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

Daniel the Mystic seemed satisfied. He mopped drops of sweat off his face. He forked two fingers and darted them like a snake’s tongue at Jack, and Jack, still asleep, obeyed them, as if he had been steel and they the two horns of a magnetic horseshoe. He swayed back and forth, and then Daniel the Mystic gave a sharp shove at the air with the palms of both hands – and Jack fell backward as though he had been hit.

But he didn’t fall as a boy would, doubling up and giving in. He fell stiff, like a board, without a bend in him anywhere. Daniel the Mystic leaped forward and caught him before he struck, and eased him down flat on his back and folded his arms up across his breast, and that made him look like dead.

More wonders were coming. Daniel the Mystic and D. C. Davello hauled two wooden chairs up close together and placed them facing each other; then lifting Jack, still rigid and frozen, they put his head on the seat of one chair and his heels on the seat of the other and stepped back and left him suspended there in a bridge. We voiced our astonishment in an anthem of gasps and overlapping exclamations. Not one of us in that town, boy or man, had ever seen a person in hypnotic catalepsy.

Before we had had time enough to take this marvel all in, Daniel the Mystic put his foot on Jack and stepped right up on his stomach, balancing himself and teetering gently above all our heads. He was tall and must have been heavy; for Jack’s body bent and swayed under the weight, yet held it up in the fashion of a hickory springboard. Some of the men jumped up then and seemed about to interfere. Old Mr. Herman Felsburg’s face was red and he sputtered, but before he could get the words out Daniel the Mystic was saying soothingly:

“Be not alarmed, friends. The subject is in no danger. The subject feels no pain and will suffer no injury.”

“Just the same, Mister, you get down off that little boy,” ordered Mr. Felsburg. “And you please wake him up right away. I don’t care much to see things done like that in my store.”

“As you say,” said Daniel the Mystic easily, smiling all round him at the ring of our startled faces. “I merely wished to give you a small demonstration of my powers. And, believe me, the subject feels no pain whatsoever.”

He stepped off of him, though, and Jack’s body came up straight and flat again. They lifted him off the chairs and straightened him up, and Daniel the Mystic made one or two rapid passes in front of his face. Jack opened his eyes and began to cry weakly. One of the clerks brought him a drink, but he couldn’t swallow it for sobbing, and only blubbered up the water when Mr. Felsburg held the glass to his lips. Van Wallace, who looked a little frightened and uneasy himself, gave two of the boys a nickel apiece and told us we had better get Jack home.

Jack could walk all right, with one of us upon either side of him, but he was crying too hard to answer the questions we put to him, we desiring exceedingly to know how he felt and if he knew anything while he was asleep. Just as we got him to his own gate he gasped out, “Oh, fellows, I’m sick!” and collapsed bodily at our feet, hiccoughing and moaning. His sister met us at the door as we lugged Jade in by his arms and legs. Even at home she had her black alpaca sleeves buttoned up to her elbows. I think she must have slept in them. We told her what had happened, or tried to tell her, all of us talking at once, and she made us lay Jack on a little rickety sofa in their parlor – there was a sewing machine in there, too, I noticed – and as we were coming away we saw a negro girl who worked for them running across the street to Tillman & Son’s grocery where there was a telephone that the whole neighborhood used.

When I got home it was suppertime and the family were at the table. My sister said somebody must be sick down past the old Enders place, because she had seen Doctor Lake driving out that way as fast as his horse would take him. But I listened with only half an ear, being mentally engaged elsewhere. I was wondering how I was going to get my berry-picking money out of a nailed-up cigar-box savings bank without attracting too much attention on the part of other members of the family. I had been saving up that money hoping to amass seventy-five cents, which was the lowest cash price for Tom Birch’s tame flying squirrel, a pet thing that would stay in your pocket all day and not bite you unless you tried to drag him out; but now I had a better purpose in view for my accumulated funds. If it took the last cent I meant to be in St. Clair Hall that night.

