The Glass Village

Five...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They turned back to the painting again, baffled.

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

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

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

“What’s wrong?” asked Andy Webster.

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

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

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

“Not to me,” said Ush Peague.

“It’s corn,” said Ferriss Adams.

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

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

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

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

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

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

They studied the canvas.

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

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

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

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

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

It was a sheaf of plain yellow papers clipped together.

They crowded around the newspaperman.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What’s that?” demanded Casavant.

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

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

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

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

Then he stopped.

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

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

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

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

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

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

They hurried back to the courtroom.

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

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.”

“Who knows,” asked Mr. Sheare oddly, “what’s the real thing and what’s not? I won’t, I can’t, do what I know to be wrong, Mr. Shinn. Nor can you.”

“You think so?” Johnny smiled with violence. “A man can do anything. I’ve seen good Joes, firstclass soldiers, pining away for their loved ones, staunch patriots, faithful churchgoers, who were made to deny and betray their buddies, their wives, their children, their country, their God — every last thing they believed in. They didn’t want to do it, Mr. Sheare, but they did.”

“And you’ve also seen men who did not,” cried the minister scornfully, “but you choose not to remember those! Mr. Shinn, if you don’t stand up now and do what you can, you’re worse than Hube Hemus and Mert Isbel and Peter Berry — you’re worse than the lot of ’em put together! Wrong as they are, they’re at least doin’ what they’re doin’ ’cause they believe in it. But the man who knows what’s right and won’t stick by it — he’s a lost man, Mr. Shinn, and the world’s lost with him.”

Samuel Sheare darted to the door. The key was in the lock. He turned it with trembling fingers and yanked the door open. Constable Hackett faced about.

“Reached a verdict?” he yawned. “’Bout time.”

Mr. Sheare dashed by him. But before the minister could take two steps in the hall, Hube Hemus was upon him.

“No, Mr. Sheare,” Hemus panted. “No.”

Then the others were there, and before Hackett’s unbelieving eyes they dragged their pastor back into the bedroom. Johnny was half out of his chair, staring.

“Set your back against that door, Burney,” rapped Hemus. His expressionless glance was on Johnny. “Orville, watch him.”

Johnny felt his arm clutched and paralyzed. Orville Pangman said in a low voice, “Don’t try nothin’, Mr. Shinn, and ye won’t git hurt.”

And Samuel Sheare’s eyes were on him, too. And a great roaring came into Johnny’s ears, and he felt for the back of the chair.

“We’re givin’ ye one last chance,” said Hube Hemus. “Mr. Sheare, will ye change your vote?”

“No,” said Samuel Sheare.

Johnny struggled to get away from those eyes. But they bored through his lids, burning.

“Mr. Shinn, will you?”

Johnny said, “No.”

“Then we know where we stand,” said the First Selectman. “Ye tricked us. I think I saw it comin’ a long time ago. It’s our own fault for lettin’ Judge Shinn talk us into this, for lettin’ you sit in with us, Mr. Sheare, for lettin’ this stranger from New York take his place amongst us like he belongs. We had our trial. We had it in our minds when we caught that murderin’ furriner. Ye’re only tryin’ to take him away from us, like Joe Gonzoli was taken away from us.”

The only thing left was the Governor and the National Guard...

“He ain’t escapin’ us through a hung jury. That’s what you want, ain’t it? But you’re not takin’ this killer tramp away from us. Are they, neighbors?”

A growl answered him.

Those twenty-four sticks of fresh-cut firewood, Johnny thought wildly. All of a sudden they were running through his head like a fence. What was there about that wood...

“Come on!”

But Constable Hackett was in the doorway, licking his lips.

“Hube—” began Hackett uncertainly.

“You, too?” shouted Hemus. “One side!”

And Burney Hackett fell back, and the mob swept by him and out through Fanny Adams’s bedroom door, dragging Samuel Sheare and Johnny Shinn with them. They thundered down the stairs and into the astounded room where Judge Shinn waited over coffee with Andrew Webster and Ferriss Adams and Roger Casavant and Usher Peague, while Josef Kowalczyk sat at the pine table with his face on his outspread arms and the Hemus twins standing over him.

