All Other Nights

by Dara Horn

  “They will start searching for you soon,” she said. Her tone was someone else’s now: firm and grave. But he could hear the slightest quaver in her voice. “I am going to stand right here until I can’t see you anymore.”

  He opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out. The stone wall surfaces on either side of the alleyway gleamed with runoff from the previous night’s rain, rising like walls of water on his right and on his left. She pointed to the end of the alleyway, the outlet to the woods.

  “Go, Jacob. Now, while you still can. Run.”

  For a moment he stood still, lifeless, unable to move. And then he ran, looking back over his shoulder as Jeannie disappeared.

  PART FOUR

  COME RETRIBUTION

  1.

  AT FIRST JACOB HID IN THE WOODS TO THE EAST OF THE town. He had nothing with him except what was in his pockets—which after buying Caleb wasn’t much in the way of money, and nothing at all in the way of food. It was mid-September, and for the first time since his arrival in Virginia, the air had turned cool. Once in the woods, he wandered all day long, trying to maintain a straight path to steer himself farther away from town. Soon he saw that he was running in circles. Every sound in the woods—a twig falling, a squirrel running over dried leaves on the ground, a bird rustling the branches above him—forced him to freeze in his tracks. As he stumbled through the woods, he recalled the encounter with Jeannie and felt an unexpected elation. At last he allowed himself to think it: Jeannie set me free. He came to a small clearing in the woods where he could see the town in the valley below. The river curled between the brick and stone and wooden buildings, winding its way past the town between clusters of trees that gathered like handfuls of dark, soft hair. The air tasted clean and rich in his mouth. For the first time, he saw that Virginia was beautiful. The whole world was beautiful.

  Before he enlisted, Jacob had never seen a forest except through the windows of a train. He remembered a story his Hebrew tutor once told him: that when the Jews first came to German Poland, they found the entire Talmud carved into the bark of the trees of the forest, waiting for them. Soon he found himself absurdly examining the tree trunks, hoping for a sign. He saw nothing but bark and mud, lichens and moss. After a few hours, during which he began to recognize certain trees and clearings and understood that he had barely progressed at all, hunger and exhaustion and the recent weeks of sleepless nights wore him down. He paused for a moment and at last gave in, lowering himself down onto the roots of a large tree. She set me free, he thought once more. Before he knew it, he had fallen asleep in the afternoon light.

  It was a tormented sleep. With his legs wallowing in mud, his body remembered the last time he had tried to sleep outdoors: on a retreat a few weeks before he was sent to New Orleans, the first skirmishes of the spring. The dead and the dying were just beyond the forest from where he had retreated, and all night he had listened to the wounded screaming for help, for water, for mercy, the sound of their shrieking following him in and out of dreams. Now he rolled in the mud again, tumbling into sleep, unsure whether waking or sleeping was worse. In his dreams he was running from Lottie. She was followed by hundreds of soldiers, their Rebel yells reverberating through his skull. He ran through the woods, always only a turn or two ahead of them, then tripped over a body. He glanced at the corpse and saw that it was Abraham Mendoza, his dark eyes still open, his olive-skinned face bloated with death. As he paused over Mendoza’s face, Lottie raised a rifle and fired at him, laughing. He was falling to the earth, covered with wet blood, when he woke up.

  He woke with a jolt and found himself lying on his stomach on the forest floor, his face and hands and suit covered with mud. The light in the woods had grown dim. He began walking again, wondering how much longer it would be possible to evade the search party, whether he would be able to walk all the way to Washington, how he would feed himself in the forest on the way, what he would do when darkness descended. Then, through what he could only think of as the providence of God, he came upon the cemetery.

  He had wondered what Caleb meant when he had mentioned a cemetery outside of town. The only cemetery he knew of in New Babylon was the one beside the church across from Philip’s office, a little local graveyard full of dead patriots who had donated their lives to better wars. But here, beneath a grove of willows on the edge of the woods, at the end of a narrow dirt path leading up from the valley, he had come to a small patch of earth layered with soft, long grass and brown slabs of stone. The sun had just set over the trees. In the fading daylight, Jacob thought at first that the stones were the ruins of an abandoned house. The air had turned quiet, as it does in the first weeks of fall when the days begin to shrink and vanish, rattled slightly by the nervous shivering of crickets. Brushing aside a drooping curtain of willow branches, he stood at the edge of what was clearly a little graveyard. The slabs of stone and beds of grass came sharply into focus in the twilight, and he saw, as his ancestors had once seen on the tree trunks of Europe, the Hebrew letters engraved into the stones.

