Old Judge Priest

From one pocket he fetched forth a rumpled packet of paper money and from the other a small cloth sack, which gave off metallic clinking sounds. He put them down together on the desk in front of Judge Priest.

“I appreciate this, ef I am right in my assumption of the motives which actuated you and the purposes to which you natchally assumed this here money would be Applied,” said Judge Priest as the other man waited for his response. “But, son, I can’t take your money. It ain’t needed. Why, I wouldn’t know whut to do with it. There ain’t no out-standin’ bills connected with that there funeral.

“All the expense entailed was met – privately. So you see – ”

“Wait just a minute before you say no!” interrupted Giltner. “Here’s my idea and it’s the idea of all the others that contributed: We-all want you to take this money and keep it – keep it in a safe, or in your pocket, or in the bank to your credit, or anywheres you please, but just keep it. And if any girl that’s gone wrong should die and not have any friends to help bury her, they can come to you and get the cash out of this fund to pay for puttin’ her away. And if any other girl should want to go back to her people and start in all over again and try to lead a better life, why you can advance her the railroad fare out of that money too. You see, Judge, we are aimin’ to make a kind of a trust fund out of it, with you as the trustee. And when the four seventy-five forty-two is all used up, if you’ll just let me know I’ll guarantee to rustle up a fresh bank roll so you’ll always have enough on hand to meet the demands. Now then, Judge, will you take it?”

Judge Priest took it. He stretched out and scooped in currency and coin sack, using therefor his left hand only. The right was engaged in reaching for Beck Giltner’s right hand, the purpose being to shake it.

II. A BLENDING OF THE PARABLES

NEARLY every week – weather permitting – the old judge went to dinner somewhere. To a considerable extent he kept up his political fences going to dinners. Usually it was of a Sunday that he went.

By ten o’clock almost any fair Sunday morning – spring, summer or early fall – Judge Priest’s Jeff would have the venerable side-bar buggy washed down, and would be leading forth from her stall the ancient white lady-sheep, with the unmowed fetlocks and the intermittent mane, which the judge, from a spirit of prideful affection and in the face of all visual testimony to the contrary, persisted in regarding as an authentic member of the equine kingdom.

Presently, in their proper combination and alignment, the trio would be stationed at the front gate, thus: Jeff in front, bracing the forward section of the mare-creature; and the buggy behind, its shafts performing a similar office for the other end of this unique quadruped. Down the gravelled walk that led from the house, under the water maples and silver-leaf poplars, which arched over to make a shady green tunnel of it, the judge would come, immaculate but rumply in white linens. The judge’s linens had a way of getting themselves all rumpled even before he put them on. You might say they were born rumpled.

Beholding his waddlesome approach out of the tail of her eye, the white animal would whinny a dignified and conservative welcome. She knew her owner almost as well as he knew her. Then, while Jeff held her head – that is to say, held it up – the old man would heave his frame ponderously in and upward between the dished wheels and settle back into the deep nest of the buggy, with a wheeze to which the agonised rear springs wheezed back an anthem like refrain.

“All right, Jeff!” the judge would say, bestowing his cotton umbrella and his palm-leaf fan in their proper places, and working a pair of wrinkled buckskin gloves on over his chubby hands. “I won’t be back, I reckin, till goin’ on six o’clock this evenin’, and I probably won’t want nothin’ then fur supper except a cold snack. So if you and Aunt Dilsey both put out from the house fur the day be shore to leave the front-door key under the front-door mat, where I kin find it in case I should git back sooner’n I expect. And you be here in due time yourse’f, to unhitch. Hear me, boy?”

“Yas, suh,” Jeff would respond. “I hears you.”

“All right, then!” his employer would command as he gathered up the lines. “Let loose of Mittie May.”

Conforming with the accepted ritual of the occasion, Jeff would let loose of Mittie May and step ceremoniously yet briskly aside, as though fearing instant annihilation in the first resistless surge of a desperate, untamable beast. Judge Priest would slap the leathers down on Mittie May’s fat back; and Mittie May, sensing the master touch on those reins, would gather her four shaggy legs together with apparent intent of bursting into a mad gallop, and then, ungathering them, step out in her characteristic gentle amble, a gait she never varied under any circumstances. Away they would go, then, with the dust splashing up from under Mittie May’s flat and deliberative feet, and the loose rear curtain of the buggy flapping and slapping behind like a slatting sail.

