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

“Course it has! What did they expect Missouri to do?”

“Buffalo – Doran – for mayor, has been elected. The rest of the reform ticket is – ”

“Oh, dad blame it! Henry, throw that stuff away and see if there ain’t some way to get something definite from Lang’s Store or Clark’s River on the race for state senator!”

“Yes, or for sheriff – that’s the kind of thing we’re all honin’ to know.”

The telephone bell rang.

“Here you are, Mr. Tompkins – complete returns from Gum Spring Precinct.”

“Now – quiet, boys, please, so we can all hear.”

It was on this night that there befell the tragedy I made mention of in the first paragraph of this chapter. The old County Ring was smashing up. One by one the veterans were going under. A stripling youth not two years out of the law school had beaten old Captain Daniel Boone Calkins for representative; and old Captain Calkins had been representative so many years he thought the job belonged to him. Not much longer was the race for sheriff in doubt, or the race for state senator. Younger men snatched both jobs away from the old men who held them.

In a far corner, behind a barricade of backs and shoulders, sat Major J. Q. A. Pickett, a spare and knotty old man, and Judge Priest, a chubby and rounded one. Of all the old men, the judge seemingly had run the strongest race, and Major Pickett, who had been county clerk for twenty years or better, had run close behind him; but as the tally grew nearer its completion the major’s chances faded to nothing at all and the judge’s grew dimmed and dimmer.

“‘What do you think, judge?” inquired Major Pickett for perhaps the twentieth time, dinging forlornly to a hope that was as good as gone already.

“I think, major, that you and me are about to be notified that our fellow citizens have returned us onc’t more to private pursoots,” said the old judge, and there was a game smile on his face. For, so far back that he hated to remember how long it was, he had had his office – holding it as a trust of honor. He was too old actively to reënter the practice of law, and he had saved mighty little out of his salary as judge. He would be an idle man and a poor one – perhaps actually needy; and the look out of his eyes by no means matched the smile on his face.

“I can’t seem to understand it,” said the major, crushed. “Always before, the old boys could be depended upon to turn out for us.”

“Major,” said Judge Priest, letting his wrinkled old hand fall on the major’s sound leg, “did you ever stop to think that there ain’t so many of the old boys left any more? There used to be a hundred and seventy-five members of the camp in good standin’. How many are there now? And how many of the boys did we bury this past year?”

There was a yell from up front and a scrooging forward of bodies.

Editor Tompkins was calling off something. The returns from Clark’s River and from Lang’s Store had arrived together. He read out the figures. These two old men, sitting side by side, at the back, listened with hands cupped behind ears that were growing a bit faulty of hearing. They heard.

Major J. Q. A. Pickett got up very painfully and very slowly. He hooked his cane up under him and limped out unnoticed. That was the night when the major established his right of squatter sovereignty over that one particular spot at the far end of Billy Sherrill’s bar-rail.

Thus deserted, the judge sat alone for a minute. The bowl of his corncob pipe had lost its spark of life and he sucked absently at the cold, bitterish stem. Then he, too, got on his feet and made his way round the end of a cluttered-up writing desk into the middle of the room. It took an effort, but he bore himself proudly erect.

“Henry,” he called out to the editor, in his homely whine – “Henry, would you mind tellin’ me – jest for curiosity – how my race stands?”

“Judge,” said the editor, “by the latest count you are forty-eight votes behind Mr. Prentiss.”

“And how many more precincts are there to hear from, my son?”

“Just one – Massac!”

“Ah-hah! Massac!” said the old judge. “Well, gentlemen,” he went on, addressing the company generally, “I reckin I’ll be goin’ on home and turnin’ in. This is the latest I’ve been up at night in a good while. I won’t wait round no longer – I reckin everything is the same as settled. I wisht one of you boys would convey my congratulations to Mr. Prentiss and tell him for me that – ”

There was a bustle at the door and a newcomer broke in through the press of men’s bodies. He was dripping with rain and spattered over the front with blobs of yellow mud. He was a tall man, with a drooping mustache and a nose that beaked at the tip like a butcher-bird’s mandible. With a moist splash he slammed a pair of wet saddlebags down on the narrow shelf at the wicket and, fishing with his fingers under one of the flaps, he produced a scrawled sheet of paper. The editor of the Daily Evening News grabbed it from him and smoothed it out and ran a pencil down the irregular, weaving column of figures.