  He had never been to a cemetery before New Orleans—because of his priestly descent, but also for a much simpler reason. His own grandparents were buried somewhere in Bavaria; any cemetery containing anyone his family cared about was half a world away. As far as he knew, a Rappaport had yet to die on American soil. He had grown up in a world without graves—and in a land, he now knew, that wasn’t yet fully his, unsanctified by death.

  This little graveyard was much smaller than the one in New Orleans, but the sixty or so stones in it were all quite close together, and nearly all of the graves—each labeled in both Hebrew and English—had one of only four last names: Cohen, Cardozo, Noah, and Gratz. Jacob stepped forward and onto the sleeping generations of Cohens, Cardozos, Noahs, and Gratzes who lay beneath the damp grassy soil, awaiting their resurrection from their native land at the end of days.

  For a moment he glanced about for a Levy grave, but he soon gave up. The Gratzes and Cardozos fairly owned the place; even the Noahs and the Cohens had only a toehold of three or four plots each. Gratzes in particular held dominion. The oldest grave he saw at first was a small slab of greenish stone, leaning back in its place almost to the ground. He squatted down to read the faded inscription in Hebrew and in English: RAPHAEL GRATZ. The birthdate was too covered in lichens to read, but the death date was clear: 1796. Then he noticed an even older grave, belonging to SARAH GRATZ, evidently Raphael’s BELOVED WIFE, who had died in 1784. His own grandparents likely hadn’t even been born by then, Jacob reflected in the strange quiet of the cool evening. But for Jacob, the notion of grandparents was an abstract one, contained not in people living or dead but rather in a phrase or two that his parents would occasionally mention, anecdotes that were invariably cut short and tinged with regret. He remembered his old Hebrew tutor in New York going over a passage from the Bible with him, something about Abraham buying a place to bury Sarah, her grave becoming the first piece of the promised land that the Hebrews ever owned. He pictured Raphael Gratz seventy-five years ago—a little man, he imagined, wearing ridiculous white stockings and a white powdered wig—negotiating with some farmer to buy a grave for his own Sarah in this new wilderness that had become his home. This little plot of land belonged to the Gratzes in a way that New York didn’t belong to Jacob, and perhaps never would.

  He backed away from Sarah Gratz’s grave, following the progress of half a century of Gratzes who rested in a long row under the willow trees. He came to the very last grave, a clean, upright stone at the little cemetery’s edge:

  DEBORAH LEVY

  (NEE GRATZ)

  1821–1854

  He looked at the stone, then at the ground below it, and knew who it was. Below her name were four Hebrew words, a quote from Proverbs, followed by a translation:

  WHO CAN FIND

  A WOMAN OF VALOR?

  Jacob looked at the stone for a long time. The wind blew, a gentle twilight breeze that barely stirred the fallen leaves at his f
eet. He read the words again and again: A WOMAN OF VALOR. At that moment he understood everything: Jeannie’s deceptions, Rose and Phoebe’s endless loyalty to their older sisters, Philip’s broken heart, and most of all, Lottie’s passion, her determination, her—yes, it was the right word—glory. Lottie was burning with glory, the first Hebrew glory since ancient times. It was the glory of her mother, buried in her beloved Virginia, and the glory of all of the other Gratzes, the glory of their finally finding their own promised land.

  The graveyard had darkened, the native-born dead drinking in the evening dusk. Remembering the custom his tutor had taught him, he found a pebble on the ground and placed it carefully on the grave marker, stone upon stone. Then he noticed the wooden shed at the edge of the cemetery, and saw, through a crack in a plank close to the ground, a tiny shining light.

