The Glass Village

“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.”