The Glass Village (4 page)

“On second thought,” said the Judge, “you can go to hell. Come along, Johnny!”

And as Johnny caught up with the old man, whose gnarled neck was as red as the flannel shirt swaying over his head, he heard the Judge mutter, “Trash!”

The Judge seemed ashamed of himself. He mumbled something about getting to be a crotchety old fool, losing his temper that way, after all Peter Berry was within his rights, what was the use of trying to keep people from drowning when the whole damned countryside was under water, and would Johnny excuse him, he'd go lie down for a while and think over his speech.

“You go right ahead,” said Johnny. He watched the Judge head across the intersection for the Shinn house with his old man's stiffkneed bounce, wondering just what sort of speech Shinn Corners was going to hear that day.

Johnny Shinn wandered about the village of his paternal ancestors for a few minutes. He went up Four Corners Road past the Berry house with its droopy front-and-side porch and its ugly Victorian turret, stopped before the decayed box of a Town Hall with its flaking sign, examined the abandoned woolen factory beyond, windowless, its entrance doors gone, the ground floor caved in … stood on the rim of the ditch behind the factory building. It was choked with sickly birches and ground pine and underbrush—and, away to the south, tin cans and rubbish.

He trudged back to the intersection and crossed over to the north corner. He inspected the old horse trough with its leaking faucet and green slime, the church and the parsonage set in lawns overrun by crab grass, chickweed, and dandelions, the little parsonage strangling in the clutch of ivy and wistaria vines and evergreens set too close to the walls. …

Beyond the parsonage lay the cemetery, but Johnny suddenly did not feel like exploring the cemetery. He suddenly felt that he had had enough of Shinn Corners for one morning, and he crossed over to the west corner, skirted the now-deserted green with its toy cannon and its chipped monument and its mocking flagpole … set foot on the Judge's precincts, achieved the skaky porch, and sat down in the rocker and rocked.

“Lewis Shinn's a reprobate. The idea him not fetchin' you to visit soon's you came,” said Aunt Fanny Adams. “I like young men. 'Specially young men with nice eyes.” She peered at him through her silver spectacles. “Color of polished pewter,” she decided. “Clean and homey-lookin'. But I expect Lewis likes 'em, too. There's no more selfish o' God's creatures than a cantankerous old man. My Girshom was the most selfish man in Cudbury County. But he did have the nicest eyes.” She sighed. “Come set.”

“I think,” said Johnny, “you're beautiful.”

“Do ye, now?” She patted the chair beside her, pleased. It was a comb-backed hickory chair, an American Windsor that would have brought tears of avarice to the eyes of an antique hunter. “A Shinn, are ye? There was always somethin' about a Shinn. Joshers, the lot o' ye!”

“If I had the nerve,” said Johnny, “I'd ask you to marry me.”

“Ye see?” She chuckled deep in her throat, patting the chair again. “Who was your mother?”

Johnny was overwhelmed. She was a rawboned old lady with knotty farmer hands and eyes sharp and twinkly as snow in Christmas sunshine, set in a face wrinkled and pungent, like an apple treefall. Ninety-one years had dragged everything down, a bosom still full, a great motherly abdomen—everything but the spirit that touched the wrinkles with grace and kept her ancient hands warm. Johnny thought he had never seen a wiser, shrewder, kinder face.

“I never knew her, Mrs. Adams. She died when I was very small.”

“Ah, that's no good,” she said, shaking her old head. “It's the mothers make the men. Who reared ye, your father?”

“No, Mrs. Adams.”

“Too busy makin' a livin'? I saw him last when he was no bigger than a newborn calf. Never came back to Shinn Corners. How is your father?”

“He's dead, too.”

The shrewd eyes examined him. “Ye've got your grandfather Horace Shinn's mouth. Stubborn. And I don't like your smile.”

“Sorry,” murmured Johnny.

“It's got nothin' behind it. Are ye married?”

“Heavens, no.”

“Ought to be,” Aunt Fanny Adams decided. “Some woman'd make a man of ye. What d'ye do, Johnny Shinn?”

“Nothing.”

“
Nothin'?
” She was appalled. “But there's somethin' wrong with ye, boy! Why, I'm over ninety, and I ain't found time to do half the things I want to! Never heard the like. How old are ye?”

“Thirty-one.”

“And ye don't do
nothin'?
Are ye rich?”

“Poor as poor.”

“Don't ye
want
to do somethin'?”

“Sure. But I don't know what.”

