The Wooden Shepherdess by Richard Hughes Read Free Book Online Page A

miles from the State road where through-traffic went and the all-night liquor trucks roared with their lights out down to New York. Moreover apart from the church (and a few scattered shacks in the woods), Augustine’s “village” had very few buildings to boast: just the Big Warren Place, the Little Warren Place, and a smithy.
    He wrote of the church—which was tiny and old, looked nearly disused and stood half buried in trees. Its proportions were naïve and lovely (Ree said “somebody British called Wren” had sent over the plans, but if so it was Wren in unwontedly simple “Shepherdess” mood). All wooden she was, that little deserted shepherdess; and barring her shingles, her green copper vane and her bell which nowadays couldn’t be tolled, all white—apart from peeps where the weathered white paint had peeled and showed her shell-pink undercoat. Along-side the church stood abandoned an ancient and gaunt Tin Lizzie (a T-model Ford) without any engine: it looked (he wrote) “like a giant black daddy-long-legs in widow’s weeds” with its height and its tatters of canopy. Standing so long it had sunk in the earthen road right down to its hubs.
    Next he described the empty “Big Warren Place.” Behind nearly impassable bushes, buried in trees and against a solid background of trees, it reared the top of a lofty Doric façade with most of the architrave missing. This too was all wooden of course, and once painted white like the church. It was huge (by New England standards), and haunted, and half fallen down.
    The “Little Warren Place” had doubtless been built as its dowerhouse. Now it lodged the Neighborhood Store, selling everything: boots and canned-beef and hairnets and axes and cough-cure, as well as those 95-cent blue canvas work-shirts which everyone wore—even girls. There were staybones and lamp-wicks, and whisky-stills (leastwise the parts for one, listing each separate item merely as “Useful for Various Purposes”). Old Ali Baba slept up above his cave in all that was left of a handsome Colonial bedroom: “I went up with him once to look for the right size of nails, and three legs of the big brass bedstead had gone through the floor.” The neighborhood stock of kerosene stood in a powder-closet. Home-made Infallible Cattle Cure too was dispensed from a one-legged object that once was a Sheffield-plate urn; and, this village store served also as Club, where everyone met whether wanting to buy things or not....
    All this seemed to be perfectly safe to write home (though the letter would have to be mailed in New York, for Augustine knew all about postmarks). And yet he paused. To Augustine himself it was just the place’s forgotten and tumble-down look which seemed so attractive, compared with the cared-for and handsome “Colonial” villages all-dolled-up-to-the-nines which he’d seen on his way here; but what of the Mary he wrote for? The English in general only cross oceans with all the right introductions and go to the usual places: it wouldn’t be easy to make her believe such a scene could exist over here, for this New England corner was certainly fifty years more out of date than anything left in the Olde one. The Wadamy circle’s American travels were all so strictly confined to skyscraping towns and exclusive resorts, and the oh-so-hospitable gilded chain of the friends of their friends....
    The smithy, alas, was in an even worse state and provided one nothing at all picturesque to write home because it had burned down too often (Ree said of the smith that fires were the principal source of his livelihood). This year’s edition had merely been thrown together from second-hand galvanised sheets already lacy with rust or gone into actual holes. The smith mended farm machines—when he could (which was seldom); and jobs which defeated him just stayed standing around “Which at