The damned firewood. What was it again? Oh, yes, what had happened to them. What had happened to them...

And suddenly there was nothing to be heard in the room, nothing at all. The men at the table slowly turned, and the prisoner raised his head, and they remained that way.

“Hube,” said Judge Shinn.

But he knew. They all knew.

“This trial,” said Hube Hemus, “is over. The verdict is guilty. The punishment—”

Josef Kowalczyk dropped out of his chair and to the floor like a snake. On all fours he slithered along under the table until he reached Lewis Shinn’s place. There he entwined himself around the Judge’s legs.

The twins jumped. Tommy Hemus flung the table aside. His brother dropped on the clinging man.

The Judge shrieked, “Stop, stop!”

What had happened to them...

Tommy Hemus brought his left arm up. It caught Judge Shinn full across the throat. The old man gagged. He staggered back, and the twin clawed at the prisoner in his brother’s clutch.

Something happened to Johnny Shinn. Something devastating, like the clap of the Last Judgment.

There was no warning. Suddenly, there it was.

The answer.

The answer!

The room was a hell of shouting, plunging people and crashing furniture. Constable Hackett fell against the corner cupboard; the glass shattered and Fanny Adams’s old silver tumbled out. Mathilda Scott was down, screaming as Peter Berry’s heavy shoes trampled her. Elizabeth Sheare crouched in a corner like an animal. Her husband was trying vainly to reach her, his lips moving in frantic soundlessness.

“String ’im up!” Merton Isbel roared.

Old Andy Webster, Peague, Casavant, Adams were struggling in the grip of frenzied men and women. Eddie Pangman and Drakeley Scott were suddenly there, in the thick of it.

Johnny found himself fighting through the wreckage. It was like an episode in one of his recurring dreams, in which fists struck him, nails tore his skin, knees doubled him up, and all the while there was no pain, no feeling of any kind, just the cool remoteness of a bodiless mind, as if all the rest of him were dead but the spirit and will to think. And somehow, he never knew how, or even why, he was on the table kicking at reaching arms, stamping and shouting and screaming and pleading.

“Wait! Wait! If you’ll hold it — if you’ll give me a chance — I’ll hang Kowalczyk for you with my own hands if I’m wrong... I’ll give you your damned proof!”

“Funny thing,” Johnny was saying, “funny and grim. Simplest thing in the world... But it had to be got to. It was camouflaged. Hidden under a mess of people. And people had nothing to do with it. That’s what’s funny. Dead wood and people. And it’s the people who turn out to be the dead wood.”

He was feeling lightheaded. With the dusk had come fireflies and mosquitoes, and they were winking and buzzing everywhere, impervious to slaughter, dancing the humid evening in. The road was as airless as Fanny Adams’s bedroom had been. The lights of the cars lined alongside the bushes showed up the vacuum dance of tiny wings, and the sounds of what was going on where the people were came hollowly to the two men leaning against Peter Berry’s delivery truck.

“What?” said Judge Shinn. He was fingering his throat.

“The alibis,” said Johnny. “Three days of alibis for mere people. And all the time the important ones were being set.”

“Important what, Johnny?”

“Alibis.”

“Alibis for whom?”

“Alibis for what,” Johnny corrected. “Why, for cars.”

“For cars?” The Judge stared. “Is that—”

“Yes,” said Johnny. “Remember Burney Hackett? ‘I parked my car in the garage.’ And ‘it’s only a one-car garage.’ Burney Hackett owns one automotive vehicle. Fair enough?”

“Fair enough,” said the Judge, “because it’s true.”

“And where was Hackett’s only car at two-thirteen P.M. Saturday? It was some nineteen miles from Fanny Adams’s house, being driven back by Hackett from Lyman Hinchley’s office in Cudbury.

“And the Berrys,” said Johnny, murdering a mosquito. “A passenger car, a delivery truck, and a wrecker from the public garage. At two-thirteen P.M. Saturday the passenger car was locked in a parking lot in Cudbury while Emily Berry and her children sat in Dr. Kaplan’s office. At two-thirteen Saturday the delivery truck was standing in Berry’s garage, where it had stood since at least ten minutes of two, when Berry began tinkering with it to find out why it didn’t start. And what’s more, the truck was boxing in his wrecker, as he complained on the stand. Three vehicles, all accounted for.