“Complete returns on all the county races are now in,” he announced loudly, and every face turned toward him.

“The returns from Massac Precinct make no changes in any of the races – ”

The cheering started in full volume; but the editor raised his hand and stilled it.

“ – make no change in any of the races – except one.”

All sounds died and the crowd froze to silence.

“Massac Precinct has eighty-four registered Democratic votes,” went on Tompkins, prolonging the suspense. For a country editor, he had the dramatic instinct most highly developed.

“And of these eighty-four, all eighty-four voted.”

“Yes; go on! Go on, Henry!”

“And all eighty-four of ‘em – every mother’s son of ‘em – voted for the Honorable William Pitman Priest,” finished Tompkins. “Judge you win by – ”

Really, that sentence was not finished until Editor Tompkins got his next day’s paper out. The old judge felt blindly for a chair, sat down and put his face in his two hands. Eight or ten old men pressed in toward him from all directions; and, huddling about him, they raised their several cracked and quavery voices in a yell that ripped its way up and through and above and beyond the mixed and indiscriminate whoopings of the crowd.

This yell, which is shrill and very penetrating, has been described in print technically as the Rebel yell..

IX. A DOGGED UNDER DOG

ONE or two nights a week my uncle used to take me with him when he went to spend the evening with old Judge Priest. There were pretty sure to be a half dozen or more gray heads there; and if it were good out-door weather, they would sit in a row on the wide low veranda, smoking their pipes and their cigars; and of these the cigars kept off the mosquitos even better than the pipes did, our country being notorious, then, as now, for the excellence of its domestic red liquor and the amazing potency of its domestic black cigars. Every little while, conceding the night to be hot, Judge Priest’s Jeff would come bringing a tray with drinks – toddies or else mint juleps, that were as fragrant as the perfumed fountains of a fairy tale and crowned with bristling sprays of the gracious herbage. And they would sit and smoke and talk, and I would perch on the top step of the porch, hugging my bare knees together and listening.

It was on just such a night as this that I heard the story of Singin’ Sandy Riggs, the Under Dog. I think it must have been in July – or maybe it was August. To the northward the sheet lightning played back and forth like a great winking lens, burning the day heat out of the air and from the dried up bed of the creek, a quarter of a mile away, came the notes of big bassooning bull frogs, baying at the night. Every now and then a black bird or a tree martin in the maple over head would have a bad dream and talk out in its sleep; and hundreds upon hundreds of birds roosting up there would rouse and utter querulous, drowsy bird-sounds, and bestir themselves until the whole top of the tree rustled and moved as though from a sudden breeze. In lulls of the talk, thin-shredded snatches of winging was borne to us from the little church beyond the old Enders orchard where the negroes were holding one of their frequent revivals.

It was worth any boy’s while to listen to the company that assembled on Judge Priest’s front porch. For one, Squire Rufus Buckley was pretty certain to be there. Possibly by reason of his holding a judicial office and possibly because he was of a conservative habit of mind, Squire Buckley was never known to give a direct answer to any question. For their own amusement, people used to try him. Catching him on a flawless morning, someone would remark in a tone of questioning that it was a fine day.

“Well now,” the Squire would say, “It tis and it taint. It’s clear now but you can’t never tell when it’ll cloud up.”

He owned a little grocery store out in the edge of town and had his magistrate’s office in a back room behind it. On a crowded Saturday when the country rigs were standing three deep outside and the two clerks were flying about measuring and weighing and counting up and drawing off, a waiting customer might be moved to say:

“Business pretty good, ain’t it Squire?”

“It’s good,” the Squire would say, licking off the corn-cob stopper of a molasses jug and driving it with a sticky plop into its appointed orifice, “And then agin it’s bad. Some things air sellin’ off very well and some things ain’t hardly sellin’ off a’tall.”

The Squire was no great shakes of a talker, but as a listener he was magnificent. He would sit silently hour after hour with his hands laced over his paunch, only occasionally spitting over the banisters with a strident tearing sound.

