All Other Nights (17 page)

He had no idea how wrong he was, Jacob thought, remembering the murder at the Passover table that spring. Eternal Tarnation was already waiting for him. But before he could reply, Caleb ran. Jacob watched his long legs flying into the woods. In seconds he was out of sight, leaving nothing but a pile of chains in the mud. Jacob turned around and retraced his steps through the forest until he had returned to the back side of the jailhouse. He made his way around the building, heading through an alley behind the jail to the street leading to the center of town. On the other end of the alleyway, Jacob saw his wife.

SHE WAS LEANING
against the gray stone building on the other side of the alley. She couldn’t have seen him with Caleb on the opposite side of the jailhouse, he understood with relief; she must have just spotted him heading toward the jail, and waited there in the alleyway for him. He hurried toward her.

“Jeannie, how—how did you know I was here?” he asked. “You know that you aren’t allowed to visit the jail.”

He glanced around the alleyway; no one else was nearby. She looked beautiful there, standing alone against a stone wall still glistening and dripping from the previous night’s rain. He leaned in to kiss her, and saw that her face was gleaming with sweat. She didn’t kiss him back.

“I followed you,” she said.

“You followed me?” He thought of their conversation the night before, and smiled. Did she want him to run away with her? “Well, the jailhouse isn’t any better than your own house, trust me. I thought I would try to see your father again, though I’m sorry to say I didn’t succeed.” Lying had become natural to him; he didn’t even think about it. As for why Jeannie was waiting for him in the alley, he was barely curious. It seemed clear that this was some sort of girlish fantasy of hers, following him into town. Maybe she had had an argument with her sisters. Of course he didn’t mind her company. “I must go to the office now; the secretary is going to wonder where I’ve been. You may walk me there, if you’d like,” he said.

She was silent. He turned to walk toward the main road, holding her hand. But she refused to move, and pulled him back. At last he faced her. “Jeannie, is everything all right?”

“Jacob, don’t go to the office,” she said. “They’re waiting for you there.”

Now he was baffled. “Who’s waiting?” he asked.

“Lottie is having you arrested.”

He stood still, and choked. “What?”

“She told me she was sending a posse for you. She’s had enough.”

He could barely breathe. “Enough of what?”

“Jacob, let’s end this charade. Lottie and I both know that you’re a Yankee spy.”

He clenched his fists, feeling the blood drain out of his head. “What on earth are you talking about?” he asked. “Jeannie, don’t be ridiculous.” But his voice was too loud, and he instantly knew that the words weren’t right. It was what Jeannie had said to William when he walked into their wedding reception with his shotgun.

Jeannie smiled. “You are a terrible actor, Jacob. And besides, I found where you hid Rose’s message in the lining of your hat.”

He gasped for air, then grabbed his hat off his head. It couldn’t possibly be true. He turned it over and started running his hands desperately under the lining. Nothing.

“I found the other messages there too, before you sent them out.”

“What—what messages?” he spat, though it was already useless. He was still standing, but she had knocked him to his knees.

“The messages you’ve been sending north. I’ve been pulling them out of your hat and putting them back in for weeks.” She grinned at him. “Sometimes I even refolded them differently, just to test you. Of course you never noticed.”

He glanced at the inside of his hat, then at Jeannie, then at the hat again. There had to be some mistake.

“Don’t worry, Jacob,” she said. “The Yankee cipher is much better than we expected. Even Rose couldn’t decipher it.”

Jacob dropped his hat. It seemed to fall slowly, slowly to the ground, landing in a mud puddle that filled a missing cobblestone.

“The message Lottie gave you about the Federal navy was pure invention. Major Stoughton didn’t tell her anything that time. If you had really sent the message on to Jackson, he would have known it was impossible. You never would have been paid. And even if someone had believed it, no one on our side would have paid you that much.”

“But Jeannie, how could you—how did you—” He didn’t even know what he wanted to ask.

“Jacob, I didn’t want you to be caught. Lottie did.”

He remembered the scene in the front room the night before, and started breathing again. Lottie?

“She wondered if you would still continue after you were married to me, if you were really that low. She even made up the story about Major Stoughton behaving despicably to her, just to see if you would be a gentleman and defend her. According to her, a real gentleman who heard something like that from his sister-in-law wouldn’t have hesitated to challenge him to a duel, considering that we don’t have any brothers and Papa is in jail. Only the worst Yankee scum would treat a lady like trash the way you did.”

Jacob bit his lip and tasted the metallic flavor of blood in his mouth. He thought of his visit to Philip, of everything Philip had said, and was petrified by a shameful fear.
Savagery is a way of life
, he heard Philip say in his head.

“A
duel
?” he asked, trying to steady his voice. “After what happened with William? But Stoughton didn’t really—she couldn’t possibly—”

“Lottie says only a coward would have responded the way you did, and that you didn’t even defend me at our wedding. You aren’t even enough of a man to serve in your own army.”

He decided to use his very last defense for his life as a man. “I
am
in the army,” he said. “I’m in the 18th Infantry Regiment of New York.”

This seemed to surprise her; her arrogant poise dissolved as he spoke. “I’m many things, Jeannie, but I’m not a coward,” he said, and winced. It sounded weak, staged, and of course it was, if not downright false. But what else could he say? “And the wedding—Jeannie, you don’t really think—I wanted you to leave, Jeannie, so that I could confront him. I saw where I could take a knife from the buffet, and I—I told you to leave, Jeannie. I tried, Jeannie, but you wouldn’t—Jeannie, you can’t possibly believe her,” he stammered. “You can’t possibly think that I would—”

But Jeannie was barely listening. “I tried to convince Lottie not to arrest you,” she said. “I tried to tell her that I could talk you out of it. But she didn’t care in the least. Lottie only wants to win. She thinks it would be retribution for our mother. I once thought that too, but not like Lottie. Nothing else matters to her. She hasn’t been happy since then, and she doesn’t want me to be happy either.”

Jacob heard her words, bewildered. In the midst of his amazement, he was suddenly honored. He had made her happy.

“Lottie was certain you were going to have me captured,” she continued, and her voice dropped. “I was sure of it too.”

Lottie’s yell was still ringing in Jacob’s ears. He imagined her screaming in the front room, watching Jeannie and Phoebe and Rose turn pale.

“But you didn’t, Jacob. You didn’t. It’s true that you didn’t send the message, but you didn’t have me captured either. I was waiting for that. But you didn’t do it. Why didn’t you do it? Don’t you know that it’s treason for you? Don’t you know you could be hanged?”

Jacob thought again of that afternoon with Rose’s message in his pocket, of almost going to the bakery, of the slave auction, of the bakery again. He thought of Phoebe’s snuffbox, of Rose’s non sequiturs, of Philip in chains, and then of Jeannie putting her ribbon in his hair, of Jeannie lying naked on the bed before him, of Jeannie sitting beside him on a frightening summer night, of the only thing she asked of him.

“I couldn’t do it,” he said.

He was surprised to see tears in her eyes. She tried to hide them, blinking as she looked down at the ground. When she looked up again, her face was blank, rigid. But she had turned pale.

“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.

A
T 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 feet. 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.