The Glass Village (2 page)

“So we let the state police come, and they took Joe from Burney Hackett's custody, and they shot out of Shinn Corners followed by most of the village in cars and buggies going lickety-split, which is not the way your New England farmer usually goes. They just about got Joe safely locked up in the county jail. Judge Webster sat in the case, best fly-fisherman in Cudbury County. At least, he used to be. You remember, Johnny—I introduced you to Andy Webster last week.”

“Hang Andy Webster,” said Johnny. “What was the verdict?”

“With Adaline Greave to testify that it was Laban attacked Joe first with the pitchfork?” said Judge Shinn. “Why, that Cudbury jury never hesitated. Brought in an acquittal.

“And Shinn Corners,” said the Judge, “never did get over that verdict, Johnny. We still slaver about it. It shook our Puritan sense of justice to the crosstrees. In our view Laban had been defending his hearth and our community from the dirty depredations of an opera-singing furriner. The fact that Labe Hemus didn't happen to have a hearth at the time he was defending it we dismissed as the puniest technicality; Adaline'd practically been promised. We made it so hot for the Greaves that Elmer Greave had to sell his place off and move downstate. Joe Gonzoli wisely never came back to pick up his satchel. He just ran, and to this day not even 'Squale Gonzoli's heard from him.

“That verdict,” said the Judge, “taught us we were living in a hostile, new sort of world, a world which didn't understand beans about the rights of God-fearing, taxpaying Shinn Corners property owners. We'd been betrayed and corrupted and shamed. It was just about the last straw.”

“I can understand that,” said Johnny. “Maybe I'm not so much of a furriner as you think.”

But Judge Shinn ignored that. “'Cause things hadn't been going well with us for a long time. A hundred years ago Shinn Corners was bigger than Comfort is today. You can still see the ruins of houses and barns and mills on the Comfort road past the Hemus farm and up beyond the Isbel and Scott farms on Four Corners Road. That three-story red brick building across from the firehouse is the remains of the Urie Cassimere Factory—”

“The what kind of factory?” asked Johnny.

“Cassimere, what they used to call cashmere. Around 1850 the Urie factory employed over two hundred people, made as fine a line of woolens as you could find in New England. Then Comfort and Cudbury and other towns around drew off a lot of our working people with a spurt of new mills, eventually the river dried up, and what with one thing and another all that's gone. We're reduced to a total population of thirty-six.”

“Thirty-six!”

“And that includes fifteen minors. Thirty-six, going to be thirty-seven in December—Emily Berry's fifth is on the way. Thirty-seven, that is, if nobody dies. Old Aunt Fanny is ninety-one. Earl Scott's father Seth is in his eighties … might just as well be dead, he has senile obesity and lives in a wheelchair. For that matter, so does Earl. He's helpless, too, had a stroke five-six years ago that left him paralyzed. Hosey Lemmon—nobody knows how old Hosey is. I'll tell you about old man Lemmon sometime; it's an interesting story.

“Twelve families,” murmured Judge Shinn. “That's what we're down to. If you leave out the unattached ones—me, Prue Plummer, Aunt Fanny, Hosey, and Calvin Waters—there's only seven families.

“We're down to four producing herds, in an area that during the last century had some of the best dairy farms in this section of the state. Hemus, Isbel, Scott, Pangman. And there's a question how long they can keep going, with milk fetching eight cents a quart from the Association out of which they have to pay for cartage and rental of the cans.

“Only store left is Peter Berry's over there on the east corner, and the only reason Peter makes out is he gets the trade of the Comfort people who happen to live closer to Shinn Corners than to their own stores. … So you might say,” said the Judge dryly, “we have nothing left but fond memories and a tradition. Let the rest of New England welcome the durn New Yorkers and the rest of the furriners. We want none of 'em.”

“Except you,” said his guest.

‘Well, I'm sort of on the sidelines,” grinned Judge Shinn. “Privileged character. I and Aunt Fanny, that is.”

“That's the third time you've mentioned Aunt Fanny,” said Johnny. “Just who is Aunt Fanny?”

“Aunt Fanny?” The Judge seemed surprised. “Aunt Fanny Adams. That's her house t'other side of the church. That hewn overhang, one of the few left in this part of the state.”

