All Other Nights

by Dara Horn

  For a moment she was silent. She lowered her head, bowing before him. Perhaps she knew that he was right. Then she spoke, and her eyes gleamed with tears. “Deborah started speaking clearly a few months ago,” she said. “She isn’t even two years old, but she understands much more than one might expect. I told her about you. She knows how to say ‘Papa.’”

  He was too small for this, he saw, too damned to deserve it. Suddenly she sat up, straightening in the shadows. “What time is it?” she asked.

  He might have thought the question odd, but he was barely present, his mind awash with regret. Without thinking, he slipped his watch out of his pocket, as though he had been asked for the time by a stranger on the street. “A quarter past midnight,” he answered. It was later than he expected, though he cared not in the least.

  Jeannie was fidgeting, anxious, as if he had broken a magic spell. “I have to go home to Deborah,” she said.

  It was strange to hear her say these words, as though Deborah were an actual child rather than an impossible fantasy. For Jacob, the very idea was inconceivable. But Jeannie had given her life, sustained her, and enabled her to reach this very moment—and now somewhere in this doomed city, an almost-two-year-old child who looked exactly like him was lying in bed asleep, waiting for her mother. To Jacob it was nothing but a dream, unearned and unreal.

  “I have to go home,” Jeannie repeated, when he didn’t reply. “My sisters will be frantic. They may even send Lottie to fetch me. It isn’t safe for you if I stay here any longer.” It was true, he knew, though he wondered if it were also an excuse, a way for her to take leave of him without guilt. She didn’t invite him to join her; they both already knew that he never could. But she also didn’t rise from her seat. Instead she leaned toward him, her face hovering over his scars, and he felt her breath against his cheek. “Forgive me, Jacob, but it’s difficult to look at you,” she said.

  He said nothing as she stood up. Her cloak narrowed her dress and her body beneath it into a thin column before him, a pillar of white smoke. Before he could struggle to his feet beside her, she bent down and blew the candle out.

  Darkness enveloped them, and suddenly he felt her arms around him, her lips against his fingers, his neck, his mouth, as she drew him to his feet. Her tongue against his skin was so electric that he became delirious: he tried to stand on his own, and forgot that he no longer could. In an instant he crashed to his knees on the hard dirt floor.

  Pain shot through his legs, but he ignored it, overwhelmed by a sweet new agony. He groped in the darkness until he felt her shoes, and then her legs beneath her dress, the unbearable curve of her flesh rising beneath his fingers as he reached up to her, pulling her down until she was kissing him again. Then his hands were slipping beneath her corset, trembling against her breasts, and he felt how stunningly strange they were, reshaped by the baby, large and unfamiliar and beautiful in his hands. But she straightened, vanishing beyond his reach, kissing the top of his head like a child as he knelt before her in the dark, and his shattered legs failed him: he could not rise up again.

  “I have to go home to Deborah,” she repeated in his ear as she pulled him back to his feet. “They’ve surely missed me by now. I don’t want my sister to—” She couldn’t support his weight. He sank down on the cotton bale, drowning in regret. “I’m so sorry, Jacob. I shall come back to you, I promise. I’ll come back with Deborah, when you leave the city. I shall wait for you,” he heard her whisper in the dark, as he panted for air. He could detect the pity in her voice, and he knew she said it only to comfort him. She kissed him again, but now her comfort compounded his pain. She had always been a liar.

  From his slouch on the cotton bale, he saw a tall gray rectangle of light appear as the door to the shed creaked open, dim lamps from the house and the street illuminating the room. The silhouette of her body was painted in black against the light. He took his cane from the ground and struggled to his feet. “Jeannie,” he called, but she was already turned toward the door.

  “I’ll come back,” she said. He knew better than to believe her; he had heard her say it before. She vanished, leaving him staring at the coffin with its open trapdoor. Three days later, the end of the world arrived.

  2.

  THE WORLD HAS ENDED MANY TIMES BEFORE, AS MEN LIKE OLD Isaacs of the Old World know. But when it is your first war, no matter how often you were warned, you are invariably surprised.

