by Dara Horn
“I’ve never heard it before,” Phoebe said. She put her box down in her lap. “What does it sound like?”
“I don’t think I could imitate it, or even describe it,” Jacob said truthfully. “It’s like—well, imagine someone scraping a nail across an anvil. Or a chicken shrieking just before you chop off its head.”
Rose and Phoebe both laughed. Lottie sat straight in her seat, with a calm smile on her face. But Jacob no longer cared about Lottie; the laughter in the room was what he needed.
Jeannie leaned forward. “I think there’s more of a bellow to it,” she insisted.
“Imagine if you took a screaming man, strung him up by his feet, and whirled him around and around a maypole,” Jacob said.
“But louder,” Jeannie said. “Like a dying whale.”
“Or an elephant giving birth,” he said. “To triplets.”
Jeannie, Rose, and Phoebe laughed out loud, and Jacob couldn’t help laughing with them. It was the happiest he had felt in weeks. And that was when Lottie opened her mouth and screamed.
It was a Rebel yell. A real one. No one who had been in any battle in that war could ever forget it. The first time Jacob heard it, he was in the third advancing line, and it was louder than the cannonfire that followed it, the sky breaking open with the thundering screams of five thousand men. They were advancing then, but when he heard it he stopped in his tracks, paralyzed. Ten feet ahead of him, a seventeen-year-old private was shot in the head and fell to the earth, precisely where Jacob would have been standing if he hadn’t stopped.
Lottie’s Rebel yell shook the house, an animal sound that vibrated through the walls and churned Jacob’s blood. Her sisters turned pale. Then she stopped, and smiled at Jacob.
A long silent moment passed under Lottie’s eerie smile, until Jeannie finally opened her mouth. “I have a horrid headache,” Jeannie announced. Her own smile had vanished. She turned to Jacob. “Jacob, won’t you please join me upstairs.”
It was a command, not a request. He was pleased to obey it. He didn’t look back as Jeannie pulled him up the stairs and into their bedroom.
She closed the door and sat down on the bed, pulling off her shoes as he sat beside her awkwardly. Outside the window, a hushed rustle of leaves announced a sudden rainfall. The rain poured down in heavy, angry waves, streaming across the windowpanes and pounding on the roof. He watched as she took the ribbons out of her hair, and waited for her to speak. At last she did.
“Jacob, I don’t like being at home anymore,” she said.
He paused, trying to decide what she meant. “Would you like to go somewhere?” he asked, though he knew this was impossible.
“I don’t know, Jacob. It’s just that this isn’t really home now.”
“Jeannie, of course it is,” he said. There was no way he could justify taking her anywhere else, even if he had somewhere to take her.
“No, it isn’t. I miss my parents,” she said. “I miss—I miss both of them. But I didn’t expect to miss my father this much.”
It occurred to Jacob that Philip would be surprised to hear this, and honored—his private honor. He wished he could somehow tell him. Jeannie must have wished it too.
“Would you hold me, Jacob? Just hold me.”
For the rest of that night, he did.
JACOB LEFT THE LEVY house in a hurry the following morning. Lottie had been strangely friendly to him at breakfast, asking what his plans were for the day. He had told a vague lie about meeting one of her father’s clients at the office at nine; she seemed pleased with that, and offered him a larger breakfast than usual. He barely ate. Instead, he said goodbye to the sisters and rushed off in the direction of the office. But as he neared the main street in town, he turned, and headed toward the jail.
“I’d like to see the warden, please,” he announced to the old drunken guard. The guard was seated at the desk by the door, smoking a pipe.
The guard looked up at Jacob and sneered. “Warden ain’t in today. Today, I’m all y’all got. But you ain’t got no more visitin’ time ’til next month. So you ain’t got no business here. Have a git day,” he said, and blew smoke in Jacob’s face.
The guard watched Jacob, waiting for him to turn around and leave. But Jacob stood still. “I haven’t come for Mr. Levy,” he said. “I’ve come to buy the slave.”
“The nigger?”
“Yes,” Jacob replied, and felt his face growing hot. “Must I wait until the warden returns, or may I buy him now?”
