The Judas Field Read online

  The first time Cass Saw Roger Lewellyn, the boy was practicing for a recital, playing Mozart to the empty seats of the Cumberland Opera House. His long hair fell over the collar of his frock coat. His thin face, painted by a single gaslight, was smiling: not with pride, for he was unaware that anyone was listening, but with wonder at the music rising on the air, the beautiful dalliance of which he, like the piano itself, was only the instrument. Cass stood with his cousin Sally Mae in the shadows of the hall and listened, Sally Mae practically swooning on his arm. Cass had already decided to hate the boy, the more so because he had promised to look out for him in the adventures to come. What does she see in this waif? he asked himself. This creature of light and water, devoted to beauty, ephemeral as an elf? And this boy was going to the army?

  Then a year passed, another April came, and Cass found himself wandering in the shredded, tangled woods beyond the sunken road at Shiloh. Cass and Roger had been together most of the day but were finally separated in the blind chaos of the fight. Cass was frantic that Roger was dead. How would he stand it, hating the boy as he did? Worse, how would he explain it to Sally Mae? He struggled through the vines and creepers, through briars, smoke, the confusion of intermingled divisions and brigades—soldiers everywhere, some of them belonging to the enemy, all bewildered as children lost—wounded men reaching out, flames crackling in the underbrush, riderless horses galloping by all flecked with foam, blood on the new leaves, a man without a jaw, a man carrying his own arm, another with his ribs showing white—this was what they had made, all them who had fought that day. Surely it could not be real, Cass thought—surely not this ruin, this shambles, this Valley of Death (nobody ever said it better than that, Cass thought). But Janie was real, and Sally Mae Burke was real, and Cass had failed them. Whatever terrible dream this was, he had failed them in it, and now they would have no more of him forever.

  The field was enormous, there was no end to it, but still he searched. Cass was done fighting. He had failed, no question; he was humiliated, ashamed, a shambling figure stuffed with straw, but he would search if it took a lifetime. He would be an old man, gaunt, wild of hair and eyes, dressed in rags, frightening picnickers in the wood: Have you seen him? A boy with long hair? Frail? He played the piano!

  He found Roger in a smoky glade, came upon him all at once and unexpected as one might a unicorn, and with the same sense of unbelief. The boy stood to his shanks in dead men, these already swollen and anonymous, of weight and mass but without substance, their faces blurred no matter how close you looked at them. Insects swirled around them. The white blossoms of some flowering tree drifted in the air. The high green boughs bent their heads; the sky promised rain before night, and the night was fast approaching for them all. Roger, his cap gone, was drenched in blood; his hair was greasy with it, his jacket stained dark with it, his hands slick with it so that his musket kept sliding as he brought it up and down, up and down, jamming the butt again and again into the face of a man who lay at his feet. The face was broken now, all the bones yielded, and made a wet, sucking sound when the steel buttplate struck. Meanwhile, Cass watched, helpless and immobile, as Roger struck until he could strike no more. He rested a moment, panting, muttering to himself, shaking his finger at the man at his feet. At last he turned his musket and drove the bayonet deep into the center of the man’s chest. Then he backed away, leaving the musket quivering upright. He looked at his hands, then brushed frantically at his jacket as if something were crawling there.

  “Roger!” said Cass, his voice a hollow squawk like a raven’s: not his own voice but one he had found along the way. He approached, his hand out, but stopped when the boy waved him off.

  “Keep away!” said Roger. “Don’t you touch me!”

  “Are you hurt?” Cass whispered.

  The other’s breath was coming in long, ragged heaves now, his thin chest rising and falling against his cartridge-box strap. His eyes were red; his teeth were clenched, white and rimmed with powder, his lips blackened and burned with it. “I swear to God, don’t touch me,” said Roger. “I must kill them all!”

  Cass moved closer. “They are dead already,” he said. “All these men are long dead, Roger. Come, let us go now.”

  Roger looked up at the sky, at the leaves beginning to turn in the wind. When he looked at Cass again, his eyes were empty. “Leave me alone,” he said.

