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

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.”

“Oh, but Jedge,” she said, “you must listen to me, please. You oughter know the truth and there ain’t no way for you to know it without I tell it to you. Jimmy didn’t want no quarrel with that man – it wasn’t never none of his choosin’. He tried not to bear no grudge for what had gone before – he jest craved to be let alone and not be pestered. Why, when Ranee Fleming cussed him that first time, last Fall, he come home to me cryin’ like his heart would break. He said he’d been insulted and that he’d have to take it up and fight it out with Ranee Fleming; he felt like he just had to. But we begged him on our bended knees mighty nigh, me and Emmy did, not to do nothin’ for our sakes – and for our sakes he promised to let it go, and say nothin’. Even after that, if Ranee Fleming had just let him be, all this turrible trouble wouldn’t a-come on us. But Ranee Fleming he come back again and slapped Jimmy’s face, and Jimmy knowed then that sooner or later he’d have to kill Ranee Fleming or be killed his-self – there wasn’t no other way out of it for him.

“Jedge Priest, he’s been the best prop a lone woman ever had to lean on – he’s been like a son to me. My own son couldn’t a-been more faithful or more lovin. I jest ask you to bear all these things in mind tomorrow.”

“I will, Madame,” said the old Judge, rather huskily. “I promise you I will. Your nephew shall have a fair trial and all his rights shall be safe-guarded. But that is all I can say to you now.”

Emmy Hardin, who hadn’t spoken at all, plucked her by the arm and sought to lead her away. Shaking her head, the old woman turned away from the steps.

“Jest one minute, please, Miss Puss,” said Judge Priest, “I’d like to ask you a question, and I don’t want you to think I’m pryin’ into your private and personal affairs; but is it true what I hear – that you’ve mortgaged your home place to raise the money for this boy’s defense?”

“I ain’t begredgin’ the money,” she protested. “It ain’t the thought of that, that brought me here tonight. I’d work my fingers to the bone if ‘twould help Jimmy any, and so would Emmy here. We’d both of us be willin’ and ready to go to the porehouse and live and die there if it would do him any good.”

“I feel sure of that,” repeated the old Judge patiently, “but is it true about this mortgage?”

“Yes, suh,” she answered, and then she began to cry again, “it’s true, but please don’t even let Jimmy know. He thinks I had the money saved up from the marketin’ to hire Mr. Prentiss with, and I don’t never want him to know the truth. No matter how his case goes I don’t never want him to know.” They had moved off down the gravel walk perhaps twenty feet, when suddenly the smouldering feud-hate stirred in the old woman’s blood; and it spread through her and made her meager frame quiver as if with an ague. And now the words came from her with a hiss of feeling:

“Jedge Priest, that plague-taken scoundrel deserved killin’! He was black hearted from the day he came into the world and black hearted he went out of it. You don’t remember, maybe – you was off soldierin’ at the time – when he was jayhawkin’ back and forth along the State line here, burnin’ folks’ houses down over their heads and mistreatin’ the wimmin and children of them that was away in the army. I tell you, durin’ that last year before you all got back home, there was soldiers out after him – out with guns in their hands and orders to shoot him down on sight, like a sheep-killin’ dog. He didn’t have no right to live!”

The girl got her quieted somehow; she was sobbing brokenly as they went away. For a long five minutes after the gate clicked behind the forlorn pair, Judge Priest stood on his porch in the attitude of one who had been pulled up short by the stirring of a memory of a long forgotten thing. After a bit he reached for his hat and closed the front door. He waddled heavily down the steps and disappeared in the aisle of the maples and silver leaf trees.

Half an hour later, clear over on the other side of town, two windows of the old court house flashed up as rectangles of light, set into a block of opaque blackness. Passers by idling homeward under the shade trees of the Square, wondered why the lights should be burning in the Judge’s chambers. Had any one of them been moved to investigate the whys and wherefores of this phenomenon he would have discovered the Judge at his desk, with his steel bowed spectacles balanced precariously on the tip of his pudgy nose and his round old face pulled into a pucker of intenseness as he dug through one sheaf after another of musty, snuffy-smelling documents. The broad top of the desk in front of him was piled with windrows of these ancient papers, that were gray along their creases with the pigeonhole dust of years, and seamy and buffed with age. Set in the wall behind him was a vault and the door of the vault was open, and within was a gap of emptiness on an upper shelf, which showed where all these papers had come from; and for further proof that they were matters of court record there was a litter of many crumbly manila envelopes bearing inscriptions of faded ink, scattered about over the desk top, and on the floor where they had fallen.