“Hosey Lemmon?” Johnny shook his head. “No conveyance of any kind. You told me that yourself.

“Prue Plummer’s car? She said on the stand it was at Wurley’s garage in Cudbury being overhauled for a trip. She said Peter Berry saw Wurley’s mechanic take it away. A statement she’d hardly have made in Berry’s hearing it if weren’t true. Out.

“The Hemuses. Two available vehicles, according to Hube’s testimony: the passenger car he drove to the village, and the farm truck his family took to follow. At two-thirteen Saturday the car was parked before Berry’s store in plain sight. At the same time his truck had to be on the Hemus place, because no one else in his family left the farm till the news of the murder came.

“The Sheares, no car at all.

“Pangman.” Johnny slapped himself in the face. “Same as the Hemuses — one passenger car, one truck. The truck was parked below the barn roof all Saturday afternoon while Joel Hackett handed up shingles to Orville. And the car, Pangman said, was in his garage.

“Scott. Again two vehicles, a car and a jeep. The car was with Drakeley in Comfort at two-thirteen waiting for a banker to say no. The jeep, according to Mathilda, stood out front on the Scott place all day.

“Calvin Waters. Like Hosey Lemmon, no vehicle of any kind, you said.

“The Isbels: one farm wagon, period. So it shares the alibis of old Mert and Sarah Isbel.

“That cleans out Shinn Corners,” said Johnny, “except for you and Dr. Cushman. And you had Russ Bailey drive that decrepit hack of yours back to Cudbury when he dropped us here a week ago, and I established through Dr. Cushman’s nurse that at two-thirteen Saturday the doctor’s car was parked outside his office in Comfort.

“Hell, you can even eliminate Judge Webster, if you’ve got that type of mind. His car didn’t get to Shinn Corners until the day after the murder.

“And that,” said Johnny, “covers the alibi of every vehicle involved with anyone in the case. Except one, the one that’s brought us here. And by the way, how did I pull it off? I don’t remember.”

“Neither do I.” Judge Shinn shivered.

There were shouts now on the still night air, peculiar sucking sounds, clanks and creaks and the muffled straining of an engine.

“But how do you connect the two parts of the argument?” asked the Judge. “Because that’s what they’re going to want to know.”

“No, they won’t,” said Johnny. “They won’t want to know anything after this. All they’ll want to do is go home and milk their lousy cows. Till the next time.”

“Johnny, Johnny,” said the Judge with a sigh. “The world does move. You’ve just moved it a little... If you won’t tell them, will you tell me?”

“It was the wood, the firewood.” Johnny listened; it seemed to him from the confused sounds that it must soon be over. “What happened to Aunt Fanny’s firewood? It was always the sixty-four dollar question, but we were too stupid to ask it...

“The wood was in that lean-to, where Kowalczyk had stacked it at two o’clock. Aunt Fanny painted it before she died at two-thirteen. After she died, after two-thirteen — gone. Taken away.

“Because taken away it was — off the property, an act of total removal, not just a transfer from one place to another. I searched for those twenty-four pieces of wood myself and didn’t find them.

“Aunt Fanny was struck down dead and her striker-downer picked up twenty-four lengths of split log — and did what?” smiled Johnny. “Carried them off by hand? With a fresh corpse a few yards away and the possiblity of interruption and discovery any minute? It would have taken four or five trips — he could hardly have carried more than five or six pieces of wood in one armful... The likely answer was a vehicle of some sort. A car, or a wagon. Took the mental stature of a foetus to figure out! Disgusting.

“If the wood was carted off in a car or a wagon, and only one vehicle has no alibi — or rather, a faulty alibi...” Johnny shrugged.

“I hope,” said the Judge, “I hope you’re proved right.”

