The Glass Village (25 page)

“Then she might decide to include the firewood or she might decide
not
to include the firewood?”

“Exactly. Every painter must be selective. Obviously. By the simplest laws of composition. However, what she did include in a painting was at least a
part
of the scene she was painting.”

“But it is true that the wood might have been stacked in the lean-to, in plain sight, and still she might
not
have included the wood in the picture?”

“That is true.”

“That's all, thank you!”

“Mr. Casavant!” Ferriss Adams jumped to his feet. “You say that even if the firewood was in the lean-to, Aunt Fanny might have chosen not to include it in this painting?”

“Yes.”

“But isn't it just as true that the fact that she
didn't
paint in any firewood doesn't mean it
was
there?”

Casavant blinked. “Would you mind repeating that, please?”

“Well,” said Adams, “if the firewood
was
included in the painting, then—on the basis of your familiarity with Fanny Adams's painting habits and so forth—you'd be positive the firewood was in the lean-to. She painted only what she actually saw, you said.”

“That is correct. If there were firewood in this painted lean-to before us, I can say without equivocation that there would have been firewood in the real lean-to.”

“But there
is
no firewood in this painted lean-to!” said Adams triumphantly. “That's a fact! An absolute, undeniable fact! Isn't it more likely, then, that since there is no firewood in the painting there was no firewood in the lean-to? And if there was no firewood in the lean-to, the defendant lied?”

“Why, that's sophistry!” shouted Andy Webster. “That doesn't follow at all! It's going around in circles!”

Roger Casavant glanced helplessly at Judge Shinn. “I can only repeat, gentlemen, this painting is finished.”

The Judge looked at Andy Webster, and Andy Webster looked at the Judge, and both men looked at the jury. Their faces were a whitewashed wall, unsmudged by comprehension.

“Are you finished with the witness, gentlemen?” asked Judge Shinn.

“Yes, your honor,” said Ferriss Adams. “And as far as the People are concerned, we're through—”

“Just a minute.”

Everyone in the room turned. It was the juror in the last seat of the second row, Juror Number Twelve. He was scribbling rapidly on the back of an envelope.

“What is it, Mr. Shinn?” asked the Judge, leaning forward.

Johnny folded the envelope. “Mind passing this to his honor, Constable?”

Burney Hackett took the folded envelope gingerly and gave it to Judge Shinn.

The Judge unfolded it.

It read:
Eureka!!!! Call a recess. I think I've got something
.

Five
…

Johnny was excited. It was like playing a slot machine to kick away an hour and suddenly you hit the jackpot. You didn't believe it, but there it was.

There was something else, too. A kind of small wriggling hope, like a newborn baby. You didn't believe that, either, but there it was, too.

It was for laughs, because what after all did it mean? That a nobody hanging in limbo, faceless and unloved, could be cut down and restored to some reasonable imitation of life. The Judge's “one man” notwithstanding, how important could a thing like that be? The nobody still had to face the world as it was. Cut the rope, and you only delayed the execution.

Still, Johnny was stirred. That was almost an end in itself, knowing you could be excited by something good again. It was, as the Judge would have said, progress. The first step in the miracle cure of an incurable disease.

There I go again, Johnny grinned to himself. The eternally springing hope of the human rubber ball. Well, he thought, it proves I still belong to the species.

He took Judge Shinn, Andrew Webster, and Adams, Casavant, and Peague into Fanny Adams's studio with the easel and the painting and he told Peague to put his broad back against the door. They kept staring from Johnny to Exhibit E and back again. Behind everything was the comfortless buzz of the courtroom. There was a restless bass note in it.

“What is it, Johnny?” demanded the Judge.

“Why, simply this,” said Johnny. “The painting is all wrong.”

They turned back to the painting again, baffled.

“I assure you, Mr. Shinn,” said Roger Casavant, “you're entirely mistaken. From every standpoint—and I speak with some claim to authority—this painting is all
right.
”

“Not from every standpoint, Mr. Casavant. From every esthetic standpoint, maybe. But it's all wrong as far as this case is concerned.”

“As to that,” said Casavant exquisitely, “I am not qualified to joust with you.”