The guard smiled. “If you gonna buy him today, then you givin’ that money to me.”
“Fine, then,” Jacob said. Now he was certain that the slave’s owner would never see a cent of it—that Philip’s hard-earned money was going straight into the guard’s pocket. But he did not care. “How much?” Jacob wondered if, in the warden’s absence, the guard would raise the price.
Fortunately the guard was no businessman. “Seb’m hundert,” he said. “You got it?”
“Yes,” Jacob said, and began to take out his wallet. But then he thought of something. “May I come in?” he asked. “I would like to see him first before I buy.” It would be another chance to exchange a word with Philip.
But the guard saw through him. “You ain’t lookin’ at nothin’. You’s buyin’ him, I know it. Y’all got yer business proposition,” he snorted. “An’ I already says, you ain’t got no more visitin’ time. You jes’ stay right there with all that money,” he said. Then he turned and headed around the corner of the hall, announcing to no one, “Suckin’ our blood.”
Jacob waited in the hallway for about a quarter of an hour, wondering whether he could summon the courage to yell something to Philip. But he knew he needed the guard on his side if he ever wanted to come back. Soon the guard returned, with the Negro in chains. Unlike Philip, he was shackled not only at the wrists and ankles, but also at the neck. Jacob hadn’t gotten a good look at him before, when he was sleeping in the straw in Philip’s cell, but now he saw that the slave was about thirty years old, and very tall, despite the irons pulling on his neck. He was wearing a pair of dark trousers and a torn gray shirt. His bare feet were large, callused almost into hooves. A curled beard covered his jaw. He had a large forehead, his hair receding slightly from it, and a rounded welt of a scar on one temple. He glanced at Jacob, his eyes bloodshot and blank.
“The money,” the guard said, and tapped a foot.
Jacob took out his wallet and began peeling off bills. The guard’s eyes bulged as he removed each note. At first Jacob placed them on the guard’s desk, but then the guard grabbed them right from Jacob’s hands, stuffing each one in his pocket as Jacob offered it.
“Sold,” the guard announced. Then he took out his key ring, and removed one of the smaller keys. “This one’s for them chains,” he said, and threw it at Jacob. It nearly hit Jacob’s face before he grabbed it out of the air. “I sugges’ you keep’m in ’em ’til you git home. Now git out.”
“Thank you,” Jacob said, and offered him a sweeping bow. Jacob was smiling; he couldn’t help it. The Negro looked at him. Jacob was about to take him by the hand or the arm before he saw that he was supposed to take him by the chain attached to his neck. The two of them walked out the jailhouse door.
Jacob led him, walking around the building until they were on the other side of the jail, facing the landscape at the town’s edge, the wooded foothills opening before them. Much farther away, on a low-slung mountainside in the distance, Jacob could see the Confederate camps set up, and a large house on a hilltop that must have been the generals’ headquarters. Long lines of colorful laundry flapped in the wind beside the house. He glanced around, saw no one, and proceeded into the woods until he could no longer see the jailhouse behind them. Then he stopped and turned to the Negro, unsure of what to say. “Caleb?” he asked.
“Thank you, Jacob,” the chained man said.
“Let me open these,” he told him, and set to work on unlocking the shackles, first on the man’s
neck, and then on the wrists before continuing on to the ankles. It took much longer than it should have. Jacob had never seen it done before, and his hands struggled with the locks. It wasn’t merely the unlocking that was difficult for him. For a moment he wished he were Philip, who had at least had a conversation with a Negro before; Jacob felt painfully awkward, and didn’t know what to say. As he fumbled with the ankle lock, Caleb laughed out loud, bending down and taking the key out of Jacob’s hand. He freed himself.
“How nice to meet you,” he said once all the chains were off, and shook Jacob’s hand. Caleb’s hand was cold and dry, the palm almost comically large. “I am a great admirer of your father-in-law.”
Philip was right; his voice didn’t sound at all like Jacob had expected. But nothing had been as expected. “I—I brought your message to the bakery,” Jacob said.
