The Judas Field: A Novel of the Civil War - Softcover

Both of Howard Bahr's previous books were New York Times Notable Books. He lives in Fayetteville, Tennessee.

Chapter One
Cass Wakefield was born in a double-pen log cabin just at break of day, and before he was twenty minutes old, he was almost thrown out with the bedclothes. The midwife, Queenolia Divine, heard him squalling, however, and so it was that Cass, blue-faced and complaining, was untangled from the wad of bloody sheets and saved for further adventures.

The first light he saw fell on the northeast corner of Yalobusha County, Mississippi, in a cleared place among ancient oaks and hickories and sweetgums called Lost Camp. By the time Cass was born, the frontier had passed the village by, and the westerly road was busy with travelers. Ox-drawn wagons filled with bewildered women and children groaned and creaked through the settlement, the men riding beside with long rifles laid across their saddle bows. Soon Texas beckoned with the Possibility that always burns so bright over a revolution. Captain David Sansing—he was not a real captain, but he seemed like one, so that is what they called him—left early, invited by Sam Houston himself to join the fray. The balance of the Lost Camp men—including Cass’s daddy, John, and his uncle Estes Burke, and the elder Wakefield brothers, Augustus and Rome—formed a company, twenty-three men, which they called the Yalobusha Yellow Jackets. With a retinue of Negroes for the camp chores, they rode away to fight for Texas independence, promising to return in glory with land grants that would make them rich. As it turned out, they never returned at all. They got lost on the way, and six of them died of fever before they got out of Arkansas. The rest found Texas finally, but before they could lift a hand in its defense, the Mexicans captured them and shot every one, even the Negroes, at Goliad in ’36.

Months later, the Memphis post-rider appeared in Lost Camp accompanied by a wagon. In the bed was a wooden crate bound with tin straps and tight as a cedar skiff, lettered General Delivery, Lost Camp, Yalobusha County, Mississippi. The post-rider was in a bad humor, for the box swarmed with flies and sugar-bees and had a musky smell about it. The women and children and old men gathered about under the oaks, and it was decided to let the post-rider open the box in the presence of them all. The man’s crowbar grated as he prized at the lid.

All his life to come, Cass could remember the smell that burst from the opened box when the lid fell off. The people lurched back, and some of them ran away. The women set up a keening, grabbing at one another, at their children. One went mad on the spot—they were never far from madness anyhow. The old men, after a while, laid them out in the sun: twenty-two yellow roundabouts trimmed in red, smeared with blood, and punctured with ragged, smoke-rimmed holes where the musket balls had entered, then left again on the other side.

Cass’s mother, Prudence, recognized the stitching in the jackets she had made. She sat in the dust, took one up, and pressed it to her face while Cass stood by, trying to understand what it all meant. Prudence, her eyes dry, her voice steady, made it plain to him. She said, Your father is dead, and your uncle Estes, and Rome, and Augustus. Cass knelt beside her, in the hot dust that swarmed with fleas, and spoke in the language he had learned early from the men. I will see to it, Ma, he said. I will find them who did this, and you will have your— But he never finished, for Prudence slapped him hard across the mouth, another lesson learned, then drew him to her hard and held him and the jacket both so close that Cass lost his breath and could not have cried had he wanted to.

At first, no one could imagine who had done this thing, and all wondered what happened to the twenty-third jacket. Certain ones began to look to Estes Burke.

Cousin Sally Mae Burke was the first girl Cass ever fell in love with, and the first, but not the last, to discourage him. Sally Mae’s mother, Diana Maria Velez, was a Spanish woman who gave her daughter eyes and hair and skin that might have suggested Mediterranean twilights to the Lost Camp lads, had they known of such. Sally Mae Burke strode among her pale Anglo-Saxon neighbors, tossing her black hair, scorning the boys, especially Cass, and igniting the girls with jealousy—teaching them all (and quick they learned, and early, for life was often short) what it meant to be beautiful. Many were the miniature fights Cass Wakefield fought to defend his cousin against boys who loved her, were rejected, and thus grew bitter in their learning. Nigger girl they called her, and Greaser, and other things, while the girls, learning their own ways, shut her out with cold silence.

On the hot afternoon when the jackets came, the people of Lost Camp forgot, if they ever knew, the distinction between Spanish and Mexican. A single thought, born of whispers by night, ran through the settlement.

