“Well,” said the Judge, “Joe and Labe had trouble from the start. Labe would make out he couldn’t understand Joe’s English, and Joe would poke fun at Labe’s slow ways. I guess Labe didn’t like being outplowed and outworked; that Joe was a working fool. They got into quite a competition. Hube Hemus didn’t mind. He had a real brisk farm in those days.
“Now Labe had never looked at a woman twice, far as any of us knew,” continued Judge Shinn, “till Adaline Greave grew up to be a strapping fine woman with the build of a Holstein. Then Labe took to taking baths regularly and hanging about the Town Hall square nights, or at church socials when Adaline would be helping out. She kind of led Labe on, too. At least Labe thought so, and everybody said it was working out to something. But one night Laban went looking for Adaline after a church supper, and he found her in the hayloft of the Farmers’ Exchange Feed and Grain barn across from the church, that Peter Berry runs. She was lying in Joe Gonzoli’s arms.”
The Judge squinted through the V made by his shoes on the porch rail as if it were a gunsight. “There was a pitchfork sticking in a bale, and Labe went crazy mad. He pluck that fork out and made for Joe with a roar. But Joe was too quick for him. He rolled Adaline aside and like a cat came up under the fork with the knife he carried in his belt. There was a terrible fight. It ended with Joe’s knife sinking up to the haft between Laban Hemus’s ribs.”
Through his pedal sight Judge Shinn fixed on the flagpole which stuck out of the wedge of village green fronting his property like an anniversary candle. “I’ll never forget the hullabaloo that night on the green there. The men buzzed around the flagpole and cannon and your forebear Asahel Shinn’s monument as if war’d been declared. Burney Hackett was constable then, too — that’s the Hackett house across Shinn Road there, on the south corner — and Burney had quite a time getting Joe into his house, which he figured was the safest place to wait for the state police. Labe’s brother Hubert tried to get at the prisoner with his bare hands. Hube is a skinny fellow, but that night he was all puffed out and vibrating like a frog. Earl Scott and Mr. Sheare, the minister, had to sit on him till Burn Hackett got Joe Gonzoli behind locked doors. Nor was Hube the only one het up. Everybody’s sympathy was with the Hemuses. If this had been down South...
“But it was New England back-country, Johnny. Vengeance is mine, saith the minister, speaking for the Lord; but the Puritan’s always torn between his sovereign individuality and the ‘Thou shalt nots.’ I don’t deny it was a narrow squeak, but in the end we compromised. We signed over our personal interest in Joe Gonzoli to the community. And that’s where we made our mistake.”
“Mistake?” said Johnny, bewildered.
“Well, we’d liked Labe. But more important, he was one of us. He belonged to the town and the land, and no Papist furriner with tricky furrin ways and Italian songs had a right to come between a Shinn Corners Congregationalist Republican member of a founding family and the girl he was fixing to marry. Justice was what we wanted, meaning that if we couldn’t light fires under Joe Gonzoli with our own hands, we could at least see to it he fried in that Chair up at the Williamston prison practically immediately.
“So we let the state police come, and they took Joe from Burney Hackett’s custody, and they shot out of Shinn Corners followed by most of the village in cars and buggies going lickety-split, which is not the way your New England farmer usually goes. They just about got Joe safely locked up in the county jail. Judge Webster sat in the case, best fly-fisherman in Cudbury County. At least, he used to be. You remember, Johnny — I introduced you to Andy Webster last week.”
“Hang Andy Webster,” said Johnny. “What was the verdict?”
“With Adaline Greave to testify that it was Laban attacked Joe first with the pitchfork?” said Judge Shinn. “Why, that Cudbury jury never hesitated. Brought in an acquittal.
“And Shinn Corners,” said the Judge, “never did get over that verdict, Johnny. We still slaver about it. It shook our Puritan sense of justice to the crosstrees. In our view Laban had been defending his hearth and our community from the dirty depredations of an opera-singing furriner. The fact that Labe Hemus didn’t happen to have a hearth at the time he was defending it we dismissed as the puniest technicality; Adaline’d practically been promised. We made it so hot for the Greaves that Elmer Greave had to sell his place off and move downstate. Joe Gonzoli wisely never came back to pick up his satchel. He just ran, and to this day not even ’Squale Gonzoli’s heard from him.
“That verdict,” said the Judge, “taught us we were living in a hostile, new sort of world, a world which didn’t understand beans about the rights of God-fearing, taxpaying Shinn Corners property owners. We’d been betrayed and corrupted and shamed. It was just about the last straw.”
“I can understand that,” said Johnny. “Maybe I’m not so much of a furriner as you think.”
But Judge Shinn ignored that. “’Cause things hadn’t been going well with us for a long time. A hundred years ago Shinn Corners was bigger than Comfort is today. You can still see the ruins of houses and barns and mills on the Comfort road past the Hemus farm and up beyond the Isbel and Scott farms on Four Corners Road. That three-story red brick building across from the firehouse is the remains of the Urie Cassimere Factory—”
“The what kind of factory?” asked Johnny.
“Cassimere, what they used to call cashmere. Around 1850 the Urie factory employed over two hundred people, made as fine a line of woolens as you could find in New England. Then Comfort and Cudbury and other towns around drew off a lot of our working people with a spurt of new mills, eventually the river dried up, and what with one thing and another all that’s gone. We’re reduced to a total population of thirty-six.”
“Thirty-six!”
“And that includes fifteen minors. Thirty-six, going to be thirty-seven in December — Emily Berry’s fifth is on the way. Thirty-seven, that is, if nobody dies. Old Aunt Fanny is ninety-one. Earl Scott’s father Seth is in his eighties... might just as well be dead, he has senile obesity and lives in a wheelchair. For that matter, so does Earl. He’s helpless, too, had a stroke five-six years ago that left him paralyzed. Hosey Lemmon — nobody knows how old Hosey is. I’ll tell you about old man Lemmon sometime; it’s an interesting story.
“Twelve families,” murmured Judge Shinn. “That’s what we’re down to. If you leave out the unattached ones — me, Prue Plummer, Aunt Fanny, Hosey, and Calvin Waters — there’s only seven families.
“We’re down to four producing herds, in an area that during the last century had some of the best dairy farms in this section of the state. Hemus, Isbel, Scott, Pangman. And there’s a question how long they can keep going, with milk fetching eight cents a quart from the Association out of which they have to pay for cartage and rental of the cans.
“Only store left is Peter Berry’s over there on the east corner, and the only reason Peter makes out is he gets the trade of the Comfort people who happen to live closer to Shinn Corners than to their own stores... So you might say,” said the Judge dryly, “we have nothing left but fond memories and a tradition. Let the rest of New England welcome the durn New Yorkers and the rest of the furriners. We want none of ’em.”
“Except you,” said his guest.
‘Well, I’m sort of on the sidelines,” grinned Judge Shinn. “Privileged character. I and Aunt Fanny, that is.”