The Judas Field Read online

  “Roger wanted to come, too,” said Lucian.

  “I told you, boy—”

  “God damn what you told me, sir,” said Lucian, his own voice sharp now. He came off the stairs and poked his finger in Cass’s chest. “I am not a boy. That is a mistake you make too often. And you wouldn’t cross the Pontotoc Road.”

  “The Pontotoc—”

  “Christmas night. You laid it off on me, but you wouldn’t cross it your own self—you would of froze to death first.”

  “I was distracted!” said Cass. “Drunk, if the truth be known—but not so much as you.”

  “Hah,” said Lucian. “You were afraid. You were afraid to cross it. So how do you expect to cross that ditch this mornin?”

  “What ditch?” said Cass, but the question and the answer came to him in the same instant. There was only one, after all, and he had put off thinking about it, and now here it was. Cass turned and walked to the window. Beyond the glass, the day was unfolding in its ordinary way. People were moving on the street. A man on horseback trotted by, his mount tossing her head in the joy of morning. All so ordinary, so regular, yet all distant and alien, as if the window glass were a bourne no traveler—at least no Wakefield—was allowed to cross.

  Do you know where you are? Cass might as well have asked the question of himself. Somehow he had missed it in the blue hours of the night, on the hack ride from the depot with mist swirling around the lamps, in the dim lobby crowded with suitcases and cranky passengers. He was tired then, and only wanted to sleep, and the morning seemed far away. Now it had arrived, and with it, Lucian and another burden of truth.

  Cass walked back to the stairs, the drummers watching him. “What is this about Roger?” he said. “I don’t recall—”

  “Oh, I told him myself,” said Lucian. “Then I had to kick him off the train.”

  “You had no business inviting anybody!” said Cass, shouting now. “Not even yourself!”

  “It ain’t a question of God damned invitations!” said Lucian.

  “Hey!” said one of the drummers. He slammed down his order book and rose from the couch—a big man with an extravagant beard and a fine silk waistcoat, a northern man by his speech. “Why don’t you ladies take it outside?” he said. “We got business here.”

  “Damn, Charlie,” said the other man, laughing. He closed his book and rose, too, pushing back his coat sleeves.

  The desk clerk vanished into the office. The porter disappeared through the broom closet door, and the bellman eased to his podium. Cass Wakefield turned, slipping his hands deep into his pants pockets. He liked to go into a confrontation that way, for it made him seem unready, vulnerable—a man who could be talked down. Meanwhile, Lucian moved out into the lobby. He lifted a brass paperweight from a table and hefted it in his hand.

  “The morn is just breaking,” Cass said. “The whole day lies before us.” He took a step, then another.

  “So much work to do,” said Lucian, circling to the desk.

  Cass understood that the two drummers—men widely traveled, whose lives were spent in cheap hotels, in saloons and taverns—might well be dangerous in a fight. Indeed, if they knew the South, as well they must, they would not have picked one otherwise. However, Cass knew also that over these men he and Lucian held a great and insurmountable advantage: they did not give a shit.

  The first drummer was about to speak again when the dining room door opened, and a swarm of women emerged into the lobby. They wore the sashes and pins and ribbons of the United Daughters of the Confederacy—a breakfast meeting, no doubt. Some were pretty and slim as whippets, though most were formidable Brunhildes who, given the chance, might fight the yankees all over again, and do it right this time.

  The second drummer picked up his book and valise. “Aw, forget it, Charlie,” he said. “We got a train to catch.” And that was all.

  The lobby was soon quiet again, the clerk at his desk once more, the porter sweeping the steps in a cloud of dust. Lucian poured a cup of coffee from the samovar, and from his pocket took a little amber bottle of laudanum. He shook it at Cass and said, “This is just the kind of thing that occurs when you leave home.”

  “Well,” said Cass, “you was the one wanted something to happen.”

