The Judas Field

by Bahr, Howard;

  “I don’t know,” Cass said. “I used to think—” He stopped then, his head tilted, and Lucian could see he was crying again, though he made no sound. Cass began to pace up and down, muttering to himself, wiping at his eyes. After a moment, he stopped and looked up toward the ceiling, where the light was showing through a big hole in the roof. “Fuck it,” said Cass. “Fuck all that.” He stepped forward then and opened his hand and let the dirt from Janie’s grave pour out into the glass that held the candle. The flame disappeared, and Cass turned and walked back out into the hot sunlight.

  Lucian was sick a long time after that. He had a little closet of a room in the house on Algiers Street, and for a whole year he hardly left it. Sometimes Alison Sansing would sit with him, and sometimes Morgan Harper. They read to him when he could stand it—histories, Shakespeare, Bulfinch, the Bible—for they knew he was short on education.

  During that time, Sally Mae and Roger were finally married. Cass did not attend the affair, but Alison told later how the bride and groom were both still sick, and Sally Mae swooned at the altar and had to be revived. Whenever Sally Mae came to sit with Lucian, she would not read to him but talked about the visions she had in her fevers, which were as lively as anything the old Bible prophets had to tell, and Lucian would tell his in return. Such a lot of dragons and red horsemen and ghosts and death angels moved through the room then, when Lucian and Sally Mae were together.

  By early autumn—he was about fourteen years old, maybe fifteen—he could walk, and walk he did, long journeys into the countryside that made his legs ache but made him stronger. Cass traded for a horse and a pony and some old, brittle tack, which they oiled up together. Cass taught Lucian how to ride the pony, and Lucian would push the little fellow even farther out in the county, riding hard, using muscles he never knew he had. He watched the leaves turn scarlet and gold, watched them fall from the trees and drift in the ditches. Sometimes the yankee cavalry would ride by, and Lucian hid among the trees or in the broomsage and watched them pass, holding the pony’s muzzle so he wouldn’t whicker, wishing he had one of those carbines that would shoot all day without reloading. (Always take out the last man first, Cass had told him once, during a skirmish on the retreat from Nashville.) He would ease up to soldiers lounging on the square and listen to them talk, and he would think, They are not much men, after all. Sometimes he went out to their camp and watched them drill, for he did not want to forget how it was: the long blue lines, drums beating, fixed bayonets gleaming. Sometimes he watched the fat men from Illinois and Indiana and Wisconsin who ran the Freedman’s Bureau, who had never done any fighting but had reaped the harvest nevertheless.

  At night, sometimes, Cass would saddle the old horse and leave, always telling Lucian to stay in the house. But Lucian wouldn’t stay. He would saddle the pony and follow, and watch as the men rode around with torches to scare the poor niggers and get chased by the yankees. He did that until Cass caught him; after that, Cass traded the pony for a real horse, and Lucian was allowed to ride along. Cass gave him a pistol, too, and he used it once.

  He and Cass spent an hour every day lifting a section of iron rail in the backyard, and after a while their arms grew knotty and hard, and they were not so easily tired. On the square, a new courthouse was going up—Cass and Lucian and Roger hauled bricks and hammered nails for ten cents a day—and new stores, and the people no longer looked weary and sick. Pretty soon, Tom Jenkins took Lucian to work in the hardware store and taught him about nails and harness and pipe and lumber, and how to cipher and make change. The store was new-built out of heart pine by Tom Jenkins’s own hand, but it wasn’t long before it took on the smells of time passing: oiled floors, grease, leather, iron, kerosene, and the sweat of the men who came there.