“Fanny Adams …” Johnny sat up with a thump. “The painter of primitives?”

“Aya.”

“Aunt Fanny Adams comes from Shinn Corners?”

“Born here. It's this valley most of her painting's about. Aunt Fanny's pretty good, I'm told.”

“Good!” Johnny stared across Four Corners Road, past the little church. He could just make out the old New England house, with its flowering garden.

“Didn't start diddling around with paints till she was eighty, after her husband—Girshom Adams, he was her third cousin—died. Only kin Aunt Fanny's got left is Ferriss Adams from over Cudbury, her grandnephew, practices law there. She was kind of lonely, I guess.”

“She's said to be a fabulous old lady. Could I possibly meet her?”

“Aunt Fanny?” Judge Shinn was astonished. “Couldn't miss her if you tried, 'specially when she hears your grandfather was Horace Shinn. Parade forms at her house, seeing she's the oldest resident outside the cemetery. You won't find her much different from any other old woman around here. They're all pa't and pa'cel of the land. Know every bulb in their gardens and every surveyor's description in their land deeds. They outlive their men and they're as indestructible, seems like, as the rocks in their fences.”

“She lives alone?”

“All alone. Does her own housework, needlework, cooking, puts up her pickles and preserves—they're like ants, these old women; their routine is practically an instinct.”

“Well, I'll be darned,” said Johnny. “Who handles her business affairs?”

“Why, she does,” chuckled the Judge. “She sold a painting last week for fifteen hundred dollars. ‘I just paint what I see,' she says. ‘And if folks are fool enough to pay for what they could have for nothin' if only they'd use the two eyes the Lord gave them, let 'em pay through the nose.' Ferriss Adams takes care of her contracts, but he'll be the first to tell you there isn't a word in them she doesn't know backwards and forwards. She's made a fortune out of her Christmas card, wallpaper, and textile designs alone. Minute some big city dealer tries to skin her, she sits him down with some of her apple pan dowdy and cream she separated with her own hands—she keeps a Jersey cow, milks it herself twice a day and gives most of the milk to the school—and before he knows it he's agreed to her terms.”

“What does she do with all her money?”

“Invests some, gives the rest away. If not for her, Samuel Sheare would have had to look for another church years ago. His only income is what Aunt Fanny donates and his wife Elizabeth makes as our grade school teacher. And Aunt Fanny's made up most of our annual town deficit now for years. Used to be my chore,” said the Judge wryly, “but my income isn't what is used to be. … And all that comes out of Aunt Fanny's diddling with paintbrushes.” He shook his head. “Beats me. Most of her daubs look like a child could do 'em.”

“You'd get a violent argument from the art critics.” Johnny stared over at the Adams property. “I should think Shinn Corners would be proud of her.”

“Proud?” said the Judge. “That old woman is Shinn Corners's one hitch to fame. She's about the only part of our corporate existence that's kept our self-respect from falling down around our ankles.”

Judge Shinn rose from the rocker, brushing his pearl gray sharkskin suit and adjusting his Panama hat. He had dressed with care this morning for the Independence Day exercises; it was expected of him, he had chuckled. But Johnny had gathered that the old man took a deep pleasure in his annual role. He had delivered the Shinn Corners Fourth of July oration every year for the past thirty years.

“Lots of time yet,” the Judge said, pulling out his big gold watch on its black silk fob. “Parade's set for twelve noon, midway between milkings. … I see Peter Berry's opening his store. Rushed you off so fast after those fish yesterday, Johnny, you never did get a chance to see Shinn Corners. Let's walk off some of Millie's breakfast.”

Where the thirty-five mile Cudbury-to-Comfort stretch of county highway ran through Shinn Corners, it was called Shinn Road. Shinn Road was intersected in the heart of the village by Four Corners Road. Squeezed around the intersection was all that survived of the village, in four segments like the quarters of a pie.

At each of the four corners of the intersection a curved granite marker had been sunk into the earth. The point of the Judge's quarter of the pie, which was occupied by the village green, was marked
WEST CORNER
, in letters worn down almost to the base.

