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

by Irvin S. Cobb

“Jeff, you go out yonder to the kitchen and tell Aunt Dilsey to hurry along my breakfast. I'll be down right away.”

“Yas, suh,” said Jeff; “I'll bring it right in, suh.”

Jeff was as anxious as the judge that the ceremony of breakfast might be speedily over; and, to tell the truth, so was Aunt Dilsey, who fluttered with impatience as she fried the judge's matinal ham and dished up the hominy. Aunt Dilsey regularly patronized all circuses, but she specialized in sideshows. The sideshow got a dime of hers before the big show started and again after it ended. She could remember from year to year just how the sideshow banners looked and how many there were of them, and on the mantelpiece in her cabin was ranged a fly-blown row of freaks' photographs purchased at the exceedingly reasonable rate of ten cents for cabinet sizes and twenty-five for the full length.

So there was no delay about serving the judge's breakfast or about clearing the table afterward. For that one morning, anyhow, the breakfast dishes went unwashed. Even as the judge put on his straw hat and came out on the front porch, the back door was already discharging Jeff and Aunt Dilsey. By the time the judge had traversed the shady yard and unlatched the front gate, Jeff was halfway to the showground and mending his gait all the time. Less than five minutes later Jeff was being ordered, somewhat rudely, off the side of a boarded-up cage, upon which he had climbed with a view to ascertaining, by a peep through the barred air-vent under the driver's seat, whether the mysterious creature inside looked as strange as it smelled; and less than five minutes after that, Jeff, having reached a working understanding with the custodian of the cage, who likewise happened to be in charge of certain ring stock, was convoying a string of trick ponies to the water-trough over by the planing mill. Aunt Dilsey, moving more slowly—yet guided, nevertheless, by a sure instinct—presently anchored herself at the precise spot where the sideshow tent would stand. Here several lodge sisters soon joined her. They formed a comfortable brown clump, stationary in the midst of many brisk; activities.

The judge stood at his gate a minute, lighting his corncob pipe. As he stood there a farm wagon clattered by, coming in from the country. Its bed was full of kitchen chairs and the kitchen chairs contained a family, including two pretty country girls in their teens, who were dressed in fluttering white with a plenitude of red and blue ribbons. The head of the family, driving, returned the judge's waved greeting somewhat stiffly. It was plain that his person was chafed and his whole being put under restraint by the fell influences of a Sunday coat and the hard collar that was buttoned on to the neckband of his blue shirt.

His pipe being lighted, the judge headed leisurely in the same direction that the laden farm wagon had taken. Along Clay Street from the judge's house to the main part of town, where the business houses and the stores centered, was a mile walk nearly, up a fairly steepish hill and down again, but shaded well all the way by water maples and silver-leaf trees. There weren't more than eight houses or ten along Clay Street, and these, with the exception of the judge's roomy, white-porched house standing aloof in its two acres of poorly kept lawn, were all little two-room frame houses, each in a small, bare inclosure of its own, with wide, weed-grown spaces between it and its next-door neighbors. These were the homes of those who in a city would haye been tenement dwellers. In front of them stretched narrow wooden sidewalks, dappled now with patches of shadow and of soft, warm sunshine.

Perhaps halfway along was a particularly shabby little brown house that pushed dose up to the street line. A straggly catalpa tree shaded its narrow porch. This was the home of Lemuel Hammersmith; and Hammersmith seems such a name as should by right belong to a masterful, upstanding man with something of Thor or Vulcan or Judas Maccabaeus in him—it appears to have that sound. But Lemuel Hammersmith was no such man. In a city he would have been lost altogether—swallowed up among a mass of more important, pushing folk. But in a town as small as ours he had distinction. He belonged to more secret orders than any man in town—he belonged to all there were. Their small mummeries and mysteries, conducted behind closed doors, had for him a lure that there was no resisting; he just had to join. As I now recall, he never rose to high rank in any one of them, never wore the impressive regalia and the weighty title of a supreme officer; but when a lodge brother died he nearly always served on the committee that drew up the resolutions of respect. In moments of half-timid expanding he had been known to boast mildly that his signature, appended to resolutions of respect, suitably engrossed and properly framed, hung on the parlor walls of more than a hundred homes. He was a small and inconsequential man and he led a small and inconsequential life, giving his days to clerking in Noble & Barry's coal office for fifty dollars a month, and his nights to his lodge meetings and to drawing up resolutions of respect. In the latter direction he certainly had a gift; the underlying sympathy of his nature found its outlet there. And he had a pale, sickly wife and a paler, sicklier child.

On this circus day he had been stationed in front of his house for a good half hour, watching up the street for some one. This some one, as it turned out, was Judge Priest. At sight of the old judge coming along, Mr. Hammersmith went forward to meet him and fell in alongside, keeping pace with him.

“Good momin', son,” said the old judge, who knew everybody that lived in town. “How's the little feller this mornin'?”

“Judge, I'm sorry to say that Lemuel Junior ain't no better this momin',” answered the little coal clerk with a hitching of his voice. “We're afraid—his mother and me—that he ain't never goin' to be no better. I've had Doctor Lake in again and he says there really ain't anything we can do—he says it's just a matter of a little time now. Old Aunt Hannah Holmes says he's got bone erysipelas, and that if we could 'a' got him away from here in time we might have saved him. But I don't know—we done the best we could. I try to be reconciled. Lemuel Junior he suffers so at times that it'll be a mercy, I reckin—but it's hard on you, judge—it's tumble hard on you when it's your only child.”