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

In front of them as they faced the shore loomed up the tall buildings, rising jaggedly like long dog teeth in Manhattan’s lower jaw. There were pennons of white steam curling from their eaves. The Judge’s puckered eyes took in the picture, from the crowded streets below to the wintry blue sky above, where mackerel-shaped white clouds drifted by, all aiming the same way, like a school of silver fish.

“Son,” he was saying, “I don’t know when I’ve enjoyed anything more than this here little visit, and I’m beholden to you boys for a lot. It’s been pleasant and it’s been profitable, and I’m proud that I met up with all of you.”

“When will you be coming back, judge?” asked Malley.

“Well, that I don’t know,” admitted the old judge. “You see, son, I’m gettin’ on in years, considerably; and it’s sort of a hard trip from away down where I live plum’ up here to New York. As a matter of fact,” he went on, “this was the third time in my life that I started for this section of the country. The first time I started was with General Albert Sidney Johnston and a lot of others; but, owin’ to meetin’ up with your General Grant at a place called Pittsburg Landing by your people and Shiloh by ours, we sort of altered our plans. Later on I started again, bein’ then temporarily in the company of General John Morgan, of my own state; and that time we got as far as the southern part of the state of Ohio before we run into certain insurmountable obstacles; but this time I managed to git through. I was forty-odd years doin’ it – but I done it! And, son,” he called out as the ferryboat began to quiver and Malley stepped ashore, “I don’t mind tellin’ you in strict confidence that while the third Confederate invasion of the North was a long time gittin’ under way, it proved a most complete success in every particular when it did. Give my best reguards to Miss Margaret Movine.”

VIII. THE MOB FROM MASSAC

YOU might call it a tragedy – this thing that came to pass down in our country here a few years back. For that was exactly what it was – a tragedy, and in its way a big one. Yet at the time nobody thought of calling it by any name at all. It was just one of those shifts that are inevitably bound to occur in the local politics of a county or a district; and when it did come, and was through and over with, most people accepted it as a matter of course.

There were some, however, it left jarred and dazed and bewildered – yes, and helpless too; men too old to readjust their altered fortunes to their altered conditions even if they had the spirit to try, which they hadn’t. Take old Major J. Q. A. Pickett now. Attaching himself firmly to a certain spot at the far end of Sherrill’s bar, with one leg hooked up over the brass bar-rail – a leg providentially foreshortened by a Minie ball at Shiloh, as if for that very purpose – the major expeditiously drank himself to death in a little less than four years, which was an exceedingly short time for the job, seeing he had always been a most hale and hearty old person, though grown a bit gnarly and skewed with the coming on of age. The major had been county clerk ever since Reconstruction; he was a gentleman and a scholar and could quote Latin and Sir Walter Scott’s poetry by the running yard. Toward the last he quoted them with hiccups and a stutter.

Also there was Captain Andy J. Redcliffe, who was sheriff three terms handrunning and, before that, chief of police. Going out of office he went into the livery-stable business; but he didn’t seem to make much headway against the Farrell Brothers, who ‘owned the other livery stable and were younger men and spry and alert to get trade. He spent a few months sitting at the front door of his yawning, half-empty stables, nursing a grudge against nearly everything and plaintively garrulous on the subject of the ingratitude of republics in general and this republic in particular; and presently he sickened of one of those mysterious diseases that seem to attack elderly men of a full habit of life and to rob them of their health without denuding them of their flesh. His fat sagged on his bones in unwholesome, bloated folds and he wallowed unsteadily when he walked. One morning one of his stable hands found him dead in his office, and the Gideon K. Irons Camp turned out and gave him a comrade’s funeral, with full military honors.

Also there were two or three others, including ex-County Treasurer Whitford, who shot himself through the head when a busy and conscientious successor found in his accounts a seeming shortage of four hundred and eighty dollars, which afterward turned out to be more a mistake in bookkeeping than anything else. Yet these men – all of them – might have seen what was coming had they watched. The storm that wrecked them was a long time making up – four years before it had threatened them.

