The Judas Field

by Bahr, Howard;

  They stopped just short of the river to wait for the pontoons. The cold had them now, and a drift of snow was falling. The men wrapped themselves in their blankets—no fires allowed—and sat or lay wherever the command to halt had found them. Cass could smell the river, the Tennessee. He knew it to be a clear, rock-bottomed stream that ran like a sluice between bluffs and rocky banks. Cass wondered about such a well-mannered river. He asked Eugene Pitcock, who had piloted on her.

  “Not so mannerly,” said Eugene. “There’s some bad falls, and the shoals above Florence cuts the river in half.”

  “Can’t you spar across ’em?” asked Cass.

  “It’s all rock and fast water,” said the other man.

  “Well,” said Cass. The idea of rocky shoals made him glad he was a Mississippi man. Was once anyhow. Perhaps again.

  Now he was leaning against a muddy bank where the road cut through, shrouded in his good Federal blanket, while the snow whispered down around him. Janie came to him, passing by out yonder in the swirl. She stood out well, for she was wearing a mourning dress and a black lace scarf over her head. Cass realized he was seeing her the way she looked on Canal Street once, when they paced behind the white hearse that bore her sister Madeline. The girl was twelve, and would be forever; she had a little boil cut off her neck on Thursday, and they were burying her on Sunday. Now, in Alabama, out in the snow, Janie raised her face to look at him. I can’t much stand this, Cass, she said. He remembered how she said those same words over and over that day, but now he didn’t know if she was speaking out of that time or this. I can’t much either, he said, hut don’t worry. It won’t he always, words as stupid and empty now as they were then.

  Pretty soon, Janie went away, and it was only a soldier trudging along where she had been, his blanket over his head. The man’s footsteps squeaked in the snow, and he was talking to himself. Cass was used to these apparitions, but he hurt in his heart anyhow. He counted the months back to August, the time when he had finally got another letter from Janie, dated in June. The army was still in Georgia then. It was said that a good deal of their mail was burned when the Atlanta depot went up, and they had been on the move since. All that time, and so much could happen. People went so quickly. She could be long asleep under the cold ground. …

  “No, she isn’t,” said Cass aloud. He prayed. “Keep her safe; let the angels watch.”

  Roger was sleeping, wrapped up in Sally Mae Burke’s quilt. Between them, Lucian shivered in his crusty blanket. Cass thought he was sleeping, too, but in a little while the boy said, “Who you talking to, Mister Cass?”

  “Nobody,” said Cass. “Go to sleep.”

  The boy rubbed his eyes and looked about. “This is the first snow I ever seen,” he said. “I feel like I ought to be looking at it.”

  “Well, it can be pretty in some circumstances,” said Cass.

  “Mister Cass, I been thinking,” said the boy. He blew his nose on his blanket. “We cross that river, they’s going to be a battle, ain’t they?”

  “I expect so,” said Cass.

  “Will it be like the one in Decatur?”

  Cass thought a moment. “I will tell you what I know about that,” he said. “The worse part of a battle is waiting for it. Then, when it commences, it’s no matter how big it is. What matters is what’s happening right where you are, and maybe you have an easy time, and maybe you don’t. There’s not any good ones. Some fellows like it, and I suppose it is well they do.”

  “Do you ever like it, Mister Cass?”

  “Sometimes, when I am in it, but not before or after.”

  “Well, are you scared much?”

  “Always at first,” Cass said. “Everbody is pretty much afraid when he starts out, and some can’t overcome it and run away. I have done that myself, and if a man tells you he has not, he is a liar. Mostly, in the thick of it, you let go of being scared; I don’t know if anybody could do it otherwise. Some of this you’ll have to find out for yourself. There ain’t a way to tell it.”

  “Hah!” said Roger suddenly. He was wakened by their talk or by some dream that roused him, and he pushed closer to the boy for warmth. He spoke in a voice harsh with sleep. “If we live a thousand years, won’t ever find a way to tell it.” He coughed, and turned his head to spit. “In a battle, everything is wrong, nothing you ever learned is true anymore. And when you come out—if you do—you can’t remember. You have to put it back together by the rules you know, and you end up with a lie. That’s the best you can do, and when you tell it, it’ll still be a lie.”

