Back Home: Being the Narrative of Judge Priest and His People

The hot round hub of a sun had wheeled low enough to dart its thin red spokes in through the westerly windows when Durham called his last witness. As Judge Priest settled himself solidly in the witness chair with the deliberation of age and the heft of flesh, the leveled rays caught him full and lit up his round pink face, with the short white-bleached beard below it and the bald white-bleached forehead above. Durham eyed him half doubtfully. He looked the image of a scatter-witted old man, who would potter and philander round a long time before he ever came to the point of anything. So he appeared to the others there, too. But what Durham did not sense was that the homely simplicity of the old man was of a piece with the picture of the courtroom, that he would seem to these watching, hostile people one of their own kind, and that they would give to him in all likelihood a sympathy and understanding that had been denied the clothing merchant and the broadclothed banker.

He wore a black alpaca coat that slanted upon him in deep, longitudinal folds, and the front skirts of it were twisted and pulled downward until they dangled in long, wrinkly black teats. His shapeless gray trousers were short for him and fitted his pudgy legs closely. Below them dangled a pair of stout ankles encased in white cotton socks and ending in low-quarter black shoes. His shirt was clean but wrinkled countlessly over his front. The gnawed and blackened end of a cane pipestem stood out of his breast pocket, rising like a frosted weed stalk.

He settled himself back in the capacious oak chair, balanced upon his knees a white straw hat with a string band round the crown and waited for the question.

“What is your name?” asked Durham. “William Pitman Priest.”

Even the voice somehow seemed to fit the setting. Its high nasal note had a sort of whimsical appeal to it.

“When and where were you born?”

“In Calloway County, Kintucky, July 27, 1889.”

“What is your profession or business?”

“I am an attorney-at-law.”

“What position if any do you hold in your native state?”

“I am presidin’ judge of the first judicial district of the state of Kintucky.”

“And have you been so long?”

“For the past sixteen years.”

“When were you admitted to the bar?”

“In 1860.”

“And you have ever since been engaged, I take it, either in the practice of the law before the bar or in its administration from the bench?”

“Exceptin’ for the four years from April, 1861, to June, 1866.”

Up until now Durham had been sparring, trying to fathom the probable trend of the old judge’s expected meanderings. But in the answer to the last question he thought he caught the cue and, though none save those two knew it, thereafter it was the witness who led and the questioner who followed his lead blindly.

“And where were you during those four years?”

“I was engaged, suh, in takin’ part in the war.”

“The War of the Rebellion?”

“No, suh,” the old man corrected him gently but with firmness, “the War for the Southern Confederacy.”

There was a least bit of a stir at this. Aunt Tilly’s tape-edged palmleaf blade hovered a brief second in the wide regular arc of its sweep and the foreman of the jury involuntarily ducked his head, as if in affiance of an indubitable fact.

“Ahem!” said Durham, still feeling his way, although now he saw the path more clearly. “And on which side were you engaged?”

“I was a private soldier in the Southern army,” the old judge answered him, and as he spoke he straightened up. “Yes, suh,” he repeated, “for four years I was a private soldier in the late Southern Confederacy. Part of the time I was down here in this very country,” he went on as though he had just recalled that part of it. “Why, in the summer of ‘64 I was right here in this town. And until yistiddy I hadn’t been back since.”

He turned to the trial judge and spoke to him with a tone and manner half apologetic, half confidential.

“Your Honor,” he said, “I am a judge myself, occupyin’ in my home state a position very similar to the one which you fill here, and whilst I realize, none better, that this ain’t all accordin’ to the rules of evidence as laid down in the books, yet when I git to thinkin’ about them old soldierin’ times I find I am inclined to sort of reminiscence round a little. And I trust your Honor will pardon me if I should seem to ramble slightly?”

His tone was more than apologetic and more than confidential. It was winning. The judge upon the bench was a veteran himself. He looked toward the prosecutor.

“Has the state’s attorney any objection to this line of testimony?” he asked, smiling a little.

Certainly Gilliam had no fear that this honest-appearing old man’s wanderings could damage a case already as good as won. He smiled back indulgently and waved his arm with a gesture that was compounded of equal parts of toleration and patience, with a top-dressing of contempt. “I fail,” said Gilliam, “to see wherein the military history and achievements of this worthy gentleman can possibly affect the issue of the homicide of Abner J. Rankin. But,” he added magnanimously, “if the defense chooses to encumber the record with matters so trifling and irrelevant I surely will make no objection now or hereafter.”