There was no balcony in St. Clair Hall, but only a sort of little hanging coop up above where the darkies sat, and the fifteen-cent seats were the two back rows of seats on the main floor. These were very handy to the door but likely to be overly warm on cold nights, when the two big, pearshaped stoves would be red hot, with the live coals showing through the cracks in their bases like broad grins on the faces of apoplectic twins. The cracked varnish upon the back of the seats would boil and bubble visibly then and the scorching wood grow so hot you couldn’t touch your bare hand to it, and a fine, rich, turpentiny smell would savor up the air.

Being the first of the boys to arrive I secured the coveted corner seat from which you had a splendid view of the stage, only slightly obscured by one large wooden post painted a pale sick blue. D. C. Davello was at the door taking tickets, along with Sid Farrell, who ran

St. Clair Hall. It kept both of them pretty busy, because there were men paying their way in whom I had never seen there at all except when the Democrats had their rally just before election, or when the ladies were holding memorial services on President Jefferson Davis’ birthday – men like old Judge Priest, and Major Joe Sam Covington, who owned the big tan yard, and Captain Howell, the bookdealer, and Mr. Herman Felsburg, and Doctor Lake, and a lot of others. Most of them took seats well down in front, I supposing that the educational and scientific features of the promised entertainment had drawn them together.

The curtain was cracked through in places and had a peephole in the middle, with black smudges round it like a bruised eye. It had a painting on it showing a street full of backwater clean up to the houses, and some elegant ladies and gentlemen in fancy-dress costumes coming down the stone steps of a large building like a county courthouse and getting into a couple of funny-looking skiffs. I seem to have heard somewhere that this represented a street scene in Venice, but up until the time St. Clair Hall burned down I know that I considered it to be a picture of some other, larger town than ours during a spring rise in the river, the same as we had every March. All round the inundated district were dirty white squares containing the lettered cards of business houses – Doctor Cupps, the dentist, and Anspach, the Old-Established Hatter – which never varied from year to year, even when an advertiser died or went out of business. We boys knew these signs by heart.

But to pass the time of waiting we read them over and over again, until the curtain rolled up disclosing the palace scene, with a double row of chairs across the stage in half-moon formation, and down in front, where the villains died at regular shows, a table with a water pitcher on it. Daniel the Mystic came out of the wings and bowed, and there was a thin splashing of hand-clapping, mostly from the rear seats, with Sid Farrell and D. C. Davello furnishing lustier sounds of applause. First off Daniel the Mystic made a short speech full of large, difficult words. We boys wriggled during it, being anxious for action. We had it soon. D. C. Davello mounted the stage and he and Daniel the Mystic brought into view a thing they called a cabinet, but which looked to us like a box frame with black calico curtains nailed on it. When they got this placed to their satisfaction, Daniel the Mystic, smiling in a friendly way, asked that a committee of local citizens kindly step up and see that no fraud or deception was practiced in what was about to follow. I was surprised to see Doctor Lake and Mr. Herman Felsburg rise promptly at the invitation and go up on the stage, where they watched closely while D. C. Davello tied Daniel the Mystic’s hands behind him with white ropes, and then meshed him to a chair inside the cabinet with so many knottings and snarlings of the twisted bonds that he looked like some long, black creature helplessly caught in a net. This done, the two watchers slipped into chairs at opposite ends of the half-moon formation. D. C. Davello laid a tambourine, a banjo and a dinner bell on the bound man’s knees and whipped the calico draperies to. Instantly the bell rang, the banjo was thrummed and the tambourine rattled giddily, and white hands flashed above the shielding draperies. But when the manager cried out and jerked the curtains back, there sat the Mystic one still a prisoner, tied up all hard and fast. We applauded then like everything.

The manager unroped him and went back to his place by the door, and after Daniel the Mystic had chafed his wrists where the red marks of the cords showed he came down a sort of little wooden runway into the audience, and standing in the aisle said something about now giving a demonstration of something. I caught the words occultism and spiritualism, both strangers to my understanding up to that time. He put his hands across his eyes for a moment, with his head thrown bade, and then he walked up the aisle four or five steps hesitating and faltering, and finally halted right alongside of Mr. Morton Harrison, the wharf master.

