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

Cap’n Jasper cleared his throat briskly, as a man might rap with a gavel for attention and talked on:

“Well, so it went. So it went for five enduring months and each one of these fights was so much like the fight before it, that it’s not worth my while trying to describe ‘em for you boys. Every month, on the day, here would come Singin’ Sandy Riggs, humming to himself. Once he came through the slush of a thaw, squattering along in the cold mud up to his knees, and once ‘twas in a driving snow storm, but no matter what the weather was or how bad the road was, he came and was properly beaten, and went back home again still a-humming or trying to. Once Harve cut loose and crippled him up so he laid in a shack under the bank for two days before he could travel back to his little clearing on the Grundy Fork. It came mighty near being Kittie, Bar the Door with the little man that time. But he was tough as swamp hickory, and presently he was up and going, and the last thing he said as he limped away was fur somebody to give the word to Harve Allen that he’d be back that day month. I never have been able to decide yet in my own mind, whether he always made his trips a month apart because he had one of those orderly minds and believed in doing things regularly, or because he figured it would take him a month to get cured up from the last beating Harve gave him. But anyhow, so it was. He never hurt Harve to speak of, and he never failed to get pretty badly hurt himself. There was another thing – whilst they were fighting, he never made a sound, except to grunt and pant, but Harve would be cursing and swearing all the time.

“People took to waiting and watching for the day – Singin’ Sandy’s day, they began calling it. The word spread all up and down the river and into the back settlements, and folks would come from out of the barrens to see it. But nobody felt the call to interfere. Some were afraid of Harve Allen and some thought Singin’ Sandy would get his belly-full of beatings after awhile and quit. But on the morning of the day when Singin’ Sandy was due for the eighth time – if he kept his promise, which as I’m telling you he always had – Captain Braxton Montjoy, the militia captain, who’d fought in the war of 1812 and afterwards came to be the first mayor of this town, walked up to Harve Allen where he was lounging in front of one of the doggeries. I still remember his swallowfork coat and his white neckerchief and the little walking stick he was carrying. It was one of these little shiny black walking sticks made out of some kind of a limber wood, and it had a white handle on it, of ivory, carved like a woman’s leg. His pants were strapped down tight under his boots, just so. Captain Braxton Mont-joy was fine old stock and he was the best dressed man between the mouth of the Cumberland and the Mississippi. And he wasn’t afraid of anything that wore hair or hide.

“‘Harvey Allen,’ he says, picking out his words, ‘Harvey Allen, I am of the opinion that you have been maltreating this man Riggs long enough.’

“Harve Allen was big enough to eat Captain Braxton Montjoy up in two bites, but he didn’t start biting. He twitched back his lips like a fice dog and blustered up.

“‘What is it to you?’ says Harve.

“‘It is a good deal to me and to every other man who believes in fair play,’ says Captain Braxton Montjoy. ‘I tell you that I want it stopped.’

“‘The man don’t walk in leather that kin dictate to me what I shall and shall not do,’ says Harve, trying to work himself up, ‘I’m a leetle the best two handed man that lives in these here settlemints, and the man that tries to walk my log had better be heeled for bear. I’m half hoss and half alligator and, – ’

“Captain Braxton Montjoy stepped up right close to him and began tapping Harve on the breast of his old deer skin vest with the handle of his little walking stick. At every word he tapped him.

“‘I do not care to hear the intimate details of your ancestry,’ he says. ‘Your family secrets do not concern me, Harvey Allen. What does concern me,’ he says, ‘is that you shall hereafter desist from maltreating a man half your size. Do I make my meaning sufficiently plain to your understanding, Harvey Allen?’

“At that Harve changed his tune. Actually it seemed like a whine came into his voice. It did, actually.

“‘Well, why don’t he keep away from me then?’ he says. ‘Why don’t he leave me be and not come round here every month pesterin’ fur a fresh beatin’? Why don’t he take his quittances and quit? There’s plenty other men I’d rather chaw up and spit out than this here Riggs – and some of ‘em ain’t so fur away now,’ he says, scowling round him.

“Captain Braxton Montjoy started to say something more but just then somebody spoke behind him and he swung round and there was Singin’ Sandy, wet to the flanks where he’d waded through a spring branch.