“The witness may proceed,” said the judge. “Well, really, Your Honor, I didn’t have so very much to say,” confessed Judge Priest, “and I didn’t expect there’d be any to-do made over it. What I was trying to git at was that cornin’ down here to testify in this case sort of brought back them old days to my mind. As I git along more in years – ” he was looking toward the jurors now – “I find that I live more and more in the past.”

As though he had put a question to them several of the jurors gravely inclined their heads. The busy cud of Juror No. 12 moved just a trifle slower in its travels from the right side of the jaw to the left and back again. “Yes, suh,” he said musingly, “I got up early this mornin’ at the tavern where I’m stoppin’ and took a walk through your thrivin’ little city.” This was rambling with a vengeance, thought the puzzled Durham. “I walked down here to a bridge over a little creek and back again. It reminded me mightily of that other time when I passed through this town – in ‘64 – just about this season of the year – and it was hot early today just as it was that other time – and the dew was thick on the grass, the same as ‘twas then.”

He halted a moment.

“Of course your town didn’t look the same this mornin’ as it did that other mornin’. It seemed like to me there are twicet as many houses here now as there used to be – it’s got to be quite a little city.”

Mr. Lukins, the grocer, nodded silent approval of this utterance, Mr. Lukins having but newly completed and moved into a two-story brick store building with a tin cornice and an outside staircase.

“Yes, suh, your town has grown mightily, but” – and the whiny, humorous voice grew apologetic again – “but your roads are purty much the same as they were in ‘64 – hilly in places – and kind of rocky.”

Durham found himself sitting still, listening hard. Everybody else was listening too. Suddenly it struck Durham, almost like a blow, that this simple old man had somehow laid a sort of spell upon them all. The flattening sunrays made a kind of pink glow about the old judge’s face, touching gently his bald head and his white whiskers. He droned on:

“I remember about those roads particularly well, because that time when I marched through here in ‘64 my feet was about out ef my shoes and them flints cut ‘em up some. Some of the boys, I recollect, left bloody prints in the dust behind ‘em. But shucks – it wouldn’t a-made no real difference if we’d wore the bottoms plum off our feet! We’d a-kept on goin’. We’d a-gone anywhere – or tried to – behind old Bedford Forrest.”

Aunt Tilly’s palmleaf halted in air and the twelfth juror’s faithful quid froze in his cheek and stuck there like a small wen. Except for a general hunching forward of shoulders and heads there was no movement anywhere and no sound except the voice of the witness:

“Old Bedford Forrest hisself was leadin’ us, and so naturally we just went along with him, shoes or no shoes. There was a regiment of Northern troops – Yankees – marchin’ on this town that mornin’, and it seemed the word had traveled ahead of ‘em that they was aimin’ to burn it down.

“Probably it wasn’t true. When we got to know them Yankees better afterward we found out that there really wasn’t no difference, to speak of, between the run of us and the run of them. Probably it wasn’t so at all. But in them days the people was prone to believe ‘most anything – about Yankees – and the word was that they was cornin’ across country, a-burnin’ and cuttin’ and slashin,’ and the people here thought they was going to be burned out of house and home. So old Bedford Forrest he marched all night with a battalion of us – four companies – Kintuckians and Tennesseeans mostly, with a sprinklin’ of boys from Mississippi and Arkansas – some of us ridin’ and some walkin’ afoot, like me – we didn’t always have horses enough to go round that last year. And somehow we got here before they did. It was a close race though between us – them a-comin’ down from the North and us a-comin’ up from the other way. We met ‘em down there by that little branch just below where your present railroad depot is. There wasn’t no depot there then, but the branch looks just the same now as it did then – and the bridge too. I walked acros’t it this momin’ to see. Yes, suh, right there was where we met ‘em. And there was a right smart fight.

“Yes, suh, there was a right smart fight for about twenty minutes – or maybe twenty-five – and then we had breakfast.”

He had been smiling gently as he went along. Now he broke into a throaty little chuckle.

“Yes, suh, it all come back to me this mornin’ – every little bit of it – the breakfast and all. I didn’t have much breakfast, though, as I recall – none of us did – probably just corn pone and branch water to wash it down with.”

And he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand as though the taste of the gritty cornmeal cakes was still there.

There was another little pause here; the witness seemed to be through. Durham’s crisp question cut the silence like a gash with a knife.

“Judge Priest, do you know the defendant at the bar, and if so, how well do you know him?”

