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

There is a new market house now on the site of the old one, a pretentious affair of brick with concrete floors and screened window openings and provision for steam heat in the winter; but then, and for many years before that, the market was a decrepit shed-like thing, closed in the middle and open at the ends, with a shingled roof that sagged in on itself and had hollows in it like the sunken jaws of a toothless old hag; and there were cracks in the side walls that you could throw a dog through, almost. In the middle, under half-way shelter, were the stalls of the butchers, which were handed down from father to son so that one stall would remain in a family for generations; and here one bought the beef steaks of the period – long bib-shaped segments of pale red meat, cut miraculously long and marvelously thin, almost like apron patterns. This thinness facilitated the beating process – the cooks would pound them with tools devised for that purpose – and then they were fried through and through and drenched with a thick flour gravy. Such was the accustomed way of treating a beef steak. Persons with good teeth could eat them so, and for the others the brown flour gravy provided a sustenance. But the spring chickens were marvels for plumpness and freshness and cheapness; and in the early spring the smoked hog jowls hung in rows, fairly begging people to carry them off and boil them with salad greens; and in the fall when the hog killing season was at hand, the country sausage and the chines and backbones and spare ribs made racks of richness upon the worn marble slabs.

Up at the far end of the square beyond the shed eaves stood the public scales, and around it hay growers and cord wood choppers and Old Man Brimm, the official charcoal burner of the county, waited for trade alongside their highpiled wagons. Next to them was the appointed place of the fish hucksters, which was an odorous place, where channel cats and river perch and lake crappies were piled on the benches, some still alive and feebly flapping. The darkies were sure to be thickest here. There was an unsung but none the less authentic affinity existing between a fresh-caught catfish and an old negro man.

Down at the other end was the domain of the gardeners and the truck patch people – an unwritten law as old as the market itself ordained these apportionments of space – and here you might find in their seasons all manner of edibles, wild and tame. The country boys and girls ranged the woods and the fields for sellable things, to go along with the product of orchard and garden and berry patch. In the spring, when herb teas and home-brewed tonics were needed for the thinning of the blood, there would be yellow-red sassafras root tied up in fragrant, pungent bunches, all ready for steeping; and strings of fresh-shot robins for pot-pies were displayed side by side with clumps of turnip-greens and mustard greens. And in summer there would be all manner of wild berries and heaps of the sickish-smelling May apples; and later, after the first light frost, ripe pawpaws and baskets of wild fox grapes, like blue shoe buttons; and then later on, scaly-bark hickory nuts and fresh-brewed persimmon beer in kegs, and piggins and crocks of the real lye hominy, with the big blue grains of the corn all asmoke like slaking lime, and birds – which meant quail always – and rabbits, stretched out stark and stiff, and the native red-skinned yams, and often possums, alive and “suiting” in small wooden cages, or else dead and dressed, with the dark kidney-fat coating their immodestly exposed interiors.

As I was saying, it was on a Saturday in November and getting along toward Thanksgiving when old Ranee Fleming came to the market to shame young Jim Faxon before the crowd. And when he came, you could tell by his look and by the way he shouldered through the press of people between the double rows of stands that all the soured animosities of his nature had swelled to bursting under the yeasty ferment of an unstable, hair-triggered temper.

The liquor he had drunk might have had something to do with it too. He came up with a barely perceptible lurch in his gait and stopped at the Faxon stall, which was the third from the lower end of the shed. With his head down between his shoulders and his legs spraddled he began staring into the face of young Jim.

Deadly offense can be carried just as well in a look as in the spoken word, if you only know how to do it – and Ranee Fleming knew.

There was outright obscenity in his glower.

Instantly it seemed, everybody in that whole end of the market square sensed what was impending. Sellers and buyers ceased trafficking and faced all the same way. Those in the rear were standing on tiptoe the better to see over the heads of those nearer to these two blood enemies. Some climbed upon the wheel hubs of the wagons that were backed up in rows alongside the open shed and balanced themselves there. The silence grew electric and tingled with the feeling of a coming clash.