Nor was the assemblage complete without Captain Shelby Woodward. Captain Shelby Woodward’s specialty in conversation was the Big War. From him I first heard the story of how Lieutenant Gracey of the County Battery floated down the river on a saw log and single handed, captured the Yankee gunboat and its sleepy-headed crew. From him I learned the why and wherefore of how our town although located right on the border of North and South, came in ‘61 to be called the Little Charleston, and from him also I got the tale of that lost legion of Illinois men, a full battalion of them, who crossing out of their own State by stealth were joyously welcomed into ours, and were mustered into the service and thereafter for four years fought their own kinspeople and neighbors – the only organized command, so Captain Shelby Woodward said, that came to the army from the outside. Frequently he used to tell about Miss Em. Garrett, who when Grant came up from Cairo on his gunboats, alone remembered what all the rest of the frightened town forgot – that the silken flag which the women had made with loving hands, was still floating from its flag pole in front of the engine house; and she drove her old rock-away down to the engine house and made her little negro house boy shin up the pole and bring the flag down to her, he greatly fearing the shells from the gunboats that whistled past his head, but fearing much more his mistress, standing down below and looking up at his bare legs with her buggy whip.

“So then,” Captain Woodward would go on, “she put the flag under her dress and drove on home. But some Union sympathizer told on her when the troops landed and a crowd of them broke away and went out to her place and called on her to give it up. She was all alone except for the darkeys, but she wasn’t scared, that old woman. They sassed her and she sassed ‘em back, and they were swearing they’d burn the house down over her head, and she was daring ‘em to do it, when an officer came up and drove ‘em off. And afterwards when the warehouses and the churches and the Young Ladies’ Seminary were chuck full of sick and wounded, brought down from Donaldson and Shiloh, she turned in and nursed them all alike, not caring which side they’d fought on. And so, some of the very men that had threatened her, used to salute when she passed them on the street.

“And sir, she wore that flag under her skirts for four years, and she kept it always and when she died it was her shroud. You remember, Billy, – you were one of the pall bearers?” he would say, turning to Judge Priest.

And Judge Priest would say he remembered mighty well and the talk would go swinging back and forth, but generally back, being concerned mainly with people that were dead and things that were done years and years before I was born.

Major J. Q. A. Pickett was apt to be of the company, dapper and as jaunty as his game leg would let him be, always in black with a white tube rose in his buttonhole. The Major was a born boulevaidier without a boulevard, a natural man about town without the right kind of a town to be about in, and a clubman by instinct, yet with no club except the awnings under Soule’s drug store, and the screening of dishrag vines and balsam apples on Priest’s front porch. Also in a far corner somewhere, little Mr. Herman Felsburg of Felsburg Brothers, our leading clothiers, might often be found. Mr. Felsburg’s twisted sentences used to tickle me. I was nearly grown before I learned, by chance, what Mr. Felsburg himself never mentioned – that he, a newly landed immigrant, enlisted at the first call and had fought in half a dozen hard battles before he properly knew the English for the commands of his captain. But my favorite story-teller of them all, was old Cap’n Jasper Lawson, and he was old – old even to these other old men, older by a full twenty years than the oldest of them, a patriarch of the early times, a Forty-niner, and a veteran of two wars and an Indian Campaign. For me he linked the faded past to the present and made it glow again in vivid colors. Wherever he was, was an Arabian Nights Entertainment for me.

He lives as a memory now in the town – his lean shaven jowl, and his high heeled boots and the crimson blanket that he wore winters, draped over his shoulders and held at the throat with a pin made of a big crusty nugget of virgin California gold. Wearing this blanket was no theatrical affectation of Cap’n Jasper’s – it was a part of him; he was raised in the days when men, white and red both, wore blankets for overcoats. He could remember when the Chickasaws still held our end of the State and General Jackson and Governor Shelby came down and bought it away from them and so gave to it its name of The Purchase. He could remember plenty of things like that – and what was better, could tell them so that you could see before your eyes the burnished backs of the naked bucks sitting in solemn conclave and those two old Indian fighters chaffering with them for their tribal lands. He was tall and sparse and straight like one of those old hillside pines, that I have seen since growing on the red clay slopes of the cotton country south of us; and he stayed so until he died, which was when he was away up in the nineties. It was Cap’n Jasper this night who told the story of Singin’ Sandy Biggs.