“I seem,” he said slowly, in a deep, solemn voice, “to see a dim shape of a young man hovering here. I get the name of Claude – no, no, it is Clyde. Clyde would tell you,” his voice sank lower and quavered effectively – “Clyde says to tell you that he is very happy over there – he says you must not worry about a certain matter that is now worrying you for it will all turn out for the best – and you will be happy. And now Clyde seems to be fading away. Clyde is gone!”

We didn’t clap our hands at that – it would have been too much like clapping hands at a funeral – because we knew it must be Clyde Harrison, who had got drowned not two months before trying to save a little girl that fell overboard off the wharfboat. Just a day or two before there had been a piece in the paper telling about the public fund that was being raised to put a monument over Clyde’s grave.

So we couldn’t applaud that, wonderful as it was, and we shivered in a fearsome, wholly delightful anticipation and sat back and waited for more spirits to come. But seemingly there weren’t any more spirits about just then, and after a little Daniel the Mystic returned to the stage and announced that we would now have the crowning achievement of the evening’s entertainment – a scientific exhibition of the new and awe-inspiring art of mesmerism in all its various branches.

“For this,” he stated impressively, “I desire the aid of volunteers from the audience, promising them that I will do them no harm, but on the contrary will do them much good. I want fellow townspeople of yours for this – gentlemen in whom you all have confidence and respect. I insist only upon one thing – that they shall be one and all total strangers to me.”

He advanced to the tin trough of the flickering gas footlights and smiled out over it at us.

“Who among you will come forward now? Come!”

Before any one else could move, two young fellows got up from seats in different parts of the hall and went up the little runway. We had never seen either of them before, which seemed a strange thing, for we boys kept a sharp eye upon those who came and went. They were both of them tall and terribly thin, with lank hair and listless eyes, and they moved as though their hip joints were rusty and hurt them. But I have seen the likes of them often since then – lying in a trance in a show window, with the covers puckered close up under the drawn face. I have peered down a wooden chute to see such a one slumbering in his coffin underground for a twenty-four or forty-eight-hour test. But these were the first of the tribe our town had encountered.

On their lagging heels followed two that I did know. One was the lumpish youth who helped Riley Putnam put up showbills and the other was Buddy Grogan, who worked in Sid Farrell’s livery stable. Both of them were grinning sheepishly and falling over their own feet. And following right behind them in turn came a shabby little man who had iron rust on his clothes, and walked all reared back, bringing his heels down hard with thumps at every step. It was old Mr. Gid Irons. We gaped at him.

I had never seen Mr. Gid Irons at St. Clair Hall before, none of us had; and in our limited capacities we were by way of being consistent patrons of the drama. In a flash it came over me that Jack must have told his father what a wonderful sensation it was to be put to sleep standing up on your feet, and that his father had come to see for himself how it felt. I judged that others besides us were surprised. There was a burring little stir, and some of the audience got up and edged down closer to the front.

Mr. Gid Irons went on up the little runway and took a seat near one end of the half-moon of chairs. Where he sat the blowy glare of one of the gas footlights flickered up in his face and we could see that it seemed redder than common, and his eyes were drawn together so close that only little slits of them showed under his red-gray, bushy eyebrows. But that might have been the effect of the gaslight at his feet. You could tell though that Daniel the Mystic was puzzled and perplexed, startled almost, by the appearance of this middle-aged person among his volunteers. He kept eyeing him furtively with a worried line between his eyes as he made a round of the other four, shaking hands elaborately with each and bending to find out the names. He came to Mr. Irons last.

“And what is the name of this friend?” he asked in his grand, deep voice.

Mr. Irons didn’t answer a word. He stood up, just so, and hauled off and hit Daniel the Mystic in the face. Daniel the Mystic said “Ouch!” in a loud, pained tone of voice, and fell backward over a chair and sat down hard right in the middle of the stage. George Muller, the town wit, declared afterward that he was looking right at Daniel the Mystic, and that Daniel the Mystic sat down so hard it parted his hair in the middle.

