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

That was old Cap’n Jasper’s way. His mind was laden like Aladdin’s sumter-mule, with treasures uncountable, and often he would drop some such glittering jewel as this and leave it and go on. I mind now how many times he started to tell me the full story of the two dissolute Virginians, nephews of one of the first Presidents, who in a fit of drunken temper killed their slave boy George, on the very night that the great Earthquake of 1811 came – and taking the agues and the crackings of the earth for a judgment of God upon their heads, went half mad with terror and ran to give themselves up. But I never did find out, and I don’t know yet what happened to them after that. Nor was I ever to hear from Cap’n Jasper the fuller and gory details of the timely taking-off of Big Harp and little Harp. He just gave me this one taste of the delightful horror of it and went on.

“Some of them said that Harve Allen had belonged to the Ford’s Ferry gang and that he’d got away when the others were trapped. For a fact he did come down the river right after the massacre at the cave, and maybe that was how the story started. But as for myself, I never believed that part of it at all. Spite of his meanness, Harve Allen wasn’t the murdering kind and it must have taken a mighty seasoned murderer to keep steady company with Big Harp and Little Harp.

“But he looked mean enough for anything – just the way he would look at a man won half his fights for him. It’s rising of sixty years since I saw him, but I can shut my eyes and the picture of him comes back to me plain as a painted portrait on a wall. I can see him now, rising of six feet-three, as I told you, and long-legged and raw-boned. He didn’t have any beard on his face – he’d pulled it out the same as the Indian bucks used to do, only they’d use mussel shells, and he used tweezers, but there were a few hairs left in his chin that were black and stiff and stood out like the bristles on a hog’s jowl. And his under lip lolled down as though it’d been sagged out of plumb by the weight of all the cuss-words that Harve had sworn in his time, and his eyes were as cold and mean as a catfish’s eyes. He used to wear an old deer skin hunting vest, and it was gormed and smeared with grease until it was as slick as an otter-slide; and most of the time he went bare foot. The bottoms of his feet were like horn.

“That was the way he looked the day he licked Singin’ Sandy the first time – and likewise the way he looked all the other times too, for the matter of that. But the first time was the day they hanged Tallow Dave, the hall breed, for killing the little Cartright girl. It was the first hanging we ever had in this country – the first legal hanging I mean – and from all over the county, up and down the river, and from away back in the oak barrens, the people came to see it. They came afoot and ahorseback, the men bringing their rifles and even old swords and old war hatchets with them, with the women and children riding on behind them. It made the biggest crowd that’d ever been here up to then. Away down by the willows stood the old white house that washed away in the rise of ‘54, where old Madame La Farge, the old French woman, used to gamble with the steamboat captains, and up where the Market Square is now, was the jail, which was built of logs; and in between stretched a row of houses and cabins, mainly of logs too, all facing the river. There was a road in front, running along the top of the bank, and in summer it was knee deep in dust, fit to choke a horse, and in winter it was just one slough of mud that caked and balled on your feet until it would pull your shoes off. I’ve seen teams mired down many a time there, right where the Richland House is now. But on this day the mud was no more than shoe-throat deep, which nobody minded; and the whole river front was just crawling with people and horses.

“They brought Tallow Dave out of the jail with his arms tied back, and put him in a wagon, him sitting on his coffin, and drove him under a tree and noosed him round the neck, and then the wagon pulled out and left him swinging and kicking there with the people scrooging up so close to him they almost touched his legs. I was there where I could see it all, and that’s another thing in my life I’m never going to forget. It was pretty soon after they’d cut him down that Harve Allen ran across Singin’ Sandy. This Sandy Biggs was a little stumpy man with sandy hair and big gray eyes that would put you in mind of a couple of these here mossy agates, and he was as freckled as a turkey egg, in the face. He hadn’t been here very long and people had just begun calling him Singin’ Sandy on account of him going along always humming a little tune without any words to it and really not much tune, more like a big blue bottle fly droning than anything else. He lived in a little clearing that he’d made about three miles out, back of the Grundy Hill, where that new summer park, as they call it, stands now. But then it was all deep timber – oak barrens in the high ground and cypress slashes in the low – with a trail where the gravel road runs, and the timber was full of razor back hogs stropping themselves against the tree boles and up above there were squirrels as thick as these English sparrows are today. He had a cub of a boy that looked just like him, freckles and sandy head and all; and this boy – he was about fourteen, I reckon – had come in with him on this day of the Tallow Dave hanging.

