13
ALISON WALKED ACROSS THE COTTON ROWS AND stood beside Cass, who knelt upon the ground, moving his hands like a man dreaming. Lucian, meanwhile, sat cross-legged in the ditch. She wished she could reach her companions and see what they were seeing. No, she thought, I don’t want to see. “You-all come back here,” she said at last.
Cass looked up in momentary confusion, then scrambled to his feet. He stumbled against Alison and caught the faint odor of rose water on her. “I am sorry,” he said. “That’s the second time I almost knocked you down.”
“Yes, it is,” said Alison. She looked at the flask in his hand. “Does that do any good?” she asked.
Cass shook the flask, then put it away. “Well, it can’t hurt,” he said.
“This is the place, then? Where they fell?”
Cass nodded. “How are you faring, then?”
“I can stand it,” she said. “But then, I was not here.”
Cass pointed to the ditch where Lucian sat. “This is where we struck the line,” he said. “Next day, we found them here, close by the parapet.”
“If I asked you what they looked like—”
Cass shook his head. “I would say … they looked like they were sleeping. That will have to suffice.” He thought a moment, rubbing his forehead. “‘Nothing … Nothing in his life became him like the leaving of it.’ That is for them both.”
Alison turned to the ditch and wondered at how ordinary it seemed. She watched a field mouse dart along the top of the worn parapet, watched him stop and sniff about, then disappear. Snowbirds peeped in the branches of a walnut tree. She had pictured this gin like the one that lay on the edge of Cumberland: rambling, surrounded by a muddy yard and a cluster of houses, shaded of oaks, covered in sheets of rusty tin that creaked and banged in the wintertime, branches and telephone wires festooned with dingy gray scraps of cotton lint. That image left no room for a rampart and a ditch crowded with dead. Now she could begin to imagine it; now, at least, she had the proper landscape to carry away in memory. Whether that was a gain or a loss, she could not tell.
“Cass Wakefield,” she said, “in all these years, I never thanked you for seeing to my kin. I never thanked you for that.”
She waited for him to speak, to trace out the expected reply: honor, comradeship, the least he could do, and so on. When he did speak, she was reminded of how easy it was to misjudge him.
“You were right not to thank me,” he said. His look was that of a man who hoped he’d said enough, all the while knowing he hadn’t. He took out his watch and stared at it, then replaced it. He patted his waistcoat pockets, then the pockets of his coat. “Well,” he said at last, and raised his eyes to the gin house. “We were played out, you see.”
“I know you were,” said Alison. She felt a shiver then, the familiar signal of mortality, and she allowed herself to be defeated by grief for a little time—giving that much to grief anyway. She turned away then, looked southward, across the brown fields to the hills beyond whence the army came. In his way, Cass had tried to make her understand, but he could not. She could never understand what had happened here. She could never understand what honor meant beyond the word itself. She only understood that, after all the violence and waste and suffering, the word had to mean something, else they were all lost. That, too, would have to suffice.
Cass followed Alison’s gaze across the fields so quiet and still in the sunlight, and he wondered what she saw out there. He thought how, in the end, memory was no more than a stubborn insistence by the living that what they had done was not in vain. Maybe that’s what he was trying to tell himself every time he looked up the Pontotoc Road. Maybe that’s why Alison had come here in the first place—not to do it, but to have it done, to have these hard hours to cling to and prove she had done all she could. Cass understood that. Trouble was, if memory were only woven out of living thread, then the earth would have no reason to hold on to it, nor houses, nor fencerows, nor any of the places that the past claimed for itself. There would be no reason to be afraid of crossing a road, no need to gaze so intently over fields gone quiet and where all the blood was long since soaked away.
Cass took off his hat and passed his sleeve across his brow. He heard a mule braying somewhere, and from somewhere a carpenter’s hammer driving a nail, tap-tap-tap. Looking down, Cass saw the broken cotton stalks sharply defined, the shadows on them and the subtle play of colors—more than you would think in old cotton. He saw a line of ants marching column-of-twos up a stalk. Time was going along, carrying them all down the stream.
