Authors: Dara Horn
T
HE PLAGUES THAT NIGHT BEGAN IN THE GUTTERS, WITH A STREAM
of spirits washing down a drain.
Just before dusk, Jacob had had a brief and shameful change of heart: watching the people panicking in the streets, he was suddenly moved by the disgustingly human urge to save nothing but his own skin. He went to the depot in a fit of cowardice, paying fifty dollars’ gold for a ride in an overcrowded carriage. But as soon as he arrived he saw that it was hopeless. The last train, the one for the government, was already loaded past capacity, its cars labeled with makeshift placards reading
STATE DEPARTMENT, TREASURY DEPARTMENT, QUARTERMASTER DEPARTMENT,
and on and on. The crowds around the train were so thick that Jacob was afraid of being crushed. He considered it a sign. His last remaining hope was to make it to the burial ground before the destruction commenced, but Shockoe Hill was on the opposite side of town. He had foolishly expected to hire a coach of some sort to take him there, but when he emerged from the depot, he saw that nothing with wheels remained in the city: the desperate refugees had commandeered every vehicle left. Night had fallen, the air dark and fresh on the cool spring night. If he were to make it to the graveyard on foot by midnight, he had to set out now.
As Jacob limped back from the depot to the center of town, he saw a Confederate soldier smash a case of whiskey and dump it onto the sidewalk. At first Jacob assumed the man was drunk. Then he noticed dozens of other men in uniform up and down the street, each doing the same thing. It was part of the evacuation orders, an attempt to keep the enemy invaders sober. Unable to keep walking without stopping to rest, Jacob sat on a stoop at the corner of Carey and 12th Streets and watched as first bottles and then barrels were carried out of various taverns and saloons and unceremoniously smashed on the street. Soon the gutters were overflowing with whiskey, brandy, and beer, the streets rimmed with rivers of liquor. It was a remarkable sight. The sight that was even more remarkable was the horde of people—at first it was only a trickle of aimless soldiers, but then the stream swelled into a crowd of men of all ages—who swarmed into the streets with pots, cups, hats, and even boots, scooping up the liquor and pouring it directly into their own mouths, even lying down on the sidewalk to slurp the elixir straight from the sewers. Jacob saw the danger coming and stood up, eager to move out of the way of the crowd. But the crowd was growing, and also growing more drunk. In minutes Jacob was being swept along 12th Street and then onto Main, struggling with his aching legs to keep himself from being trampled. Then the madness began.
The first businesses to be robbed were the jewelry stores, followed by, of all things, the candy stores. Jacob watched as old men smashed windows, little boys screaming with glee as everyone helped themselves, throwing candy and gold out to the crowd. The dry-goods stores went next, followed by the saloons, and then the millineries. A few men broke windows at the banks, but they were disappointed: the Treasury Department had emptied them hours earlier. Jacob saw women rolling barrels of meat out of saloons, girls loading wheelbarrows with boots and hats. The government storehouses were opened, and the screams of joy and rage were deafening—in the middle of a starving city, there were immense hoards of food, entire warehouses full of flour and sugar and meat. Jacob tried to fight his way to the side as he saw men his father’s age nearly clawing the guards to death, children taking soldiers’ guns and attacking the unarmed men like animals, scratching and biting and beating them in unmatched fury while their parents pillaged the goods. He thought of the plans he had read and knew he had to hurry, but the mob had grown so thick that it was almost impossible to walk without being carried by the crowd. He spent over an hour trapped in the horde, progressing along Main Street, unable to move except by the whims of those around him. Along the edges of the throng he spotted several Union soldiers in chains, freed from the prisons when their drunken captors abandoned them; he watched as they took axes from the plundered stores and tried to chop open each other’s shackles, before giving up and descending upon the gutters themselves. He smelled smoke, and knew the fires had been lit.
At first Jacob looked around, wondering what rampaging thief had stepped out of the mob to enjoy a cigar. The smell of burning tobacco is an intimate one. The scent alone suggests an easing of tension, a quiet moment in a saloon, in a drawing room, in a railroad car, in a barracks—a conversation replacing an argument, a secret unburdened to a friend, a comforting acknowledgment of desire and weakness: the thin wisp of tobacco smoke rising between two people is a quiet celebration of civilization over savagery. At least that was what it had always suggested to Jacob until that night, when he inhaled the overwhelming stench of entire warehouses full of tobacco bushels set aflame. The taste coated his tongue until he gagged. He looked up and saw the first flames encroaching on the night sky, even though the closest tobacco warehouse was several blocks away. And then he felt the wind begin to blow.