There had grown up a younger generation of men who complained – and perhaps they had reason for the complaint – that they did nearly all the work of organizing and campaigning and furnished most of the votes to carry the elections, while a close combine of aging, fussy, autocratic old men held all the good county offices and fatted themselves on the spoils of county politics. These mutterings of discontent found shape in a sort of semi-organized revolt against the county ring, as the young fellows took to calling it, and for the county primary they made up a strong ticket among themselves – a ticket that included two smart young lawyers who could talk on their feet, and a popular young farmer for sheriff, and a live young harnessmaker as a representative of union labor, which was beginning to be a recognized force in the community with the coming of the two big tanneries. They made a hard fight of it, too, campaigning at every fork in the big road and every country store and blacksmith shop, and spouting arguments and oratory like so many inspired human spigots. Their elderly opponents took things easier. They rode about in top buggies and democrat wagons from barbecue to rally and from rally to schoolhouse meeting, steadfastly refusing the challenges of the younger men for a series of joint debates and contenting themselves with talking over old days with fading, grizzled men of their own generation. These elders, in turn, talked with their sons and sons-in-law and their nephews and neighbors; and so, when the primaries came, the young men’s ticket stood beaten – but not by any big margin. It was close enough to be very close.

“Well, they’ve licked us this time!” said Dabney Prentiss, who afterward went to Congress from the district and made a brilliant record there. Dabney Prentiss had been the younger element’s candidate for circuit-court judge against old Judge Priest. “They’ve licked us and the Lord only knows how they did it. Here we thought we had ‘em out-organized, outgeneraled and outnumbered. All they did was to go out in the back districts and beat the bushes, and out crawled a lot of old men that everybody else thought were dead twenty years ago. I think they must hide under logs in the woods and only come out to vote. But, fellows” – he was addressing some of his companions in disappointment – “but, fellows, we can afford to wait and they can’t. The day is going to come when it’ll take something more than shaking an empty sleeve or waving a crippled old leg to carry an election in this county. Young men keep growing up all the time, but all that old men can do is to die off. Four years from now we’ll win sure!” The four years went by, creakingly slow of passage to some and rolling fast to others; and in the summer of the fourth year another campaign started up and grew hot and hotter to match the weather, which was blazing hot. The August drought came, an arid and a blistering visitation. Except at dusk and at dawn the birds quit singing and hung about in the thick treetops, silent and nervous, with their bills agape and their throat feathers panting up and down. The roasting ears burned to death on the stalk and the wide fodder blades slowly cooked from sappy greenness to a brittle dead brown. The clods in the cornrows wore dry as powder and gave no nourishment for growing, ripening things. The dust powdered the blackberry vines until they lost their original color altogether, and at the roadside the medicinal mullein drooped its wilted long leaves, like lolling tongues that were all furred and roiled, as though the mullein suffered from the very fevers that its steeped juices are presumed to cure. At its full the moon shone hot and red, with two rings round it; and the two rings always used to mean water in our country – two rings for drinking water at the hotel, and for rainwater two rings round the moon – but week after week no rain fell and the face of the earth just seemed to dry up and blow away. Yet the campaign neither lost its edge nor abated any of its fervor by reason of the weather. Politics was the chief diversion and the main excitement in our county in those days – and still is.

One morning near the end of the month a dust-covered man on a sorely spent horse galloped in from Massac Creek, down in the far edge of the county; and when he had changed horses at Farrell Brothers’ and started back again there went with him the sheriff, both of his deputies and two of the town policemen, the sheriff taking with him in his buckboard a pair of preternaturally grave dogs of a reddish-brown aspect, with long, drooping ears, and long, sad, stupid faces and eyes like the chief mourners’ at a funeral. They were bloodhounds, imported at some cost from a kennel in Tennessee and reputed to be marvelously wise in the tracking down of criminals. By the time the posse was a mile away and headed for Massac a story had spread through the town that made men grit their teeth and sent certain armed and mounted volunteers hurrying out to join the manhunt.

Late that same afternoon a team of blown horses, wet as though they had wallowed in the river and drawing a top buggy, panted up to the little red-brick jail, which stood on the county square alongside the old wooden white courthouse, and halted there. Two men – a constable and a deputy sheriff – sat back under the overhanging top of the buggy, and between them something small was crushed, huddled down on the seat and almost hidden by their broad figures. They were both yellowed with the dust of a hard drive. It lay On their shoulders like powdered sulphur and was gummed to their eyelashes, so that when they batted their eyelids to clear their sight it gave them a grotesque, clownish look. They climbed laboriously out and stretched their limbs.