“Alison,” he said, “I am sorry for what happened back in the yard. I only meant it for another story, but I suppose it is different, being on the ground again. I never meant it for you—I mean, for a lesson. I have no business—”
“Never mind,” she said. “I’ve known you for half a century, and that was the first time you’ve been a rude and insufferable ass—well, at least to me.”
“Ah,” said Cass. “Half a century?”
“I am sure it will be the last time,” said Alison.
“Yes,” he said. He drew a deep breath and expelled it. "You know, Lucian and me can handle this. You don’t have to—”
“Hah!” she said. She turned her back on the ditch and lowered her voice to a harsh whisper. “Lucian doping himself blind, you drinking at eight in the morning—is that how you handle it?”
“The boy is not doping himself,” said Cass. “That is his medicine that he has to take.”
“Yes, he is,” she said. “But never mind—it’s not for me to say one way or the other. You think I’m afraid, Cass? You think—”
“No, Alison,” he said. “I don’t think you’re afraid.” He smiled lamely and turned his hat in his hands. “I can’t say the same for myself. I have buried the dead but never raised them.”
“Cass Wakefield,” she said, “you raise the dead all the time.”
He smiled then and took her hand; it was small and cold, light as a leaf. “Alison, when we get back home, I should like to—”
“Cass,” she said, interrupting, “I was unkind yesterday, on the train when you told about those awful things. Do you know what I was thinking a while ago? Calves and foals and fawns, how they can walk and get around in such a little time, and know to hide and be still? We are supposed to be smarter, but we never do figure out how to do much—what’s important, I mean. Who ever knew how to love, or to hide and be still? Who ever learned how to quit remembering? Then, when we finally have enough mistakes to learn from, it’s time to die.”
“I guess we know how to do that well enough,” said Cass.
“I can assure you we do not,” she said. “We watch others do it, but we get no practice for ourselves, you might say.”
“The colonel died well, and Perry—a good many others—”
She shook her head. “That’s only what we say to help us bear it. They were afraid, same as you and me. They weren’t ready, and they suffered—and when you found them, they did not look as if they were sleeping. I know that.”
“Still, I do not believe you are afraid,” said Cass.
“That’s wrong,” she said. “It’s almost more than I can bear. I don’t know what to do or even what I’m supposed to be feeling, and if they were here today, and you in the cold ground … if they were here, they wouldn’t know either. I have required a good deal of you. I—”
“Now, don’t be starting with that,” said Cass. He looked eastward again. We took them over there, that way, along the ditch, in front of the line, until we found the place. …
Lucian was rising from the ditch, wiping his hands on his coat. Cass turned and saw the lean face, pale and wondering—not the man’s face but the boy’s, always the boy’s, black with powder and sweat, bleeding at the ears, looking to Cass Wakefield for an answer he had no power, no wisdom, to provide. Yet somebody had an answer, Cass thought, for in spite of everything, they were delivered out of the dark night of the army’s rui
n. All these years, Cass had insisted it was luck only, and no purpose or design, that kept them breathing and drove them through time. Yet here they were, come around to a place they had sworn never to lay eyes on again.
Lucian said, “Cass, we need to get away from here.”
Cass nodded. “Look to Miss Alison,” he said. “Follow me.”
He turned and walked eastward toward the distant houses, the cotton stalks rustling under his feet. He did not look to see if the others followed. The ground was soft under him, and in one place he tripped over the cotton rows and fell to his knees. He felt the blood coursing in his temples, and with it the old sensation of electric shock and a dizziness that unnerved him. For a moment, he forgot what he was about, was unsure how to go—forward or back, and to what? Yonder was a stone wall hung with dead vines. It had not been there when they came this way before. Cass got to his feet and stumbled to the wall. He clambered over, tearing his hand on a thorny vine. On the other side, he licked the blood from his hand, then set off again. He went away from the ditch and the cotton gin and the field of Franklin, and he did not look back.
