Knox took the fence picket from Cass’s hand. “Who’s this for?”
Lucian was so tired that he sat down on the steps, and as soon as he did, he fell half asleep. He heard Cass say, “For the colonel and Perry. We’ll bury them together, I guess.”
Knox said, “Perry is dead, too?”
“Well, I thought you knew that,” said Cass.
“I should of knowed it,” said Knox. He sneezed again. The sound was so odd that it startled Lucian, and he looked up to see Knox wipe his nose as before. He laid the picket across his lap like a dulcimer and brushed absently at it with a rag. After a while, he asked, “Who’d you say this one is for?”
Cass told him again.
Knox took off his spectacles and rubbed his eyes. “Ah, me. Cass, I wish I didn’t have to make one for them. It’s too hard.”
Cass sat down on the steps beside Lucian. “I know, Sam,” he said.
Lucian looked up at the sky. It was low and gray, bleared of smoke, and mist shrouded the hills about. Mister Lewellyn said falling weather seemed to always follow a battle, as if the sky grieved at what it had to look upon. Way aloft, circling and patient, the carrion birds balanced on their pinions.
Cass said, “I wish we had some coffee.” He said it to no one. Lucian watched S. Cragin Knox twist his spectacles in two. “Sam?” said Cass, looking around.
“It’s too many,” said the other. He wiped at his eyes. “I could paint all day for ten years and never get to the end of’em.”
“It’s all right,” said Cass, rising. “You don’t have to paint ’em all; just the ones in the yard.”
“Sure—just the ones in the yard,” said Knox. He began to rock his body back and forth in the cane-bottom chair.
“You don’t have to paint any more a-tall if you don’t want to,” said Cass. He put his hand on the man’s shoulder.
Knox looked at his ruined spectacles, then stuffed them under his coat. “It ain’t I don’t want to,” he said, and stood up quickly. The picket clattered to the porch. “God is tryin’ to learn us a lesson, Cass,” he said. “I just don’t know what.” He looked at Cass and wiped his eyes yet again. “What do you reckon it is?”
“He is not,” said Cass. “It ain’t His way. You are tired, is all.”
“Yes, He is,” said Knox. “We gone too far this time, and He’s held off His judgment till now.” He stood unsteadily, his hand on the back of the chair. “See them birds up there? They are His messengers.”
“Sam, they are only birds,” insisted Cass. Lucian looked at the sky again. He had been told how buzzards always followed the army and always descended in their eager myriads after a fight, as regular as the rain. Sometimes, the soldiers had to beat them off the dead with ramrods. “Messengers they may be,” said Cass, “but not from God.” He spoke only to himself now, for Knox was across the yard and gone.
So it was that Cass Wakefield painted the board that would mark the grave of Perry and the colonel. He made a clumsy job of it, for his hand was unsteady. When he was done, he rose, and Lucian followed, holding to his jacket. Cass carried the fence pale to the open grave, where his comrades waited patiently in the rain. Their faces were gray, smeared, deeply lined, like those of old men. They were sitting or kneeling in silence, some of them nodding, but they stood up when Cass and Lucian approached. The rain pattered on the canvas that shrouded the bodies; it ran in rivulets down the mound of earth beside the hole. “Well, boys,” said Cass.
Lucian heard the rustling of the tent fly as they wrapped the bodies. Down, down, down into the mud they went. The day was already falling colder, and Ike Gatlin said, “It’ll be rough in Nashville. We ought to keep that fly.” The men talked it over and decided Ike was right, but they left the fly anyhow, for the earth was cold, too, and none of them wanted to shovel dirt in their comrades’ faces. Lucian would learn how that was the way of it sometimes: you couldn’t let go, could never convince yourself that the newly dead had surrendered everything that touched them in life. Wherever they had gone, they might still be cold or hot, hungry or lonesome. Their names were still alive, after all, and men could still hear their voices—a minute ago, an hour, yesterday—and the meal you had cooked together was still in your stomach, and theirs, and you still carried the dollar lent or the letter given for safekeeping, the chess game sketched on an envelope to be taken up again when there was time. Only the time would never come now, the game never played out, the castle, king, queen, pawns all frozen in place forever, the knight paused for a check that might have won it all. No one wanted to shovel dirt in their faces. Sleep, comrades, and wait for us.