  The Jews of Richmond were the last to hear. It happened during the magical hour, on a bright Sunday morning when everyone else was in church. Jefferson Davis was the first to be surprised, approached in his pew at St. Paul’s with a telegram. When he read it, his face turned gray, and he rose in the middle of the sermon and hurried out of the sanctuary. The rest of the congregation soon followed, talebearers dispatched from church to church, and shortly thereafter every preacher in the city was announcing the news to the faithful. The Hebrews were still taking their Sunday walks when the Christians returned home early, rushing to pack their bags and running to the railroad depot. Jacob had remained in his rented room, but when he heard the shouting outside, he immediately loaded all the gold he still had into the various pockets of his suit and made his way to the office, where he expected Benjamin’s letter to be waiting for him.

  He usually took an omnibus between his lodgings and the government offices—a distance he would have happily walked, if he were able—but the combination of the Christian Sabbath and the Confederate apocalypse had eliminated that option. It would have been impossible regardless: the streets were jammed with every imaginable type of carriage, coach, and wagon, those already loaded unable to move because of all the furniture and belongings being carried into the streets. He made his way through the city slowly, forced to stop every thirty yards or so both by his legs and by the traffic on the sidewalks, and he grew increasingly nervous. Had Jeannie listened to him? He prayed that she had, that she and her family were long gone, though he still stared at every young woman he saw in the streets. It took him hours to traverse the distance to Capitol Square. By the time he arrived, the sidewalks were already on fire.

  Small fires, this time: pyres had been lit in front of the government offices, and soldiers were burning large bundles of documents in the street. Jacob made his way around them, glancing at the piles of papers and wondering if there might be anything in them that he ought to rescue. But it had all become moot; his very presence had become unnecessary, redundant. The only paper he needed was the one in Benjamin’s safe. He made his way into the building and limped toward Benjamin’s office. He was about to knock on Benjamin’s half-closed door when he heard Benjamin’s voice inside, speaking in French. “I have nothing in particular to say to you, but I wanted to be sure that I shook your hand before we left,” he heard Benjamin say, remembering what he had learned in French lessons years ago, in his rich boy’s life. “We shall return in three weeks. Four at the most. I appreciate your services, Monsieur.” Then the door opened, and the French consul emerged, looking utterly bewildered as he hurried down the hallway. Few people are ever prepared for the end of the world.

  Judah Benjamin was. Jacob found him seated at his desk, arranging papers in neat stacks. As Jacob entered, Benjamin slid one of the stacks into the fireplace, as routinely as though he were inserting it into a drawer. “I have been waiting for you, Rappaport,” he said, slipping another stack into the fire. “I expected you hours ago. We shall be leaving for the depot in an hour and a half.”

  “I do apologize,” Jacob replied. “There was a bit of traffic on the way.”

  The perpetual smile emerged again, Benjamin’s private shield against contempt. Jacob saw it and felt almost nostalgic. Benjamin may have been the enemy, but Jacob knew how much he had suffered, how he had borne his entire life as a burden of proof.

  “I trust that you recall the assignment I mentioned to you,” Benjamin said, and crossed the room to open the safe. The safe was empty now, Jacob saw, except for the little envelope
with Benjamin’s seal. The gold was finished; everything was finished. Benjamin handed the envelope to Jacob. “It is exceedingly urgent that this message be delivered to the courier without fail. He will be at the burial ground at Shockoe Hill at midnight. I know that I may depend on you.”

  “Of course,” Jacob said as he tucked the letter into his vest pocket—though at that very moment he was remembering the evacuation orders, thinking of how difficult it had been simply to walk across town in the crowds, and considering whether he ought instead to be heading to the depot himself. Wasn’t his work here finished too?

  It was, as far as Benjamin was concerned. Benjamin stood and reached out to shake Jacob’s hand. “I’m sorry, but I must take leave of you now. I have a great deal to accomplish in the brief time remaining,” he said. More documents to burn, Jacob assumed. “I hope we shall meet again someday, under kinder circumstances,” he added. Then, to Jacob’s surprise, Benjamin bowed to him. “I am grateful for your loyalty, Rappaport. It has been a great comfort to me to have someone here whom I could trust.”

