“It’s a hundred ninety-one sixty-three,” said Peter Berry.
“On second thought,” said the Judge, “you can go to hell. Come along, Johnny!”
And as Johnny caught up with the old man, whose gnarled neck was as red as the flannel shirt swaying over his head, he heard the Judge mutter, “Trash!”
The Judge seemed ashamed of himself. He mumbled something about getting to be a crotchety old fool, losing his temper that way, after all Peter Berry was within his rights, what was the use of trying to keep people from drowning when the whole damned countryside was under water, and would Johnny excuse him, he’d go lie down for a while and think over his speech.
“You go right ahead,” said Johnny. He watched the Judge head across the intersection for the Shinn house with his old man’s stiffkneed bounce, wondering just what sort of speech Shinn Corners was going to hear that day.
Johnny Shinn wandered about the village of his paternal ancestors for a few minutes. He went up Four Corners Road past the Berry house with its droopy front-and-side porch and its ugly Victorian turret, stopped before the decayed box of a Town Hall with its flaking sign, examined the abandoned woolen factory beyond, windowless, its entrance doors gone, the ground floor caved in... stood on the rim of the ditch behind the factory building. It was choked with sickly birches and ground pine and underbrush — and, away to the south, tin cans and rubbish.
He trudged back to the intersection and crossed over to the north corner. He inspected the old horse trough with its leaking faucet and green slime, the church and the parsonage set in lawns overrun by crab grass, chickweed, and dandelions, the little parsonage strangling in the clutch of ivy and wistaria vines and evergreens set too close to the walls...
Beyond the parsonage lay the cemetery, but Johnny suddenly did not feel like exploring the cemetery. He suddenly felt that he had had enough of Shinn Corners for one morning, and he crossed over to the west corner, skirted the now-deserted green with its toy cannon and its chipped monument and its mocking flagpole... set foot on the Judge’s precincts, achieved the skaky porch, and sat down in the rocker and rocked.
“Lewis Shinn’s a reprobate. The idea him not fetchin’ you to visit soon’s you came,” said Aunt Fanny Adams. “I like young men. ’Specially young men with nice eyes.” She peered at him through her silver spectacles. “Color of polished pewter,” she decided. “Clean and homey-lookin’. But I expect Lewis likes ’em, too. There’s no more selfish o’ God’s creatures than a cantankerous old man. My Girshom was the most selfish man in Cudbury County. But he did have the nicest eyes.” She sighed. “Come set.”
“I think,” said Johnny, “you’re beautiful.”
“Do ye, now?” She patted the chair beside her, pleased. It was a comb-backed hickory chair, an American Windsor that would have brought tears of avarice to the eyes of an antique hunter. “A Shinn, are ye? There was always somethin’ about a Shinn. Joshers, the lot o’ ye!”
“If I had the nerve,” said Johnny, “I’d ask you to marry me.”
“Ye see?” She chuckled deep in her throat, patting the chair again. “Who was your mother?”
Johnny was overwhelmed. She was a rawboned old lady with knotty farmer hands and eyes sharp and twinkly as snow in Christmas sunshine, set in a face wrinkled and pungent, like an apple treefall. Ninety-one years had dragged everything down, a bosom still full, a great motherly abdomen — everything but the spirit that touched the wrinkles with grace and kept her ancient hands warm. Johnny thought he had never seen a wiser, shrewder, kinder face.
“I never knew her, Mrs. Adams. She died when I was very small.”
“Ah, that’s no good,” she said, shaking her old head. “It’s the mothers make the men. Who reared ye, your father?”
“No, Mrs. Adams.”
“Too busy makin’ a livin’? I saw him last when he was no bigger than a newborn calf. Never came back to Shinn Corners. How is your father?”
“He’s dead, too.”
The shrewd eyes examined him. “Ye’ve got your grandfather Horace Shinn’s mouth. Stubborn. And I don’t like your smile.”
“Sorry,” murmured Johnny.
“It’s got nothin’ behind it. Are ye married?”
“Heavens, no.”
“Ought to be,” Aunt Fanny Adams decided. “Some woman’d make a man of ye. What d’ye do, Johnny Shinn?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothin’?” She was appalled. “But there’s somethin’ wrong with ye, boy! Why, I’m over ninety, and I ain’t found time to do half the things I want to! Never heard the like. How old are ye?”
“Thirty-one.”
“And ye don’t do nothin’? Are ye rich?”
“Poor as poor.”
“Don’t ye want to do somethin’?”
“Sure. But I don’t know what.”
“But weren’t ye trained for nothin’?”
Johnny laughed. “Studied law, or started to. The war stopped that. Then afterward I couldn’t seem to decide on anything. Sort of drifted, trying one thing and another. Came Korea, and I jumped back in. Since then...” He shrugged. “Let’s talk about you, Mrs. Adams. You’re a far more interesting subject.”
But the withered mouth did not relax. “Unhappy, ain’t ye?”
“Happy as a lark,” said Johnny. “What’s there to be unhappy about? Do you know this is a red-letter day in my life, Mrs. Adams?”
She took his limp hand between her warm papery ones. “All right,” she said. “But I’m not lettin’ ye off the hook, Johnny Shinn. We got to have a real long talk...”
It was eleven o’clock when Judge Shinn had walked him up Shinn Road past the church to turn into the Adams gate and through a garden fragrant with pansies and roses and dogwood trees to the simple stone step and the gracious door overhung by the second story and the steep-pitched roof; and there she had been, this wonderful old woman, receiving her neighbors with dry hospitality, a word for everyone, and a special sharp one for the Judge.
Her house was like herself — clean, old, and filled with beauty. Color ran everywhere, the same bright colors that flamed on her canvases. And the Shinn Corners folk who crowded her parlor seemed freshened by them, simplified and renewed. There was a great deal of laughter and joking; the parlor was filled with nasal good-fellowship. Johnny gathered that Aunt Fanny Adams’s “open house” occasions were highlights in the dull life of the village.
The old lady had prepared pitchers of milk and great platters of cookies and heaps of ice cream for the children. Johnny tasted blueberry muffins and johnnycake, crabapple jelly and cranberry conserve and grape butter. There was coffee and tea and punch. She kept feeding him as if he were a child.
He had very little time with her. She sat beside him in her long black dress with its high collar, without ornament except for an oldfashioned cameo locket-watch which she wore on a thin gold chain about her neck — talking of the long ago when she had been a girl in Shinn Corners, how things had been in those days, and how looking backward was a folly reserved for the very old.
“The young ones can’t live in their kinsmen’s past,” she said, smiling. “Life is tryin’ to upset applecarts. Death is pushin’ a handplow in a tractor age. There’s nothin’ wicked about change. In the end the same good things — what I s’pose ye’d call ‘values’ — survive. But I like keepin’ up to date.”
“Yet,” Johnny smiled back, “your house is full of the most wonderful antiques.” Death, he thought, is standing still in a hurricane. But he did not say it.