The Judas Field

by Bahr, Howard;

  A black boy skipped along with his shoeshine box. Mister George Boswell, hands in his pockets, passed by whistling “Old Gray Mare Came Storming out the Wilderness”—whistling badly between his teeth stained of tobacco—and Mister Johnny Cross and Mister Audley Brummett with him, just come from the horse lot. “Say, hey, there,” said Mister Cross, and shook Lucian’s hand and held on to it while he asked about Cass and Tom Jenkins and Miz Margaret Jenkins, and told a long story about a fellow he knew once who hunted rabbits with a pack of tomcats.

  It was a breezeless noon, and dust rose from the square. The courthouse oaks were deep green, and the shaded ground beneath them trodden grassless and gray, littered with cedar shavings and tobacco spit. Tethered mules and horses bowed their heads and swished their tails at the flies, and some were led to the long cedar troughs for drinking. The sky was piled high with clouds, but no one thought they held any rain, and people talked about the cotton and how it might be good this year.

  Lucian knew every person and nearly every horse and mule in sight, and who belonged to every dog. He knew what lay behind every window in the buildings of the square—knew that right now a noontime dice game was going on at the lumberyard, and Gawain Harper was working on the noon train, and L. W. Thomas was practicing his mandolin under a hack-berry tree behind the Citadel. Time was going along, and Lucian with it, and all the elements of his universe in place. He felt at home, and it was something like he imagined true love might be, when you were comfortable with a person, and you moved together in time and harmony for all your flaws and strife. It was good to feel that, good to feel anything after so long a time.

  Then someone called him from inside the store. He was about to turn back when he noticed that time, and all things in it save himself, seemed to be slowing. He watched, puzzled, as the people and horses and dogs slowed down, and the leaves on the trees grew still, and sounds lost their resonance and stretched out long and solemn until there was no sound at all, and no movement—only a flat plane in gray and white, like an illustration.

  He heard his name again. It seemed to come from the air this time.

  Alison was leaning over him, stroking his hair, and crying. “Lucian,” she said.

  He was laid out on the ground, and above him was the deep blue sky. He felt cold all over, but he was sweating, too, and he could feel heat from somewhere, so he thought the cold must be inside him.

  Then Alison lifted his head and cradled it, and he could see they were in a field, and a scrap of old canvas was pulled up to his chest. The heat was coming from a burning house. The flames had eaten through the roof, and a black plume of smoke rose toward the sky, and the stink was awful. He saw Roger Lewellyn sitting against a fence post, holding his head, and Cass kneeling beside. Lucian knew that all this had something to do with him, but he couldn’t remember what. He looked up at Alison. He said, “It’s all right. Whatever it is will be all right.”

  “I know,” she said. “Hush now.”

  “I was just home,” he said. “Just now.” He thought the fact might comfort her, but it only made her cry again.

  “How did it look?” she said. “How is it at home?”

  “It was summer,” said Lucian. He tried to look around. “Are we on an excursion?” he asked.

  Cass was there then, in shirtsleeves, without his hat, and his face was drawn and streaked with soot. “Lucian,” he said. “Hold on. Don’t go drifting off.”

  Lucian tried to sit up, but Cass said no and held him down; it didn’t take much, for Lucian had no strength in him. He knew something was wrong, for a thing heavy and wet, like a full wineskin, was lying on his stomach. He fumbled at the canvas, said, “I want to see—”

  But Cass took his hands and held on to them. “No, you don’t want to look under there,” he said, and his voice was shaking. “You been shot up, Lucian,” he said. “A man in there shot you.”

  “Is it bad, Cass?”

  “Oh, no,” said Cass. He hunched his shoulder and wiped his eyes on his shirtsleeve, but he didn’t let go of Lucian’s hands. “No, no,” he said. “It ain’t so bad.”

  Lucian remembered some of it then. He remembered the close room, the terrible noise, and the flame, remembered being struck in the belly with something like a sheep-nose hammer. All at once, he knew what was hidden under the canvas: secret things spilling from his insides that Cass didn’t want him to see, that nobody should have to see. He thought, I should be afraid, but he wasn’t afraid. Everything would be all right. He felt no pain, so it must be all right, like Cass said. Lucian recognized the lie, of course; he had heard it told to other men. Still, he would believe it so long as there was no pain.