  They drank their coffee on the couch vacated by the drummers. Cass was stirred up by the excitement, and now he was impatient for Alison to appear. He remembered what L. W. Thomas said once: Boys, they’s only two things I cannot do. I can’t travel with a woman, and I can’t take a shit with my hat on. Through experimentation, Cass had found the second anomaly to be true of himself as well. Now he was learning about the first, and not doing well with that, either. He had not traveled with a woman since he brought Janie upriver on the steamboat Alonzo Child at the beginning of the war. She was little trouble, though she did have a good many trunks. Then Cass thought how he should have left her with her people in New Orleans. If he had, maybe the typhoid wouldn’t have taken her. No, it would have been the yellow fever then, he thought, or the cholera. He stood and paced the rug, up and down.

  “What?” said Lucian. He was dipping a willow twig in his coffee.

  “Nothing,” said Cass. The electricity was sparking in his head, bouncing around. A chromo in a gaudy frame caught his attention, and he went to look at it: a broken column, like the ones in graveyards, shrouded in the old battle flag. The column sat atop a stone carved with the portentous date 1865. In the foreground lay all manner of warlike rubbish: shattered cannon, broken sword twined in laurel, a shield, more flags, a harp—the minstrel boy’s wild harp, no doubt, or the one that sang in Tara’s halls, the warrior-poet’s harp, strings all loose as if the song were finished, the poet silenced forever. In the background, a grove of trees, a suggestion of smoke or mist—the ghostly legions, perhaps—and under all, the inscription In Memoriam.

  The picture made him sick, and he turned away. He looked at Lucian, chewing on his willow twig. The minstrel boy to the war has gone—“What makes you think we’ll go to the ditch, anyway?” Cass said.

  “That’s where we’ll have to go if you want to find the place,” said Lucian. “That’s where we’ll have to start.”

  Cass knew the boy was right. They would go to the cotton gin, where.the ditch had been, and from there they should be able to follow the ground over which they bore the dead. That was the easy part.

  “I got to move around,” said Cass. “If I told you to wait for Alison—”

  “I will wait for her,” said Lucian, “though, if you ask me, we could get it done without troubling her.”

  “I didn’t ask you,” said Cass, and went out the door before Lucian could make reply.

  When the door of the hotel closed behind him, Cass was alone in the sunlight. He looked at the windows above. Somewhere up there, Alison was sleeping, or combing out her hair perhaps. What did women do in a hotel room? he wondered.

  He was not much surprised to see Lucian. In fact, it was a wonder that a half-dozen others had not come with him. Perhaps they should have done it that way—engaged a whole railway car, draped it in bunting, made an excursion of it with wives and picnic lunches and the like, waving the old flag out the window, singing. …

  Alison would not be sorry for Lucian’s company. She had always favored the boy. He is not a boy, Cass chided himself. He can stand it.

  Cass plucked at his watch chain and the buttons on his coat. He consulted his watch, then put it back, still without any idea what time it was. A whiskery old woman shuffled by, muttering to herself. When Cass lifted his hat, the old lady snarled at him.

  The various churches of the town all seemed to be on this end. Cass had seen their steeples for the first time by the light of a dying sun twenty years gone, but he had not seen them up close until the next day, when the long column marched through Franklin, chasing the yankees, whom General Hood had promised were sorely whipped. By then, the town was no longer a thing to be gained, but to be left behind. It belonged to no army, no
country—only to God, who had not surrendered, and to the dead still lying in rows and piles, and to the ruined ones. With these last, the churches, houses, public buildings, corncribs, everything with a roof was crammed and overflowing. The iron fences around the churchyards were hung with blankets and drying bandages; the sanctuaries echoed with cries, curses, pleadings. They were rife with smells that spilled out into the street. The soldiers hurried by, closing their minds against the knowledge that sooner or later it would be their cries and pleading, their blood on the sticky floors and thrice-used bandages—not here but somewhere. Soon or late, and, somewhere.

  Now the churches were peaceful, orderly, seemingly forgotten of all that had happened, though Cass knew they had not forgotten. The placid morning was only part of the air around him; not an illusion, exactly, but a gauzy curtain that would part with little effort, or none, if the watcher knew but to lift his hand. All that had happened was still there, just beyond the thin curtain of time.