Young Jim wanted no trouble, that was plain enough to be seen. The first darting realization that his tribal foe had forced a meeting on him seemed to leave him dazed, and at a loss for the proper course to follow. He bent his face away from the blasphemous insistent – glare of the old man and made a poor pretense at straightening up his wares upon the bench in front of him; but his hands trembled so he overturned a little wooden measure that held a nickel’s worth of dried lady-peas. The little round peas rolled along a sunken place in the wood and began spattering off in a steady stream, like buck-shot spilling from a canister. A dark red flush came up the back of the boy’s neck. He was only twenty, anyhow, and those who looked on were sorry for him and for his youth and helplessness and glad that little Emmy Hardin, his sweetheart, wasn’t there.

It was a long half minute that old Ranee, without speaking, stood there, soaking his soul in the sight of a Faxon’s discomfiture, and when he spoke he grated the words as though he had grit in his mouth.

“Looky here you,” he ordered, and the boy, as though forced to obey by a will stronger than his own, lifted his head and looked at him.

“Mister Fleming,” he answered, “what – what is it you want with me – Mister Fleming?”

“Mister Fleming – Mister Fleming,” mimicked the older man, catching at his words, “Mister Fleming, huh? Well, you know mighty good and well, I reckin, whut it is I want with you. I want to see if you’re as white-livered as the rest of your low-flung, hound-dawg, chicken-hearted breed used to be. And I reckin you are.

“Mister Fleming, huh? Well, from now on that’s whut it better be and don’t you fail to call me by them entitlements either. The next time I come by I reckin you better take off your hat to me too. Do you hear me, plain, whut I’m a-sayin’? You – ”

He called him the unforgivable, unatonable name – the fighting word, than which, by the standards of that community and those people, no blow with a clenched fist could be in one twentieth part so grievous an injury; yes, it was worse than a hundred blows of a fist. So at that, the onlookers gave back a little, making way for the expected rush and grapple. But there was no forward rush by the younger man, no grapple with the older.

Young Jim Faxon took it – he just stood and took it without a word or a step. Old Ranee looked at him and laughed out his contempt in a derisive chuckle and then he turned and slouched off, without looking back, as though he disdained to watch for a rear attack from so puny and spineless an enemy. It all started and happened and was over with in a minute or less. The last of the spilt lady peas were still spattering down upon the rough bricks of the market and running away and hiding themselves in cracks. Young Jim, his head on his breast and his shamed eyes looking down at nothing, was fumbling again with his wares and Ranee Fleming’s hunching shoulders were vanishing at the end of the shed.

People talked about it that night and for days after. It was not a thing to forget – a man near grown who lacked the sand to resent that insult. A fist fight might have been forgotten, even a fist fight between these two heritors of a feud instinct, but not this. Some of the younger fellows didn’t see, they said, how Jim Faxon could hold his head up again and look people in the eye. And Jim didn’t hold his head up – not as high as he had held it before this happened. Broody-eyed and glum and tight-lipped, he tended Miss Puss Whitley’s truck patch and brought his products to market every morning. He had always been quiet and sparing of speech; now he was quiet to the point almost of dumbness.

A month and more went by, and old Ranee didn’t ride in from Gum Spring, and then the Christmas came. Christmas Day fell on a Monday so that the Christmas itself properly started on the Saturday before. It was a warm and a green Christmas as most of them are in that climate, mild enough at midday for folks to sit on their front porches and just cold enough at night to beard the grass with a silver-gray frost rime. Languid looking house flies crawled out in the afternoons and cleaned their gummy wings while they sunned themselves on the southern sides of stables. The Christmas feeling was in the air. At the wharfboat lay the Clyde, deep laden for her annual jug-trip, with thousands of bottles and jugs and demi-johns consigned to the dry towns up the river. There was a big sidewalk trade going on in fire crackers and rockets, the Christinas and not the Fourth being the time for squibbing of crackers in the South, the market, though, was the busiest place of all. It fairly milled with people. Every huckster needed four hands, and still he wouldn’t have had enough.