Somehow or other, the talk had flowed and eddied by winding ways to the subject of cowardice, and Judge Priest had said that every brave man was a coward and every coward was a brave man – it all depended on the time and the place – and this had moved Captain Shelby Woodward to repeat one of his staple chronicles – when the occasion suited he always told it. It concerned that epic last year of the Orphan Brigade – his brigade he always called it, as though he’d owned it.

“More than five thousand of us in that brigade of mine, when we went out in ‘61,” he said, “and not quite twelve hundred of us left on that morning in May of ‘64 when we marched out of Dalton – Joe Johnston’s rear guard, holding Sherman back. Holding him back? Hah, feeding ourselves to him; that was it, sir – just feeding ourselves to him a bite at a time, so as to give the rest of the army a chance for its life. And what does that man Shaler say – what does he say and prove it by the figures? One hundred and twenty solid days of fighting and marching and retreating – one hundred and forty days that were like a hot red slice carved out of hell – fighting every day and mighty near every hour, hanging on Sherman’s flanks and stinging at him like gadflies and being wiped out and swallowed in mouthfuls. A total, sir, of more than 1800 deadly, or disabling wounds for us in those hundred and twenty days, or more than a wound apiece if every man had been wounded, and there were less than fifty of the boys that weren’t wounded at that. And in September, at the end of those hundred and twenty days, just 240 of us left out of what had been five thousand three years before – 240 out of what had been nearly twelve hundred in May – 240 out of a whole brigade, infantry, and artillery – but still fighting and still ready to keep right on fighting. Those are Shaler’s figures, and he was a Federal officer himself, and a most gallant gentleman. And it is true, sir – every word of it is true.

“Now was that bravery? Or was it just pure doggedness? And when you come right down to it, what is the difference between the two? This one thing I do know, though – if it was bravery we were no braver than the men who fought us and chased us and killed us off on that campaign to Atlanta and then on down to the Sea and if it was doggedness, they’d have been just as dogged as we were with the conditions reversed – them losing and us winning. When you’re the underdog you just naturally have to fight – there’s nothing else for you to do – isn’t that true in your experience, Billy?”

“Yes,” said Judge Priest, “that’s true as Gospel Writ. After all, boys,” he added, “I reckin the bravest man that lives is the coward that wants to run and yit don’t do it. And anyway, when all’s said and done, the bravest fighters in every war have always been the women and not the men. I know ‘twas so in that war of ours – the men could go and git what joy there was out of the fightin’; it was the women that stayed behind and suffered and waited and prayed. Boys, if you’ve all got a taste of your toddies left, s’posen we drink to our women before Jeff brings you your fresh glasses.”

They drank with those little clucking sipping sounds that old men make when they drink, and for a bit there was a silence. The shifting shuttle play of the lightning made stage effects in yellow and black against the back-drop of the sky. From the shadows of the dishrag vine where he sat in a hickory arm chair, his pipe bowl making a glowing red smudge in the darkness, old Cap’n Jasper Lawson spoke.

“Speaking of under dogs and things, I reckon none of you young fellows” – he chuckled a little down in his throat – “can remember when this wasn’t a gun-toting country down here? But I do.

“It was before your day, but I remember it. First off, there was the time when my daddy and the granddaddies of some of you gentlemen came out over the Wilderness trail with a squirrel rifle in one hand and an ax in the other, swapping shots with the Indians every step of the way. And that was the beginning of everything here. Then, years later on, the feuds started, up in the mountains – although I’m not denying but we had our share of them down here too – and some broken down aristocrats moved out from Virginia and Maryland and brought the Code and a few pairs of those old long barreled dueling pistols along with them, which was really the only baggage some of them had; and awhile after that the Big War came on; and so what with one thing and another, men took to toting guns regularly – a mighty bad habit too, and one which we’ve never been entirely cured of yet, as Billy’s next court docket will show, eh, Billy?”

Judge Priest made an inarticulate sound of regretful assent and Squire Buckley spat out into the darkness with a long-drawn syrupy swish.

