All Other Nights

by Dara Horn

  Jacob remembered his time in the barrel on the way to New Orleans, the parting of the sea of memory. “I can sing it,” he said.

  Now Ellis looked at him again. “You can?”

  “Only in Hebrew,” Jacob added, then shrugged. He regretted mentioning it.

  “That’s how Moses would’ve done it,” Ellis said. “Sing it for me.”

  Jacob wondered if he really remembered it. But when he began to sing it, it was as if a different person had borrowed his voice—a person he used to be, long ago. The words flowed out in a wave of triumph, one after another, until he ended on the full crescendo: “Until Your people has passed over…to the sanctuary, O Lord, that Your hand has established—The Lord shall reign forever and ever!”

  The song ended, and the person he used to be ended along with it. The world shrank down to the size of the small dark room. Avoiding Ellis’s eyes, he looked at the scar on Ellis’s neck.

  “A nice song,” Ellis conceded. Jacob finally looked him in the eye, and ventured a smile. Ellis smiled back, and added, “But your singin’ is awful.”

  There was a knock at the cellar door. Jacob froze in terror, but Ellis laughed. “Light and loyalty,” a man’s voice called through the locked door. Ellis got up, still laughing, and let his father in.

  “SO MY REDEEMER has arrived,” Caleb announced with a smile.

  Jacob looked up at him from his seat on the wooden crate. Caleb was so tall that he couldn’t stand straight in the little room. He hunched his shoulders, his towering head shadowing the room like a reigning giant. He reached out his hands and, to Jacob’s surprise, bent down and kissed Jacob’s dirty cheeks.

  “I’m so sorry to impose,” Jacob said softly, feeling his face warming again. “I found myself in a rather urgent situation today. Your son has been very gracious.”

  He waited for Caleb to ask why he had come, but he didn’t. Clearly he had been trained, as Achilles Fogg had been, to ask as little as possible.

  “You are always welcome here,” Caleb said. “I only regret that I wasn’t here to greet you. But I had an opportunity this evening to arrange a meeting with my wife. She was very grateful to you for passing her message along.”

  Jacob was confused. “The message about the troop movements?” he asked.

  Ellis poured Caleb a cup of water from the barrel. Caleb sat down on one of the crates, took the cup, and brought it to his lips. He continued drinking for a long time, making Jacob wait and watch as the Adam’s apple on his long thin neck bobbed up and down. A scar along the side of Caleb’s neck throbbed as he swallowed.

  “My wife is one of General Longstreet’s slaves at his headquarters,” Caleb said. “The officers discuss everything in front of her, as though she weren’t there.”

  Was the whole Confederacy littered with spies, in the form of slaves? Even if it were, what Caleb was saying still struck him as impossible. “I don’t understand,” he finally admitted. “The message was from you, not from her. You were in jail.”

  Caleb was grinning now, along with Ellis. “Headquarters is on the hilltop outside of town,” Caleb said. “My wife does the officers’ laundry at headquarters, and every day she hangs different shirts on the laundry lines. Most of the time she uses the lines in the back, where nobody in the valley can see them, but if she uses the lines on the edge of the hill, then it’s a message. The number of shirts she puts out is the number of troops that are moving, in thousands. She pins them to certain parts of the line, depending on the direction the troops are moving. When the shirts are all on the left, facing the valley, that means west; all on the right means east; both sides with an empty space between them means north; and grouped in the middle means south.” Caleb grinned. “Of course she didn’t expect me to see it. She only hoped it would be noticed by someone in the League. But as it happened, our cell faced the right direction. The warden took away your father-in-law’s spectacles, but he only needs them for seeing things nearby, not for distance. He climbed onto my shoulders to look out the window, and I borrowed his eyes.” Caleb took another sip of water. “Thank you for delivering the message.”

  Everything about this man cast Jacob into a state of awe. Caleb was leaning toward him now, still smiling. “Now please tell me how we can best serve you here,” he said.

  The word “serve” made Jacob’s stomach sway. He glanced at Ellis and then at Caleb, his eyes running along their scars. “I don’t need anything,” he said quickly. “I don’t mean to trouble you.”