For a good long time the old Judge rummaged briskly, pawing into the heaps in front of him and snorting briskly as the dust rose and tickled his nostrils. Eventually he restored most of the papers to their proper wrappers and replaced them in the vault, and then he began consulting divers books out of his law library – ponderous volumes, bound in faded calf skin with splotches of brown, like liverspots, on their covers. It was nearly midnight before he finished. He got up creakily, and reaching on tiptoe – an exertion which created a distinct hiatus of inches between the bottom of his wrinkled vest and the waistband of his trousers – he turned out the gas jets. Instantly the old courthouse, sitting among the trees, became a solid black mass. He felt his way out into the hallway, barking his shins on a chair, and grunting softly to himself.

When young Jim Faxon’s case was called the next morning and the jailor brought him in, Jim wore hand-cuffs. At the term of court before this, a negro cow thief had got away coming across the court house yard and the Judge had issued orders to the jailor to use all due precautions in future. So the jailor, showing no favoritism, had seen fit to handcuff young Jim. Moreover, he forgot to bring along the key to the irons and while he was hurrying back to the jail to find it, young Jim had to wait between his women folk, with his bonds still fast upon him. Emmy Hardin bent forward and put her small hands over the steel, as though to hide the shameful sight of it from the eyes of the crowd and she kept her hands there until Jailor Watts came back and freed Jim. The little group of three sitting in a row inside the rail, just back of Lawyer Dabney Prentiss’ erect and frock-coated back, were all silent and all pale-faced, young Jim with the pallor of the jail and Emmy Hardin with the whiteness of her grief and her terror, but the old aunt’s face was a streaky, grayish white, and the wrinkles in her face and in her thin, corded neck looked inches deep.

Right away the case was called and both sides – defense and commonwealth – announced as ready to proceed to trial. The audience squared forward to watch the picking of the jurors, but there were never to be any jurors picked for the trial of this particular case.

For Judge Priest had readied the point where he couldn’t hold in any longer. He cleared his throat and then he spoke, using the careful English he always used on the bench – and never anywhere else.

“Before we proceed,” he began, and his tone told plainly enough that what he meant to say now would be well worth the hearing, “before we proceed, the court has something to say, which will have a direct bearing upon the present issue.” He glanced about him silently, commanding quiet. “The defendant at the bar stands charged with the death of one Ransom Fleming and he is produced here to answer that charge.”

From the desk he lifted a time-yellowed, legal-looking paper, folded flat; he shucked it open with his thumb. “It appears, from the records, that in the month of February and of the year 1865, the said Ransom Fleming, now deceased, was a fugitive from justice, going at large and charged with divers and sundry felonious acts, to wit, the crime of arson and the crime of felonious assault with intent to kill, and the crime of confederating with others not named, to destroy the property of persons resident in the State of Kentucky. It appears further that a disorganized condition of the civil government existed, the State being overrun with stragglers and deserters from both armies then engaged in civil war, and therefore, because of the inability or the failure of the duly constituted authorities to bring to justice the person charged with these lawless and criminal acts, the Governor of this State did offer a reward of $500 for the apprehension of Ransom Fleming, dead or alive.”

Now, for sure, the crowd knew something pregnant with meaning for the prisoner at the bar was coming – knew it without knowing yet what shape it would assume. Heads came forward row by row and necks were craned eagerly.

“I hold here in my hand an official copy of the proclamation issued by the Governor of the State,” continued Judge Priest. “Under its terms this reward was open to citizens and to officers of the law alike. All law-abiding persons were in fact urged to join in ridding the commonwealth of this man. He stood outside the pale of the law, without claim upon or right to its protection.

“It would appear further,” – the old Judge’s whiny voice was rising now – “that this proclamation was never withdrawn, although with the passage of years it may have been forgotten. Under a strict construction of the law of the land and of the commonwealth, it may be held to have remained in force up to and including the date of the death of the said Ransom Fleming. It accordingly devolves upon this court, of its own motion, to set aside the indictment against the defendant at the bar and to declare him free – ”

For the time being His Honor got no further than that. Even the stupidest listener there knew now what had come to pass – knew that Judge Priest had found the way to liberty for young Jim Faxon. Cheering broke out – loud, exultant cheering and the stamping of many feet. Persons outside, on the square and in the street, might have been excused for thinking that a dignified and orderly session of court had suddenly turned into a public rally – a ratification meeting. Most of those actually present were too busy venting their own personal satisfaction to notice that young Jim was holding his sweetheart and his aunt in his arms; and there was too much noise going on round about them for any one to hear the panted hallelujahs of joy and relief that poured from the lips of the young woman and the old one.

