The lively eyes sparkled. “But I’ve also got me a Deepfreeze, and modern plumbin’, and an electric range. The furniture’s for memories. The range is for tellin’ me I’m alive.”
“I’ve read a very similar remark, Mrs. Adams,” said Johnny, “about your painting.”
“Do they say that?” The old lady chuckled. “Then they’re a sight sma’ter than I give ’em credit for. Most times seems like they talk Chinese... You take Grandma Moses. Now she’s a mighty fine painter. Only most of her paintin’s what she remembers of the way things used to be. I like rememberin’, too — I can talk your ear off ’bout the way life was when I was a girl in this village. But that’s talkin’. When I find a paintbrush in my hand, rememberin’ and talkin’ just don’t seem to satisfy me. I like to paint what I see. If it all comes out funny-lookin’ — what Prue Plummer’s friends call ‘art’ — why, I expect it’s ’cause of how I see the colors, the way things set to me... and mostly what I don’t know ’bout paintin’!”
Johnny said earnestly, “Do you really believe that what you see is worth looking at, Mrs. Adams?”
But that was a question she never got to answer. Because at that moment Millie Pangman waddled over to whisper in Aunt Fanny’s ear, and the old lady jumped up and exclaimed, “My land! There’s lots more in the freezer, Millie,” and excused herself to him with a sharp look and went away. And by the time she got back with more ice cream for the children, Johnny had been boarded and seized by Prue Plummer.
Prue Plummer was a thin vibrant lady of valorous middle age with a liverish face coming to a point and lips which she kept preening with a tireless tongue. She was dressed in a smart summer suit of lavender linen which looked as outrageously out of place in that Colonial roomful of plainly dressed farm women as a Mondrian would have looked on the wall. Two big copper hoops dangled from her ears and a batik scarf, bound round her gray hair, trailed coquettisly over one shoulder.
“May I, Mr. Shinn?” said Prue Plummer, digging her bloody talons into his arm. “I’ve been watching for my chance to monopolize you. I could hug Millie Pangman for luring dear old Aunt Fanny away. Such a darling! Of course, she doesn’t know beans about art, and brags about it, which is such a delightful part of her quaintness, because of course she really doesn’t—”
“I understand,” said Johnny rather abruptly, “you sell antiques, Miss Plummer.”
“Oh, I dabble at it. I do have some good rock crystal and old Dresden, and rather an amusing collection of miniature lamps, and a few old Colonial and Early American pieces when I can persuade my neighbors to let me market them—”
“I should think,” said Johnny, not without malice, “that this house of Mrs. Adams’s would be a gold strike for you.”
“Haven’t I tried, just,” laughed Prue Plummer. “But she’s simply making too much money. Isn’t it disgusting? You just watch the vultures descend when Aunt Fanny passes on. She has a stenciled ‘rockee’ in her attic that’s worth a fortune. You know there aren’t many good old things left undiscovered in New England — oh, dear, such a bother... Hello! Our minister and his wife. Mr. and Mrs. Sheare, Mr. Shinn?”
In the exchange, he managed to throw off the grappling iron.
Samuel and Elizabeth Sheare made a sort of clerical Mr. and Mrs. Jack Spratt. The minister was a lean little elderly man with a troubled smile; his wife was stout and anxious. Both had an air of vague alertness. Mr. Sheare, it appeared, had inherited the Shinn Corners parish from his father; Elizabeth Sheare had been a Urie, a family which no longer existed. Between them they had catered to the village’s spiritual and educational needs for thirty-five years. They had no children, they said wistfully as they watched Peter Berry’s four stuff themselves. Did Mr. Shinn have any? No, said Johnny again, he was not married. Ah, said Mr. Sheare, that’s too bad, as if it really were. And he pressed closer to his wife. They were lonely people, Johnny thought, and harried. Mr. Sheare’s God must seem very near and dear to them both. He made a mental note to go to church on Sunday.
Johnny met the Hemus family, and the Hacketts, and Merton Isbel, and Drakeley Scott’s mother Mathilda (Drakeley was not there), and old Hosey Lemmon, and Emily Berry, and all the children young and grown, and he was a little confused and uneasy. He felt New Yorkish, which he did not often feel. He should be feeling Shinn Cornerish, since it was supposedly in his blood. The truth is, Johnny thought, I’ve got less kinship with these people than I had with the Koreans and Chinese. What’s the matter with them? Is everybody in the world a carrier of nastiness and doubt?
The Hemuses were disturbing. Hubert Hemus was a slight one-syllabled man with dirty hands, stiff in his Sunday clothes. He shed a steady, unpleasant power. Nothing moved in his gaunt face but his sharp jaws; he looked at things with his whole head, as if his eyes had no independent maneuverability. But even with his head turned, he seemed on the watch. He joked and talked to the other men without enjoyment. It was impossible to think of him as capable of changing his mind or seeing another point of view. Johnny was not surprised to learn that Hube Hemus had been First Selectman of Shinn Corners for over twenty years.
His wife, Rebecca, was a great cow of a woman, swinging all over. She giggled with the other women, but always with an eye on her husband.
Their children were formidable. They had twin sons, Tommy and Dave, hulking eighteen-year-olds, powerfully muscled, with heavy blue jaws and expressionless eyes. They were going to make mean and dangerous men, Johnny thought, remembering some of the hard cases he had met in the Army. The daughter, Abbie, had the family eyes — a precocious twelve-year-old with overdeveloped breasts who kept watching the big boys brazenly.
Then there was Merton Isbel and his family. There was something queer about the Isbels. Johnny had seen them coming into the village in a battered farm wagon drawn by a team of plow-horses, the big craggy farmer woodenly at the reins — needing only the beard, Johnny thought, to look like old John Brown — his daughter Sarah and his granddaughter Mary-Ann sitting like mice at his side. Isbel was a widower, Judge Shinn had said, and Sarah and her child lived with him. The Judge had seemed reluctant to talk about them.
Isbel stood about with Hubert Hemus and Orville Pangman and Peter Berry and the Judge talking weather and crops and prices, but his daughter and her child sat by themselves in a corner as if they were looking through a window at an unreachable luxury. No one went near them except Fanny Adams. The old lady brought Mary-Ann a plateful of ice cream and cookies and a glass of milk, and pressed some punch and cake on the woman; but at her evident urging that they join the others, the woman shook her head with a faint smile and the child looked frightened. They remained where they were. The woman Sarah had large, sad eyes. Only when they turned on her little girl did they glow, and then only for a moment.
Johnny was introduced to Merton Isbel by Constable Burney Hackett. The old farmer barely acknowledged the introduction and turned away.
“Did I say something wrong to Mr. Isbel, Mr. Hackett?” Johnny asked, smiling.
“Shucks, no.” Hackett was a lean chinless man with birdlike shoulders and a permanent furrow between his eyes. “It’s just Mert’s way. You’d have to live here forty-odd years before Mert’d think you had a right to cast a vote. And even then he’d hardly pass the time o’ day.
“Nobody in Shinn Corners is what you’d call real modern,” said Constable Burney Hackett in his nasal drawl, “but Mert’s still back in McKinley’s administration. Ain’t changed his farmin’ methods from the way it was when he was a boy. Won’t listen to reason any more ’n a deaf Baptist. Does his own horseshoein’! Mighty mulish man, Mert.”