  “You forget that you are my personal Moses,” Caleb said. “Now is not the time to be polite.”

  Jacob sat straighter. “Really,” he said. “I—” Then he paused. There was no choice; he was trapped. He felt like flinging himself at Caleb’s feet. “I need to go back north,” he said, barely breathing. “As soon as possible.”

  He was relieved when Caleb’s posture didn’t change. “That was what I needed to know,” Caleb said. “The League has sent people back over the lines many times. I can’t say it’s simple, but it can be done.” He took another long drink of water. “I would advise waiting here for two weeks, until everyone is convinced that you’ve already left. After that I can arrange your passage to Washington. You have reunited me with my family. It is the least I can do to welcome you here, and to reunite you with yours.”

  “Thank you,” Jacob mumbled, though he barely understood the words. His family? Who was his family now?

  “I shall put the message through that we will arrange for your return,” Caleb was saying. “Ellis will deliver it to the bakery tomorrow. Is there anything else urgent that you need to include in the message?”

  Jacob thought of Jeannie stopping him in the alleyway. But he had to do it. “Yes, there is,” he said.

  “Write it here,” Caleb told him. He reached into the pocket of his baggy trousers, pulling out a charcoal pencil and a swath of old newspaper and passing them to Jacob. “Don’t worry about the code. I can cipher it for you before I send it. Unless you would prefer that I not see it, of course.”

  “That’s all right,” Jacob said. There was some empty space along the top of the paper, above the masthead. He began scribbling words, trying to minimize the message as he always did to make the coding easier, and this time to fit the entire message in the space before the newsprint began. He wrote quickly, pushing the pencil hard onto the thin paper, entering the words that had been burning in his brain:

  MISSION COMPROMISED BY CONFIRMED CONFEDERATE AGENT CHARLOTTE LEVY. REQUEST CAPTURE OF CHARLOTTE LEVY AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.

  As he wrote out the words, he felt himself burning with glory. He read it over once, then handed it back to Caleb.

  Caleb looked at the page, reading slowly, mouthing the words the way his son had read the Bible, like someone who only learned to read poorly, or late. Then he looked back at Jacob. His face was grave.

  “Charlotte Levy?” he asked. “She isn’t Philip’s daughter, is she?”

  The question surprised Jacob. The idea of Lottie as Philip’s daughter, rather than merely Jeannie’s sister, seemed strange to him now. He thought of his first evening in Philip’s house, of meeting the Levy sisters, how they had all lined up before him next to their father, a row of beautiful dark curls. “Yes, she is,” he said.

  “Your wife?” Caleb asked.

  “No, no,” he said quickly, and looked back at Caleb again. “Philip has four daughters.”

  “I remember,” said Caleb, in a measured, careful tone. His voice filled Jacob with unease.

  “My wife is named Eugenia. Charlotte is her older sister,” Jacob said. He looked back at Caleb, anticipating relief.

  But it didn’t come. The scar on Caleb’s neck throbbed. “She’s Philip’s daughter. Your wife’s sister,” Caleb said slowly. “Your own sister, in effect. And you are handing her over.” He kept his eyes on the paper in his hand.

  Jacob swallowed. “She’s a danger to the Union,” he heard himself say.

  Caleb pursed his lips, the
n let out a breath. “You know that this will break Philip’s heart all over again.”

  Jacob thought for a moment of defending himself, of reciting for Caleb an entire litany of Lottie’s betrayals, but he knew it didn’t matter. He looked at the bare dirt floor.

  “It isn’t a choice,” he said.

  Caleb frowned. “There are always choices.”

  Jacob was silent.

  Caleb looked at the message one more time, and finally shook his head. He folded it carefully and placed it in his pocket. “We are supposed to envy the white men for their freedom,” he said. “But I have to say that I will never, ever envy you.”

  3.