The constable hurried stiffly up the short gravel path to the jail and rapped on the door and called out something. The deputy sheriff reached in under the buggy top and hauled out a little negro, skinny and slight and seemingly not over eighteen years old. He hauled him out as though he was handling a sack of grits, and the negro came out like a sack of grits and fell upon his face on the pavement, almost between the buggy wheels. His wrists were held together by a pair of iron handcuffs heavy enough to fetter a bear, and for further precaution his legs had been hobbled with a plowline, and his arms were tied back with another length of the plowline that passed through his elbows and was knotted behind. The deputy stooped, took a grip on the rope across the prisoner’s back and heaved him up to his feet. He was ragged, barefooted and bareheaded and his face was covered with a streaky clayish-yellow caking, where the sweat had run down and wetted the dust layers. Through this muddy mask his pop-eyes stared with a dulled animal terror.

Thus yanked upright the little negro swayed on his feet, shrinking up his shoulders and lurching in his tethers. Then his glazed stare fell on the barred windows and the hooded door of the jail, and he realized where he had been brought and hurried toward it as toward a welcome haven, stretching his legs as far as the ropes sawing on his naked ankles would let him. Willing as he was, however, he collapsed altogether as he reached the door and lay on his face kinking and twisting up in his bonds like a stricken thing. The deputy and the constable dragged him up roughly, one lifting him by his arm bindings and the other by the ropes on his legs, and they pitched him in flat on the floor of the little jail office. He wriggled himself under a table and lay there, sniffling out his fear and relief. His tongue hung out of his mouth like the tongue of a tied calf, and he panted with choky, slobbering sounds.

The deputy sheriff and the constable left him lying and went to a water bucket in the corner and drank down brimming dippers, turn and turn about, as though their thirst was unslakable. It was Dink Bynum, the deputy jailer, who had admitted them and in the absence of his superior he was in charge solely. He waited until the two had lowered the water line in the cedar bucket by a matter of inches.

“Purty quick work, boys,” he said professionally, “if this is the right nigger.”

“I guess there ain’t much doubt about him bein’ the right one,” said the constable, whose name was Quarles. “Is there, Gus?” he added.

“No doubt at all in my mind,” said the deputy. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve, which smeared the dust across his face in a sort of pattern.

“How’d you fellers come to git him?” asked Bynum.

“Well,” said the deputy, “we got out to the Hampton place about dinner time I reckin it was. Every man along the creek and every boy that was big enough to tote a gun was out scourin’ the woods and there wasn’t nobody round the place exceptin’ a passel of the womenfolks. Just over the fence where the nigger was s’posed to have crossed we found his old wool hat layin’ right where he’d run out from under it and we let the dogs smell of it, and inside of five minutes they’d picked up a trail and was openin’ out on it. It was monstrous hot going through them thick bottoms afoot, and me and Quarles here outrun the sheriff and the others. Four miles back of Florence Station, and not more’n a mile from the river, we found this nigger treed up a hackberry with the dogs bayin’ under him. I figure he’d been hidin’ out in the woods all night and was makin’ for the river, aimin’ to cross, when the dogs fetched up behind him and made him take to a tree.”

“Did you carry him back for the girl to see?”

“No,” said the deputy sheriff. “Me and Quarles we talked it over after we’d got him down and had him roped up. In the first place she wasn’t in no condition to take a look at him, and besides we knowed that them Massac people jest natchelly wouldn’t listen to nothin’ oncet they laid eyes on him. They’d ‘a’ tore him apart bodily.”

The bound figure on the floor began moaning in a steady, dead monotone, with his lips against the planking.

“So, bein’ as me and Quarles wanted the credit for bringin’ him in, not to mention the reward,” went on the deputy, without a glance at the moaning negro, “we decided not to take no chances. I kept him out of sight until Quarles could go over to the river and borrow a rig, and we driv in with him by the lower road, acrost the iron bridge, without goin’ anywhere near Massac.”

“What does the nigger say for himself?” asked Bynum, greedy for all the details.

