The Glass Village

“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!”