“But in between, back in the twenties and the thirties, there was a period when gun toting wasn’t so highly popular. Maybe it was because pistols hadn’t got common yet and squirrel rifles were too heavy to tote around, and maybe it was because people were just tired of trouble. I won’t pretend to say exactly what the cause of it was, but so it was – men settled their differences with their fists and their feet – with their teeth too, sometimes. And if there were more gouged eyes and more teeth knocked out, there were fewer widows and not so many orphans either.

“I notice some of you younger fellows have taken here lately to calling this town a city, but when I first came here, it wasn’t even a town – just an overgrown wood landing, in the river bottom, with the shacks and houses stuck up on piles to keep ‘em out of the river mud. There were still Indians a plenty too – Chickasaws and Creeks and some Shawnees – and some white folks who were mighty near as ignorant as the Indians. Why it hadn’t been but a few years before – three or four at most, I reckon – since they’d tried to burn the widow woman Simmons as a witch. As boys, some of you must have heard tell of old Marm Simmons. Well, I can remember her and that’s better. She lived alone with an old black cat for company, and she was poor and friendless and sort of peculiar in her ways and that started it. And one spring, when the high-water went down, the children got sickly and begun dying off of this here spotted fever. And somebody started the tale that old Marm Simmons was witching ‘em to make ‘em die – that she’d look at a child and then the child would take down sick and die. It was Salem, Massachusetts, moved up a couple of hundred years, but they believed it – some of them did. And one night a dozen men went to her cabin and dragged her out along with her cat – both of them spitting and yowling and scratching like blood sisters – and they had her flung up onto a burning brush pile and her apron strings had burnt in two when three or four men who were still sane came running up and broke in and kicked the fire apart and saved her. But her old cat went tearing off through the woods like a Jack-mer-lantern with his fur all afire.”

He paused a moment to suck deliberately at his pipe, and I sat and thought about old Marm Simmons and her blazing tom cat, and was glad clear down to my wriggling toes that I didn’t have to go home alone. In a minute or so Cap’n Jasper was droning on again:

“So you can tell by that, that this here city of yours was a pretty tolerable rough place In its infancy, and full of rough people as most all new settlements are. You’ve got to remember that this was the frontier in those days. But the roughest of them all, as I recollect, rougher even than the keel-boaters and the trappers and even the Indian traders – was Harve Allen. He set himself up to be the bully of this river country.

“Well, he was. He was more than six feet tall and built like a catamount, and all the whiskey he’d drunk – you could get a gallon then for what a dram’ll cost you now – hadn’t burnt him out yet. He fought seemingly just for the pure love of fighting. Come a muster or a barn raising or an election or anything, Harve Allen fought somebody – and licked him. Before he had been here a year he had beat up half the men in this settlement, and the other half were pretty careful to leave him alone, even those that weren’t afraid of him. He never used anything though except his fists, and his feet and his teeth – he never needed anything else. So far as was known, he’d never been licked in his whole life.

“You see, there was nobody to stop him. The sheriff lived away down at the other end of the county, and the county was five times as big as it is now. There were some town trustees – three of them – and they’d appointed a long, gangling, jimpy-jawed fellow named Catlett to be the first town constable, but even half grown boys laughed at Catlett, let alone Harve Allen. Harve would just look at Catlett sort of contemptously and Catlett would slide off backwards like a crawfish. And when Harve got a few drams aboard and began churning up his war medicine, Catlett would hurry right straight home, and be taken down sick in bed and stay there until Harve had eased himself, beating up people.

“So Harve Allen ran a wood yard for the river people and had things pretty much his own way. Mainly people gave him the whole road. There was a story out that he’d belonged to the Ford’s Ferry gang before they broke up the gang. That’s a yarn I’ll have to tell this boy here some of these days when I get the time – how they caught the gang hiding in Cave-In-Rock and shot some of them and drowned the rest, all but the two head devils – Big Harp and Little Harp who were brothers – and how they got back across the river in a dug out and were run down with dogs and killed too; and the men that killed them cut off their heads and salted them and packed them in a piggin of brine and sent the piggin by a man on horseback up to Frankfort to collect the reward. Yes, that’s what they did, and it makes a tale that ought to be written out some time.”