“So I heard,” Caleb replied, with a gentle smile. “Thank you.”
“I don’t understand how you could have—”
Caleb looked him in the eye. “I can’t tell you now,” he said. “I have to hurry to the house.”
“All right,” Jacob replied, though he was disappointed. What house, he wondered?
“Your father-in-law suggested that you may need to come there too,” he said. “If you do, it’s the caretaker’s shack outside the cemetery by the woods. Knock on the cellar door. Do you know the password for the Legal League?”
The Legal League was a network of Negro spies that funneled people and information northward—in legend only, as far as Jacob had believed. He had never before even considered that it might actually be real. “No,” Jacob said.
“‘Friends of Uncle Abe,’” Caleb quoted quickly, under his breath. “‘Light and loyalty.’” He craned his neck backward and opened his mouth, as if drinking in the sky. “I hope we shall meet again in this world,” he said, looking back at Jacob. “If we don’t, you have earned a place in heaven. May I be privileged to meet you there someday.”
He had no idea how wrong he was, Jacob thought, remembering the murder at the Passover table that spring. Eternal Tarnation was already waiting for him. But before he could reply, Caleb ran. Jacob watched his long legs flying into the woods. In seconds he was out of sight, leaving nothing but a pile of chains in the mud. Jacob turned around and retraced his steps through the forest until he had returned to the back side of the jailhouse. He made his way around the building, heading through an alley behind the jail to the street leading to the center of town. On the other end of the alleyway, Jacob saw his wife.
SHE WAS LEANING against the gray stone building on the other side of the alley. She couldn’t have seen him with Caleb on the opposite side of the jailhouse, he understood with relief; she must have just spotted him heading toward the jail, and waited there in the alleyway for him. He hurried toward her.
“Jeannie, how—how did you know I was here?” he asked. “You know that you aren’t allowed to visit the jail.”
He glanced around the alleyway; no one else was nearby. She looked beautiful there, standing alone against a stone wall still glistening and dripping from the previous night’s rain. He leaned in to kiss her, and saw that her face was gleaming with sweat. She didn’t kiss him back.
“I followed you,” she said.
“You followed me?” He thought of their conversation the night before, and smiled. Did she want him to run away with her? “Well, the jailhouse isn’t any better than your own house, trust me. I thought I would try to see your father again, though I’m sorry to say I didn’t succeed.” Lying had become natural to him; he didn’t even think about it. As for why Jeannie was waiting for him in the alley, he was barely curious. It seemed clear that this was some sort of girlish fantasy of hers, following him into town. Maybe she had had an argument with her sisters. Of course he didn’t mind her company. “I must go to the office now; the secretary is going to wonder where I’ve been. You may walk me there, if you’d like,” he said.
She was silent. He turned to walk toward the main road, holding her hand. But she refused to move, and pulled him back. At last he faced her. “Jeannie, is everything all right?”
“Jacob, don’t go to the office,” she said. “They’re waiting for you there.”
Now he was baffled. “Who’s waiting?” he asked.
“Lottie is having you arrested.”
He stood still, and choked. “What?”
“She told me she was sending a posse for you. She’s had enough.”
He could barely breathe. “Enough of what?”
“Jacob, let’s end this charade. Lottie and I both know that you’re a Yankee spy.”
He clenched his fists, feeling the blood drain out of his head. “What on earth are you talking about?” he asked. “Jeannie, don’t be ridiculous.” But his voice was too loud, and he instantly knew that the words weren’t right. It was what Jeannie had said to William when he walked into their wedding reception with his shotgun.
Jeannie smiled. “You are a terrible actor, Jacob. And besides, I found where you hid Rose’s message in the lining of your hat.”
He gasped for air, then grabbed his hat off his head. It couldn’t possibly be true. He turned it over and started running his hands desperately under the lining. Nothing.
“I found the other messages there too, before you sent them out.”
“What—what messages?” he spat, though it was already useless. He was still standing, but she had knocked him to his knees.