Jimmy Faxon had little Emmy Hardin helping him through the hours when the pressure was greatest and the customers came fastest. She kept close to him, with little nestling motions, and yet there was something protecting in her attitude, as though she would stand between him and any danger, or any criticism. The looks she darted at him were fairly caressing. Through the jam appeared Ranee Fleming, elbowing his way roughly. His face above his straggly whiskers was red with temper and with liquor. His cotton shirt was open at the throat so that his hairy chest showed. His shapeless gray jeans trousers – gray originally but now faded and stained to a mud color – were both beltless and suspenderless, and were girthed tightly about his middle by the strap at the back. From much ramming of his hands into the pockets, they were now crowded down far upon his hips, showing an unwontedly long expanse of shirt; and this gave to him an abnormally short-legged, long-waisted look.

A lot of those little fuzzy parasitic pods called beggar-lice were stuck thick upon his bagged knees – so thick they formed irregular patterns in grayish green. He wore no coat nor waistcoat, but an old mud-stiffened overcoat was swung over his shoulders with the arms tied loosely around his neck and the skirts dangling in folds behind him; and cuckleburrs clung to a tear in the lining. He was a fit model of unclean and unwholesome ferocity.

Before young Jim or little Emmy Hardin saw him, he was right up on them; only the width of the bench separated him from them. He leaned across it and called Jim that name again and slapped him in the face with a wide-armed sweeping stroke of his open hand. The boy flinched back from the coming blow so that only the ends of old Ranee’s flailing fingers touched his cheek, but the intent was there. Before the eyes of his sweetheart, he had been slapped in the face. The girl gave a startled choking gasp and tried to put her arms about young Jim. He shook her off.

Well content with his work, old Ranee fell back, all the time watching young Jim. People gave way for him involuntarily. When he was clear of the shed he turned and made for one of the saloons that lined the square on its western side. He had a choice of several such places; the whole row was given over to saloons, barring only a couple of cheap john clothing stores and a harness store, and two or three small dingy pawn shops. Pistol stores these last were, in the vernacular of the darkies, being so called because the owners always kept revolvers and spring-back knives on display in the show windows, along with battered musical instruments and cheap watches.

The spectators followed old Ranee’s figure with their eyes until the swinging doors of the nearest bar room closed behind him. When they looked back again toward Stall No. 3 young Jim was gone too. He had vanished silently; and Emmy Hardin was alone, with her face buried in her arms and her arms stretched across the counter, weeping as though she would never leave off.

From the next stall there came to her, comfortingly, a middle aged market woman, a motherly figure in a gray shawl with puckered and broad red hands. She lifted Emmy up and led her away, calling out to her nearest neighbor to watch her stall and the Faxon stall until she got back.

“There’s liable to be trouble,” she added, speaking in a side whisper so the sobbing girl wouldn’t hear what she said.

“I reckin not,” said the man. “It looks to me like Jimmy Faxon is plumb cowed down and ‘feared of that there old bush whacker – it looks like he ain’t got the spirit of a rabbit left in him. But you take her on away somewheres, Mizz Futrell – me and my boys will ‘tend stand for both of you, and you needn’t worry.”

Under such merciful guardianship little Emmy Hardin was taken away and so she was spared the sight of what was to follow.

Old Ranee stayed in the nearest saloon about long enough to take one drink and then he came out and headed for the next saloon along the row. To reach it he must pass one of the pawn-brokers’ shops. He had just passed it when a sort of smothered warning outcry went up from behind him somewhere, and he swung round to look his finish square in the face.

Young Jim Faxon was stepping out of the pawn-broker’s door. He was crying so the tears streamed down his face. His right arm was down at his side stiffly and the hand held clenched a weapon which the Daily Evening News subsequently described as “a Brown & Rogers thirty-eight calibre, nickle plated, single-action, with a black rubber handle, and slightly rusted upon the barrel.”

Old Ranee made no move toward his own hip pocket. It came out at the inquest that he was not carrying so much as a pen-knife. He half crouched and began stumbling backward toward the front of the building with his arms out and his hands making empty pawing clutches behind him as though he were reaching for some solid support to hold him up in his peril. But before he had gone three steps, young Jim brought the pistol up and fired – just once.