“Well, some way or other, Singin’ Sandy gave offense to Harve Allen – which as I have told you, was no hard thing to do – bumped into him by accident maybe or didn’t get out of the road brisk enough to suit Harve. And Harve without a word, up and hauled off and smacked him down as flat as a flinder. He laid there on the ground a minute, sort of stunned, and then up he got and surprised everybody by making a rush for Harve. He mixed it with him but it was too onesided to be much fun, even for those who’d had the same dose themselves and so enjoyed seeing Harve taking it out of somebody else’s hide. In a second Harve had him tripped and thrown and was down on him bashing in his face for him. At that, Singin’ Sandy’s cub of a boy ran in and tried to pull Harve off his dad, and Harve stopped pounding Sandy just long enough to rear up and fetch the cub a back handed lick with the broad of his hand that landed the chap ten feet away. The cub bounced right up and made as if to come back and try it again, but some men grabbed him and held him, not wanting to see such a little shaver hurt. The boy was sniveling too, but I took notice it wasn’t a scared snivel – it was a mad snivel, if you all know what I mean. They held him, a couple of them, until it was over.

“That wasn’t long – it was over in a minute or two. Harve Allen got up and stood off grinning, just as he always grinned when he’d mauled somebody to his own satisfaction, and two or three went up to Singin’ Sandy and upended him on his feet. Somebody fetched a gourd of water from the public well and sluiced it over his head and face. He was all blood where he wasn’t mud – streaked and sopped with it, and mud was caked in his hair thick, like yellow mortar, with the water dripping down off of it. He didn’t say a word at first. He got his breath back and wiped some of the blood out of his eyes and off his face onto his sleeve, and I handed him his old skin cap where it had fallen off his head. The cub broke loose and came running to him and he shook himself together and straightened up and looked round him. He looked at Harve Allen standing ten feet away grinning, and he said slow, just as slow and quiet:

“‘I’ll be back agin Mister, one month frum today. Wait fur me.

“That was all – just that ‘I’ll be back in a month’ and ‘wait fur me.’ And then as he turned around and went away, staggering a little on his pins, with his cub trotting alongside him, I’m blessed if he didn’t start up that little humming song of his; only it sounded pretty thick coming through a pair of lips that were battered up and one of them, the upper one, was split open on his front teeth.

“We didn’t then know what he’d meant, but we knew in a month. For that day month, on the hour pretty nigh, here came Singin’ Sandy tramping in by himself. Harve Allen was standing in front of a doggery that a man named Whitis ran – he died of the cholera I remember years and years after – and Singin’ Sandy walked right up to him and said: ‘Well, here I am’ and hit out at Harve with his fist. He hit out quick, like a cat striking, but he was short armed and under sized. He didn’t much more than come up to Harve’s shoulder and even if the lick had landed, it wouldn’t have dented Harve hardly. His intentions were good though, and he swung out quick and fast. But Harve was quicker still. Singin’ Sandy hit like a cat, but Harve could strike like a moccasin snake biting you. It was all over again almost before it started.

“Harve Allen bellowed once, like a bull, and downed him and jumped on him and stomped him in the chest with his knees and pounded and clouted him in the face until the little man stretched out on the ground still and quiet. Then, Harve climbed off of him and swaggered off. Even now, looking back on it all, it seems like a shameful thing to admit, but nobody dared touch a hand to Singin’ Sandy until Harve was plumb gone. As soon, though, as Harve was out of sight behind a cabin, some of them went to the little man and picked him up and worked over him until he came to. If his face had been dog’s meat before, it was calf’s liver now – just pounded out of shape. He couldn’t get but one eye open. I still remember how it looked. It looked like a piece of cold gray quartz – like the tip of one these here gray flint Indian darts. He held one hand to his side – two of his ribs were caved in, it turned out – and he braced himself against the wall of the doggery and looked around him. He was looking for Harve Allen.

“‘Tell him for me,’ he said slow and thick, ‘that I’ll be back agin in a month, the same as usual.’

“And then he went back out the road into the oak barrens, falling down and getting up and falling some more, but keeping right on. And by everything that’s holy, he was trying to sing as he went and making a bubbling noise through the blood that was in his throat.

