Eight Nights
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Summary
This is what Jack doesn’t know: that this First Night, the beginning of the year where he’ll turn 20, this brief reprieve from the war where he’s been dragged back to Shiloh for the sheer joy of celebration, is the last one he’ll truly enjoy.
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- Part 1 of Eight Nights
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“Atonement is about the ability to admit we’ve done wrong to those around us. And to ourselves. We can sin against ourselves. There is no greater damage done to the soul than the damage we do ourselves. Weep, and find forgiveness.”
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- Part 2 of Eight Nights
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“Did you ever celebrate Harvest, as a kid?” David asks, automatically, picking up the cards and tossing them back to Duncan.
Duncan just gives him the eye. “I was raised in Shiloh,” he says, “the only farm in Shiloh isn’t the kind you set up a hut and stare out into the night sky.”
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- Part 3 of Eight Nights
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There are beginnings and endings. That’s what every child learns, that the year is a beginning and an ending. Every beginning, then, follows with an ending - a new year, a turn, First Night and Second Night and bright gifts, that’s the beginning and ending for the whole world. The Atonement, the beginning and ending for the crimes of the soul, and Harvest, but Assembly, that’s the one David never grasped. It was a failure on his father’s part, he supposes, but with seven sons who would imagine one falling to the wayside?
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- Part 4 of Eight Nights
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Perhaps, what it takes, is a show of drunkeness to sharpen what is lingering below the surface.
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- Part 5 of Eight Nights
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“God does not ask us for sacrifices because he wants things, David. The reason is the struggle. Didn’t anyone ever tell you that?” Jack is holding his rifle and his mouth is a thin line, but David cannot fathom what he is disapproving of today.
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- Part 6 of Eight Nights
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There is a matter of choice and God, and God will win every time. If David leaves his post, the entire kingdom will suffer, but that is not why David will not leave. It is responsibility. As the Books had been given, so David is given, to service, to his marriage, to this ceaseless task of ruling.
“You are not the first-ripened harvest,” his mother says, when he speaks that way. “You are not an offering to God.”
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- Part 7 of Eight Nights
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Sometimes David thinks it melodramatic, to count Jack’s death in a string of calamities that fall on this day, as if the death of any man is so monumental to hold it up against the other things that have happened, the weary march of tragedies that have befallen the world of the night, or the eve, or the day after.
Series
- Part 8 of Eight Nights