Back Home: Being the Narrative of Judge Priest and His People - Irvin Cobb 3 стр.

He wore a black alpaca coat that slanted upon him in deep, longitudinal folds, and the front skirts of it were twisted and pulled downward until they dangled in long, wrinkly black teats. His shapeless gray trousers were short for him and fitted his pudgy legs closely. Below them dangled a pair of stout ankles encased in white cotton socks and ending in low-quarter black shoes. His shirt was clean but wrinkled countlessly over his front. The gnawed and blackened end of a cane pipestem stood out of his breast pocket, rising like a frosted weed stalk.

He settled himself back in the capacious oak chair, balanced upon his knees a white straw hat with a string band round the crown and waited for the question.

What is your name? asked Durham. William Pitman Priest.

Even the voice somehow seemed to fit the setting. Its high nasal note had a sort of whimsical appeal to it.

When and where were you born?

In Calloway County, Kintucky, July 27, 1889.

What is your profession or business?

I am an attorney-at-law.

What position if any do you hold in your native state?

I am presidin judge of the first judicial district of the state of Kintucky.

And have you been so long?

For the past sixteen years.

When were you admitted to the bar?

In 1860.

And you have ever since been engaged, I take it, either in the practice of the law before the bar or in its administration from the bench?

Exceptin for the four years from April, 1861, to June, 1866.

Up until now Durham had been sparring, trying to fathom the probable trend of the old judges expected meanderings. But in the answer to the last question he thought he caught the cue and, though none save those two knew it, thereafter it was the witness who led and the questioner who followed his lead blindly.

And where were you during those four years?

I was engaged, suh, in takin part in the war.

The War of the Rebellion?

No, suh, the old man corrected him gently but with firmness, the War for the Southern Confederacy.

There was a least bit of a stir at this. Aunt Tillys tape-edged palmleaf blade hovered a brief second in the wide regular arc of its sweep and the foreman of the jury involuntarily ducked his head, as if in affiance of an indubitable fact.

Ahem! said Durham, still feeling his way, although now he saw the path more clearly. And on which side were you engaged?

I was a private soldier in the Southern army, the old judge answered him, and as he spoke he straightened up. Yes, suh, he repeated, for four years I was a private soldier in the late Southern Confederacy. Part of the time I was down here in this very country, he went on as though he had just recalled that part of it. Why, in the summer of 64 I was right here in this town. And until yistiddy I hadnt been back since.

He turned to the trial judge and spoke to him with a tone and manner half apologetic, half confidential.

Your Honor, he said, I am a judge myself, occupyin in my home state a position very similar to the one which you fill here, and whilst I realize, none better, that this aint all accordin to the rules of evidence as laid down in the books, yet when I git to thinkin about them old soldierin times I find I am inclined to sort of reminiscence round a little. And I trust your Honor will pardon me if I should seem to ramble slightly?

His tone was more than apologetic and more than confidential. It was winning. The judge upon the bench was a veteran himself. He looked toward the prosecutor.

Has the states attorney any objection to this line of testimony? he asked, smiling a little.

Certainly Gilliam had no fear that this honest-appearing old mans wanderings could damage a case already as good as won. He smiled back indulgently and waved his arm with a gesture that was compounded of equal parts of toleration and patience, with a top-dressing of contempt. I fail, said Gilliam, to see wherein the military history and achievements of this worthy gentleman can possibly affect the issue of the homicide of Abner J. Rankin. But, he added magnanimously, if the defense chooses to encumber the record with matters so trifling and irrelevant I surely will make no objection now or hereafter.

The witness may proceed, said the judge. Well, really, Your Honor, I didnt have so very much to say, confessed Judge Priest, and I didnt expect thered be any to-do made over it. What I was trying to git at was that cornin down here to testify in this case sort of brought back them old days to my mind. As I git along more in years he was looking toward the jurors now I find that I live more and more in the past.

As though he had put a question to them several of the jurors gravely inclined their heads. The busy cud of Juror No. 12 moved just a trifle slower in its travels from the right side of the jaw to the left and back again. Yes, suh, he said musingly, I got up early this mornin at the tavern where Im stoppin and took a walk through your thrivin little city. This was rambling with a vengeance, thought the puzzled Durham. I walked down here to a bridge over a little creek and back again. It reminded me mightily of that other time when I passed through this town in 64 just about this season of the year and it was hot early today just as it was that other time and the dew was thick on the grass, the same as twas then.