“‘Excuse me, Esquire,’ he says to Captain Montjoy, ‘and I’m much obliged to you, but this here is a private matter that’s got to be settled between me and that man yonder – and it can’t be settled only jist one way.’

“‘Well sir, how long do you expect to keep this up, may I inquire?’ says Captain Braxton Montjoy, who never forgot his manners and never let anybody else forget them either.

“‘Ontil I lick him,’ says Singin’ Sandy, ‘ontil I lick him good and proper and make him yell ‘nuff!’

“‘Why you little spindley, runty strippit, you ain’t never goin’ to be able to lick me,’ snorts out Harve over Captain Braxton Montjoy’s shoulder, and he cursed at Sandy. But I noticed he hadn’t rushed him as he usually did. Maybe, though, that was because of Captain Montjoy standing in the way.

“‘You ain’t never goin’ to be big enough or strong enough or man enough to lick me,’ says Harve.

“‘I ‘low to keep on tryin’, says Singin’ Sandy. ‘And ef I don’t make out to do it, there’s my buddy growin’ up and comin’ along. And some day he’ll do it,’ he says, not boasting and not arguing, but cheerfully and confidently as though he was telling of a thing that was already the same as settled.

“Captain Braxton Montjoy reared away back on his high heels – he wore high heels to make him look taller, I reckon – and he looked straight at Singin’ Sandy standing there so little and insignificant and raggedy, and all gormed over with mud and wet with branch water, and smelling of the woods and the new ground. There was a purple mark still under one of Sandy’s eyes and a scabbed place on top of one of his ears where Harve Allen had pretty nigh torn it off the side of his head.

“‘By Godfrey,’ says Captain Braxton Montjoy, ‘by Godfrey, sir,’ and he began pulling off his glove which was dainty and elegant, like everything else about him. ‘Sir,’ he says to Singin’ Sandy, ‘I desire to shake your hand.’

“So they shook hands and Captain Braxton Montjoy stepped one side and bowed with ceremony to Singin’ Sandy, and Singin’ Sandy stepped in toward Harve Allen humming to himself.

“For this once, anyhow, Harve wasn’t for charging right into the mix-up at the first go-off. It almost seemed like he wanted to back away. But Singin’ Sandy lunged out and hit him in the face and stung him, and then Harve’s brute fighting instinct must have come back into his body, and he flailed out with both fists and staggered Singin’ Sandy back. Harve ran in on him and they locked and there was a whirl of bodies and down they went, in the dirt, with Harve on top as per usual. He licked Singin’ Sandy, but he didn’t lick him nigh as hard as he’d always done it up till then. When he got through, Singin’ Sandy could get up off the ground by himself and that was the first time he had been able to do so. He stood there a minute swaying a little on his legs and wiping the blood out of his eyes where it ran down from a little cut right in the edge of his hair. He spit and we saw that two of his front teeth were gone, broken short off up in the gums; and Singin’ Sandy felt with the tip of his tongue at the place where they’d been. ‘In a month,’ he says, and away he goes, singing his tuneless song.

“Well, I watched Harve Allen close that next month – and I think nearly all the other people did too. It was a strange thing too, but he went through the whole month without beating up anybody. Before that he’d never let a month pass without one fight anyhow. Yet he drank more whiskey than was common even with him. Once I ran up on him sitting on a drift log down in the willows by himself, seemingly studying over something in his mind.

“When the month was past and Singin’ Sandy’s day rolled round again for the ninth time, it was spring time, and the river was bankfull from the spring rise and yellow as paint with mud and full of drift and brush. Out from shore a piece, in the current, floating snags were going down, thick as harrow teeth, all pointing the same way like big black fish going to spawn. Early that morning, the river had bitten out a chunk of crumbly clay bank and took a cabin in along with it, and there was a hard job saving a couple of women and a whole shoal of young ones. For the time being that made everybody forget about Singin’ Sandy being due, and so nobody, I think, saw him coming. I know I didn’t see him at all until he stood on the river bank humming to himself.

“He stood there on the bank swelling himself out and humming his little song louder and clearer than ever he had before – and fifty yards out from shore in a dugout that belonged to somebody else, was Bully Harve Allen, fighting the current and dodging the drift logs as he paddled straight for the other side that was two miles and better away. He never looked back once; but Singin’ Sandy stood and watched him until he was no more than a moving spot on the face of those angry, roily waters. Singin’ Sandy lived out his life and died here – he’s got grandchildren scattered all over this county now, but from that day forth Harve Allen never showed his face in this country.”

