The Glass Village

One...

“Now you take murder,” said Superior Court Judge Lewis Shinn, putting down the novel his house guest had left lying on the porch. “Murder in New England is not the simple matter you furriners from New York and such places hold it to be. No back-country Yank would have reacted like this criminal.”

“Fellow who wrote this, for your information,” said Johnny, “was born twenty-eight miles from here.”

Judge Shinn snorted, “Oh, you mean Cudbury!” as if the bench he had occupied there for the past thirty-two years had never raised the calluses he was currently sitting upon. “Anyway, he couldn’t have been. I’d know him.”

“He moved away at the ripe old age of eleven.”

“And that makes him an authority, I suppose! Not that you’ve damaged my thesis.” The Judge leaned over and dropped the book gingerly into his guest’s lap. “I know Cudbury people who are as ignorant of the real New England as this fellow. Or you, for that matter.”

Johnny settled back in one of the Judge’s rush-bottomed rockers with a grin. The early July sun in his face was smoothing the wrinkles around his eyes, as the Judge had promised, and Millie Pangman’s breakfast — consisting chiefly of their Peepers Pond catch of the day before — had accomplished the same feat for his stomach. He brought his feet up to the porch railing, sending a brittle paintfall to the warped floorboards.

“Cudbury,” Judge Shinn was sneering. “Yes, Cudbury is twenty-eight miles northeast of Shinn Corners as those pesky crows fly — look at ’em over yonder in Mert Isbel’s corn! — and just about ten thousand miles away from the Puritan spirit. What would you expect from a county seat? It’s practically a metropolis. You’ll never learn about the back-country Yankee from Cudbury.”

In the week Johnny had hung about Cudbury waiting for the Judge to clear his docket he had heard Shinn Corners referred to with snickers, like a vaudeville joke — Cudbury asserting its cultural superiority, the Judge had said. Johnny had grasped the reason on the drive down Wednesday evening. They had taken a chewed-up blacktop road out of Cudbury, bearing southwest. The road ran through flat tobacco farmland for a few miles, worsening as low hills appeared and the farms petered out. Then they were in scrubby, burned-over-looking country. The boy at the wheel of the Judge’s old Packard, Russell Bailey, had spat repeatedly out his window... not very tactfully, Johnny had thought, but Judge Shinn had seemed not to notice. Or perhaps the Judge was used to it. While court was in session he lived in Cudbury, in Bessie Brooks’s boarding house next to the County Lawyers’ Clock and within a hundred yards of the County Court House. But on occasional weekends he had Russ Bailey drive him down to Shinn Corners, where Millie Pangman would open the old Shinn house, air the beds and dust the ancient furniture, and cook his meals as if the Pangman farm across the road had no connection with her at all. Perhaps — Johnny remembered thinking — the fact that the road Millie Pangman had to cross to reach the Judge’s house was named Shinn had something to do with it. Not to mention the Shinn Free School, which had graduated her Merritt and her Eddie, and which little Deborah was to attend in the fall. Powerful name, Shinn. In Shinn Corners.

Twenty miles out of Cudbury the scrub had changed to second-growth timber as the hills thickened, to degenerate a few miles on into a land of marsh and bogs. Then at the twenty-five mile mark they had skirted Peepers Pond with its orchestra of bull fiddles, and suddenly they had topped the hill named Holy and seen Shinn Corners in the wrinkled valley a mile below, looking like a cluster of boils on an old man’s neck. Everything in the shifty dusk had seemed poor — the untidy land, the dried-up bed of what his kinsman said had once been a prosperous river, the huddle of once-white buildings. When Russ Bailey deposited them in the heart of the village on the uncut lawn of the Shinn house and drove the Judge’s Packard away to be garaged in Cudbury at ’Lias Wurley’s for the week of their stay, Johnny had felt an absurd sinking of the heart. It was different from Cudbury, all right. And Cudbury had been bad enough. It was the last place in the world a man could find an answer to anything.

Johnny smiled at himself. All hope was not dead, then.

The thought tickled him in a lazy sort of way.

“But you mentioned murder,” Johnny said. “I suppose you’re prepared with an impressive list of local homicide statistics?”