He halted a moment.

Of course your town didnt look the same this mornin as it did that other mornin. It seemed like to me there are twicet as many houses here now as there used to be its got to be quite a little city.

Mr. Lukins, the grocer, nodded silent approval of this utterance, Mr. Lukins having but newly completed and moved into a two-story brick store building with a tin cornice and an outside staircase.

Yes, suh, your town has grown mightily, but and the whiny, humorous voice grew apologetic again but your roads are purty much the same as they were in 64 hilly in places and kind of rocky.

Durham found himself sitting still, listening hard. Everybody else was listening too. Suddenly it struck Durham, almost like a blow, that this simple old man had somehow laid a sort of spell upon them all. The flattening sunrays made a kind of pink glow about the old judges face, touching gently his bald head and his white whiskers. He droned on:

I remember about those roads particularly well, because that time when I marched through here in 64 my feet was about out ef my shoes and them flints cut em up some. Some of the boys, I recollect, left bloody prints in the dust behind em. But shucks it wouldnt a-made no real difference if wed wore the bottoms plum off our feet! Wed a-kept on goin. Wed a-gone anywhere or tried to behind old Bedford Forrest.

Aunt Tillys palmleaf halted in air and the twelfth jurors faithful quid froze in his cheek and stuck there like a small wen. Except for a general hunching forward of shoulders and heads there was no movement anywhere and no sound except the voice of the witness:

Old Bedford Forrest hisself was leadin us, and so naturally we just went along with him, shoes or no shoes. There was a regiment of Northern troops Yankees marchin on this town that mornin, and it seemed the word had traveled ahead of em that they was aimin to burn it down.

Probably it wasnt true. When we got to know them Yankees better afterward we found out that there really wasnt no difference, to speak of, between the run of us and the run of them. Probably it wasnt so at all. But in them days the people was prone to believe most anything about Yankees and the word was that they was cornin across country, a-burnin and cuttin and slashin, and the people here thought they was going to be burned out of house and home. So old Bedford Forrest he marched all night with a battalion of us four companies Kintuckians and Tennesseeans mostly, with a sprinklin of boys from Mississippi and Arkansas some of us ridin and some walkin afoot, like me we didnt always have horses enough to go round that last year. And somehow we got here before they did. It was a close race though between us them a-comin down from the North and us a-comin up from the other way. We met em down there by that little branch just below where your present railroad depot is. There wasnt no depot there then, but the branch looks just the same now as it did then and the bridge too. I walked acrost it this momin to see. Yes, suh, right there was where we met em. And there was a right smart fight.

Old Bedford Forrest hisself was leadin us, and so naturally we just went along with him, shoes or no shoes. There was a regiment of Northern troops Yankees marchin on this town that mornin, and it seemed the word had traveled ahead of em that they was aimin to burn it down.

Probably it wasnt true. When we got to know them Yankees better afterward we found out that there really wasnt no difference, to speak of, between the run of us and the run of them. Probably it wasnt so at all. But in them days the people was prone to believe most anything about Yankees and the word was that they was cornin across country, a-burnin and cuttin and slashin, and the people here thought they was going to be burned out of house and home. So old Bedford Forrest he marched all night with a battalion of us four companies Kintuckians and Tennesseeans mostly, with a sprinklin of boys from Mississippi and Arkansas some of us ridin and some walkin afoot, like me we didnt always have horses enough to go round that last year. And somehow we got here before they did. It was a close race though between us them a-comin down from the North and us a-comin up from the other way. We met em down there by that little branch just below where your present railroad depot is. There wasnt no depot there then, but the branch looks just the same now as it did then and the bridge too. I walked acrost it this momin to see. Yes, suh, right there was where we met em. And there was a right smart fight.

Yes, suh, there was a right smart fight for about twenty minutes or maybe twenty-five and then we had breakfast.

He had been smiling gently as he went along. Now he broke into a throaty little chuckle.

Yes, suh, it all come back to me this mornin every little bit of it the breakfast and all. I didnt have much breakfast, though, as I recall none of us did probably just corn pone and branch water to wash it down with.

And he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand as though the taste of the gritty cornmeal cakes was still there.

There was another little pause here; the witness seemed to be through. Durhams crisp question cut the silence like a gash with a knife.

