The Glass Village (26 page)

He did not really pay attention until Andy Webster put Roger Casavant on the stand as a witness—this time!—for the defense.

Johnny admired the way the old man handled Casavant and
July Corn
. Cudbury's dean of the bar had been a great angler in his day. Now he pulled his fish in on a long taut line, little by little, giving it sea room, never letting it break the surface, until the jury were pulling with him, straining to catch a glimpse of what was moment by moment becoming more obviously a big one. And just when he had them at the snapping point, Judge Webster yanked.

“Will you count the pieces of firewood in Exhibit F—the painting
July Corn—for
the benefit of the jury, Mr. Casavant?”

And Casavant whipped out his lens, stooped over the painting, said, “One, two, three, four,” and kept counting until he reached the number twenty-four.

“Mr. Casavant, you have just heard the defendant, in confirmation of his original statement on his arrest, testify that he split six logs into quarters at Mrs. Adams's request and stacked them in the lean-to. Six logs quartered make how many pieces of firewood?”

“Twenty-four.”

“And you have just counted how many pieces of firewood in the picture Mrs. Adams was painting when she was stopped by death?”

“Twenty-four.”

“In other words, friends of Shinn Corners,” cried old Andy, wheeling on the jury as if he had never heard of the rules of evidence, “the defendant, Josef Kowalczyk, is
not
the criminal liar the state's attorney has made him out to be. This man told the truth. The exact, the literal truth. He told the truth about the money, and he told the truth about the firewood!”

Ferriss Adams could no longer contain himself. He jumped up with a shout. “Your honor, counsel is concluding!”

“You will save your conclusions, Judge Webster, for your summation. …”

The two lawyers summed up bitterly. No mock battle now. They were using live ammunition as they whanged away.

But Johnny was no longer on the battlefield except in body. The spirit was elsewhere, back on the sidelines. Fight for what? The stupid look on Calvin Waters's face?

He did not really wake up to a sense of time and place until he found himself upstairs in Fanny Adams's bedroom with his eleven co-jurors. The women were chittering away on the four-poster, the men milled about, grumbling. The door was locked and through its aged panels came the sound of Burney Hackett's nasal breathing. It was a small hot room and it was filled with Prue Plummer's strong perfume and the sweetish odors of the barn.

Johnny slouched in a corner, suffering.

A dud, a big loud nothing. They might have been listening down there to an abstruse passage from
Das Kapital
in the original German for all the conviction it had carried. “I want to see their faces,” the Judge had said with happy grimness. Well, so he had seen them. Even Lewis Shinn had been fooled. How we want the truth to be what we believe!

Johnny was sore. Suckered by the same old catchwords! “Truth …” The world was lousy with sentiments about truth, how it must prevail, how it shines in the dark, how it is simple, tough, knowledge, supreme, open to all men. But who was it had said, “What I tell you three times is true”? Lewis Carroll or somebody.
That
was the truth. Nothing else. Hitler had known it. The Kremlin gang knew it. McCarthy knew it. The good guys kept kidding themselves that they were using yardsticks of eternal adamant, when all the time the damned stuff in the hands of the bad guys was made of goo. …

Hube Hemus was saying, “Anybody want to ask questions?”

“Questions about what?” yipped Emily Berry. “There's nothin' to ask, Hube Hemus. We all know he did it.”

“Now, Em,” said Hemus. “We got to do this right.”

“Take a vote,” said Merton Isbel heavily. “Take a vote and let's git this abomination over with.”

Johnny caught himself preparing to make a speech. He fought with it, he tried to pin it down and throttle it.

But there it was, coming out of his mouth like a demon. “Wait, wait, I'd like to say this. Can anyone here look me in the eye and say he feels no
doubt
about Kowalczyk's guilt? No shadow of doubt?”

They could look him in the eye. He was surrounded by eyes looking him in the eye. Eyes and eyes and eyes.

“How can you be
sure?
” Johnny was outraged to hear himself pleading. “In view of the fact that nobody saw him? No blood was found on him? There's no fingerprint evidence on the poker?”

“The money,” Mathilda Scott said passionately. “The money, Mr. Shinn. He did steal Aunt Fanny's money. A man who'd steal money—”

What was the use? Reason would make about as big a noise here as a pinfall in a shooting gallery.

