All Other Nights (22 page)

“What?” McAllister asked. Like Jacob, he was a city boy through and through.

“Cattle feed,” Hoff said, grinning. “Feed is what keeps a bull alive, and meat is a dead bull. So feed is the opposite of meat. See? I win!”

“Congratulations,” Abigail said, and leaned even closer to him. For an instant, Hoff closed his eyes and leaned forward in a comic pose, as if waiting for a kiss. As a result, he didn’t see her back away, turning to stir the pot behind her. “You have won the right to escort Sergeant McAllister around town tomorrow afternoon.”

Hoff blinked his eyes, then gaped in genuine astonishment. After a moment he recovered in order to collapse theatrically on the bar, but he was less graceful than McAllister, and knocked his skull against the wooden counter. “Damn!” he yelped, then clutched his head with his hand. Apparently he had really hurt himself. “Pardon, miss,” he grunted.

McAllister laughed out loud. “Fallen in the line of duty,” he announced, placing his newly emptied cup on top of Hoff’s head. “The gentleman regrets that he had but one life to give for his country and his meat.” He turned to Jacob. “Samuels, would you like to venture a guess?”

Hoff raised his head, pressing the heel of one hand against his temple. “Miss, don’t bother with him,” he said, jerking his other thumb toward Jacob as he finally sat upright. “No one’s ever seen him open his mouth. The whole company calls him the ghost.”

Abigail’s lips spread into a slow smile. “This is Mississippi,” she said. “Even the dead are entitled to their opinions.” She turned to Jacob, and asked, “What is the opposite of meat?”

The candle on the bar between them lit her face and body from below. For one unimaginably precious instant, Jacob imagined Jeannie standing before him, risen from the dead, with a baby at her breast.

“Milk,” he said.

“That’s right,” Abigail replied in a whisper. The possibility of someone actually answering her had been too remote to be real. Her hands had been fidgeting with the strings of her apron, but now they were still. When she looked up, the blood had drained from her cheeks. Her face was the color of chilled white milk.

“No, not the ghost!” McAllister wailed.

“Miss, you can’t waste your affections on him!” Hoff screeched. “He’s a walking corpse!”

McAllister banged the counter with his fist. “And what kind of answer is that?
Milk
? Where’s the sense in that?”

“Who says that milk is the opposite of meat?” Hoff whined. “Where is it written?”

Abigail smiled. “I shall be honored to meet you tomorrow in the square at one o’clock, Sergeant Samuels,” she said to Jacob, and curtsied behind the bar.

“Of course,” Jacob stammered. “The honor is mine.” His voice sounded unfamiliar even to him.

“And you may escort your friends back to the barracks now,” she added, gathering their empty cups and depositing them somewhere beneath the bar. “We will be closing in a few minutes.”

“Closing?” Hoff gasped. “But it’s Friday afternoon!”

Jacob turned slightly and saw the two boys gathering dishes and hurrying them back to the kitchen, collecting money from the tables. He almost laughed.

“Yes, it’s Friday afternoon,” Abigail said. “We shall be open again tomorrow night. If you would prefer not to return to the camp, I’ve heard the whiskey is quite good at Smith’s.”

McAllister groaned as he reached into his pocket, plunking a few coins onto the bar. Abigail took them, curtsied once more, and disappeared through the door behind her.

Outside, as they left the tavern, the sun had just dropped behind the trees. The sky was purple above them as they walked down the road away from Solomon’s Inn. A quiet had descended from the branches on either side of the road, flowing down from the clouds and draining the world of worry and regret.

“How did you know that, Samuels?” McAllister asked at last. “Why is milk the opposite of meat?”

For a moment Jacob thought of trying to explain it—the biblical law against cooking a goat in its mother’s milk, the extension of the law into never mixing milk and meat, the prohibition on consuming any meal that blended birth with death—but he saw that there was no point in trying; in the end it would have explained nothing at all. And at that moment he suspected that the law itself was in fact nothing but a magic spell, inscribed into the tradition thousands of years ago for the sole purpose of being called up for duty on this Sabbath eve in Holly Springs, Mississippi, to bring him face to face with a woman who could raise the dead.

“I suppose it’s just my good luck,” he replied.

