The Glass Village (5 page)

Johnny was introduced to Merton Isbel by Constable Burney Hackett. The old farmer barely acknowledged the introduction and turned away.

“Did I say something wrong to Mr. Isbel, Mr. Hackett?” Johnny asked, smiling.

“Shucks, no.” Hackett was a lean chinless man with birdlike shoulders and a permanent furrow between his eyes. “It's just Mert's way. You'd have to live here forty-odd years before Mert'd think you had a right to cast a vote. And even then he'd hardly pass the time o' day.

“Nobody in Shinn Corners is what you'd call real modern,” said Constable Burney Hackett in his nasal drawl, “but Mert's still back in McKinley's administration. Ain't changed his farmin' methods from the way it was when he was a boy. Won't listen to reason any more 'n a deaf Baptist. Does his own horseshoein'! Mighty mulish man, Mert.”

Johnny began, “His daughter—”

But Hackett went on as if Johnny had said nothing at all. “Peter Berry tried to sell him a flush toilet once, but Mert said the old three-holer'd been good enough for his pa and by jing it was good enough for him. Things like that. Actu'ly, he ain't got no runnin' water exceptin' what he hand-pumps. No 'lectric lights, no tank gas, no nothin'. Mert Isbel might just as well be livin' back in Asahel Shinn's time. But Mert's a righteous man, God-fearin' as all getout, and ain't nobody bellows a hymn out Sundays louder.”

“Why does his daughter—”

“Pa'don, Mr. Shinn. There's my mother havin' a to-do with the youngest,” said Burney Hackett quickly; and it was a long time before Johnny got to hear why Merton Isbel's daughter and granddaughter sat in corners.

He was rather taken with Mathilda Scott, the mother of the troubled boy he had met in Berry's store that morning, but he found her shyness too stubborn for a shiftless man. She was a half sister of Rebecca Hemus's; they were both Ackleys, a once numerous family of Shinn Corners. But they were the last. Mrs. Scott's face was a dark hollow mask of old and present pain; drudgery had done the rest. “She was a beautiful girl,” Judge Shinn said as she went looking for her thirteen-year-old daughter. “Drakeley got those eyes of his from her. They're about all Mathilda has left.” She looked sixty; the Judge said she was forty-four.

And then there was Hosey Lemmon. Old man Lemmon was one of the few Yankees of Johnny's experience to wear a beard. It was a long beard, rain-silver, and it flowed from a head of long silvery hair as from a fountain. The old fellow was broad and spry and heavily sunburned, and he walked softly about Fanny Adams's house, as if it were a church. He wore tattered, filthy overalls and a faded winter farm hat with upturned flaps; on his feet were a pair of manure-caked boots. He avoided the adults, remaining among the younger children, who accepted him as if he were one of them.

Judge Shinn told Johnny about Lemmon. “Hosey was once a prosperous farmer up Four Corners Road, past the Isbel place. One night he had a fight with his wife and went to the barn with a quart of whiskey. He finished it and staggered out into one of his pastures and fell asleep. When he woke up his barn and house were a mass of flames. He'd apparently dropped his pipe in the barn, it had ignited the hay, and a high wind had done the rest. By the time the engine got out there from the village it was impossible to do anything but watch the house burn to the ground and keep the fire from spreading to the woods. His wife and six children were burned to death. Lemmon went up Holy Hill and crept into an abandoned shack, and there he's been ever since. Exactly how he manages we don't know. He won't accept help; Lord knows Aunt Fanny and I have offered it. Traps and hunts some, I expect. When he needs cash, he comes down the hill and hires out to one of the farmers, the way he's doing now at the Scotts'. Probably the only reason he's here today. People don't see him in the village for months on end, and when they do he won't speak to them.”

And there was Calvin Waters, edging around the circle of talking men with his empty face, a trace of blueberry muffin on his brown lips—an obscenity, thought Johnny, a perambulating obscenity … And Emily Berry, the storekeeper's wife. Em Berry's thin Gothic figure seemed strung on piano wires; dowdy hair was drawn back in a tight brown knot; she wore a dark expensive maternity dress that managed to look cheap. Her voice was sharp and she talked to the other women as if they were dirt. Johnny slipped away from her as soon as he decently could.

