The Glass Village

“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.