  Cass said to the boy, “You were in that fight the other day—what do you remember of it?”

  Lucian thought a moment. “Legs, mostly,” he said. “Smoke, fire, noise. Sometimes I think like it lasted twenty seconds, other times a month or so. All I really remember is you dragging me acrost that cotton field. I don’t even know who beat.”

  “That’s good,” said Cass. “Put that in your memoirs, and you will be telling the truth.”

  “Who’d want to read that?” asked the boy.

  Roger laughed. “Nobody. That’s why, when Mister Wakefield writes his memoirs, he will come out a major general. It’s what all the first-chair memoirists do.”

  Cass said, “How do you know about memoirs if nobody’s written any yet? Anyway, I will leave your sorry ass out of’em.”

  “No, you won’t,” said Roger.

  “Well, now listen, you-all,” said the boy. “If you are scared, do you … do you pray before?”

  “I don’t believe God takes any part to speak of,” Cass said. “Not in these fights of ours, anyway.”

  “Well, why not?” asked Lucian. “He’s in charge, ain’t He—you said He was. Don’t He pick a favorite?”

  “It would not be fair if He did,” said Cass. “Anyhow, I guess we’re all His favorites. I mean, more or less. Some more than others. Me, for instance—I’m a great favorite. Now, Roger here—”

  “Well, fine,” said the boy, and pulled the blanket over his head. Cass poked him, and he put his head out again. “Never mind,” the boy said. “I ain’t likely to be a favorite anyhow.”

  “Well,” said Cass, “you might be if you quit cussing so damn much.”

  “Huh,” said the boy.

  Roger threw off his quilt and sat up, fully awake now. He pointed at Cass. “You quit ragging this boy about his language,” he said. “It is his way of being genteel. Besides, he has a natural talent for it.”

  “Roger,” said Cass, “you do not know a goddamned thing about cussing. I have never heard you utter so much as a syllable that couldn’t be trot out at solemn high mass.”

  Roger ignored his comrade. "Listen here, Lucian,” he said. “As a philosopher, your uncle Cass is only an amateur, and you have thrown him off by asking questions he is not equipped to answer.”

  “Now, see here—” began Cass.

  “Never mind,” said Roger. “The boy asked about praying, and all you can do is rag him.” He poked the boy’s legs. “Here—sit up, you.”

  Lucian obeyed, rubbing his eyes again, and gapping. “Lord, don’t you-all ever sleep?” he said.

  Roger passed him a canteen. Ice clinked inside it. ' “There’s plenty of time for sleeping tomorrow, or the next day, when you’re dead and your uncle Cass throws dirt in your face.”

  “Roger!” said Cass.

  “You be quiet!” said Roger. “Or, better yet, deny it if you can!”

  “Nobody’s throwing dirt in this boy’s face,” said Cass. “He is going home with us.”

  Roger laughed. He looked at the boy and said, “What Mister Wakefield means, in his crude and belligerent way, is that he has faith. Tomorrow, or the next day, there’ll be a fight, and it won’t be such a little thing as Decatur was. Mister Wakefield believes that God takes no sides but hopes for the best for everyone. I happen to believe the same. In a fight, lad, it is not so much us and the yankees. The Angel of Death wants us all—that’s where the real battle is
, and why it’s all so insane.”

  “Well, could you pray to him, then?” asked the boy. “The Angel of Death?”

  “You could,” said Roger, “but he wouldn’t listen. Only God does, and He can’t help you right then.”

  “Well,” said Lucian, “there’s no sense in praying a-tall, if you ask me.”

  Roger laughed again and slapped the boy’s leg. “There you have it,” he said. “No sense in it a-tall. To ask for protection is pure lunacy, lad, especially when the other side is doing the same, and to the same address. That’s exactly why everybody prays, you see; it’s all we have to offer commensurate with the madness.”

  “But if God—”

  “Hush,” said Roger. “Be still and listen. You must have your faith, and it will be sore tested when you see what’s left after a fight, what’s hanging in the trees and spread over the ground—that place you saw back at Muscle Shoals was a garden by comparison. You look around, and you might be tempted to ask where God was when all this happened.”

