The Judas Field Read online

  Lucian shivered. He stood just inside the overhang of the platform, behind a curtain of rain, and turned his mind to his present purpose. He did not question this journeying; probably none of the old boys would either. Roger Lewellyn had not questioned it when Lucian told him. Roger declared he would go himself, but Lucian wouldn’t let him. Roger needed to stay with Sally Mae, who was suffering from the old fever in her brain.

  Nevertheless, when the cars began to draw away from Cumberland, Lucian went out on the platform and thought about dropping off the train. He thought about forgetting the whole thing, walking back to the house on Algiers Street, where he could smoke a pipe of Injun weed and settle his mind. Cass had told him not to come. Cass didn’t need anybody following along to complicate things. Yet here was Lucian, following anyhow. It was simple, really: follow Cass Wakefield up the old road, come what may, and never mind the reason. There did not even have to be a reason. The boy Lucifer had asked for nothing, and Cass Wakefield had given him everything. That was reason enough.

  Lucian was tired, but he had no mind for sleeping. He thought, Here is Lucian Wakefield in Alabama in the year Eighteen-and-eighty-five. It might as well be Omaha, for he recognized nothing among the ramshackle buildings of the railroad district. Still, it did no good to reason. Just over there, beyond the town buildings, the streetcars, the electric lights, beyond the arbitrary designation of the day—he had seen it on a Union Pacific calendar in the depot, and he had tapped the date with his finger—over there, in the mist of a winter’s eve, it was still November of Eighteen-and-sixty-four. If he had time, and if it was day, he might go and find the yard where he first saw Cass Wakefield leaning against a board fence. Lucian remembered a woman from the house. She was gone gray and stooped with years of meanness. You’uns goddamned rebels, she had called them. Well, they had been rebels, sure enough—even the boy, though he hadn’t known it yet. He hadn’t thought himself much of anything then.

  Rebels they were, soldiers of an imaginary country that even on that afternoon was moribund and populous with ghosts. Lucian remembered how the woman’s husband had struck him, and he remembered running across the cotton field, hair sticky with blood, trying to catch Mister Cass. That was the moment he saw, for the first time, the torn red battle flags break out over the lines. It came to him then, though he didn’t know how to think it yet, that here was a thing not long for the earth, but immortal still, so full of sorrow, so terrible and grand that it would never die so long as any of them lived.

  Lucian came to love the flag, though he never saw it planted on any piece of ground they could call home. He loved it yet for what it meant to him: not a country, nor any cause, for these had ceased to mean much in the war’s twilight—after the Nickajack line, they painted no more names of battles across their flag, and after Franklin, it never flew over the regiment again. But Lucian loved and remembered the flag for those whose epitaph it was, those still quick and those gone down to dust, epitaph for them all who had traveled the old road and never returned, not even the living, who left so much of themselves in the smoke: “the boys,” they styled themselves in their old, easy way. They had names—Bushrod Carter, Jack Bishop, Virgil C. Johnson and Julian Bomar, Gawain Harper, old Bill Williams, Eugene Pitcock, Nebo and the archbishop of Canterbury, Hook and Bloodworth, and Craddock and Lewellyn—kind, dangerous, homesick, frightened, and exhausted men among whom he had come without a proper name of his own. He had appeared in their midst by God’s peculiar grace, a cipher with no kin or any tomorrow he could imagine, and the soldiers had taken him in. One of them had given his own name in trust, without question or. regret, and taught him how he could be proud of it.

  Lucian stuffed a clay pipe with Injun weed. He lit it off with a Lucifer match and drew deep of the harsh smoke. By the time his train got under way, he ought to be feeling better. He peered south toward the old Confederate lines. He decided that, even if he had time someday, he would never go down there. He preferred to go on despising the old couple, alive or not, and he liked to remember Cass Wakefield leaning against the fence, the first time he ever saw him. He would like to be rid of some things, but not that. He would keep that as it was, and if it meant keeping all the rest, too, then that was all right.

