The Judas Field

by Bahr, Howard;

Now, in the quiet room, she began to cry again. She prayed to Saint Agatha. “Protect me,” she said to the darkness, where a vision hovered: the martyr’s severed breasts presented on a charger while a serving girl wept and caught the blood in a winding sheet.

  “Then I don’t know how long you will have,” said the doctor, though she hadn’t asked. She saw the pain in his eyes and hated him for it. “When it’s time, you can come here,” he said. “I will watch after you.” As if she had no kin, no friends.

  Well, she had no kin, that was true. Her mother and baby sister were buried in Alabama before the journey to the new country. She remembered dimly her mother’s face, her voice a comfort in some forgotten darkness. The sister, stillborn, she never knew at all. The rest were far away in alien ground—she could not imagine Tennessee—hidden from the light, with nothing to mark them but a board torn from a paling fence.

  Still, she had plenty of friends who would watch with her. The women, the ones who had been through the war, could bear it; otherwise, grief would have killed them long ago. Some had died of it—Perry’s betrothed, poor child, had lasted a year—but the strong ones bore it, watched the seasons pass, the months and years spool away, until they learned that grief was too much of a coward ever to kill them. A coward, a thief, a murderer of children—but they had stood it.

  Grief had done no noble thing by Alison. It had not strengthened her, as well-meaning people often predicted, nor did it bring her closer to God; that was for people who blamed Him for their troubles. She had always been close enough to God to satisfy them both, and anyway she had seen for herself that He was present in hell as much as in heaven—maybe more, for He always went where people needed Him the most.

  But what if He asked for a tally? God had given her four-and-fifty years, a reasonable span. Yet, though she had done the best she could, she had little to show for it—an old maid living in her father’s house. “I never wasted it!” she insisted to the dark. And if she had, it was not her fault, for grief had accomplished this much, at least: it barred the door to every possibility and closed her away in a room alone. Outside her window, beyond the tight-shut jalousies, lay a world she knew little about, save that her people had gone there long ago and never returned. She had lived with that fact, accepted it, since the letter came from Franklin. Beyond that, she had done nothing. Was that what she would tell the angel at the gate?

  The pain was what she feared the most, more than death, more than judgment. She told herself, I will make it their pain—Father’s and Perry’s. I will bear it so they didn’t have to. Still, the thought of it, the cancer spreading like foul black water through her veins, the smell that would drive people from the room—she had seen it in others, had stood it herself when nobody else would. Sally Mae would stand it, and Morgan Harper, but not the men. They couldn’t stand anything. The thought of it made her cry, not in fear, but in anger that they had all cheated pain but her.

  She pulled the cover from her face and wiped her tears. She breathed the cold air. She touched her throat, felt the blood pulsing there. Blood and breath were all she needed to prove she was alive. No, not all, she thought, for even the blind worm could claim those things. Some other proof was needed: an act of will, of movement, to demonstrate that what she had lost had not subdued her, that she was worthy of the life remaining. She had thought about it a long time, had wanted it a long time, but never dared to believe she could do it. It was the one thing she had asked for herself but never given.

  When the town cemetery was first laid out, her father bought an ample section and ringed it with young cedars and a fence twined with iron vines and berries brought all the way from a foundry in Nashville. The cedars were tall now; they threw too much shade, and the grass would hardly grow, and the fence was rusted. For twenty years, whenever she walked through the cemetery, she had lingered by the fence among the drowsing cedars and considered that plot of empty ground. The ones who should be there—father and brother—had never come home, and others who might have preceded her—husband, in-laws, a child perhaps—had never entered her life to leave it. When she stood at the fence, she had no one to grieve for but herself. She always thought she would tell the undertaker to plant her right in the middle and order a big pedestal with a weeping angel so she wouldn’t be alone: a single, preposterous grave that people would show their visiting kin and say, “Now here is Alison Sansing, a lonely old woman, never wed, a tragic story …”

  Yet, now and then, she had given herself to imagine something different. She had always said that people had more choices than they allowed themselves, and the gift of Possibility was greater than most people had courage to grasp. It was not always truth that set you free, for some truths were strong as prison walls and offered no chance for freedom. Rather, it was the power to imagine and the heart to make a truth of your own. Thus she would think, in the pale twilight by the iron fence, that maybe she did not have to be satisfied with truth. Father and Perry were dust—that was true—but even dust could be brought home, whatever remained of them that she could call her own, that could be laid to rest in the place where they belonged.

