The Glass Village (6 page)

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.

Two
…

He was plastered against the flimsy wall with his eye to the hole in the freezing dark righting off the stench from the alley and saying don't don't don't he's only a kid from Oklahoma who ought to be kissing his date in a jalopy under a willow by some moonlit river but they went on jamming lighted cigarets against his nipples and other places and telling him to say what he'd dropped from his plane on their people's villages and the hole in the wall got bigger and bigger and bigger until the hole was the whole room and he was the kid flyer twisting and jerking like a trout on a line to get away from the little probing fires the fires the fires …

Johnny opened his eyes.

He was in a sweat and the room was black.

“Who is it?” he said.

“Me,” said the Judge's voice. The old man's finger was poking holes in him. “For a restless sleeper you're sure hard to wake up. Get up, Johnny!”

“What time is it?”

“Almost five. That's a three-mile walk to the pond, and the big ones bite early.”

They hiked up Shinn Road in the dawn with their fishing gear and a camping outfit, the Judge insisting they make a day of it. Or as much of a day as the threatening skies would allow.

“When a man gets to be as old as I am,” observed the Judge, “half a day is better than none.”

Each carried a gun, taken from a locked commode drawer in the Judge's bedroom, where the weapons lay wrapped in oily rags among boxes of ammunition. The old jurist frowned on hunting for sport; he had his property severely posted to protect the pheasant and deer. But he considered chuck, rabbit, and such pests fair game. “When the fishing runs out we'll go after some. They're thick up around there. Come down into the valley and play hob with the farms. Maybe we'll get a bead on some fox. They've done a lot of damage this year.” He had issued to Johnny a 20-gauge double for the rabbits, reserving to himself what he called his “varmint rifle.” It was a .22 caliber handloader designed to play a little hob of its own, the Judge said ferociously, with the damn woodchucks. And he sighed, wishing old Pokey were trotting along to heel. Pocahontas had been the Judge's last hunting dog, a red setter bitch whose tenderly framed photograph hung on his study wall. Johnny had seen her grave in the woods behind the garage.

“Pokey and I had some fine times in the woods,” Judge Shinn said happily.

“Hunting the butterflies, no doubt,” grinned Johnny.

The Judge flushed and mumbled something about all that foolishness being dead and buried.

So the day began peacefully, nothing marring their pleasure but the closing sky. They netted some peepers for live bait and went out in the old flatbottomed boat the Judge had had carted up to the pond the week before, and they fished for largemouthed bass and were successful beyond their dreams. Then they hauled the boat up on shore and did some steel-rod casting for pickerel, and they caught not only pickerel in plenty but a couple of husky trout, at which the Judge declared gleefully the coming of the millennium, for Peepers Pond had been considered fished out of trout, he said, for years.

“Did I croak some twaddle yesterday about premonitions?” he chortled. “False prophet!”

Then they made camp on the edge of the pond, broiled their trout and swallowed the delectable flesh along with their pond-cooled beer and Millie Pangman's oatmeal bread, and Johnny brewed he-man's coffee while the Judge cut open the ambrosial currant pie Aunt Fanny Adams had sent over by little Cynthia Hackett the evening before; and they stuffed themselves and were in heaven.

Whereupon the Judge said drowsily, “Don't feel a bit like snuffing out life. Hang the chucks,” and he spread his poncho and dropped off like a small boy after a picnic.

So Johnny lay down and did likewise, hoping this time he wouldn't dream the one about the ten thousand men in yellow blanket-uniforms all shooting at him with the Russian guns in their yellow hands.

And that was how the rain caught them, two innocents fast asleep and soaked to the skin before they could scramble to their feet.

“I'm running true to form,” gasped Johnny. “Did I ever tell you I'm a jinx?”

It was a few seconds past two o'clock by the Judge's watch, and they huddled under a big beech peering at the sky and trying to determine its long range intentions. The woods about the pond crackled and trembled under lightning bolts; one struck not a hundred feet away.

“Rather be drowned on the road than electrocuted under a tree,” shouted the Judge. “Let's get out of here!”

They turned the boat over, hastily gathered their gear, and ran for the road.

They pushed against a curtain of water, squishing along heads down at a steady pace. At two-thirty by the Judge's watch they were half a mile from the crest of Holy Hill.

“We're not doing bad!” roared the old man. “We've come about halfway. How d'ye feel, Johnny?”

“Reminiscent!” said Johnny. He never wanted to see another fish. “Isn't there
any
traffic on this road?”

“Let us pray!”

“Keep your weather eye peeled for anything on wheels. A scooter would look good just now!”

Five minutes later a figure swam into view on the opposite side of the road, heading in the direction from which they had come and leaning into the rain.

“Hi, there!” yelled Johnny. “Enjoying the swim?”

The man leaped like a deer. For a moment he glared in their direction, the width of the road between them. They saw a medium-sized man of spare build with a face dark gray as the skies, a stubble of light beard, and two timid, burning eyes. The rain had fluted the brim of his odd green hat and was coursing down his face in rivers; patched black pants plastered his shanks and the light tweed jacket with its leather elbow patches hung on his body like a wet paper sack. He carried a small black suitcase, the size of an overnight bag, made of some cheap material which was dissolving at the seams—a rope held it together. … For a moment only; then, in a lightning flash, water squirting out of his shapeless shoes, the man ran.

Soaked as they were, Johnny and the Judge stared up the road after the running man.

“Wonder who he is,” said the Judge. “Stranger around here.”

“Never look a stranger in the mouth,” said Johnny.

But the Judge kept staring.

“Foreigner, I'd say,” shrugged Johnny. “Or of recent foreign origin. He never got that green velour hat in the U.S.A.”

