The Judas Field Read online

  I will, said the other.

  “You go through Cumberland next time,” said Cass, “you find Sally Mae Burke’s house—you know it, a fine place back in some oak trees. Look and see—”

  Ob, I been there already, said Rufus.

  “You been there?”

  Where your Janie lives still? Surely I been there. I been to all them kind of places touching our comrades.

  Cass felt a tightening in his heart. “What did you see there, Rufus? What did you come to tell?”

  Miss Sally Mae was in the front room making a letter. I found your Janie sleeping in a hammick by the heat of the day. She was in a dress of green, and her hair all a-loose. She was so pretty, I made to touch her, but she got a chill and waken up. Said, “Cass?” and looked right at me.

  “She spoke my name? What else? Is she going to be all right?”

  Rufus grew uncomfortable again. He fidgeted with the stacking swivel of his musket. He took off his cap and wiped his brow on his sleeve. Finally, he said, Cass, I’m sorry. It don’t work that way.

  “What way, Rufus?”

  Now, Cass, I can’t tell you what you ain’t supposed to know yet. That would put things out of order, don’t you seel

  “Oh, that’s a fine thing,” said Cass. “A fellow has to be dead to get all the news.”

  Rufus was growing dimmer. His voice seemed to come from far away. He said, Janie’s all right now. I can tell you she ain’t forgotten. That’s what you’re worried about, ain’t it? Why you want to run away !

  “I got to get home, Rufus!” said Cass. “I got no choice!”

  Only the voice remained now. Aw, you always got chokes, pard.

  “You—” Cass began, but a spark of electricity arced and capered through his head, and he shot upright, reaching blindly. “You don’t know anything about all that!” he cried.

  But he was alone. His visitor was gone, and where he had been was only a little dot of sunlight shining down through a hole in the ambulance roof.

  6

  CASS WAKEFIELD DESERTED THE ARMY OF TENnessee while they were fighting in front of Atlanta on the Nickajack line. He said nothing to Roger; he simply put down his musket and accoutrements and walked off from the company without a word. His head was still foggy, but he could walk in a straight line now, and his hand had ceased burning, though it was stiff and still leaked pus into the rag he’d wrapped it in. Cass walked toward the rear; nobody paid him any mind, and everything was so easy that he wondered why he hadn’t done it long ago. He made three miles, in fact, before he was snatched up by the cavalry and bound hand and foot with a picket rope.

  At the company bivouac, Cass was delivered to First Sergeant William ap William Williams, an old Regular Army man who ordered the old Regular Army punishment known as the “buck and gag”: a bayonet was jammed lengthwise in Cass’s mouth, his hands tied behind, and the picket rope wound around the bayonet and around his drawn knees and tied around his feet. This was supposed to last for an afternoon; within five minutes, Cass was in such pain that his spirit forsook him and perched in the branches of a pine tree overhead, and from there he watched the approach of Roger Lewellyn.

  Roger looked down at Cass where he was trussed up. “What is this?” he demanded of the guard.

  “It is a God damned abomination,” said the man, “but you must leave him alone. He deserted and was caught. Go on now, Roger, and mind your business.”

  Roger said, “Cass Wakefield deserted? Nonsense. He would not do that without telling me.” He knelt and put his hand on Cass’s shoulder. “What is all this, Cass?” he asked.

  Cass tried to answer from the pine tree, but he could make no sound.

  Roger departed, only to return a few minutes later with an open clasp knife. He knelt and cut the rope, unwound it, and took the bayonet from Cass’s mouth. At once, Cass’s spirit returned, and he looked up at Roger through a haze of scarlet.

  The guard hissed, “Damn you, Roger, now you’ve done it. I must call for the corporal of the guard.”

  “Well, call for him, then,” said Roger.

  The guard called the corporal, and the corporal called the first sergeant. “Here! What are you about, then, Lewellyn, you snipe?” said the first sergeant when he arrived.

  “Well, I am cutting him loose, as you can see,” said Roger.

  “God damn you, then,” said the first sergeant. “You will join him in the traces, by God.”

  “No,” said Roger. By this time, a crowd of soldiers had gathered. Roger faced the first sergeant, the knife in his hand. “Bill,” he said, “you shan’t do it to me, and if you truss Cass Wakefield up again, I will kill you.”