Cap’n Jasper got up slowly, and shook himself, as a sign that his story was finished, and the others rose, shuffling stiffly. It was getting late – time to be getting home. The services in the darky church had ended and we could hear the unseen worshippers trooping by, still chanting snatches of their revival tunes.

“Well, boys, that’s all there is to tell of that tale,” said Cap’n Jasper, “all that I now remember anyhow. And now what would you say it was that made Harve Allen run away from the man he’d already licked eight times hand running. Would you call it cowardice?”

It was Squire Buckley, the non committal, who made answer.

“Well,” said Squire Buckley slowly, “p’raps I would – and then agin, on the other hand, p’raps I wouldn’t.”

X. BLACK AND WHITE

OVER night, it almost seems, a town will undergo radical and startling changes. The transition covers a period of years really, but to those who have lived in the midst of it, the realization comes sometimes with the abruptness of a physical shock; while the returning prodigal finds himself lost amongst surroundings which by rights should wear shapes as familiar as the back of his own hand. It is as though an elderly person of settled habits and a confirmed manner of life had suddenly fared forth in new and amazing apparel – as though he had swapped his crutch for a niblick and his clay pipe for a gold tipped cigarette.

It was so with our town. From the snoreful profundities of a Rip Van Winkle sleep it woke up one morning to find itself made over; whether for better or worse I will not presume to say, but nevertheless, made over. Before this the natural boundaries to the north had been a gravel bluff which chopped off sharply above a shallow flat sloping away to the willows and the river beyond. Now this saucer-expanse was dotted over with mounds of made ground rising like pimples in a sunken cheek; and spreading like a red brick rash across the face of it, was a tin roofed, flat-topped irritation of structures – a cotton mill, a brewery, and a small packing plant dominating a clutter of lesser industries. Above these on the edge of the hollow, the old warehouse still stood, but the warehouse had lost its character while keeping its outward shape. Fifty years it resounded to a skirmish fire clamor of many hammers as the negro hands knocked the hoops off the hogsheads and the auctioneer bellowed for his bids; where now, brisk young women, standing in rows, pasted labels and drove corks into bottles of Dr. Bozeman’s Infallible Cough Cure. Nothing remained to tell the past glories of the old days, except that, in wet weather, a faint smell of tobacco would steam out of the cracks in the floor; and on the rotted rafters over head, lettered in the sprawling chirography of some dead and gone shipping clerk, were the names and the dates and the times of record-breaking steamboat runs —Idlewild, Louisville to Memphis, so many hours and so many minutes; Pat Cleburne, Nashville to Paducah, so many hours and so many minutes.

Nobody ever entered up the records of steamboat runs any more; there weren’t any to be entered up. Where once wide side-wheelers and long, limber stern-wheelers had lain three deep at the wharf, was only a thin and unimpressive fleet of small fry-harbor tugs and a ferry or two, and shabby little steamers plying precariously in the short local trades. Along the bank ran the tracks of the railroad that had taken away the river business and the switch engines tooted derisively as if crowing over a vanquished and a vanished rival, while they shoved the box cars back and forth. Erecting themselves on high trestles like straddle bugs, three more railroads had come in across the bottoms to a common junction point, and still another was reliably reported to be on its way. Wherefore, the Daily Evening News frequently referred to itself as the Leading Paper of the Future Gateway of the New South. It also took the Associated Press dispatches and carried a column devoted to the activities of the Women’s Club, including suffrage and domestic science.

So it went. There was a Board of Trade with two hundred names of members, and half of them, at least, were new names, and the president was a spry new comer from Ohio. A Republican mayor had actually been elected – and that, if you knew the early politics of our town, was the most revolutionary thing of all. Apartment houses – regular flat buildings, with elevator service and all that – shoved their aggressive stone and brick faces up to the pavement line of a street where before old white houses with green shutters and fluted porch pillars had snuggled back among hack berries and maples like a row of broody old hens under a hedge. The churches had caught the spirit too; there were new churches to replace the old ones. Only that stronghold of the ultra conservatives, the Independent Presbyterian, stood fast on its original site, and even the Independent Presbyterian had felt the quickening finger of progress. Under its gray pillared front were set ornate stone steps, like new false teeth in the mouth of a stem old maid, and the new stained glass memorial windows at either side were as paste earrings for her ancient virginal ears. The spinster had traded her blue stockings for doctrinal half hose of a livelier pattern, and these were the outward symbols of the change.

