to.

So after work that evening he came back

And let enough light into it by cutting

To see if it was empty.  He made out in there

A slender length of pith, or was it pith?

It might have been the skin a snake had cast

And left stood up on end inside the tree

The hundred years the tree must have been growing.

More cutting and he had this in both hands,

And, looking from it to the pond near by,

Paul wondered how it would respond to water.

Not a breeze stirred, but just the breath of air

He made in walking slowly to the beach

Blew it once off his hands and almost broke it.

He laid it at the edge where it could drink.

At the first drink it rustled and grew limp.

At the next drink it grew invisible.

Paul dragged the shallows for it with his fingers,

And thought it must have melted.  It was gone.

And then beyond the open water, dim with midges,

Where the log drive lay pressed against the boom,

It slowly rose a person, rose a girl,

Her wet hair heavy on her like a helmet,

Who, leaning on a log looked back at Paul.

And that made Paul in turn look back

To see if it was anyone behind him

That she was looking at instead of him.

Murphy had been there watching all the time,

But from a shed where neither of them could see him.

There was a moment of suspense in birth

When the girl seemed too water-logged to live,

Before she caught her first breath with a gasp

And laughed.  Then she climbed slowly to her feet,

And walked off talking to herself or Paul

Across the logs like backs of alligators,

Paul taking after her around the pond.

Next evening Murphy and some other fellows

Got drunk, and tracked the pair up Catamount,

From the bare top of which there is a view

To other hills across a kettle valley.

And there, well after dark, let Murphy tell it,

They saw Paul and his creature keeping house.

It was the only glimpse that anyone

Has had of Paul and her since Murphy saw them

Falling in love across the twilight mill-pond.

More than a mile across the wilderness

They sat together half-way up a cliff

In a small niche let into it, the girl

Brightly, as if a star played on the place,

Paul darkly, like her shadow.  All the light

Was from the girl herself, though, not from a star,

As was apparent from what happened next.

All those great ruffians put their throats together,

And let out a loud yell, and threw a bottle,

As a brute tribute of respect to beauty.

Of course the bottle fell short by a mile,

But the shout reached the girl and put her light out.

She went out like a firefly, and that was all.

So there were witnesses that Paul was married,

And not to anyone to be ashamed of.

Everyone had been wrong in judging Paul.

Murphy told me Paul put on all those airs

About his wife to keep her to himself.

Paul was what's called a terrible possessor.

Owning a wife with him meant owning her.

She wasn't anybody else's business,

Either to praise her, or so much as name her,

And he'd thank people not to think of her.

Murphy's idea was that a man like Paul

Wouldn't be spoken to about a wife

In any way the world knew how to speak.