All Other Nights

by Dara Horn

  But Abigail was ecstatic. He looked at her and was astonished to see something he had never seen in her face before: happiness. She was laughing, crying, unable to control herself. She grabbed him, startling him, giddily holding his hands, dancing in place. Her face was shining. “Jacob, I can scarcely believe it. I’m going to see Michael again!”

  “I—I am very happy for you,” he said slowly. All human relations, he was learning, were eased by lies. But he almost meant it. She deserved it, he thought, far more than he ever would.

  “It’s like a dream,” she was saying, her eyes full of tears. “I’m only sorry that I have to say goodbye to you. You have been so kind to me.”

  He watched her, dumbfounded, as she stood. After a long time, he finally spoke. “Abigail, if anything should change—” he said, and hesitated, wondering if there was a way to express it. “If—if you should ever need me—for—for anything at all—please know that I am here for you,” he stammered. “I promise you that.”

  “Thank you, Jacob,” she said. She looked at him, but there was nothing left to say. He walked her back to the inn, and she let him kiss her on the doorstep. Then she closed the door, and he turned back to the dirt road that led to the camp.

  The moss was still hanging from the high branches as it was before, the tall trees still glowing in starlight. Now all he could see were the brambles on the ground, the deep, thick mud as he returned to the wastes, the residue of a dream. The next day, General Grant expelled the Jews from the Department of the Tennessee.

  NO ONE COULD KNOW then that the expulsion would last only three weeks—that a group of those expelled would make their way to Washington and win an audience with Lincoln, who had never heard of the order and who gladly overturned it, even though it meant spiting his best general. At the time when it was issued, there was no reason to believe that it wouldn’t last four hundred years.

  Jacob heard about it first through a memorandum from headquarters, posted and distributed to all officers in the camp. There had been talk, in the previous few weeks, of how something desperately needed to be done to control the endless stream of war profiteers who had overrun the Department. The other officers were likely less alarmed than Jacob was by the form the order actually took:

  GENERAL ORDER NO. 11

  HOLLY SPRINGS, DECEMBER 17, 1862

  THE JEWS, AS A CLASS VIOLATING EVERY REGULATION OF TRADE ESTABLISHED BY THE TREASURY DEPARTMENT AND ALSO DEPARTMENT ORDERS, ARE HEREBY EXPELLED FROM THE DEPARTMENT WITHIN TWENTY-FOUR HOURS FROM RECEIPT OF THIS ORDER. POST COMMANDERS WILL SEE THAT ALL OF THIS CLASS OF PEOPLE BE FURNISHED WITH PASSES AND REQUIRED TO LEAVE, AND ANY ONE RETURNING AFTER SUCH NOTIFICATION WILL BE ARRESTED AND HELD IN CONFINEMENT UNTIL AN OPPORTUNITY OCCURS OF SENDING THEM OUT AS PRISONERS, UNLESS FURNISHED WITH PERMITS FROM HEADQUARTERS. NO PASSES WILL BE GIVEN THESE PEOPLE TO VISIT HEADQUARTERS FOR THE PURPOSE OF MAKING PERSONAL APPLICATION FOR TRADE PERMITS.

  BY ORDER OF MAJ. GEN. U. S.

  GRANT:

  JNO. A. RAWLINS,

  ASSISTANT ADJUTANT GENERAL.

  Nearly everything Jacob had read in the past few months had been difficult to believe. He read through the memorandum once, then twice, and was reminded of nothing more than the article in the copy of the Washington Daily Chronicle that he had idly picked up on the train to Tennessee—a decree that could not possibly be true, that reversed every hope one had ever had of what the world might be, but that somehow was nonetheless undeniable and even predictable, a jolting but inevitable waking from a deep, beautiful dream. As he read it for the third time, he understood that everything he had done in the past year, all the lives he had destroyed, including his own, had been for absolutely nothing, that there was nothing waiting for him at the end. Judah Benjamin had been rewarded in his own ostensible country, but that was only an imaginary country, a delusion. In his own real country, Jacob never would be.