Johnny lounged against the truck, waiting. How had he done it? Not through sheer lung power — Mert Isbel had outroared him by many decibels. Yet, somehow, in that pandemonium, he had arrested their frenzy, caught their ears, seized their minds, such as they were. He had no faintest memory of what he had said to them. Maybe — the thought came out of nowhere — maybe they wanted to be stopped. Could that be it? Like kids in a tantrum, begging for their little world to be set right again. Johnny laughed, and the Judge looked at him sharply.

“They’ve got it out!”

It was Usher Peague, bursting out of the blackness of the swamp with his red hair flying like a banner, arms whirling in triumph.

They rushed with Peague up the old wagon road through the marsh, each with a flashlight scribbling nonsense on the dark, the sounds of the people and the machinery suddenly stilled.

They came to the end of the road. Flares had been set up, and they cast a cheap pink light over the scene. The derrick of Peter Berry’s wrecker was dangling the corpse of Ferriss Adams’s bogged coupé from its teeth like a dog. The wrecker was slowly pulling away from the quagmire. Men with two-by-fours and pulleys were maneuvering the car clear of the bog as the wrecker dragged it off. The women of Shinn Corners stood about in silence, watchfully.

“Set it down!” shouted Judge Shinn. “Never mind how! Just so we can get at the trunk!”

The coupé came down with a crash.

Men leaped from every direction.

In a moment the trunk compartment was open...

It was full of firewood.

Ferriss Adams sagged. He would have fallen if not for the Hemus twins.

“One, two, three, four, five—” Johnny kept flinging the sticks to the ground as he counted aloud.

Kowalczyk was there, too, beside Burney Hackett. His hands were still tied with a rope. He was gaping at the wood, his eyes glaring in the pink light.

“Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen—”

Samuel Sheare’s lips were moving.

“Twenty, twenty-one...”

Hubert Hemus stepped back. There was a look of enormous uncertainty on his gaunt face. He was blinking, grinding.

“Twenty-four,” said Johnny. “And that’s the last, good friends and kindly neighbors.”

Burney Hackett untied Josef Kowalczyk’s wrists. He took the rope over to Ferriss Adams and the Hemus twins jammed Adams’s wrists together and Hackett tied them.

Hube Hemus turned away.

Slowly the people followed.

The peepers and chugarums were really going at it in the Hollow. A calf bawled in Orville Pangman’s cow barn; the Scotts’ dog was howling faintly at the moon. The street light above Berry’s Variety Store on the east corner lit up the deserted intersection.

Judge Shinn puffed a smoke screen from his cigar and complained: “I really ought to screen this porch. Promise myself to do it every summer, but I never seem to get around to it.” He waved his arms at the insects.

“Quiet tonight,” said Johnny.

“Enjoy it while you can, my boy. With dawn’s early light come the reporters.”

The Hackett house, Prue Plummer’s, the Pangman farmhouse were dark. One window of the parsonage glowed.

They smoked peacefully, reviewing the noisy aftermath of the swamp... the arrival of the state police, the magical reappearance of Sheriff Mothless and Coroner Barnwell, Ferriss Adams’s twitching face in the studio as he re-enacted his crime, his hysterical confession, the silent villagers looking on and then melting away, Hube Hemus the last to leave, as if defying Captain Frisbee to arrest him for the wounding of the trooper... They were all gone now, the police and the officials and Adams and Peague and Casavant and Andrew Webster. Only Josef Kowalczyk remained; Samuel and Elizabeth Sheare had taken him into the parsonage, where they insisted he spend the night.

“Hard to believe it’s all past,” remarked the Judge.

Johnny nodded in the darkness. He was feeling empty and restless. “The stupidity is still with us,” he said.

“Always,” said the Judge. “But so are perception and the right.”

“But late,” grinned Johnny. “Anyway, I was referring to myself.”

“Your stupidity? Johnny—”

“For letting that trick alibi of his take me in.”

“What should I say?” growled the Judge. “I didn’t see it at all. Still don’t, entirely.”