Jeff would stand there watching them until they had faded away in the deeper dust where Clay Street merged, without abrupt transition, into a winding country road; and, knowing the judge was definitely on his way, Jeff would be on his way, too, but in a different direction. Of his own volition Jeff never fared countryward on Sundays. Green fields and running brooks laid no spell of allurement on his nimble fancy. He infinitely preferred metropolitan haunts and pastimes – such, for instance, as promenades along the broken sidewalks of the Plunkett’s Hill section and crap games behind the coloured undertaker’s shop on Locust Street.

The judge’s way would be a pleasant way – a peaceful, easy way, marked only by small disputes at each crossroads junction, Mittie May desiring always to take the turn that would bring them back home by the shortest route, and the judge stubborn in his intention of pushing further on. The superior powers of human obstinacy having triumphed over four-legged instinct, they would proceed. Now they would clatter across a wooden bridge spanning a sluggish amber-coloured stream, where that impertinent bird, the kingfisher, cackled derisive imitations of the sound given off by the warped axles of the buggy, and the yonkerpins – which Yankees, in their ignorance, have called water lilies – spread their wide green pads and their white-and-yellow cusps of bloom on the face of the creek water.

Now they would come to cornfields and tobacco patches that steamed in the sunshine, conceding the season to be summer; or else old, abandoned clearings, grown up rankly in shoe-make bushes and pawpaw and persimmon and sassafras. And the pungent scent of the wayside pennyroyal would rise like an incense, saluting their nostrils as they passed, and the grassy furrows of long-harvested grain crops were like the lines of graves on old battlegrounds.

Now they would come into the deep woods; and here the sunlight sifted down through the tree tops, making cathedral aisles among the trunks and dim green cloisters of the thickets; and in small open spaces the yellowing double prongs of the mullein stalks stood up stiff and straightly like two-tined altar candles. Then out of the woods again and along a stretch of blinding hot road, with little grey lizards racing on the decayed fence rails as outriders, and maybe a pair of those old red-head peckerwoods flickering on from snag to snag just ahead, keeping company with the judge, but never quite permitting him to catch up with them.

So, at length, after five miles, or maybe ten, he would come to his destination, which might be a red-brick house set among apple trees on a low hill, or a whitewashed double cabin of logs in a bare place down in the bottoms. Here, at their journey’s end, they would halt, with Mittie May heaving her rotund sides in and out in creditable simulation of a thoroughbred finishing a hard race; and Judge Priest would poke his head out from under the buggy hood and utter the customary hail of “Hello the house!” At that, nine times out of ten – from under the house and from round behind it – would boil a black-and-tan ground swell of flap-eared, bugle-voiced hound dogs, all tearing for the gate, with every apparent intention of devouring horse and harness, buggy and driver, without a moment’s delay. And behind them, in turn, a shirt-sleeved man would emerge from the shelter of the gallery and hurry down the path toward the fence, berating the belling pack at every step he took:

“You Sounder, you Ring, you Queen – consam your mangy pelts! Go on back yonder where you belong! You Saucer – come on back here and behave yourse’f! I bet I take a chunk some of these days and knock your fool head off!”

As the living wave of dogs parted before his advance and his threats, and broke up and turned about and vanished with protesting yelps, the shirt-sleeved one, recognising Mittie May and the shape of the buggy, would speak a greeting something after this fashion:

“Well, suh – ef it ain’t Jedge Priest! Jedge, suh, I certainly am proud to see you out this way. We was beginnin’ to think you’d furgot us – we was, fur a fact!”

Over his shoulder he would single out one of a cluster of children who magically appeared on the gallery steps, and bid Tennessee or Virgil or Dora-Virginia or Albert-Sidney, as the name of the chosen youngster might be, to run and tell their ma that Judge Priest had come to stay for dinner. For the judge never sent any advance notice of his intention to pay a Sunday visit; neither did he wait for a formal invitation. He just dropped in, being assured of a welcome under any rooftree, great or humble, in his entire judicial district.