“Well, you’ve got me there,” admitted the old man. “We had one gaudy case in 1739 — infanticide by a seventeen-year-old girl who’d made the two-backed animal with a deacon of the church — that church there on the north corner, where your grandfather was baptized, married, and buried from. Then there was a regrettable corpse during the Civil War, the result of an argument between an Abolitionist and a Vallandigham Democrat. And we had a murder only about fifteen years ago... I suppose you wouldn’t say that three in two hundred and fifty-some years constitute much of a statistic, no. For which, by the way, the Lord be praised, and may He continue to stay the hand of Cain ad finem.” And Judge Shinn glowered at his village, a panorama of sunny emptiness. “Where the dickens was I?”

“The complexity of murder in re the back-country Yank,” Johnny said.

“Exactly. You have to understand that the Puritan spirit lies heavy within us, like gas on a troubled stomach. None of your New York or even Cudbury melting pots for us, to reduce us to some watery soup with a furrin handle. We’re concentrated in our substance, and if you set your nose to the wind you’ll get the whiff of us.”

“Not me,” said Johnny. “I’m all scattered to hell and gone.”

“Who said anything about you?” demanded the Judge. “Your disease is as about as close to Shinn Corners as Asiatic cholera. Don’t let your name fool you, my boy. You’re a heathen ignoramus, and it’s historical fact I’m preaching. Let me tell you about the Puritan nature that’s somehow been bred out of you. The Puritan nature boils down to just one thing — privacy. You let me be, neighbor, and I’ll do likewise. Unless and until, of course, the community is threatened. That’s a different pack of pickles. That’s where the contradiction starts operating.”

“Murder,” reminded his New York kinsman.

“I’m getting there,” said Judge Shinn, warming to it. “Murder to folks hereabout is more than a legal indiscretion. We’ve been taught with our mush that killing is forbidden by the Bible, and we’re mighty set on it. But we’re also all wrapped up in the sacred rights of the individual. Thou shalt not kill, but thou hast a powerful hankering sometimes, when your personal pinkytoe’s been trod on. Murder being a crime that wantonly destroys a man’s most precious piece of assessable property, we’re pulled back and forth like Rebecca Hemus trying to decide between her waistline and that extra helping of gravy and potatoes. It makes us sure of one thing: it’s got to be punished, and quick. Puritan justice doesn’t delay.

“Take that case I mentioned a minute ago,” said the Judge. “The one that happened just before the war — not the Korean business, but the big war.”

“Funny thing about wars,” said Johnny. “I was in both of them and I couldn’t see much difference in scale. The one you’re in is always the biggest one ever was.”

“I s’pose,” said the Judge. “Well, in those days Hubert Hemus’s brother Laban helped work the Hemus farm. Laban was a slowpoke, not too sha’p, mostly kept his mouth shut. But he never missed a town meeting or failed to vote right.

“The Hemuses employed a hired hand by the name of Joe, Joe Gonzoli, a cousin of ’Squale Gonzoli’s of Cudbury. Joe made a real good hand for the farmers who didn’t have modern equipment. Back on the farm in Italy, Joe used to say in his broken English, if you needed a new sickle or a hoe handle, why, you just made it. He had curly hair and black eyes like a woman’s, and he always had a joke and a snatch of Italian opera song for the girls.

“Well,” said the Judge, “Joe and Labe had trouble from the start. Labe would make out he couldn’t understand Joe’s English, and Joe would poke fun at Labe’s slow ways. I guess Labe didn’t like being outplowed and outworked; that Joe was a working fool. They got into quite a competition. Hube Hemus didn’t mind. He had a real brisk farm in those days.

“Now Labe had never looked at a woman twice, far as any of us knew,” continued Judge Shinn, “till Adaline Greave grew up to be a strapping fine woman with the build of a Holstein. Then Labe took to taking baths regularly and hanging about the Town Hall square nights, or at church socials when Adaline would be helping out. She kind of led Labe on, too. At least Labe thought so, and everybody said it was working out to something. But one night Laban went looking for Adaline after a church supper, and he found her in the hayloft of the Farmers’ Exchange Feed and Grain barn across from the church, that Peter Berry runs. She was lying in Joe Gonzoli’s arms.”