  For the first time, then, Cass understood their fate. They might live or die or be broken according to the chance that befell them, but alive or dead or broken, the one thing they would all be was mad. It could not be otherwise now. Here, in this awful glade, these men must be killed again and again—and who was to say there was no sense in it? That it made sense to Cass Wakefield frightened him more than anything he had seen down his long passage from the first pink blush of dawn. And Cass understood this, too: that in all that terrible wood, nothing was more dangerous than the boy, the piano teacher, Roger Lewellyn.

  “All right,” Cass said. “All right, pard. We will see to it.”

  “Will you help me?” asked Roger.

  That night the rain came in torrents; the trees thrashed overhead; the ground ran with bloody water. Shells from the yankee gunboats on the river burst in filthy yellow blossoms in the woods. All night, lanterns moved like wills-o’-the-wisp through the trees, and men called to one another, searching. Sometimes they would move through the glade and raise their lanterns over the dead men’s faces. By midnight, all the dead men had been turned over, and their faces were like putty in the lantern light. Sometimes the searchers noticed the two living ones sitting together under a big oak tree, huddled under gum blankets taken from the dead. “Have you seen … ?” they would ask, and speak the name of a lost comrade. But the living ones would only shake their heads, and the searchers moved on.

  A dark hour came when the earth held its breath for morning. The rain, gentling now, pattered in the fallen leaves, the fallen blossoms, the sodden clothes of the dead men. The rain fell on their faces, washing away the blood. In this dark hour, when the searchers had long since returned to their regiments, Roger said, “Cass, you really ought to try and sleep.” His voice was annoyingly calm; he spoke as if they had just returned from a late night at the theater.

  “I may never sleep again,” said Cass.

  “Well, you’d feel better if you did.”

  “Might,” said Cass, but Roger Lewellyn was already asleep himself, trembling with dreams.

  That was two and a quarter years past, and now it was high summertime in Georgia. Cass and Roger were both asleep, hats over their faces, when the horseman came. Cass heard the hooves scuffing on the road, sat up, opened his eyes, blinked in the sunlight. The horseman towered over them, leaning on his pommel.

  “Great God!” said Cass, rubbing the sweat out of his eyes. “It is the Angel of Death!”

  It was not the Angel of Death, but Lieutenant Perry Sansing, the regimental adjutant, come to close up the column. He said, “Gentlemen, what are you doing?”

  “God damn, it’s a popinjay, then,” said Cass. “Wake up, Roger, and see. Do popinjays mate for life?”

  The other did not move. “I do not think they mate at all,” he said from beneath his hat.

  “How come there’s so many of ’em, then?” said Cass. He shielded his eyes and looked up at the horseman. “Mister Sans-ing, how do you do, sir?”

  “I am well, sir,” said the adjutant, and shifted the cud of tobacco in his jaw. Perry was from a distinguished line, a handsome boy in a butternut frock coat whose breeding showed in his face. He had enlisted as a private, though his father was colonel of the regiment, and advanced through the ranks by pluck and enterprise. When he was made adjutant, young Perry was presented his father’s Mexican War saber and great howitzer of a Dragoon Colt, which Perry carried in a holster on his civilian saddle. His mount was a sleek, nervous racer known throughout Loring’s Division for her speed and endurance. Cass had won a good deal of money on the little mare, and be
sides, he was fond of young Perry himself and actually glad to see him.

  “I am glad to hear you are well,” said Cass. “Why don’t you light awhile and join us?”

  The boy shook his head. “No, I can’t,” he said, “though I should like to. Now, Cass, you boys mustn’t be lying around like this. It is indecorous. It looks bad. You are cluttering up the countryside. And besides, we are likely to be engaged soon.”

  Cass shifted uncomfortably. “Perry, say it ain’t so.”

  “It is so,” said the lieutenant. “Furthermore, we are dangling out here like a ram’s balls, and if we don’t hook up pretty soon—”

  “I am engaged already!” said Roger suddenly, and laughed in a strange, girlish way that shuddered the nerves. The others did not laugh. Young Perry was betrothed himself, to a sweet child so sprightly and gay that Cass had expected to hear music every time he saw her. She was Perry’s great weakness, and sometimes Cass was afraid the boy’s yearning would kill him.