Fortunately the crowd was too drunk to run out of the way immediately; Jacob would have been trampled in an instant. But he had hardly progressed three blocks through the screaming, inebriated throngs on Main Street before he could see the fires spreading, the light of the blaze jumping from one building to another in the streets between the depot and where he now stood. He heard the clanging of bells, saw the fire brigades running, but the crowds blocked the streets; there was no way for anyone to get through, and the inferno had in any case grown too large to be contained. The city was lit like daylight; he could see the flames emerging onto 11th Street, and then onto 10th, and then onto 9th. Suddenly everyone ran.
Jacob was grateful at first; the rush of people carried him several blocks at a pace he couldn’t have sustained on his own. Then the mob attempted to turn a corner, and he was nearly crushed. By the providence of God he found a clear path leading up 8th Street, where the drunks roamed loose, and tried to hasten his way toward Shockoe Hill, which was still several miles away. But he had been on his feet for so long that he could stay on them no longer. He found a doorway out of the reach of the throng and sank down on the threshold, leaning his back against the door. He panted for air, coughing and choking on the thick tobacco fumes until his lungs finally settled. He rested against the doorway for a long time, relishing the small blessing of that little wooden sanctuary, until he saw the building across the street from him ignite. He had not yet succeeded in struggling to his feet when the building groaned, an audible rumbling like an old man waking from a deep sleep, and exploded into a spectacular fountain of ash and flame.
Jacob clung to the buildings on his side of the street and tried to progress, but burning debris was falling all around him now, children screaming above his head and climbing out of second-story windows. He raised his hand in front of his face and saw that he was coated with a thick layer of ash. He hobbled along the buildings until he found an alley, cutting away from the flaming street to one that was filled merely with smoke—until an ember fell into a sewer and ignited the alcohol in the gutters. Walls of flame raced along the sides of the street. Jacob stayed along the edges of the houses that hadn’t yet burned until he found another outlet, a back lane that led to an emptier road. He hobbled along it as fast as he could. This street was still full of drunks and thieves, for whom the light of the approaching fires was merely a convenient way to illuminate the stores that had yet to be pillaged. The ground was covered with shattered glass and broken crates. The plunderers, men and women and children, were covered with ashes. By the time he reached the bottom of Shockoe Hill, the people in the streets—soldiers and slaves and girls, black and white, little boys and old women, many of them drunk, all of them raving—were walking about dazed, their clothing and faces and hands and hair painted with a layer of gray soot. The effect was to erase the races, making the white people look like Negroes and the Negroes look like whites. The raging fires were mostly behind him now, though he didn’t know when the winds might change direction. He stopped to rest every ten feet or so, collapsing on stoops and doorsteps as he proceeded uphill, but he soon found that it was faster going if he crawled, arm over arm. It took an eternity. At long last, half-dead, he crawled into the cemetery.
The old burial ground was an island of silence and solitude rising above the burning city, the blaze enveloping only mortal habitations, and the ever-growing mob committed to terrorizing only the living. By now the sky glowed as though it were sunrise; the flames from the fires spread and grew brighter by the minute in the city below. Jacob clutched a tree and rose to his feet, grateful to have retained his cane. With his back to the inferno, he saw Judah Benjamin’s selected meeting point rising before him: he had arrived at the graveyard’s Hebrew half. It was stately, well-kept, with its monuments elaborately engraved in both Hebrew and English. In the light from the fires below, Jacob glanced about at the graves and saw the dates going back over a century. Here were the first Jewish families of Virginia, peacefully awaiting the messianic age as their city burned to the ground.
Just beyond the Hebrew graves, Jacob could see the tall crosses looming from the grand tombstones in the Christian cemetery, less than thirty yards away. Perhaps the two burial grounds had once been further apart, but now they were separated from each other by little more than a few wide patches of grass and a worn dirt path. Jacob limped past the Hebrew graves and across the dirt and grass divide until he was standing among the first Christian families of Virginia, peacefully awaiting the messianic age as their city burned to the ground. As he contemplated the crosses rising out of the earth, he noticed something—someone—stirring beside one of the gravestones. Jacob looked again, squinting as he breathed in ash. There, slouched like a living corpse against one of the tombstones, was his last remaining chance at American glory: John Surratt.