  He watched the light, wondering if it might not simply be a reflection of something, or some sort of optical illusion, anything that did not involve a living person watching him from the shed—until he understood who it might be. He stepped carefully forward, crushing dead leaves in the cool evening air until he reached the side of the shed, where a tiny, awkward cellar door leaned against the bottom of the wall. He squatted down and pulled at the handle, but it was chained from the inside. He knocked.

  “Who’s there?” a voice asked.

  The voice didn’t sound like Caleb’s. It was higher, perhaps a woman’s, or a child’s. It reminded Jacob of when he had first arrived at the Levy house, many lifetimes ago, of his surprise when little Rose opened the door. But now he had to remember what to say next. He paused, racking his brain. It had only been hours earlier that he had bought Caleb and set him free. Was it really just a single day?

  “Friends of Uncle Abe,” Jacob said.

  “What do you want?”

  Was there more? Yes, Caleb had said something more. But what? Jacob tried to remember. Something about light.

  “Light and—” he said, and paused. Light and what? Light and liberty, surely. He almost said it, but he hesitated. No, of course not: it was something much better than that, and much harder to find.

  “Light and loyalty,” he finished, and held his breath. A chain rattled as someone unlocked the door, someone more experienced than Jacob would ever be at handling chains.

  2.

  THE PERSON WHO OPENED THE DOOR WAS ELLIS, THE NEGRO BOY who made deliveries for the bakery. He was about Rose’s height, but bone thin. He had short cropped hair and enormous dark eyes, and wore a pair of ragged gray overalls with no shirt, though the day had been cool. His feet were bare on the wooden steps that rose up from the cellar. He held a lit candle in one hand, and as Jacob took hold of the open door, he quickly lowered his other hand around it to shelter the flame, peering out into the darkening graveyard.

  “Come in,” he mumbled.

  Jacob followed the boy down the steps. As he closed the door behind him, he imagined himself dropping down below the Gratzes, burrowing into the earth.

  The boy returned the candle to a small lamp resting on a wooden crate, in the corner of a small and mostly empty room. There was a straw pallet and a blanket on the floor near the wall on the right, and four small wooden crates arranged around a larger crate on the opposite side. The large crate had a cloth draped over it, and sitting on top of it was another lampstand and a book. There was a small barrel in one corner, corked closed, and on top of the barrel were two dented tin cups and two tin bowls, one half-filled with dark yellow mush. The floor was dirt. As he looked down, he saw his own expensive mud-covered leather shoes, and the boy’s bare feet.

  The boy took a seat on one of the wooden crates next to the makeshift table and folded his arms, looking at Jacob, waiting. Something in the narrowness of his eyes reminded Jacob of Harry Hyams’s slave. Now the boy’s narrow eyes were roaming across Jacob’s chest, evaluating his watch chain, his vest, his mud-encrusted suit. Jacob felt as though he were standing across from the three officers in Washington, waiting to be judged.

  “I’m so sorry to disturb you,” he finally said. “You’re—you’re Ellis, aren’t you.”

  “Yes, Mis’r Rapp’port,” the boy said.

  Ellis must have heard his name from Fogg. The boy continued glaring at him, an unnerving gaze that made Jacob feel accused. He found himself thinking again of Rose, of her greeting him at the Levys’ door, and he felt extremely old. What a horrid world, he thought, that we are giving to these children. How will they ever build it up again?

  “Please, call me Jacob,” he said at last, then winced. He remembered the last time he had said it: a lifetime ago, to William Williams the Third.

  “Yes, Jac’b Rapp’port,” the boy replied.

  Jacob waited for the boy to say more, but it was clear that Ellis had no intention of making this conversation easy for him. “I’m so sorry to disturb you,” Jacob said again, then remembered he had already said that. His face grew hot. If I were a Negro, Jacob thought, absurdly, I would be invincible: no one would ever see me blush. He cleared his throat.

  “Caleb Johnson told me I might come here, if I needed to,” he said quickly. “I cannot thank you enough for taking me in. I assure you I wouldn’t have come unless the need were urgent. I hope you will forgive me for arriving unannounced, and accept my gratitude for your hospitality. I would like to offer you some compensation for your kindness, though I’m afraid I left town rather hastily today, without much in the way of funds.”