Judge Priest, do you know the defendant at the bar, and if so, how well do you know him?

I was just comin to that, he answered with simplicity, and Im obliged to you for puttin me back on the track. Oh, I know the defendant at the bar mighty well as well as anybody on earth ever did know him, I reckin, unless twas his own maw and paw. Ive known him, in fact, from the time he was born and a gentler, better-disposed boy never grew up in our town. His nature seemed almost too sweet for a boy more like a girls but as a grown man he was always manly, and honest, and fair and not quarrelsome. Oh, yes, I know him. I knew his father and his mother before him. Its a funny thing too comin up this way but I remember that his paw was marchin right alongside of me the day we came through here in 64. He was wounded, his paw was, right at the edge of that little creek down yonder. He was wounded in the shoulder and he never did entirely git over it.

Again he stopped dead short, and he lifted his hand and tugged at the lobe of his right ear absently. Simultaneously Mr. Felsburg, who was sitting close to a window beyond the jury box, was also seized with nervousness, for he jerked out a handkerchief and with it mopped his brow so vigorously that, to one standing outside, it might have seemed that the handkerchief was actually being waved about as a signal.

Instantly then there broke upon the pause that still endured a sudden burst of music, a rollicking, jingling air. It was only a twenty-cent touth organ, three sleigh bells, and a pair of the rib bones of a beef-cow being played all at once by a saddle-colored negro man but it sounded for all the world like a fife-and-drum corps:

To some who heard it now the time was strange; these were the younger ones. But to those older men and those older women the first jubilant bars rolled back the years like a scroll.

The sound swelled and rippled and rose through the windows the marching song of the Southern trooper Forrests men, and Morgans, and Jeb Stuarts and Joe Wheelers. It had in it the jingle of saber chains, the creak of sweaty saddle-girths, the nimble clunk of hurrying hoofs. It had in it the clanging memories of a cause and a time that would live with these people as long as they lived and their children lived and their childrens children. It had in it the one sure call to the emotions and the sentiments of these people.

And it rose and rose and then as the unseen minstrel went slouching down Main Street, toward the depot and the creek it sank lower and became a thin thread of sound and then a broken thread of sound and then it died out altogether and once more there was silence in the court house of Forked Deer County.

Strangely enough not one listener had come to the windows to look out. The interruption from without had seemed part and parcel of what went on within. None faced to the rear, every one faced to the front.

There was Mr. Lukins now. As Mr. Lukins got upon his feet he said to himself in a tone of feeling that he be dad-fetched. But immediately changing his mind he stated that he would preferably be dad-blamed, and as he moved toward the bar rail one overhearing him might have gathered from remarks let fall that Mr. Lukins was going somewhere with the intention of being extensively dad-burned. But for all these threats Mr. Lukins didnt go anywhere, except as near the railing as he could press.

Nearly everybody else was standing up too. The states attorney was on his feet with the rest, seemingly for the purpose of making some protest.

Had any one looked they might have seen that the ember in the smoldering eye of the old foreman had blazed up to a brown fire; that Juror No. 4, with utter disregard for expense, was biting segments out of the brim of his new brown-varnished straw hat; that No. 7 had dropped his crutches on the floor, and that no one, not even their owner, had heard them fall; that all the jurors were half out of their chairs. But no one saw these things, for at this moment there rose up Aunt Tilly Haslett, a dominant figure, her huge wide bade blocking the view of three or four immediately behind her.

Uncle Fayette laid a timid detaining hand upon her and seemed to be saying something protestingly.

Turn loose of me, Fate Haslett! she commanded. Aint you ashamed of yoursef, to be tryin to hold me back when you know how my only dear brother died a-followin after Gineral Nathan Bedford Forrest. Turn loose of me!

She flirted her great arm and Uncle Fayette spun flutteringly into the mass behind. The sheriff barred her way at the gate of the bar.

Mizz Haslett, he implored, please, Mizz Haslett you must keep order in the cote. Aunt Tilly halted in her onward move, head up high and elbows out, and through her specs, blazing like burning-glasses, she fixed on him a look that instantly charred that, unhappy official into a burning red ruin of his own self-importance.

Keep it yoursef, High Sheriff Washington Nash, Esquire, she bade him; thats whut you git paid good money for doin. And git out of my way! Im a-goin in there to that pore little lonesome thing settin there all by herself, and there aint nobody goin to hinder me neither!