“The messages you’ve been sending north. I’ve been pulling them out of your hat and putting them back in for weeks.” She grinned at him. “Sometimes I even refolded them differently, just to test you. Of course you never noticed.”
He glanced at the inside of his hat, then at Jeannie, then at the hat again. There had to be some mistake.
“Don’t worry, Jacob,” she said. “The Yankee cipher is much better than we expected. Even Rose couldn’t decipher it.”
Jacob dropped his hat. It seemed to fall slowly, slowly to the ground, landing in a mud puddle that filled a missing cobblestone.
“The message Lottie gave you about the Federal navy was pure invention. Major Stoughton didn’t tell her anything that time. If you had really sent the message on to Jackson, he would have known it was impossible. You never would have been paid. And even if someone had believed it, no one on our side would have paid you that much.”
“But Jeannie, how could you—how did you—” He didn’t even know what he wanted to ask.
“Jacob, I didn’t want you to be caught. Lottie did.”
He remembered the scene in the front room the night before, and started breathing again. Lottie?
“She wondered if you would still continue after you were married to me, if you were really that low. She even made up the story about Major Stoughton behaving despicably to her, just to see if you would be a gentleman and defend her. According to her, a real gentleman who heard something like that from his sister-in-law wouldn’t have hesitated to challenge him to a duel, considering that we don’t have any brothers and Papa is in jail. Only the worst Yankee scum would treat a lady like trash the way you did.”
Jacob bit his lip and tasted the metallic flavor of blood in his mouth. He thought of his visit to Philip, of everything Philip had said, and was petrified by a shameful fear. Savagery is a way of life, he heard Philip say in his head.
“A duel?” he asked, trying to steady his voice. “After what happened with William? But Stoughton didn’t really—she couldn’t possibly—”
“Lottie says only a coward would have responded the way you did, and that you didn’t even defend me at our wedding. You aren’t even enough of a man to serve in your own army.”
He decided to use his very last defense for his life as a man. “I am in the army,” he said. “I’m in the 18th Infantry Regiment of New York.”
This seemed to surprise her; her arrogant poise dissolved as he spoke. “I’m many things, Jeannie, but I’m not a coward,” he said,
and winced. It sounded weak, staged, and of course it was, if not downright false. But what else could he say? “And the wedding—Jeannie, you don’t really think—I wanted you to leave, Jeannie, so that I could confront him. I saw where I could take a knife from the buffet, and I—I told you to leave, Jeannie. I tried, Jeannie, but you wouldn’t—Jeannie, you can’t possibly believe her,” he stammered. “You can’t possibly think that I would—”
But Jeannie was barely listening. “I tried to convince Lottie not to arrest you,” she said. “I tried to tell her that I could talk you out of it. But she didn’t care in the least. Lottie only wants to win. She thinks it would be retribution for our mother. I once thought that too, but not like Lottie. Nothing else matters to her. She hasn’t been happy since then, and she doesn’t want me to be happy either.”
Jacob heard her words, bewildered. In the midst of his amazement, he was suddenly honored. He had made her happy.
“Lottie was certain you were going to have me captured,” she continued, and her voice dropped. “I was sure of it too.”
Lottie’s yell was still ringing in Jacob’s ears. He imagined her screaming in the front room, watching Jeannie and Phoebe and Rose turn pale.
“But you didn’t, Jacob. You didn’t. It’s true that you didn’t send the message, but you didn’t have me captured either. I was waiting for that. But you didn’t do it. Why didn’t you do it? Don’t you know that it’s treason for you? Don’t you know you could be hanged?”
Jacob thought again of that afternoon with Rose’s message in his pocket, of almost going to the bakery, of the slave auction, of the bakery again. He thought of Phoebe’s snuffbox, of Rose’s non sequiturs, of Philip in chains, and then of Jeannie putting her ribbon in his hair, of Jeannie lying naked on the bed before him, of Jeannie sitting beside him on a frightening summer night, of the only thing she asked of him.
“I couldn’t do it,” he said.
He was surprised to see tears in her eyes. She tried to hide them, blinking as she looked down at the ground. When she looked up again, her face was blank, rigid. But she had turned pale.