Year's Best SF 15 - By David G. Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer Page 0,24

vowels, and pronouncing them deep in his throat, that defies transcription. It was like listening to a volcano rumble.

“Take his right arm, then,” I said. “I’ll get on his left. The carriage is beyond that ridge.”

“I know where your carriage is. But, sir, I won’t put down this rifle. I don’t think that would be wise. You can help him yourself.”

I went to where Percy sat and began to lift him up. Percy startled me by saying, “No, Tom, I don’t want to go to the carriage.”

“What do you mean?” the assailant asked, before I could pose the same question.

“Do you have a name?” Percy asked him.

“Ephraim,” the man said, reluctantly.

“Ephraim, my name is Percy Camber. What did you mean when you said your son was inside this barracks?”

“I don’t like to tell you that,” Ephraim said, shifting his gaze between Percy and me.

“Percy,” I said, “you need a doctor. We’re wasting time.”

He looked at me sharply. “I’ll live a while longer. Let me talk to Ephraim, please, Tom.”

“Stand off there where I can see you, sir,” Ephraim directed. “I know this man needs a doctor. I’m not stupid. This won’t take long.”

I concluded from all this that the family of wild Negroes the landlady had warned me about was real and that they were living in the sealed barn.

Why they should want to inhabit such a place I could not say.

I stood apart while Percy, wounded as he was, held a hushed conversation with Ephraim, who had shot him.

I understood that they could talk more freely without me as an auditor. I was a white man. It was true that I worked for Percy, but that fact would not have been obvious to Ephraim any more than it had been obvious to the dozens of hotelkeepers who had assumed without asking that I was the master, and Percy was the servant. My closeness to Percy was unique and all but invisible.

After a while Ephraim allowed me to gather up my photographic gear, which had been scattered in the crisis.

I had been fascinated by photography even as a child. It had seemed like such patent magic! The magic of stopped time, places and persons rescued from their ephemeral natures. My parents had given me books containing photographs of Indian elephants, of the pyramids of Egypt, of the natural wonders of Florida.

I put my gear together and waited for Percy to finish his talk with the armed lunatic who had shot him.

The high cloud that had polluted the sky all morning had dissipated during the afternoon. The air was still scaldingly hot, but it was a touch less humid. A certain brittle clarity had set in. The light was hard, crystalline. A fine light for photography, though it was beginning to grow long.

“Percy,” I called out.

“What is it, Tom?”

“We have to leave now, before the sun gets any lower. It’s a long journey to Crib Lake.” There was a doctor at Crib Lake. I remembered seeing his shingle when we passed through that town. Some rural bonesetter, probably, a doughty relic of the mustard-plaster era. But better than no doctor at all.

Percy’s voice sounded weak; but what he said was, “We’re not finished here yet.”

“What do you mean, not finished?”

“We’ve been invited inside,” he said. “To see Ephraim’s son.”

Some bird, perhaps a mourning dove, called out from the gathering shadows among the trees where the meadow ended.

I did not want to meet Ephraim’s son. There was a dreadful aspect to the whole affair. If Ephraim’s son was in the barn, why had he not come out at the sound of gunshots and voices? (Ephraim, as far as I could tell, was an old man, and his son wasn’t likely to be an infant.) Why, for that matter, was the barracks closed and locked? To keep the world away from Ephraim’s son? Or to keep Ephraim’s son away from the world?

“What is his name?” I asked. “This son of yours.”

“Jordan,” he said.

I had married Maggie not long after I got back from Cuba. I had been trying to set up my photography business at the time. I was far from wealthy, and what resources I had I had put into my business. But there was a vogue among young women of the better type for manly veterans. I was manly enough, I suppose, or at least presentable, and I was authentically a veteran. I met Maggie when she came to my shop to sit for a portrait. I escorted her to dinner.