“I was just comin’ to that,” he answered with simplicity, “and I’m obliged to you for puttin’ me back on the track. Oh, I know the defendant at the bar mighty well – as well as anybody on earth ever did know him, I reckin, unless ‘twas his own maw and paw. I’ve known him, in fact, from the time he was born – and a gentler, better-disposed boy never grew up in our town. His nature seemed almost too sweet for a boy – more like a girl’s – but as a grown man he was always manly, and honest, and fair – and not quarrelsome. Oh, yes, I know him. I knew his father and his mother before him. It’s a funny thing too – comin’ up this way – but I remember that his paw was marchin’ right alongside of me the day we came through here in ‘64. He was wounded, his paw was, right at the edge of that little creek down yonder. He was wounded in the shoulder – and he never did entirely git over it.”

Again he stopped dead short, and he lifted his hand and tugged at the lobe of his right ear absently. Simultaneously Mr. Felsburg, who was sitting close to a window beyond the jury box, was also seized with nervousness, for he jerked out a handkerchief and with it mopped his brow so vigorously that, to one standing outside, it might have seemed that the handkerchief was actually being waved about as a signal.

Instantly then there broke upon the pause that still endured a sudden burst of music, a rollicking, jingling air. It was only a twenty-cent touth organ, three sleigh bells, and a pair of the rib bones of a beef-cow being played all at once by a saddle-colored negro man but it sounded for all the world like a fife-and-drum corps:

If you want to have a good time,

If you want to have a good time,

If you want to have a good time,

If you want to ketch the devil —

Jine the cavalree!

To some who heard it now the time was strange; these were the younger ones. But to those older men and those older women the first jubilant bars rolled back the years like a scroll.

If you want to have a good time,

If yu want to have a good time,

If you want to have a good time,

If you want to ride with Bedford —

Jine the cavalree!

The sound swelled and rippled and rose through the windows – the marching song of the Southern trooper – Forrest’s men, and Morgan’s, and Jeb Stuart’s and Joe Wheeler’s. It had in it the jingle of saber chains, the creak of sweaty saddle-girths, the nimble clunk of hurrying hoofs. It had in it the clanging memories of a cause and a time that would live with these people as long as they lived and their children lived and their children’s children. It had in it the one sure call to the emotions and the sentiments of these people.

And it rose and rose and then as the unseen minstrel went slouching down Main Street, toward the depot and the creek it sank lower and became a thin thread of sound and then a broken thread of sound and then it died out altogether and once more there was silence in the court house of Forked Deer County.

Strangely enough not one listener had come to the windows to look out. The interruption from without had seemed part and parcel of what went on within. None faced to the rear, every one faced to the front.

There was Mr. Lukins now. As Mr. Lukins got upon his feet he said to himself in a tone of feeling that he be dad-fetched. But immediately changing his mind he stated that he would preferably be dad-blamed, and as he moved toward the bar rail one overhearing him might have gathered from remarks let fall that Mr. Lukins was going somewhere with the intention of being extensively dad-burned. But for all these threats Mr. Lukins didn’t go anywhere, except as near the railing as he could press.

Nearly everybody else was standing up too. The state’s attorney was on his feet with the rest, seemingly for the purpose of making some protest.

Had any one looked they might have seen that the ember in the smoldering eye of the old foreman had blazed up to a brown fire; that Juror No. 4, with utter disregard for expense, was biting segments out of the brim of his new brown-varnished straw hat; that No. 7 had dropped his crutches on the floor, and that no one, not even their owner, had heard them fall; that all the jurors were half out of their chairs. But no one saw these things, for at this moment there rose up Aunt Tilly Haslett, a dominant figure, her huge wide bade blocking the view of three or four immediately behind her.

Uncle Fayette laid a timid detaining hand upon her and seemed to be saying something protestingly.

“Turn loose of me, Fate Haslett!” she commanded. “Ain’t you ashamed of yourse’f, to be tryin’ to hold me back when you know how my only dear brother died a-followin’ after Gineral Nathan Bedford Forrest. Turn loose of me!”

She flirted her great arm and Uncle Fayette spun flutteringly into the mass behind. The sheriff barred her way at the gate of the bar.

“Mizz Haslett,” he implored, “please, Mizz Haslett – you must keep order in the cote.” Aunt Tilly halted in her onward move, head up high and elbows out, and through her specs, blazing like burning-glasses, she fixed on him a look that instantly charred that, unhappy official into a burning red ruin of his own self-importance.

“Keep it yourse’f, High Sheriff Washington Nash, Esquire,” she bade him; “that’s whut you git paid good money for doin’. And git out of my way! I’m a-goin’ in there to that pore little lonesome thing settin’ there all by herself, and there ain’t nobody goin’ to hinder me neither!”

The sheriff shrunk aside; perhaps it would be better to say he evaporated aside. And public opinion, reorganized and made over but still incarnate in Aunt Tilly Haslett, swept past the rail and settled like a billowing black cloud into a chair that the local attorney for the defense vacated just in time to save himself the inconvenience of having it snatched bodily from under him.