But there was one institution among us that remained as it was – Eighth of August, ‘Mancipation Day, celebrated not only by all the black proportion of our population – thirty-six per cent by the last census – but by the darkies from all the lesser tributary towns for seventy-five miles around. It was not their own emancipation that they really celebrated; Lincoln’s Proclamation I believe was issued of a January morning, but January is no fit time for the holidaying of a race to whom heat means comfort and the more heat the greater the comfort. So away back, a selection had been made of the anniversary of the freeing of the slaves in Hayti or San Domingo or somewhere and indeed it was a most happy selection. By the Eighth of August the watermelons are at their juiciest and ripest, the frying size pullet of the spring has attained just the rightful proportions for filling one skillit all by itself, and the sun may be reliably counted upon to offer up a satisfactory temperature of anywhere from ninety in the shade to one hundred and two. Once it went to one hundred and four and a pleasant time was had by all.

Right after one Eighth the celebrants began laying by their savings against the coming of the next Eighth. It was Christmas, Thanksgiving, and the Fourth of July crowded into the compass of one day – a whole year of anticipation packed in and tamped down into twenty-four hours of joyous realization. There never were enough excursion trains to bring all those from a distance who wanted to come in for the Eighth. Some, travelers, the luckier ones, rode in state on packed day coaches and the others, as often as not, came from clear down below the Tennessee line, on flat cars, shrieking with nervous joy as the engine jerked them around the sharp curves, they being meantime oblivious alike to the sun shining with midsummer fervor upon their unprotected heads, and the coal cinders, as big as buttons, that rained down in gritty showers. There was some consolation then in having a complexion that neither sun could tan nor cinders blacken.

For that one day out of the three hundred and sixty-five and a fourth, the town was a town of dark joy. The city authorities made special provision for the comfort and the accommodation of the invading swarms and the merchants wore pleased looks for days beforehand and for weeks afterward – to them one good Eighth of August was worth as much as six Court Mondays and a couple of circus days. White people kept indoors as closely as possible, not for fear of possible race clashes, because we didn’t have such things; but there wasn’t room, really, for anybody except the celebrants. The Eighth was one day when the average white family ate a cold snack for dinner and when family buggies went undrivered and family washing went unwashed.

On a certain Eighth of August which I have in mind, Judge Priest spent the simmering day alone in his empty house and in the evening when he came out of Clay Street into Jefferson, he revealed himself as the sole pedestrian of his color in sight. Darkies, though, were everywhere – town darkies with handkerchiefs tucked in at their necks in the vain hope of saving linen collars from the wilting-down process; cornfield darkies whose feet were cramped, cabin’d, cribb’d and confined, as the saying goes, inside of stiff new shoes and sore besides from much pelting over unwontedly hard footing; darkies perspiry and rumpled; darkies gorged and leg weary, but still bent on draining the cup of their yearly joy to its delectable dregs. Rivers of red pop had already flowed, Niagaras of lager beer and stick gin had been swallowed up, breast works of parched goobers had been shelled flat, and blade forests of five cent cigars had burned to the water’s edge; and yet here was the big night just getting fairly started. Full voiced bursts of laughter and yells of sheer delight assaulted the old Judge’s ears. Through the yellowish dusk one hired livery stable rig after another went streaking by, each containing an unbleached Romeo and his pastel-shaded Juliet.

A corner down town, where the two branches of the car lines fused into one, was the noisiest spot yet. Here Ben Boyd and Bud Dobson, acknowledged to be the two loudest mouthed darkies in town, contended as business rivals. Each wore over his shoulder the sash of eminence and bore on his breast the badge of much honor. Ben Boyd had a shade the stronger voice, perhaps, but Bud Dobson excelled in native eloquence. On opposite sidewalks they stood, sweating like brown stone china ice pitchers, wide mouthed as two bull-alligators.

“Come on, you niggers, dis way to de-real show,” Ben Boyd would bellow unendingly, “Remember de grand free balloom ascension teks place at eight o’clock,” and Ben would wave his long arms like a flutter mill.

