The Judas Field

by Bahr, Howard;

  He had plenty of time on his hands, and he knew where the men were buried, though he was not sure he could find the place again. It only made sense that she would ask him. The only thing left was to wish she had not asked at all. He stood a moment longer by the old square, then pulled up his collar and started up the street toward home.

  At the Wakefield house—a paintless single-story cottage almost invisible behind a forest of untrimmed privet—he went around back to get a fresh jug from the mildewed, spider-haunted cellar. Then he went through the creaky back door and into the tacked-on kitchen, greeted by the sound of mice hightailing it to safety. The kitchen had not been used in decades, but the mice still preferred it, as if hope burned eternal in their tiny breasts. Cass swore and fumbled for a lamp, then gave it up and felt his way into the hall, where a pale glow defined the sidelights and the milky glass panel of the front door. This panel had been cracked by the discharge of an artillery piece in the front yard during the fighting for Cumberland, and in the wintertime, the crack admitted gusts of cold air.

  Along the walls, barely visible, huddled shapes of furniture. Near the door stood a gaudy hall stand, resting place for a quartet of rotting umbrellas that once belonged to Janie. Her hats still hung on the hooks there. A low horsehair settee, piled with old newspapers, lurked by the north wall; in the center, a wing table with a lamp no one ever lit, flanked by a brace of spindly chairs no one sat in anymore. On the table lay a loaded 28-gauge shotgun. By daylight, the walls themselves were yellowed and grimed with the smoke of fireplaces, pipes, cigars, French cigarettes, and Injun weed; the original white existed only behind the pictures—oil portrait of Janie and her father, the old fart, a charcoal of her sister, who died in New Orleans, a chromo of Notre Dame de Paris—and behind the furniture, regions only spiders and mice had visited in the last two decades.

  Cass followed the smell of cannabis to the office and discovered Lucian sitting cross-legged on a cushion, drawing on one of the pipes of his hookah. He had a candle burning, which gave just enough light to see that his eyes were closed and a wet rag was tied around his head. Lying open beside him was a fat, threadbare dictionary, and on top of this slumbered a fat yellow tomcat.

  “Well, Cass,” said Lucian.

  Cass set the jug between his legs. He did not care to take the Injun weed himself, for it made his throat sore. When he was settled, Cass told of his visit with Alison. Lucian was silent for a moment, drawing on the pipe. Finally, he shook his head. “You don’t need to be going back up there. She should not have asked such a thing.”

  “Well, she feels strongly about it,” said Cass. “Strongly. And she can’t go by herself.”

  “She ought to leave those boys alone,” said Lucian.

  The two men were silent for a while, each remembering how it had been the morning after the Franklin battle. Cass, as usual, found that the memory had lost all its hard edges and returned as a sad dream. The few who remained of the regiment had been searching for their dead when they found Colonel Sansing and young Perry only a few yards apart in the ditch before the cotton gin. They wrapped the bodies in tent flys left behind by the enemy, and carried them in silent procession to the backyard of a house nearby, where other men had been buried that morning, and where now the Sansings were laid in a common grave. Down, down, down.

  In the dream, the boys buried them together out of sentiment; in truth, they were too worn out to dig two holes, and the one they dug was not deep and filled quickly with water.

  Chaplain Sam Hook said some words no one could remember, though Cass often wished he could. Sam Hook was chaplain for the whole brigade, but he stayed with his old regiment that day. Since first light, they had buried a dozen of their comrades and would bury that many more (each a little shallower than the one before), but Sam Hook always thought of something eloquent and particular to say about each one, for he had known them. That evening, they would kneel in the oak grove by McGavock’s house, and Hook would remember every one they couldn’t find. It was his last homily. The chaplain was lost at Nashville; no one knew where or how, but they all knew no one had spoken over him before the mud was shoveled in his face. Cass had always been sorry for that, and many times, as he waited for sleep, he imagined what he might have said if he had only been there.