  The courthouse bell rang the half hour, a single note drifting out over the town and dying away. She listened until it faded, and then she heard the clock on the mantel. The chime must have wound down, but not the mainspring. She listened, holding her breath, thinking it might stop at any moment, but it went on, ticking softly, and then the little chunk where the chime should have been. Running slow, she thought, and smiled at the ordinary thing.

  She flung the featherbed aside, crossed the cold floor to the jalousies. She stood there, afraid and doubtful, with her hand on the latch. She had never told anyone of the thing she wanted. Instead, she had kept the possibility in her heart, and it had sustained her for a long time, even if she could never really believe in it. Well, now she had to believe. She would die—the day and the hour were practically laid before her—and compared to Death, every task that Life could offer seemed easy and small. Why not, then? she asked herself. The question hung in the cold air like the voice of the bells, and, after a while, like the bells, died away.

  She opened the shutters. Her neighbor’s house was dark, the town sleeping—all but an old hunting owl who queried from the oak tree by the road. Looking up, she saw the stars fading. She knew they were traveling toward morning, as she herself must be. She had tomorrow, then, and a few days after. That would have to be enough.

  2

  TWO BRICK CHIMNEYS FLANKED COLONEL SANSING’S old house, each lifting a narrow plume toward the gray underside of heaven, filling the air with the odor of burning coal. Nearly everyone had grates now, and Cass Wakefield usually paid the coal smoke no mind, but this afternoon, as he stood before the house, it made him think of St. Louis. He could not have said why, but the vision drifted back to him across the years: the sloping levee crowded with boats, ice on the river, the grimy red-brick faces of the buildings, and the smell of coal.

  Cass Wakefield was a pilot of steamboats once, before the war when the river was booming. He was a soldier once, too, and once a husband. He had done pretty well by them all—save the last, he supposed. Since the war, twenty years almost, he had traveled for the Colt’s Patent Fire Arms Company of Hartford, Connecticut—a handgun drummer, purveyor of home protection and personal defense. He had done well enough that he didn’t have to travel much anymore, filling orders by telegraph and the new telephone for customers from Vicksburg to St. Louis. A woman of his acquaintance once asked how he could bear to look at guns, knowing as he did their sole purpose. Cass agreed that it was contrary to good sense and order, but the fact was, he liked guns. He liked to shoot, too. He could punch out the ace of hearts at fifty feet with any Colt revolver, a skill he hadn’t known about when he went to work for the company. He hadn’t been much of a shot during the war, but then, he hadn’t used a pistol either.

  Cass would be fifty-five in August, though he might have passed for a younger man, so lean he was,
and all his brown hair still present for duty. He had all but four of his teeth, and his hands were steady, his eyes still sharp except for close-up work like playing dominoes, writing, filling out orders, perusing the labels of patent medicines. Then he had to use reading glasses, which he was always misplacing. He had to hunt for a pair so he could read the note from Alison Sansing, the small, careful hand on good paper delivered yesterday, which had brought him to this corner in the January afternoon.

  He had the feeling that time was gaining on him. In the last year or so, his mustache had gone mouse-gray, and a paunch was growing amidships where there had been none before. That was a mystery, since he rarely ate and took no pleasure in it when he did. Sometimes the sight of food, especially in abundance, made him sick. Sometimes he was afraid to eat lest the hunger come again, which he knew to be illogical, but there it was. Yet the paunch grew, straining against his waistband. Well, let it strain, was his reaction. He was not about to have his breeches let out.

  Lucian had the same problem with food, fried meat in particular. Worse, since just after the war, the boy was visited by headaches that blinded him but made him see visions. For these he took laudanum, sometimes paregoric, and sometimes smoked a plant the Negroes called Injun Weed, which was really cannabis.