The burying didn’t take long, and when it was done, they stepped back and looked at the grave. All over the yard the graves were mounded, but this one was nearly level as if nothing was down there at all. Lucian tried to think about why that was, but he was too tired. At last, they drove in the fence picket with a musket butt, and Gawain Harper went to fetch the chaplain.
Cass knelt beside Lucian, who was sitting cross-legged in the mud. “You still deaf?” he asked. The boy shook his head. Cass leaned closer. “Hey—how you like that new jacket?” he said.
Lucian plucked at the tarnished buttons of his coat. “Can we go home now?” he said.
Lucian wore a frock coat now, and he plucked at the buttons and moved his hand across the front of his waistcoat and felt the chain for the watch Cass had given him once. He could hear the watch ticking and feel the weight of the pistol in his coat pocket. He fumbled in his pockets for the Black Draught, then remembered he had taken it all. He was tired and wanted to sit down, but Cass and Alison were going into the yard, and Lucian followed. He could hear his feet in the long grass and felt the dampness. A yellow hound ran out from under the porch, snarling, and Cass stepped between the dog and Alison. Cass snarled back at the dog, and cursed, and fetched the dog a kick in the head, and it howled and ran away.
Lucian looked around, thinking he should see Roger, but the yard was empty. Cass called out, “Roger!” He walked back and forth in the grass, calling out, but no one answered. Lucian thought he saw a face in a window, behind the gray curtains, but he couldn’t be sure if it was this time or another. Lucian remembered how, at McGavock’s, faces were in all the windows, pale and round like owls’ faces. The curtains there were heavy and brocaded, and a man with scissors was cutting them up for bandages.
Cass walked back and forth. He was talking to Alison now, pointing to a sunken place in the yard. “This is the place,” he said. “I stood right there, and Tom Jenkins there, and Sam Hook—does that satisfy you?”
Lucian quit listening. That was not the place, and Cass knew it. He was only trying to mollify Alison. Well, never mind, Lucian thought, one place or another, it doesn’t matter now.
Lucian moved away, and the grass brushed his pants legs as the broomsage had done once. Nothing good has ever happened here, he thought, and it is our fault: we put a curse on this ground years ago. Lucian looked back toward the gin and saw the roofline across the field. How many men were carried across the mud to this yard—and why? Lucian wondered why this place had been chosen. Well, he thought, the answer was left behind in the cold rain among men too tired and sick to know why they did anything.
Lucian moved through the yard. To his right, the house sat brooding among the chinaberries. It was being pulled slowly down into the earth like an old bee-stump, but Lucian knew that the house, like the gin, would outlast them all. Still, the gin was what you made of it, and only those who had been there could make anything of it at all. This house was different. Anyone who came here could feel the malice in the paintless boards, the windows with their gray curtains, the shadowy tunnel of the dogtrot. It wasn’t like that the first time—it was only a house then. Maybe it isn’t our fault after all, thought Lucian, and he remembered what the boy said. If the man who lived here was a Union man, then he must suffer the very defeat he helped create, and be reminded every day of a victory that had left him behind.
Lucian knew the war was still with them, that it would not be over until they were all gone: yankee and rebel, white and colored, men and women—all those who had suffered by it. That’s what this house was, Lucian thought: a place where the war had never quit, where it lived still. In that way, the house was like the men themselves, the dead and living both. Now the house had drawn them back to stand once more in the yard, in the little square field of blood where they had laid their comrades uneasy into the ground.
Lucian stumbled across the yard. He looked to the sky where the carrion birds once hovered. He remembered how graceful they looked, their heads turning this way and that as they sailed overhead; but they were gone now. There was only the deep blue sky of winter, and a little flag of a cloud drifting by.
Then all at once, he’ was falling. It seemed to go on a long time before he felt himself strike hard. It didn’t hurt much but jarred him and made a buzzing in the back of his head. He was lying on his face, smelling the fresh-turned earth, which was wet and clotted. When he turned over, he could see the sky and the branches of trees and the handle of a shovel. Somebody had dug a shallow grave, and he was in it.