“Oh, you were on the phone with the Governor when Adams told all.” Johnny flipped his cigaret into the dark garden. “His trick was so simple it was clever. Adams’s alibi was that he’d left his office in Cudbury just before one o’clock Saturday afternoon and got back to his office ‘about two-thirty’ to find Emily Berry’s note saying that she was at the dentist’s office and he was to phone her there, she had a message for him from his aunt. So, Adams said, he used his office phone to call Mrs. Berry and she gave him his aunt’s message to go right over to Shinn Corners and he did — arriving here, he said, at three-thirty, over an hour and a quarter after her murder. Emily Berry confirmed the note business, Adams’s phone call at two-thirty; we ourselves saw him get to the Adams house at three-thirty... Complete. A rounded picture of his innocent afternoon.

“Only,” said Johnny, “we’d been conned. In all that mess of testimony and confirmation we lost sight of the only important fact in it: that Emily Berry had merely Adams’s word for it that when he phoned her at Dr. Kaplan’s at two-thirty he was calling from his office phone in Cudbury. The vital part of his alibi was completely without substantiation. A phone call can be made from anywhere. He might have been calling from New York — or Shinn Corners.

“So at two-thirty Saturday afternoon Ferriss Adams wasn’t necessarily in Cudbury, twenty-eight miles from the scene of the two-thirteen crime. And if Adams wasn’t necessarily in Cudbury at that time, neither was Adams’s car. In other words, neither Adams nor his car had a real alibi for the time of the murder, and that’s why I staked everything on my proposal to dig that coupé out of the muck.”

“The firewood,” murmured the Judge. He shook his head in the darkness. “And you say there’s no justice, Johnny? He’s going to roast in hell over that firewood.”

Johnny said nothing.

The Judge’s cigar glowed brightly.

“Tell me,” said the Judge at last, “about his confession. He found Em Berry’s note earlier Saturday, I take it?”

“Yes. He got back from lunch not at two-thirty but about twenty after one — he’d grabbed a sandwich at a diner. The note mentioned that there was a message from his Aunt Fanny. Instead of phoning Emily Berry at the dentist’s, Adams phoned his aunt direct... at one-twenty, from his office. And what Fanny Adams told him over the phone at that time sealed her fate.”

“What did she say to him? Why in God’s name did he kill her?”

“Nothing epic,” said Johnny. “He’s been scrabbling along with his law practice, barely making a living, and as Fanny Adams’s only relative he’d always expected to inherit from her when she died. She told him over the phone that she’d decided to make a will leaving her entire estate in trust to Shinn Corners — a permanent fund to be administered by the town elders for school maintenance, making up budget deficits, loans to needy villagers, and so on. She wanted him to draw the will for her... What you might call killed by kindness.”

“Johnny,” said the Judge.

“Well, wasn’t she?” Johnny was silent. Then he said, “He got his car and drove to Shinn Corners. It was just about two-ten when he drove down the hill into the village and saw a tramp running out of his aunt’s house stuffing something into a pocket. Adams parked in the driveway and went in. His aunt was painting away in her studio... At this point,” said Johnny, “our big bad killer starts whining. He had no intention of killing her, he says. He’d just come to plead his cause — the blood tie, his need, his hopes, the rest of his piddling concerns. But she cut him short and said he was still young and the town was old and in need. So he went blind-mad, he says, and the next thing he knew he found himself over her dead body, the bloody poker in his hand.”

Judge Shinn stirred. “The legal mind. He’s already setting up a plea of unpremeditated murder.”

“The whole thing, he says, took no more than two or three minutes. Right away his brain cleared — it’s wonderful how these attacks of temporary insanity go away as suddenly as they come! He needed an alibi and a fall guy, he says. Luck seemed to be with him. The tramp who’d been running away... Adams found the empty cinnamon jar and realized that the tramp had robbed the old lady. Made to order. He must be headed for Cudbury — the road went nowhere else — and going on foot he’d be a sitting duck any time that afternoon Adams chose to sick the hunters on him.

“As for the alibi, Adams says he had to use what means he had. He simply picked up his aunt’s phone in the kitchen at two-thirty and phoned Emily Berry at Dr. Kaplan’s office in Cudbury, telling her he was calling from his own office. The record of that call, by the way, ought to be a strong link in the evidence against him. It’s a toll call and will be in the phone company’s records.”

“So will the call from his office to Aunt Fanny’s at one-twenty,” said the Judge grimly. “And the firewood business?”