  4

  CASS WAKEFIELD PACED UP AND DOWN OUTSIDE THE depot at Spring Hill, Tennessee, remembering. A dreary light rain was leaking through the platform roof, hissing on the lanterns that burned here and there. The village was dark and forsaken at this hour, the buildings mere shapes in the gloom. Cass remembered hours marching and countermarching in the dark, but he hadn’t known what happened until years later when he read about how a full corps of Federals had slipped blithely past them in the night, marched to Franklin, and spent all day digging breastworks while the rebels marched themselves to exhaustion in pursuit. That was how the fight came to be at Franklin, and how it was lost.

  Looking out from the depot, Cass could not place where his regiment had been that night. He remembered bivouacking near a big house, and a citizen remarked that General Van Dorn had been shot there the year before. Some of the boys who had been with Van Dorn at Corinth went to take a look, but were chased away by sentries. He recalled that Ike Gatlin lost a clay pipe here—his favorite, and many were the colorful words he sent aloft on account of it—and no doubt it was still out there, along with buttons and ammunition, forks, spoons, frying pans, empty sardine cans from the lot they had bought in Florence. All that truck was lying in the dark, buried in leaves or turned under by the plow, scattered like the long-dead ashes of their fires. It had been there all these years, and behind it a long trail of similar relics to mark their passage across the land.

  Their train had been at Spring Hill for almost an hour, while others came and went around it on the passing track. The conductor had alluded to some trouble with the locomotive, but he was guarded with his information, as if it were nobody’s business why they were stalled out here in the middle of the night. In return, the passengers had grown surly. They defied his injunction not to leave the train and were now crowded in the depot. When Cass went by the foggy window, he saw Alison Sansing in a chair near the stove, reading a newspaper. It occurred to him how unusual it was to see a woman doing that. He wondered why that was so. A child slept on a bench facing the window, and beside him his mother knitted. People drowsed in impossible positions or read tattered weeklies; their faces, the dull yellow walls, the calendars, and the railway advertisements were muted in the glow of the lamps. The effect was like a painting, a nocturne, whereas Cass, standing outside, felt he was in one of those photographs from the war—all blacks and whites and grays, ill-defined edges, grainy, and a little out of focus. All the scene required was a few yankee officers standing around with their coats buttoned, leaning on their swords, and maybe a little contraband boy sitting on the bricks with his knees drawn up, wearing a forage cap too big for him. Cass was reminded of how much he hated images from the war—all those goddamned smug yankees lounging against walls and fences, the background full of overloaded wagons and fat horses. Apparently, no one had taken any pictures of rebels—live ones, anyway. There were plenty of dead ones, however. One time, in Chicago, Cass went alone to view the Gardner images from Sharpsburg. He made it through the Dunker Church series all right, but the group in the Sunken Lane was too much—men swollen, faces like grotesque balloons, humiliated beyond all measure. Why would anyone take a picture like that, and why would anyone go to see it?

  Another thing that bothered Cass about war photographs was that even those taken in summer all seemed wintry to him. He was curious if the world had really looked like that back then: drained of color, everything bleak, barren, muddy, and raggedy assed, the land devoid of trees. He hadn’t perceived it that way at the time. Strangely, the color was leaching out of his memory, too, though he knew there had been plenty of color. The blue coats of the Federals had looked black from a distance. Their pants were light blue; their clustered bayonets shone like new-minte
d lead; their tattered flags, national and regimental, were gay. Trees were golden in the springtime, and chickens, like the rebels themselves, were clothed in every hue. Mud was yellow or red or black, fires winked like stars among the dark, and the moon was pale. Death had its colors, too. Blood was bright red, brains a pinkish gray, tendons and bones gleaming white. A dead man’s skin looked like candle wax sometimes, when the blood was driven out of it. Lately, in memory, all these colors were fading, and movement, too. Cass saw too many tableaux now, in grays and whites, as if his mind were arranging every moment in an album.

  He paced some more. Presently, a flagman carrying a red lantern came skulking down the flank of the halted train. Cass said, “Beg pardon—” The man didn’t stop or raise his eyes. “Broke a drive rod,” he said, and walked off into the dark.