“Probably some itinerant heading for Cudbury and a mill job. Why do you suppose he ran like that, Johnny?”

“Sudden memories of the old country and the People's Police, no doubt. Two armed men.”

“Good Lord!” The Judge shifted his rifle self-consciously. “I hope the poor devil gets a lift.”

“Hope for yourself, Judge. And while you're at it, put in a good word for me!”

A minute or so later a gray shabby sedan bore down on them from behind, shedding water like a motorboat. They turned and shouted, but it was going over forty miles an hour and before they could half open their mouths it was past them and out of sight over the hill. They stood in the slap of its wake, dejected.

“That was Burney Hackett's car,” growled the Judge. “Darn his chinless hide! He never even saw us.”

“Courage, your honor. Only a mile or so more to go.”

“We could stop in at Hosey Lemmon's shack,” said the Judge doubtfully. “It's at the top of the hill there, in the woods off the road.”

“No, thanks, I filled my quota of filthy shacks long ago. I'll settle for your house and a clean towel.”

As they reached the top of Holy Hill, the Judge exclaimed, “There's old Lemmon now, footing it for home.”

“Another pioneer,” grumbled Johnny. “Doesn't he have a car, or a buggy, or a tricycle, either?”

“Hosey? Heavens, no.” Judge Shinn frowned. “What's he doing back up here? He's hired out to the Scotts.”

“Prefers high ground, of course!”

The Judge bellowed at the white-bearded hermit, but if Lemmon heard the hail he paid no attention to it. He disappeared in his hut, a ramshackle cabin with a torn tar-paper roof and a rusty stovepipe for a chimney.

Nothing human or mechanical passed them again. They fell into the Judge's house at three o'clock like shipwrecked sailors on a providential beach, stripped and showered and got into clean dry clothes as if the devil were after them; and at three-fifteen, just as they were sitting down in the Judge's living room with a glass of brown comfort and rags to clean the guns, the phone rang twice and the Judge sighed and said, “Now I don't consider that neighborly,” and he answered the phone and Burney Hackett's nasal voice, more nasal and less lucid than the Judge had ever heard it, announced with total unbelief that he had just walked over to the Adams house and found Aunt Fanny Adams stretched out on the floor of her paintin' room deader than a shucked corn.

“Aunt Fanny?” said Judge Shinn. “Did you say, Burney, Fanny Adams is
dead?
”

Johnny put his glass down.

The Judge hung up and blindly turned in his direction.

“Heart?” said Johnny, wishing he could look elsewhere.

“Brains.” The Judge groped. “Where's my gun? Brains, Burney Hackett says. They're spilled all down her smock.
Where's my gun!
”

They splashed up the path of the Adams house to the front door, which resisted. Judge Shinn rattled the brass knocker, pounded.

“Burney! It's me, Lewis Shinn!”

“I locked it, Judge,” said Burney Hackett's voice. “Come around the side to the kitchen door.”

They raced around to the east side of the house. The kitchen door was open to the rain. In the doorway stood Constable Hackett, very pale, with a yellow undertinge. The cold water was running in the sink near the door, as if he had just been using it. He reached over and turned off the tap and said, “Come on in.”

A puddle of muddy water lay inside the doorway. The muddy tracks of Hackett's big feet were all over the satiny inlaid linoleum.

It was a small modern kitchen, with an electric range and a big refrigerator and a garbage disposal unit in the sink. On the kitchen table stood a platter of half-eaten food, boiled ham and potato salad, a dish of berry pie, a pitcher of milk and a clean glass.

There was a swinging door on the wall opposite the outer door, and the Judge went to it slowly.

“Let me,” said Johnny. “I'm used to it.”

“No.”

The old man pushed the door aside. He made no sound at all for a long time. Then he cleared his throat and stepped into the inner room, and Johnny stepped in after him. Behind Johnny the telephone on the kitchen table rattled as Constable Hackett asked fretfully for a number.

The studio was almost square. Its two outside walls faced north and west and were all glass, with a view of Merton Isbel's cornfield to the north and, on the west beyond the stone wall, the church and cemetery. The cornfield stretched to the flat horizon.

She looked small lying on the floor, little more than a bundle of dry bones covered by a smeared smock, the rivulets of blood in the wrinkles already turning to the color of mud, the single exposed hand with its wavery blue veins—like a relief map of its ninety-one years—still grasping the paintbrush as if that, at least, could not be taken from her. The hand lay old and shriveled, at peace. On the easel behind her stood a painting. The palette she had been working with daubed the floorboards gaily under the north window, where it had fallen.

Johnny went back into the kitchen. He yanked a clean huck towel from a rack above the sink and returned to the studio. Burney Hackett put down the phone and followed.

Johnny covered the head and face gently.

“Two-thirteen,” said the Judge. “Remember the time. Remember it.” He turned to the blackened fireplace on the wall opposite the north picture window and pretended to be studying it.

Johnny squatted. The weapon was on the floor almost within her reach. It was a long heavy poker of black iron, fire-pocked and crusted with the smoke of generations. The blood on it was already dry.

“Does this poker come from the fireplace?” Johnny asked.

“Yes,” said the Judge's back. “Yes, it does. It was made by her grandfather, Thomas Adams, in a hand-forge that once stood on this property. The past, she couldn't get away from the past even in death.”

Who can? thought Johnny.

“Even this room. It was originally the kitchen and it's as old as the house. When Girshom died and she began to paint she blocked off the east end for a small modern kitchen and turned the balance into a studio. Knocked out the north and west walls for light, had a new floor laid, supply cabinets built … But she left the old fireplace. Said she couldn't live without it.” Judge Shinn laughed. “Instead, it killed her.”