I heard somebody behind me make a choking outcry and turned to see D. C. Davello just bursting in upon us, with shock and surprise spreading all over his face. But just at that precise moment Fatty McManus, who was the biggest man in town, jumped up with an awkward clatter of his feet and stumbled and fell right into D. C. Davello, throwing his mighty arms about him as he did so. Locked together they rolled backward out of the door, and with a subconscious sense located somewhere in the back part of my skull I heard them go bumping down the steep stairs. I think there were ten distinct bumps.

David Pryor, one of our policemen, was sitting almost directly in front of me. He had been a policeman only two or three months and was the youngest of the three who policed the town at nights. When old Mr. Gid Irons knocked Daniel the Mystic down David Pryor bounced out of his seat and called out something and started to run toward them.

Old Judge Priest blocked his way on the instant, filling the whole of the narrow aisle. “Son,” he said, “where you aimin’ to go to?”

“Lemme by, Judge,” sputtered David Pryor; “there’s a fight startin’ up yonder!”

Judge Priest didn’t budge a visible inch, except to glance quickly backward over his shoulder toward the stage.

“Son,” he asked, “it takes two, don’t it, to make a fight?”

“Yes,” panted David Pryor, trying to get past him, “yes, but – ”

“Well, son, if you’d take another look up there you’d see there’s only one person engaged in fightin’ at this time. That’s no fight – only a merited chastisement.”

“A chesty which?” asked David Pryor, puzzled. He was young and new to his job and full of the zeal of duty. But Judge Priest stood for law and order embodied, and David Pryor wavered.

“David, my son,” said Judge Priest, “if you, a sworn officer of the law, don’t know what chastisement means you ought to. Set down by me here and I’ll try to explain its meanin’s.” He took him by the arm and pulled the bewildered young policeman down into a seat alongside his own and held him there, though David was still protesting and struggling feebly to be loose.

This I heard and saw out of a corner of my mind, the rest of me being concentrated on what was going on up on the stage among the overturning chairs and those scattering recruits in the cause of mesmerism. I saw Daniel the Mystic scramble to his feet and skitter about. He was wildly, furiously pained and bewildered. It must be painful in the extreme, and bewildering too, to any man to be suddenly and emphatically smitten in his good right eye by one who seemed all peace and elderly sedateness, and to behold an audience, which though cold, perhaps, had been friendly enough, arise in its entirety and most vociferously cheer the smiting. How much more so, then, in the case of a Seer of the Unseen, who is supposed to be able to discern such things ahead of their happening?

Daniel the Mystic looked this way and that, seeking a handy way of escape, but both ways were barred to him. At one side of the stage was Doctor Lake, aiming a walking stick at him like a spear; and at the other side was Mr. Felsburg, with an umbrella for a weapon.

Old Mr. Gid Irons was frightfully quick. His hands shot out with hard, fast dabbing motions like a cat striking at a rolling ball, and he planted his fists wheresoever he aimed.

Daniel the Mystic’s long arms flew and flailed wildly in air and his mane of hair tossed. He threw his crossed hands across his face to save it and Mr. Irons hit him in the stomach. He lowered his hands to his vitals in an agonized clutch and Mr. Irons hit him in the jaw.

I know now in the light of a riper experience of such things that it was most wonderfully fast work, and all of it happening much faster than the time I have taken here to tell it, Mr. Gid Irons wading steadily in and Daniel the Mystic flopping about and threshing and yelling – he was beginning to yell – and the chairs flipping over on their backs and every-, body standing up and whooping. All of a sudden Daniel the Mystic went down flat on his back, calling for help on some one whose name I will take oath was not D. C. Davello. It sounded more like Thompson.

Doctor Lake dropped his walking stick and ran out from the wings.

“It would be highly improper to strike a man when he’s down,” he counseled Mr. Irons as he grabbed Daniel the Mystic by the armpits and heaved him up flappingly. “Allow me to help the gentleman to his feet.”