The Judge pounded for order with his gavel, pounding long and hard, before the uproar simmered down into a seething and boiling of confused, excited murmurings.

“Mister Sheriff,” he ordered, with a seeming sternness which by no means matched the look on his face, “keep order in this court! If any further disorder occurs here you will arrest the offenders and arraign them for contempt.”

The sheriff’s bushy eyebrows expressed bewilderment. When it came to arresting a whole court house full of people, even so vigilant and earnest-minded an official as Sheriff Giles Bindsong hardly knew where to start in. Nevertheless he made answer promptly.

“Yes, suh, Your Honor,” he promised, “I will.”

“As I was saying when this interruption occurred,” went on the Judge, “it now devolves upon the court to discharge the defendant at the bar from custody and to declare him entitled to the reward of $500 placed upon the head of the late Ransom Fleming by the Governor of Kentucky in the year 1865 – ” Young Jim Faxon with his arms still around the heaving shoulders of the women, threw his head up:

“No Judge, please, sir, I couldn’t touch that money – not that” – he began, but Judge Priest halted him:

“The late defendant not being of legal age, the court rules that this reward when collected may be turned over to his legal guardian. It may be that she will find a good and proper use to which this sum of money may be put.” This time, the cheering, if anything, was louder even than it had been before; but when the puzzled sheriff looked around for instructions regarding the proper course of procedure in such an emergency, the judge on the bench was otherwise engaged. The judge on the bench was exchanging handshakes of an openly congratulatory nature with the members of the county bar headed by Attorney for the Defense, Dabney Prentiss.

IV. A JUDGMENT COME TO DANIEL

THE sidewheel packet Belle of Memphis landed at the wharf, and the personal manager of Daniel the Mystic came up the gravel levee with a darky behind him toting his valises. That afternoon all of the regular town hacks were in use for a Masonic funeral, or he could have ridden up in solitary pomp. You felt on first seeing him that he was the kind of person who would naturally prefer to ride.

He was a large man and, to look at, very impressive. On either lapel of his coat he wore a splendid glittering golden emblem. One was a design of a gold ax and the other was an Indian’s head. His watch-charm was made of two animal claws – a tiger’s claws I know now they must have been – jointed together at their butts by a broad gold band to form a downward-dropping crescent. On the middle finger of his right hand was a large solitaire ring, the stone being supported by golden eagles with their wings interwoven. His vest was the most magnificent as to colors and pattern that I ever saw. The only other vest that to my mind would in any way compare with it I saw years later, worn by the advance agent of a trained dog and pony show.

From our perch on the whittled railings of the boat-store porch we viewed his advent into our town. Steamboats always brought us to the river front if there was no business more pressing on hand, and particularly the Belle of Memphis brought us, because she was a regular sidewheeler with a double texas, and rising suns painted on her paddle boxes, and a pair of enormous gilded buckhorns nailed over her pilot house to show she held the speed record of the White Collar Line. A big, red, sheet-iron spread-eagle was swung between her stacks, and the tops of the stacks were painted red and cut into sharp points like spearheads. She had a string band aboard that came out on the guards and played Suwannee River when she was landing and Goodby, My Lover, Goodby when she pulled out, and her head mate had the loudest swearing voice on the river and, as everybody knew, would as soon kill you as look at you, and maybe sooner.

The Belle was not to be compared with any of our little stem wheel local packets. Even her two mud clerks, let alone her captain and her pilots, wore uniforms; and she came all the way from Cincinnati and ran clean through to New Orleans, clearing our wharf of the cotton and tobacco and the sacked ginseng and peanuts and such commonplace things, and leaving behind in their stead all manner of interesting objects in crates and barrels. Once she brought a whole gipsy caravan – the Stanley family it was called – men, women and children, dogs, horses, wagons and all, a regular circus procession of them.

She was due Tuesdays, but generally didn’t get in until Wednesdays, and old Captain Rawlings would be the first to see her smoke coiling in a hazy smudge over Livingston Point and say the Belle was coming. Captain Rawlings had an uncanny knack of knowing all the boats by their smokes. The news would spread, and by the time she passed the Lower Towhead and was quartering across and running down past town, so she could turn and land upstream, there would be a lot of pleasurable excitement on the wharf. The black draymen standing erect on their two-wheeled craft, like Roman chariot racers, would whirl their mules down the levee at a perilous gallop, scattering the gravel every which way, and our leisure class – boys and darkies – and a good many of the business men, would come down to the foot of Main Street to see her land and watch the rousters swarm off ahead of the bellowing mates and eat up the freight piles. One trip she even had white rousters, which was an event to be remembered and talked about afterward. They were grimy foreigners, who chattered in an outlandish tongue instead of chanting at their work as regular rousters did.

