All Other Nights (18 page)

T
HE 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.

“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.”

Jacob remembered his time in the barrel on the way to New Orleans, the parting of the sea of memory. “I can sing it,” he said.

Now Ellis looked at him again. “You can?”

“Only in Hebrew,” Jacob added, then shrugged. He regretted mentioning it.

“That’s how Moses would’ve done it,” Ellis said. “Sing it for me.”

Jacob wondered if he really remembered it. But when he began to sing it, it was as if a different person had borrowed his voice—a person he used to be, long ago. The words flowed out in a wave of triumph, one after another, until he ended on the full crescendo: “Until Your people has passed over…to the sanctuary, O Lord, that Your hand has established—The Lord shall reign forever and ever!”

The song ended, and the person he used to be ended along with it. The world shrank down to the size of the small dark room. Avoiding Ellis’s eyes, he looked at the scar on Ellis’s neck.

“A nice song,” Ellis conceded. Jacob finally looked him in the eye, and ventured a smile. Ellis smiled back, and added, “But your singin’ is awful.”

There was a knock at the cellar door. Jacob froze in terror, but Ellis laughed. “Light and loyalty,” a man’s voice called through the locked door. Ellis got up, still laughing, and let his father in.

“SO MY REDEEMER
has arrived,” Caleb announced with a smile.

Jacob looked up at him from his seat on the wooden crate. Caleb was so tall that he couldn’t stand straight in the little room. He hunched his shoulders, his towering head shadowing the room like a reigning giant. He reached out his hands and, to Jacob’s surprise, bent down and kissed Jacob’s dirty cheeks.

“I’m so sorry to impose,” Jacob said softly, feeling his face warming again. “I found myself in a rather urgent situation today. Your son has been very gracious.”

He waited for Caleb to ask why he had come, but he didn’t. Clearly he had been trained, as Achilles Fogg had been, to ask as little as possible.

“You are always welcome here,” Caleb said. “I only regret that I wasn’t here to greet you. But I had an opportunity this evening to arrange a meeting with my wife. She was very grateful to you for passing her message along.”

Jacob was confused. “The message about the troop movements?” he asked.

Ellis poured Caleb a cup of water from the barrel. Caleb sat down on one of the crates, took the cup, and brought it to his lips. He continued drinking for a long time, making Jacob wait and watch as the Adam’s apple on his long thin neck bobbed up and down. A scar along the side of Caleb’s neck throbbed as he swallowed.

“My wife is one of General Longstreet’s slaves at his headquarters,” Caleb said. “The officers discuss everything in front of her, as though she weren’t there.”

Was the whole Confederacy littered with spies, in the form of slaves? Even if it were, what Caleb was saying still struck him as impossible. “I don’t understand,” he finally admitted. “The message was from you, not from her. You were in jail.”

Caleb was grinning now, along with Ellis. “Headquarters is on the hilltop outside of town,” Caleb said. “My wife does the officers’ laundry at headquarters, and every day she hangs different shirts on the laundry lines. Most of the time she uses the lines in the back, where nobody in the valley can see them, but if she uses the lines on the edge of the hill, then it’s a message. The number of shirts she puts out is the number of troops that are moving, in thousands. She pins them to certain parts of the line, depending on the direction the troops are moving. When the shirts are all on the left, facing the valley, that means west; all on the right means east; both sides with an empty space between them means north; and grouped in the middle means south.” Caleb grinned. “Of course she didn’t expect me to see it. She only hoped it would be noticed by someone in the League. But as it happened, our cell faced the right direction. The warden took away your father-in-law’s spectacles, but he only needs them for seeing things nearby, not for distance. He climbed onto my shoulders to look out the window, and I borrowed his eyes.” Caleb took another sip of water. “Thank you for delivering the message.”

Everything about this man cast Jacob into a state of awe. Caleb was leaning toward him now, still smiling. “Now please tell me how we can best serve you here,” he said.

The word “serve” made Jacob’s stomach sway. He glanced at Ellis and then at Caleb, his eyes running along their scars. “I don’t need anything,” he said quickly. “I don’t mean to trouble you.”

“You forget that you are my personal Moses,” Caleb said. “Now is not the time to be polite.”

Jacob sat straighter. “Really,” he said. “I—” Then he paused. There was no choice; he was trapped. He felt like flinging himself at Caleb’s feet. “I need to go back north,” he said, barely breathing. “As soon as possible.”

He was relieved when Caleb’s posture didn’t change. “That was what I needed to know,” Caleb said. “The League has sent people back over the lines many times. I can’t say it’s simple, but it can be done.” He took another long drink of water. “I would advise waiting here for two weeks, until everyone is convinced that you’ve already left. After that I can arrange your passage to Washington. You have reunited me with my family. It is the least I can do to welcome you here, and to reunite you with yours.”

“Thank you,” Jacob mumbled, though he barely understood the words. His family? Who was his family now?

“I shall put the message through that we will arrange for your return,” Caleb was saying. “Ellis will deliver it to the bakery tomorrow. Is there anything else urgent that you need to include in the message?”

Jacob thought of Jeannie stopping him in the alleyway. But he had to do it. “Yes, there is,” he said.

“Write it here,” Caleb told him. He reached into the pocket of his baggy trousers, pulling out a charcoal pencil and a swath of old newspaper and passing them to Jacob. “Don’t worry about the code. I can cipher it for you before I send it. Unless you would prefer that I not see it, of course.”

“That’s all right,” Jacob said. There was some empty space along the top of the paper, above the masthead. He began scribbling words, trying to minimize the message as he always did to make the coding easier, and this time to fit the entire message in the space before the newsprint began. He wrote quickly, pushing the pencil hard onto the thin paper, entering the words that had been burning in his brain:

MISSION COMPROMISED BY CONFIRMED CONFEDERATE AGENT CHARLOTTE LEVY. REQUEST CAPTURE OF CHARLOTTE LEVY AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.