All Other Nights (25 page)

“Stand up,” he said.

Jacob tried to move, but couldn’t. “Help me.”

Michael lifted Jacob from the floor as though Jacob were a small boy, hoisting him up with his hands beneath Jacob’s armpits. Jacob’s side was still burning, and he winced, recoiling as Michael touched it. He could feel how Michael tried to be gentle, leaning him against his own body as he escorted him to the door and out to the dirt road that led away from the inn. After a few steps Jacob was able to walk, though slowly, with Michael’s hand gripping his bound elbow, as though they were a couple out for a stroll on the green.

The two of them walked on together through the gray predawn haze that hovered over the hanging moss. As Jacob struggled through each step, he glanced at Michael again. He was a good man, Jacob suddenly knew: devoted, loyal. All Jacob could think of at that moment was how fortunate it was—for Abigail, for Michael, for their future, in the event that delusions had consequences—that Michael Solomon looked so much like him.

T
HE TOWN WAS ON FIRE. NOT ENTIRELY, OF COURSE, NOT YET.
The buildings that the Union forces had commandeered as storehouses were being burned one by one, but only after being emptied by a kind of reverse bucket brigade of Confederate soldiers, who were tossing sacks and crates full of supplies straight out of windows and along lines of men onto waiting carts that were driven away as soon as they were filled. Once a building was emptied, it was set aflame. The only Union troops Jacob saw in town were kneeling at gunpoint outside the storehouses; apparently the masses hadn’t yet mobilized, or more likely were engaged on the other side of town, in the woods by the camp. Every now and then a shell would explode, or a tree would catch fire.

Michael escorted Jacob through this scene almost casually, as though it were an ordinary morning in Holly Springs. They barely paused, even as they passed rows of cringing captured soldiers and burning buildings. For Michael, none of it mattered except for one place, and he began pulling Jacob along faster, hauling him along the streets lined with captives until they reached the jail.

The sun had risen by then, and the world was soaked in light, smoke, and thunder. But the street where the jail stood remained relatively undisturbed. Some captured soldiers knelt in clusters on the street, but nothing was on fire. The jail was a pathetic little building, nothing more than a police station with a cell or two inside. The front door was locked, but the constable’s office facing the street had a glass window, which Michael promptly smashed with a loose cobblestone. He had just finished pulling both of them through it, mangling Jacob’s uniform and skin in the process, when a Union soldier appeared in the office doorway.

It was a boy Jacob knew in passing from the camp, from one of the newest regiments. He couldn’t have been older than fifteen. Assigned to guard the prisoner overnight, he had apparently locked himself inside the little jailhouse, too paralyzed by the call of duty to abandon his post when he had first heard the shelling, and now he was trapped.

Michael raised his gun at the boy, who was pointing a pistol at him in return. But the boy saw Jacob’s bruised, swollen face, and recognized him. Suddenly the boy began quaking in horror. He dropped his gun and raised his hands in the air. To Jacob’s astonishment, the boy started to cry uncontrollably, sobbing like a baby. “Please don’t kill me,” he begged.

Michael glanced at Jacob, and almost smiled. “This is a prisoner exchange,” he announced, his voice a parody of gruffness. “Who are you holding here?”

The boy paused, gulping. “Only a lady,” he said, his voice cracking.

“Give me the keys,” Michael told the boy. The boy backed away, cowering toward the wall. “Now.”

The boy glanced at Jacob, as if looking for approval. Jacob nodded at him, and watched as the boy’s hands tugged at his belt until he had released a ring of keys, which he threw at Michael.

Michael grabbed them out of the air, then fumbled for a moment to put them in his pocket. In the meantime the boy quickly bent down, desperately reaching for his pistol. But Michael saw it. He straightened in a fraction of a second and fired a shot high at the wall, shattering a clock into a downpour of glass and brass numbers. The boy fell to his knees, wailing, “Jesus, save me, Jesus, save me!”

“Get out,” Michael said.

