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“That’s the third time you’ve mentioned Aunt Fanny,” said Johnny. “Just who is Aunt Fanny?”

“Aunt Fanny?” The Judge seemed surprised. “Aunt Fanny Adams. That’s her house t’other side of the church. That hewn overhang, one of the few left in this part of the state.”

“Fanny Adams...” Johnny sat up with a thump. “The painter of primitives?”

“Aya.”

“Aunt Fanny Adams comes from Shinn Corners?”

“Born here. It’s this valley most of her painting’s about. Aunt Fanny’s pretty good, I’m told.”

“Good!” Johnny stared across Four Corners Road, past the little church. He could just make out the old New England house, with its flowering garden.

“Didn’t start diddling around with paints till she was eighty, after her husband — Girshom Adams, he was her third cousin — died. Only kin Aunt Fanny’s got left is Ferriss Adams from over Cudbury, her grandnephew, practices law there. She was kind of lonely, I guess.”

“She’s said to be a fabulous old lady. Could I possibly meet her?”

“Aunt Fanny?” Judge Shinn was astonished. “Couldn’t miss her if you tried, ’specially when she hears your grandfather was Horace Shinn. Parade forms at her house, seeing she’s the oldest resident outside the cemetery. You won’t find her much different from any other old woman around here. They’re all pa’t and pa’cel of the land. Know every bulb in their gardens and every surveyor’s description in their land deeds. They outlive their men and they’re as indestructible, seems like, as the rocks in their fences.”

“She lives alone?”

“All alone. Does her own housework, needlework, cooking, puts up her pickles and preserves — they’re like ants, these old women; their routine is practically an instinct.”

“Well, I’ll be darned,” said Johnny. “Who handles her business affairs?”

“Why, she does,” chuckled the Judge. “She sold a painting last week for fifteen hundred dollars. ‘I just paint what I see,’ she says. ‘And if folks are fool enough to pay for what they could have for nothin’ if only they’d use the two eyes the Lord gave them, let ’em pay through the nose.’ Ferriss Adams takes care of her contracts, but he’ll be the first to tell you there isn’t a word in them she doesn’t know backwards and forwards. She’s made a fortune out of her Christmas card, wallpaper, and textile designs alone. Minute some big city dealer tries to skin her, she sits him down with some of her apple pan dowdy and cream she separated with her own hands — she keeps a Jersey cow, milks it herself twice a day and gives most of the milk to the school — and before he knows it he’s agreed to her terms.”

“What does she do with all her money?”

“Invests some, gives the rest away. If not for her, Samuel Sheare would have had to look for another church years ago. His only income is what Aunt Fanny donates and his wife Elizabeth makes as our grade school teacher. And Aunt Fanny’s made up most of our annual town deficit now for years. Used to be my chore,” said the Judge wryly, “but my income isn’t what is used to be... And all that comes out of Aunt Fanny’s diddling with paintbrushes.” He shook his head. “Beats me. Most of her daubs look like a child could do ’em.”

“You’d get a violent argument from the art critics.” Johnny stared over at the Adams property. “I should think Shinn Corners would be proud of her.”

“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.