“Huh!” said the deputy. “He’s been too scared to say much of anything. Says he’d tramped up here from below the state line and was makin’ for Ballard County, lookin’ for a job of work. He’s a strange nigger all right. And he as good as admits he was right near the Hampton place yistiddy evenin’ at milkin’ time, when the girl was laywaid, and says he only run because the dogs took out after him and scared him. But here he is. We’ve done our duty and delivered him, and now if the boys out yonder on Massac want to come in and take him out that’s their lookout and yourn, Dink.”

“I reckon you ain’t made no mistake,” said Bynum. Cursing softly under his breath he walked over and spurned the prisoner with his heavy foot. The negro writhed under the pressure like a crushed insect. The under jailer looked down at him with a curious tautening of his heavy features.

“The papers call ‘em burly black brutes,” he said, “and I never seen one of ‘em yit that was more’n twenty years old or run over a hundred and thirty pound.” He raised his voice: “Jim – oh, Jim!”

An inner door of sheet-iron opened with a suspicious instantaneousness, and in the opening appeared a black jail trusty, a confirmed chicken thief. He ducked his head in turn toward each of the white men, carefully keeping his uneasy gaze away from the little negro lying between the table legs in the corner.

“Yas, suh, boss – right here, suh,” said the trusty.

“Here, Jim” – the deputy jailer was opening his pocketknife and passing it over – “take and cut them ropes off that nigger’s arms and laigs.”

With a ludicrous alacrity the trusty obeyed.

“Now pull him up on his feet!” commanded Bynum. “I guess we might as well leave them cuffs on him – eh?” he said to the deputy sheriff. The deputy nodded. Bynum took down from a peg over the jailer’s desk a ring bearing many jingling keys of handwrought iron. “Bring him in here, Jim,” he bade the trusty.

He stepped through the inner door and the negro Jim followed him, steering the manacled little negro. Quarles, the constable, and the deputy sheriff tagged behind to see their catch properly caged. They went along a short corridor, filled with a stifling, baked heat and heavy with the smell of penned-up creatures. There were faces at the barred doors of the cells that lined one side of this corridor – all black or yellow faces except one white one; and from these cells came no sound at all as the three white men and the two negroes passed. Only the lone white prisoner spoke out.

“Who is he, Dink?” he called eagerly. “What’s he done?”

“Shut up!” ordered his keeper briefly, and that was the only answer he made. At the far end of the passage Bynum turned a key in a creaky lock and threw back the barred door of an inner cell, sheathed with iron and lacking a window. The trusty shoved in the little handcuffed negro and the negro groveled on the wooden floor upon all fours. Bynum locked the door and the three white men tramped back through the silent corridor, followed by the sets of white eyes that stared out unwinkingly at them through the iron-latticed grills. It was significant that from the time of the arrival at the jail not one of the whites had laid his hands actually upon the prisoner. “Well, boys,” said Bynum to the others by way of a farewell, “there he is and there he’ll stay – unless than Massac Creek folks come and git him. You’ve done your sworn duty and I’ve done mine. I locked him up and I won’t be responsible for what happens now. I know this much – I ain’t goin’ to git myself crippled up savin’ that nigger. If a mob wants to come let ‘em come on!”

No mob came from Massac that night or the next night either; and on the second day there was a big basket picnic and rally under a brush arbor at the Shady Grove schoolhouse – the biggest meeting of the whole campaign it was to be, with speaking, and the silver cornet band out from town to make music, and the oldest living Democrat in the county sitting on the platform, and all that. Braving the piled-on layers of heat that rode the parched country like witch-hags half the town went to Shady Grove. Nearly everybody went that could travel. All the morning wagons and buggies were clattering out of town, headed toward the west. And in the cooking dead calm of the midaftemoon the mob from Massac came.

They came by roundabout ways, avoiding those main traveled roads over which the crowds were gathering in toward the common focus of the Shady Grove schoolhouse; and coming so, on horseback by twos and threes, and leaving their horses in a thicket half a mile out, they were able to reach the edge of the town unnoticed and unsuspected. The rest, their leader figured, would be easy. A mistake in judgment by the town fathers in an earlier day had put the public square near the northern boundary, and the town, instead of growing up to it, grew away from it in the opposite direction, so that the square stood well beyond the thickly settled district.