“But weren't ye trained for nothin'?”

Johnny laughed. “Studied law, or started to. The war stopped that. Then afterward I couldn't seem to decide on anything. Sort of drifted, trying one thing and another. Came Korea, and I jumped back in. Since then …” He shrugged. “Let's talk about you, Mrs. Adams. You're a far more interesting subject.”

But the withered mouth did not relax. “Unhappy, ain't ye?”

“Happy as a lark,” said Johnny. “What's there to be unhappy about? Do you know this is a red-letter day in my life, Mrs. Adams?”

She took his limp hand between her warm papery ones. “All right,” she said. “But I'm not lettin' ye off the hook, Johnny Shinn. We got to have a real long talk. …”

It was eleven o'clock when Judge Shinn had walked him up Shinn Road past the church to turn into the Adams gate and through a garden fragrant with pansies and roses and dogwood trees to the simple stone step and the gracious door overhung by the second story and the steep-pitched roof; and there she had been, this wonderful old woman, receiving her neighbors with dry hospitality, a word for everyone, and a special sharp one for the Judge.

Her house was like herself—clean, old, and filled with beauty. Color ran everywhere, the same bright colors that flamed on her canvases. And the Shinn Corners folk who crowded her parlor seemed freshened by them, simplified and renewed. There was a great deal of laughter and joking; the parlor was filled with nasal good-fellowship. Johnny gathered that Aunt Fanny Adams's “open house” occasions were highlights in the dull life of the village.

The old lady had prepared pitchers of milk and great platters of cookies and heaps of ice cream for the children. Johnny tasted blueberry muffins and johnnycake, crabapple jelly and cranberry conserve and grape butter. There was coffee and tea and punch. She kept feeding him as if he were a child.

He had very little time with her. She sat beside him in her long black dress with its high collar, without ornament except for an oldfashioned cameo locket-watch which she wore on a thin gold chain about her neck—talking of the long ago when she had been a girl in Shinn Corners, how things had been in those days, and how looking backward was a folly reserved for the very old.

“The young ones can't live in their kinsmen's past,” she said, smiling. “Life is tryin' to upset applecarts. Death is pushin' a handplow in a tractor age. There's nothin' wicked about change. In the end the same good things—what I s'pose ye'd call ‘values'—survive. But I like keepin' up to date.”

“Yet,” Johnny smiled back, “your house is full of the most wonderful antiques.” Death, he thought, is standing still in a hurricane. But he did not say it.

The lively eyes sparkled. “But I've also got me a Deepfreeze, and modern plumbin', and an electric range. The furniture's for memories. The range is for tellin' me I'm alive.”

“I've read a very similar remark, Mrs. Adams,” said Johnny, “about your painting.”

“Do they say that?” The old lady chuckled. “Then they're a sight sma'ter than I give 'em credit for. Most times seems like they talk Chinese. … You take Grandma Moses. Now she's a mighty fine painter. Only most of her paintin's what she remembers of the way things
used
to be. I like rememberin', too—I can talk your ear off 'bout the way life was when I was a girl in this village. But that's
talkin'
. When I find a paintbrush in my hand, rememberin' and talkin' just don't seem to satisfy me. I like to paint what I
see
. If it all comes out funny-lookin'—what Prue Plummer's friends call ‘art'—why, I expect it's 'cause of how I see the colors, the way things
set
to me … and mostly what I don't know 'bout paintin'!”

Johnny said earnestly, “Do you really believe that what you see is worth looking at, Mrs. Adams?”

But that was a question she never got to answer. Because at that moment Millie Pangman waddled over to whisper in Aunt Fanny's ear, and the old lady jumped up and exclaimed, “My land! There's lots more in the freezer, Millie,” and excused herself to him with a sharp look and went away. And by the time she got back with more ice cream for the children, Johnny had been boarded and seized by Prue Plummer.

Prue Plummer was a thin vibrant lady of valorous middle age with a liverish face coming to a point and lips which she kept preening with a tireless tongue. She was dressed in a smart summer suit of lavender linen which looked as outrageously out of place in that Colonial roomful of plainly dressed farm women as a Mondrian would have looked on the wall. Two big copper hoops dangled from her ears and a batik scarf, bound round her gray hair, trailed coquettisly over one shoulder.