And the older boys—the Hemus twins, Joel Hackett, Eddie Pangman—who had drifted out of the house, bored, and were setting off firecrackers under Merton Isbel's team …

Johnny was very glad when the Judge looked at his watch, sighed, and announced, “It's time!”

And so Shinn Corners in its near unanimity—the only ones missing, observed the Judge to Johnny, were the three generations of Scott men and Merritt Pangman—set out from the gate of Aunt Fanny Adams's house to straggle down Shinn Road to the intersection and the west corner with its cannon and its flagpole and its monument to Asahel Shinn, the men ahead, the women and children in tow; and they all sat down on campchairs brought over by Burney Hackett and Laughing Waters from the Town Hall, three rows of them in the road, while trestles bearing warning signs guarded them from a traffic that never came; and Judge Shinn mounted the pedestal of the monument and took off his Panama hat in the burning July sun and wiped his scalp with a handkerchief. And everyone grew quiet, even the youngest children.

And the Judge said, “We will begin our annual exercises in the usual way, with a salute to the flag.”

And turned and faced the flagpole, and Shinn Corners got up from the campchairs and all the men's hats came off and all right arms came up, and the Judge led his village in pledging allegiance to the flag of the United States, “one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

And there was a rustle as all took seats again, and then the Judge said, “And now we will render unto God. Our pastor will lead us in prayer.”

And Samuel Sheare took his spare body up onto the pedestal, and he no longer wore the troubled smile but a look of solemn responsibility; and he bowed his head, and the Judge bowed his head, and all the people below bowed their heads; and the minister said a prayer in a loud clear voice, as if he had authority to speak without fear at last. And it was a prayer to the Heavenly Father to preserve our liberties as He had bestowed them, to send us rain so that the fruits of our fields might multiply, and to send peace to our aged, and health to our sick, and good will toward all men high or humble. And Mr. Sheare prayed for the security of our country, that it might prevail over its enemies; and for wisdom on the part of the President of the United States and his counselors; and for peace wheresoever on earth. And the people of Shinn Corners murmured, “Amen,” and raised their heads obediently as their pastor stepped down to resume his seat and his troubled smile.

And the Judge said with a smile, “Judy Scott, who constitutes in her lone majesty next year's graduating class of our grade school, will now read the Declaration of Independence.”

And Mathilda Scott's Judy, her yellow braids shining in the sun, her cheeks pink with excitement, marched stiffly up to stand beside Judge Shinn, and she held up a white scroll printed in rather blurry blue printing with a red border around it, and the scroll shook a little, at which she frowned and began to read in a high tight voice with an occasional squeak in it the Declaration of Independence. …

Johnny glanced about him at the Judge's fellow townsmen. It seemed to him that with the exception of Fanny Adams he had never seen a more uniform vacancy. The noble-sounding words flowed over them like a spring tide over stones. Nothing soaked in; and in a little while the stones would be dry again. Well, Johnny thought, why not? What were words but the lawyer's delusion, mockery, and snare? Who but a few old men like Lewis Shinn listened to them any more?

He noticed that when Judy Scott stepped down with relief, to have her shoulder squeezed by Elizabeth Sheare and receive the misty love-glance of her mother, Judge Shinn was silent for a space, as if even he had been impressed by their vacuity.

Then the Judge began his speech.

He began by addressing them as neighbors and saying that he well remembered the village's Independence Day exercises when he was a small boy, and some of them remembered, too. “The river ran through Shinn Corners then. All the houses were white as the Monday wash, and there were lots of fine old shade trees. The dirt roads were rutted and dusty from all the rigs and surreys and farm wagons driving in for the celebration. And the crowds—of purely Shinn Corners folks—spread all over the Four Corners and up and down these roads, there were so many of us. We had a fife-and-drum corps for stirring us up, and it made good loud music. The militia company of our district fired off muskets in a salute, to start things going, and we had our prayer and the reading and the oration, and in my father's boyhood this cannon was fired, too; and afterwards there were bread and cheese and punch for everybody. The orator of the day made a rousing speech about how our ancestors had fought and bled and died to win our liberties for us, and how we were free men and must ever be ready to lay down our lives in defense of our freedom. And we yelled and whistled and shot off guns, because the freedom to be young and strong and prosperous and full of hope and scared of nothing and nobody seemed to us a mighty important thing.”