“He got skeered,” growled Orville Pangman. “Lost his head. Maybe she caught him at the cin'mon jar with his fingers in it—”

“She was killed in the studio, Mr. Pangman, not the kitchen!” His voice was actually getting up into the Casavant regions. That was going to help, that was.

“Well, maybe he chased her back into the paintin' room. Any one of a dozen things could ‘a' happened, Mr. Shinn—”

“Yes, Mr. Pangman. And maybe he didn't chase her back into the studio, too. Maybe she
didn't
catch him stealing. Maybe it all happened just the way he says it did. Show me one thing that proves his testimony false. In the only two particulars in which his story could be checked—the stealing of the money and the splitting of the firewood—he's proved to have told the truth! You folks are supposed to remember what the law says about the burden of proof being on the prosecution. You show me proof—
proof
—that Josef Kowalczyk murdered Aunt Fanny Adams!”

He had not intended to go that far at all. It was all so silly and pointless. Hell, it was no trial, anyway. Kowalczyk would get his deserts somewhere else, later. What did it matter what these yokels did and what they didn't do?

And yet, somehow, it seemed to matter. It seemed suddenly of tremendous importance that these people see it right, see it without prejudice, see it … Whoa, Johnnyboy. You're falling into old Lewis Shinn's trap.

He stood at bay, hemmed in by their stupid anger.

“If this furriner didn't murder Aunt Fanny,” Peter Berry shouted, “you tell me who did. Who could have!”

“Take a vote!” roared Merton Isbel.

“He was there,” shrilled Millie Pangman.

“The
only
one there,” said Prue Plummer triumphantly.

“Was he?” cried Johnny. “Then who switched those two paintings?
That
proves someone else was there, doesn't it? Why in God's name would Kowalczyk do a thing like that? Don't you see what happened? We know Kowalczyk split that wood and left it in the lean-to—we know that because Aunt Fanny painted it. We also know that the wood wasn't there when Burney Hackett found the body. So somebody took the wood away—took it away for the same reason that the paintings were switched:
to make Kowalczyk out a liar!
And if Kowalczyk could be made to look like a liar on a little thing like did he split wood or didn't he, then who'd believe him on a big thing like did he kill Aunt Fanny and him saying no?
Kowalczyk's been framed, my fellow Americans!
”

“By who?” said a quiet voice.

“What?”

“By who, Mr. Shinn?” It was Hube Hemus.

“How should I know? Do I have to produce a killer for you before you'll let an innocent man go?”

“You have to show us somebody could have been there,” said the First Selectman. “But you can't. 'Cause nobody was. There ain't a livin' soul in this town hasn't got an alibi, Mr. Shinn … if what ye're drivin' at is one of
us
. Even you outsiders got alibis. Maybe we ain't sma't enough to figger out all that stuff about the paintin'—like you educated folks—but we're sma't enough to know this: Had to be
somebody
bring that poker down on Aunt Fanny's poor old head, and the only one there was who could have is that tramp furriner, Mr. Shinn.”

“Take a vote!” snarled Mert Isbel again, making a fist.

Johnny turned to the wall.

Okay, brethren. I'm through.

“Neighbors!” It was Samuel Sheare's voice. Johnny turned around, surprised. He had forgotten all about Samuel Sheare. “Neighbors, before we take a vote … As you would that men should do to you, do you also to them likewise. … Be you merciful, even as your Father is merciful. And judge not, and you shall not be judged; and condemn not, and you shall not be condemned; release, and you shall be released. Isn't there one here for whom these words mean somethin'? Don't you understand them? Don't they touch you? Neighbors, will you pray with me?”

Now we can both be happy in the discharge of our duty as we saw it, Johnny thought. Reason and the mercy that comes from faith. We've tried them both, Reverend.

And we're both in the wrong pew.

“Pray for his whoreson's soul,” grated Mert Isbel. “
Take a vote.
”

“We take a vote,” nodded Hubert Hemus. “Peter?”

Peter Berry passed out new pencils and small pads of fresh white paper. The pencils had sharp, sharp points.

“Write your verdicts,” directed Hemus.