The Judge squinted through the V made by his shoes on the porch rail as if it were a gunsight. “There was a pitchfork sticking in a bale, and Labe went crazy mad. He pluck that fork out and made for Joe with a roar. But Joe was too quick for him. He rolled Adaline aside and like a cat came up under the fork with the knife he carried in his belt. There was a terrible fight. It ended with Joe’s knife sinking up to the haft between Laban Hemus’s ribs.”

Through his pedal sight Judge Shinn fixed on the flagpole which stuck out of the wedge of village green fronting his property like an anniversary candle. “I’ll never forget the hullabaloo that night on the green there. The men buzzed around the flagpole and cannon and your forebear Asahel Shinn’s monument as if war’d been declared. Burney Hackett was constable then, too — that’s the Hackett house across Shinn Road there, on the south corner — and Burney had quite a time getting Joe into his house, which he figured was the safest place to wait for the state police. Labe’s brother Hubert tried to get at the prisoner with his bare hands. Hube is a skinny fellow, but that night he was all puffed out and vibrating like a frog. Earl Scott and Mr. Sheare, the minister, had to sit on him till Burn Hackett got Joe Gonzoli behind locked doors. Nor was Hube the only one het up. Everybody’s sympathy was with the Hemuses. If this had been down South...

“But it was New England back-country, Johnny. Vengeance is mine, saith the minister, speaking for the Lord; but the Puritan’s always torn between his sovereign individuality and the ‘Thou shalt nots.’ I don’t deny it was a narrow squeak, but in the end we compromised. We signed over our personal interest in Joe Gonzoli to the community. And that’s where we made our mistake.”

“Mistake?” said Johnny, bewildered.

“Well, we’d liked Labe. But more important, he was one of us. He belonged to the town and the land, and no Papist furriner with tricky furrin ways and Italian songs had a right to come between a Shinn Corners Congregationalist Republican member of a founding family and the girl he was fixing to marry. Justice was what we wanted, meaning that if we couldn’t light fires under Joe Gonzoli with our own hands, we could at least see to it he fried in that Chair up at the Williamston prison practically immediately.

“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.

“Oh.” The Hackett boy turned away.

“Aren’t you up kind of early, Joel, for a summer’s morning?” asked Judge Shinn pleasantly. “Or was the thought of today’s excitement too much for you?”

“That corn.” Joel Hackett kicked the sagging picket gate. “I’d a lot rather take my twenty-two and go huntin’ with Eddie Pangman. But Pop made me go over and ask Orville for a job. I’m startin’ tomorrow — strippin’ his darn-fool cows.”

He went into the Hackett house and banged the door.

“You’ll have to make quite a speech today to impress that boy,” remarked Johnny. “What’s that sign?”

The house next to Burney Hackett’s was a red-painted clapboard with drawn white blinds, sitting primly in the sun. A sign on a wrought-iron stand in the front yead read PRUE PLUMMER-ANTIQUES AND OLD BUTTONS. Everything needed paint.

“Well, there’s enterprise,” said Johnny.

“Prue makes out. Sells an occasional piece in summer, when there’s some traffic between Cudbury and Comfort, but mainly she does a small year-round mail order business in antique buttons. Prue’s our intellectual, has some arty Cape Cod friends. She’s tried to interest Aunt Fanny Adams in ’em with no luck. Aunt Fanny says she wouldn’t know what to say to them, ’cause she doesn’t know anything about art. It’s just about killed Prue,” chuckled the Judge, “having a national art celebrity as a lifelong neighbor and not being able to turn her into a profit. There’s Orville Pangman.”

“Judge, don’t introduce me as Major Shinn.”

“All right, Johnny,” said the Judge quietly.

They had rounded the stone fence separating the Plummer lot from the Pangman farm and were trudging past the small farmhouse toward the big red barns. A huge perspiring man in bib overalls was in the barn doorway, wiping his face.

“’Scuse my not shakin’ hands,” he said when the Judge introduced Johnny. “Been cleanin’ out the manure troughs. Millie feedin’ ye all right, is she, Judge?”