“They all stood staring at him until he was away off amongst the trees, and then they recalled that that was what he had said before – that he’d be back in a month; and two or three of them went and hunted up Harve Allen and gave him the message. He swore and laughed that laugh of his, and looked hard at them and said:

“‘The runty varmint must love a beatin’ a sight better than some other folks I could name,’ and at that they sidled off, scenting trouble for themselves if Harve should happen to take it into his head that they’d sided with Singin’ Sandy.”

Cap’n Jasper stopped to taste of his toddy, and the other older men stirred slightly, impatient for him to go on. Sitting there on the top step of the porch, I hugged my knees in my arms and waited breathless, and Singin’ Sandy and Harve Allen visualized themselves for me there before my eyes. In the still I could hear the darkies singing their Sweet Chariot hymn at their little white church beyond the orchard. That was the fourth time that night they had sung that same song, and when they switched to “Old Ark A’Movin’” we would know that the mourners were beginning to “come through” and seek the mourners’ bench.

Cap’n Jasper cleared his throat briskly, as a man might rap with a gavel for attention and talked on:

“Well, so it went. So it went for five enduring months and each one of these fights was so much like the fight before it, that it’s not worth my while trying to describe ‘em for you boys. Every month, on the day, here would come Singin’ Sandy Riggs, humming to himself. Once he came through the slush of a thaw, squattering along in the cold mud up to his knees, and once ‘twas in a driving snow storm, but no matter what the weather was or how bad the road was, he came and was properly beaten, and went back home again still a-humming or trying to. Once Harve cut loose and crippled him up so he laid in a shack under the bank for two days before he could travel back to his little clearing on the Grundy Fork. It came mighty near being Kittie, Bar the Door with the little man that time. But he was tough as swamp hickory, and presently he was up and going, and the last thing he said as he limped away was fur somebody to give the word to Harve Allen that he’d be back that day month. I never have been able to decide yet in my own mind, whether he always made his trips a month apart because he had one of those orderly minds and believed in doing things regularly, or because he figured it would take him a month to get cured up from the last beating Harve gave him. But anyhow, so it was. He never hurt Harve to speak of, and he never failed to get pretty badly hurt himself. There was another thing – whilst they were fighting, he never made a sound, except to grunt and pant, but Harve would be cursing and swearing all the time.

“People took to waiting and watching for the day – Singin’ Sandy’s day, they began calling it. The word spread all up and down the river and into the back settlements, and folks would come from out of the barrens to see it. But nobody felt the call to interfere. Some were afraid of Harve Allen and some thought Singin’ Sandy would get his belly-full of beatings after awhile and quit. But on the morning of the day when Singin’ Sandy was due for the eighth time – if he kept his promise, which as I’m telling you he always had – Captain Braxton Montjoy, the militia captain, who’d fought in the war of 1812 and afterwards came to be the first mayor of this town, walked up to Harve Allen where he was lounging in front of one of the doggeries. I still remember his swallowfork coat and his white neckerchief and the little walking stick he was carrying. It was one of these little shiny black walking sticks made out of some kind of a limber wood, and it had a white handle on it, of ivory, carved like a woman’s leg. His pants were strapped down tight under his boots, just so. Captain Braxton Mont-joy was fine old stock and he was the best dressed man between the mouth of the Cumberland and the Mississippi. And he wasn’t afraid of anything that wore hair or hide.

“‘Harvey Allen,’ he says, picking out his words, ‘Harvey Allen, I am of the opinion that you have been maltreating this man Riggs long enough.’

“Harve Allen was big enough to eat Captain Braxton Montjoy up in two bites, but he didn’t start biting. He twitched back his lips like a fice dog and blustered up.

“‘What is it to you?’ says Harve.

“‘It is a good deal to me and to every other man who believes in fair play,’ says Captain Braxton Montjoy. ‘I tell you that I want it stopped.’

“‘The man don’t walk in leather that kin dictate to me what I shall and shall not do,’ says Harve, trying to work himself up, ‘I’m a leetle the best two handed man that lives in these here settlemints, and the man that tries to walk my log had better be heeled for bear. I’m half hoss and half alligator and, – ’

“Captain Braxton Montjoy stepped up right close to him and began tapping Harve on the breast of his old deer skin vest with the handle of his little walking stick. At every word he tapped him.