He heard his name, but it was a long way off. He remembered how Chaplain Sam Hook said the dead could rest now, how they could dream in peace, and how they would be waiting. Well, Lucian thought, they would be waiting anyway; that much was true.
They think l am dead, Lucian told himself. Now they will throw dirt in my face. It seemed unfair, and he cried out. He saw Cass Wakefield above him. “I am not dead, Cass!” he cried.
“I know,” said Cass. “You stay right there and rest.”
Alison’s voice: “Is he hurt?”
“He is not hurt,” said Cass. “Roger has been here—been digging. Where the hell is he?”
“Don’t let them shovel the dirt in my face!” Lucian cried.
“I won’t,” said Cass. “That’s a good place for you; just rest, and I’ll come and fetch you after a while.”
Cass went away, but voices tangled in the air where he had been, going farther and farther away, Alison and Cass.
What is this? You can’t leave him here—in a hole!
He is out of his head. He took too much medicine. He needs to go to sleep. I got to find Roger.
The voices went away. Lucian wanted to follow. He tried to move his arms, but they seemed to weigh a hundred pounds, and his hands a hundred more. He was in a black place for a while, then out of it again, and a dog was barking somewhere, and voices—a stranger’s voice now, angry: I told ye once, I ain’t goin to tell ye agin! And Cass: By God, sir, where is he!
Something was happening, but it was all far away. Lucian smelled the cold, damp ground. He thought, Well, this is the way being dead is. He had seen a good many dead men, and now he knew how it was for them: looking out at the living, wanting to help, trying to speak and move, refusing to believe. Pictures came to him: the cavalry man in Alabama, and Colonel Sansing when they turned him over in the ditch, and Perry when they found him. In Alabama, Lucian was afraid and sorrowful; after Franklin, there was only a gray, empty place where feeling used to be. In memory, none of the dead men had faces, and Lucian wondered if he had a face now, and if he only had his old shawl, he would cover his face, if he had one, so the dirt—
Lucian.
A woman was in the grave with him. It was like a long cavern now, and the woman was dressed in clothes he remembered, which hung in the wardrobe in the shape of her. When he first came to the house on Algiers Street, he would press his face against her clothes and smell her, because that’s all he would ever have. Then the moths came, and the mildew, and the smell of her was gone, and the shape of her lost in time. Now she was here with him. Lucian marveled at her face and the fall of her hair.
Lucian said, I know you. She seemed at peace, calm and graceful. The sight of him made Lucian feel sorrowful, and he wished Cass could see her.
She said, Rise up, Lucian Wakefield. She put her cool hand against his forehead and said, Don’t be grieving. It is like Roger said—they are always close.
Who is close, ma’am? asked Lucian, though he knew very well.
All of them, in the air and leaves and earth. Alison will know that, too, if you tell her.
I will tell her, said Lucian.
The woman smiled. I know, she said. But right now, you have to rise up. You need to help Cass.
Then she was gone. Lucian was alone and somehow standing in the yard again, risen up from the grave. It was hard to move, and he couldn’t keep his balance. He fell once, fell again. The dead grass and the sky and trees wheeled about him, and he was sick and vomited. When he looked up, he saw S. Cragin Knox sitting in the yard in a cane-bottom chair with his cap turned backward. Knox was making letters in white paint on a fence picket, and he turned the picket so Lucian could see what he had written, «
Lucian Wakefield
A Good Boy
and Knox wiped his nose and said, Well, this is the last one.
So it was all right. Lucian was in good company, had been since the day he saw Cass Wakefield sitting by the fence. It was something to have been one of them, one of the boys, and if that was all his life came to, it was enough.
Lucian began to cry then, for the first time since the farmyard in Alabama. He didn’t want to, but. he couldn’t stop. A woman came to him, and Lucian blinked at her and wiped his eyes, trying to remember. This was not the one in the grave, but another, her face wet with crying, not a spirit or vision this time. She put her hands flat against his chest and said, “Lucian, Lucian!”