“Fine, fine, Orville,” said the Judge. “What do you hear from Merritt?”

“Seems to like the Navy a lot more than he ever did farmin’,” said Orville Pangman. “Raise two sons, one of ’em enlists in the Navy and the other’s too lazy to scratch.” He shouted, “Eddie, come ’ere!”

A tall skinny boy of seventeen with great red hands appeared from the interior of the barn.

“Eddie, this is the Judge’s kin from N’York, Mr. Shinn.”

Johnny said hello.

“Hello,” said Eddie Pangman. He kept looking sullenly at the ground.

“What are you going to do when you graduate next year, Eddie?” asked Judge Shinn.

“Dunno,” said the Pangman boy, still studying the ground.

“Great talker, ain’t he?” said his father. “He don’t know. All he knows is he’s unhappy. You finish cleanin’ those milkin’ machines, Eddie. I’ll be right along.”

“Hear we’re due for a rain tomorrow, Orville,” said the Judge as Eddie Pangman disappeared without a word.

“Aya. But the forecast for the summer’s dry.” The big farmer scowled at the cloudless sky. “Another dry summer’ll just about finish us off. Last September we lost practic’ly the whole stand of feed corn; rains came too late. And there wasn’t enough hay in the second cuttin’ to see us through Christmas. Hay’s been awful scarce. If it happens again...”

“Don’t ever be a farmer, Johnny,” said the Judge as they walked back toward Shinn Road. “Here’s Orville, with the best farm around if you recognize degrees of indigence, good herd of Brown Swiss, Guernseys, and Holsteins, makes almost ten cans, and it’s a question if he can hang on another year. Things are even sorrier for Hube Hemus, Mert Isbel, and the Scotts. We’re withering on the vine, Johnny.”

“You’re really setting me up, Judge,” complained Johnny. “For a time there I thought you had designs on me.”

“Designs?” asked the Judge innocently.

“You know, getting me up here so you could talk to me like a Yank uncle, pump some blood into my veins. But you’re worse than I am.”

“Am I?” murmured the Judge.

“You almost make me revert to my ancient chauvinism. I want to twist your arm and tell you to look at that flag flying up there. That’s not going to wither away, no matter what happens to you and me. Droughts are temporary—”

“Old age and wickedness,” retorted Judge Shinn, “are permanent.”

Millie Pangman was waddling across Shinn Road. She was almost as large as her husband, formidably featherbedded fore and aft. The sun bounced off her goldrimmed eyeglasses as she waved a powerful arm. “Made you some jiffy oatmeal bread, Judge,” she called in passing. “I’ll be back to fix your supper... Deb-bie? Where are you?”

The Judge waved back at the farmer’s wife with tenderness. But he repeated, “Permanent.”

“You’re a fraud,” said Johnny.

“No, I mean it,” said the Judge. “Oh, I make sma’t rema’ks on and off, but that’s only because a Yankee’d rather vote Democratic than make a public parade of his feelings. The fact is, Johnny, you’re meandering along the main street of a hopeless case.”

“And here I was, laboring under the delusion that you’re a gentleman of great spiritual substance,” grinned Johnny.

“Oh, I have faith,” said Judge Shinn. “A lot more faith than you’ll ever have, Johnny. I have faith in God, for instance, and in the Constitution of these United States, for another instance, and in the statutes of my sovereign state, and in the future of our country — Communism, hydrogen bombs, nerve gas, McCarthyism, and ex-majors of Army Intelligence to the contrary notwithstanding. But Johnny, I know Shinn Corners, too. As we get poorer, we get more frightened; the more frightened we get, the narrower and meaner and bitterer and less secure we are... This is a fine preparation for a Fourth of July speech, I must say! Let’s drop in on Peter Berry, cheeriest man in Shinn Corners.”

The village’s only store occupied the east corner of the intersection. A ramshackle building painted dirty tan, it was evidently a holdover from the nineteenth century. The entrance straddled the corner. A pyramid of creaking wooden steps led to a small porch cluttered with garden tools, baskets, pails, brooms, potted geraniums, and a hundred other items. Above the porch ran a faded red sign: BERRY’S VARIETY STORE.