“Don’t pay no ‘tention, friends, to dat cheap nigger,” Bud Dobson would vociferously plead, “an’ don’t furgit de grand fire works display at mah park! Ladies admitted free, widout charge! Dis is de only place to go! Tek de green car fur de grand annual outin’ an’ ball of de Sisters of the Mysterious Ten!”

Back it would come in a roar from across the way:

“Tek de red car – dat’s de one, dat’s de one, folks! Dis way fur de big gas balloom!” Both of them were lying – there was no balloon to go up, no intention of admitting anybody free to anything. The pair expanded their fictions, giving to their work the spontaneous brilliancy of the born romancer. Like straws caught in opposing cross currents, their victims were pulled two ways at once. A flustered group would succumb to Bud’s blandishments and he would shoo them aboard a green car. But the car had to be starting mighty quick, else Bud Dobson’s siren song would win them over and trailing after their leader, who was usually a woman, like blade sheep behind a bell wether they would pile off and stampede over to where the red car waited. Some changed their minds half a dozen times before they were finally borne away.

These were the country darkies, though – the town bred celebrants knew exactly where they were going and what they would do when they got there. They moved with the assured bearing of cosmopolitans, stirred and exhilarated by the clamor but not confused by it. Grand in white dresses, with pink sashes and green headgear, the Imperial Daughters of the Golden Star rolled by in a furniture van. The Judge thought he caught a chocolate-colored glimpse of Aunt Dilsey, his cook, enthroned on a front seat, as befitting the Senior Grand Potentate of the lodge; anyhow, he knew she must be up front there somewhere. If any cataclysm of Providence had descended upon that furniture van that night many a kitchen beside his would have mourned a biscuit maker par excellence. Sundry local aristocrats of the race – notably the leading town barber, a high school teacher and a shiny black undertaker in a shiny high hat – passed in an automobile, especially loaned for the occasion by a white friend and customer of the leading barber. It was the first time an automobile had figured in an Eighth of August outing; its occupants bore themselves accordingly.

Further along, in the centre of the business district, the Judge had almost to shove a way for himself through crowds that were nine-tenths black. There was no actual disorder, but there was an atmosphere of unrestrained race exultation. You couldn’t put your hand on it, nor express it in words perhaps, but it was there surely. Turning out from the lit-up and swarming main thoroughfare into the quieter reaches of a side street, Judge Priest was put to it to avoid a collision with an onward rush of half grown youths, black, brown, and yellow. Whooping, they clattered on by him and never looked back to see who it was they had almost run over.

In this side street the Judge was able to make a better headway; the rutted sidewalk was almost untraveled and the small wholesale houses which mainly lined it, were untenanted and dark. Two-thirds of a block along, he came to a somewhat larger building where an open entry way framed the foot of a flight of stairs mounting up into a well of pitchy gloom. Looking up the stairs was like looking up to a sooty chimney, except that a chimney would have shown a dim opening at the top and this vista was walled in blankness and ended in blankness. Judge Priest turned in here and began climbing upward, feeling the way for his feet, cautiously.

Once upon a time, a good many years before this, Kamleiter’s Hall had been in the centre of things municipal. Nearly all the lodges and societies had it then for their common meeting place; but when the new and imposing Fraternity Building was put up, with its elevator, and its six stories and its electric lights, and all, the Masons and the Odd Fellows and the rest moved their belongings up there. Gideon K. Irons Camp alone remained faithful. The members of the Camp had held their first meeting in Kamleiter’s Hall back in the days when they were just organizing and Kamleiter’s was just built. They had used its assembly room when there were two hundred and more members in good standing, and with the feeble persistency of old men who will cling to the shells of past things, after the pith of the substance is gone, they still used it.

So the Judge should have known those steps by the feel of them under his shoe soles, he had been climbing up and down them so long. Yet it seemed to him they had never before been so steep and so many and so hard to climb, certainly they had never been so dark. Before he reached the top he was helping himself along with the aid of a hand pressed against the plastered wall and he stopped twice to rest his legs and get his breath. He was panting hard when he came to the final landing on the third floor. He fumbled at a door until his fingers found the knob and turned it. He stood a moment, getting his bearings in the blackness. He scratched a match and by its flare located the rows of iron gas jets set in the wall, and he went from one to another, turning them on and touching the match flame to their stubbed rubber tips.