“R
APPAPORT! JUST WHO I WAS HOPING TO MEET ON THE NIGHT
of Armageddon. Good evening, sir. Lovely weather, isn’t it?”
Tall Little Johnny was lounging on the ground with his head and shoulders against a gravestone, observing the bright orange sky above the burning city while he smoked a corncob pipe. He had been spared the rain of ash and soot, it seemed; his worn coat looked perfectly clean. Surely he had been there for hours already, taking in the flames from a comfortable distance. Jacob watched as he twirled the pipe’s mouthpiece around the end of his mustache, calm and relaxed, as though he were lounging in his own drawing room. He looked up at Jacob and grinned.
Jacob tried to smile back, but he was too exhausted even for the minimal performance that such a smile would require. The familiar pain burned in his knees, and he couldn’t keep his footing anymore. He staggered toward Little Johnny and stumbled, his cane flailing before him. Just before falling, he caught himself on the gravestone of
EZEKIEL HANAVEE, JR., 1748–1807, FATHER AND VISIONARY
, and stabbed at the grave with his cane until the dirt yielded beneath it, balancing him on solid ground.
“So what brings you here tonight, Rappaport?” Little Johnny asked, still grinning. “Have you come to pay your respects? How thoughtful of you. I’m sure the honored dead are delighted to have your company.”
Jacob tried to speak, but he had to breathe hard for a moment before he succeeded. He panted, each painful breath reminding him of his many weaknesses before he replied. “I was told you would be leaving from here this evening,” he gasped. At last he turned and sank down to the ground, collapsing on Ezekiel Hanavee’s dry bones. As he leaned his head against the tombstone, he could still smell the city burning, the perverse fumes mingling with the intimate scent of the tobacco from Little Johnny’s corncob pipe.
Jacob continued panting as he observed Little Johnny seated on the grave beside him. On the ground next to the courier’s legs was the same dirty old satchel Jacob had seen him carrying the first time they met. Surely it was full of gold. Now Jacob noticed that Little Johnny reeked slightly of liquor, perhaps fresh from the gutters. But it seemed not to have affected his senses. He took another puff on his pipe and scrutinized Jacob’s face, his features twisting into a scowl. Suddenly he asked, “Who told you I was leaving tonight?”
Jacob looked around, glancing at the orange sky above the flaming city below. “The Secretary, of course,” he said, though in the light of the burning capital this seemed utterly irrelevant.
Little Johnny blew a ring of smoke, his boyish lips forming a perfect circle behind it. Jacob watched as the courier took the pipe and tapped out the ashes onto the gravestone behind him. Each gesture was smooth, slow, almost comically controlled. Then he looked at Jacob, and Jacob noticed the incipient fury creeping into his face. “You’ve always had it easy, haven’t you? The easy job in the office, the keys to the safe, the access to the gold. And of course he told
you
that I was supposed to leave tonight—tonight, of all the nights in the history of the world!”
Jacob braced his cane against his legs as he stretched them out on the grave, flinching from the pain. “I wasn’t aware that it was a secret,” he said, as his breathing calmed. “Mr. Benjamin simply said that—”
But Little Johnny was enraged. “Did you know that I slept here last night?”
Jacob looked at him, bewildered. Why should he know, or even care, where Little Johnny had slept last night? Tonight was the sort of night that wiped away every night that had ever come before it: last night no longer mattered; the last four years no longer mattered; the last four hundred years mattered not at all. To appease him, Jacob asked, “You slept in the cemetery?”
Little Johnny sneered. “No, in the Spotswood Hotel.” He spat on the grave he was sitting on, and resumed his screech. “Yes, in the cemetery! I slept in this graveyard, right here on this dumping ground for every goddamned dead patriot since Jamestown, and right next to a pile of dead Jews!” He waved a hand at the Hebrew cemetery just over the dirt path, its old tilted gravestones glowing from the light of the fires in the city below. “Of course, I stayed up for hours before that, waiting for a carriage that never came. Even a horse didn’t show up for me. Eventually I just fell asleep, like an abandoned corpse! ‘Sunday at midnight,’ everyone kept telling me, over and over and over again. ‘Sunday at midnight.’ ‘Sunday at midnight.’ ‘Sunday at midnight.’ Well, ‘Sunday at midnight’ was
last night
, you goddamned imbeciles! Tonight is
Monday
!”