Once was enough. If you had never before this seen a man shot, you would have known instinctively that this one was mortally stricken. Some who were near and looking right at him told afterward how the loose end of one overcoat sleeve, dangling down on his breast, flipped up a little at the shot. A slightly pained, querulous look came into his face and he brought his arms round and folded them tightly across his stomach as though taken with a sudden cramp. Then he walked, steadily enough, to the edge of the sidewalk and half-squatted as though he meant to sit on the curbing with his feet in the gutter. He was half way down when death took him in his vitals. He pitched forward and outward upon his face with his whiskers flattening in the street. Two men ran to him and turned him over on his back. His face had faded already from its angry red to a yellowish white, like old tallow. He breathed hard once or twice and some thought they saw his eyelids bat once; then his chest fell inward and stayed so, and he seemed to shrink up to less than his proper length and bulk.

Young Jim stood still ten feet away looking at his handiwork. He had stopped crying and he had dropped the pistol and was wiping both hands flatly against the breast of his wool sweater as though to cleanse them of something. Allard Jones, the market-master, who had police powers and wore a blue coat and a German silver star to prove it, came plowing through the ring of on-lookers, head tilt, and laid hands upon him. Allard Jones fumbled in his pocket and produced a pair of steel nippers and made as if to twine the chain round the boy’s right wrist.

“You don’t need to be putting those things on me, Mr. Jones,” said his prisoner. “I’ll go all right – I’ll go with you. It’s all over now – everything’s over!”

Part of the crowd stayed behind, forming a scrooging, shoving ring around the spot in front of Benny Michelson’s pawn shop where the body of old Ranee lay face upward across the gutter with the stiffening legs on the sidewalk, and the oddly foreshortened body out in the dust of the road; and the rest followed Allard Jones and young Jim as they walked side by side up Market Square to Court Street and along Court Street a short block to the lock-up.

The sympathy of the community was with young Jim – and the law of the land was dead against him on all counts. He had not fired in sudden heat and passion; there had been time, as the statutes measured time, for due deliberation. However great the provocation and by local standards the provocation had been great enough and pressing hard to the breaking point, he could not claim self-defense. Even though Fleming’s purpose had been, ultimately, to bring things to a violent issue, he was retreating, actually, at the moment itself. As a bar to punishment for homicide, the plea of temporary insanity had never yet been set up in our courts. Jim Faxon was fast in the snarls of the law.

From the lock-up he went to the county jail, the charge, wilful and premeditated murder. Dr. Lake and Mr. Herman Felsburg and Major Covington, all customers of the accused, and all persons of property, stood ready to go bail for him in any sum namable, but murder was not bailable. In time a grand jury buttressed the warrant with an indictment – murder in the first degree, the indictment read – and young Jim stayed in jail awaiting his trial when circuit court should open in the spring.

Nobody, of course, believed that his jury would vote the extreme penalty. The dead man’s probable intentions and his past reputation, taken with the prisoner’s youth and good repute, would stand as bars to that, no matter how the letter of the law might read; but it was generally accepted that young Jim would be found guilty of manslaughter. He might get four years for killing old Ranee, or six years or even ten – this was a subject for frequent discussion. There was no way out of it. People were sorrier than ever for Jim and for his aunt and for the tacky, pretty little Hardin girl.

All through the short changeable winter, with its alternate days of snow flurrying and sunshine, Emmy Hardin and Miss Puss Whitley, a crushed forlorn pair, together minded the stall on the market, accepting gratefully the silent sympathy that some offered them, and the awkward words of good cheer from others. Miss Puss put a mortgage of five hundred dollars on her little place out in the edge of town. With the money she hired Dabney Prentiss, the most silvery tongued orator of all the silver tongues at the county bar, to defend her nephew. And every day, when market hours were over, in rain or snow or shine, the two women would drive in their truck wagon up to the county jail to sit with young Jim and to stay with him in his cell until dark.

Spring came earlier than common that year. The robins came back from the Gulf in February on the tail of a wet warm thaw. The fruit trees bloomed in March and by the beginning of April everything was a vivid green and all the trees were clumped with new leaves. Court opened on the first Monday.