  In Cass’s particular dream, the boys were neither tired nor hungry nor afraid, and no cold rain fell. There were no bright colors, but at least the oppressive gray was softened to a kind of twilight, and no wounded men cried out, and the terrible landscape all around was shut away. There were only the boys, and a great silence, and the mounded grave with a fence pale driven at its head, lettered by Cass Wakefield himself in the white paint one of them had found in a shed:

  SANSING

  Col. & Adjutant

  Father & Son

  21 st Miss.

  Our Comrades

  Cass knew that the scene he remembered in this moment was a lie, but no matter. Plenty of time left to remember it as it was.

  “I reckon the marker is long gone,” said Cass at last. He uncorked the jug and took a long swallow. “I will have a devil of a time finding the place.”

  Lucian leaned back and rubbed his eyes. “I don’t even remember the house,” he said. “When I see it, I’ll know it, though.”

  “You won’t see it,” said Cass. “You ain’t going.”

  “Oh, I forgot,” said Lucian. “I’m not invited. But then—I wasn’t the first time, either.”

  “That is not funny,” said Cass. He tipped the jug, trying not to regret the promise he’d made. Well, no matter. In the morning, he would board a northbound passenger train with Alison Sansing, and sooner or later they would return. That was sufficient thought for the night to come.

  3

  IT WAS A WONDER TO LOOK OUT THE WINDOW AND WATCH the woods and fields roll past, even barren as they were. In all her life, Alison had never been out of Mississippi, and now, pretty soon, she would be.

  She wondered if the wintertime was the same in other places as it was here. She wondered if Tennessee would be full of snow. She was tired of winter, and the worst of it, the dreary month of February, was yet to come. In March, the crocuses and daffodils would poke up their heads, though the daffodils were usually humbled by a late frost. They never seemed to learn but always pushed up and peered around hopefully. According to the Prayer Book, Easter would be early in April this year, and after that—

  She pressed her gloved hand to her mouth to keep from crying out. Death was supposed to be a surprise, she thought bitterly. No one should have to live with the knowledge that next summer’s birds would light on her grave. But of course she didn’t really believe that yet. That was how you stood it, by not believing. Alison told herself she would have the summer, just one more, and the long, drowsy fall, and then the winter to die in. Having arranged that, she felt better.

  She was not sure why she kept her secret. Pity, most likely. She could not bear pity. Besides, a revelation would only complicate matters. When she came back, she would tell her minister, and he would help her get ready. The rest could find out in their own time.

  No doubt it was unfair to leave Cass Wakefield in the dark after he had done this thing for her. Cass had been friendly that morning at the depot, but he had spoken hardly a word since. She put this down to the fact that he didn’t really want to go. She accepted that, just as she accepted the fact that she could never have gone alone. Yet chivalry, even in the best of men (and Cass, for all his singular ways, was among the best), couldn’t always mask reluctance when the circumstance weighed heavy, and it would be just as hard for him to mask pity. She risked a quick glance at her companion. Cass was leaned back in the seat, his eyes closed, pondering God knows what. He was no longer young, but he was still a fair-looking man, if she cared to think about it. As she looked at him now, it was odd to think that once he journeyed a long way down a road she could not begin to imagine, and saw and did things no words could shape even while they were h
appening. Her father and brother had done the same and had not returned to even try to tell how it had been or how they had stood it.

  Once she had hoped Cass Wakefield would court her, but he never had—perhaps because of her father, a formidable obstacle, though he didn’t mean to be. In any event, Cass went off to the river and, in time, married another. When Cass came home to join the army in ’61, he left his bride in Alison’s charge. Alison and Jane and Sally Mae Burke passed the war together, staying in one another’s houses, praying, waiting for the news, trembling when it came. They rolled bandages, collected lint, went cold and hungry. They watched the yankees come and go, watched the Negroes run off, watched the square razed. After Franklin, Jane and Sally Mae kept Alison among the living by refusing to let her die. During Gault’s Rebellion, when the whole world seemed to have tilted beyond the last mad precipice, they convinced one another it hadn’t, if only because they would not allow such a thing to happen.