The Judge looked down at the vacant faces, and the vacant faces stared up at him; and he said suddenly, “And today we're celebrating another Fourth of July. And the river that ran through our village we now call the Hollow, and we use part of it to dump our trash and garbage. The houses that were white are a dirty gray and falling to pieces. We're worn away to a handful. Nine children in the grade school, three in the high school at Comfort. Four farms, all struggling to keep out of the hands of the Sheriff. And an old man gets up and babbles about liberty, and you say to yourselves, ‘Liberty? Liberty to what? To get poorer? To lose our land? Liberty to see our children want? Liberty to get blown up, or to die in caves like moles, or to see our bones glow like candles in the dark?' These are hard questions to answer, neighbors, but I'm going to try to answer them.”

They stirred.

They stirred, and the Judge talked of the great conflict between the free world and Communism, and of what was happening to Americans' liberties in the name of the fight against it. How some in power and authority had seized the opportunity, in the struggle against Communism, to attack and punish all who held opinions contrary to theirs, so that today a man who held a contrary opinion, no matter how loyal he might be, was denied equal justice under law. How today in some cases even the thoughts of a man's father, or of his sister, were sometimes held against him. How today men stood convicted of high crimes by reason of mere association, even of the distant past. How today the unsupported word of self-confessed traitors was honored under oath. How today accusation was taking the place of evidence, and the accused were not permitted to cross-examine their accusers, and often were not told who their accusers were—or even, as was happening with increasing frequency, the exact nature of the charges.

“And you ask me,” said Judge Shinn, his arms jerking a little, “what all this has to do with you, and I tell you, neighbors, it has everything to do with you! Who wants to be poor? But who'd hesitate if he were given the choice between being a poor freeman and a rich slave? Isn't it better to lose your land than your right to think for yourself? Did the farmers who grabbed their muskets and fought the Redcoats from behind their farm fences take up arms to defend their poverty or their independence of mind and action?

“The attack on free men always begins with an attack on the laws which protect their freedom. And how does the tyrant attack those laws? By saying at first, ‘We will set the laws aside for a little while—this is an emergency.' And the emergency is dangled before your eyes while your rights are stolen from you one by one; and soon you have no rights, and you get no justice, and—like Samson—you lose your strength and your manhood and you become a thing, fit only to think and to do what you're told. It happened that way in Nazi Germany. It happened that way in Soviet Russia. Are you going to let it happen here?”

Judge Shinn wiped his face; and he cried, “There is no liberty without justice, and there's no justice unless it's the identical justice for all. For those who disagree with us as for those who hold the same opinions. For the poor man as for the rich. For the man with the furrin-sounding name as for the Cabots and the Lodges. For the Catholic as for the Protestant and the Jew as for the Catholic. For the black as for the white. These aren't mere words, neighbors, pretty sayings to hang on your parlor walls. They're the only armor between you and the loss of your liberties. Let one man be deprived of his liberty, or his property, or his life without due process of law, and the liberty and property and lives of all of us are in danger. Tell your Congressmen and your Senators that. Make yourselves heard … while there's still time!”

When “The Star-Spangled Banner” had been sung, and Peter Berry had hurried ahead to reopen his store, and the children had whooped after him to buy cap pistols and bubble gum, and their elders dispersed in groups talking weather and crops and prices, Johnny took the old man's arm and walked him around the Shinn house and into the woods beyond.

“I thought that was a fine speech, Judge,” said Johnny, “as speeches go.”

Judge Shinn stopped and looked at him. “What did I say, Johnny, that you don't believe?”

“Oh, I
believe
. I believe it all.” Johnny shrugged. “But what can I do about it? Have a cigaret?”

The Judge shook his head irritably. ‘When a man with paralysis of the vocal chords talks to people who are stone deaf, the net result is a thundering silence. Let's walk.”