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

by Irvin S. Cobb

If the judge didn't wait nearly everybody else did—waited with what patience and impatience they might through a period that was punctuated by a dozen false alarms, each marked with much craning of elderly necks and abortive rushes by younger enthusiasts to the middle of the street. After a while, though, from away up at the head of Jefferson Street there came down, borne along on the summer air, a faint anticipatory blare of brazen horns, heard at first only in broken snatches. Then, in a minute or two, the blaring resolved itself into a connected effort at melody, with drums throbbing away in it. Farmers grabbed at the bits of restive horses, that had their ears set sharply in one direction, and began uttering soothing and admonitory “whoas.” The stores erupted clerks and customers together. The awning poles on both sides of the street assumed the appearance of burdened grape trellises, bearing ripe black and white clusters of small boys. At last she was coming!

She was, for a fact. She came on until the thin runlet of ostensible music became a fan-faring, crashing cataract of pleasing and exhilarating sound, until through the dancing dust could be made out the arching, upcurved front of a splendid red-and-gold chariot. In front of it, like wallowing waves before the prow of a Viking ship, were the weaving broad backs of many white horses, and stretching behind it was a sinuous, colorful mass crowned with dancing, distant banner-things, and suggesting in glintings of gold and splashings of flame an oncoming argosy of glitter and gorgeousness.

She was coming all right! But was she? A sort of disappointed, surprised gasp passed along the crowded sidewalks, and boys began sliding down the awning poles and running like mad up the street. For instead of continuing straight on down Jefferson, as all circus parades had always done, the head of this one was seen now, after a momentary halt as of indecision, to turn short off and head into Clay. But why Clay Street—that was the question? Clay Street didn't have ten houses on it, all told, and it ran up a steep hill and ended in an abandoned orchard just beyond the old Priest place. Indeed the only way to get out of Clay Street, once you got into it, was by a distant lane that cut through to the paralleling street on the right. What would any circus parade in possession of its sane senses be doing going up Clay Street?

But that indeed was exactly what this parade was doing—with the added phenomena of Sheriff Giles Birdsong sitting vigilantly erect on the front seat of the band wagon, and a band-wagon driver taking orders for once from somebody besides his rightful boss—taking them protestingly and profanely, but nevertheless taking them.

Yes, sir, that's what she was doing. The band wagon, behind the oblique arc of its ten-horse team, was swinging into Clay Street, and the rest of the procession was following its leader and disappearing, wormlike, into a tunnel of overarching maples and silver-leaf poplars.

And so it moved, slowly and deliberately, after the fashion of circus parades, past some sparsely scattered cottages that were mainly closed and empty, seeing that their customary dwellers were even now downtown, until the head of it came to a particularly shabby little brown house that was not closed and was not empty. From a window here looked out a worn little woman and a little sick boy, he as pale as the pillow against which he was propped, and from here they saw it all—she through tears and he with eyes that burned with a dumb joy unutterable—from here these two beheld the unbelievable marvel of it. It was almost as though the whole unspeakable grandeur of it had been devised for those eyes alone—first the great grand frigate of a band wagon pitching and rolling as if in heavy seas, with artistes of a world-wide repute discoursing sweet strains from its decks, and drawn not by four or six, but by ten snow-white Arabian stallions with red pompons nodding above their proud heads—that is to say, they were snow-white except perhaps for a slight grayish dappling. And on behind this, tailing away and away, were knights and ladies on mettled, gayly caparisoned steeds, and golden pageant dens filled with ferocious rare beasts of the jungle, hungrily surveying the surging crowds—only, of course, there weren't any crowds—and sun-bright tableau cars, with crystal mirrors cunningly inset in the scrolled carved work, so that the dancing surfaces caught the sunlight and threw it back into eyes already joyously dazzled; and sundry closed cages with beautiful historical paintings on their sides, suggesting by their very secrecy the presence of marvelous prisoned creatures; and yet another golden chariot with the Queen of Sheba and her whole glittering court traveling in imperial pomp atop of it.

That wasn't all—by no means was it all. There succeeded an open den containing the man-eating Bengal tigers, striped and lank, with the intrepid spangled shoulders of the trainer showing as he sat with his back against the bars, holding his terrible charges in dominion by the power of the human eye, so that for the time being they dared not eat anybody. And then followed a whole drove of trick ponies drawing the happy family in its wheeled home, and behind that in turn more cages, closed, and a fife-and-drum corps of old regimentals in blue and buff, playing Yankee Doodle with martial spirit, and next the Asiatic camel to be known by his one hump, and the genuine Bactrian dromedary to be known by his two, slouching by as though they didn't care whether school kept or not, flirting their under lips up and down and showing profiles like Old Testament characters. And then came more knights and ladies and more horses and more heroes of history and romance, and a veritable herd of vast and pondrous pachyderm performers, or elephants—for while one pachyderm, however vast and pachydermic, might not make a herd, perhaps, or even two yet surely three would, and here were no less than three, holding one another's tails with their trunks, which was a droll conceit thought up by these intelligent creatures on the spur of the moment, no doubt, with the sole idea of giving added pleasure to a little sick boy.

That wasn't all either. There was more of this unapproachable pageant yet winding by—including such wonders as the glass-walled apartment of the lady snake-charmer, with the lady snake-charmer sitting right there in imminent peril of her life amidst her loathsome, coiling and venomous pets; and also there was Judge Priest's Jeff, hardly to be recognized in a red-and-yellow livery as he led the far-famed sacred ox of India; and then the funny old clown in his little blue wagon, shouting out “Whoa, January” to his mule and dodging back as January kicked up right in his face, and last of all—a crowning glory to all these other glories—the steam calliope, whistling and blasting and shrilling and steaming, fit to split itself wide open!

You and I, reader, looking on at this with gaze unglamoured by the eternal, fleeting spirit of youth, might have noted in the carping light of higher criticism that the oriental trappings had been but poor shoddy stuffs to begin with, and were now all torn and dingy and shedding their tarnished spangles; might have noted that the man-eating tigers seemed strangely bored with life, and that the venomous serpents draped upon the form of the lady snake-charmer were languid, not to say torpid, to a degree that gave the lady snake-charmer the appearance rather of a female suspender pedler, carrying her wares hung over her shoulders. We might have observed further had we been so minded—as probably we should—that the Queen of Sheba bore somewhat a weatherbeaten look and held a quite common-appearing cotton umbrella with a bone handle over her regal head; that the East-Indian mahout of the elephant herd needed a shave, and that there were mud-stained overalls and brogan shoes showing plainly beneath the flowing robes of the Arabian camel-driver. We might even have guessed that the biggest tableau car was no more than a ticket wagon in thin disguise, and that the yapping which proceeded from the largest closed cage indicated the presence merely of a troupe of uneasy performing poodles.

But to the transported vision of the little sick boy in the little brown house there were no flaws in it anywhere—it was all too splendid for words, and so he spoke no words at all as it wound on by. The lurching shoulders of the elephants had gone over the hill beyond and on down, the sacred ox of India had passed ambling from sight, the glass establishment of the snake-charmer was passing, and January and the down wagon and the steam calliope were right in front of the Hammersmith house, when something happened on ahead, and for a half minute or so there was a slowing-up and a closing-up and a halting of everything.