The Judas Field
14
LUCIAN WATCHED CASS WAKEFIELD WALK AWAY OVER the ground they once crossed with the regiment’s dead. Time, rain, the turning plow and harrow—these might have changed the ground, but no matter. Some things could never be hid, and some places could not be healed. The war had never left this place and never would, for all the generations to come, and the lost ones would remain even in the sunlight. Lucian felt them brush against him. He could feel them under his feet, restless, pushing against the weight of the earth. He knew that Cass felt them, too. Cass could hear them better than most—what they wanted, what they had to tell—and they would guide him.
Lucian passed through a black space, and when he emerged, he was teetering on the edge of the ditch. He supposed he had taken too much medicine, but that didn’t scare him. He didn’t worry about dying, because he already was, and death was easy. Enough medicine, and you would dig your own grave, and gladly. Time began to order itself like the leaves of a book, where you could look at some pictures and not others, or go back and look at some you skipped—over and over, as much as you wanted. The pages turned, the pictures opened out. Injun weed was different; it made everything go away—pain and memory both—so that Lucian didn’t care whether he felt anything or not. But the Black Draught made him see things clearly even when he didn’t want to. He had tried to tell that to Cass, but he wouldn’t listen. Cass preferred his liquor, which, he said, only made the pages blank.
Lucian looked one last time at the works the yankees had built long ago. They had dug frantically in terrible expectation, all through the Indian-summer day, until the earth was piled chest-high, the ditch ready, the head-logs in place. They had dug a grave that day, though they didn’t know it—one big enough to bury a whole army. Now the works were worn and soft and carpeted with brown grass, and Lucian thought how, in summer, the grass must grow rank and lush and green from the blood in the ground. He wondered how long blood could feed the grass, and if it would always. The ditch will always he here, he thought. Like the gin house.
He remembered the gentleman by the Columbia Pike, who said the old soldiers were always coming back. Even the dead ones, the man had said, all the while carving his cedar cane, sitting in the sunshine as if nothing had ever happened on the ground around him. If Lucian saw the man again, he would ask him what his secret was. He would ask how anyone could live among all this memory.
A little while ago, Lucian had knelt there in the ditch, spreading his hands over the grass. In that moment, the leaves of time turned back, and Lucian saw once more the long lines-of-battle walking into the smoke. He saw Cass prowling up and down behind the regiment, his musket slanted on his shoulder, his fixed bayonet gleaming by the setting sun, the rising moon. Lucian had turned the leaves and seen it all the way to the end.
The great Battle of Franklin had sputtered out before daylight. Cass and Lucian and Roger crawled out of the ditch, careful to make no noise lest the yankees discover them. When they could stand at last, they traveled a’long time through a fearsome landscape lit by fires until they found themselves at McGavock’s house again, where Lucian was supposed to wait on the gallery—a long time ago, it seemed now. That afternoon, the house—long gallery, old brick soft in the twilight, gardens gone to winter sleep—seemed immune to the terrible thing taking shape around it. Now, in the dark hour before dawn, it was immune no longer, but a part of all that must happen here. The house and yard had caught the wreckage washed out of the battle—a myriad of stragglers and broken men, crying out in pain, in grief, lying in heaps and piles or wandering aimlessly through the yard like ghosts. In the midst of such company, the house no longer seemed aloof.
Lucian was stone deaf from the noise of the battle, and he was glad of it, for he knew the air was full of terrible noises. He wished he could surrender all his other senses, too, just for that little while, so that he would not have to see the look on men’s faces or the slithery pile of arms and legs and feet growing outside a downstairs window, nor have to smell the chloroform, the blood, the unwashed bodies. They sought no farther than the yard and at last found a place in a fence corner and stayed there until daylight, when Cass and Roger decided to go back to where the ditch was.
