Judas & Justice:

(from Chapter 1)

As I look back at my collection of recollections, it seems as though it was only yesterday, yet in reality it has been many yesterdays. I only hope there are as many happy tomorrows as there were sorrowful yesterdays.

There were four of us: my mother and father, my brother Phillip and I. We lived in a rather large house, which at one time had been a farm; a barn behind the house had been a victim of a thunder and lightning storm the night I was born. My father always used to claim, in what I believe to be a joking manner, that it had been the most exciting day of his life and when I asked if he meant my birth, he said, 'Hell no! The fire that burnt the barn down.' Then he would laugh and give me a hug. We lived about a mile from the village where my mother taught school. My father was a woodcutter, but due to hard time - these were the depression days - money was scarce and what little money people had was not spent on such luxuries as custom-made furniture. There was a sawmill in town and the man who owned the mill was an old friend of my father, and when my father was not busy with an occasional job he worked at the mill. The fourth member of course was my brother Phillip who was five years older than I, and whom I can remember with fond memories and love every time he comes across my memory, which has been often in recent times.

We were not poor although we were far from what one nowadays calls comfortable. It was the mid-thirties and life moved at a slow pace. My brother and I roamed the woods each day after school, and we were familiar with every nook and dell within five miles of the house. We had our own fishing hole that we stocked with fish from a nearby stream. We never ate any of the fish, Phillip always saying, 'Well, Jackson (my name is John J. Cole), this one looks a little too small for the frying pan; let's throw it back.' And before I could nod my assent he would have the fish off the hook and either in the pail for pond restocking, or back in the water if we were yesterday. And the 'Jackson,' well, Phillip had a nickname for everyone, and he must have had half a dozen for me: Jackson, Jack, Jason, J.J. and others. Sometimes it would take me a minute or two before I realized I was the one he was addressing. He even had nicknames for Mom and Dad, although he only used them behind their backs. My mother, 'ole Mar,' not 'old' but 'ole'; he made some such distinction between these two words but it didn’t make much sense to me. My father’s nickname was 'Woody.' I guess this came from his being a woodworker, but then it could have come from anywhere knowing his given name was John. Today I can still hear Phillip saying, 'You know, J.J., ole Mary and Woody aren't as young as they used to be.' (They were in their late thirties.) 'When we get a little older and become rich, we'll have to send them on vacation by themselves while we stay with Aunt Liz and Uncle Thadd.' My uncle Thadd was married to my mother's sister Elizabeth. They lived in Chicago, sixty miles from us, door to door. I say this with authority because Uncle Thadd drove a 1935 Packard which was equipped with a gauge you could set when you left on a trip . Every time we visited we went by train and were driven home in the Packard. I was the one who set the mileage gauge, always thinking for some reason that the end result would change someday. Uncle Thadd would go along with my little charade and ask before we left if I thought the mileage would change this trip. I would shrug my shoulders and say maybe and then tell him at the end of the trip that it hadn't changed. Once when I fell asleep I think they took a different route home because the mileage came out ten miles longer. They all told me the road had somehow changed from being overused, and ten miles had been added. I didn’t believe them, however I made it a point never to fall asleep on the trip again.

Every summer as my mother finished teaching school, we would start planning and packing for our trip to the big city. We always went for the month of July. We got out of school in late June and would catch the train on the last day of the month. Aunt Liz and Uncle Thaddeus lived in a Chicago suburb in a house which I thought of as a mansion. It was a many-roomed three story clapboard built before the Civil War, and according to Aunt Elizabeth, Abraham Lincoln had slept there on one of his political campaigns. But like so many stories told of Washington's stops in the east, Lincoln's stays were often reported in Illinois, and I somehow doubted his overnight stop.

Uncle Thadd was a doctor and Aunt Elizabeth had once been a nurse. They had met in the mid 1920's when he was an intern in a Chicago hospital, had fallen in love and eloped - unheard of at that and loved my brother and me as if we were their own, yet Aunt Elizabeth lit a candle each night and prayed that God would answer her prayers and bless her with a child. Uncle Thaddeus never went with her but always looked somewhat sad whenever she talked about having her own children. My Uncle Thadd had his offices downstairs in one section of their house and was considered a very good doctor. The office was crowded and my uncle seemed to be always working. If he wasn't at this office he was making house calls, no matter what time of day or night. Many a night I heard the phone ring and the lowered voices in the kitchen, then the muffled start of the Packard from the garage which was under my window. Each time he left, I would promise myself to wait up for his return, but somehow I always fell asleep, and when I went downstairs to breakfast he would be in his office seeing patients as usual. At the time it seemed that he never slept.

Next to my father, my Uncle Thadd was my favorite person in the whole world, except my mother of course. No matter how busy he was, Uncle Thadd always found time to stop what he was doing and talk to me about the most important things in the world: toy soldiers, the Chicago Cubs, pets, frogs, and all the other things a boy loves. He always asked about my father and I felt that he was concerned about what he asked, no matter what it was. During my summer visits we went to Wrigley Field every Sunday the Cubs were in town, and we attended many games after I grew older. My Aunt Liz would occasionally go with us but Mama would never go, saying, 'maybe next time,' but somehow we could never convince her to join us. I think she was frightened of the crowds jammed into the stadium, having grown up in a small town. Although she could hold a conversation with any number of people, and was in no way shy, she avoided large crowds all her life. My Uncle Thadd admired my father to the point of hero worshipping. He was always asking me, my mother of Phillip what my father was working on and what he was doing. As I mentioned before, my father was a woodworker and he did some beautiful work, including one particular piece for Uncle Thadd each Christmas. And Uncle Thadd was the only person for whom he did that. Thinking back, I guess Dad admired Uncle Thadd as much as Uncle Thadd admired him. Dad seldom came with us during summer vacations, however he and my uncle took at least two trips together each year: one fishing trip and one during deer season. Although they always brought fish home, they never got a deer; in fact, I don’t think they ever shot at a deer. I believe deer season was just an excuse to go out into the woods together and just talk to each other. I remember them talking intently, their conversation occasionally broken with laughter either on Uncle Thadd's or Dad's side. Though serious in thought their keen sense of humor shone through by seeing the humor in all parts of their conversations. They talked of everything and about every subject one could name: literature, sports, politics, philosophy. My father had attended the university for one year but had to quit because of the Depression. He boo