“
What's
wrong?” asked Andy Webster.

“Mr. Casavant has said that Fanny Adams invariably painted only what she saw,” said Johnny. “As a matter of fact, she told me substantially the same thing Friday morning herself. The trouble is, I didn't take her literally.”

“Can the buildup,” said Usher Peague coarsely. “Lay it on the line.”

“It's too lovely,” grinned Johnny. “Because look. On Saturday, fifth July, Aunt Fanny was standing where I'm standing now and she was looking out this picture window and painting—Mr. Casavant says—what she saw. So let's do the same thing. It's the ninth of July, only four days have passed. Let's look at the cornstalks she saw in Merton Isbel's field there. Anything queer-looking about that corn?”

“Not to me,” said Ush Peague.

“It's corn,” said Ferriss Adams.

“Yes, Mr. Adams,” said Johnny, “it's corn—corn as the good Lord intended corn to look on the ninth day of July. The plants stand a little better than kneehigh; like all early July corn, they're young and green. But now I ask you,” and Johnny suddenly pointed to the stalks in the painted cornfield on the canvas, “to observe the corn in her picture. Mr. Casavant, did Fanny Adams—who always painted exactly what she saw—see tall withered cornstalks where nature placed small green ones?”

Casavant turned a beautiful rose color. “By George,” he mumbled. “It's autumn corn!”

“So this can't be the painting Fanny Adams was working on when she was murdered. But if you want to argue, I can nail it down. This is a finished painting, according to Mr. Casavant. It's a painting of the scene visible from this window, with the addition of a rainstorm. Again, if we're to accept Mr. Casavant's expert knowledge, Aunt Fanny wouldn't have painted in a rainstorm unless rain were actually falling—that is, if this were the painting she was working on Saturday, she must have started it as a scene without rain, but as she was working the rain began to come down and so she painted it into her picture.

“But on Saturday,” said Johnny, “the rain didn't start until two o'clock. So she couldn't have begun to paint the rain in until two. Yet thirteen minutes later, the time of her death, the painting's supposed to be finished! I think Mr. Casavant will agree that, no matter how fast a worker Fanny Adams was, she could hardly have painted this rainstorm in in its present finished form in a mere thirteen minutes.”

“No, no.” Casavant nibbled his perfect fingernails.

“So I repeat, this is the wrong painting.”

They studied the canvas.

“But what's it mean?” asked Andy Webster, bewildered.

Johnny shrugged. “I don't know, beyond the obvious fact that somebody switched paintings on the easel. Removed the picture she was actually working on and substituted this one. The question is, What happened to the other painting? Seems to me we ought to look for it.”

But he did know. Or thought he knew. Johnny was a hunch player. In a world in which the odds went crazy it seemed as reasonable a way of life as any. He wondered if he would be proved right.

They were banging the slide-doors of the cabinets and beginning to haul out canvases when Roger Casavant smacked his pale forehead with his palm, “Wait! She kept a master list in here … she'd assign a number and title to a picture when she started one. Didn't she keep it—? On the top shelf somewhere!”

“One side, slow boy,” grunted Usher Peague. “Found!”

It was a sheaf of plain yellow papers clipped together.

They crowded around the newspaperman.

“God bless her practical old soul,” said Johnny, “if she didn't even check off the ones she'd sold! … Wait, wait. Number 259,
not
marked sold. September-something. What is that?”

“
September Corn in the Rain,
” read Judge Shinn.

“That's it!” Johnny was at the easel turning the painting over. “Ought to be a number on it somewhere … There was! But it's been scraped off. See this paper shred still stuck to the frame?” He turned the painting face up again. “Any doubts? This is
September Corn in the Rain
. And now I remember something, Judge. Orville Pangman's crack Friday morning about the rains last September coming too late to save the crop—he lost practically his whole stand of corn because of the drought! September corn isn't normally this dried-up-looking, is it?”

“No,” muttered Judge Shinn. “You're right, Johnny. Last September's corn grew to a good height, but it went completely to pot one night between sunset and dawn.”

“Here's a notation of the one she
was
painting,” cried old Andrew Webster. “The last entry on the last sheet.”