This time when the Belle of Memphis came and the personal manager of Daniel the Mystic came up the levee, half a dozen of us were there and saw him coming. We ran down the porch steps and trailed him at a respectful distance, opinion being acutely divided among us as to what he might be. He was associated with the great outer world of amusement and entertainment; we knew that by the circumstances of his apparel and his jewels and high hat and all, even if his whole bearing had not advertised his calling as with banners. Therefore, we speculated freely as we trailed him. He couldn’t be the man who owned the Eugene Robinson Floating Palace, because the Floating Palace had paid its annual visit months before and by now must be away down past the Lower Bends in the bayou country. Likewise, the man who came in advance of the circus always arrived by rail with a yellow car full of circus bills and many talented artists in white overalls. I remember I decided that he must have something to do with a minstrel show – Beach & Bowers’ maybe, or Thatcher, Primrose & West’s.

He turned into the Richland House, with the darky following him with his valises and us following the darky; and after he had registered, old Mr. Dudley Dunn, the clerk, let us look at the register. But two or three grown men looked first; the coming of one who was so plainly a personage had made some stir among the adult population. None there present, though, could read the name the stranger had left upon the book. Old Mr. Dunn, who was an expert at that sort of thing, couldn’t decide himself whether it was O. O. Driscoll or A. A. Davent. The man must have spent years practicing to be able to produce a signature that would bother any hotel clerk. I have subsequently ascertained that there are many abroad gifted as he was – mainly traveling salesmen. But if you couldn’t read his name, all who ran might read the nature of his calling, for ‘twas there set forth in two colors – he had borrowed the red-ink bottle from Mr. Dunn to help out the customary violet – and done in heavy shaded letters – “Representing Daniel the Mystic” – with an ornamental flourish of scrolls and feathery beaded lines following after. The whole took up a good fourth of one of Mr. Dudley Dunn’s blue-ruled pages.

Inside of an hour we were to know, too, who Daniel the Mystic might be, for in the hotel office and in sundry store windows were big bills showing a likeness of a man of magnificent mien, with long hair and his face in his hand, or rather in the thumb and forefinger of his hand, with the thumb under the chin and the finger running up alongside the cheek. Underneath were lines to the effect that Daniel the Mystic, Prince of Mesmerism and Seer of the Unseen, was Coming, Coming! Also that night the Daily Evening News had a piece about him. He had rented St. Clair Hall for two nights hand-running and would give a mysterious, edifying and educational entertainment dealing with the wonders of science and baffling human description. The preliminaries, one learned, had been arranged by his affable and courteous personal representative now in our midst, Mr. D. C. Davello – so old Mr. Dudley Dunn was wrong in both of his guesses.

Next morning Daniel the Mystic was on hand, looking enough like his pictured likeness to be recognized almost immediately. True, his features were not quite so massive and majestic as we had been led to expect, and he rather disappointed us by not carrying his face in his hand, but he was tall and slim enough for all purposes and wore his hair long and was dressed all in black. He had long, slender hands, and eyes that, we agreed, could seem to look right through you and tell what you were thinking about.

For one versed in the mysteries of the unseen he was fairly democratic in his minglings with the people; and as for D. C. Davello, no one, not even a candidate, could excel him in cordiality. Together they visited the office of the Daily Evening News and also the office of our other paper, the Weekly Argua-Eye, which was upstairs over Leaken’s job-printing shop. They walked through the market house and went to the city hall to call on the mayor and the city marshal and invite them to come to St. Clair Hall that night and bring their families with them, free of charge. Skinny Collins, who was of their tagging juvenile escort, at once began to put on airs before the rest. The city marshal was his father.

About the middle of the afternoon they went into Felsburg Brothers Oak Hall Clothing Emporium, steered by Van Wallace, who seemed to be showing them round. We followed in behind, half a dozen or more of us, scuffling our dusty bare feet on the splintery floor between the aisles of racked-up coats. In the rear was Willie Richey, limping along on one toe and one heel. Willie Richey always had at least one stone bruise in the stone-bruise season, and sometimes two.