  Here, all at once, was a novel situation to interrupt the afternoon. The men spread unconsciously into a circle, with Roger, Cass, and the first sergeant at the center. They were silent, with none of the jeers that accompanied fights of lesser import. Their silence was their testimony: here was a solemn trial, no longer of authority but of the principals themselves. No one understood this better than the first sergeant, who had been soldiering all his life.

  “Is it so, then?” the first sergeant said mildly. He lay down his rifle and began to remove his accoutrements. He was a big man, a Welshman, with muttonchop whiskers and a lean face and eyes that always squinted. He had fought Indians on the plains of the mysterious West. No one knew why he had cast his fortune with the state of Mississippi, but here he was.

  By comparison, Roger looked small and lost. The long campaigns had not altered his appearance. He had been gaunted at the start and could not be gaunted further. The sun would not brown but only burned him. His fingers were slender and delicate, like a girl’s, and he guarded them above all his person. You would not find Roger Lewellyn clumsily ramming a charge, or reaching in the fire for an ear of corn. In fact, the thing that surprised the boys most was that Roger was using a clasp knife, which might close on his fingers in a fight.

  He was soaked with sweat, his hair plastered with it, his thin, filthy shirt transparent down to his bony chest. He was gone pale under the sunburned flakes; his voice had risen a full octave, but the hand with the knife was steady.

  Williams stood before him, now divested of coat and equipment, the symbols of his rank. He, too, was soaked in sweat, but his body was hard and knotted of muscle. He gave no glance at the circle of men around him. He said, “Lewellyn, I have sworn to gag you and Wakefield both for your treason. It cannot be unsaid, though I take no pleasure in it. You have stated that if I do, you will kill me. How, then, are we to resolve this?”

  “I … I mean what I say,” said Roger. “This is no fit punishment for a gentleman.”

  Williams nodded. “I see. A gentleman. Does a gentleman desert his comrades?”

  The words stung Cass like a hornet. “Roger,” he croaked.

  “Be quiet, Wakefield,” said Williams. He looked at Roger. “You must answer me, lad.”

  Roger shook the hair from his eyes. He was trembling, all but his hand, as if it were bent by a will of its own. “You don’t”—he hiccupped—“you don’t know the circumstance!” he said.

  Williams spread his palms. “All right, then,” he said. “Have at it, as you will.”

  The sun beat down hot upon them, and there was no breeze. Somewhere, crows were cawing in the pines, the only sound. It was so quiet that when Cass moved, he heard the grating of his elbows in the red dirt, the groaning in his joints as he pushed himself erect. “Roger, for God’s sake,” he said.

  Roger turned to him then, his face white and stricken, not with fear but with pain. “I don’t know what to do, Cass,” he said. “I won’t allow—”

  “Remember Sally Mae Burke,” said Cass. “She is all you must think on.”

  Roger drew in his breath, let it out in a sob. “I am,” he said. “I am, don’t you see? She would want—”

  “I know,” said Cass. “Honor. She would ask no less of you than that. But you cannot fight the first sergeant.” He took the knife from
Roger’s hand, closed it, tucked it in his breeches pocket. He turned to Williams then. “Bill, I am your man,” he said, “but I won’t be trussed again.”

  The first sergeant stood with his hands on his hips. He shook his head. “Well, fuck me all around,” he said. He seemed to notice for the first time the men gathered about. “I am be-fucked,” he said to them. “This is honor, then? Would you care to take a vote, lads? Draw up a referendum? Shall we schedule a debate? What say you, then?”

  The men looked at one another. They shuffled their feet and studied the sky. “Well, it is a mean thing to bind a man so,” said one.

  “I never said ’twasn’t,” replied the first sergeant.

  “Um … you could have him dig a trench,” said another.

  “A trench?” said the first sergeant, his whiskers quivering.

  “A large trench,” the man said, spreading his arms to demonstrate.

  “Yes, and fill it up with rocks,” said a third man.

  “There ain’t any rocks around here, fool,” said a fourth.

  “Well, goddamn, fill it with frogs then—and don’t be callin’ me a fool.”

  “Or bullshit,” said a bearded man. “He could fill it up with bullshit. They’s aplenty of that around here.”