  Cass thought it astonishing that such a thing could happen thirteen miles from their destination. They had walked it once, of course, all the boys, the miles-long patchwork column winding up the muddy roads. Before that, they had walked infinite leagues, and would walk a good many yet before enough dead men were counted. Lucian once speculated that among all those myriads, yankees and rebels both, you could not render enough fat to fry a pan of bacon, and indeed the soldiers were lean then. Their legs were thin and knotted with muscle, their feet—many of the rebels were barefoot, and some of the yankees—horny and thick with calluses, nails cracked and yellow, so that they could walk through briars if need be. Ice would cut them, though, and freeze them, as they found out on the retreat from Nashville. Cass thought of Ike Gatlin hobbling around the streets of Cumberland—it was not fair. Why hadn’t they gotten him some shoes, away back yonder in Nashville? Cass thought about it and decided that the answer was plain, if unsatisfactory: there were no dead yankees in reach of the works, and therefore no shoes to be obtained.

  A man’s feet ruined for want of corpses. The logic was appalling, but there it was.

  Cass rubbed the mysterious bulge of his stomach. No matter how little he ate, he remained too well fed. His rendered corpus could fry a brace of hams now, he supposed. He was annoyed by the rain, too—further proof that he was no longer fit for campaigning. Back then, rain made no difference at all. They had walked this very road northward in the rain, sometimes in snow and driving sleet, and laughed at all of it. That was how Cass remembered it anyhow. But they made few jokes after Franklin, and none at all on the southward trek from Nashville.

  He went back to the window and looked in at Alison again. He was glad she was comfortable and warm, but part of him wished she would come out to seek him. Cass wanted to talk to her, tell her all that had happened, but no doubt she was tired of such telling—and who could blame her? Cass was tired of it himself, tired of thinking about it. He walked to the end of the platform again and listened. Somewhere in the dark, a horse was kicking against the wall of a barn. The rain had stopped, leaving a mist behind, and heavy dampness clung to everything. Wood smoke lay ghostly in the low places; it drifted from the depot stovepipe and from all the stovepipes of the coaches and from the locomotives. The sharp reek of the smoke, and the smell of his own damp wool coat, reminded Cass of the way the boys used to smell; years and years he had smelled them, and himself, and the air wanted only the stink of unwashed bodies and the sweet sulfur smell of powder to complete. Cass took off his bowler and drew his sleeve across the crown, and settled the hat on the back of his head. He was tired of black humors, tired of dropping coins in the moving picture machine, but he had no notion of how to quit. Moreover, he was tired of himself, of his own company. He wished Alison would come out.

  He drew his handkerchief from his sleeve and wiped his face. Another train, northbound, had come into view and stopped just short of the flag. Its headlight illuminated the mist and gleamed on the wet flanks of a cut of empty boxcars. Their open doors were rectangles of deep night.

  He should not have told Alison about burning the old people’s house in Decatur. He should have left that out, he thought. Maybe she had some of her own stories she would like to tell, but he never gave her the chance. Who else would she have to tell them to? He should have paid more attention to her. He should have paid attention to the way things had changed, rather than to the way they hadn’t. Should have, should have. Voices on the platform behind told him that others had come out for the air. Cass walked away from them, out into the yard.

  In the depot, Alison was nodding by the hot stove when a conductor announced they would be boarding. Another train had arrived to take them on their way. The conductor did not beg their pardon for the inconvenience.

  A bright flame danced in the stove’s isinglass window, and Alison realized she was fairly burning up. She fanned herself with the Nashville paper she had found. Ordinarily, she didn’t read newspapers—too much sorrow in too narrow a space—but she had read some of this one. Sure enough, it was full of trouble: robberies, shootings, houses burning down. A despairing person had thrown himself under a streetcar; a mean one had butchered a family; a cuckolded husband had stabbed his wife, then drunk a quart of lye.