They went clear back to the end of the store where the office was and the stove, but we, holding our distance, halted by the counter where they kept the gift suspenders and neckties – Felsburg Brothers gave a pair of suspenders or a necktie with every suit, the choice being left to the customer and depending on whether in his nature the utilitarian or the decorative instinct was in the ascendency. We halted there, all eyes and ears and wriggling young bodies. The proprietors advanced and some of the clerks, and Van Wallace introduced the visitors to Mr. Herman Felsburg and to Mr. Ike Felsburg, his brother. Mr. Herman said, “Pleased to meetcher,” with professional warmth, while Mr. Ike murmured, “Didn’t catch the name?” inquiringly, such being the invariable formula of these two on greeting strangers. Cigars were passed round freely by D. C. Davello. He must have carried a pocketful of cigars, for he had more of them for some of the business men who came dropping in as if by chance. All of a sudden Van Wallace, noting how the group had grown, said it would be nice if the professor would show us what he could do. D. C. Davello said it wasn’t customary for Daniel the Mystic to vulgarize his art by giving impromptu demonstrations, but perhaps he would make an exception just for this once. He spoke to Daniel the Mystic who was sitting silently in the Messrs. Felsburg’s swivel office-chair with his face in his hands – the poster likeness was vindicated at last – and after a little arguing he got up and looked all about him slowly and in silence. His eye fell on the little huddle of small boys by the necktie counter and he said sharp and quick to Jack Irons: “Come here, boy!”

I don’t know yet how Jack Irons came to be of our company on that day; mostly Jack didn’t run with us. He was sickly. He had spells and was laid up at home a good deal.

He couldn’t even go barefooted in summer, because if he did his legs would be broken out all over with dew poison in no time.

Jack Irons didn’t belong to one of the prominent families either. He lived in a little brown house on the street that went down by the old Enders place. His mother was dead, and his sister worked in the county clerk’s office and always wore black alpaca sleeves buttoned up on her forearms. His father was old Mr. Gid Irons that stayed in Scotter’s hardware store. He didn’t own the store, he just clerked there. Winter and summer he passed by our house four times a day, going to work in the morning and coming back at night, coming to dinner at twelve o’clock and going back at one. He was so regular that people used to say if the whistle on Langstock’s planing mill ever broke down they could still set the clocks by old Mr. Gid Irons. Perhaps you have known men who were universally called old while they were yet on the up-side of middle life? Mr. Gid Irons was such a one as that.

I used to like to slip into Scotter’s just to see him scooping tenpenny nails and iron bolts out of open bins and kegs with his bare hands. Digging his hands down into those rusty, scratchy things never seemed to bother him, and it was fascinating to watch him and gave you little flesh-crawling sensations. He was a silent, small man, short but very erect, and when he walked he brought his heels down very hard first. The skin of his face and of his hands and his hair and mustache were all a sort of faded pinkish red, and he nearly always had iron rust on his fingers, as though to advertise that his name was Irons.

By some boy intuition of my own I knew that he cut no wide swath in the lazy field of town life. When the veterans met at the city hall and organized their veterans’ camp and named it the Gideon K. Irons Camp, it never occurred to me that they could be offering that honor to our old Mr. Gid Irons. I took it as a thing granted that there were some other Gideon Irons somewhere, one with a K in his name, a general probably, and no doubt a grand looking man on a white horse with a plume in his hat and a sword dangling, like the steel engraving of Robert E. Lee in our parlor. Whereas our Mr. Irons was shabby and poor; he didn’t even own the house he lived in.

This Jack Irons who was with us that day was his only son, and when Daniel the Mystic looked at him and called him, Jack stepped out from our midst and went toward him, his feet dragging a little and moving as if some one had him by the shoulders leading him forward. His thin arms dangled at his sides. He went on until he was close up to Daniel the Mystic. The man threw up one hand and snapped out “Stop,” as though he were teaching tricks to a dog, and Jack flinched and dodged. He stopped though, with red spots coming and going in the cheeks as though under the stoking of a blowpipe, and he breathed in sharp puffs that pulled his nostrils almost shut. Standing so, he looked as poor and weak and futile as a sprig of bleached celery, as a tow string, as a limp rag, as anything helpless and spineless that you had a mind to think of. The picture of him has hung in my mind ever since. Even now I recall how his meager frame quivered as Daniel the Mystic stooped until his eyes were on a level with Jack’s eyes, and said something to Jack over and over again in a half-whisper.

Suddenly his hands shot out and he began making slow stroking motions downward before Jack’s face, with his fingers outstretched as though he were combing apart banks of invisible yam. Next with a quick motion he rubbed Jack’s eyelids closed, and massaged his temples with his thumbs, and then stepped back.

There stood Jack Irons with his eyes shut, fast asleep. He was still on his feet, bolt upright, but fast asleep – that was the marvel of it – with his hands at his side and the flushed color all gone from his cheeks. It scared us pretty badly, we boys. I think some of the grown men were a little bit scared too. We were glad that none of us had been singled out for this, and yet envious of Jack and his sudden elevation to prominence and the center of things.