All Other Nights (16 page)

T
HAT EVENING AND THE FOLLOWING MORNING, THE LEVY HOUSE
seemed unusually tense. Instead of leaving Jacob alone with Jeannie after the boarders had gone out for the evening, Lottie, Phoebe, and Rose sat down in the front room with them as Jacob told them about his visit to Philip. The girls were eager for every last detail of how he seemed to be faring, and as he had after his first visit, Jacob continued to lie as much as possible. They didn’t hear a word about his cell, or the guard, or his shackles, or anything about the business proposition he had made to Jacob. Instead, Jacob talked about Philip’s happy mood, and how well he looked as they discussed some business matters. By the time Jacob was done, the sisters must have pictured the two of them having a meeting over a few fine cigars.

Even after that conversation had exhausted itself, something about the way Lottie looked at Jacob still left him too embarrassed to retreat with Jeannie upstairs. Instead he remained in Philip’s old chair with Jeannie in the seat beside him, reading one of the newspapers he had bought on his way home. Rose was scribbling earnestly on a piece of paper, while Phoebe was whittling a new box; Lottie was knitting socks for the Rebel army. The clicking of knitting needles in the chair opposite Jacob’s made him unaccountably nervous. Jeannie was occupying herself with a needlepoint, and he couldn’t help but wonder why Jeannie hadn’t joined in Lottie’s knitting spree. Not long after Jacob had begun pretending to read the newspaper, Lottie put down her sock and looked right at him. For a while he gazed at his paper, trying to withstand her eyes, but soon he had to give in. When he finally looked up, she was grinning at him.

“What’s the news today?” Lottie asked.

“News?” Jacob asked stupidly.

“Yes, the news,” she said, and laughed out loud. “You have about five newspapers there. Surely I wouldn’t be remiss to expect you to be well-informed this evening.”

Jacob glanced at Jeannie, hoping for help. Jeannie barely looked up. The sisters had had some sort of fight, it seemed. “Oh, the news, of course,” he replied, and then improvised. “I was interested because the statehouse was supposed to pass a new tariff bill today. It could be good for the business, if it goes through. But it seems they postponed the vote.”

“Star comedy by Democrats,” Rose remarked. Her sisters ignored her.

“What about the front?” Lottie asked.

“The usual murder and mayhem,” he said, with a theatrical sigh. “But one just has to accept that by now.”

“One doesn’t have to accept anything,” Lottie said icily.

“Live not on evil!” Rose proclaimed.

Jeannie suddenly stirred, putting a hand on Jacob’s arm. He looked at her and saw that she had just understood what Lottie was asking about. “Jacob, is there any news about the Federal navy?” she asked.

“Federal navy,” Jacob mumbled, and began rustling the newspapers, just as he had seen the guard in the jailhouse rustle his when he went to visit Philip. “Federal navy,” he repeated, turning pages.

“And fear Levy,” Rose announced.

Ignoring Rose, he flipped more pages in the paper before returning Lottie’s glare. “No, nothing about the Federal Levy—I mean, the Federal navy,” he stammered. Rose giggled.

“That’s a good thing, isn’t it?” said Phoebe. “I’d heard a rumor that the Yankees were planning an attack.” Phoebe, he had noticed earlier, was the most honest of the sisters: the most loyal, and the worst liar. Lottie narrowed her eyes at her, but she simply kept whittling, with a growing smile on her face. “Thank goodness for that. I suppose anybody who was thinking about attacking us heard the Rebel yell, and turned back.”

“Belly reel,” Rose said. “Won’t lovers revolt now?”

Clearly, Phoebe thought the girls’ own Rebel yell had sent the forces away. Jacob wondered if perhaps he could convince Lottie and Jeannie of the same. While he thought of how best to try, he decided to change the subject. “Have you girls ever heard it?”

“Heard what?” asked Phoebe.

“A real Rebel yell,” he said.

“William did it for me once,” Jeannie said, then blushed as Jacob turned to her. Hearing William’s name still enraged him, and she knew it. She took his hand. “He tried to teach me how, but I couldn’t ever do it myself. Of course, I couldn’t do a lot of things he wanted me to do.” She smiled. Jacob squeezed her fingers as they curled around his hand, and felt at home.

“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.”