The Glass Village

“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.