  “Well, where was He?” asked Lucian.

  “He was there,” said Roger. “He was there all along, watching and grieving. If we live, I will take you over the next field myself, and maybe you will learn what you can only learn the hard way: that God is there with you, and whatever sorrow you are feeling—well, how infinite must the sorrow be in His heart? It is the only way. Once a man decides God planned all this, once he points to God as responsible, then his faith is gone. No mortal can bear that, no matter what he says. We have lost pretty much everything, but faith we must not lose. That is why we pray, and fervently—but not for preservation, mind. That article is left to you and your pards, not to God. To ask Him for it, and be spared when so many are not, will only doom your faith.”

  “What do you ask for, then?” said the boy.

  Roger pulled the quilt around his shoulders. “To be forgiven,” he said.

  They were quiet then. The snow swirled around them, borne on a cutting wind, and through it ghostly shapes began to pass, bending, searching, speaking softly. Little stars of candlelight pricked out in the whiteness as men gathered their belongings. A murmur rose from the camps; the army was stirring, its vast and myriad soul already in motion toward the mystery that waited beyond the river.

  Cass and Roger stood and stretched and groaned. Muscles cramped in the cold, and the blood slowed. Lucian sat a moment longer, watching them. “Mister Roger,” he said at last, “if I pray to be forgive, you reckon it will take?”

  Roger knelt, took up Lucian’s hat—Cass had lifted one from a gatepost along the march—brushed the snow from it, and set it on the boy’s head. “You can ask the dead ones,” he said. “They know better than us.”

  Lucian came slowly to his feet. He was shivering, and Cass took up the blanket and spread it over the boy’s shoulders. He said, “Dern it, we got to get you a coat. We’ll find one today.”

  The boy looked up. In the pale, ambient light of the snow, his face held no measure of understanding, but a great deal of wonder, a little less of fear. Together, fear and wonder made understanding of a kind, enough for a boy, and as much as any of them could hope for. “Can you see ’em, Cass?” he said. “The dead ones? No fooling, now.”

  “Sometimes, yes,” said Cass. He looked at the ground. “They are close tonight, but they mean no harm. They are just lonesome, I guess.”

  “I will see them, too,” said the boy, and turned his eyes toward the river.

  “It will take, lad,” said Cass. “When you pray, and do it rightly, it always takes just fine. They would tell you that, I think, should you ask them.”

  Lucian nodded, his eyes still fixed on the barren trees where the river flowed silent and dark. “It ain’t much time,” he said. “I reckon you better teach me how.”

  They crossed the river to Florence next day and set out northward. It rained and snowed and sleeted by turns until the weather broke, and Indian summer lay upon the land. At Spring Hill, Tennessee, the Gods of War looked down on the army and offered a splendid chance for victory, but orders were ignored or misunderstood, the darkness confused everybody, and next morning they woke to discover the great opportunity lost forever.

  So they went on to Franklin, where, it was said, the yankees had halted with their backs to the Harpeth River. The rebels hurrying north tried not to think of what that meant. They swung along, talking at first, or complaining, or speculating, only to fall silent as the sun grew higher and the miles began to tell. Then it was only the sound of their feet on the road, the clank of their accoutrements, their coughing, and the voices of their officers: Come on, boys. … Close it up now, boys. … Keep it moving there, lads.

  Still they knew—these boys from Tennessee and Mississippi and Alabama, from far-off Texas and Missouri and South Carolina—what lay before them. Somewhere up ahead, by a town most of them had never heard of, the enemy was strengthening his works and setting his guns in place, waiting for the moment when the colors of the Army of Tennessee would break out upon the plain. The soldiers knew that the fields they would have to cross were still marked with the furrows of last year’s planting. No smoke hung in the woods, and the Harpeth had never run with blood, and the houses and churches and woodsheds were innocent, for a little while yet, of the cries of wounded men and the rasp of bone saws and the stink of chloroform and gangrene. They knew also that the Death Angel had made his choices, and, for some, the cold ground was waiting. For the rest, they were marching into a darkness like nothing they had ever seen, into a shadow that would fall across all their days remaining. They understood that no prayer or promise could shape a different end, but they prayed anyway—them who would—and made promises to God that they could not keep. Then they bent to the long miles, making ready, each man telling himself that surely he would see tomorrow.