Shortly thereafter the judge, having been welcomed in due state, and provision made for Mittie May’s stabling and sustenance, would be established on the gallery in the rocking-chair of honour, which was fetched out from the parlour for his better comfort. First, a brimming gourd of fresh spring water would be brought, that he might take the edge off his thirst and flush the dust out of his throat and moisten up his palate; and then would follow a certain elaborated rite in conjunction with sundry sprigs of young mint and some powdered sugar and outpourings of the red-brown contents of a wicker demijohn.

Very possibly a barefooted and embarrassed namesake would be propelled forward, by parental direction, to shake hands with the guest; for, except old Doctor Saunders, Judge Priest had more children named for him than anybody in our county. And very probably there would come to his ears from somewhere rearward the frenzied clamour of a mighty barnyard commotion – squawkings and cacklings and flutterings – closely followed by the poignant wails of a pair of doomed pullets, which grew fainter and fainter as the captives were borne to the sacrificial block behind the woodpile – certain signs, all these, that if fried chicken had not been included in the scope and plan of Sunday dinner, fried chicken would now be, most assuredly.

When dinner was over, small messengers would be sent up the road and down to spread the word; and various oldsters of the vicinity would leave their own places to foregather in the dooryard of the present host and pass the time of day with Judge Priest. Sooner or later, somehow, the talk would work backward to war times. Overhearing what passed to and fro, a stranger might have been pardoned for supposing that it was only the year before, or at most two years before, when the Yankees came through under Grant; while Forrest’s Raid was spoken of as though it had taken place within the current month.

Anchored among the ancients the old judge would sit, doing his share of the talking and more than his share of the listening; and late in the afternoon, when the official watermelon, all dripping and cool, had been brought forth from the springhouse, and the shadows were beginning to stretch themselves slantwise across the road, as though tired out completely by a hard day’s work in the broiling sun, he and Mittie May would jog back toward town, meeting many an acquaintance on the road, but rarely passing one. And the upshot would be that at the next Democratic primary the opposing candidate for circuit judge – if there was any opposing candidate – got powerfully few votes out of that neighbourhood.

Such Sunday excursions as these and such a Sunday dinner as this typical one formed a regular part of Judge Priest’s weekly routine through at least nine months of the year. If unforeseen, events conspired to rob him of his trip to the country he felt the week had not rightly rounded itself out; but once a year he attended a dinner beside which all other dinner occasions were, in his estimation, as nothing at all. With regard to this particular affair, he used to say it took him a week to get primed and ready for it, one whole night to properly enjoy it, and another week to recover from the effects of it. I am speaking now of the anniversary banquet of the survivors of Company B – first and foremost of the home companies – which was and still is held always on a given date and at a given place, respectively, to wit: The evening of the twelfth of May and the dining room of the Richland House.

Company B held the first of its annual dinners at the Richland House away back in ‘66. That time sixty and more men – young men, mostly, in their mid-twenties and their early thirties – sat down together to meat and drink, and no less a personage than General Grider presided – that same Meriwether Grider who, going out in the first year of the war as company commander, came back after the Surrender, bringing with him the skeleton remnants of a battered and a shattered brigade.

General Meriwether Grider has been dead this many a year now. He gave his life for the women and the children when the Belle of the Bends burned up at Cottonwood Bar; and that horror befell so long ago that the present generation down our way knows it only as a thing of which those garrulous and tiresome creatures, the older inhabitants, are sometimes moved to speak. But the rules for the regulation and conduct of subsequent banquets which were adopted on that long-ago night, when the general sat at the head of the table, hold good, even though all else in our town has changed.

Of the ardent and youthful sixty-odd who dined with him then, a fading and aging and sorely diminished handful is left. Some in the restless boom days of the eighties moved away to other and brisker communities, and some have marched down the long, lone road that leads to a far country. Yet it abides as a bylaw and a precedent that only orthodox members of the original company shall have covers and places provided for them when anniversary night rolls round. The Richland House – always – must be the place of dining; this, too, in spite of the fact that the Richland House has been gnawed by the tooth of time into a shabby old shell, hardly worthy to be named in the same printed page with the smart Hotel Moderne – strictly European plan; rates, three dollars a day and upward – which now figures as our leading hotel.