  Meanwhile, Cass worked at odd jobs and passed his idle time stealing from the yankees. He drank a good deal and talked about Janie and about dead men and old battles. He no longer carried his rosary. At night, he would rage and curse and throw things around, and then he would talk to Janie as if she were still there among them. It was then that Lucian began to walk the streets at night. He could not reach Cass Wakefield in the place where he was, so Lucian went off alone, in spite of the yankees’ curfew, and in time he met others who did the same. The little house where Janie had lived began to grow heavy with smoke and dust, the walls growing closer and closer and hardly ever a lamp or candle lit. The house became a place where no one cooked or washed, where visitors never called—a museum of immovable furniture and locked trunks, of vases, and lamps and ivy bowls still setting where Janie had put them, and her clothes moldering in the wardrobe, breeding generations of moths. When Lucian’s headaches came, he would lie in his darkened room and dream his laudanum dreams. When he was well, he worked in the store, and walked the back roads, and paced the streets at night watching out for soldiers, and time passed right along.

  One winter afternoon, the priest of Holy Cross sent his card around. The next day, he came to call. Brennan was his name. He was a short, balding man with a wooden leg, who wore no collar and smoked fat cigars. His speech was not of Mississippi. Cass was in a bad humor that day, but tied on a cravat and made some coffee, and they all sat together in what used to be the parlor, with the blinds closed and dust all over everything and a meager fire on the hearth. On a table was a dried-up fishbowl with Janie’s petrified goldfish still curled up on the bottom. Cass sat upright, stiff and wary.

  They talked about the war for a while. (Once upon a time, people began with the weather, but now they always started off with the war.) The priest told how he had gone off soldiering and lost his leg for his trouble—on Culp’s Hill at Gettysburg, he said. Lucian had never heard of the place. Finally they reached a quiet spell, as people will do, and Cass said, “Well, Mister Brennan, no doubt you are here to inquire after our souls. What profound truths, what miracles of grace and healing have you come to offer?”

  The priest looked up sharply. His coffee cup clinked into the saucer. “I didn’t come to offer you a damn thing,” he said. “Is that what you thought?”

  Cass was clearly taken aback by this. Lucian, who had no knowledge of priests, thought that if they were all like this one, they might be worth listening to.

  “That is bold language to use in a man’s house,” said Cass stiffly.

  The priest laughed without humor. “Don’t speak to me about language in another’s house,” he said. “I was in the sacristy the day you did your trick with the candle. My first day in the parish, and to be greeted with that!”

  Cass’s face went as red as the candle’s little glass. “I was just come from my wife’s grave,” he said. “Before that—

  The priest waved him silent. “I know your story,” he said. “It is like a good many others, as for that. In any event, it has taken until now for me to summon the humility to call on you, and to be truthful, it is of little interest to me whether you come around the church or not—that is between God and you and this boy here. If you are having a crisis of faith, maybe I can help you. On the other hand, if you are merely being an ass, then I bid you good day.”

  Cass Wakefield looked at the priest and laughed. It was the first time in many months that Lucian had heard the sound. The priest, red-faced himself now, started to rise, but Cass beckoned him to stay. A wind rattled in the windowpanes and stirred the fire on the hearth. Such a cold day, and bleak, and the fires from the yankee camp drifting across the yard—but all at once both men were laughing.

  Cass said, “You put me in mind of our old chaplain, Sam Hook. He used language like that to good effect in a homily.”

  “Hah,” said the priest, and poured another cup of coffee. Lucian laughed to himself then, thinking how the coffee but lately belonged to the yankee soldiers, and what the priest would have to say about that.

  Cass put his hands together. He said, “Mister Brennan, I have not lost my faith, and I do not presume to fault the Almighty for His apparent indifference. It is only that I am ti
red of making excuses for Him. I am tired of hearing about His design this and Hi's design that; if He has one at all, ’tis a sorry one indeed and of no use to anybody. The facts bear it out, as you ought to know yourself.”

  The priest nodded. He sipped his coffee and this time placed the cup carefully back in its saucer. “Well, then,” he said, “I see your God is a personal one. Perhaps you’d be more comfortable with a vague abstraction.” He smiled then. “I won’t worry too much about you, though I might throw out a prayer now and again.”

  “As you will, Mister Brennan,” said Cass. “Perhaps one day, when I am capable of sympathy again, I’ll come back to the church house.”

  “Worship does not require your sympathy, sir,” said the priest. “That’s why they call it worship.”

  “Yes, it does,” said Cass, “else I could send my card, if I had a card, and leave the rest of me at home.”