  Cass wore a bowler hat, a muffler, a suit of houndstooth wool, the pants correctly hung over white spats and shoes streaked with the mud of January. He carried a walking stick and, in a custom-made pocket of his coat, a blued .38 Colt Lightning (one of his best sellers at $19.95, including cleaning rod, brush, and oil can). In his waistcoat, at the end of a thick silver chain decorated with a Masonic fob, lay the big Howard watch his uncle Lewis had left him. The porcelain face was cracked and fretted now, but the delicate blue hands still measured precisely the innumerable hours. Cass was aware of its weight in his pocket, and he could hear it ticking in there, so he thought.

  Colonel Sansing’s house, where Alison had lived alone since the war, wanted paint, but so did all the houses in Cumberland, Mississippi. It needed new gutters, too, and someone to trim the hedges and scrape the grass from the brick walk and repair the rotten fence. In the yard were the composted leaves of twenty autumns, the latest drained of color now under the white oaks that shed them. A trifling wind stirred among them so that they moved like the ghosts of birds, though the clouds aloft were motionless. Cass felt the stillness around him, the emptiness of the winter afternoon when the streets off the square were vacant, the trees barren, the birds hushed, and the smoke seemed the only living thing. The cold reached deep inside him to the place where he used to fear it, where he feared it still in certain moments of awareness. He was safe from the cold now, of course; any time he wanted, he could cross the street to Alison’s parlor where it was warm. Yet Cass did not move, as if to flee might taunt the cold, encourage it, spin him back to some place from which he could not escape so easily. Such a notion was silly, he knew, but his memory was like one of those moving picture machines in the city arcades. If he wasn’t careful, somebody would drop a coin in the slot, and the cards would begin to flip, and figures jerk to life in a dim, flickering light. He frowned at the house where Alison Sansing was waiting to meet him. With her note, she had dropped in a whole handful of pennies. Cass might well have resented it, but he didn’t. He would not do her that discourtesy, no matter how contentious she was.

  She had not always been contentious. Cass had known her all his life, was close to courting her once, in fact. She was pretty of face, eyebrows arched over her brown eyes, a mouth quick to laugh. She could play the violin, after a fashion, and her father gave her real books to read: Emerson, Thoreau, Aquinas, Homer, Dickens. She was lively, a dancer with a happy spirit. Then Cass went out on the river, and in due season met Jane Spell in the old French Opera House, and married her, and brought her home. Then the war came and took from Alison Sansing not only her kin but all Possibility forever. Now Janie was dead, and here was Alison, an old maid, and … well, who could blame her for being contrary? Not Cass Wakefield, surely, who was sufficiently contrary himself at times.

  And who could blame her if she wished to raise the dead? Time, no doubt, was gaining on Alison as well. You can help me, she had written. In a little while, he intended to tell her in person that he could not.

  He lifted his face into the breeze and found it laden with a dark perfume: cedars, perhaps the ones in the cemetery beyond the ridge. But no, it could only be his imagination. You couldn’t smell cedar trees that far.

  The street was empty, the houses mute. No curtains moved in the windows. To the west, a locomotive blew for the Oxford Road crossing; at the same moment, the courthouse bell began to toll. Three o’clock. He was late; he needed to go and put this foolishness to rest. He leaned against the fence—it creaked and nearly fell over—and fished in his greatcoat pocket, where he kept a silver flask shaped like a little canteen. It was inscribed, To Cass from Lucian, Christmas, 1878. Cass looked at the date. The summer of 78 was a yellow fever time, the worst ever. The men of Cumberland had taken turns guarding the depot to see that no one got off the trains from the south. The refugees got off up at Holly Springs instead, and before long, half that town was wiped out. That’s how it was in those times. Cass took a long draft from his flask, then tucked it away and steadied himself. In a moment, he passed through the open gate.