  Jacob was speechless, but Benjamin was already ushering him to the door. “Remember me to my sister,” he said. Before Jacob could reply, he had closed the door behind him, the scent of burning paper wafting into the hallway.

  Jacob hobbled down the corridor, his last trip back to his shabby clerk’s room, and wondered what he might be able to salvage from the papers there. But the room had already been thoroughly stripped, the shelves and drawers completely emptied, the papers presumably already incinerated in the street. Nothing remained except a few unused stationery supplies. Jacob took an envelope the same size as Benjamin’s letter and slid it into his pocket. He wouldn’t be able to reseal it, but it would have to do.

  He left the building, passed the burning documents in Capitol Square, and retreated into an alley by a horses’ stable. Then he tore open the letter and began to read.

  TO BE RELEASED TO ALL AGENTS:

  INSOFAR AS THE GOVERNMENT IS CURRENTLY UNABLE TO OVERSEE THE ACTIONS OF ITS AGENTS BEHIND ENEMY LINES, IT IS HEREBY ORDERED THAT ALL OPERATIONS BE CANCELED, AND THAT NO ACTION BE TAKEN BY ANY AGENTS AGAINST THE ENEMY, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. ANY DEVIATION FROM THIS ORDER WILL BE SUBJECT TO CAPITAL CHARGES OF TREASON AGAINST THE C.S.A.

  BY ORDER OF

  J.P. BENJAMIN,

  SECRETARY OF STATE.

  The message startled him. Were there really people in the field who were still planning to kidnap Lincoln, despite it all? Or was Benjamin afraid that the agents would become rogues, that their rage couldn’t be contained without specific instructions? The latter, Jacob decided. But if the agents couldn’t be trusted to refrain from acting on their own—from going through with the kidnapping, or something even more dire—then how on earth would this mere message succeed in restraining them? The letter’s final line was painfully poignant: to what defunct court would such charges be brought? What reason would these agents have to obey such an order at all? Only loyalty, Jacob understood: delusional devotion to a lost cause. That they surely had. He slipped the letter into the new envelope, and knew that he had to deliver it.

  3.

  THE PLAGUES THAT NIGHT BEGAN IN THE GUTTERS, WITH A STREAM of spirits washing down a drain.

  Just before dusk, Jacob had had a brief and shameful change of heart: watching the people panicking in the streets, he was suddenly moved by the disgustingly human urge to save nothing but his own skin. He went to the depot in a fit of cowardice, paying fifty dollars’ gold for a ride in an overcrowded carriage. But as soon as he arrived he saw that it was hopeless. The last train, the one for the government, was already loaded past capacity, its cars labeled with makeshift placards reading STATE DEPARTMENT, TREASURY DEPARTMENT, QUARTERMASTER DEPARTMENT, and on and on. The crowds around the train were so thick that Jacob was afraid of being crushed. He considered it a sign. His last remaining hope was to make it to the burial ground before the destruction commenced, but Shockoe Hill was on the opposite side of town. He had foolishly expected to hire a coach of some sort to take him there, but when he emerged from the depot, he saw that nothing with wheels remained in the city: the desperate refugees had commandeered every vehicle left. Night had fallen, the air dark and fresh on the cool spring night. If he were to make it to the graveyard on foot by midnight, he had to set out now.

  As Jacob limped back from the depot to the center of town, he saw a Confederate soldier smash a case of whiskey and dump it onto the sidewalk. At first Jacob assumed the man was drunk. Then he noticed dozens of other men in uniform up and down the street, each doing the same thing. It was part of the evacuation orders, an attempt to keep the enemy invaders sober. Unable to keep walking without stopping to rest, Jacob sat on a stoop at the corner of Carey and 12th Streets and watched as first bottles and then barrels were carried out of various taverns and saloons and unceremoniously smashed on the street. Soon the gutters were overflowing with whiskey, brandy, and beer, the streets rimmed with rivers of liquor. It was a remarkable sight. The sight that was even more remarkable was the horde of people—at first it was only a trickle of aimless soldiers, but then the stream swelled into a crowd of men of all ages—who swarmed into the streets with pots, cups, hats, and even boots, scooping up the liquor and pouring it directly into their own mouths, even lying down on the sidewalk to slurp the elixir straight from the sewers. Jacob saw the danger coming and stood up, eager to move out of the way of the crowd. But the crowd was growing, and also growing more drunk. In minutes Jacob was being swept along 12th Street and then onto Main, struggling with his aching legs to keep himself from being trampled. Then the madness began.

