Back Home: Being the Narrative of Judge Priest and His People — John Shaqi
Back Home: Being the Narrative of Judge Priest and His PeopleCobb, Irvin S. (Irvin Shrewsbury)
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Back Home: Being the Narrative of Judge Priest and His People
Cobb, Irvin S. (Irvin Shrewsbury)
Kentucky -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; Short stories, American
“Yes, suh, it all come back to me this mornin'--every little bit of
it--the breakfast and all. I didn't 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.
Durham's 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
I'm 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. I've 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 girl's--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. It's 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:
If you want to have a good time,
If you want to have a good time,
If you want to have a good time,
If you want to ketch the devil--
Jine the cavalree!
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.
If you want to have a good time,
If yu want to have a good time,
If you want to have a good time,
If you want to ride with Bedford--
Jine the cavalree!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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