The boy sobbed again and rose quickly, hurrying out the office door. Michael followed, taking the boy’s pistol off the floor and then pulling Jacob with him until they were both in the little hallway, watching the boy unlock the front door and flee into the street.

“Michael?”

Michael dropped Jacob’s elbow and rushed around the corner. By the time Jacob limped behind him, Abigail was already rising to her feet in her cell, rushing to where Michael was fitting key after key into the lock until one finally caught.

Abigail looked nothing like Jacob had ever seen her. Her hair was wild, tangled in thick clumps around her head. Her dress was stained with something—food, perhaps, or vomit. But when he saw her kissing Michael through the bars, he recognized her, and Michael too, and he felt each kiss as though it were his. It was only when Michael finally opened the door that she saw Jacob, and drew in her breath.

“The sergeant generously agreed to a trade,” Michael said. Jacob watched him as he checked her, hesitant, searching her expression. “We’re leaving him here.”

Abigail looked at Jacob, but her face betrayed nothing. “Thank you, sergeant,” she said.

Fortunately Michael couldn’t see Jacob’s face after that; he had turned Jacob around, untying his hands. “The town is surrounded,” he told Jacob as he pulled at the rope. “If you walk out that door, you’ll be taken immediately.” Jacob heard Abigail breathing behind him, and tried not to weep. “Stay here until it calms down. We’re only burning the supply houses, and it doesn’t seem like there are any on this street. If you wait here until we leave, you’ll be safe.”

In fact the shop right next to the jailhouse had been commandeered weeks ago as an ammunition dump. If Michael didn’t know this, Jacob reasoned, then his fellow Rebels didn’t either. And Jacob had seen the captives in the street and knew that what Michael said was true: walking out that door in a blue uniform, unarmed, would lead only to imprisonment or death. The boy had surely fled directly into a trap. Jacob had barely thought the matter through before he heard Abigail’s soft breathing again. He closed his eyes and felt the hard ache in the side of his head, his left eye forced shut.

Finally his hands were freed, and Michael turned him around. His face was too bruised and swollen for Michael to notice the tears in his eyes.

“We owe you everything, sergeant,” Abigail said to Jacob. “May God reward you, in the next world or in this one.”

Before Jacob could think of anything to say in return, Michael had taken her by the hand and hurried her out the door. Jacob sank down to the cold floor in the corridor outside Abigail’s cell, and accepted his reward.

THE WALK FROM
the inn had been torture, though his body only registered it now in its fullest capacity. He panted, exhausted. For a time there was a strange quiet in the air; the shelling and gunshots paused, the eye of the battle’s storm. He looked down at his uniform, torn and bloody from the trip through the shattered window, and felt his pockets to see if he had anything on his person that might be useful as he tried to make his way back. And that was when he remembered the letter.

He took it out of his pocket, looking at the front of the envelope for a moment before tearing it open to read the curled handwriting inside:

With each line his good eye grew wider, his mouth hanging open as he slowly read and reread every word. “I have cousins in Virginia,” he heard Abigail saying in his head.
Your new address at Aunt Rachel’s…
He thought of his own wedding, of talking to Jeannie’s aunt from Richmond just moments before William Williams burst through the door. Had that been her name?
Your husband was so generous…
Had his hundred-dollar bill from the command been divided, a portion of it sent to Holly Springs?
…which you sent us a full week after Yom Kippur…
A week after the day she had died in jail? But that meant—that meant—

And then he heard the thunderous roar as the earth opened its jaws and swallowed him whole.

T
HE AMMUNITION DUMP ADJACENT TO THE JAIL IN HOLLY SPRINGS
exploded just moments after Abigail and Michael fled. Later Jacob remembered the sound of the first detonation, so near that he felt it instead of hearing it—felt himself lifted and hurled through the air and then slammed and crushed against a wall, and then under a wall, a wall that caught fire. He remembered a pillar of fire rising before him, bowing down over his head as he kneeled beneath it, cowering lower and lower, prostrating himself deep into the earth. He didn’t remember the rest.