“‘I do not care to hear the intimate details of your ancestry,’ he says. ‘Your family secrets do not concern me, Harvey Allen. What does concern me,’ he says, ‘is that you shall hereafter desist from maltreating a man half your size. Do I make my meaning sufficiently plain to your understanding, Harvey Allen?’

“At that Harve changed his tune. Actually it seemed like a whine came into his voice. It did, actually.

“‘Well, why don’t he keep away from me then?’ he says. ‘Why don’t he leave me be and not come round here every month pesterin’ fur a fresh beatin’? Why don’t he take his quittances and quit? There’s plenty other men I’d rather chaw up and spit out than this here Riggs – and some of ‘em ain’t so fur away now,’ he says, scowling round him.

“Captain Braxton Montjoy started to say something more but just then somebody spoke behind him and he swung round and there was Singin’ Sandy, wet to the flanks where he’d waded through a spring branch.

“‘Excuse me, Esquire,’ he says to Captain Montjoy, ‘and I’m much obliged to you, but this here is a private matter that’s got to be settled between me and that man yonder – and it can’t be settled only jist one way.’

“‘Well sir, how long do you expect to keep this up, may I inquire?’ says Captain Braxton Montjoy, who never forgot his manners and never let anybody else forget them either.

“‘Ontil I lick him,’ says Singin’ Sandy, ‘ontil I lick him good and proper and make him yell ‘nuff!’

“‘Why you little spindley, runty strippit, you ain’t never goin’ to be able to lick me,’ snorts out Harve over Captain Braxton Montjoy’s shoulder, and he cursed at Sandy. But I noticed he hadn’t rushed him as he usually did. Maybe, though, that was because of Captain Montjoy standing in the way.

“‘You ain’t never goin’ to be big enough or strong enough or man enough to lick me,’ says Harve.

“‘I ‘low to keep on tryin’, says Singin’ Sandy. ‘And ef I don’t make out to do it, there’s my buddy growin’ up and comin’ along. And some day he’ll do it,’ he says, not boasting and not arguing, but cheerfully and confidently as though he was telling of a thing that was already the same as settled.

“Captain Braxton Montjoy reared away back on his high heels – he wore high heels to make him look taller, I reckon – and he looked straight at Singin’ Sandy standing there so little and insignificant and raggedy, and all gormed over with mud and wet with branch water, and smelling of the woods and the new ground. There was a purple mark still under one of Sandy’s eyes and a scabbed place on top of one of his ears where Harve Allen had pretty nigh torn it off the side of his head.

“‘By Godfrey,’ says Captain Braxton Montjoy, ‘by Godfrey, sir,’ and he began pulling off his glove which was dainty and elegant, like everything else about him. ‘Sir,’ he says to Singin’ Sandy, ‘I desire to shake your hand.’

“So they shook hands and Captain Braxton Montjoy stepped one side and bowed with ceremony to Singin’ Sandy, and Singin’ Sandy stepped in toward Harve Allen humming to himself.

“For this once, anyhow, Harve wasn’t for charging right into the mix-up at the first go-off. It almost seemed like he wanted to back away. But Singin’ Sandy lunged out and hit him in the face and stung him, and then Harve’s brute fighting instinct must have come back into his body, and he flailed out with both fists and staggered Singin’ Sandy back. Harve ran in on him and they locked and there was a whirl of bodies and down they went, in the dirt, with Harve on top as per usual. He licked Singin’ Sandy, but he didn’t lick him nigh as hard as he’d always done it up till then. When he got through, Singin’ Sandy could get up off the ground by himself and that was the first time he had been able to do so. He stood there a minute swaying a little on his legs and wiping the blood out of his eyes where it ran down from a little cut right in the edge of his hair. He spit and we saw that two of his front teeth were gone, broken short off up in the gums; and Singin’ Sandy felt with the tip of his tongue at the place where they’d been. ‘In a month,’ he says, and away he goes, singing his tuneless song.

“Well, I watched Harve Allen close that next month – and I think nearly all the other people did too. It was a strange thing too, but he went through the whole month without beating up anybody. Before that he’d never let a month pass without one fight anyhow. Yet he drank more whiskey than was common even with him. Once I ran up on him sitting on a drift log down in the willows by himself, seemingly studying over something in his mind.