“Let's see!” said Johnny. “Number 291,
July Corn
… Search the backs of the canvases for a Number 291!”

They found it midway in the rack, where it had been thrust apparently at random.

“Easy! Gently! This has unique value,” snarled Roger Casavant. He turned
July Corn
to the light. Then he removed the canvas that was on the easel, propped it against the window, and put the new canvas in its place.

The differences from
September Corn in the Rain
were evident even to a layman's eyes.

“No
F.A
. on it,” said Judge Shinn. “So she didn't get to finish it—”

“Not nearly finished,” said Casavant impatiently. “It's the same scene painted in the same perspective and from the same vantage point. But observe her treatment of the rain. She'd hardly begun to paint it in. She hadn't even got around to making the stones of the fence look wet, or the foreground or barn roof. And the leaves of the young corn are still vigorously erect, not beaten down as they would have to be if she'd begun the painting as corn in a rainstorm.

“What happened, of course,” said Casavant, “was that she had begun to paint the picture as a dry scene. She did considerable work on it before the storm came up. When the rain started, she had the choice of either stopping work and waiting for another rainless day, or incorporating the rainstorm into her picture. Every other artist I know of would have stopped and waited. But I suppose something in the changed conditions piqued her. This was an experiment of a most unusual sort—a sort of overleaf reflection of nature, rain attacking a world that was dry to begin with. Of course, the sky must have been dark and threatening all day, so that the mood of the picture as far as she'd gone was in harmony with the suddenly altered conditions. If only she'd had time to finish this!”

Pay-off, thought Johnny. My man comes in at—what?—thirty-five to one? He felt a glow whose warmth surprised him.

“She did have time to do one thing,” smiled Johnny, “and for that Joe Kowalczyk can light a candle to her memory.”

“What's that?” demanded Casavant.

“Aunt Fanny added something else that hadn't been there when she started the picture. Look at the interior of the lean-to.”

On the floor of the lean-to in the unfinished painting a pile of firewood had been painted in. The individual sticks had merely been sketched; she had not even had time to give the wood grain or character. But it was recognizable as a woodpile.

“Just for the hell of it, and to make the acid test of your claim, Mr. Casavant, that when Fanny Adams did paint what she saw she painted it exactly as it was,” murmured Johnny, “suppose you count the pieces of wood she sketched in.”

Casavant produced a lens. He went close to
July Corn
and peered at the lean-to. “One, two, three, four …” He kept counting until he reached twenty-four.

Then he stopped.

“Twenty-four,” said Johnny softly. “And what's Kowalczyk kept saying?
That he split six lengths of log into quarters and stacked them in the lean-to
. What price reliability now, Mr. Adams? Was Pal Joey telling the truth?”

“I'll be jiggered,” said Adams in a feeble way.

“You've done it,” chortled Andy Webster. “By God, that Army training has something to recommend it after all. Let's get back in there!”

“Yes, who knows?” echoed Peague. “Even into those sunless mentalities some light of doubt may fall.”

“Only thing is,” said Johnny with a frown, “what does it lead to? Seems as if it ought to give us a lot. But I just can't put my finger on it.”

“Never mind that now,” said Judge Shinn grimly. “I want to see their faces when this is brought out.”

They hurried back to the courtroom.

They had to wait before they could spring the big surprise. First Adams rested his “case.” Then there was some legalistic hocus-pocus, and Andrew Webster opened the “defense.” He put Josef Kowalczyk on the stand as his first witness, and a long struggle began with the prisoner's monosyllabic English. Through all of this Johnny was conscious of a restlessness about him, a feel of pressures building up. When Ferriss Adams sharply cross-examined, while Adams and Webster wrangled, the tension mounted in the room. About him Johnny could hear the stealthy creak of campchairs as bottoms tightened. They know something's due to pop here and they're worried stupid, Johnny thought with enjoyment as he kept chasing the artful dodger in his head: Keep dodging, I'll corner you in time, there's plenty of that, these poor benighted Hindus aren't going anywhere, wriggle, you bastards. You'll soon be wriggling like worms on a hook.