“
May
I, Mr. Shinn?” said Prue Plummer, digging her bloody talons into his arm. “I've been watching for my chance to monopolize you. I could hug Millie Pangman for luring dear old Aunt Fanny away. Such a darling! Of course, she doesn't know beans about art, and brags about it, which is such a delightful part of her quaintness, because of course she really
doesn't—
”

“I understand,” said Johnny rather abruptly, “you sell antiques, Miss Plummer.”

“Oh, I dabble at it. I do have some good rock crystal and old Dresden, and rather an amusing collection of miniature lamps, and a few old Colonial and Early American pieces when I can persuade my neighbors to let me market them—”

“I should think,” said Johnny, not without malice, “that this house of Mrs. Adams's would be a gold strike for you.”

“Haven't I tried, just,” laughed Prue Plummer. “But she's simply making too much money. Isn't it disgusting? You just watch the vultures descend when Aunt Fanny passes on. She has a stenciled ‘rockee' in her attic that's worth a fortune. You know there aren't many good old things left undiscovered in New England—oh, dear, such a bother … Hello! Our minister and his wife. Mr. and Mrs. Sheare, Mr. Shinn?”

In the exchange, he managed to throw off the grappling iron.

Samuel and Elizabeth Sheare made a sort of clerical Mr. and Mrs. Jack Spratt. The minister was a lean little elderly man with a troubled smile; his wife was stout and anxious. Both had an air of vague alertness. Mr. Sheare, it appeared, had inherited the Shinn Corners parish from his father; Elizabeth Sheare had been a Urie, a family which no longer existed. Between them they had catered to the village's spiritual and educational needs for thirty-five years. They had no children, they said wistfully as they watched Peter Berry's four stuff themselves. Did Mr. Shinn have any? No, said Johnny again, he was not married. Ah, said Mr. Sheare, that's too bad, as if it really were. And he pressed closer to his wife. They were lonely people, Johnny thought, and harried. Mr. Sheare's God must seem very near and dear to them both. He made a mental note to go to church on Sunday.

Johnny met the Hemus family, and the Hacketts, and Merton Isbel, and Drakeley Scott's mother Mathilda (Drakeley was not there), and old Hosey Lemmon, and Emily Berry, and all the children young and grown, and he was a little confused and uneasy. He felt New Yorkish, which he did not often feel. He should be feeling Shinn Cornerish, since it was supposedly in his blood. The truth is, Johnny thought, I've got less kinship with these people than I had with the Koreans and Chinese. What's the matter with them? Is everybody in the world a carrier of nastiness and doubt?

The Hemuses were disturbing. Hubert Hemus was a slight one-syllabled man with dirty hands, stiff in his Sunday clothes. He shed a steady, unpleasant power. Nothing moved in his gaunt face but his sharp jaws; he looked at things with his whole head, as if his eyes had no independent maneuverability. But even with his head turned, he seemed on the watch. He joked and talked to the other men without enjoyment. It was impossible to think of him as capable of changing his mind or seeing another point of view. Johnny was not surprised to learn that Hube Hemus had been First Selectman of Shinn Corners for over twenty years.

His wife, Rebecca, was a great cow of a woman, swinging all over. She giggled with the other women, but always with an eye on her husband.

Their children were formidable. They had twin sons, Tommy and Dave, hulking eighteen-year-olds, powerfully muscled, with heavy blue jaws and expressionless eyes. They were going to make mean and dangerous men, Johnny thought, remembering some of the hard cases he had met in the Army. The daughter, Abbie, had the family eyes—a precocious twelve-year-old with overdeveloped breasts who kept watching the big boys brazenly.

Then there was Merton Isbel and his family. There was something queer about the Isbels. Johnny had seen them coming into the village in a battered farm wagon drawn by a team of plow-horses, the big craggy farmer woodenly at the reins—needing only the beard, Johnny thought, to look like old John Brown—his daughter Sarah and his granddaughter Mary-Ann sitting like mice at his side. Isbel was a widower, Judge Shinn had said, and Sarah and her child lived with him. The Judge had seemed reluctant to talk about them.

Isbel stood about with Hubert Hemus and Orville Pangman and Peter Berry and the Judge talking weather and crops and prices, but his daughter and her child sat by themselves in a corner as if they were looking through a window at an unreachable luxury. No one went near them except Fanny Adams. The old lady brought Mary-Ann a plateful of ice cream and cookies and a glass of milk, and pressed some punch and cake on the woman; but at her evident urging that they join the others, the woman shook her head with a faint smile and the child looked frightened. They remained where they were. The woman Sarah had large, sad eyes. Only when they turned on her little girl did they glow, and then only for a moment.