The raid on Holly Springs mattered, in the end, to almost no one. The railway lines and roads that Jacob’s regiment had been protecting were destroyed, along with vast stores of supplies. But Grant reconstructed the supply line within weeks and proceeded on to Vicksburg to great success, while Jacob lay in his bed in New York, useful as a soldier only for retreat and defeat. The only people for whom the attack made any difference at all, as it turned out, were the captured, the dead, Abigail and Michael Solomon, and Jacob.

His mother later read him the reports describing it all: how his mangled body was found, unconscious, by the burial detail, who assumed he was dead; how they noted his rank and loaded his body in with other officers’ corpses to be transported home for an officer’s burial; how someone, by the obscurest of miracles, happened to hear a moan emerge from the stack of dead bodies, and pulled him back into the land of the living. Both of his legs were shattered and he had lost his right eye, among other wounds, but for some idiotic reason, he was alive.

Five months passed before he could get out of bed. Pain was his constant companion, clasping him in bed night and day in a lover’s torrid embrace, kissing his face with its burning lips and sinking deep into his seared and branded flesh. During most of that time his face was bandaged daily, and it was usually too painful to speak. When his parents first saw him, his mother had sobbed and wailed, doubled over, screaming to the skies, “My baby! My baby!” His father had examined him in utter revulsion, afraid to approach him. When his father finally deigned to touch him, he held him only gingerly, with the tips of his fingers, his skin radiating disgust. Jacob perceived through his remaining eye, as he proceeded through the long blank months of his convalescence, that things in the household had changed. Few visitors came by, and there seemed to be only two servants left. But it was his parents who had changed the most.

His father had aged. He seemed to have lost much of his hair in the year and a half since Jacob had left; what remained of it appeared less blond and more silver, and was combed carefully across the top of his bare head. His blue eyes appeared watery, red around the rims of his eyelids. He had become thinner, too, his belly no longer protruding beneath his vest. But what had changed about him most was that he no longer smiled at Jacob, not even condescendingly. He no longer spoke to Jacob at all. He came into Jacob’s room only once a day, if that, and when he did he didn’t open his mouth. Instead he sat watching Jacob as though Jacob couldn’t see him, rendering judgment.

During those long months while he remained in bed, the only time Jacob heard his father speak was when he listened to his parents in the hall beyond his bedroom, when they both thought he was sleeping. One night outside his closed bedroom door, his mother’s voice began as a whisper and grew into an unbearable wail. When he could finally make out her words, she was sobbing.

“You did this to him, Marcus,” she cried. “You did this to him!” In his bed, Jacob cringed.

“Don’t insult me.” His father’s voice was a hard black stone. “He did this to himself.”

Jacob listened as his mother lost courage, and begged for his approval. “Please, Marcus, I—I didn’t mean—it’s just that he’s only a boy, Marcus. Please, he’s just a boy, he’s—”

He heard his father’s foot pound the floor. “I won’t accept responsibility for someone else’s foolishness.”

“Marcus, please, you’re a generous man, a reasonable man. Please, be reasonable, please, be generous, please—” She was whimpering now, cowering before him, the way Jacob remembered her. It was oddly comforting to him. “Marcus, think of yourself when you were young. You ran away from your father too.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” his father spat. “My father wanted me to spend the rest of my life in the yeshiva. It was a life sentence to prison. What I gave Jacob was an opportunity.”

“You gave him a life sentence,” his mother said, with a quaver. “And he knew it.”

“At his age I would have killed to have what he was offered.”

His mother’s voice retreated, as though her voice itself were kneeling on the floor. “Please, Marcus. At least be kind to him now, now that he’s here. You ought to at least be pleased that he won’t leave again. He—he can’t.” Jacob could hear her weeping. “Please, Marcus—”

“I’m being quite kind to him just by having him in my house,” his father said. But Jacob was shocked to hear a slight crack in his father’s voice. His father cleared his throat, and tried to speak firmly again. But his voice was a ghost of what it had been. “Another father would have rejected him, punished him. But I don’t have to punish him. God is punishing him.”