  “Shut up, Roger,” said Cass. “Don’t be talking about that.” He rose stiffly to his knees and looked at the adjutant. “Roger is a little pixilated,” he said. “The heat has infected his brains.”

  “I understand,” said the lieutenant. “My fleas are all dead of the sunstroke.” He unwound the strap of a wooden canteen from the brass horn of his saddle. “Here’s some good spring water,” he said.

  Cass uncorked the canteen, and the smell of whiskey coiled out like a jinni. He took a sip, then nudged his companion. Roger sat up, his hat sliding away. “What?” he said, blinking.

  “Take a little,” said the adjutant.' “It will quicken the blood.”

  Roger sipped at the canteen. “Cass says he is goin’ to desert,” he said.

  “Hah,” snorted the lieutenant, and spat. He had only lately taken up chewing, and was not accurate.

  “Damn you, Roger,” began Cass, “I only mentioned—”

  A distant splatter of gunfire broke across the quiet afternoon: the skirmishers had found somebody. Perry’s horse sidestepped nervously, her ears pricked toward the sound. “Damn!” said the adjutant, tightening the reins.

  “Hi-ho!” said Roger merrily. “This is no time to swap knives!”

  Lieutenant Sansing looked at Cass. “You want to light out, now’s the time.”

  “God dammit,” said Cass, “I don’t want to light out—I only mentioned—”

  “All right,” said the adjutant. The little horse was backing now, and suddenly Perry was talking in the peculiar strained way that officers had when events were closing down around them. “Join your company, then,” he said. “Be quick.”

  Cass handed up the canteen. “I never meant I would run away,” he said.

  “I know,” said the adjutant, and smiled, and for an instant was the boy again. “Hell, Cass,” he said, “my daddy whipped the Mexicans twice. These yankees are nothin’ but a Sunday stroll.” Then he clamped his heels down, and the mare scratched in the clay and gravel until she found her footing and was gone, just like that, her tail streaming out behind her.

  “We may rue this day,” said Roger, watching the adjutant ride away. His face screwed up into a mask of worry. “I forgot it was Sunday. I wish those fellows would leave us alone.”

  “Well, so do I,” said Cass, rising stiffly to his feet, his muscles cramped just as he had known they would be. “Now get up. Get your traps on.”

  Roger got to his hands and knees. “Where are my things?” he said. “I must roll up my quilt.” Up ahead, the firing swelled to a steady roar, then in the midst of it the sudden thump of artillery—one report, then another, then another, a battery firing by gun, the concussion jarring the air.

  Cass fumbled at the buttons of his jacket, his hands shaking. He was not ready for this.

  Roger was rolling his quilt, slowly and deliberately, muttering to himself. Cass reached for his accoutrements, picked up his cartridge box; the strap was tangled in his belt and haversack, and everything came up in a wad, as it always did, no matter how carefully he laid it out. Cass was having trouble breathing again. Up ahead, the guns fired by section, and he flinched, feeling the sound, the terrible detonation like a blow to the chest.

  Roger was up now, puzzling out his own tangle of equipment. Cass slung his cartridge box, then strapped on the belt with its dangling bayonet and cap box, and the bayonet was twisted, of course, and he had to straighten it and pull the cap box around front, holding both ends of the belt together, then fasten the oval buckle with the star for Mississippi, far away as any star that burned. Then the haversack and canteen—forget the blanket, he would have to get another one somewhere; it was too hot for blankets anyhow, just as his mother had said—then his hat, then his musket. He picked up the Enfield by the barrel and dropped it straightway; the piece had been lying in the sun and was blistering hot. Cass sucked his fingers and thought, Haw will l ever get a charge in that? and time ticked away.

  Roger, fully accoutred now, was brushing the dust from his sleeve. “Come along, Cass,” he said. “Don’t dawdle, and a big fight just up the road.”

  “What makes you so goddamned eager all of a sudden?” said Cass. He thought, This is not real; somebody is dreaming it. Sally Mae is real. Janie is real.

  A throaty cheer rose above the firing: the yankees applauding themselves. Cass looked at his musket, reached for his canteen, remembered it was dry as a cob. What, then? Only this remained, one more humiliation: he unbuttoned his fly, summoned his will, thinking Please, please, and sure enough he felt the pressure, and in a moment he was thinking, Well, I am pissing on my rifle, while Roger shook his head in disapproval and the steam rose from the hot barrel.

