Johnny stared.
The Judge studied him speculatively, pinching his lip.
“Yes?” said Johnny.
“No,” the Judge said. “I’ll let you tell me. Let’s go across the road and pay a visit to Josef Kowalczyk.”
Eddie Pangman was on late afternoon guard duty before the church. He no longer looked unhappy. He whistled as he marched, and he executed his sentry turns with a military gusto, in an excited solemnity that enlivened his long face and made it curiously little-boyish.
He passed the Judge and Johnny along gravely.
Drakeley Scott, patroling the rear, was another story. Drakeley Scott was not a boy exuberantly playing games. He was like a man who, under severe strain to escape the pressures of manhood, has gone back to the child. His pimpled face was pinchy, with a ghastly overcast; he held his narrow shoulders in tense readiness; there was something furtively eager in his excitement.
When he saw the two men he looked uncomfortable, and something of the hurt Johnny had seen in his eyes in Peter Berry’s store Friday morning came back into them; but only for a moment.
He said defiantly, “I don’t know if I’m s’posed to let you through, Judge. Hube Hemus said—”
“I’ll tell you what, Drakeley,” said Judge Shinn with tremendous earnestness. “At the first move Johnny Shinn or I makes to let the prisoner escape, you shoot to kill. Fair enough?”
The Scott boy flushed scarlet.
“Who has the key to the bin?”
“There’s a guard down there,” mumbled the boy.
They went past him down the crumbling stone steps to the church cellar. Johnny blinked after the sunshine. As he accommodated to the gloom he made out rough rafters overhead bearing irregular axmarks. They had been hewn out of whole oak trees; some of the original bark clung, looking petrified. There was a storage bin, an oldfashioned coal furnace, and the coalbin.
The coalbin was large and entirely enclosed. The door was slightly ajar, a lock hanging open from a new-looking hasp. Light came through chinks in the walls.
On a chair facing the bin door, a shotgun across his knees, sat Merton Isbel. The chair was part of an old broken pew, which seemed to Johnny fitting. The craggy features bunched at sight of him.
“Someone in there with him, Mert?” asked the Judge.
“Mr. Sheare.” Isbel’s bass voice had an unused sound.
Judge Shinn touched Johnny’s arm. “Before we go in,” he said in a low voice.
“Yes?”
“I want you to pretend you’re interested in him.”
“In Kowalczyk? But I am.”
“Question him, Johnny.”
Johnny nodded.
The minister’s voice answered the Judge’s knock, and they entered the bin.
The only coal Johnny saw was a small heap in a corner, apparently the leftovers of the previous winter’s supply. But coal dust was everywhere. An attempt had been made — by the Sheares, he felt sure — to sweep it up, but the prisoner’s movements had scattered it again; and nothing could be done about the soot on the walls, which looked as if they had been sprayed with lampblack.
The one window high in the rough foundation wall, the chute window, had been newly boarded up. Light came from a 25-watt bulb in a naked ceiling socket protected by a wire cage.
Josef Kowalczyk sat on the edge of a cot drinking hot tea out of a water glass. A folding table was strewn with the remains of a meal. Mr. Sheare was stacking the dishes on a tray when they came in.
“He’s had a hearty dinner,” said the minister cheerfully. “Wanted his tea in a glass with lemon and jelly, European style. Judge, don’t you think he’s lookin’ a good deal better?”
“I do, Mr. Sheare.” The Judge glanced at the dishes. “Some of Elizabeth’s famous boiled dinner, I see.”
The minister said in a firm voice, “Someone must take care of his bodily needs. I wish we could do somethin’ about this coal dust.”
“You’ve done wonders, Mr. Sheare.”
A white chamberpot stood in one corner.
The minister’s troubled smile returned. He picked up the tray and went out. The door remained open.
Merton Isbel sat watching them.
The prisoner set down his empty glass with a start, as if he had just noticed them. He started to rise.
“Sit down, sit down, Kowalczyk,” said the Judge testily.
Kowalczyk sank back, staring at Johnny.
He was wearing his own clothes again; Elizabeth Sheare had evidently tried to clean as well as mend them, with indifferent results. The gray flannel shirt she had washed and ironed. Either his shoes were beyond repair or the village fathers had decreed their confiscation: he wore old carpet slippers, presumably Mr. Sheare’s. His colorless hair was combed; aside from a badly swollen lower lip, where he had lost the tooth, his face was unmarked.
The stubble of blondish beard was salted with gray and white now; Johnny suspected that Mr. Sheare had been forbidden to provide a razor. Beneath the stubble and the dark gray skin the face was skeletal, with flaring jaws and high cheekbones, the ears wide and prominent, the forehead low with heavily furred bulges of bone above the eyes. The eyes themselves, still timid, still burning, were deep in his head. His neck was loose and stringy over a large Adam’s apple; it looked like the neck of a gobbler. His hands were work hands, joints swollen, nails cracked, fingertips splayed. He kept them clasped between his thighs and his torso bent forward, as if his groin still ached.
He looked sixty-five. It was hard to remember that he was in his early forties.
“This gentleman,” said Judge Shinn to the staring man, “is interested in your story, Kowalczyk. He’s had a lot of experience talking to men in trouble. His name is Mr. Shinn.”
“Sheen,” said the prisoner. “Mister Sheen, what they do to me?” He spoke awkwardly, with a thick accent.
Johnny glanced at the Judge. The Judge nodded.
“Kowalczyk,” said Johnny. “Do you know why you are here in this cellar, a prisoner?”
The man raised his thin shoulders, dropped them. It was an Old World gesture, saying: I know, I do not know, what does it matter?
“Tell me everything that happened yesterday,” said Johnny. “But first I wish to know more about you, Kowalczyk, your life, where you came from, where you were going. Will you tell me?”
“Tell Judge before,” said the prisoner. “What they do to me?”
“Tell me,” Johnny smiled.
The prisoner unclasped his hands and rubbed the palms slowly together, addressing the floor of the coalbin. “Me Polish. Had got wife, two child, old mother, old father in Poland. Nazis come, kill them. Me, put labor camp. After war, Communists. No good. Escape, come America, have cousin New York, live by cousin three year. Try get job—”
“Did you have a trade in the old country?”
“Work l’ather.”
“Lather?” said Johnny. “You mean you were a barber?”
“No, no. L’ather, like for shoe.”
“Oh, leather! Leather worker? Tanning, that sort of thing?”
“Yes,” said Josef Kowalczyk with a trace of animation. “Good worker, me. Old father, he learn me trade.” Then the shoulders went up and down again, and the animation died. “In America no can get job l’ather worker. No got union card. I like belong union, but got no money pay dues. Got no ref — no ref—”
“Work references?”
“Yes. So no can work l’ather job. Then cousin die, heart. Go live Polish family Brooklyn, friend my cousin. Work odd job, one day here, two day there. Friend get ’nother baby, no more room Kowalczyk. Say why not go country, Josef, get work farm. I go, I walk country. Get job one farm, two farm, walk more, work again—”
The prisoner stopped, glancing at Judge Shinn helplessly.
“Apparently,” explained the Judge, “he’s been an itinerant farm worker for the past several years, wandering all over New England. From what I gather he doesn’t like farm work, feels it’s beneath him, and has never given up the hope that he’d find a job at his old trade. Where were you coming from, Kowalczyk, when you passed through this village yesterday?”