“No, Marcus.” His mother’s voice was cold now, and he could hear how much she had aged. “God is punishing you.”

It occurred to Jacob, as their voices faded, that it was the first time he had ever heard his mother say no.

Most of the time it was Jacob’s mother who stayed at his side, along with one of the remaining servants, whom his mother would direct to reapply his bandages, turn him in his bed, feed him, bathe him, and attend to his most unpleasant needs. Both he and his mother were ashamed of it. When the servant left the room, his mother held his hand and kissed the unburned side of his face. Yet even in those rare instances when the pain ebbed back, all he could see when he looked at her wide lips and her green eyes was the face of Elizabeth Hyams. And when his mother spoke to him, she invariably delivered some sort of awful, damning utterance—something which perhaps wasn’t deliberately designed to extinguish the last remaining embers of his soul, but which inevitably had precisely that effect:

“Papa and I heard about what Grant did to the Jews in Tennessee, right where you were found. It was in the Jewish newspaper here. An American embarrassment, Papa says. How you could have possibly joined the army of such a man is beyond him, he says. Papa didn’t want to tell you, but I thought you ought to know.”

“I must tell you that it has been rather difficult at the firm since you left. Papa could never find anyone to substitute for you, at least no one who could handle the accounts the way you did. The firm lost half its value in the past year alone. Papa didn’t want to tell you, but I thought you ought to know.”

“David Jonas’s company went bankrupt last summer, and the Jonases put poor Emma in an asylum. David said that you would have been her last chance at a decent existence, but now she’s in the asylum for life. Papa didn’t want to tell you, but I thought you ought to know.”

“Last year I had a letter from Aunt Elisheva—well, ‘Elizabeth,’ as you’d say—after the Union took New Orleans and she could finally write to us again. She’s lost her mind, I’m afraid. Do you remember Uncle Harry? He was always so fond of you. Well, he was murdered by one of his own slaves. Poisoned, at the seder! Can you imagine? Otto Strauss has a nephew in New Orleans and he told me it was true, but if I had only heard it from Elizabeth I’m afraid I wouldn’t have believed her, because in her letter she was clearly hysterical. She wouldn’t stop rambling on about
you
, of all people. You can’t imagine how upsetting it was for us. She’d had some sort of elaborate delusion that you had come to their house, and that you were in their army, and even that you had a dead wife in Alabama or some other such nonsense. Really it was quite outrageous. At the time we wondered if it might be true somehow, since we didn’t know where you’d gone off to, but once you came back we knew that it made no sense at all, absolutely none. I’m afraid she’s lost her mind completely after Harry’s death. I’ve written to her many times, but I haven’t heard any more from her since then. To think that Harry was murdered! By his own slave! Papa didn’t want to tell you, but I thought you ought to know.”

Even after Jacob was able to speak again, he did not want to. There was simply nothing that he could say.

Instead he retreated into his own mind, developing imaginary photographs on the blank plate of the ceiling above his bed. During the day he envisioned Abigail and Michael as he had seen them just before they left him behind, kissing through the bars of her cell in the jail. It occurred to him that he had probably only survived the explosion because he had been in the corridor, farther away from the side of the building adjacent to the ammunition stockpile; if Abigail had remained trapped in her cell, she would surely have been crushed to death. But Abigail wasn’t the one who haunted him at night. After his mother and the servants abandoned him each evening, the pain would wake him in the darkness—searing, unforgiving pain. Each time his mind would cower into delirium, and then he would see Jeannie appear on the black expanse of the ceiling, laughing.