  “A doctor will come,” said Alison. “We sent Peter to fetch him.”

  “I’m sorry about Roger,” said Lucian. “I never should of told him.”

  “It’s all right,” said Alison. She tried to laugh. “He just had to come, same as you. Now we’re all here together.”

  “The house caught afire,” said Cass. He looked at Alison. “It was the lamp. An accident.”

  “An accident,” said Alison. She began to tremble. “If I hadn’t brought you here—”

  “None of that,” said Cass. He touched her shoulder, then her face. “It don’t work that way,” he said. “It’s like you said: nobody came that didn’t have to. Now, why don’t you look to Roger for a minute.”

  She was gone then, and Cass was kneeling there, grinding his fists together.

  “Goddammit,” he said. “Goddammit, Lucian.”

  “What happened?”

  Cass shook his head. “That old man, Ambrose—I don’t know. Roger found the place—the right place—and he was digging, and the old man bushwhacked him. Beat him up pretty bad, dragged him in the house—told me Roger was his prisoner, he was holding him for the provost—” Cass stopped and looked at his hands. “An old soldier,” he said. “He wouldn’t give it up. Then you come in, and before I knew it—” Cass stopped again and drew the heel of his hand across his eyes. “I’m sorry. I should have seen it coming.”

  “No,” began Lucian, but all at once he was choking. He coughed and felt the hot blood on his chin. Cass wiped it away. For a moment, Lucian couldn’t speak for coughing and spitting out blood, and Cass wiping it off with his hand. He wanted to tell Cass that nobody could have stopped it, that it was nobody’s fault because all this started long ago, and all of them a part of it, and they would never be free. Never. But the thought was a jumble in his mind, like a gray cloud rising out of time, and he couldn’t say it because he was starting to be afraid.

  “So I killed him,” said Cass. “Too late, but I killed him.” He looked toward where Alison had gone, where she was sitting by the fence with Roger. “The house was no accident,” said Cass. “Alison knows, but she won’t say it. We laid you out here and made her stay with you, then Roger and me set fire to it. We burned it, and him in it, the son of a bitch.”

  Lucian felt sorrow at that. Seemed like they had come so far, just to get to the starting place again. Then a thought jarred him. “The old woman,” he said. It was getting hard to talk at all now. “There’s an old woman in there.”

  “No, there was nobody else,” said Cass, and smiled a little. “We always make sure when we burn a house, don’t we?”

  Lucian shook his head, wanting to argue, but he couldn’t make the words. He cleared his throat and spat, but he had forgotten what they were talking about. Then he thought of something he needed to tell. He said, “Cass, I saw Janie. She came to me in the grave yonder.”

  Cass put his hand on Lucian’s chest and bent down close. “What?”

  “Janie,” said Lucian, and Cass looked away as if he had not heard, but Lucian saw in his face that he had heard. Lucian said, “It was not a bad thing. She was beautiful. She said not to worry, not to grieve.”

  “She said that?”

  “She said it don’t matter where they lie, Cass. They are all around us. Will you tell Alison that?
”

  “You can tell her yourself,” said Cass.

  But Lucian couldn’t talk anymore. He laid his head back and began to turn loose of things—so much trouble and worry, and maybe he would rest now. He was scared a while ago, but he wasn’t now. Alison was come again, and Mister Lewellyn with her, and Cass was there—all together, just like Alison said, in the little room on Algiers Street, and nothing to be afraid of now. The window was streaked with rain, and Lucian could hear it pounding on the roof as it did on summer afternoons—hard and violent, then gone all at once, then the sun again, and the steam rising. Lucian’s head was hurting, but no matter. Pretty soon he would be well once more, and he would get up and walk in the yard among the old privet and the bright marigolds that came every year without anybody planting them. Then, when he was strong enough, maybe they would all go down to Leaf River and fish awhile, and make a picnic on a gravel bar. They would be able to hear the courthouse bell from there, ringing the hour across the slow afternoon.