Lucian could not understand why they wanted to go back there, but if they went, he would go, too. Once more they crossed the fields among the dark figures of men, all fearful and mad, calling out the names of those who were lost. Lucian’s clothes were stiff with dried blood not his own. He held to the skirt of Cass’s jacket so he wouldn’t be lost in the dark. He stumbled and floundered, but whenever he fell, Cass reached for him, caught his hand and spoke kindly, and never scolded. All the time Lucian was a boy, Cass never again scolded, never again struck him as he had when they lay fearful in the ditch.
Lucian knew Cass spoke to him, but he was still deaf and couldn’t hear his voice, only felt it. He couldn’t hear, but he could see, and he could smell the odor that hung over the battlefield as if the earth itself were bleeding. The smell clung to him, and the stink of fear that was like no other smell but closer to death than any. Torches and lanterns flickered in the gray dawn and cast a bitter yellow light, and what Lucian beheld by their lumination was more terrible than anything old Pelt had ever told of hell. He remembered how the little ones of the orphanage had listened to old Pelt. They cowered and were silent, and later in their dreams they saw once more the torn and blistered souls consumed in flame, burned and swollen to bursting, only to be made whole again, to burn again. Still, that was only imagination. Now, at Franklin, the boy once called Lucifer had come to that place old Pelt had spoken of, and he knew Mister Lewellyn was right: God, if He loved as He was said to love, could not be blamed for this, could not have planned this back when the planets were still being flung across the sky. Something else—vanity, madness, illusion, he would never know—had risen from the will of Man and laid all this under the moon. God grieved among them, as bent and helpless and alone as any, while each prayer of the dying pierced Him like a nail. God suffered more than any, for He had seen this countless times before and knew He would see it again and again, and the hammer would ring again and again. God was greater than them all and must suffer more than any, and suffer for them all.
Now Lucian watched Cass make his way toward the distant houses, watched him stumble once in the field, then rise again, then cross a stone wall. After that, Lucian couldn’t see him anymore, though it was easy enough to see, across all this time, the solemn procession of men bearing their dead—the soldiers in gray and brown, or in the dingy white of their cotton shirts, all soaked with the cold rain, all pulling hard against the mud under a sky that held almost no light at all.
The sky was bright now, and Lucian put on his green spectacles and squinted at the light. The new moon was setting to the west, a pale crescent over the hills. The world was silent s
ave for the crows down by the river and a meadowlark in the field.
Alison came and stood beside him. Lucian had forgotten all about her, but now he thought she looked beautiful in her green cape with the bright winter sun shining down. Her face was in shadow, though, and Lucian found that troubling, as if she were dissolving in the light. She was watching after Cass. She said, “He is forever going off somewhere.”
Lucian took off his spectacles and tucked them away. “He is going to find the … the place. He wants us to follow him.” She looked at him a moment. “Lucian,” she said softly, “how long have you had those green glasses?”
He didn’t want to answer, though he couldn’t say why. He stood blinking in the sunlight a moment, then remembered what Cass had said. “Cass told me to look after you. We need to get away from here.”
Alison took his arm, but her eyes were still on his face. “Lucian,” she began, but she stopped and shook her head. “Never mind,” she said.
Lucian had already forgotten what they were talking about. He tried to remember, but he couldn’t. “We need to follow Cass,” he said.
They found him in a narrow, muddy lane that ran behind a half dozen houses. Lucian didn’t remember the lane, and the houses didn’t look right, but twenty years must bring a good many changes in the scenery: more trees, and taller, in the yards; fences intact, some whitewashed. No pall of smoke hung over the scene, of course, save that which drifted from the peaceful chimneys. The yards and fields were empty of soldiers, and down at this end, near the river, the old Federal works had grown up with vines and mulberry thickets and so had lost all their menace. Time had been working right along since the day the army maneuvered under fire out there in the field.
The Judas Field Page 20