“Why, Miss Alison,” said Lucian, remembering. “What are you doing here?”
“I don’t know what’s happening,” she said. “Cass is in yonder, with … with that man, and he has a gun, Lucian. He is crazy—”
“Oh, Cass has always been crazy,” said Lucian.
“Listen to me!” she said, and slapped him hard across the face, and again. “Wake up!” she said. “God damn you, wake up!”
The blows stung him. Lucian shook himself, trying to clear his head. You need to help Cass, the other woman had said, and now Alison was telling him the same thing. “All right,” said Lucian. “Where?”
“In the house,” she said, and stroked his face where she had hit him. "I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Lucian.”
“It’s all right,” he said. “It’s what I come for.” He put his foot on the stone where the steps used to be. He was in the dogtrot then and chose a door and kicked it open. The room was smoky and dank, and an old crone cowered by the hearth. She cried out and pointed a long finger at Lucian and said, “Hit’s a jedgment on all you goddamned rebels!”
Lucian wanted to reply, but he fell into a black place, and when he came out, he was across the dogtrot, stumbling through the door into the other room. The walls were lined of newspaper; a fire lay on the hearth; a lamp was burning on a trestle table. Roger Lewellyn sat against the wall, his face running blood, and Cass kneeling beside him. A man—blue-jowled, long of hair, in an old ragged greatcoat and canvas breeches—was yelling and cursing and waving a shotgun. “Here, now!” said Lucian, and lurched forward. He almost fell but caught himself.
“Get away!” said the man. “I won’t suffer it!”
Lucian drove his hand into his pocket where the pistol was. He saw Cass rise, hand darting inside his coat. The man swung the shotgun around, and Lucian heard the hammers pulling back. Cass said, “No! Don’t do it!” and everything was moving slow and graceful so Lucian had time to think, You ought not to of done that, God damn you.
Then a sound filled the room and drove all the air out of it, and flame was everywhere, and Lucian felt a blow in his stomach like somebody had swung a sledge hammer. He hit the wall just as Cass drew and fired his pistol, and before the black place came again, Lucian thought, You can heat me, you son hitch, but you can’t beat Cass Wakefield.
15
LUCIAN HEARD THE COURTHOUSE BELL RING OUT dinnertime across th
e square. The clamor sent the courthouse pigeons flapping and clattering from the cupola as they did every hour in daylight, year in and year out, generation after generation. The bell did not seem to disturb them at night, nor would they stir from their roosts on Sunday, and when Lucian was a boy, he had asked why that was so. Cass said the pigeons had a job like everybody else, and they should not be expected to work nights and Sundays, too. That made as much sense as anything, Lucian decided. In any event, he was glad for the birds’ hourly eruptions, for it always made him laugh.
It was high summertime, and he was in his shirtsleeves, leaning against the wall of Tom Jenkins’s store, in the shade under the striped cotton awning. Behind the tall framed windows, barely visible through the murky glass, kerosene cans and harness and coffeepots and bolts of cloth faded by the sun were laid out in a display that had not changed since Reconstruction. The smell of the dim interior—that distinctive compound of seed, leather, and old wood that grew richer and more eradicable every year—was drawn through the open doors and spread out upon the air.
At noon, everyone emerged into the bright sunlight. Lawyers and merchants struck homeward for dinner, pulling on their coats. Country people ambled off to their wagons or to Fudge’s Grocery, where they would buy potted meat and hoop cheese and sardines, to be eaten in the shade of this gallery or that, or under the oaks around the courthouse. From the grocery, too, came women, white and black, with baskets draped in dishtowels to keep the flies away. The bailiff announced recess from the courthouse gallery, while, beneath him, judges and lawyers and defendants and plaintiffs made their way to the Colonial Hotel, and the jailer went off to get dinner for the prisoners. Mothers and colored nurses called up their children, and the children called back in return, complaining. At the depot, the noon passenger train blew for the first crossing, and everywhere men were pulling out their watches and setting them. Down the southerly road, Queenolia Divine was still ringing the dinner bell at the Citadel of Djibouti long after the courthouse had ceased and the pigeons settled in again.
The Judas Field Page 22