  Others came then: Colonel Sansing and Perry, Bushrod Carter, Jack Bishop, Cragin Knox, good Captain Byron Sullivan, all crowded into the little room. Lucian heard their voices from far away, and he took comfort in them. He thought how, when Sally Mae came, he would have a long dream to tell her. The laudanum warmed him. It was time to sleep. He would sleep a little while, and they would be there, all the time, and when he woke, they would be there still.

  16

  ALISON SANSING SETTLED HER AFFAIRS IN CUMBERland. Then she waited, and early in February the pain arrived. She knew a good deal of it, and for a week or more Cass Wakefield could not bear to enter the room where she lay. Finally, Alison gave it up. She sent Morgan Harper to the attic for the Black Draught and drank a cupful and fell asleep. Only then did Cass come to sit with her. The Death Angel followed close behind, and on St. Valentine’s eve, he took her at last. So deep in dreams was she, and so quiet and peaceful her passing, that the watchers never noticed when she crossed.

  Cass knew she was sick on the journey, but he had supposed it was the journey itself that troubled her—that long traveling into a past she could never understand. He only learned how sick she really was on the day after Lucian died, when they were sitting on the hotel gallery after dinner. Lucian was at the undertaker’s; Roger was upstairs, his head swathed in bandages, full of morphine and sleeping like the dead. Alison sat in a rocking chair, wrapped in a shawl. Cass was trifling drunk and pacing, pacing, over the hollow boards of the gallery.

  I will rent a hack, said Cass. We’ll go out to McGavock’s, and you can see them, where they’re buried.

  She was rocking slowly, the boards creaking under her. She smiled a little and said,No, Cass, I won’t have you go out there. You have seen sufficient old places for one trip.

  I don’t mind it, said Cass. It might ease your mind. Did l ever tell you how I made Lucian wait on the porch? Only he wouldn’t—he just had to follow—

  Cass choked up, unable to speak, and Alison looked at him, her eyes liquid and soft. She reached and took his hand. You told me that, she said. My mind is eased. I am satisfied, and anyhow, I'll see ’em soon enough, and Lucian, too.

  Cass knelt beside her. That’s a good while yet, he said.

  No, Cass, she said. Then she told him of all that Doctor Craddock said, and Cass had the truth at last. Later, when Alison fell asleep in her chair, Cass left the gallery and carried her truth out into the sunlight, took it with him on an aimless wandering through the quiet streets, down into Freedman’s town, where he sat on a bench under an oak tree. A yellow dog with drooping ears and a sad face came and lay beside him, and Cass talked with him awhile. Finally, he rose and went back to the hotel, for he did not want Alison to wake alone.

  The police made inquiries, but none that Cass could not lie his way out of. The law seemed ready to accept his tale of an accidental shooting, an overturned lamp, a tragic fire from which old Ambrose, in his perversity, refused to be saved. No one mentioned that the burned corpse had a .38 round in him. Alison said little to the police, speaking only when they addressed her directly, which they did deferentially, with exaggerated courtesy. They never questioned Roger at all, who remained hors de combat in his room. The next day, they were on a southbound train with Lucian’s casket in the baggage car. Alison slept most of the trip, and while she slept, Roger and Cass took turns riding with Lucian. They would not go together. One of them needed to be there should Alison awake.

  Now Alison was in a long sleep from which there would be no waking. For the first time in many years, Colonel Sansing’s old house was filled with people. The women washed and dressed her body, and the coffin was brought, and the women allowed Cass and Roger to lay her in it. Then, in due season, the casket was taken away to the church, the mourners walking behind the plumed hearse with its plumed and black-clad horses. Cass stood on the porch and watched until Alison and all who loved her were vanished into the short winter twilight. He could not follow yet. Not yet. Cass knew that the house still held her, that some part of her lingered in the darkening rooms, reluctant to pass. It would never pass, of course, but neither would it be as strong as it was now.

  Cass walked down the porch, his steps ringing hollow on the paintless boards. He leaned on the balustrade and looked down at the rusty azaleas in their leaf-choked bed. Among them, a single Cape Jessamine bush was green still. No birds sang, but somewhere a cricket, sleepy in the cold, made a thin, monotonous chirping.