One can become used to anything, Jacob was learning. The thick smell of burning tobacco, burning cotton, burning leather, burning meat and burning buildings was slowly becoming normal, no longer oppressing the space behind his missing eye. His head cleared as Little Johnny thrust the corncob pipe in his scarred and filthy face. “Now you had better be here to tell me when I ought to expect the transport going to Washington tonight,” Little Johnny snarled. “Because otherwise I’m going to carry you back to town myself and throw your crippled backside directly into the fires of hell.”
Jacob paused, waiting for him to calm down. Before, Jacob might have been nervous, but now he exuded patience, like a burned corpse who had all the time in the world and nothing left to fear. “I’m here to deliver a message for you, from the Secretary,” Jacob said at last, after the color had drained from Little Johnny’s narrow cheeks. “He told me that it was urgent.”
Jacob was prepared for the courier to punch him in the face, but apparently this reply intrigued him. Little Johnny watched, his rage dissolving in the smoky air, as Jacob opened the jacket of his ash-coated suit and reached into the pocket of his vest. “Urgent, is it?” Little Johnny sneered. “It seems a bit late for that.”
“I couldn’t say,” Jacob replied, and handed the open envelope to him. “I was merely told to deliver it to you before your departure, in the event of an evacuation. It would appear that the appropriate occasion has arrived.”
“Indeed,” Little Johnny conceded, and snatched the envelope from Jacob’s hands. He opened it, removing the single folded page inside. Without unfolding the letter, he peered again into the envelope before looking back at Jacob with a frown. “This message was not accompanied by any
remuneration
, was it?” he asked. He pronounced the word like a man who had never said it aloud before, proud to have it pass through his pouting lips.
Jacob grimaced. He had been afraid that he would ask. But he was prepared to pay him out of his own pocket, for the cause. “No, it was not,” Jacob told him. “If its dissemination should prove onerous, I would be pleased to assist in defraying your expenses until the government reimburses you.”
Little Johnny snorted. “Or until pigs and cows start to fly.” He proceeded to unfold the note, and Jacob held his breath as he began to read.
The courier clutched the paper in his hand for a long time, struggling as he mouthed each word. For Jacob, waiting for Little Johnny to work his way through the few lines on the page proved agonizing. Jacob watched him follow the writing with a finger—moving his lips, stumbling, returning to a word again, stuttering under his breath. After what seemed like hours, Jacob registered the moment when the written letters at last resolved in Little Johnny’s brain from cipher into sense. He looked back at Jacob, and pursed his lips.
“Who wrote this?” he asked.
The question was absurd, unless he were unable to read the signature. “The Secretary, of course,” Jacob replied, struggling to keep the condescension out of his voice.
Little Johnny looked down at the paper. “Ha!” he spat. His eyes traced through it again before he looked back at Jacob, his face locked in a terrifying scowl. “You, Rappaport, are the world’s worst liar. Any fool can see that you wrote this yourself.”
Jacob coughed, choking on ash. “Pardon me?”
“You wrote it yourself. It’s as clear as day.”
Of all the fears Jacob had in delivering this letter, he had never anticipated that it wouldn’t be believed. He swallowed, stricken. Every innocent man accused of lying secretly imagines that there must be some tribunal somewhere where provable facts are being stored and catalogued, where every right and wrong is being inscribed in a massive ledger book so that true judgment may be rendered and all slander wiped away. Jacob had no way to prove anything anymore. Nothing was left but him and Little Johnny, facing each other over the bodies of those already judged: the courier’s devotion against his.
“That’s absurd,” Jacob said.
“No, Rappaport.
This
is absurd,” Little Johnny declared, planting his finger on Benjamin’s script. “Why the devil would Benjamin ‘cancel all operations’? After everything we’ve arranged all these months? And after I’ve distributed thousands of dollars in gold?
Thousands
of dollars, Rappaport! ‘Take no action against the enemy’? What kind of sense does that make? Why on earth would he ever write that?”
It wasn’t a ridiculous question, though the answer was clear enough to Jacob: that unlike nearly everyone else in his doomed and deluded land, Judah Benjamin knew the consequences of losing a war. But that was an insight Jacob felt no need to share. “I don’t know why he wrote it,” Jacob lied. “All I know is that he did.”
“Well, all I know is that
you
did, Rappaport,” Little Johnny seethed. “And that you think I’m enough of an imbecile to believe you.”
Jacob leaned away from Little Johnny’s reddened face. Little Johnny stood up, stamping his boots on the grave. Jacob struggled to stand beside him, to avoid cowering at his feet. He hoisted himself up on Ezekiel Hanavee’s tombstone, clutching his cane and leaning back against the stone as Little Johnny railed in his face.