  That is how the war did for some people, Lucian thought. It used up everything, stole everything, and what remained—memory, mostly—was just enough to keep the shape of a man, just enough to propel the flesh from one day to the next, only without feeling or interest or desire. Time itself ceased to mean anything; with the laudanum, Lucian could lose two or three days and be no worse off than he was. The dead were the lucky ones, maybe, who quit with the dream still in their heads, who could still believe in Possibility only because they would never have to lose it.

  Roger said once that, after a battle, you had to try to put things back together according to the rules you knew, and the best you could come up with was still a lie. So it was, Lucian thought. Once, in the back of the store, he took an old clock apart, laid out the wheels and gears and springs, cleaned and studied them, and put them back in the same order. Sitting on the workbench, the thing looked just like the clock it had been, except that it would not run. Nothing Lucian did would induce it to run. That was what the war did to people.

  When the priest rose to leave at last, Lucian was sorry to see him go. At the door, Cass touched the man’s sleeve and said, “Now, regarding this Culp’s Hill in Gettysburg that we never heard of—”

  “Never heard of Culp’s Hill?” said the priest, shrugging on his coat. “Well, you must read the histories when they come out.”

  “That is unlikely,” said Cass. “Anyhow, I was going to ask who you were with.”

  “Ah, I failed to mention that detail,” said the priest, and winked at Lucian. “Fifth Maine Artillery,” he said, and Cass Wakefield laughed out loud again.

  In time, the yankees folded their tents and went away, but still there was trouble, for the war had opened doors that could not be closed again so long as any lived who remembered it. A restlessness drove them in those days, and a good many went out to the territories, and some to Mexico or Brazil or Argentina, never to be heard from again. Those who remained went through the motions of rebuilding. They dedicated a new courthouse, made speeches, ran off the carpetbaggers, cleared new ground—knowing all the while it was a lie, for they could not rebuild themselves. Beneath the ordinary strain of life ran a dark current of memory and violence, and sometimes a crack broke open and the black water boiled out.

  One day in August, a blistering hot afternoon, Sheriff Julian Bomar jailed a man named Back Stutts who was waving a pistol around and threatening the citizens. Stutts was turned loose next morning, after the way of such things, but he stood in the street before the new jail and called down perdition on Julian Bomar and all his kin. The next day, Sheriff Bomar was shot down in ambush away out in the country and left to die in the middle of the southerly road. His horse, still harnessed to the sheriff’s yellow-wheeled hack, came back to the square and trotted around and around the courthouse until somebody caught it. When the people saw the bloody seat, they asked no questions; they did not summon the constable or consult an attorney. Before sundown, the Cumberland Rangers had caught Back Stutts after a wild chase on horseback and a running gun-fight. The affair ended with an all-night siege of an abandoned cabin that left two citizens dead and Stutts shot full of holes but mean and dangerous to the last. Before he could die on them, the men took a door off its hinges and laid him out on it, then propped him up on the cabin gallery where Professor Brown took his picture. Then they hanged Back Stutts from the rafters—Cass and Roger and Lucian were among those who put their hands to the rope—and left him dangling for the birds.

  It took only a week for the real killer—a man who had proven himself bold in the siege of the cabin—to get drunk enough to brag about his deed at the Citadel of Djibouti. That night, the Cumberland Rangers hanged him too, from the only big oak tree left on the yard of the new courthouse.

  That was home, then, for Lucian Wakefield, who knew no other home. For a long time, he felt lightly tethered, but the people accepted him and looked out for him just as the soldiers had—and with less cause, he supposed.

  Now he looked around in surprise. He was no longer in Cumberland but in a hotel lobby in Franklin, Tennessee, wondering where Cass Wakefield had gone. Lucian rose in a panic, trying to remember what he was supposed to do. Find Cass Wakefield was his first thought. That was always the best thing.