“When the month was past and Singin’ Sandy’s day rolled round again for the ninth time, it was spring time, and the river was bankfull from the spring rise and yellow as paint with mud and full of drift and brush. Out from shore a piece, in the current, floating snags were going down, thick as harrow teeth, all pointing the same way like big black fish going to spawn. Early that morning, the river had bitten out a chunk of crumbly clay bank and took a cabin in along with it, and there was a hard job saving a couple of women and a whole shoal of young ones. For the time being that made everybody forget about Singin’ Sandy being due, and so nobody, I think, saw him coming. I know I didn’t see him at all until he stood on the river bank humming to himself.

“He stood there on the bank swelling himself out and humming his little song louder and clearer than ever he had before – and fifty yards out from shore in a dugout that belonged to somebody else, was Bully Harve Allen, fighting the current and dodging the drift logs as he paddled straight for the other side that was two miles and better away. He never looked back once; but Singin’ Sandy stood and watched him until he was no more than a moving spot on the face of those angry, roily waters. Singin’ Sandy lived out his life and died here – he’s got grandchildren scattered all over this county now, but from that day forth Harve Allen never showed his face in this country.”

Cap’n Jasper got up slowly, and shook himself, as a sign that his story was finished, and the others rose, shuffling stiffly. It was getting late – time to be getting home. The services in the darky church had ended and we could hear the unseen worshippers trooping by, still chanting snatches of their revival tunes.

“Well, boys, that’s all there is to tell of that tale,” said Cap’n Jasper, “all that I now remember anyhow. And now what would you say it was that made Harve Allen run away from the man he’d already licked eight times hand running. Would you call it cowardice?”

It was Squire Buckley, the non committal, who made answer.

“Well,” said Squire Buckley slowly, “p’raps I would – and then agin, on the other hand, p’raps I wouldn’t.”

X. BLACK AND WHITE

OVER night, it almost seems, a town will undergo radical and startling changes. The transition covers a period of years really, but to those who have lived in the midst of it, the realization comes sometimes with the abruptness of a physical shock; while the returning prodigal finds himself lost amongst surroundings which by rights should wear shapes as familiar as the back of his own hand. It is as though an elderly person of settled habits and a confirmed manner of life had suddenly fared forth in new and amazing apparel – as though he had swapped his crutch for a niblick and his clay pipe for a gold tipped cigarette.

It was so with our town. From the snoreful profundities of a Rip Van Winkle sleep it woke up one morning to find itself made over; whether for better or worse I will not presume to say, but nevertheless, made over. Before this the natural boundaries to the north had been a gravel bluff which chopped off sharply above a shallow flat sloping away to the willows and the river beyond. Now this saucer-expanse was dotted over with mounds of made ground rising like pimples in a sunken cheek; and spreading like a red brick rash across the face of it, was a tin roofed, flat-topped irritation of structures – a cotton mill, a brewery, and a small packing plant dominating a clutter of lesser industries. Above these on the edge of the hollow, the old warehouse still stood, but the warehouse had lost its character while keeping its outward shape. Fifty years it resounded to a skirmish fire clamor of many hammers as the negro hands knocked the hoops off the hogsheads and the auctioneer bellowed for his bids; where now, brisk young women, standing in rows, pasted labels and drove corks into bottles of Dr. Bozeman’s Infallible Cough Cure. Nothing remained to tell the past glories of the old days, except that, in wet weather, a faint smell of tobacco would steam out of the cracks in the floor; and on the rotted rafters over head, lettered in the sprawling chirography of some dead and gone shipping clerk, were the names and the dates and the times of record-breaking steamboat runs —Idlewild, Louisville to Memphis, so many hours and so many minutes; Pat Cleburne, Nashville to Paducah, so many hours and so many minutes.

Nobody ever entered up the records of steamboat runs any more; there weren’t any to be entered up. Where once wide side-wheelers and long, limber stern-wheelers had lain three deep at the wharf, was only a thin and unimpressive fleet of small fry-harbor tugs and a ferry or two, and shabby little steamers plying precariously in the short local trades. Along the bank ran the tracks of the railroad that had taken away the river business and the switch engines tooted derisively as if crowing over a vanquished and a vanished rival, while they shoved the box cars back and forth. Erecting themselves on high trestles like straddle bugs, three more railroads had come in across the bottoms to a common junction point, and still another was reliably reported to be on its way. Wherefore, the Daily Evening News frequently referred to itself as the Leading Paper of the Future Gateway of the New South. It also took the Associated Press dispatches and carried a column devoted to the activities of the Women’s Club, including suffrage and domestic science.