Ronnie looked away. “I don’t know who it was,” he answered.
“Come on, boy. Speak up if you know!”
“Really, Gramps. I’m not sure. I don’t want to say until I’m real sure.”
Grandfather didn’t press the point. “Ronnie,” he said, “this village has been the love and joy of my life. But lately it’s just as if—just as if the prophecy were meant to come true.”
“What prophecy, Gramps?” Ronnie asked. “Is that what the secret’s all about?”
“Yes, in a way, I suppose.” The old man looked out over the valley and then back to the boy. “I reckon the time has come when you must hear the story. It can’t die the way I’d hoped it would. The past won’t let it.”
Gramps took out his pipe and tobacco pouch from his pocket. He filled the bowl of the pipe and placed the stem between his yellowed teeth.
“Turn your mind back, boy, to what I was telling you the other evening when we were talking about the candlesticks.” He lit a match and drew heavily on the stem of the pipe until the tobacco glowed crimson. Then he exhaled the blue smoke in a cloud that rose over his head. “I told you about your great-great-grandfather Ezra and his partner Jacob Williams, if you’ll recollect. This Williams fellow was a kind of no-good scoundrel, from everything I’ve heard tell, and why Ezra got bamboozled into such an arrangement, nobody’ll ever know. Took him in as a full partner he did, lock, stock, and barrel, or in other words—Glassworks, land, and merchandise.”
“Then half this land doesn’t really belong to us, Gramps? Is that right?”
“Yep, I reckon so, if there’s anyone around to claim it. I’ll come to that later. Well, anyway, these two partners seemed to have gotten along well for a number of years. The business flourished. Rorth glassware got to be known practically around the world. Then around 1886 or thereabouts, things started worsening up, and by 1888 the company was well-nigh bankrupt. Now this Jacob Williams, who was keeping the books, finally got around to telling your great-great-grandfather how bad things were, and darned if he didn’t accuse Ezra of milking the company dry. Yep, he claimed Ezra had been stealing quantities of money and glassware from the company. And this Williams didn’t stop at that. He spread it all around the neighborhood, and pretty soon people began to believe it was true.”