  The order didn’t seem to apply to Union soldiers, because in the camp no one sought him out—though later he heard that Captain Trounstine, the only other Hebrew officer he knew of, chose to resign. He was a braver man than Jacob was. Instead, along with the order, Jacob was handed a particularly heavy schedule of drills to run in the camp during the next two days. The additional drills were gratuitous, he slowly understood, designed to keep him out of town. He ran the drills as though asleep, trying not to think of anything that mattered, and succeeding grandly at it. It was only when he saw McAllister the following day in the mess tent in the camp that he understood what he had lost.

  “I was out enforcing the new order this morning, and you’ll never guess who we arrested,” he said to Jacob, spearing potatoes with a fork. “Your lady sphinx!”

  Jacob had blocked out any thought of Abigail after reading the order, burying her in his mind beneath thick layers of shame. But now, mid-swallow, he choked. “What?”

  McAllister jabbed his fork at the air. “The pastor and the mayor gave us the names we needed, and she and her brothers were on the list.”

  The absurdity of this was so vast as to defy any attempt to respond. McAllister swallowed a few more mouthfuls before speaking again. “We managed to clear out nearly everyone else in town without any problems. Especially the old people. I was surprised. We were afraid we would be dragging grandmothers out of their beds, but most of them were already packed when we came for them. It was as if they were expecting it.”

  Of course, Jacob thought, remembering old Isaacs. They would have been expecting it for fifty years. Their only surprise would have been that it had taken so long.

  “Even that brat from the tavern must have had some sense knocked into him, because he went with his brother on the next train to Illinois,” McAllister continued. “But it was different with your lady friend. She screamed and screamed, and then she started kicking us. She was like a lady possessed. She even bit Lieutenant Hicks.” He wiped his mouth with his sleeve, wide-eyed and grinning. The whole affair was merely an entertaining episode to him, as though he were relating something improbable that Hoff had done while drunk. “I was guarding the jail just before I went off duty,” he said. “By the time I left she was raving hysterical.”

  The image of Abigail hysterical in a prison cell was more than Jacob was willing to picture. “When she saw me leaving,” McAllister added, “she started shouting about you.”

  “About me?”

  “Yes, you.”

  For an instant he was ashamed, horrified of what she might have said. But as always, Abigail surprised him.

  “She started screaming that you should guard the tavern, to make sure no one takes any of her parents’ things,” McAllister said. “Heaven knows how she expects you to manage that.”

  He smiled at Jacob, then turned and waved to someone. Jacob followed his eyes and saw Hoff, who had just appeared with his own rations, ready to join them. Without excusing himself, Jacob rose from his seat and ran out.

  There was no point in trying to go to the jail; he knew that route would only lead him to an unwinnable argument with whoever was on guard. Instead he went to headquarters and made every plea he possibly could to be heard. At first he was told that no one was there to register his complaint; finally, on his ninth attempt, he managed to get a lieutenant there merely to record his concerns on paper and promise him further inquiry. He returned to the camp, defeated. He already knew that nothing would be done. But the following day, when the commanders requested additional guard duty for the new supply houses in town, he volunteered, and had himself stationed at Solomon’s Inn.

  6.

  JACOB WAS ASSIGNED TO THE GRAVEYARD SHIFT, ALONE. IT WAS A perfunctory assignment, protecting the supplies not against any actual enemy raid—for which a single soldier would likely be useless—as much as against spiteful boys from town. It was really a job for a private, but apparently only petty officers could be trusted not to help themselves to the goodies stored in the place. He was provided with a key and instructed to stand guard, watching for imbeciles.
At first he paced in front of the inn, trying not to think of Abigail lying sleepless in her prison cell, and resisted the temptation to enter. But after several long and lonely hours, he gave in to curiosity and went inside.

  It was completely dark, of course. He took out a match and lit the two large lamps on either side of the door just inside the tavern. At first he was surprised by how long it took his eyes to focus. For a minute or more, he couldn’t see anything but black shadows, as if new walls had been erected in the room. But his eyes had indeed adjusted. The tavern had been filled, floor to ceiling, with wooden crates.