Johnny struck a match and held it to a fresh cigaret. “That’s where friend Adams began to get clever. He decided to make the case against the tramp look even blacker. He’d noticed the freshly split firewood stacked in the lean-to. Obviously his aunt at ninety-one hadn’t been splitting wood; therefore, he reasoned, it must have been the tramp’s work, payment for the half-eaten meal on the kitchen table. Adams went outdoors, threw the twenty-four sticks into his coupé trunk, removed the evidences of Kowalczyk’s axwork behind the barn. That would make the tramp out a liar... Adams still thinks it was an inspiration.”

“Then he noticed the painting on the easel,” said Judge Shinn. “I see, I see. She’d already sketched the firewood into the picture—”

“Yes, and he realized that he either had to replace the wood or get rid of the painting. To put the wood back in the lean-to meant wasting time and running the further risk of being seen. And he couldn’t bring himself to destroy the painting — even intestate, her estate came to him and her paintings constituted the valuable part of it. So he began rummaging in the closet for a possible substitute picture which showed the lean-to empty. He found September Corn in the Rain. He put that one on the easel and stowed the unfinished picture away in the cabinet. He figured that by the time it was dug out again the paint would be dry and it would simply be dismissed as a picture she’d once started and never completed. The seasonal differences between the two canvases just never occurred to him, Adams says.

“And then all he had to do,” Johnny yawned, “was drive up the hill and off the road, and park. He waited in the woods till he judged he could safely make his appearance as Horrified Nephew, and then he did just that.”

“Lucky,” muttered the Judge. “Lucky throughout. Not being seen. The heavy rains. Kowalczyk’s pushing his car into the bog—”

“And there he snafued himself,” Johnny said, grinning. “He’d completely forgotten the wood in the trunk of his coupé — just went clean out of his mind, he says, otherwise he’d have dumped the twenty-four sticks in the woods somewhere before going back. When he saw his car sinking into the muck late that afternoon it all came back to him with a thud. Of course he pretended to be riled, but you’ll recall he also gave us some cogent reasons on the trip back to the village after Kowalczyk’s capture why he wasn’t going to ‘bother’ salvaging the car. He simply can’t explain why he forgot about the firewood till it was too late for him to do anything about it.”

“Mr. Sheare could probably explain it,” remarked Judge Shinn, “citing chapter and verse to boot. There goes the light in the parsonage. I imagine Josef Kowalczyk will sleep soundly tonight.”

“More likely have nightmares.” Johnny stared over at the little dark house of the Sheares. “By the way, what happens to Kowalczyk?”

“Well, I called Talbot Tucker in Cudbury last night — he owns the tanning factory. Talbot said to send Kowalczyk to him, and that’s where Kowalczyk’s headed tomorrow morning. With a visit first to Father Girard of the Catholic church. I talked to Father about Kowalczyk, and he’s finding him a place to live, get him settled, and so on.”

“I didn’t mean that. He still has a theft rap hanging over his head.”

“Oh, that.” Judge Shinn dropped his cigar neatly over the porch railing, and rose. “Who’s going to press the charge — Ferriss Adams?”

Samuel Sheare held open the door of the parsonage. Josef Kowalczyk stepped into the early sunlight, blinking.

Most of Shinn Corners was gathered on the parsonage lawn, the men in their sweaty work clothes, the women in their house dresses, the children in dusty jeans and shorts.

They faced him silently.

Kowalczyk’s eyes rolled toward the minister. He took a jerky backward step, his gray skin darkening.

His trousers and tweed jacket looked almost spruce this morning. He wore a tie and shirt of Mr. Sheare’s, and he carried an old black felt hat from the same source. A tin lunch box was clutched to his ribs.

He had not shaved, and his hair was still long. “He was anxious,” Mr. Sheare explained later, “to get away.” His beard was very thick now, its ends beginning to curl. A blond beard with gray in it. It gave him a curiously dignified appearance.

Mr. Sheare put a hand on his arm and murmured.

Josef Kowalczyk let his breath go; he even smiled. But the smile was nervous and perfunctory, a polite flickering of the muscles about his mouth.

His eyes remained wary.