Near the conclusion of the feast, when the cloth has been cleared of the dishes and only the glasses are left, the rolls called by the acting top-sergeant – cholera having taken off the real top-sergeant in ‘75. Those who are present answer for themselves, and for those who are absent some other voice answers. And then at the very last, after the story-telling is done, they all stand and drink to Company B – its men, its memories, its most honourable record, and its most honourable dead.

They tell me that this last May just seven met on the evening of the twelfth to sit beneath the crossed battle-flags in the Richland House dining room, and that everything was over and done with long before eleven o’clock. But the annual dinner which I especially have in mind to describe here took place on a somewhat more remote twelfth of May, when Company B still might muster better than the strength of a corporal’s guard. If I remember correctly, eighteen grizzled survivors were known to be alive that year.

In saying that, though, I would not have you infer that there were no more than eighteen veterans in our town. Why, in those times there must have been two hundred easily. Gideon K. Irons Camp could turn out upward of a hundred members in good standing for any large public occasion; but you understand this was a dinner limited to Company B alone, which restriction barred out a lot of otherwise highly desirable individuals.

It barred out Sergeant Jimmy Bagby, for the sergeant had served with King’s Hellhounds; and Captain Shelby Woodward, who belonged to the Orphan Brigade, as you would have learned for yourself at first hand had you ever enjoyed as much as five minutes of uninterrupted conversation with the captain; and Mr. Wolfe Hawley, our leading grocer, who was a gunner in Lyon’s Battery – and many another it barred out. Indeed, Father Minor got in only by the skin of his teeth. True enough he was a Company B man at the beginning; but he transferred early to another branch of the service and for most of the four years he rode with Morgan’s men.

The committee in charge looked for a full attendance. It was felt that this would be one of the most successful dinners of them all. Certainly it would be by long odds the best advertised. It would seem that the Sunday editor of the Courier-Journal, while digging through his exchanges, came on a preliminary announcement in the columns of the Daily Evening News, which was our home paper; and, sensing a feature story in it, he sent one of his young men down from Louisville to spend two days among us, compiling facts, names and photographs. The young man did a page spread in the Sunday Courier-Journal, thereby unconsciously enriching many family scrapbooks in our town.

This was along toward the middle of April. Following it, one of the Eastern syndicates rewrote the piece and mailed it out to its constituent papers over the country. The Associated Press saw fit to notice it too; and after that the tale got into the boiler-plate shops – which means it got into practically all the smaller weeklies that use patent insides. It must have been a strictly non-newspaper-read-ing community of this nation which did not hear that spring about the group of old soldiers who for forty years without a break had held a dinner once a year with no outsiders present, and who were now, for the forty-first time, about to dine again.

Considering this publicity and all, the committee naturally counted on a fairly complete turnout. To be sure, Magistrate Matt Dallam, out in the country, could not hope to be present except in the spirit, he having been bedridden for years. Garnett Hinton, the youngest enlisted member of Company B, was in feeble health away off yonder in the Panhandle of Texas. It was not reasonable to expect him to make the long trip back home. On the tenth Mr. Napoleon B. Crump was called to Birmingham, Alabama, where a ne’er-do-well son-in-law had entangled himself in legal difficulties, arising out of a transaction involving a dubious check, with a yet more dubious signature on it. He might get back in time – and then again he might not.

On the other hand, Second Lieutenant Charley Garrett wrote up from his plantation down in Mississippi that he would attend if he had to walk – a mere pleasantry of speech, inasmuch as Lieutenant Garrett had money enough to charter for himself a whole railroad train should he feel so inclined. And, from his little farm in Mims County, Chickasaw Reeves sent word he would be there, too, no matter what happened. The boys could count on him, he promised.

Tallying up twenty-four hours or so ahead of the big night, the arrangements committee, consisting of Doctor Lake, Professor Lycurgus Reese and Mr. Herman Felsburg, made certain of fifteen diners, and possibly sixteen, and gave orders accordingly to the proprietor of the Richland House; but Mr. Nap Crump was detained in Birmingham longer than he had expected, and Judge Priest received from Lieutenant Charley Garrett a telegram reading as follows:

“May the Lord be with you! – because I can’t. Rheumatism in that game leg of mine, – it!”

