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

hands and horses; and all the good savors of woodfires, clean hay, and turned-up turf were commingled there.

      The fair had ideal weather for its windup. No frost had fallen yet, but in the air there were signs and portents of its coming. The long yellow leaves of the hickories had begun to curl up as if to hold the dying warmth of the sap to the last; and once in a while an ash flamed red like a signal fire to give warning for Indian summer, when all the woods would blaze in warpaints before huddling down for the winter under their tufted, ragged tawnies and browns – like buffalo robes on the shoulders of chilled warriors. The first flights of the wild geese were going over, their V’s pointed to the Gulf; and that huckstering little bird of the dead treetops, which the negroes call the sweet-potato bird – maybe it’s a pewee, with an acquired Southern accent – was calling his mythical wares at the front door of every woodpecker’s hole. The woods were perfumy with ripening wild grapes and pawpaws, and from the orchards came rich winy smells where the windfalls lay in heaps and cider mills gushed under the trees; and on the roof of the smokehouse the pared, sliced fruit was drying out yellow and leathery in the sun and looking – a little way off – like countless ears all turned to listen for the same thing.

      Saturday, by sunup, the fair grounds were astir. Undershirted concessionaries and privilege people emerged from their canvas sleeping quarters to sniff at a the tantalizing smell that floated across to them from certain narrow trenches dug in the ground. That smell, just by itself, was one square meal and an incentive to another; for these trenches were full of live red hickory coals; and above them, on greenwood stakes that were stretched across, a shoat and a whole sheep, and a rosary of young squirrels impaled in a string, had been all night barbecuing. Uncle Isom Woolfolk was in charge here – mightily and solely in charge – Uncle Isom Woolfolk, no less, official purveyor to the whole county at fish fries or camp breakfasts, secretary of the Republican County Committee, high in his church and his lodges and the best barbecue cook in seven states. He bellowed frequent and contradictory orders to two negro women of his household who were arranging clean white clothes on board trestles; and constantly he went from shoat to sheep and from sheep to squirrels, basting them with a rag wrapped about a stick and dipped into a potent sauce of his own private making. Red pepper and sweet vinegar were two of its main constituents, though, and in turn he painted each carcass as daintily as an artist retouching the miniature of his lady fair, so that under his hand the crackling meatskins sizzled and smoked, and a yellowish glaze like a veneer spread over their surfaces. His white chin-beard waggled with importance and the artistic temperament.

      Before Uncle Isom had his barbecue off the fire the crowds were pouring in, coming from the town afoot, and in buggies and hacks, and from the country in farm wagons that held families, from grandsire to baby in arms, all riding in kitchen chairs, with bedquilt lap robes. At noon a thin trickle of martial music came down the pike; and pretty soon then the veterans, forty or fifty of them, marched in, two by two, some in their reunion gray and some in their best Sunday blacks. At the head of the limping line of old men was a fife-and-drum corps – two sons of veterans at the drums and Corporal Harrison Treese, sometime bugler of Terry’s Cavalry, with his fife half buried in his whiskers, ripping the high notes out of The Girl I Left Behind Me. Near the tail of the procession was Sergeant Jimmy Bagby, late of King’s Hellhounds. Back in war times that organization had borne a more official and a less sanguinary title; but you would never have guessed this, overhearing Sergeant Jimmy Bagby’s conversation.

      The sergeant wore a little skirtless jacket, absurdly high-collared, faded to all colors and falling to pieces with age. Three tarnished buttons and a rag of rotted braid still dung to its front. Probably it had fitted the sergeant well in the days when he was a slim and limber young partisan ranger; but now the peaked little tail showed halfway up his back where his suspenders forked, and his white-shirted paunch jutted out in front like a big cotton pod bursting out of a gray-brown boll. The sergeant wore his jacket on all occasions of high military and civic state – that, and a gangrened leather cartridge-box bouncing up and down on his plump hip – and over his shoulder the musket he had carried to war and back home again, an ancient Springfield with a stock like a log butt and a hammer like a mule’s ear, its barrel merely a streak of rust.