  JACOB’S TIME IN THE BASEMENT ROOM PASSED IN A SLOW AGONY. Caleb and Ellis were free men now, or at least freed by the assumptions of others, none of whom imagined the immense liberty of will that the two of them enjoyed. With the help of a friend of his former master’s son, Caleb had gotten himself placed cleaning latrines in Longstreet’s encampment, conveniently reunited with his wife, while Ellis was still ostensibly the property of the baker Achilles Fogg, delivering goods of various kinds to and from headquarters as well. Occasionally Caleb came back too, ostensibly on some errand for his masters. But now it was Jacob who was the fugitive, imprisoned in the little underground tomb on the graveyard’s edge, with nothing to do but read Ellis’s Bible and alternately anticipate and dread his return. Sometimes Ellis would return at night, bringing food from the bakery, though not nearly often enough. Jacob was famished, his empty stomach aggravating his frayed nerves. At last the day arrived when Caleb would come, at midnight, to help him escape. The taste of forthcoming freedom was so intense that Jacob almost clawed at the walls of the basement room.

  As the endless day wore on, he perched on a crate and peered out through the crack in the planks that gave him a view just above the ground level. There he could see a little sliver of the graveyard outside, the daylight fading over the graves. He had done this for many hours during his imprisonment, and not once had he seen a single living creature, except an occasional squirrel. But as the daylight drained into dusk, he squinted through the planks and saw a small figure moving toward the graveyard, one that eventually resolved into a person, and then into a woman, a dark-haired woman in a long dark dress.

  His heart pounded. For an instant he was sure he was about to be discovered. Then he saw the woman crouch next to one of the last graves in the row, touching a pebble that had been perched on the gravestone.

  “Jeannie!” he shouted.

  She jumped, startled, as she turned toward where he was hidden. But she didn’t run away. He scrambled down from the crate and rushed to the door, struggling to unlock the chain that held it closed. When he finally pushed open the door and emerged from the ground, Jeannie was standing before him.

  He was close enough to touch her now. In those dark two weeks in his graveyard cell, he had forgotten the smell of her, the deep sweet smell of the side of her neck, like overripe fruit. He watched her, breathing in. Something in her demeanor made him hesitate to reach for her. Instead he followed her, like an obedient child, as she led him a few steps from the open cellar door to sit with her in the weedy grass beside her mother’s grave.

  “Jeannie,” he said. “How did you find me?”

  She swallowed before she spoke. “The lawyer brought me a message from Papa,” she answered, slowly. “It said you might be here.”

  Her face was severe, solemn, as though she had aged in merely two weeks. For a moment he wondered whether something awful had happened, more awful than she could ever tell him. “I didn’t believe it, but I came anyhow,” she said. “I saw the stone on the grave, and I knew you had been here.”

  She took him in her arms, and he devoured her, unable to stop kissing her. Then he pulled back, glancing around the graveyard in the graying daylight.

  “Jeannie, how could you come here on your own?” he asked. He tried not to sound suspicious, but he couldn’t help glancing over his shoulder, searching for Lottie’s posse in the late afternoon shadows. Or had Lottie already been captured? “Do your sisters know you’re here?”

  “No, I didn’t tell any of them,” she said.

  So no one had yet come for Lottie. That meant he was still in danger. Was Jeannie here as a lure, to draw him into a trap? He searched her face; her eyes were still on his. He decided, for no reason and for every reason, to believe her.

  “They all think I’m in the house,” she added.

  This confused him. “But—but aren’t they at home?” Usually at least Rose and Phoebe would be home at this hour, even if Lottie was out with some unsuspecting suitor. Had Rose and Phoebe now taken on gentleman callers too, for the cause?

  “No, they went to the synagogue,” she said. “I told them I was feeling too sick to go. It will be another two hours before they come back, maybe more.”

  “Synagogue?” He was baffled. He had never seen the girls go to synagogue during all the time he had lived with them. He hadn’t even seen Philip go, except on the anniversary of his wife’s death. Had someone else died?

  “Jacob, you’ve forgotten everything,” Jeannie said. “How could you not know that tonight is Yom Kippur?”