“You bastard,” McAllister said, and slapped his arm, hard enough to hurt.

“I say we go to Smith’s,” Hoff announced.

They did. But Jacob did not join them. Instead he sat down on a tree stump on the side of the road and stayed there for a long time, watching the sunlight disappear, taking the past week, the past month, the past year, and slipping them into the archive of life. When he returned to the camp that night, he fell asleep without raising his gun to his head.

T
HE NEXT DAY JACOB WENT TO LOOK FOR ABIGAIL IN FRONT OF
the post office in town, where he almost had trouble spotting her among the dozens of women who were gathered to sell what looked like the entire inventory of their homes to whatever men in blue happened to be passing by. Cartloads of books, trinkets, and especially men’s clothing were for sale. The square was crowded: Jacob’s fellow soldiers were buying up cotton socks and shirts and undergarments by the sack from the closets of the deceased. It was a cool November afternoon, bright enough to fool one into believing that spring was on the way, that this was part of the trajectory of days leading up to the brilliance of summer, when clothing and care could be sold off at a profit.

Abigail wasn’t the sort to be fooled. She was wearing a coat, though a thin one, a dark cotton cloak that was hanging open, with buttons missing. Jacob saw her leaning against the side of the post office building. She was standing with her arms folded in front of her in a very unladylike posture, which she barely bothered to adjust once he arrived. It occurred to him that there probably hadn’t been any men in town for over a year, except for slaves; all the ladies had long given up their airs, and were hardly going to return to them for the sake of the enemy invaders. Abigail had her hood pulled up over her hair, though the same errant curl still hung in front of one of her eyes. When she spotted him, she stepped away from the wall and threw back her head until the hood fell to her shoulders. As she raised her head again, she blew a puff of air up at the loose curl again until it cleared her eyebrow, freeing her face. Jacob watched this ballet of gestures and was entranced by the power it revealed: a bold woman’s casual disregard for what anyone else thought of who she was.

He bowed to her, a shallow bow that was little more than a nod, feeling strangely embarrassed by the gesture. She smiled and curtsied, stooping so low as to be ridiculous—a winking acknowledgment that their meeting itself was a kind of joke, a parody of courtship, in a town square that was a parody of a town square, in a country that was a parody of a country, in a world that was a parody of a world. Everything about her movements rendered the present situation absurd. The only way to avoid being shamed by her was to know that she was right.

He offered her his arm, and she slipped her hand into the curve of his elbow. His skin tingled as her fingers touched his sleeve. He glanced at her sideways as they began walking and saw that she was avoiding his eyes, which made him want to watch her more. Despite his enchantment, there was something repulsive about her, as if her body were ringed by an impenetrable armor. Her hand in the crook of his elbow was cold and immobile, like a cane hooked onto his sleeve. He watched the cartloads of men’s clothes passing just beyond her profile, customers holding up nightshirts whose owners had gone to sleep in the earth, and imagined one of the missing men in town taking her by the arm, escorting her through a hole in the bright fall day into a world that had disappeared.

“You know, of course, that the only reason I don’t despise you is because you’re Jewish,” she said, when they had finally left the square.

“A refreshing reversal of the attitude of nearly everyone else on the planet,” he replied. “I’m much obliged.”

She seemed surprised by this answer; it was clear that she was amused, though she didn’t want to be. He watched as she tried hard to continue looking straight ahead. “Just promise me that you weren’t at Shiloh,” she said.

“I wasn’t.”

She turned to look at him now, scrutinizing him. Her hand slipped from his arm. “I don’t believe you,” she hissed. “I already heard your regiment was there.”

“I’m new to the regiment,” he said.

She considered this. He watched as one corner of her mouth curled. “I don’t believe you,” she repeated.

“It’s true,” he said. “I used to be in the 18th New York.” He remembered telling this to Jeannie, how surprised she had been to hear it.

“A New York regiment?” Abigail asked. Now she was intrigued.

“I’m from New York City,” he explained. “I’ve only fought in Virginia until now.”

“That can’t be,” she said. “Really?”