As Johnny pulled back the screen door for the Judge, an old-fashioned bell tinkled and a rich whiff of vinegar, rubber, coffee, kerosense, and cheese surged up his nose.

“I could have used this smell once or five times,” said Johnny, “in those stinking paddies.”

“Too bad Peter didn’t know that,” said the Judge. “He’d have bottled it and sold it.”

There was almost as much stock in midair as on the floor and shelves. They made their way through a forest of dangling merchandise, crowding past kegs of nails, barrels of potatoes and flour, sacks of onions, oil stoves, tractor parts, counters of housewares, drygoods, and sundries, cheap shoes, a wire-enclosed cubicle labeled U.S. POST OFFICE SUB-STATION — there was even a display rack of paper-backed books and comic books. Signs advertised charcoal and ice, developing and printing, laundry and dry cleaning — there was no service, it seemed, that Peter Berry was not prepared to render.

“Is Berry’s Garage next door on Shinn Road his, too?” asked Johnny, impressed.

“Yes,” said the Judge.

“How does he take care of it all?”

“Well, Peter tries to do most of his car-tinkering nights, after he closes the store. Em helps out when she can. Dickie — he’s ten — is big enough to handle the gas pump and run errands, and Calvin Waters makes deliveries in Peter’s truck.”

They edged along a narrow aisle toward the main counter of the grocery department, where the cash register stood. A large fat man with a head like William Jennings Bryan was stacking loaves of bread on the counter as he talked to a lanky teenage boy in jeans. There was something tense about the set of the boy’s head, and Judge Shinn touched Johnny on the arm. “Let’s wait,” he said.

The boy at the counter said something at last in a low voice. Peter Berry smiled, shaking his head. He was about forty-five, with a jowly face that kept changing shape as its curves merged and dissolved. It was the kind of face that should have been rosy; instead, it was a disappointing gray. And where the blue eyes should have twinkled, they were lumpy and cold.

“Who’s the boy?” murmured Johnny.

“Drakeley Scott, Earl and Mathilda Scott’s eldest. He’s seventeen.”

“He seems distressed about something.”

“Well, Drake’s got his row to hoe. With Earl and Seth helpless, it’s his farm to run. It’s cut into his schooling.” The Judge shrugged. “He’s a full year behind. Don’t suppose he’ll ever finish... Good morning, Drake.”

Drakeley Scott shuffled toward them, eyes lowered. They were beautiful eyes with great welts under them. His thin face was pimpled and sore-looking.

“Mornin’, Judge.”

“Want you to meet a relative of mine.”

The boy raised his eyes unseeingly. “How do,” he said. “Judge, I got to get back to the barn—”

“Getting any help these days, Drakeley?” asked the Judge.

“Some. Old man Lemmon right now. Jed Willet from over Comfort — he’s promised to cut the south lot and help me get the hay in, but Jed can’t come till next week.” The Scott boy pushed by them suddenly.

“See you at the exercises?”

“Dunno, Judge. Ma’ll be there with Judy.” Drakeley Scott shuffled out rapidly, his meager shoulders drawn in as if he expected a blow from behind.

“Mornin’,” boomed Peter Berry. He was all overlapping smiles. “Real fine day, Judge! Lookin’ forward to your speech today...” He kept glancing from Judge Shinn to Johnny, his gray face shifting and changing as if it were composed of seawater.

“Thank you, Peter.” The Judge introduced Johnny.

“Real glad to meet you, Mr. Shinn! Judge’s kin, hey? Ever visited before?”

“No.”

“That’s too bad. How d’ye like our little community?”

“Nice solid sort of town,” said Johnny tactfully. “Settled. Peaceful.”

“That’s a fact.” Johnny wished that Berry’s face would stand still for a moment, “Visitin’ long?”

“A week or so, Mr. Berry.”

“Well, now, that’s fine. Oh, Judge, Millie Pangman was in t’other day chargin’ some groceries to your account. Is it all right?”

“Of course it’s all right, Peter,” said the Judge a bit sharply.

“Darn fine woman, Millie. Credit to Shinn Corners—”

“We won’t keep you, Peter,” said the Judge. “I know you’re open only for a few hours this morning—”

“Judge.”