The excisions, it developed, were the work of the telegraph company.

Then, right on top of this, another disappointment piled itself – I have reference now to the sudden and painful indisposition of Chickasaw Reeves. Looking remarkably hale and hearty, considering his sixty-eight years, Mr. Reeves arrived in due season on the eleventh, dressed fit to kill in his Sunday best and a turndown celluloid collar and a pair of new shoes of most amazing squeakiness. After visiting, in turn, a considerable number of old friends and sharing, with such as them as were not bigoted, the customary and appropriate libations, he dropped into Sherill’s Bar at a late hour of the evening for a nightcap before retiring.

At once his fancy was drawn to a milk punch, the same being a pleasant compound to which he had been introduced an hour or so earlier. This milk punch seemed to call for another, and that one for still another. As the first deep sip of number three creamily saluted his palate, Mr. Reeves’ eyes, over the rim of the deep tumbler, fell on the free lunch displayed at the far end of the bar. He was moved to step down that way and investigate.

The milk punches probably would not have mattered – or the cubes of brick cheese, or the young onions, or the pretzels, or the pickled beets and pigs’ feet. Mr. Reeves’ seasoned and dependable gastric processes were amply competent to triumph over any such commonplace combination of food and drink. Undoubtedly his undoing was directly attributable to a considerable number of little slickery fish, belonging, I believe, to the pilchard family – that is to say, they are pilchards while yet they do swim and disport themselves hither and yon in their native element; but when caught and brined and spiced and oiled, and put in cans for the export trade, they take on a different name and become, commercially speaking, something else.

Mr. Reeves did not notice them at first. He had sampled one titbit and then another; finally his glance was arrested by a dish of these small, dainty appearing creatures. A tentative nibble at the lubricated tail of a sample specimen reassured him as to the gastronomic excellence of the novelty. He stayed right there until the dish was practically empty. Then, after one more milk punch, he bade the barkeeper good night and departed.

Not until three o’clock the following afternoon was Mr. Reeves able to receive any callers – except only Doctor Lake, whose visits until that hour had been in a professional rather than in a social capacity. Judge Priest, coming by invitation of the sufferer, found Mr. Reeves’ room at the hotel redolent with the atmospheres of bodily distress. On the bed of affliction by the window was stretched the form of Mr. Reeves. He was not exactly pale, but he was as pale as a person of Mr. Reeves’ habit of life could be and still retain the breath of life.

“Well, Chickasaw, old feller,” said Judge Priest, “how goes it? Feelin’ a little bit easier than you was, ain’t you?”

The invalid groaned emptily before answering in wan and wasted-away tone.

“Billy,” he said, “ef you could ‘a’ saw me ‘long ‘bout half past two this mornin’, when she first come on me, you’d know better’n to ask sech a question as that. First, I wus skeered I wus goin’ to die. And then after a spell I wus skeered I wusn’t. I reckin there ain’t nobody nowheres that ever had ez many diff’runt kinds of cramps ez me and lived to tell the tale.”

“That’s too bad,” commiserated the judge. “Was it somethin’ you et or somethin’ you drunk?”

“I reckin it wus a kind of a mixture of both,” admitted Mr. Reeves. “Billy, did you ever make a habit of imbibin’ these here milk punches?”

“Well, not lately,” said Judge Priest.

“Well, suh,” stated Mr. Reeves, “you’d be surprised to know how tasty they kin make jest plain ordinary cow’s milk ef they take and put some good red licker and a little sugar in it, and shake it all up together, and then sift a little nutmaig seasonin’ onto it – you would so! But, after you’ve drunk maybe three-four, I claim you have to be sorter careful ‘bout whut you put on top of ‘em. I’ve found that much out.

“I reckin it serves me right, though. A country-jake like me oughter know better’n to come up here out of the sticks and try to gormandise hisse’f on all these here fancy town vittles. It’s all right, mebbe, fur you city folks; but my stomach ain’t never been educated up to it. Hereafter I’m a-goin’ to stick to hawg jowl and cawn pone, and things I know ‘bout. You hear me – I’m done! I’ve been cured.