  “Nobody asked you, Joe Clem,” said the third man. More words were exchanged, a shoving match broke out, and the crowd shifted its circle in accommodation. Soon, the four men were trading blows and curses, and the soldiers were jeering and laughing. Bets passed between them, and more hard words, and old insults were recalled. Cass, Roger, and the first sergeant, outside the circle now, watched as the scuffle turned into a general melee, raising a great cloud of dust, lasting a good five minutes until some officers arrived and broke it up. Finally, the men wandered away, all of them in good spirits, relieved, satisfied that honor had somehow been preserved.

  First Sergeant William ap William Williams took up his jacket from the ground, shook out the dust, and drew it on. He buttoned it up to the neck and flexed his shoulders. “Lewellyn,” he said, and pointed.

  Roger picked up the worn accoutrements and girded and belted the first sergeant, adjusting cap box and bayonet. He handed the first sergeant his hat, then his rifle.

  “Very well, then,” said Williams. He looked at Roger, then at Cass. “You understand,” he said, “how all this might have turned out different.”

  Roger made to speak, but Cass hushed him. “Yes, First Sergeant,” said Cass.

  “This is not a play,” said Williams. “You should know that by now. The ending is not always the same.”

  “Yes, First Sergeant.”

  “Therefore,” said Williams, “you must not press me again. Not ever. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, First Sergeant,” said Cass and Roger together.

  “And Mister Wakefield,” said the first sergeant, “you will take your place in the line henceforth. We do not need file closers who run away.”

  Williams turned then and walked away. He limped, where a Comanche arrow had taken him in the thigh years ago. When he was gone, Cass sat down in the dirt and rubbed his jaws. “Goddamn, Roger,” he said.

  “You’re welcome,” said Roger, and sat down himself. He looked at his hands. “How come you wanted to run away, Cass? You are no more worn out than anybody else.”

  Cass could say nothing to that. They were all walking shadows now, these lads, and only the strongest remained. Some invisible wire held them in place or pulled them here and there, but bound them together nevertheless, even Cass Wakefield. He remembered what it was like, only a little while before, to divest himself of it, uncoil the wire from his heart and lay it aside. For the first hour, a great weight seemed lifted from him; after that, only something lost.

  Roger had found a stick and was poking at the dirt with it. After a moment, he threw the stick away and looked at Cass. “Old Bill was nearly right,” he said. “When he told how this isn’t a play, I mean. But not entirely right.”

  “Roger—”

  “It is a play, after a fashion,” said the other. A horned, pin-cered beetle, glistening black, crawled between them, scuttling along like a model for some great siege engine. Roger watched it pass, then looked at Cass again. “You wear the worn-out mask,” he said.

  “Ah,” said Cass. “And which one do you wear?”

  Roger laughed. “You should know. I took it off a minute ago, and you saw what was under it. I was scared pretty nigh to death.”

  “There is no man here,” said Cass, “if you took off his mask, wouldn’t show that. You did damn well, for a piano player.”

  “You were going home to Janie,” Roger said. “I don’t know why you don’t just tell the truth. How long since you heard from her?”

  Cass tried to remember. The days, weeks, months had a way of running together, and only places had any meaning. “I’m sure it was at Ringgold,” he said. “The letter was written in March.”

  Roger counted on his fingers. “That’s a long stretch,” he said. “Truth is, you are afraid she has forgotten. That is your circumstance; there is no shame in it, and if you are bent on running away, I wish you success, as long as you tell the truth. I will tell the boys you acted with honor. They will know it anyway. They know you are not a coward.”

  “I am obliged,” said Cass. He felt as if he were filled with straw. He could almost see it leaking out his pants cuffs, his sleeves, the collar of his shirt. He unwound the filthy rag from his hand and dropped it in the dirt. The pus had drawn some maggots, which he flicked away like grains of rice, as if it were a thing every man did in the course of the day. You shaved, oiled your hair, chose a shirt and cravat, brushed the maggots away. Then you put on your mask, so that when you ran away, the boys would say.you were brave.

  Roger had brightened some, drawn up his knees and linked his arms around them. He turned his face toward the sky. “I acted with honor,” he said, and nodded once. “I can tell Sally Mae someday.”