On the Sunday night before the first Monday, Judge Priest sat on his porch as the dusk came on, laving his spirits in the balm of the young spring night. In the grass below the steps the bull-cricket that wintered under Judge Priest’s front steps was tuning his fairy-fiddle at regular, half-minute intervals. Bull bats on the quest for incautious gnats and midges were flickering overhead, showing white patches on the tinder sides of their long wings. A flying squirrel, the only night-rider of the whole squirrel tribe, flipped out of his hole in a honey locust tree, and cocked his head high, and then he spread the furry gray membranes along his sides and sailed in a graceful, downward swoop to the butt of a silver leaf poplar, fifty feet away, where he clung against the smooth bark so closely and so flatly he looked like a little pelt stretched and nailed up there to dry.

The front gate clicked and creaked. The flying squirrel flipped around to the safe side of his tree and fled upward to the shelter of the branches, like a little gray shadow, and Judge Priest, looking down the aisle of shady trees, saw two women coming up the walk toward him, their feet crunching slowly on the gravel. He laid his pipe aside and pulled chairs forward for his callers, whoever they might be. They were right up to the steps before he made them out – Miss Puss Whitley and little Emmy Hardin.

“Howdy do, ladies,” said the old Judge with his homely courtesy. “Howdy, Miss Puss? Emmy, child, how are you? Come in and set down and rest yourselves.”

But for these two, this was no time for the small civilities. The weight of trouble at their hearts knocked for utterance at their lips. Or, at least, it was so with the old aunt.

“Jedge Priest,” she began, with a desperate, driven eagerness, “we’ve come here tonight to speak in private with you about my boy – about Jimmy.”

In the darkness they could not see that the old Judge’s plump figure was stiffening.

“Did Mister Dabney Prentiss – did anyone, send you here to see me on this business?” he asked, quickly.

“No, suh, nobody a’tall,” answered the old woman. “We jest came on our own accord – we felt like as if we jest had to come and see you. Court opens in the momin’ and Jimmy’s case, as you know, comes up the first thing. And oh, Jedge Priest, we air in so much trouble, Emmy and me – and you’ve got the name of bein’ kind hearted to them that’s borne down and in distress – and so we come to you.”

He raised his hand, as though to break in on her, but the old woman was not to be stopped. She was pouring out the grievous burden of her lament:

“Jedge Priest, you knowed my husband when he was alive, and you’ve knowed me these many years. And you know how it was in them old days that’s gone that the Flemings was forever and a day fightin’ with my people and forcin’ trouble on ‘em ‘till finally they hunted ‘em plum’ out of the county and out of the State, away from the places where they was born and raised. And you know Jimmy too, and know what a hard time he had growin’ up, and how he’s always stood by me and helped me out, jest the same as if he was my own son. And I reckin you know about him – and Emmy here.”

She broke off to wipe her eyes. Had it been a man who came on such an errand the Judge would have sent him packing – he would have been at no loss to put his exact meaning into exact language; for the Judge held his place on the bench in a high and scriptural regard. But here, in the presence of these two woeful figures, their faces drenched and steeped with sorrow, he hesitated, trying to choose words that would not bruise their wounds.

“Miss Puss,” he said very softly, almost as though he were speaking to a child, “whatever my private feelin’s may be towards you and yours, it is not proper for me as the Judge upon the bench, to express them in advance of the trial. It is my sworn duty to enforce the law, as it is written and laid down in the books. And the law is merciful, and is just to all.”

The old woman’s angular, slatty figure straightened. In the falling light her pinched and withered face showed, a white patch with deep grayish creases in it, the color of snow in a quick thaw.

“The law!” she flared out, “the law, you say, Jedge. Well, you kin talk mighty big about the law, but what kind of a law is that that lets a fightin’, swearin’, drunken bully like Ranee Fleming plague a poor boy and call him out of his name with vile words and shame him before this child here, and yit not do nothin’ to him for it? And what kind of a law is it that’ll send my boy up yonder to that there penitentiary and wreck his life and Emmy’s life and leave me here alone in my old age, ashamed to lift my head amongst my neighbors ever again?”

“Madame,” said the Judge with all kindliness in his tone, “it’s not for me to discuss these matters with you, now. It’s not even proper that I should let you say these things to me.”