  Then the war ended, and Cass and Roger and Lucian came home on the Pontotoc Road. A boy had seen them out there, and told some men on the square, and one of the men fetched Alison. She went to meet them alone, walking far out the road, past the cemetery and into the hot, empty countryside. Finally she quit walking and stood in the middle of the road, the sun beating down and the grass in the ditches dry and buzzing with insects. She stood there in her black dress and bonnet like the Angel of Death, waiting, and at last they appeared over the ridge. She had expected two scarecrows, but instead there were three shuffling along, talking in that excited way people will when they are almost home after a journey. When they saw her, they stopped. Cass spoke her name, and Alison beckoned. Even from that distance, she could see in Cass Wakefield’s eyes that he knew she was a messenger. They came slowly then, the strange boy walking behind Cass and holding on to the rag of his shirt.

  “Well, Miss Alison,” said Cass. She could smell the stink on them, but no matter. She put out her hands, but Cass stepped back. “Careful,” he said, “you’ll get greybacks all over you.” He ran his hands through the tangle of his hair, then held them out to Alison. “See? We got them, Alison, and fleas, too.” He stood there, swaying in the sunlight, the boy peeking around him.

  Roger said, “Alison, where is—”

  “No!” said Cass. He began to back up the road. “I don’t want you to tell,” he said. “You must go away and not tell.”

  “Listen to me,” she said. “You must listen.” Then she told how Janie was dead of the typhoid a month past, and Sally Mae gone half mad of it. When she finished, she was crying, surprised to find her heart still beating, the blood still coursing through her veins. She watched them kneel in the dust of the Pontotoc Road, Cass and Roger, while the boy looked past her toward the town.

  That was the homecoming she gave them. She thought Cass Wakefield might hate her for a long time, but he never did. In a few days, he came to ask her help with the boy, who was sick, and to tell her how her people had died, and to assure her they had died with honor. That seemed to be important to him.

  Now, in the railway coach, she said, “This is hard for you.”

  He opened his eyes, but he did not look at her. “I have studied on it some,” he said. “We’ll find the place. That part is easy.”

  “What is the hard part?”

  Cass studied his hands. “I helped to put them there,” he said. “That was a long time ago. When we find the grave, I would not want you to look in it.”

  “I will not promise that,” she said.

  He nodded and closed his eyes again. “Well see,” he said.

  The country had changed a good deal, something Cass began to notice when their train crossed into Alabama. It was a bleak country of wide fields and dead cotton stalks, ponds whose still waters shone like polished coins. Here and there a barren wolf tree or a cedar rose in solitude, and now and then a chimney with no house. But there were intact houses, too, and more cabins than he remembered, and as darkness settled, the windows began to wink with lamps. Nowhere rose any landmark that Cass could recognize.

  The train sped on through the darkening country. The porter had not yet lit the lamps in the coach, so Cass could make out the passing landscape—the broad, dark fields like the sea, the shapes of trees along the creek bottoms. He cursed the early dark and the clouds that hid the stars. The lamps in the houses seemed futile in all that blackness, offering no comfort to the traveler. Cass had looked out of countless train windows in his day, up and down the Mississippi valley, up to Missouri and down to Orleans, and he had always felt the same sense of loneliness and loss when other people’s houses passed in the night. Still, it was better this time, for between him and the dark was the profile of Alison’s face. There was her forehead, her eyes half closed, the curve of her nose, her lips parted—and beyond her the ghosts of the old army lying on the land, of Roger and Lucian, Ike and all the rest, and himself, too.

  Then, at Decatur, Cass had a rude shock. As they came around the curve to the depot, he expected, even in the dark, to see the Federal works. They would be decayed perhaps, worn down by the rains, but he knew they would still be looming over the town like the cone of a sleeping volcano. Instead, they were vanished. Nothing remained to match the image Cass had long held in memory, and he stared dumbfounded. He simply could not accept that they were gone, nor that the universe could sustain such a vacancy. This time, he gave voice to his thoughts, and Alison put her hand on his arm. “Well,” she said, “maybe they only looked big at the time.”