And for a few seconds there was nothing in the air of Fanny Adams's bedroom but the whisper of pencils.

Then the First Selectman collected the papers.

When he came to Calvin Waters, he said, “Why, Calvin, you ain't wrote nothin'.”

Laughing Waters looked up in an agony of intellectual effort. “How do ye write ‘guilty'?”

They stood ten to two for conviction.

Two hours later Johnny and Reverend Sheare were backed against a highboy before a three-quarter circle of angry men and women.

“Ye think to deadlock us?” rumbled old Isbel. “Ye think to balk the will of the majority? Vote guilty!”

“Are you threatenin' me, Merton Isbel?” asked Samuel Sheare. “Are you so far gone in hatred and passion that you'd force me to cast my lot with yours?”

“We'll stay here till the cows dry up,” rasped Orville Pangman. “And then some!”

“It's a conspiracy, that's what it is,” spat Rebecca Hemus. “Puttin' a minister on a jury!”

“And an out-and-out stranger,” said Emily Berry. “Ought to run
him
out o' town!”

“And me,” sighed Mr. Sheare.

They were shouting and waving their arms. All but Hube Hemus. Hemus leaned against the chintz-hung window, jaws grinding, eyes on Johnny.

“Excuse me,” said Johnny in a tired voice. “It's very close in here, good people. I'd like to go over to that corner and sit down.”

“Vote guilty!”

“Make him stand!”

“Throw him out!”

“Let him,” said Hemus.

They made way.

Johnny sank into the aged pine captain's chair by the four-poster, wiping his face. Thinking came hard in this airless, supercharged room. What idiots they had been to think at all, to “plan” a “campaign.” This sort of mindless tenacity, he thought, can't be argued or wheedled or prayed into letting go. It was a blind force, as manageable as the winds. It only went to prove what he had known for a long time now, that man was a chaos, without rhyme or reason; that he blundered about like a maddened animal in the delicate balance of the world, smashing and disrupting, eager only for his own destruction. Compared with the vast and plunging mob, how many beings of wisdom and order and creativeness stood out? A miserable few, working wonders, but always against mind-shattering odds, and doomed in the end to go down with their works, cities and prophets, appliances and arts. The first men to set foot on Mars would find, not goggle-eyed pinheads with antennae, or supermen, but lifeless fused deserts still radiating death. In the evolution of life there was no gene of the spirit; God, Who provided for all things, had left the most important thing out. …

“Mr. Shinn.”

“Yes?” Johnny looked up. It was Samuel Sheare. The room was suddenly quiet. Hube Hemus was surrounded by his pliable neighbors, and he was whispering to them.

“I think,” said Mr. Sheare in a low voice, “somethin' very bad is goin' to happen.”

“Sure,” said Johnny. “And as far as I'm concerned, the sooner the better.”

“Are you one of them, too?” cried the minister.

“What?” Johnny was surprised.

“Givin' in? Givin' up?”

“I didn't give up, padre. But what do you expect me to do?”

“Fight error and evil!”

“Even unto death? All right, Mr. Sheare, I was a chronic neck-sticker-outer in my day. But what does it accomplish? How does that change anything?”

“It does, it does,” said Mr. Sheare, wringing his hands. “We mustn't despair, above all we mustn't despair …” He bent over Johnny, whispering. “Mr. Shinn, there's no time for talk. They're confused, they're poor and sick, and in their extremity they're plottin' somethin' wicked. If you can get out of here and downstairs to warn the others, I'll stay and try to distract their attention—”

“The door is locked and Burney Hackett's on the other side, Mr. Sheare.” Johnny squeezed the little man's hand. “Look. I know this goes down hard with a man like you, padre. There's one way to lick this—for a while, anyway.”

“How?”

“By pretending we're won over.”

“Won over?”

“If you and I vote guilty, they'll be satisfied. That will get Kowalczyk a reprieve—”

Mr. Sheare straightened. “No,” he said coldly. “You're makin' fun of me, Mr. Shinn.”

“But I'm not!” Johnny felt anger rising. “Isn't the object to save Kowalczyk? That may do it. This trial doesn't mean anything, Mr. Sheare. The whole thing is a ruse—was from the beginning! It's not the real thing.”