The Glass Village Read Online Free PDF Page B

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?”
    â€œHappy 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.
    â€œThe 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.”
    â€œYet,” 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.
    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.”
    â€œI’ve read a very similar remark, Mrs. Adams,” said Johnny, “about your painting.”
    â€œDo 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