It was a long bare room papered in a mournful gray paper, that was paneled off with stripings of a dirty white. There were yellow, wooden chairs ranged in rows and all facing a small platform that had desks and chairs on it, and an old fashioned piano. On the wall, framed uniformly in square black wooden frames and draped over by strips of faded red and white bunting, were many enlarged photographs and crayon portraits of men either elderly or downright aged. Everything spoke of age and hard usage. There were places where gussets of the wall paper had pulled away from the paste and hung now in loose triangles like slatted jib sails.

In corners, up against the ceiling, cobwebs hung down in separate tendrils or else were netted up together in little gray hammocks to catch the dust. The place had been baking under a low roof all day and the air was curdled with smells of varnish and glue drawn from the chairs and the mould from old oil cloth, with a lingering savor of coal oil from somewhere below. The back end of the hall was in a gloom, and it only lifted its mask part-way even after the Judge had completed his round and lit all the jets and was reaching for his pocket handkerchief. Maybe it was the poor light with its flickery shadows and maybe it was the effect of the heat, but standing there mopping his forehead, the old Judge looked older than common. His plump figure seemed to have lost some of its rotundness and under his eyes the flesh was pouchy and sagged. Or at least, that was the impression which Ed Gafford got. Ed Gafford was the odd jobs man of Kamleiter’s Hall and he came now, and was profuse with apologies for his tardiness.

“You’ll have to excuse me, Judge Priest,” he began, “for bein’ a little late about gettin’ down here to light up and open up. You see, this bein’ the Eighth of August and it so hot and ever’thing, I sort of jumped at the conclusion that maybe there wouldn’t be none of your gentlemen show up here tonight.”

“Oh, I reckin there’ll be quite a lot of the boys comin’ along pretty soon, son,” said Judge Priest. “It’s a regular monthly meetin’, you know, and besides there’s a vacancy to be filled – we’ve got a color bearer to elect tonight. I should say there ought to be a purty fair crowd, considerin’. You better make a light on them stairs, – they’re as black as a pocket.”

“Right away, Judge,” said Gafford, and departed.

Left alone, the Judge sat down in the place of the presiding officer on the little platform. Laboriously he crossed one fat leg on the other, and looked out over the rows of empty wooden chairs, peopling them with the images of the men who wouldn’t sit in them ever again. The toll of the last few months had been a heavy one. The old Judge cast it up in his mind: There was old Colonel Horace Farrell, now, the Nestor of the county bar to whom the women and men of his own State had never been just plain women and men, but always noble womanhood and chivalric manhood, and who thought in rounded periods and even upon his last sick bed had dealt in well measured phrases and sonorous metaphor in his farewell to his assembled children and grandchildren. The Colonel had excelled at memorial services and monument unveilings. He would be missed – there was no doubt about that.

Old Professor Lycurgus Reese was gone too; who was principal of the graded school for forty-odd years and was succeeded a mercifully short six months before his death by an abnormally intellectual and gifted young graduate of a normal college from somewhere up in Indiana, a man who never slurred his consonant r’s nor dropped his final g’s, a man who spoke of things as stimulating and forceful, and who had ideas about Boy Scout movements and Native Studies for the Young and all manner of new things, a remarkable man, truly, yet some had thought old Professor Reese might have been retained a little longer anyhow.

And Father Minor, who was a winged devil of Morgan’s cavalry by all accounts, but a most devoted shepherd of a struggling flock after he donned the cloth, and old Peter J. Galloway, the lame blacksmith, with his impartial Irish way of cursing all Republicans as Black Radicals – they were all gone. Yes, and a dozen others besides; but the latest to go was Corporal Jake Smedley, color bearer of the Camp from the time that there was a Camp.

The Judge had helped bury him a week before. There had been only eight of the members who turned out in the dust and heat of mid-summer for the funeral, just enough to form the customary complement of honorary pallbearers, but the eight had not walked to the cemetery alongside the hearse. Because of the weather, they had ridden in hacks. It was a new departure for the Camp to ride in hacks behind a dead comrade, and that had been the excuse – the weather. It came to Judge Priest, as he sat there now, that it would be much easier hereafter to name offhand those who were left, than to remember those who were gone. He flinched mentally, his mind shying away from the thought.