Judas Peckerwood

“Judas Peckerwood” turns suspicion of betrayal into a recurring verbal motif in the story of William Henry Devereaux, Jr.’s brief tenure as department chair. First hurled at him by Billy Quigley amid rumors of a faculty purge, the phrase follows Devereaux from a hostile phone call into his private reckoning with the layoff lists, then returns as he sneaks onto campus through a back entrance. Its repetition makes an insult into a question Devereaux cannot dismiss: whether, in considering whom the university might remove, he has already taken part in the betrayal his colleague fears.

Meaning and First Use

Billy’s accusation comes in a phone call prompted by rumors of an impending purge. He has heard that Gracie DuBois “cleaned your clock this afternoon,” and Devereaux confirms that she did. Billy then calls him “None of your business, you goddamn sellout, son of a bitch. You’d sell us all out for a nickel, you goddamn Judas peckerwood.” The insult is not an isolated outburst: Billy suspects Devereaux has made a list of colleagues to be cut and expects his own name to be at the top.

Devereaux does not offer reassurance. He decides Billy would not believe it anyway, and answers the accusation with a joke: “Not for a nickel, Billy,” followed by the claim that his department is worth two bits and he always gets full price. The exchange turns the charge of selling out into a bargaining gag. It also shows the limits of Devereaux’s usual comic deflection. He says jokes often work on Billy, who has only a finite amount of meanness and usually exhausts it quickly; Paul Rourke, by contrast, proudly vows never to laugh at anything Devereaux says or does. Humor can soften Billy’s anger, but it does not settle what Devereaux is doing with the lists.

Billy presses the suspicion directly, saying he bets his name is at the top of the list and insisting that Devereaux must have made one. Devereaux admits that he has made a merit-pay list, but claims to have put Billy in for a bonus. Billy answers that he will need it because his child has been accepted at Notre Dame. The exchange briefly shifts from the imagined purge to a concrete financial need, without dispelling the suspicion behind the insult.

The Phrase and the Mental Lists

The phrase acquires a sharper inward force after Devereaux returns home. He finds Julie asleep in the guest room and observes that his eyes are swollen almost completely shut. Too exhausted even to stop in the bathroom to urinate, he takes antihistamines and plays the answering-machine messages. After a brief rewind that sounds like a hang-up, he recognizes Billy’s voice. The message consists entirely of “You Judas Peckerwood.” Detached from the argument that produced it, the accusation arrives as a compact verdict rather than a conversation.

Upstairs, Devereaux repeats the phrase aloud and connects Billy’s suspicion to his own mental lists, which he has been composing since leaving Dickie Pope’s office. He considers whether poor teaching could justify dismissals, but that standard would place Finny near the top and bring Teddy Barnes and other people he likes close behind. A different test—whether someone has published, presented a paper, or attended a conference—would also implicate Finny, but would catch Billy and other exhausted former high-school teachers recruited decades earlier as the campus expanded. The difficulty is not simply that Devereaux has feelings for some of the people who might be cut; each proposed standard produces a list whose consequences he cannot make defensible.

His conclusion is that he cannot devise even one criterion, or a small combination of criteria, that would sacrifice the right people. Yet he recognizes that undertaking the exercise at all must mean something. He cannot feel guilty, he thinks, because he is too tired and sick; still, the name “Judas Peckerwood” keeps appearing from one mental list to the next. The phrase gives shape to the contradiction: Devereaux may not have sold anyone out for money, but he has entered the work of sorting colleagues into those who might be spared and those who might not.

From Insult to Part Title

The phrase becomes a structural marker when the narrative opens Part Two under the heading “JUDAS PECKERWOOD.” The placement carries Billy’s accusation beyond the telephone call: it names a new part of the book at the point where Devereaux’s private speculation about cuts has already made the label difficult to treat as mere comic abuse. The title also holds together two different kinds of exposure. Billy says aloud what he fears Devereaux is doing; Devereaux’s own reflections show why that suspicion has unsettled him.

The charge recurs in another conversation, this time involving Meg Quigley. Devereaux tells her he cannot see how her father could be fired, since he has been at the university for an exceptionally long time. When she asks whether her father is on Devereaux’s list, Devereaux realizes that he is being accused not only by Billy but by Meg as well. She then tells him that Billy wanted to be a writer when he was young and wrote a novel. Devereaux is genuinely surprised, noting that many English-department colleagues have half-written novels tucked away, but that Billy never asked him to read his. The disclosure deepens his regard for Billy even as the accusation strains their relationship: behind the suspected name on a list is a colleague whose private writing Devereaux sees as evidence of an unusual reserve.

The Back Door Refrain

In a later return to campus, Devereaux notices that for the fourth time in as many trips he is approaching by way of the rear gate rather than driving through the university’s main gate and parking near Modern Languages, as he has done for twenty-five years. He calls himself “Judas Peckerwood, Back Door Man.” The phrase now accompanies his own furtive movement: the suspected betrayer has become a self-conscious sneak.

The association is also political. Earlier that day, Devereaux briefly entertained the possibility of becoming dean through a back-door phone call to Dickie Pope. The rear entrance and the imagined private approach to the deanship become parallel forms of access that avoid the customary front door. The wording does not prove that Devereaux has actually secured the position or betrayed anyone through the call; it records his awareness of the temptation and his discomfort with the means he has considered.

That uneasy self-label is immediately followed by an encounter with his mother. In gentle rain, Devereaux skids to a stop a foot in front of her after a realtor opens a passenger door into the street. His mother is approaching a two-story Victorian with a for-sale sign, a house that recalls the homes in which he lived with his parents as a child. The moment shifts the scene from institutional maneuvering to family history, while leaving the phrase’s back-door image attached to Devereaux’s approach. Across Billy’s accusation, the imagined lists, the part heading, and the rear-gate refrain, “Judas Peckerwood” marks the gap between being called a betrayer and recognizing how readily one can begin to act within the logic of betrayal.