Mr. Irons hit him just once more, a straight jabbing center blow, and knocked him clear into and under his black calico cabinet, so far in it and under it that its curtains covered all but his legs, which continued to flutter and waggle feebly.

“Get a couple-a chairs, Gideon.” This advice came from Mr. Herman Felsburg who jumped up and down and directed an imaginary orchestra of bass drummers with his umbrella for a baton – “Get a couple-a chairs and stand on the son-of-a-gun’s stomach. It does the subcheck no harm and the subcheck feels no pain. As a favor to me, Gideon, I ask you, stand on his stomach.”

But Mr. Irons was through. He turned about and came down the runway and passed out, rearing back and jarring his heels down hard. If he had spoken a single word the whole time I hadn’t heard it. As I remarked several times before he was a small man and so I am not trying to explain the optical delusion of the moment. I am only trying to tell how Mr. Gid Irons looked as he passed me. He looked seven feet tall.

It must have been just about this time that D. C. Davello worked his way out from underneath the hippopotamously vast bulk of Fatty McManus and started running back up the stairs. But before he reached the door the city marshal, who had been standing downstairs all the time and strange to say, hadn’t, it would appear, heard any of the clamor, ran up behind him and arrested him for loud talking and disorderly conduct. The city marshal obtusely didn’t look inside the door for visual evidences of any trouble within; he would listen to no reason. He grabbed D. C. Davello by the coat collar and pulled him back to the sidewalk and had him halfway across Market Square to the lock-up before the captive could make him understand what had really happened. Even then the official displayed a dense and gummy stupidity, for he kept demanding further details and made the other tell everything over to him at least twice. This also took time, because D. C. Davello was excited and stammering and the city marshal was constantly interrupting him. So that, by the time he finally got the straight of things into his head and they got back to St. Clair Hall, the lights were out and the stairs were dark and the last of the audience was tailing away. The city marshal stopped, as if taken with a clever idea, and looked at his watch and remarked to D. C. Davello that he and his friend the Professor would just about have time to catch the 10:50 accommodation for Louisville if they hurried; which seemed strange advice to be giving, seeing that D. C. Davello hadn’t asked about trains at all.

Nevertheless he took it – the advice – which also necessitated taking the train.

Even in so short a time the news seemed to have spread with most mysterious speed, that Daniel the Mystic had canceled his second night’s engagement and would be leaving us on the 10:50. Quite a crowd went to the depot to see him off. We boys tagged along, too, keeping pace with Judge Priest and Doctor Lake and Major Joe Sam Covington and certain other elderly residents, who, as they tramped along, maintained a sort of irregular formation, walking two by two just as they did when the Veterans’ Camp turned out for a funeral or a reunion.

There must have been something wrong down the road that night with the 10:50. Usually she was anywhere from one to three hours late, but this night she strangely came in on time. She was already whistling for the crossing above Kattersmith’s brickyard when we arrived, moving in force. D. C. Davello saw us from afar and remembered some business that took him briskly back behind the freight shed. But Daniel the Mystic sat on a baggage truck with a handkerchief to his face, and seemed not to see any of us coming until our advance guard filed up and flanked him.

“Well, suh,” said Judge Priest, “you had a signal honor paid you in this community tonight.”

Daniel the Mystic raised his head. The light from a tin reflector lamp. shone on his face and showed its abundant damages. You would hardly have known Daniel the Mystic for the same person. His gorgeousness and grandeur of person had fallen from him like a discarded garment, and his nose dripped redly.

“I – had – what?” he answered, speaking somewhat thickly because of his swollen lip.

“A mighty signal honor,” said Judge Priest, in his thin whine. “In the presence of a representative gatherin’ of our best people you were licked by the most efficient and the quickest-actin’ scout that ever served in General John Morgan’s entire cavalry command.”

But the reply of Daniel the Mystic, if he made one, was never heard of living man, because at that moment the 10:50 accommodation came in and her locomotive began exhausting.