  A junction of five roads wandered off into the countryside. Of these, the heaviest traveled, besides Main Street itself, was the Columbia Pike, identified by a sign nailed to a telegraph pole. Cass looked down the Columbia Pike toward the little rise a half mile away, and the old sorrow and anger rose again, unbidden, from the stumbling track—he could almost see it in the mud of the street—that he had left behind twenty years ago on the retreat—and Roger’s, and Lucian’s, and the blood trail Ike Gatlin walked in. He knew that if he put out his hand, he could open the curtain, and there would be the long, ragged column passing—going out or returning, no matter, for it was all the same: thousands of men struggling in a dark that came from within themselves, that they would never outrun. And down the road, just over that rise yonder—oh, there they were again, in another fold of time, caught forever, like moths in a vain striving toward some light they did not understand. Cass knew they were there still, that he should feel connected to them, and not to the living people on the street. …

  “Ah!” he said, and rubbed his eyes. Whatever happened down the pike was over, and only ghosts strove there now. And if they strove still, it was for no other purpose, apparently, than that an old man, standing in the sun, might remember and be afraid again. Cass felt like a fool—afraid, indeed! Afraid of what? There was nothing in this place he hadn’t visited in memory a thousand times in the last twenty years, and memory was worse than anything he might encounter in the sunlight.

  A block away was a brick church with a crenellated tower. Cass thought he would go and see what kind it was. On the way, he stopped at a grocery and bought a bottle of Tennessee whiskey. He filled his flask, then asked the clerk to take the rest to his room in the hotel.

  The church tower belonged to the Episcopal Church of St. Paul. A Negro youth in brogans and ragged breeches and an old sack coat was cleaning the walk with a broom and bucket of water. Cass scraped his shoes on the edge of the boards. “It’ll be spring soon,” said Cass, annoyed to find his voice shaking. In fact, spring was three months away, but at least it was closer than it was yesterday. “Then summer,” said Cass, “and no more mud for a while.”

  “Yes, Cap’n,” said the youth. “Then it’ll be the dry dust.”

  Cass sat down on the church steps, took a drink, and watched the boy sweep. People were beginning to stir about. Some schoolboys came up the plank walk, swinging their tattered books and jostling one another, each trying to outtalk the others. They looked to be about Lucian’s age when he came to the regiment. A little way behind, a trio of girls in poke bonnets walked primly, clutching their own books to their coats, pretending to take no notice of the lads. He saw the old woman again, on the other side of the street, coming back from wherever she had gone, still muttering. This time, she was swinging a chicken, its head lolling. Every few steps, she would give the bird a twirl, as though she were not convinced it was dead. Cass tried to connect himself to these people and found he could not, as though the window glass were still between them.

  Then a young woman with a basket on her arm passed by. She was pretty, her cheeks rosy, her eyes bright with Tomorrow. Cass lifted his hat and this time got a smile in return. She would not have understood his presence here, most likely, this girl passing into the morning; She had not been born when Perry and the colonel met their violent ends and were shoveled under the earth in a grave too shallow. Yet, Cass realized, she was the very reason for it all. It occurred to Cass that, for all the times he’d been asked how they did it, he had seldom been asked why. Now here, all at once on the streets of Franklin, the girl offered an answer. Maybe they had done all that for her, believing that what they suffered, what they tried to accomplish, would somehow touch her down the long corridor of years. The idea was almost laughable now, for they had lost, and their vanity and striving had come to nothing. The child was perfectly carefree and content, though the old flag, and not the Stars and Bars, was floating over the courthouse. But the idea might not have been so absurd in that distant November when the army aligned itself at the foot of the hills.