  “Was that really necessary?” asked Roger, but Cass ignored him. He unbuckled his haversack, dropping the tin cup and frying pan that dangled from the strap, and fumbled inside until he found his rosary. Father Denby Garrison had given one to all the Episcopal men before they left Cumberland, at great expense to himself, since they had to be brought out of Cincinnati, no easy trick even in the early days of the war. A good many were already underground, twined in the hands of the dead. In any event, it was Father Garrison’s rosary that Cass carried now. He pressed the crucifix to his lips, looked for an instant into the face of the suffering Christ, then took off his hat and slipped the beads around his neck, which was his custom in a fight. He replaced his hat, picked up the cup and frying pan, buckled his haversack, bent to retrieve his rifle. When he straightened, he was as much an instrument of war as he would ever be.

  In a moment, they were shambling after the regiment, Cass holding his musket upside down by the small of the stock, smelling the reek of it. Cass thought of all the foul things he’d smelled in the war: the leavings of men, the unwashed living and the swelling dead, burning houses, the stench of powder and of fear. He cursed the sense of smell from which there was no escape. His feet pounded on the hard clay; he stumbled once, skinned his knee, was up again and following Roger Lewellyn toward the battle that loomed before them in a cloud of white smoke and flashes and yelling. And then they were in it.

  The regiment, about to make contact with the right flank of the division, had been ambushed. A full brigade of ragged yankees had risen from the fields to meet them, had overrun the skirmishers and struck the column head-on. As the regiment maneuvered into line, it was caught in enfilade by a battery masked in a pine grove and supported by infantry.

  It was a tight place. Once upon a time, a regiment of the Army of Tennessee would have stood in line of battle, taking the hot canister, slugging it out with the lads across the way. But those days were gone, and now the regiment was going to ground. The boys dug frantically with bayonets and tin plates and frying pans and with unsoldered canteen halves kept just for that purpose, while the enemy’s twelve-pounders showered them with chunks of red clay and iron fragments, and the foul smoke rolled over them, and the officers snarled and bellowed like demons, and the regiment’s drums beat to no purpose. In the midst of thes
e things, Cass and Roger arrived on the field.

  They struck the line midway where the color company lay, where the ragged banner of the regiment was shaken loose and waving in the smoke. Men were kneeling or lying on their backs to load, the rattle of their ramrods unaccountably loud amid the firing. The air was quivering with detonation, holding the sound and pressure as if it had jelled, so that to move through the sound was like moving in deep water. The air, too, was alive with the hum of fat minié balls passing, each one searching with malice for a living heart.

  Officers prowled upright behind the line, their swords drawn, pausing now and then to fire their pistols into the smoke. One of them spied Cass and Roger. “Look here!” he cried. “Get in the line!”

  “Captain Sullivan’s company!” shouted Cass.

  The officer grew apoplectic. He was so crowded with opinion that he could not speak, could only move his mouth and gasp for air. He raised his sword, but a ball came and struck the base of the blade—it made a distinct sound in all that uproar, like a stone striking a tin roof—and the officer howled and dropped the weapon and thrust his fingers in his mouth like a child, and Cass and Roger fled toward the right of the line.

  Meanwhile, the battle grew on itself, consumed itself in the fury whirling at its center. The regiment, too, would have been consumed—nothing left but surrender or death—had not the balance of Adams’s Brigade, in contact at last, come loping to the rescue across the broad savanna. Quick the scarecrow rebel infantry came, running in the killing heat with muskets at the shoulder, eager to possess this land between the ridges—every grain of sand, every gully, every wind-shook pine and rag of struggling grass—as if no other land in all the earth could be worth their dying. They lifted their voices, so that over the guns rose a quavering eerie cry like harpies descending, which drowned the manly hurrahs of the yankees and shivered the soul of every man. The smoke was riven with stabs of fire, here with a glimpse of tattered colors, there a man caught for an instant with arms outflung. The smoke rolled toward heaven, toward the gates of night, and under it no man could see its ending.