After the wave of pain subsided, he would sometimes allow himself to remember Abigail’s letter, the haunting possibility that it had illuminated for him in the instant before the world exploded. Sometimes, when the night was darkest and the momentary relief from the pain was greatest, he would even permit himself to believe it: that somewhere in the world Jeannie was alive, and waiting for him. In the rarest of such moments, he would fall asleep, freed into the realm of total fantasy, and discover Jeannie lying naked in his bed beside him. He would invariably wake up just before touching her, in sudden and excruciating pain. Abigail’s letter, of course, had been incinerated in the fire, along with the rest of the world as he had once known it. By the end of the first year of his convalescence, he had at last managed to convince himself that the letter had never existed at all.

After he was finally able to rise from his bed, it took another four months to learn to walk again. Even once he had mastered it, he still could only manage short distances, with the help of a cane. Stairs were a special torture, possible at first only with his mother supporting him. But after what seemed like centuries of agony, a day came when he was able to get out of bed, walk through the house, lower himself down the stairs, and even limp out the front door with nothing but his cane at his side—without collapsing, and with only a deep, dull ache substituting for the searing embrace of pain. It was the eve of Yom Kippur, September 22, 1863, and he went with his father to the synagogue.

The synagogue, B’nai Jeshurun, was in a grand building on Greene Street which had been built when Jacob was six years old. In their prewar religious life, his parents generally preferred the more social events like the annual Purim parties and the Simchas Torah ball, and his father was more likely to be found at the Harmonie Club than in the synagogue. Jacob had even once heard him admit that on ordinary Sabbaths, he occasionally preferred to pay the members’ fine rather than attend. But the synagogue was nonetheless a traditional one, its grandness not intended to outshine the churches in the manner of Temple Emanu-El—the “reformed” congregation that Jacob’s parents enjoyed loathing—but rather simply to outshine the old Spanish–Portuguese synagogue farther downtown. Jacob’s last memory of it was of the high holidays when he was eighteen years old, of listening to the rabbi, Dr. Morris Raphall, give a sermon defending slavery—a long and convoluted exegesis with the unspoken purpose of preserving the union, of preventing a war in which many would die. It sparked a conflagration: it was published in national newspapers, rabbis around the country wrote their own sermons against it, and congregants came close to blows. Jacob’s father had lashed out at the rabbi for it, calling him a charlatan and a fraud, a pretentious British import whom the chief rabbi of London had been snide enough to ship off to the New World as some sort of patronizing joke, a man who knew nothing about liberty or about the country where he had so condescendingly deigned to reside, and now here he was making the whole congregation look like bigots at best and traitors at worst, they who could least afford to be either. His father was so enraged that he ought to have left the congregation for good, but that would have meant forfeiting the pleasure of remaining enraged. It shamed Jacob now to remember how irrelevant the subject had seemed to him when he was eighteen, as if they were arguing about whether people should be permitted to raise chickens on the moon without a kosher butcher. Most Jewish arguments seemed like that to him at the time. He had no idea, then, that those arguments were about how best to be human, about the most trivial and most horrifying obligations involved in repairing a broken world.

The sanctuary was crowded. Every seat was filled, and the air inside was uncomfortably warm, heavy and burdened by another year of regret. Every man in the room stared at Jacob as he entered the sanctuary, hobbling along at his father’s side, and every last one of them looked away the instant his eyes met Jacob’s, particularly the rich boys whose parents had paid the bounty and bought their way out of the war. Jacob was grateful that they arrived at their assigned seats at nearly the very last minute, so that no one was able to speak to them in the crowd. His father pulled him into a standing position as the congregation rose for the annual annulment of future vows between man and God.

It is meant to be the moment when lives are altered, when one declares one’s failures before the Eternal and tries, by anticipating future failures, to renew a damaged trust. But Jacob knew that no future failures could outweigh what he had already destroyed. The rabbi stood on the platform with two men holding Torah scrolls beside him, and the ceremony began with the traditional announcement: “By the authority of the tribunal above, and by the authority of the tribunal below, we are permitted to pray with sinners.” Jacob understood, as he glanced around the room and saw everyone avoiding his one good eye, that the words referred to him.