  The smell of the church embraced him, and he rose and went up the steps. The door was open, and he passed through, removing his hat. Here the weak winter sunlight was transformed. It spread across the Tiffany windows and lit in glorious illumination the faces of angels and apostles, shepherds and Magi. Then it crept aloft to the timbers of the ceiling, diffused to shadow, holy and calm. The sacristy candle, suspended by a golden chain, burned beside the altar. Cass walked up the aisle, the boards creaking under his feet, and sat in a pew. He shut his eyes and fixed his mind on the silence, trying to believe in what the candle told: the presence of a God who had not surrendered, who alone understood the Why and asked only that He be trusted with it. Cass wanted to believe that God had healed this place, had shriven it of blood and chloroform and filthy bandages and death, of dying men calling for their mothers. He listened a long time, thinking if he only listened well enough, if he only paid attention, he would feel, no matter how lightly, the touch that once sustained him. The candle gleamed, a rafter creaked; that was all.

  Beside him on the pew lay a pair of women’s gloves and a prayer book, ribbons tattered, the gold cross on the cover worn nearly away. The gloves smelled of leather and lavender. Cass picked up the book, and a scattering of scraps fell out: poems clipped from newspapers, memorable lines from sermons, a Confederate banknote. Cass replaced these carefully, closed the book and laid it by, then rose and made his way back down the aisle. A sparrow in the eaves cocked his head at Cass, then flew out the open door. Cass followed him into the sunlight.

  10

  LUCIAN DRANK HIS COFFEE SLOWLY. IT WARMED HIM, and the laudanum warmed him—Mister Leslie, the druggist, called it Black Draught—and time turned more easily. Lucian had not been in many hotels: the Colonial in Cumberland, where he took most of his meals in the lunch-room, the Gayoso in Memphis a few times, and one down in Baton Rouge when he went to a doctor there. Last night, he waited outside the Avalon until Cass and Alison cleared the lobby before he registered. His room was small and threadbare, and when he blew out the lamp, he could sense the travelers who had passed time there. He hardly slept at all in the unfamiliar bed, with strangers pacing the hall, muted voices, and, as dawn approached, the noises from the street. Once, he thought he might go walk around outside, but he was afraid he might find himself in some place he had been before, alone in the dark.

  The first time Lucian saw the Square in Cumberland—the place Cass said was home, the place they were supposed to go to when the war was over—it was all ashes, charred timbers, eyeless shells of buildings. Lucian was sick then, but when he was able to get up and walk around, he found ashes still, and the same blank walls, and the people tired and sick like himself. Cass walked with him, holding him by the arm, letting him rest when he needed to. Cass showed where the courthouse had been, and such-and-such a store, and here was where so:and-so lived, and they went out to the graveyard and walked among all the new graves, and Cass pointed to one a
nd said, “That is Janie that I told you about.” In the army, Cass told all the time about how Janie would care for them when they got home, but now she could not. A long time they sat in the dry grass by the grave, looking at the hard, new-mounded earth and the little slanted board: Jane Spell Wakefield, it said, and the dates that told she was twenty-five years old when she died. Cass took up some of the dirt and held it in his hand. He cried a little then, and Lucian thought he ought to cry, too, but he didn’t. He could not feel anything to cry for.

  They went inside Holy Cross church. It was empty and dark, the pews taken out, the windows boarded up. Wasps by the hundreds bumped against the arched ceiling and swooped around their heads. They walked up the middle, glass crunching under their feet, to the place Lucian didn’t know to call the altar yet. There, a candle burned in a red glass suspended by a chain from the ceiling. Cass told him it was lit by the priest, and it meant that God was present in the sacraments.

  “Right now?” said Lucian. “He’s here right now?”

  Cass touched him on the shoulder. When he spoke, his voice was unsteady. “Kneel and pray,” he said.

  “Pray for what?” said Lucian.

  “Forgiveness,” said Cass. “Remember how Mister Lewellyn taught you.”

  “Forgiveness for what?” Lucian asked. “I ain’t done nothing.”

  Cass thought a moment. He said, “Well, then pray for grace in time of trouble.”

  Lucian remembered the look on Cass Wakefield’s face as they sat by the grave. From that moment, he could think back as far as he wanted and find nothing but trouble: hard times, battle and death, sickness, lonesomeness, meanness. He said, “They’s so much trouble, Cass. If God is here, then why don’t He just go ahead and fix it—or at least some of it? Does He have to be asked ever time? Can’t He see?”