All things had worked out well for their purpose. The sheriff and the jailer, both candidates for renomination, were at Shady Grove, and the sheriff had all his deputies with him, electioneering for their own jobs and his. Legal Row, the little street of lawyers’ offices back of the square, might have been a byroad in old Pompeii for all the life that showed along its short and simmering length. No idlers lay under the water maples and the red oaks in the square. The jail baked in the sunlight, silent as a brick tomb, which indeed it somewhat resembled; and on the wide portico of the courthouse a loafer dog of remote hound antecedents alternately napped and roused to snap at the buzzing flies. The door of the clerk’s office stood agape and through the opening came musty, snuffy smells of old leather and dry-rotted deeds. The wide hallway that ran from end to end of the old building was empty and echoed like a cave to the frequent thump of the loafer dog’s leg joints upon the planking.

Indeed, the whole place had but a single occupant. In his office back of the circuit-court room Judge Priest was asleep, tilted back in a swivel chair, with his short, plump legs propped on a table and his pudgy hands locked across his stomach, which gently rose and fell with his breathing. His straw hat was on the table, and in a corner leaned his inevitable traveling companion in summer weather – a vast and cavernous umbrella of a pattern that is probably obsolete now, an unkempt old drab slattern of an umbrella with a cracked wooden handle and a crippled rib that dangled away from its fellows as though shamed by its afflicted state. The campaigning had been hard on the old judge. The Monday before, at a rally at Temple’s Mills, he had fainted, and this day he hadn’t felt equal to going to Shady Grove. Instead he had come to his office alter dinner to write some letters and had fallen asleep. He slept on for an hour, a picture of pink and cherubic old age, with little headings of sweat popping out thickly on his high bald head and a gentle little snoring sound, of first a drone and then a whistle, pouring steadily from his pursed lips.

Outside a dry-fly rasped the brooding silence up and down with its fret-saw refrain. In the open spaces the little heat waves danced like so many stress marks, accenting the warmth and giving emphasis to it; and far down the street, which ran past the courthouse and the jail and melted into a country road so imperceptibly that none knew exactly where the street left off and the road began, there appeared a straggling, irregular company of men marching, their shapes more than half hid in a dust column of their own raising. The Massac men were coming.

I believe there is a popular conception to the effect that an oncoming mob invariably utters a certain indescribable, sinister, muttering sound that is peculiar to mobs. For all I know that may be true of some mobs, but certain it was that this mob gave vent to no such sounds. This mob came on steadily, making no more noise than any similar group of seventy-five or eighty men tramping over a dusty road might be expected to make.

For the most part they were silent and barren of speech. One youngish man kept repeating to himself a set phrase as he marched along. This phrase never varied in word or expression. It was: “Goin’ to git that nigger! Goin’ to git that nigger!” – that was all – said over and over again in a dull, steady monotone. By its constant reiteration he was working himself up, just as a rat-terrier may be worked up by constant hissed references to purely imaginary rats.

Their number was obscured by the dust their feet lifted. It was as if each man at every step crushed with his toe a puffball that discharged its powdery particles upward into his face. Some of them carried arms openly – shotguns and rifles. The others showed no weapons, but had them. It seemed that every fourth man, nearly, had coiled upon his arm or swung over his shoulder a rope taken from a plow or a well-bucket. They had enough rope to hang ten men or a dozen – yes, with stinting, to hang twenty. One man labored under the weight of a three-gallon can of coal-oil, so heavy that he had to shift it frequently from one tired arm to the other. In that weather the added burden made the sour sweat run down in streaks, furrowing the grime on his face. The Massac Creek blacksmith had a sledge-hammer over his shoulder and was in the front rank. Not one was masked or carried his face averted. Nearly all were grown men and not one was under twenty. A certain definite purpose showed in their gait. It showed, also, in the way they closed up and became a more compact formation as they came within sight of the trees fringing the square.

Down through the drowsing town edge they stepped, giving alarm only to the chickens that scratched languidly where scrub-oaks cast a skimpy shade across the road; but as they reached the town line they passed a clutter of negro cabins clustering about a little doggery. A negro woman stepped to a door and saw them. Distractedly, fluttering like a hen, she ran into the bare, grassless yard, setting up a hysterical outcry. A negro man came quickly from the cabin, clapped his hand over her mouth and dragged her back inside, slamming the door to behind him with a kick of his bare foot. Unseen hands shut the other cabin doors and the woman’s half-smothered cries came dimly through the clapboarded wall; but a slim black darky darted southward from the doggery, worming his way under a broken, snaggled fence and keeping the straggling line of houses and stables between him and the marchers. This fleeing figure was Jeff, Judge Priest’s negro bodyservant, who had a most amazing faculty for always being wherever things happened.