  She had read a whimsical name, and as she came awake, she tried to think of it. Then she remembered the name: March Hare. It belonged to a lynched Negro. A lawyer, the paladin of the night riders (the paper had not called him a night rider but did say he was a paladin), boasted to the paper, and to the world at large, that he had personally dispatched the whimsically named Negro. He kept coming back to the name, as if it were stuck in his head. Emptied his pistol into the man, he said. A beast, he said, and if he wasn’t a murderer then, he would be sooner or later. The lawyer was a distinguished member of the community and a candidate for the legislature. He was eager to point out that he had served with valor in the Army of Tennessee and for years had been secretary of the United Confederate Veterans bivouac in the chief city of the state, and he felt it his duty … and the women of Nashville and the South deserved … and the Negroes had to learn … and so forth, the old rhetoric spooling predictably from the page.

  After the war, Alison had been sympathetic to the night riders around Cumberland—not that fool King Solomon Gault, of course, but the ones who came later, who styled themselves the Cumberland Rangers. She had known most of them well, Cass Wakefield and Roger Lewellyn among them. They looked ridiculous in their masquerade costumes and engaged in all manner of, high jinks—moaning and wailing, burning holes in their wives’ sheets with torches, thundering up and down the roads at night with pumpkins under their arms, and other foolishness—but they never killed anybody until the very end. Two white men from Illinois were lounging on the square when a disguised man in a long duster and slouch hat and green sunglasses walked right up to them and shot them both and walked away. No woman of Cumberland, to Alison’s knowledge, ever learned who did the shooting. The men knew, of course, but the secret stayed among them, and it would no doubt die with the last of them.

  When the yankees finally got tired of reconstructing and went away, the Cumberland Rangers disbanded, and its members went back to being Freemasons and Knights of Honor and Knights of Pythias and so on. How they loved to band together: Lodges and Camps and Bivouacs, gangs and mobs and armies—always an army somewhere. She thought about that and decided that maybe war was the greatest Lodge Meeting of all. Death was the Grand Master, no women allowed, and the men, under their costumes and banners, were all the same, all playing at brotherhood, wallowing in tradition, ritual, pageantry, allegory … and secrets, she thought. Plenty of secrets.

  She jammed the newspaper into the kindling box and stood up, a little shakily, and felt the tiredness deep inside her. She wore out quicker these days—Culver Craddock had warned that she would, and it made her madder than anything. Still, the journey had brought her closer to the place where her father and brother lay. What the grave held—bones, or dust, or perhaps no more than a dark stratum in the mud—did not matter. Bones or dust or mud, she would bring them home where they belonged.

  Her intention was selfis
h, of course, and was causing Cass Wakefield no end of trouble, but she believed in it still. Cass would be all right—or at least no worse off than he was before—and her people would be home, and she would not be alone among the cedars.

  She pulled up the hood of her cape and made her way across the waiting room and into the damp night. Cass was wandering out there somewhere, and she would find him whether he wanted to be found or not.

  Cass was watching a switch engine shunt the cars from their train onto another, and from that he surmised they would be leaving soon. The new train blocked the lamps from the depot, so he was standing in the dark when he heard footsteps in the cinders. He turned, and there was Alison, her face a pale oval under the hood of her cloak.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to wander off.”

  “It’s no trouble,” she said. “I just looked for the lonesomest spot I could find—and, sure enough, here you are.” She drew her cloak tight around her and shivered. “What are you doing out here in the dark?”

  “Nothin’,” he said.

  “No,” she said, “you were out here thinking.” She walked a little way and looked off into the dark. “I suppose you all came through here. Father was here, was he not? And Brother?”

  “Oh, they were here,” said Cass, “but I have no idea what they did. I hardly know what I did.” He watched Alison peering into the dark as if she could see them out there: the bivouac fires and men moving across them, the pacing sentries, the sleeping guns parked hub-to-hub, her father standing with his hand on his sword hilt, and Perry breaking little sticks for the fire. Then Cass understood that she could see no such thing—the images were all his own. He said, “It was a grand confusion. We marched around in the woods, then we stopped, and wherever we stopped, we built fires and made coffee. Meanwhile the yankees marched right by us. I remember your daddy—”