“There, honey,” said Aunt Tilly crooningly as she gathered the forlorn little figure of the prisoner’s wife in her arms like a child and mothered her up to her ample bombazined bosom, “there now, honey, you jest cry on me.”

Then Aunt Tilly looked up and her specs were all blurry and wet. But she waved her palmleaf fan as though it had been the baton of a marshal.

“Now, Jedge,” she said, addressing the bench, “and you other gentlemen – you kin go ahead now.”

The state’s attorney had meant evidently to make some sort of an objection, for he was upon his feet through all this scene. But he looked back before he spoke and what he saw kept him from speaking. I believe I stated earlier that he was a candidate for rejection. So he settled back down in his chair and stretched out his legs and buried his chin in the top of his limp white waistcoat in an attitude that he had once seen in a picture entitled, “Napoleon Bonaparte at St. Helena.”

“You may resume, Judge Priest,” said the trial judge in a voice that was not entirely free from huskiness, although its owner had been clearing it steadily for some moments.

“Thank you kindly, suh, but I was about through anyhow,” answered the witness with a bow, and for all his homeliness there was dignity and stateliness in it. “I merely wanted to say for the sake of completin’ the record, so to speak, that on the occasion referred to them Yankees did not cross that bridge.” With the air of tendering and receiving congratulations Mr. Lukins turned to his nearest neighbor and shook hands with him warmly.

The witness got up somewhat stiffly, once more becoming a commonplace old man in a wrinkled black alpaca coat, and made his way back to his vacant place, now in the shadow of Aunt Tilly Haslett’s form. As he passed along the front of the jury-box the foreman’s crippled right hand came up in a sort of a clumsy salute, and the juror at the other end of the rear row – No. 12, the oldest juror – leaned forward as if to speak to him, but remembered in time where his present duty lay. The old judge kept on until he came to Durham’s side, and he whispered to him: “Son, they’ve quit lookin’ at him and they’re all a-lookin’ at her. Son, rest your case.” Durham came out of a maze.

“Your Honor,” he said as he rose, “the defense rests.”

The jury were out only six minutes. Mr. Lukins insisted that it was only five minutes and a half, and added that he’d be dad-rotted if it was a second longer than that.

As the lately accused Tandy came out of the courthouse with his imported lawyer – Aunt Tilly bringing up the rear with his trembling, weeping, happy little wife – friendly hands were outstretched to clasp his and a whiskered old gentleman with a thumbnail like a Brazil nut grabbed at his arm.

“Whichaway did Billy Priest go?” he demanded – “little old Fightin’ Billy – whar did he go to? Soon as he started in talkin’ I placed him. Whar is he?”

Walking side by side, Tandy and Durham came down the steps into the soft June night, and Tandy took a long, deep breath into his lungs.

“Mr. Durham,” he said, “I owe a great deal to you.”

“How’s that?” said Durham.

Just ahead of them, centered in a shaft of light from the window of the barroom of the Drummers’ Home Hotel, stood Judge Priest. The old judge had been drinking. The pink of his face was a trifle more pronounced, the high whine in his voice a trifle weedier, as he counted one by one certain pieces of silver into the wide-open palm of a saddle-colored negro.

“How’s that?” said Durham. “I say I owe everything in the world to you,” repeated Tandy.

“No,” said Durham, “what you owe me is the fee you agreed to pay me for defending you. There’s the man you’re looking for.”

And he pointed to the old judge.

II. THE COUNTY TROT

SATURDAY was the last day of the county fair and the day of the County Trot. It was also Veterans’ Day, when the old soldiers were the guests of honor of the management, and likewise Ladies’ Day, which meant that all white females of whatever age were admitted free. So naturally, in view of all these things, the biggest day of fair week was Saturday.

The fair grounds lay in a hickory flat a mile out of town, and the tall scaly barks grew so close to the fence that they poked their limbs over its top and shed down nuts upon the track. The fence had been whitewashed once, back in the days of its youth when Hector was a pup; but Hec was an old dog now and the rains of years had washed the fence to a misty gray, so that in the dusk the long, warped panels stood up in rows, palely luminous – like the highshouldered ghosts of a fence. And the rust had run down from the eaten-out nail-holes until each plank had two staring marks in its face – like rheumy, bleared eyes. The ancient grandstand was of wood too, and had lain outdoors in all weathers until its rheumatic rafters groaned and creaked when the wind blew.