  The parlor was cold when Cass entered, the fire dying on the hearth. The room smelled of snuffed candles, and the branches outside made thin shadows on the windowpanes. Cass opened the piano and touched a single key; the note hung in the cold air like the blade of a wind chime turning, and as it faded, Cass believed he heard voices just discernible—no words he could tell, but voices still, such as murmured sometimes on the edge of sleep. In that moment, Cass was sure that sorrow would defeat him, that there could be no rising from the place where he had gone. Then, all at once, the falling sun drove a spear of pale light through a grimed window. One fragment pierced the crystal pendant of a candlestick and broke in colored ribbons across the floor, but the balance spread in a pool of momentary gold over Alison’s desk, as though a lamp had been lighted there. Cass knew then that the voices would be there always; that they came from the room itself, from the furniture, the faded curtains, the dark wood and plaster walls that spoke of all the hours they had seen unfold—not beginnings or endings, but time in passage, the quiet unreeling of one unremarkable moment to the next that made up the sum of life. Cass listened and watched until the light was gone and the room was occupied by darkness and the voices ceased. Only then did he leave, down the quiet street under the quiet winter trees, already too late for the funeral.

  Time passed along, carrying them all together down the stream. March brought the martin scouts and filled the yards with yellow daffodils, and daffodils marked old buried walks on the sites of houses the yankees had burned long ago. Good, slow rains fell for days at a time, promising tall cotton and corn. In the last week of April, Leaf River stepped out of its muddy banks and walked over the land just to prove that it could. A few days later, the chimney swifts arrived in their myriads. One day they were nowhere to be seen; the next, the evening sky was filled with their darting and chattering, and that night the Flower Moon rose full and red.

  Other signs arrived in season: the blue iris, poke salad, swarms of lightning bugs all at once twinkling under the trees. Morning glories twined on porches and opened their bells to the sun, and the cow-itch vine lifted its red trumpets. The leaves settled to a deeper green; the grass grew rank in the ditches. Finally the cicadas began their drowsy afternoon chirring, and with that, high summertime lay upon the land.

  On a morning in early September, Queenolia Divine came in to light the stove in the Citadel of Djibouti. She fussed around in the kitchen for a good long while, putting things right, muttering to herself of the many injustices laid upon her in the course of her d
ays. Finally, when everything was right and a fresh gob of lard was laid in the big frying pan, Queenolia smoothed her apron and passed through the greasy curtain. The tavern was gloomy dark, as it always was, and she took a moment to let her eyes adjust to the dim light. Shapes began to emerge: tables, scattered chairs, a hat rack, the forlorn mounted head of a deer. L. W. Thomas was sitting in a corner, feet propped on a table, his mandolin in his lap. Queenolia spoke, and when she got no answer, she crept near. His eyes were open and fixed on the spot over the bar where once, in the first Citadel before the fire took it, hung the mysterious portrait of a reclining woman. Queenolia stood quietly for a while, remembering, then closed L.W.’s eyes and crossed his hands over the mandolin and went to fetch Doctor Craddock. In a little while, when the body had been borne away, Queenolia swept the tavern clean and stopped the clock and turned the grimy bar mirror to the wall. She stood a long time in the smoky light, listening, then went back to her cabin and got in bed and never left it until the time came to carry her to the grave.

  Cass Wakefield sat with her as the twilight closed down. Toward the end, she rallied and wanted to tell Cass once again of how she had saved him. The telling occupied the last hour of her long life, and was mixed in with other tales, and many a ghost rose in her voice and walked through the room, and those who had come for the vigil—a goodly number—could see them plain, as if the old times had come again. When her voice failed at last, Cass took her hand. Do you hear the angels? he said, and she nodded. The tears ran down her face, but no one wiped them away, for they all knew her tears were not from sorrow. She petted and stroked Cass’s hand for a little while yet, but her eyes were looking past him at the window. When the September moon rose, lifting its lantern behind the trees, she seemed to be satisfied, and her eyes closed, and her soul went off into the moonlight, dancing like a girl.