  11

  THE SUN WAS BRIGHT, HARD ON HIS EYES, AND LUCIAN took his green sun-spectacles from his pocket and put them on. They were useful for keeping the headaches away, but Lucian had not worn them in a long time and had forgotten until now that they were in his coat pocket. Now he marveled once more at the world transformed by the green glass, as if everything were under water. He could feel time moving past him as if it were water. He took out the amber bottle with its glass stopper, poured a little Black Draught in the palm of his hand, and licked it, for he understood that this was a place where time might get away from him, or he from it.

  Across the street was a sign on a telegraph pole: Columbia Pike. Lucian knew well that the gin house, where they had struck the yankee line, was still down that road. A generation had been raised up; kings and princes and presidents had come and gone; the worms had long since conquered the dead of Franklin. They might never find the place where the boys were buried, but no doubt they would discover the God damned gin house intact, and the ditch before it.

  The morning after the battle, the gin house drew them as a suck hole draws the autumn’s floating leaves, back down to the center of darkness from which there could be no rising. They went timidly, like insects, even the ones who pretended to be bold under the light of torches. Then the packed charnel of the ditch surprised them, and Cass stopped and knelt, and Lucian knelt beside, and together they looked at the gin house, where it rose like the skeleton of some ancient carnivore against the stars.

  When daylight came, they saw it clearly. The enemy had pulled the boards off to use in his breastworks. The roof was a colander of bullet holes. Cass speculated it would fall over when the first good wind came along, and Ike Gatlin argued to burn it just for spite. But they didn’t burn it. In fact, they walked quietly around it and talked in whispers, for even in that first daylight—when many of the men did not yet know the name of the town where they had fought—it was already becoming a landmark dark and sinister in their memory. By the time the army went into the works at Nashville, the gin had become the Cotton Gin and taken its place among the sacred groves of their mythology. Certainly the sight of its skeleton against the timid light of dawn was already a fixture in Lucian’s dreams, and there it dwelled yet. Thus Lucian had no doubt it remained these twenty years gone, and would remain a thousand years hence. The gin was immortal, sacred, and cursed all at once. Too much of violence and fear and courage had happened there, too many had died there for it to ever lose its place in the universe.

  Too many, too much. Was it quantity alone that made the gin different from the farmhouse in Alabama, the muddy field in Decatur, any of a thousand lost, nameless places where men had fought and died? After all, those lads had been just as scared, and the dead were just as dead. No, the butcher’s bill alone was not enough, Lucian though
t. They remembered the gin because they needed a place like it, a single immortal shrine to which they might return, tragic enough and fatal enough to contain not only itself but all the lost places, too, as if the soldiers’ violence and loss and pain had been given a single monument to stand forever. That was as it should be, Lucian thought, for they were unlikely to have a monument of any other kind.

  Lucian shivered and squinted into the winter sun. Yesterday morning—was it only yesterday?—Cass was packing his bag. He looked up at Lucian and said, Don’t you even think of following us up there. You been there once—that is enough.

  I wish to hell you’d told me that twenty years ago, said Lucian.

  I did tell you, Cass said. Maybe you’ll listen this time.

  Well, Cass had told him, and he didn’t listen that time, and he hadn’t listened this time either. Now here he was, about to go hunting Cass Wakefield again. But it’s not Cass this time, he thought, and suddenly he remembered Alison.

  When they hunted down Back Stutts, every man on the expedition had been a soldier once, or had been ruined by the war, or damaged by it, including Stutts himself. So the war did this, too: it put those who suffered by it all together in a glass jar like So many strange, dangerous insects, and they could crawl up and down the glass all they wanted, but they could never reach the other side. By the same token, no one else could enter, so inside the jar they created their own world out of memory and grief. Here they kept alive their anger and fed on it; they pledged their own troths, guarded their secrets—and from these things drew a perverse strength and the knowledge that they could depend on one another, no matter what madness presented itself. Alison Sansing, by virtue of her loss, was one of these. She belonged to them and depended on them. It was no mystery to Lucian why she had come to Franklin, why Cass had followed, why Lucian had followed himself—nor why Roger Lewellyn had to be forced from the train at the depot in Cumberland. That was home, too, in a way—a community, at least—a secret society open to all ages, races, sexes, where lifetime dues were paid at the door.