“Yes?”

Peter Berry was leaning over his counter in a confidential way.

“Had it in my mind to talk to you for quite a while now...”

Johnny delicately drifted off to the book rack. But Berry seemed to have forgotten him, and the booming voice carried.

“It’s about the Scotts.”

“Oh?” said Judge Shinn. “What about the Scotts?”

“Well, now, you know I been carryin’ the Scotts right along...”

“Owe you a big bill, do they, Peter?”

“Well, yes. I was wonderin’ what I could do about it. You bein’ a lawyer and a judge—”

Judge Shinn’s voice grew shrill. “You mean you want to take the Scotts to court?”

“Can’t carry ’em forever, Judge. I like to oblige my neighbors, but—”

“Haven’t they paid you anything?”

“Dribs and drabs.”

“But they have been trying to pay.”

“Well, yes, but the balance keeps gettin’ bigger.”

“Have you talked to Earl, Peter?”

“No use talkin’ to Earl.”

“No, I s’pose not,” said the Judge, “Earl being tied down to that wheelchair.”

“I’ve talked to Drakeley, but shucks! Drakeley’s not half a man yet. Lettin’ a boy run a farm! Seems to me what Earl ought to do is sell out—”

“What does Drakeley say, Peter?”

“He says he’ll pay first chance he gets. I don’t want to be hard on them, Judge—”

“But you’re contemplating legal measures. Well, Peter, I’ll tell you,” said Judge Shinn. “I remember — a long time ago — when Nathan Berry was so deep in a hole he had the Sheriff peering down over the edge. You remember it, too — it was during the depression. Old Seth Scott was a man then, standing on his two feet, not a bag of mumbling lard whose legs won’t support him, the way he is today. And between Seth and his son Earl, they’d weathered the storm. And your father, Nathan Berry, went to Seth and Earl Scott for help, and they saved his neck, Peter — yes, and yours, too. You wouldn’t be standing behind this counter today if not for the Scotts!” And Judge Shinn’s voice came to Johnny in a long thin line, like charging infantry. “If you had to carry those people for five years, Peter Berry, you ought to do it and be thankful for the chance! And while I’m riled up, Peter, I’m going to tell you what I think of your prices. I think you’re a highway robber, that’s what I think. Taking advantage of these folks you grew up with, who can’t deal anywhere else ’cause there’s nowhere else to deal! Sure you work hard. So did Ebenezer Scrooge. And so do they, only they haven’t got anything to show for it, the way you have!”

“No call gettin’ het up, Judge,” said the other voice, still smily-boomy. “It was just a question.”

“Oh, I’ll answer your damned question! If the Scotts owe you less than a hundred dollars, you can file your claim in the Small Claims Court. If it’s anything above that up to five hundred, you can go to the Court of Common Pleas—”

“It’s a hundred ninety-one sixty-three,” said Peter Berry.

“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.

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.”

They walked through the Judge’s woods for a long time. Finally the Judge stopped and sat down on a fallen tree. He mopped his face, and swatted at the gnats, and he said, “I don’t know what’s the matter with me today.”

“It’s the Yankee conscience,” smiled Johnny, “rebelling at a display of honest emotion.”

“I don’t mean that.” The Judge paused, as if groping for the right words. “All day I’ve had the funniest feeling.”

“Feeling?”

“Well, it’s like waking up on one of those deathly still, high-humidity days. When the air weighs a ton and you can’t breathe.”

“Seen a doctor lately?” asked Johnny lightly.

“Last week,” growled the old man. “He says I’ll live to be a hundred.”

Johnny was silent. Then he said, “It’s tied up with Shinn Corners, of course. You don’t get down here much any more, you said. It doesn’t surprise me. This place is pretty grim.”

“Do you believe in premonitions, Johnny?” asked Judge Shinn suddenly.

Johnny said, “Sure do.”

The Judge shook himself a little.

He got up from the log and reached for his handkerchief again. “I promised Mathilda Scott I’d bring you over to meet Earl. Lord, it’s hot!”

The next day Aunt Fanny Adams was murdered.