Ellery Queen
The Glass Village
One...
“Now you take murder,” said Superior Court Judge Lewis Shinn, putting down the novel his house guest had left lying on the porch. “Murder in New England is not the simple matter you furriners from New York and such places hold it to be. No back-country Yank would have reacted like this criminal.”
“Fellow who wrote this, for your information,” said Johnny, “was born twenty-eight miles from here.”
Judge Shinn snorted, “Oh, you mean Cudbury!” as if the bench he had occupied there for the past thirty-two years had never raised the calluses he was currently sitting upon. “Anyway, he couldn’t have been. I’d know him.”
“He moved away at the ripe old age of eleven.”
“And that makes him an authority, I suppose! Not that you’ve damaged my thesis.” The Judge leaned over and dropped the book gingerly into his guest’s lap. “I know Cudbury people who are as ignorant of the real New England as this fellow. Or you, for that matter.”
Johnny settled back in one of the Judge’s rush-bottomed rockers with a grin. The early July sun in his face was smoothing the wrinkles around his eyes, as the Judge had promised, and Millie Pangman’s breakfast — consisting chiefly of their Peepers Pond catch of the day before — had accomplished the same feat for his stomach. He brought his feet up to the porch railing, sending a brittle paintfall to the warped floorboards.
“Cudbury,” Judge Shinn was sneering. “Yes, Cudbury is twenty-eight miles northeast of Shinn Corners as those pesky crows fly — look at ’em over yonder in Mert Isbel’s corn! — and just about ten thousand miles away from the Puritan spirit. What would you expect from a county seat? It’s practically a metropolis. You’ll never learn about the back-country Yankee from Cudbury.”
In the week Johnny had hung about Cudbury waiting for the Judge to clear his docket he had heard Shinn Corners referred to with snickers, like a vaudeville joke — Cudbury asserting its cultural superiority, the Judge had said. Johnny had grasped the reason on the drive down Wednesday evening. They had taken a chewed-up blacktop road out of Cudbury, bearing southwest. The road ran through flat tobacco farmland for a few miles, worsening as low hills appeared and the farms petered out. Then they were in scrubby, burned-over-looking country. The boy at the wheel of the Judge’s old Packard, Russell Bailey, had spat repeatedly out his window... not very tactfully, Johnny had thought, but Judge Shinn had seemed not to notice. Or perhaps the Judge was used to it. While court was in session he lived in Cudbury, in Bessie Brooks’s boarding house next to the County Lawyers’ Clock and within a hundred yards of the County Court House. But on occasional weekends he had Russ Bailey drive him down to Shinn Corners, where Millie Pangman would open the old Shinn house, air the beds and dust the ancient furniture, and cook his meals as if the Pangman farm across the road had no connection with her at all. Perhaps — Johnny remembered thinking — the fact that the road Millie Pangman had to cross to reach the Judge’s house was named Shinn had something to do with it. Not to mention the Shinn Free School, which had graduated her Merritt and her Eddie, and which little Deborah was to attend in the fall. Powerful name, Shinn. In Shinn Corners.
Twenty miles out of Cudbury the scrub had changed to second-growth timber as the hills thickened, to degenerate a few miles on into a land of marsh and bogs. Then at the twenty-five mile mark they had skirted Peepers Pond with its orchestra of bull fiddles, and suddenly they had topped the hill named Holy and seen Shinn Corners in the wrinkled valley a mile below, looking like a cluster of boils on an old man’s neck. Everything in the shifty dusk had seemed poor — the untidy land, the dried-up bed of what his kinsman said had once been a prosperous river, the huddle of once-white buildings. When Russ Bailey deposited them in the heart of the village on the uncut lawn of the Shinn house and drove the Judge’s Packard away to be garaged in Cudbury at ’Lias Wurley’s for the week of their stay, Johnny had felt an absurd sinking of the heart. It was different from Cudbury, all right. And Cudbury had been bad enough. It was the last place in the world a man could find an answer to anything.
Johnny smiled at himself. All hope was not dead, then.
The thought tickled him in a lazy sort of way.
“But you mentioned murder,” Johnny said. “I suppose you’re prepared with an impressive list of local homicide statistics?”
“Well, you’ve got me there,” admitted the old man. “We had one gaudy case in 1739 — infanticide by a seventeen-year-old girl who’d made the two-backed animal with a deacon of the church — that church there on the north corner, where your grandfather was baptized, married, and buried from. Then there was a regrettable corpse during the Civil War, the result of an argument between an Abolitionist and a Vallandigham Democrat. And we had a murder only about fifteen years ago... I suppose you wouldn’t say that three in two hundred and fifty-some years constitute much of a statistic, no. For which, by the way, the Lord be praised, and may He continue to stay the hand of Cain ad finem.” And Judge Shinn glowered at his village, a panorama of sunny emptiness. “Where the dickens was I?”
“The complexity of murder in re the back-country Yank,” Johnny said.
“Exactly. You have to understand that the Puritan spirit lies heavy within us, like gas on a troubled stomach. None of your New York or even Cudbury melting pots for us, to reduce us to some watery soup with a furrin handle. We’re concentrated in our substance, and if you set your nose to the wind you’ll get the whiff of us.”
“Not me,” said Johnny. “I’m all scattered to hell and gone.”
“Who said anything about you?” demanded the Judge. “Your disease is as about as close to Shinn Corners as Asiatic cholera. Don’t let your name fool you, my boy. You’re a heathen ignoramus, and it’s historical fact I’m preaching. Let me tell you about the Puritan nature that’s somehow been bred out of you. The Puritan nature boils down to just one thing — privacy. You let me be, neighbor, and I’ll do likewise. Unless and until, of course, the community is threatened. That’s a different pack of pickles. That’s where the contradiction starts operating.”
“Murder,” reminded his New York kinsman.
“I’m getting there,” said Judge Shinn, warming to it. “Murder to folks hereabout is more than a legal indiscretion. We’ve been taught with our mush that killing is forbidden by the Bible, and we’re mighty set on it. But we’re also all wrapped up in the sacred rights of the individual. Thou shalt not kill, but thou hast a powerful hankering sometimes, when your personal pinkytoe’s been trod on. Murder being a crime that wantonly destroys a man’s most precious piece of assessable property, we’re pulled back and forth like Rebecca Hemus trying to decide between her waistline and that extra helping of gravy and potatoes. It makes us sure of one thing: it’s got to be punished, and quick. Puritan justice doesn’t delay.
“Take that case I mentioned a minute ago,” said the Judge. “The one that happened just before the war — not the Korean business, but the big war.”
“Funny thing about wars,” said Johnny. “I was in both of them and I couldn’t see much difference in scale. The one you’re in is always the biggest one ever was.”
“I s’pose,” said the Judge. “Well, in those days Hubert Hemus’s brother Laban helped work the Hemus farm. Laban was a slowpoke, not too sha’p, mostly kept his mouth shut. But he never missed a town meeting or failed to vote right.
“The Hemuses employed a hired hand by the name of Joe, Joe Gonzoli, a cousin of ’Squale Gonzoli’s of Cudbury. Joe made a real good hand for the farmers who didn’t have modern equipment. Back on the farm in Italy, Joe used to say in his broken English, if you needed a new sickle or a hoe handle, why, you just made it. He had curly hair and black eyes like a woman’s, and he always had a joke and a snatch of Italian opera song for the girls.