  The Ditch

  9

  CASS WAKEFIELD WOKE SHIVERING WITH ANGER AND dread, the usual residue of his dreams. He did not believe his dreams meant anything—their only purpose seemed to be to scare the shit out of him—and he cursed them in the same way he cursed the deep midnight. Both left him weak, unsure, cowardly even. Waking and midnight; everything seemed worse then, and the smallest tic of the universe seemed insurmountable.

  He had no idea where he was—the hotel room looked like any of the hundreds he had been in—nor even if it were morning or evening, for the light in the window was pale and transient, preparing to slide into light or dark. He lurched from the bed and crossed to the window and banged his fist against the glass. He focused on the frosted rooftops below him, and the smoke from the chimneys, and decided it was morning. Then he remembered he was in Franklin, Tennessee.

  At the washstand, he splashed water in his face and caught a glimpse of himself in the cloudy mirror. He looked like owl shit, he thought: unshaven, baggy under the eyes, in the same shirt he had worn for—how many days now? Well, no matter. A shirt was good for four days in the wintertime if he did no heavy work.

  He had slept in his clothes, so dressing was only a matter of putting on his shoes and finding his hat and frock coat. He needed coffee. The world would look more manageable then. He wondered if Alison was awake. He hoped she was not, for she needed to rest. Besides, in his present humor, Cass would do better not to see her. At midnight, he had wanted her company; at waking, he didn’t—unfair, but there it was.

  He cracked the door and peered out to find the hall empty. He moved quickly to the stairs and in a moment was in the lobby of the Avalon, a dark-paneled room with tired wicker chairs arranged on a threadbare rug, newspapers littering the tables, a few struggling plants, and tall windows through which the winter sun slanted hopefully. The place had the weary, used-up smell that Cass associated with hotels: a compound of cigar smoke, newsprint, kerosene, furniture oil, and the indefinable scent of peregrine souls. Behind a pair of glasspaned doors was a dining room, but Cass could not bear the thought of the smell of frying meat. Then he beheld a great steaming samovar, polishe
d and formidable, surrounded by heavy white cups. The sight elevated his spirits, and he allowed himself to observe the others gathered in the lobby.

  The desk clerk, in shirtsleeves, was sliding mail into pigeonholes. A black porter leaned on his broom in a ray of sunlight, talking quietly to the bellman. Two fat drummers on a couch leafed through their order slips, valises opened beside them, and from the dining room came the clink of silverware and muted voices. Cass smiled at the familiar scene and felt comfortable in its midst. For a moment, he wished he were only on a selling trip, alone and anonymous in some northern city with his traveling case of pistols and order slips of his own, far away from memory and no business with the dead. The road was not so bad, he thought, and when he heard the sound of his name, he believed it must be some fellow traveler crossing his path again. He was still smiling when he turned and saw Lucian on the stairs.

  For an instant, Cass was confused. Here was the kind of infernal jumbling that dreams delighted in: Lucian Wakefield, whom Cass knew to be far away in Cumberland, was descending the frayed carpet of the stairs in a rumpled frock coat and cravat all askew, unshaven, hair disarranged and greasy, looking like owl shit himself. “Lucian, for God’s sake,” said Cass sharply. The drummers looked up. Lucian stopped, his hand on the newel post. Cass said, “Do you … do you know where you are?”

  Lucian’s hands were shaking, his eyes red. He straightened his cravat and ran his fingers through his hair. “Well, hey, Cass,” he said, and smiled. “We came in on the same train after all—funny, ain’t it? Spring Hill, the switching woke me up, and I looked out and saw you and Alison at the depot, and I thought to find you then, but it was late, so I decided—”

  “Listen to me,” said Cass. He closed the distance between them. A telephone rang feebly behind the desk, and the front door opened and closed. Cass said, “You got no business here. I told you yesterday—”