  The tavern was unrecognizable. The room had been stripped of its furniture; it was now packed with teetering towers of boxes. The supplies were pushed up against the windows, boxes lining the walls as if the room itself had shrunk. The center of the room was clear and empty; a kind of aisle had been built out of crates that widened after the doorway into an empty space that stretched all the way to the bar. He walked further into the room and lit another match, which he then used to light a lamp hanging overhead. Now he could see not only the crates lining the walls, but also the heaped sacks of flour and corn and potatoes, along with coils of rope and rolls of canvas. There was an enormous castle, taller than he was, built out of smaller jars, which upon closer inspection were labeled as full of marvels largely unknown to the noncommissioned soldier, including sugar, jam, real coffee, and even chocolate. He wondered how much of it had been taken right from the kitchen of Solomon’s Inn. Piled on the bar itself were rifles and boxes upon boxes of ammunition; above the bar, on the rack that had held tin tankards, officers’ uniforms were hanging in a row, like dangling men on a gallows. Behind the bar, where the drinks had been kept, were more crates, carefully labeled as brandy, ale, and whiskey. Apparently the inn’s liquor supply would be accompanying the Union officers en route to Vicksburg. The door behind the bar was open, though the space behind it was dark. There was a clear path through the room to the open side of the bar; he followed it until he was standing behind the bar, and took down a lamp from the wall. He lit the lamp and passed through the doorway where he had seen Abigail for the first time.

  The threshold of that door had become a Mason–Dixon line between order and chaos, dividing the carefully organized army supply house from the Solomons’ ransacked home. Just past the threshold behind the bar, he came upon what apparently was once the pantry. As he raised the lamp higher, he saw that the floor was covered with broken jars, hardened puddles of honey and molasses, round stains of spilled milk, scraps of bread and potato peelings. Above the floor were wooden shelves that had been emptied, some of them partly pulled from the wall. Large smears of jam decorated a few of the dangling shelves, embedded with shards of the glass jars that had once contained them, and thoroughly colonized by ants.

  He passed through the pantry to the narrow staircase beyond it, and followed the mud-encrusted stairs up to the family’s apartment on the second floor. The parlor had been searched, and apparently looted. Every piece of furniture—a dining table, six ladderback chairs, a chest of drawers, and a desk—had been turned upside-down, as though the room itself had been inverted. A large rectangle of pale paint on the wall marked where a picture or a mirror must have been removed; the drawers from the chest and the desk were lying empty and scattered on the floor of the room. The floor was covered with papers, pen nibs, and feathers that must have fallen out of pillows. In places where the floorboards showed, there was a pair of thick dark scratch marks that ran toward the door like a railroad track; apparently something large and heavy—a sofa?—had been dragged out of the room. Next to an amputated drawer he saw a bundle of letters, some of which were falling loose from the string that held them. He picked them up, examining the envelope at the top of the stack.

  His lamp had begun to run low, flickering a bit, and it was difficult to see the entire envelope at once. There was no stamp, and the return address was Abigail’s. He shifted the lamp and glanced at the last line of the address; it was a letter to someone in Richmond. Presumably she had intended to send it more than a month ago, before Holly Springs had changed hands. He held the letter, amazed by the warmth of the paper against his skin, the soft beauty radiating from it that must have come from knowing that Abigail’s hand had held it last. As he stood holding the envelope, the lamp shifted in his other hand, illuminating the whole address. It was addressed to Eugenia Rappaport.

  He stood paralyzed in the upside-down parlor, looking at the name inscribed on the paper. For the first few moments he didn’t think at all. Then, when he finally allowed himself to think, all he could think was that it was impossible. Clearly it was nothing more than a coincidence, another woman with the same name. Even the address was wrong; Jeannie had never lived in Richmond. And even if it had really been for her, this letter still couldn’t possibly mean anything at all; it was surely written before Jeannie died, or at least before anyone had heard about her death. But even Jeannie’s name on a piece of paper in his hand was something. In fact, it was everything. In that instant, the letters of Jeannie’s name encompassed the entire world. He heard a noise downstairs, a wooden slapping sound like a door swinging shut. He had forgotten to close the door to the tavern behind him.