  The Day of Atonement, of all things. The late afternoon light was fading, long shadows stretching across the soft yellowed grass. Jacob hadn’t been outside in two weeks, and now even the dying light terrified him. He imagined men waiting to capture him behind the trees just past the graveyard, rustling footsteps in the woods. “Jeannie, I can’t stay here with you,” he told her. “I have to go back inside.”

  Her fingernails dug into his hands. “Please don’t make me go home,” she said. “I want to stay with you.”

  He looked down at the grass. “It’s impossible,” he said. “I’m leaving tonight.”

  She clutched his hands, pleading: “Take me with you.”

  For one brief, delusional moment, he considered it. He imagined bringing her into the little cellar room below the graves, telling Caleb that he needed to arrange for her passage, meeting her in a few days somewhere across the lines, and then somehow living out his life with her as if none of the events of the past year had ever occurred, as if he had simply met a daughter of one of his father’s business associates and married her like a normal human being, as if there had been no war.

  “I can’t.”

  Now her face changed. She released his hands, looking at her mother’s grave. When she spoke, her voice was perfectly even, flat, cold. “You told them about me and Lottie, didn’t you,” she said.

  It wasn’t a question. He tried to lie, but to his astonishment he couldn’t. “I told them about Lottie,” he said, finally. “Only about Lottie.”

  Jeannie’s face turned pale. She looked down at her lap, and he saw her mother’s wedding ring glimmering in the fading light. “Anyone who comes to capture Lottie will take me too.”

  He shook his head, desperate. “That isn’t necessarily—”

  “Please, Jacob. Save us, even if we don’t deserve it.” Jeannie said, her eyes still on her hands. She was begging now, turning into her own version of old Isaacs, pleading on her knees. “I’m not asking for myself. I’m asking for Rose and Phoebe. Even if they weren’t taken too, they can’t run the house alone. They’re—they’re children.”

  Jacob avoided her eyes. “I had to tell them about Lottie,” he said. “She tried to have me hanged.”

  “I know, and she should have,” Jeannie said. “It was the right thing for her to do.”

  He understood then, with staggering clarity, that his dream of living a real life with Jeannie had been only that, a dream. They lived in different countries now. “You can’t stay here with me, Jeannie,” he told her. “I wish you could, but you can’t.”

  She clutched his hands again. “I haven’t been well since you left,” she said. “I feel so ill that I have to leave the table at meals, so that I don’t become sick in front of the boarders.”

  He
could feel how cold her fingers were. “You—you’ve been ill?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Because of our baby.”

  Or at least that was what he thought she said. “Because of what?”

  “Our baby,” she repeated, and smiled.

  This should not have been unfathomable, yet it was. “You—you can’t be serious,” he stammered. A baby?

  “Of course I am. I’m your wife.”

  She was! “Jeannie,” he gasped. It was impossible, but it was true. Everything could be rebuilt. “Did you tell your family?” he asked. The question was giddy, delirious—as though they were living in some other realm where reality didn’t apply, where her mother hadn’t been murdered, where her father wasn’t in jail, where her sister wasn’t trying to have him hanged, where there was nothing but family and love.

  “Jacob, don’t be cruel.”

  The graveyard was dark now, generations of Gratzes sleeping underground, with the weight of two more generations seated just above them. Jeannie sat rooted to the earth, her dark dress spilling over the soft shadowed grass. When she spoke again, her voice quivered in the darkness: “What are we going to do?”

  Jacob’s vision reeled, overwhelmed by everything and everyone to whom his life was owed. He made a decision. He stood, and Jeannie rose beside him, watching.

  “Some—some people have been hiding me here,” he told her, afraid to say more, and pointed to the shed. He could barely make it out now in the shadows. He put his arm around Jeannie’s waist, clasping her against him in the dark. “They’ve arranged to take me back to Washington tonight at midnight. Perhaps they can take us both. If they can’t, then at least you might hide here until they could arrange it. Once we cross the lines, I will find you.”

  In the dark he heard her breathe. “Thank you,” she whispered.

  He held her in his arms and imagined the child suspended within her. “Come with me,” he said. He began moving toward the shed, with Jeannie beside him. He held her tight, cleaving to her, his skin electric with unexpected joy.