Except for the green, which was village property, the entire west quarter belonged to the Judge. On it stood the Shinn mansion, built in 1761—the porch with its ivy-choked pillars, the Judge told Johnny, had been added after the Revolutionary War, when pillars became the architectural fashion—and behind the house stood a building, older than the mansion, that served as a garage. Before that it had been a coach house; and very long ago, said the Judge, it had been the slave quarters of a Colonial house occupying the site of the 1761 building.

“Slavery didn't last in New England not for moral reasons so much,” remarked the Judge slyly, “as for climatic ones. Our winters killed off too many high-priced Negroes. And the Indian chattels were never a success.”

The Judge's seven hundred acres had not been tilled for two generations; choked woods came to within yards of the garage. The gardens about the house were jungles in miniature. The house itself had a gray scaling skin, as if it were diseased, like most of the houses in the village.

“Where's my grandfather's house?” demanded Johnny, as they strolled across the arc of cracked blacktop before the Shinn property. “Don't ask me why, but I'd sort of like to see it.”

“Oh, that went long ago,” said the Judge. “When I was a young man. It used to be on Four Corners Road, beyond the Isbel place.”

They stepped onto the village green. Here the grass was healthy, the flagpole glittered with fresh paint, the flag floating aloft was spanking new, and the Revolutionary cannon and the shaft to Asahel Shinn on its three-step granite pedestal had been cleaned and hung with bunting.

“That's too bad,” said Johnny, wondering why it should be.

“This is where I preach my sermon,” said the Judge, setting his foot on the second step of the pedestal. “Old Asahel Shinn led an expedition from up north in 1654, massacred four hundred Indians, and then said a prayer for their immortal souls on this spot. … Morning, Calvin!”

A man was dragging a rusty lawnmower across the intersection. All Johnny could think of was a corpse he had once stumbled over in a North Korean rice paddy. The man was tall and thin and garmented in hopeless brown, topped with a brown hat that flopped lifelessly about his brown ears. Even his teeth were long and brown.

The man shambled toward them in sections, as if he were wired together.

He touched his hatbrim to Judge Shinn, jiggled the lawnmower over the west corner marker, and sent it clacking along the grass of the green.

The Judge glanced at Johnny and followed. Johnny tagged along.

“Calvin, I want you to meet a distant kinsman of mine. Johnny Shinn, Calvin Waters.”

Calvin Waters stopped deliberately. He set the mower at a meticulous angle, slewed about, and looked at Johnny for the first time.

“How do,” he said. And off he clacked again.

Johnny said, “Brrr.”

“It's just our way,” murmured the Judge, and he took Johnny's arm and steered him into the road. “Calvin's our maintenance department. Custodian of town property, janitor of the school and Town Hall and church, official gravedigger … Lives halfway up the hill there, past Aunt Fanny's. Waters house is one of the oldest around, built in 1712. Calvin's outhouse is a museum piece all by itself.”

“So is Calvin,” said Johnny.

“All alone in the world. Only thing Calvin owns is that old house and the clothes on his back—no car, not even a buggy or a goat cart. What we call around here a real poor man.”

“Doesn't he smile?” asked Johnny. “I don't think I ever saw a face with such a total lack of expression outside a military burying ground.”

“Guess Calvin thinks there isn't much to smile about,” said the Judge. “Far back as I can remember, Shinn Corners youngsters have called him Laughing Waters. Fell out of a farm wagon when he was a baby and's never been quite right since.”

They crossed Shinn Road to the south corner. Burney Hackett, who owned the corner house, Judge Shinn explained, was not only the local constable, he was the fire chief, town clerk, tax collector, member of the school board, and the Judge didn't know what all. He also sold insurance.

“Burn has to keep hopping,” said the Judge. “His wife Ella died giving birth to their youngest. His mother, Selina Hackett, keeps house for him, but Selina's pretty old and deaf now, and the three children have kind of brought themselves up. Hi, Joel!”

A stocky boy in jeans came slouching down Shinn Road toward the Hackett house, looking curiously at Johnny.

“'Lo, Judge.”

“Burney Hackett's eldest, Johnny—junior at Comfort High. Joel, this is Major Shinn.”

“Major?” The boy left Johnny's hand in midair. “A real major?”

“A real ex-major,” said Johnny, smiling.