      He walked side by side with his closest personal friend and bitterest political foe, Major Ashcroft, late of the Ninth Michigan Volunteers – walking so close to him that the button of the Loyal Legion in the major’s left-hand lapel almost touched the bronze Southern Cross pinned high up on the right breast of the sergeant’s flaring jacket.

      From time to time the sergeant, addressing the comrades ahead of him, would poke the major in the side and call out:

      “Boys, I’ve took the first prisoner – this here pizen Yank is my meat!”

      And the imperturbable major would invariably retort:

      “Yes, and along about dark the prisoner will have to be loading you into a hack and sending you home – the same as he always does.” Thereupon a cackling laugh would run up the double line from its foot to its head.

      The local band, up in its coop on the warped gray roof of the grandstand, blared out Dixie, and the crowd cheered louder than ever as the uneven column of old soldiers swung stiffly down the walkway fronting the grandstand and halted at the word – and then, at another word, disbanded and melted away into individuals and groups. Soon the veterans, with their womenfolks, were scattered all over the grounds, elbowing a way through the narrow aisles of Floral Hall to see the oil paintings and the prize cakes and preserves, and the different patterns of home-made rag quilts – Hen-and-Chickens and Lone Star and Log Cabin – or crowding about the showpens where young calves lowed vainly for parental attention and a Berkshire boar, so long of body and so vast of bulk that he only needed to shed his legs to be a captive balloon, was shoving his snout through a crack in his pen and begging for goodies. And in Agricultural Hall were water-melons like green boulders, and stalks of corn fourteen feet long, and saffron blades of prize-winning tobacco, and families of chickens unhappily domiciled in wooden coops. The bray of sideshow barkers, and the squeak of toy balloons, and the barnyard sounds from the tied-up, penned-up farm creatures, went up to the treetops in a medley that drove the birds scurrying over the fence and into the quieter woods. And in every handy spot under a tree basket dinners were spread, and family groups ate cold fried chicken and lemon meringue pie, picnic fashion, upon the grass.

      In the middle of this a cracked bugle sounded and there was a rush to the grandstand. Almost instantly its rattling gray boards clamored under the heels of a multitude. About the stall of the one lone bookmaker a small crowd, made up altogether of men, eddied and swirled. There were men in that group, strict church members, who would not touch a playing card or a fiddle – playthings of the devil by the word of their strict orthodoxy; who wouldn’t let their children dance any dance except a square dance or go to any parties except play parties, and some of them had never seen the inside of a theater or a circus tent. But they came each year to the county fair; and if they bet on the horses it was their own private affair.

      So, at the blare of that leaky bugle, Floral Hall and the cattlepens were on the moment deserted and lonely. The Berkshire boar returned to his wallow, and a young Jersey bullock, with a warm red coat and a temper of the same shade, was left shaking his head and snorting angrily as he tried vainly to dislodge a blue ribbon that was knotted about one of his short, curving black horns. Had he been a second prizewinner instead of a first, that ribbon would have been a red ribbon and there is no telling what might have happened.

      The first race was a half-mile dash for running horses. There were four horses entered for it and three of the four jockeys wore regular jockey outfits, with loose blouses and top boots and long-peaked caps; but the fourth jockey was an imp-black stable boy, wearing a cotton shirt and the ruins of an old pair of pants. The brimless wreck of a straw hat was clamped down tight on his wool like a cup. He be-straddled a sweaty little red gelding named Flitterfoot, and Flitterfoot was the only local entry, and was an added starter, and a forlorn hope in the betting.

      While these four running horses were dancing a fretful schottische round at the half-mile post, and the starter, old man Thad Jacobson, was bellowing at the riders and slashing a black-snake whip round the shins of their impatient mounts, a slim black figure wormed a way under the arms and past the short ribs of a few belated betters yet lingering about the