  “Yes, you can,” said Cass. He put his arm around the boy’s thin, sweaty shoulders. “You surely can. Remind me at the wedding, and I will tell her myself.”

  In the world the soldiers inhabited, a man could be dead any number of ways: by gun, bayonet, knife, saber, canister, by all the chance of battle, but not by battle only. They died by tree limb or sun or the slow freezing of the blood; of dysentery, measles, fever, the bloody flux; by standing too close behind a horse or coming unexpected on a picket line in the dark. Cass watched a man die from the prick of a thorn, another from drinking cold buttermilk. Once the company, flung out in skirmish line, was crossing an abandoned farmstead when one of their number vanished like a wraith before their eyes. They found him at the bottom of a well, his neck broken. One day, a boy, cleaning his revolver, let the piece discharge. He apologized to everyone, then, a half hour later, went to waken his father, asleep against a rail fence with his hat over his eyes. The boy called out his father’s name, then lifted the hat. The pistol ball had struck the old man at the bridge of his nose. The boy cried all day, and that night hanged himself in a barn. Sometimes men died for no apparent reason: they simply quit; they sat down, arranged themselves, and ceased to be. The Death Angel was everywhere waiting, counting them over and over, eager to subtract. He marched beside them in the ranks; he moved among them when they slept, peering into their faces. He was eager for the little slip, the moment of weakness or forgetfulness. He courted them all.

  They grieved. True, after so long a time among the slaughter and waste, they no longer seemed capable of sorrow. Cass remembered crossing an old battlefield sown with dead; from a shallow grave reached a hand, all bone and leathery skin, a tin cup’s handle hooked in its fingers. But the cup was not joke enough. Into it, the passing troops had thrown pennies, buttons, IOUs, even a wedding ring. They laughed going by. They said, Look! See the poor soldier begging for back pay. They said, Look! It’s somebody’s darling. But secretly they grieved for the unknown lad whose hand, strangely graceful sti
ll, beckoned to them. They would not admit it, not even to themselves, but they sorrowed. And behind them, on the long road they had come, followed the faces, the voices, of those they could never forget. The sorrow grew in them, though no one from the old, the other world, could have told it. Grief crowded the secret rooms of their hearts. Now and then, it passed a shadow over their own faces, trembled in their own voices. Now and then, a man, sitting by a fire perhaps, or strolling through the camp, would suddenly begin to cry. He would weep without shame until he was done, while the boys looked away and were silent. No one ever laughed or ever brought it back again in jest.

  So they grieved, and more: they were harried by guilt. That, too, was the work of the Death Angel, who chose one and let another live, who dropped this one by the roadside while his comrade walked on. The soldiers traveled always in the company of those who were gone, who were transformed by memory into better men—gentler, funnier, braver men—than they might have been in life. The Death Angel reminded the living always of how much promise was lost, and how, beside it, their own possibilities shrank to no consequence. He whispered how they could never do enough, be enough now to be worthy of the gift of life. And yet, are you not relieved? he would whisper. Tell yourself truly—are you not glad it was him and not you ? The soldiers might speak of tomorrow, of what good deeds they would do, of redemption or love or promise or hope, but deep in their hearts, they knew it to be a lie, a tale they told themselves to beguile their shame.

  Consider a line of battle advancing under the red, tattered, star-crossed flags. The line wavers; it is hewn by musketry, shredded by canister, consumed in the bitter smoke. A man makes this terrible passage, and when it is done, he wakes from the dream that has possessed him and looks about in wonder. He is alive. For a moment, the world is Eden born anew for him, and life so precious it cannot be comprehended. For that moment, his very flesh seems pink and warm, just fashioned from the clay. Then he looks again, more closely. In the regiment’s wake lay the ones subtracted—some trembling, others crawling, most quiet as stones. All at once, the illusion of life gives way to its hardest truth, and the living man chills his heart, or so he believes. It is easy now, he thinks, after so long and so many lost. Yet, in the company of the living, he is drawn back over the field of the dead, ignoring the shouts of officers to rally, to pursue. All that is over now, and new business must be attended to. A tally must be made, seeds gathered for future dreams. The living must see for themselves, this last time, who will follow them on the road.