  “No, they were monumental,” said Cass. “They were eternal, like the Pyramids. The armies of Charlemagne could not have prevailed against them.”

  “I should like to hear about it, then,” she said, as the train crawled over the Tennessee River bridge. “And about how Lucian came to you. This was the place, wasn’t it?”

  “The very place,” said Cass. Then he told how Lucian, conscripted from an orphanage, appeared in the backyard of a house in Decatur just before the battle. He told of the fight itself and how the rebels dashed themselves against the Federal works to no purpose, and how, when the battle was over, they came back to the house and burned it and left the owners homeless with winter coming down. When the story was done, he turned to Alison and found her eyes moving across his face.

  “You burned a house?” she said. “An old woman’s house?”

  “Well, I take no pride in it,” he said. “It was a rough time. We were … different then.”

  She shifted in the seat to face him, the window a dark square behind her, the night fleeing past. “Different,” she said. “I do not think you were different. I do not think you are different now.”

  “I would not burn a person’s house now,” Cass said.

  “Yes, you would,” she said. “You certainly would.”

  “That is a hard judgment.”

  She shook her head, her eyes never leaving his face. “It is no judgment. It is merely a fact.”

  "Very well,” said Cass, and left unmentioned his belief that sometimes fact and truth were not the same thing.

  Cass and Alison’s train left Decatur on time, and luckily so, for an hour later a freight engine derailed on the bridge approach, and a half dozen trains backed up behind it. One of these numbered Lucian Wakefield among its travelers.

  Lucian stood beneath the passenger shed watching the rain and the deep-blue night. The depot was hot and swarming with passengers and squalling children, so Lucian preferred the cool air of the platform. He walked off to the south end, his hands shoved deep in his coat pockets, and looked off in the direction of town. He was already tired of the rain. He never took long to grow weary of it in winter, though he liked it in the summertime when it fell hard, silver and green, and afterward steamed from the backs of horses, steamed up from the railroad ties and lay in a mist along Town Creek. In summer, the birds sang after a rain, but no such music rose from the cold drizzle of the dead time. Only silence, and only the dark.

  He was tired of t
he dark, too, and the dark was worst of all. In winter, the day was hardly begun before it was already getting ready for night. Sometimes, in winter, they had to burn the lamps in the back of Tom Jenkins’s store all day, and even when the sunlight fell in a shallow slant through the front panes, it was pale and watery and reluctant. Never enough light anywhere—no lamp, no thousand lamps, could light the rooms through which they moved—fire to fire, lamp to lamp, in the dead time.

  The winter nights were hard to walk through, though walk they did: Lucian Wakefield, Roger, Tom Jenkins, and others—Gawain Harper wandering home from the depot, Ike Gatlin hobbling on his ruined feet. (“It’s the nerves,” Ike would say sometimes, and tap his feet with his cane, punishing the nerves killed years before by the ice on the long retreat.) They met, these wanderers; they passed on in solitude or walked on together, always in silence but for Tom’s constant tuneless whistling, while the tree limbs rattled above them, groaning and creaking with cold, and the fence palings gleamed with frost. In summer they might talk sometimes, and remember, laugh even—but the winter closed around them, struck them silent, and the sullen dawn came late and sent no heralds before it.

  Rain and dark. Lucian was tired of them both, but he kept his sentiments well hidden, at the very edge of thought, lest Fate mistake him. This rain, this dark, whatever cold might come—these were nothing beside what the soldiers had known once, and now they lived with the fear that, if they pressed too hard, the terrors they remembered would come again. Thus Tom Jenkins whistled in the night, Steven Peck always drank his coffee from a tin cup, Bloodworth often went without a coat in the coldest weather, the Craddocks stayed every month of November in hunting camp, living in dog tents, and Carl Nobles kept a bull’s-eye canteen wound around his saddle horn. They did these things not from joy or sentiment or habit, but because they knew something was watching, waiting to snatch them up again if they let themselves get too comfortable.