“I don’t know who you’re working for, or why,” Little Johnny declared. “But I wouldn’t be surprised if you were just working for whoever offered you the highest price.” Jacob saw now that Little Johnny was not only a volatile man, but also an imaginative one, the most dangerous combination. Did he know who Jacob was? Or was he merely spiteful—unmanned and enraged, like every white person in the burning city below, by the fact that he had lost? “You’re a goddamned traitor, and you always were. Benjamin only listened to you because you’re another Jew like him.” Mere spite. Jacob felt slightly reassured. He would have wondered how the courier had known, if the air weren’t quite so thick with ash. Little Johnny continued ranting. “You and him both, all of you—you’d hire yourselves out to just about anyone if the price were right. You’d sell out the whole country if the price were right, just like you’ve done in every place you’ve ever lived. You infest the whole damned world like a race of leeches. I’ve always wanted to know: what the devil is the point of you people? Are you here simply as bloodsucking parasites, or is there some greater purpose to your existence?”
Answers raced through Jacob’s mind, every answer he had ever heard: to fulfill a contract with God; to recall the pain of slavery and the shock of liberation; to accept forever the gift of free will; to sense, in every living moment, the presence and the power of the law. But for Little Johnny, he only had one answer—a simpler, less glorious version of all the others, yet a true one. “To serve our country,” he said. “Just like you.”
“Is this your idea of serving your country? By tying everyone’s hands behind their backs?”
The pain behind Jacob’s missing eye had returned. “This is Mr. Benjamin’s order,” he replied, struggling to keep his voice level. “I am merely the messenger.”
Little Johnny laughed, then spat at the ground. “That is horseshit, Rappaport. This envelope doesn’t even have his seal.”
This was true, of course. Jacob clutched his cane and steadied himself against the earth. “But the message has the Secretary’s signature,” he pointed out. “It’s in his handwriting. You ought to recognize it yourself.”
Little Johnny looked again at the letter, holding it up to the light of the eerily bright sky. Then Jacob remembered Little Johnny’s childlike print on the receipt he had asked him to write for Benjamin. Perhaps the subtleties of orthography were beyond him. As the courier squinted at the paper, Jacob detected the embarrassment in his expression, accompanied by the slightest hint of doubt. Jacob had won.
Little Johnny turned to Jacob, his eyebrows furrowed into an exaggerated sternness. “All right, Rappaport, I’ve got a proposition for you,” he announced. “If my carriage ever arrives, I’m going to take it straight to the Potomac, and from there I’m going to continue on through to Washington. Now if you really are a patriot, and Benjamin really did write this letter, then I propose that you come with me to Washington—and I shall leave it to you to convince all the agents of its veracity yourself. They’ve all received your correspondence before, so they can judge for themselves whether to believe you. But if you won’t come with me, no matter what pathetic excuse you use, then I will know who you really are. And in that case you may feel free to secure your own transportation to hell.”
It was precisely what Jacob was looking for, though, as it turned out, several hours later than he might have preferred. “Agreed,” Jacob said. “Take me with you.”
Little Johnny looked at Jacob, skeptical. Then he grinned. “All right, then,” he replied. Jacob watched as the courier folded the note and returned it to the envelope, tucking it into the inside pocket of his vest. “When the carriage arrives, you—”
Suddenly he stopped speaking. For a moment Jacob was confused, watching as his eyes searched the sky. But in the same split second, Jacob heard what Little Johnny heard: a piercing whistle, and then a strange, suffocating silence, as if the whole world had stopped.
“Holy Mother of God,” Little Johnny whispered.
And then they were both blown off the graves, as the wrath of God shook them free from the foundations of the earth.
The explosion was so deafening that it surpassed the realm of sound and became tangible, visible, as if they were clutched in a fist of thunder. For that instant, nothing existed but the awesome power of that sound. It released them from the ground, casting them both through the air before dropping them in an angry heap on a pile of soft earth just past the path dividing the Christian from the Hebrew burial grounds. Jacob cowered on the dirt, blinded by shock. When he at last pulled his head up and opened his eye, the first thing he saw in the glowing light from the fires below was an old tombstone carved with an image of two hands held together with their fingertips touching, the fingers separated into pairs—the mark for the grave of a descendant of the biblical high priest. As he regained his senses, his first conscious, illogical, and irrelevant thought was to remember that he should never have been in a cemetery to begin with.