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

by Irvin S. Cobb

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.