“Yes,” he answered. After months of lies, it felt odd to tell the truth, even if only a partial truth. “I was at Manassas, and other battles in Virginia,” he said, sliding into vagueness as he bumped up against the time he spent in New Orleans and in the Levys’ house. “I’ve actually never been in a battle that we’ve won.” It had been such a long time since he had been in a battle that this particular pattern hadn’t previously occurred to him, but now he noticed it with a sense of wonderment. “Every time I’ve been in a battle, we’ve retreated.”

Abigail smiled. “Perhaps your own talents have contributed to that result,” she said.

“Undoubtedly.”

She took his arm again, and smirked. “The Union needs more men like you.”

For the first time in what felt like an eternity, Jacob laughed.

They had walked down a few smaller streets, and now they were strolling on a public green, with a church on one end and the edge of the forest on the other. Even though the weather was cool, some women were out in the bright afternoon playing croquet on the lawn, while others sat on blankets in the grass, taking their knitting and sewing labors outdoors. It was strange to observe this alternate universe, a world without men. It occurred to him that this might well become a permanent situation, that a world had been created in which free men his age were becoming a species near extinction, the entire South populated only by slaves, children, and lonely women like Abigail. Some boys ran by with a ball, not forgetting to stick out their tongues at him as they passed. A world without fathers, too. Whatever men finally grew up here would be a generation coddled by grieving and indulgent women, raised fatherless, angry and damned.

“Tell me what New York is like,” Abigail said. “I’ve never been to a city bigger than Jackson. Someone once told me that in New York there are so many horses that the streets are always flooded with manure, and nobody can even walk outside without wearing boots. Is it true?”

The idea of New York seemed utterly alien to him now. His entire life there—his parents, the company, the Jonases, the night when his father had sold him off—might as well have taken place on the other side of the moon. “When it rains, it’s beyond disgusting,” he finally said. “The dung flows like a river, and the garbage like a mighty stream.”

Abigail laughed. “It sounds lovely.”

“It is.”

“I’ve heard there are thousands of Jews there,” she said.

“Except for the ones who are busy losing battles in Virginia,” he replied, and tried to make it sound like a joke.

“My mother was from Virginia,” Abigail said, with a brightness that he wouldn’t have expected. “She only came to Mississippi after she met my father. She didn’t want to come here, but he succeeded in dragging her away. He was a very persuasive person. I still have an aunt and a few cousins there. Of course I haven’t seen any of them in years.”

The mention of her parents intrigued him. It reminded him vaguely of Jeannie, of his first real conversation with her, when she told him how her mother died. But everything in the entire world reminded him of Jeannie. “Is your mother living?” he asked.

Abigail looked across the green, at the women playing croquet, and shook her head. “There was a yellow fever epidemic a few years ago. As of this past spring I’m a full-fledged orphan. And a widow.”

This astonished him. “A widow?”

Abigail sighed. “I know. I’m not wearing a veil, and the patrons call me Miss and I never correct them. But one makes choices. I just couldn’t manage it, not with having to also manage the boys and the tavern alone. It was too difficult to compete with the other taverns in town. The only reason we aren’t starving anymore is because I’m behind the bar.”

She said this boldly, but as she understood what she had suggested, she blushed, turning away from him to look at the ground.

“My condolences for your loss,” he said softly.

She shook her head again, brushing another loose curl back behind her ear, and moved to sit down on a bench next to the church. Jacob sat down beside her. There was only an inch of space between them. He didn’t move closer, though he was surprised to find that he wanted to. “To be honest, I hardly knew him,” she said. Jacob did not know whether to believe this. “He was a distant cousin, from Jackson. His name was David Solomon. Our name is Solomon too, so I never had to take a new name. I had been friendly with David and his brother, and David had made some money in the railroad. When the inn had a dry spell, he bought it from my father. But we were only married two months when he left. He and my father were in the same regiment. They both died at Shiloh.”

There was something unspeakably sad about this, something no grief could even encompass. He thought of Jeannie again, and the baby, how two generations had been erased in an instant. He was grateful when Abigail interrupted his thoughts. “Now my brothers are the men of the house,” she said. “Rather pathetic.”

“The boys I saw at the tavern?” he asked.

She nodded. “The only thing that’s saved their lives is that they had the sense to be born after 1845. Franklin is thirteen years old, and Jefferson is eleven.”