Next morning, just after daylight, a crowd of women stormed up the road to the Burke cabin. It was a mob of despair, all the women red-eyed from crying, their hair in disarray, some with suckling babes, intent to revenge themselves on the Mexican. The madwoman came tottering behind, tearing at her hair, her mouth a dark oval. Prudence Wakefield counseled reason and was shouted down. Annie Frye counseled reason, but she had lost no one and so was scorned to shame. Cass Wakefield ran beside the column, among the packs of barking dogs; he cried for his cousin, pulled at the women’s faded dresses, at last was cuffed into the roadside ditch by a hand that might have petted him once. Young Alison Sansing, toting her baby brother, discovered Cass there. They held tight to one another and wept while Perry squalled for milk.

The women found voice in the yard. Prudence and Annie moved among them, pleading, touching hands and faces, all futile, for someone had to carry the blame. The women shook their fists, held up their infants in accusation, cried terrible things from throats grown raw with weeping. They cried foolishness, how Burke was spared because he had married a Greaser. His was the lost jacket, they cried. He was a coward and betrayed the rest, they cried, for this was what had come to their minds as reason. They shouted until their voices were harsh, but received only silence in return. The cabin was empty; Diana Maria Velez, with the foresight common to those who are different, had vanished with her daughter in the night. The women burned the cabin anyway.

No glory or riches, then, for the widows and orphans of Old Yalobusha, nor even anyone to bury among the cedars. They learned months later, by home-traveling men, that the Mexicans had burned all the bodies, including Estes Burke’s, way out yonder in the Land of Promise.
Cass’s mother went to work at Frye’s Tavern, cooking and cleaning and serving meals to the people filling up the new country, who came with slaves and cottonseed to make riches in the Leaf River bottoms. Times were flush then, and Lost Camp became a Land of Promise all its own. Meanwhile, the widows married again, and new ground was cleared at such a rate that, in a few years, a tree was hard to find anywhere but along Leaf River or in the cemetery.

Prudence Wakefield did not marry. She scorned her few suitors, who were tubercular or crippled anyhow and could find no prospects among the more robust women. In any event, Prudence and all her suitors, and a good many wormy children and broken-down old people, were struck by the scarlet fever of ’44, as if Providence had decided to tidy up the place once and for all.

The fever came in a warm November, a season of drizzling rain, low clouds, deep mud, when the sun, the moon, the stars seemed to have deserted the heavens. The prosperous holed up on their farms, where they died just the same, or fled north into Tennessee. Smudge fires burned day and night on the square, blanketing the town in a dingy gray pall meant to drive the miasma away. The Presbyterians owned the only bell, and it tolled constantly to keep the atmospheres stirred. Every day, droves of blackbirds came from their roosts along Leaf River, and more crows than anyone could remember. Dogs roamed the deserted streets, licking at the mud, and the wheels of the dead-cart creaked through the nights.

Cass’s mother lay dying in a room above the tavern. All the boarders had fled, and the place groaned with emptiness. Only Mister Frye and his wife remained, and their black girl, Queenolia Divine, who changed the sheets and emptied the bedpan until only gravelly vomit was left to empty. Miz Annie Frye did the cooking right on the hearth, spooning broth between Prudence Wakefield’s cracked lips, around her swollen tongue.

Once, Prudence said, Leave. It will come on you, too, if you don’t. Take the lad and go.

Why, Prudy, said Mister Frye, you don’t really want that, do you?

No, she said. Her eyes were hot and glittering. I can’t stand the thought of bein’ alone.

Then don’t think it, said Mister Frye.

So they stayed, all of them, in the close loft smelling of bile and wood smoke, and of their own bodies, while the rain hammered at the shutters. The clocks had long since wound down, and Mister Frye did not bother to wind his watch, so time was only light and dark, passing almost imperceptibly, one to another. By night, Miz Frye read Psalms aloud by candlelight, but only the pretty ones, and over and over again the story of the woman at Jacob’s well, for Prudence loved to hear about the living water and the dauncy girl with all her husbands.

Meanwhile, Cass sat by his mother’s bed, bathing her face or listening to her voice ramble through other times, among people he did not know. Now and then, she clutched his hand tight, her eyes moving, watching some shadow pass before her. I am so sorry, she would say to someone in the shadow. I am so sorry. At such times she wept.

Sometimes, when she was sleeping, Cass left the tavern and wandered ...