  The first businesses to be robbed were the jewelry stores, followed by, of all things, the candy stores. Jacob watched as old men smashed windows, little boys screaming with glee as everyone helped themselves, throwing candy and gold out to the crowd. The dry-goods stores went next, followed by the saloons, and then the millineries. A few men broke windows at the banks, but they were disappointed: the Treasury Department had emptied them hours earlier. Jacob saw women rolling barrels of meat out of saloons, girls loading wheelbarrows with boots and hats. The government storehouses were opened, and the screams of joy and rage were deafening—in the middle of a starving city, there were immense hoards of food, entire warehouses full of flour and sugar and meat. Jacob tried to fight his way to the side as he saw men his father’s age nearly clawing the guards to death, children taking soldiers’ guns and attacking the unarmed men like animals, scratching and biting and beating them in unmatched fury while their parents pillaged the goods. He thought of the plans he had read and knew he had to hurry, but the mob had grown so thick that it was almost impossible to walk without being carried by the crowd. He spent over an hour trapped in the horde, progressing along Main Street, unable to move except by the whims of those around him. Along the edges of the throng he spotted several Union soldiers in chains, freed from the prisons when their drunken captors abandoned them; he watched as they took axes from the plundered stores and tried to chop open each other’s shackles, before giving up and descending upon the gutters themselves. He smelled smoke, and knew the fires had been lit.

  At first Jacob looked around, wondering what rampaging thief had stepped out of the mob to enjoy a cigar. The smell of burning tobacco is an intimate one. The scent alone suggests an easing of tension, a quiet moment in a saloon, in a drawing room, in a railroad car, in a barracks—a conversation replacing an argument, a secret unburdened to a friend, a comforting acknowledgment of desire and weakness: the thin wisp of tobacco smoke rising between two people is a quiet celebration of civilization over savagery. At least that was what it had always suggested to Jacob until that night, when he inhaled the overwhelming stench of entire warehouses full of tobacco bushels set aflame. The taste coated his tongue until he gagged. He looked up and saw the first flames encroaching on the night sky, even though the closest tobacco warehouse was several blocks away. And then he felt the wind begin to
blow.

  Fortunately the crowd was too drunk to run out of the way immediately; Jacob would have been trampled in an instant. But he had hardly progressed three blocks through the screaming, inebriated throngs on Main Street before he could see the fires spreading, the light of the blaze jumping from one building to another in the streets between the depot and where he now stood. He heard the clanging of bells, saw the fire brigades running, but the crowds blocked the streets; there was no way for anyone to get through, and the inferno had in any case grown too large to be contained. The city was lit like daylight; he could see the flames emerging onto 11th Street, and then onto 10th, and then onto 9th. Suddenly everyone ran.

  Jacob was grateful at first; the rush of people carried him several blocks at a pace he couldn’t have sustained on his own. Then the mob attempted to turn a corner, and he was nearly crushed. By the providence of God he found a clear path leading up 8th Street, where the drunks roamed loose, and tried to hasten his way toward Shockoe Hill, which was still several miles away. But he had been on his feet for so long that he could stay on them no longer. He found a doorway out of the reach of the throng and sank down on the threshold, leaning his back against the door. He panted for air, coughing and choking on the thick tobacco fumes until his lungs finally settled. He rested against the doorway for a long time, relishing the small blessing of that little wooden sanctuary, until he saw the building across the street from him ignite. He had not yet succeeded in struggling to his feet when the building groaned, an audible rumbling like an old man waking from a deep sleep, and exploded into a spectacular fountain of ash and flame.