He knew it was inappropriate, but he couldn’t help but laugh. “A very patriotic family,” he said.

Abigail smiled, a tired smile. “There was a Washington too, who was older than Frank and Jeff. But he died from the fever a few years ago, when our mother died. Though I suppose he’d be dead within a few years now anyway. And at this point it would only mean another brother for me to worry about.”

Jacob pictured this parade of miniature founding fathers, three Jewish boys named after dead patriots and a girl named after a dead president’s wife, all running a tavern in a Mississippi forest, raised to serve their neighbors and their country. “Do you have any other relatives here?” he asked.

“No. But there are about a dozen Jewish families in town. It’s really like one family now.” A dead leaf fell on her lap. She brushed it off. “My father’s family is in Jackson. I wanted to take Frank and Jeff there, when we heard about our father and my husband. It was a few months before I managed to find someone who wanted to lease the inn from me, and by then the lines had moved and Jackson was in another country. I was a fool, I should have just abandoned the place. But I always hear my father’s voice in my head, and I know he would have been devastated if I had lost it. I told you my father was persuasive. He still is. Sometimes I think that it doesn’t matter that he’s dead. I still speak with him all the time.”

Jacob looked at the women on the green, and wondered if they did the same, communicating with their missing men. Most likely they only wished they did. At that moment he noticed that Abigail had been talking to him for quite a while, and much more intimately than any woman had ever spoken to him before, other than Jeannie. “It’s a gift to be able to speak to the dead,” he said.

For a few moments she said nothing. Then she breathed in, a long breath that faded into a sigh, and folded her arms against her chest. He looked at the thin inch of wooden bench between his legs and hers, and suddenly wanted to wrap his arms around her, to prove that they both were still alive.

“I still can’t quite believe everything that’s happened in the past two years. Or even in the past six months,” she said. She was looking down at her lap now, tracing a circle on her knee with her finger. “It’s as if the world we all thought was real was just an illusion. One expects life to be difficult, but I must admit that I never expected to be widowed at the age of nineteen.”

“Neither did I,” he said.

Abigail turned to him, astounded. “Dear God,” she whispered. “Was she ill?”

“There was a hysterical episode,” he said carefully.

Abigail considered this. “And you must have been at the front when it happened,” she said, as if thinking aloud.

“I was,” he replied. It was almost true, though of course the picture it conveyed could not have been more false. He began to feel the familiar poisonous shame leaching into his body. There was no way to stop it.

“Are there—do you have children?” she asked, her voice still.

He swallowed.
Yes,
he thought,
I am a murderer—not only of my uncle and my wife, but of my baby too.
It was invariably surprising how fresh the wound was, how it never improved. “There would have been one,” he said.

Abigail looked at him. “I’m so sorry,” she murmured, almost under her breath.

“Please don’t pity me,” he said. “Trust me, I don’t deserve it.”

He hoped that she would interpret this as a casual attempt at bravery, however pathetic, but to his dismay she didn’t. She leaned toward him, intrigued. “Why don’t you deserve it?” she asked.

He said nothing, staring in horror at his knees.

“I suppose that means you killed her yourself,” she said. When he looked up, he saw she was half-grinning, the same smirk from the very first time he saw her, in her lair, behind the bar. He was awed by the sheer power of that smile, at how familiar she was with death, so intimate with it that she could make jokes with it and smirk in its face.

He paused for a moment, terrified, and then he was foolish enough to answer. “I suppose it does,” he replied.

A gust of relief blew through his chest as she laughed out loud. “It’s impossible to find a man who isn’t a murderer anymore,” she said, twisting a dark curl around her finger. “Personally I’d rather be with a murderer than be alone.”

She turned her head to look behind her, glancing up at the clock on the steeple of the church, and stood up. Without thinking, he quickly stood up beside her, his gentleman’s reflex oddly intact. He was still trying to interpret what she had just said. Was it an invitation?

“I must go home now, but I would like to see you again,” she said.

This astonished him. Before he had time to consider what it meant, she was curtsying to him, turning away. “Please come by the inn on Monday night. We close at ten o’clock. Come at half past ten.”