Now Hubert Hemus stepped out of the crowd, one hand out of sight behind his back. He was almost as gray-skinned this morning as Kowalczyk; his eyes were inflamed, as if he had not slept.

He wet his lips several times.

“Mr. Kowalczyk,” he began.

Kowalczyk’s eyes widened.

“Mr. Kowalczyk,” Hube Hemus began a second time. “As First Selectman of Shinn Corners, I’m speakin’ for the whole community.” He swallowed. Then he went on in a rush. “I expect, Mr. Kowalczyk, we used you hard. Made a mistake.” Hemus’s jaws ground futilely. “Bad mistake,” he acknowledged.

And he stopped again.

Kowalczyk said nothing.

Hemus cried suddenly, “We’re a law-abidin’ community! Don’t ever think we ain’t! Town’s got a right to protect itself. That’s how we figgered.” Then his narrow shoulders slumped. “But I guess we went off half-cocked... went about it the wrong way. Seemed so open and shut...”

Hube Hemus stopped once more, bitterly.

Kowalczyk’s lips tightened.

“I go Cudb’ry,” he said.

“Wait!” Hemus sounded panicky. He brought his concealed hand around and thrust it at Kowalczyk. It held a purple-stained pint berry basket. ‘We’re askin’ you to accept this, Mr. Kowalczyk,” he said rapidly. “Here.”

Josef Kowalczyk stared into the basket. It was full of bills and coins.

“Here,” Hube Hemus said again, urgently.

Kowalczyk took it.

And Hemus turned away at once, and as he turned away the people of the town turned away, too. Men, women, and children went quickly back into the road, and some climbed into cars, and the Isbels climbed into the wagon behind the horses tethered at the trough, and some walked across the intersection, and soon they were all gone.

“I’ll give you your text for your sermon Sunday, Mr. Sheare,” said Judge Shinn dryly. “‘The wicked flee when no man pursueth.’”

Samuel Sheare shook his head, smiling. “Josef, don’t stand here gawpin’ at it. It’s their way of makin’ amends. A conscience offerin’.”

But Kowalczyk eyed the money sullenly.

“It’s all right, Joe,” said Johnny. “It’s an old American custom. Kick a man between the legs and then get up a collection to buy him a truss.”

A grin spread over the bearded face. Kowalczyk pressed the basket into Mr. Sheare’s astonished hand.

“You take,” he said.

And he turned and shuffled rapidly down the parsonage walk as if he were afraid the minister might come running after. He hurried up Four Corners Road and around the horse trough into Shinn Road, putting on Mr. Sheare’s hat with a sort of fussy enjoyment as he went.

“Now that’s nice,” said the minister slowly, looking down at the basket. “That’s real nice.”

They went to the intersection. Kowalczyk was already passing Fanny Adams’s house. He did not glance at it, but they noticed his steps quicken.

He began the long climb up the sun-drenched hill.

“What am I thinking of? Kowalczyk, wait!” shouted Judge Shinn. “Don’t you want me to get somebody to drive you to Cudbury?”

But Josef Kowalczyk only walked the faster. They watched him until he was a speck against the blazing eastern sky.

As he topped the rise and disappeared over Holy Hill, two cars came rushing past him and bore down the hill toward the village. They were taxicabs from Cudbury.

“What did I tell you?” chuckled the Judge. “Out-of-town reporters, and they never even looked his way.”

“What’s a tramp?” said Johnny.

“Indeed, indeed,” said the Judge absently. “Well, Mr. Sheare. Who was it remarked that only the poor know the luxury of giving?”

“A wise man,” Mr. Sheare murmured, “I’m sure. I think — yes! — I’ll use this money to keep fresh flowers on Fanny Adams’s grave. She was real fond of flowers.”

And the minister hurried smiling back across the parsonage lawn to tell his wife.

The Judge and Johnny sauntered over to the Shinn lawn and up the porch steps. They sat down in the rockers to wait for the newsmen.

“Ah, me,” said the Judge. “Fine, fine day in the making, Johnny.”

Johnny looked at the houses and the roads and the fields and the blue blue sky, and he breathed in with real pleasure.

“I’ve seen worse,” conceded Johnny Shinn.