Back of the grandstand stood Floral Hall and Agricultural Hall. Except for their names and their flagstaffs you might have taken them for two rather hastily built and long-neglected bams. Up the track to the north were the rows of stables that were empty, odorous little cubicles for fifty-one weeks of the year, but now – for this one week – alive with darky stable hands and horses; and all the good savors of woodfires, clean hay, and turned-up turf were commingled there.

The fair had ideal weather for its windup. No frost had fallen yet, but in the air there were signs and portents of its coming. The long yellow leaves of the hickories had begun to curl up as if to hold the dying warmth of the sap to the last; and once in a while an ash flamed red like a signal fire to give warning for Indian summer, when all the woods would blaze in warpaints before huddling down for the winter under their tufted, ragged tawnies and browns – like buffalo robes on the shoulders of chilled warriors. The first flights of the wild geese were going over, their V’s pointed to the Gulf; and that huckstering little bird of the dead treetops, which the negroes call the sweet-potato bird – maybe it’s a pewee, with an acquired Southern accent – was calling his mythical wares at the front door of every woodpecker’s hole. The woods were perfumy with ripening wild grapes and pawpaws, and from the orchards came rich winy smells where the windfalls lay in heaps and cider mills gushed under the trees; and on the roof of the smokehouse the pared, sliced fruit was drying out yellow and leathery in the sun and looking – a little way off – like countless ears all turned to listen for the same thing.

Saturday, by sunup, the fair grounds were astir. Undershirted concessionaries and privilege people emerged from their canvas sleeping quarters to sniff at a the tantalizing smell that floated across to them from certain narrow trenches dug in the ground. That smell, just by itself, was one square meal and an incentive to another; for these trenches were full of live red hickory coals; and above them, on greenwood stakes that were stretched across, a shoat and a whole sheep, and a rosary of young squirrels impaled in a string, had been all night barbecuing. Uncle Isom Woolfolk was in charge here – mightily and solely in charge – Uncle Isom Woolfolk, no less, official purveyor to the whole county at fish fries or camp breakfasts, secretary of the Republican County Committee, high in his church and his lodges and the best barbecue cook in seven states. He bellowed frequent and contradictory orders to two negro women of his household who were arranging clean white clothes on board trestles; and constantly he went from shoat to sheep and from sheep to squirrels, basting them with a rag wrapped about a stick and dipped into a potent sauce of his own private making. Red pepper and sweet vinegar were two of its main constituents, though, and in turn he painted each carcass as daintily as an artist retouching the miniature of his lady fair, so that under his hand the crackling meatskins sizzled and smoked, and a yellowish glaze like a veneer spread over their surfaces. His white chin-beard waggled with importance and the artistic temperament.

Before Uncle Isom had his barbecue off the fire the crowds were pouring in, coming from the town afoot, and in buggies and hacks, and from the country in farm wagons that held families, from grandsire to baby in arms, all riding in kitchen chairs, with bedquilt lap robes. At noon a thin trickle of martial music came down the pike; and pretty soon then the veterans, forty or fifty of them, marched in, two by two, some in their reunion gray and some in their best Sunday blacks. At the head of the limping line of old men was a fife-and-drum corps – two sons of veterans at the drums and Corporal Harrison Treese, sometime bugler of Terry’s Cavalry, with his fife half buried in his whiskers, ripping the high notes out of The Girl I Left Behind Me. Near the tail of the procession was Sergeant Jimmy Bagby, late of King’s Hellhounds. Back in war times that organization had borne a more official and a less sanguinary title; but you would never have guessed this, overhearing Sergeant Jimmy Bagby’s conversation.

The sergeant wore a little skirtless jacket, absurdly high-collared, faded to all colors and falling to pieces with age. Three tarnished buttons and a rag of rotted braid still dung to its front. Probably it had fitted the sergeant well in the days when he was a slim and limber young partisan ranger; but now the peaked little tail showed halfway up his back where his suspenders forked, and his white-shirted paunch jutted out in front like a big cotton pod bursting out of a gray-brown boll. The sergeant wore his jacket on all occasions of high military and civic state – that, and a gangrened leather cartridge-box bouncing up and down on his plump hip – and over his shoulder the musket he had carried to war and back home again, an ancient Springfield with a stock like a log butt and a hammer like a mule’s ear, its barrel merely a streak of rust.

He walked side by side with his closest personal friend and bitterest political foe, Major Ashcroft, late of the Ninth Michigan Volunteers – walking so close to him that the button of the Loyal Legion in the major’s left-hand lapel almost touched the bronze Southern Cross pinned high up on the right breast of the sergeant’s flaring jacket.

From time to time the sergeant, addressing the comrades ahead of him, would poke the major in the side and call out:

“Boys, I’ve took the first prisone