  He fumbled at his dirty pockets, trying to find his wallet. At last he pulled it out and opened it. There was nothing in it but a crumpled two-dollar Rebel bill. He took the bill out and placed it on the table next to the book. Now he was close enough to see the cross emblazoned on the book’s cover. Judah Benjamin’s lithographed face gazed up at him beside it.

  “We don’t want your money,” Ellis said.

  Jacob paused, humiliated. He was cowering, he knew, the old Isaacs within him seeping out again, pushing him to his knees. “Well, then, thank you again, then,” he stammered. “If Caleb—if Caleb Johnson is expected here, he—”

  The boy was still watching him. “My father’ll be here soon,” he said.

  Now Jacob was startled. “Caleb is your father?”

  Ellis smiled. “I hadn’t seen ’m since he’d been locked up. I jus’ saw ’m today.” He picked up the two-dollar bill on the table, stood, and returned the bill to Jacob’s hand. “I heard what you paid this mornin’. Seems like plenty to me,” he said.

  Jacob stared at Ellis, searching for his father’s features. He vaguely remembered the dark mark on the side of Caleb’s forehead, and glanced at the corresponding spot on Ellis’s head. Then he noticed a long, raised scar along the side of Ellis’s cheek, streaking down to his neck and shoulder. It occurred to Jacob that neither this nor Caleb’s scar were birthmarks.

  “Have some cornmeal,” Ellis said, stepping toward the barrel. “I ’ready ate some.” He uncorked the barrel and filled one of the metal cups with water. He put the cup and the half-filled bowl on the table, and waved a hand at Jacob to sit down.

  “Thank you,” Jacob said. He was still blushing as he sat on one of the crates. The cornmeal smelled disgusting, even worse than what he remembered of army food. The boy offered no fork or spoon. Jacob didn’t care. His hands were filthy, but he plunged his fingers into the gruel and ate.

  Ellis kept staring at him, then suddenly spoke. “My father tol’ me I gotta read while I wait for ’m. He’s gonna be mad if I don’t finish before he’s back. Pardon,” he said. Then he opened the Bible on the table to a page marked with a ribbon. He bowed his head down toward the book, squinting, mouthing the words very slowly as he read.

  The boy could read? Jacob nodded at him, relieved not to have to speak to him while he ate, and even more relieved that the boy wouldn’t continue watching him as he stuffed his mouth with his dirty hands. But he finished the food quickly, and it soon became awkward to watch Ellis struggling with the words.

&nbs
p; “What are you reading?” Jacob finally asked. Only after he had said it did he realize what a ridiculous question it was.

  “Word o’ the Lord,” Ellis said, without looking up.

  “So I see,” Jacob replied. He decided not to ask more. He had met more than his share of soldiers who had tried to persuade him to abandon his apparent fate of Eternal Tarnation; the persuasion process had always involved reading aloud to him about Jesus, and had never ended well. But Ellis’s Bible was opened to a place quite close to the beginning, nowhere near the second half. “Whereabouts?” Jacob asked.

  “Moses singin’ at the Red Sea. I gotta read the whole song.” Ellis looked up, then back down to where his finger rested on the text. “‘I will sing unto the Lord, for He hath proudly triumphed,’” he read aloud, his voice halting agonizingly before almost every word. He pronounced “proudly” as “proodly,” and “triumphed” as “tree-oomped.” A bead of sweat formed at his temple. “‘The horse and his rider hath He hoo—hoor—hurled into the sea.’”

  Jacob sat up, recognizing the words. It was the portion he had chanted at his bar mitzvah service, years ago. He remembered memorizing the passage and the translation, and recalled how he had thought at the time that there was something vaguely ridiculous about what he was reading. In the moment immediately after the Israelites escaped Egypt via the miraculous upending of the sea, the song barely even mentioned the parting of the water, or even the fact of liberation. Instead, all of the praise of God was for drowning the Egyptian army. He had never understood it before. He thought of the message Rose had given him, ciphered with the key-phrase come retribution. Everyone on every side was waiting for it.

  “Pharaoh’s chariots done drowned in the sea. All that,” Ellis mumbled, half to himself. “It ain’t much fun, readin’ a song nobody can sing. My father says there ain’t nobody now that knows how they used to sing it.”