Jeff was short and slim and he could run fast. He ran fast now, snatching off his hat and carrying it in his hand – the surest of all signs that a negro is traveling at his top gait. A good eighth of a mile in advance of the mob, he shot in at the back door of the courthouse and flung himself into his employer’s room.

“Jedge! Jedge!” he panted tensely. “Jedge Priest, please, suh, wake up – the mobbers is comin’!”

Judge Priest came out of his nap with a jerk that uprighted him in his chair.

“What’s that, boy?”

“The w’ite folks is conin’ after that there little nigger over in the jail. I outrun ‘em to git yere and tell you, suh.”

“Ah-hah!” said Judge Priest, which was what Judge Priest generally said first of all when something struck him forcibly. He reared himself up briskly and reached for his hat and umbrella.

“Which way are they comin’ from?” he asked as he made for the hall and the front door.

“Comin’ down the planin’-mill road into Jefferson Street,” explained Jeff, gasping out the words.

As the old judge, with Jeff in his wake, emerged from the shadows of the tall hallway into the blinding glare of the portico they met Dink Bynum, the deputy jailer, just diving in. Dink was shirtsleeved. His face was curiously checkered with red-and-white blotches. He cast a backward glance, bumped into the judge’s greater bulk and caromed off, snatching at the air to recover himself.

“Are you desertin’ your post, Dink?” demanded the judge.

“Jedge, there wasn’t no manner of use in my stayin’,” babbled Bynum. “I’m all alone and there’s a whole big crowd of ‘em comin’ yonder. There’ll git that nigger anyhow – and he deserves it!” he burst out.

“Dink Bynum, where are the keys to that jail?” said Judge Priest, speaking unusually fast for him.

“I clean forgot’em!” he quavered. “I left ‘em hangin’ in the jail office.”

“And also I note you left the outside door of the jail standin’ wide open,” said the judge, glancing to the left. “Where’s your pistol?”

“In my pocket – in my pocket, here.”

“Git it out!”

“Jedge Priest, I wouldn’t dare make no resistance single-handed – I got a family – I – ” faltered the unhappy deputy jailer.

The moving dustcloud, with legs and arms showing through its swirling front, was no more than a hundred yards away. You could make out details – hot, red, resolute faces; the glint of the sun on a gunbarrel; the polished nose of the blacksmith’s sledge; the round curve of a greasy oilcan.

“Dink Bynum,” said Judge Priest, “git that gun out and give it to me – quick!”

“Jedge, listen to reason!” begged Bynum. “You’re candidate yourse’f. Sentiment is aginst that nigger – strong. You’ll hurt your own chances if you interfere.”

The judge didn’t answer. His eyes were on the dustcloud and his hand was extended. His pudgy fingers closed round the heavy handful of blued steel that Dink Bynum passed over and he shoved it out of sight. Laboring heavily down the steps he opened his umbrella and put it over his shoulder, and as he waddled down the short gravel path his shadow had the grotesque semblance of a big crawling land terrapin following him. One look Judge Priest sent over his shoulder. Dink Bynum and Jeff had both vanished. Except for the men from Massac there was no living being to be seen.

They didn’t see him, either, until they were right upon him. He came out across the narrow sidewalk of the square and halted directly in their path, with his right hand raised and his umbrella tilted far back, so that its shade cut across the top of his straw hat, making a distinct line.

“Boys,” he said familiarly, almost paternally – “Boys, I want to have a word with you.”

Most of the Massac men knew him – some of them knew him very well. They had served on juries under him; he had eaten Sunday dinners under their rooftrees. They stopped, the rear rows crowding up closer until they were a solid mass facing him. Beyond him they could see the outer door of the jail gaping hospitably and the sight gave an edge to their purpose that was like the gnawing of physical hunger. Above all things they were sharp-set to hurry forward the thing they had it in their minds to do.