  Two hours later, he was walking back to town. A few lamps burned in the stores and houses, and sometimes Cass saw a figure move across a lighted window. A number of his old comrades would rise late in the night and walk the quiet streets for hours, no matter how cold it was, but not Cass Wakefield. He would roam the house perhaps, or pace the rooms of boardinghouses and hotels, but he would not go abroad in the hours when the lamps were dark.

  Ordinarily it pleased him at this early hour to look in people’s lighted windows, to see the life going on inside, to see how they arranged their furniture and painted their rooms. Of course, Cass had been inside every white person’s house in Cumberland at one time or another—and many of the Negroes’—but the night made each dwelling different and fresh, as if a secret were being revealed. Tonight, however, he took no pleasure in the act. He felt as lonely as he had when he stood night watches on the river; when, from the pilothouse, he would see the wink of a cabin on the dark shore or pass a town spread out on the bluffs. Then the lights would only make him feel more lonesome, as though he had been born to a vanished race.

  By the time he reached the square, the warmth of Alison’s parlor had deserted him. It was only half past five but felt much later. When the sun went down in the winter—or, like today, when the gray merely faded from the sky—the hour seemed already far advanced. Every small thing was asleep that made the summer so busy. He heard no night birds, no voices from the porches, no children in the yards. All the doors and windows were shut tight, so he heard no pianos, no dishes rattling, no babies squalling. Even the hung-out wash was stiff and motionless. What he did hear was dogs barking, horses stamping in their stables, a steam engine popping off down by the depot, his own footsteps on the plank walk. These seemed more melancholy than any silence, as if God had created them just to illustrate how lonely mortals were, and how helpless in the vast mystery of night.

  Cass leaned against a lamppost and looked out at the square. Drops of rain hissed against the hot globe of the street lamp. A horseman went by, huddled against the damp and cold, his mount’s hooves squelching in the mud. Cass took out his flask and drank.

  Alison Sansing had a house maid, but when Cass had knocked on her door, it was opened by her minister, who was of the Presbyterian species. This gentleman, as chaperone, said nothing past a cool greeting; he thought little of Cass Wakefield anyway, who frequented taverns and was an Episcopalian and a Mason and therefore a freethinker and heretic, not to be trusted. The minister spent the whole time sitting by the window with his legs crossed, pondering, no doubt, the inscrutable Will of God, who, in the minister’s view, had known about Cass Wake
field’s appearance in this parlor since before Eden bloomed. So Cass thought anyhow, who had a low opinion of Calvinists in general and this one in particular.

  Cass could ignore the clergyman, but he could not take his eyes from Alison Sansing. Cumberland was a small place, isolated from the wide world, and full of people who had been together too long. Somehow, though, Cass had missed Alison over the years. When Lucian was still a boy, she would sit with him night after night while his head pained him, reading to him when he could stand the light, listening to his visions when he lay in darkness. Then Lucian grew older, and Cass was busy traveling, and Alison Sansing fell away from them into that closed, lavender-scented world where old maids were thought to live—peering at the world through drawn jalousies, taking tea in the long, empty afternoons, clipping items from newspapers, and working on their genealogy. From this world she emerged only on Sundays for church, and sometimes Cass would meet her on the street and pass a little while with her, and meanwhile the clocks ticked on, the hands moved across the porcelain faces, marking the hours, weeks, years. Cass thought it might have been a year since he’d seen her at all, and he saw with startling clarity how time had gained upon her. Her face was still pretty but lean now, hollow of cheek, with arcs of shadows under her eyes. She had cut her black hair, shorn it like a boy’s, and roughly, as if she’d hacked it off with pinking shears. He saw a frailty in her and, stranger still, a hint of mortality. Cass realized he had never thought of Alison Sansing as mortal.

  There was nothing frail about her voice, however, or the way she paced before the mantel as she offered her plan in the same words she had used in the note, without enlargement. It was simple enough: she wanted him to go with her to Franklin and find her long-dead kinfolk and bring them home. She did not say why, after all this time, she had determined such a thing. Cass never asked, for he understood the quest as one of those that didn’t need to make sense except to the one making it. Moreover, he agreed to go, all his arguments and misgivings dying away as he watched Alison’s face.