  He stuffed the letter into his pocket, fighting hard against the urge to tear it open. Then he hurried back downstairs, barely able to breathe as he rushed through the pantry and stumbled around the bar into the room that used to be the tavern. And that was when Jacob saw a man in Confederate uniform standing in the doorway, pointing a rifle at his face.

  JACOB REACHED FOR his own rifle, but it was too late. The other man’s gun was already leveled right at him. He slowly raised his hands until he was reaching for the ceiling, unable to touch the sky.

  “On your knees,” the man ordered.

  Jacob sank down slowly to the hard wooden floor in front of the bar, putting one palm down to balance himself against the floorboards before raising his hands again. He was sickened to notice how natural this posture felt to him, even comfortable. The man stepped over to Jacob, keeping his rifle pointed at Jacob’s face until he was able to reach around and remove Jacob’s rifle, slinging it over his shoulder, and then Jacob’s pistol, which he tucked into his belt. Somewhere outside Jacob heard shots being fired in the distance, followed by an explosion. It was a real raid. As Jacob held his hands above his head, he saw that the man was looking around the room, peering around the towers of crates, checking to make sure Jacob was alone. Jacob looked down at the floor, wondering how it would end—until he decided not to spend his final moments looking at the floorboards, and instead looked back up at the other man.

  He was about Jacob’s age, and about Jacob’s height, with sandy blond hair and blue eyes like Jacob’s, and a thick blond mustache. His nose was like Jacob’s, too, long and narrow, though his skin was rough and chapped, hardened from months of living outdoors. When he turned his head, Jacob saw a long red scar running from the middle of his cheek to the top of his right ear, part of which was missing. Jacob looked beyond him to the door of the tavern, where the lamps he had lit when he first came in were still burning. He listened for more people outside, but he could hear nothing but the other man’s boots on the floorboards, and more guns firing in the distance. Even if the other man’s regiment had successfully raided the town, the man had come to Solomon’s Inn alone, at least for the moment.

  Now the man was nosing his way through the boxes, taking inventory of the stacked supplies. He glanced behind the bar, at the liquor packed into labeled crates, and turned back to Jacob.

  “How much have you stolen from this place?” he asked, glowering. From one side, he was quite handsome. But when he turned his head, Jacob winced at the sight of the disfigured ear.

  “I haven’t stolen anything,” Jacob answered. Then he thought of the letter in his pocket, and felt himself blush.

  The man noticed. “You’re lying,” he spat.

  “It was looted, it’s true,” Jacob
said. “But not by me.”

  The kick came suddenly, a swift hard crunch to Jacob’s groin. The burn of his cheek against the floorboards preceded the pain by a long, languorous second, and then his entire body snapped into a tight ball like a spring recoiling. For a moment he was blinded, nauseated, listening to a long, low howl that he only gradually recognized as his own voice. The pressure of the other man’s boot against his spine an instant later felt almost ethereal, a comforting pat on the back, until it forced Jacob’s stomach against the floor. Jacob gagged on bile, retching, before opening his eyes to see the toe of the man’s other boot, encrusted with mud, inches from his nose. Beyond it, a tower of cartons hovered sideways, floating on air. Jacob closed his eyes again and imagined William Wilhelm Williams the Third standing before him, Jeannie cowering at his side. But now there was no one to save him but himself.

  The man’s voice came through clearly over the rush of blood in Jacob’s head. “This was my brother’s business,” he said, pushing his heel deep into Jacob’s back. Jacob grimaced, still nauseous, his teeth pressed against the floor. “You have no reason to be here except as a thief.”

  A tight knot of thought suddenly loosened in Jacob’s mind. His brother? But that meant—

  “You have a choice. You can be captured, or you can be dead.”

  —that meant he was—

  “Which would you prefer?”

  Jacob opened his eyes, wincing as he twisted his neck so that he could see the man’s face. The man’s bristled eyebrows were taut with rage, his jaw clenched into some cruel equivalent of a smile. It was obvious to Jacob at that moment that he had been planning this for days, mentally performing it, fantasizing about how he would make whoever was here suffer. Jacob’s mind raced, delirious, trying to choose the best way out.

  “Perhaps you might consider a prisoner exchange,” Jacob finally said, wheezing.