Year's Best SF 15 - By David G. Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer Page 0,25

Maggie was fond of me; and I was fond of Maggie, in part because she had no political convictions or fierce unorthodox ideals. She took the world as she found it.

Elsebeth came along a year or so after the wedding. It was a difficult birth. I remember the sound of Maggie’s screams. I remember Elsebeth as a newborn, bloody in a towel, handed to me by the doctor. I wiped the remnant blood and fluid from her tiny body. She had been unspeakably beautiful.

Ephraim wore the key to the barn on a string around his neck. He applied it to the massive lock, still giving me suspicious glances. He kept his rifle in the crook of his arm as he did this. He slid the huge door open. Inside, the barn was dark. The air that wafted out was a degree or two cooler than outside, and it carried a sour tang, as of long-rotten hay or clover.

Ephraim did not call out to his son, and there was no sound inside the abandoned barracks.

Had Ephraim once held his newborn son in his arms, as I had held Elsebeth?

The last of the Liberty Lodges were closed down in 1888. Scandal had swirled around them for years, but no sweeping legal action had been taken. In part this was because the Lodges were not a monolithic enterprise; a hundred independent companies held title to them. In part it was because various state legislatures were afraid of disclosing their own involvement. The Lodges had not proved as profitable as their founders expected; the plans had not anticipated, for instance, all the ancillary costs of keeping human beings confined in what amounted to a jail (guards, walls, fences, discipline, etc.) for life. But the utility of the Lodges was undisputed, and several states had quietly subsidized them. A “full accounting,” as Percy called it, would have tainted every government south of the Mason Dixon Line and not a few above it. Old wounds might have been reopened.

The Ritter Inquiry was called by Congress when the abuses inherent in the Lodge system began to come to light, inch by inch. By that time, though, there had been many other scandals, many other inquests, and the public had grown weary of all such issues. Newspapers, apart from papers like the Tocsin, hardly touched the story. The Inquiry sealed its own evidence, the surviving Lodges were hastily dismantled, and the general population (apart from a handful of aged reformers) paid no significant attention.

“Why dredge up all that ugliness?” Maggie had asked me.

Nobody wants to see those pictures, Elsebeth whispered.

Nobody but a few old scolds.

It was too dark in the immense barracks to be certain, but it seemed to me there was nobody inside but the three of us.

“I came here with Jordan in ’78,” Ephraim said. “Jordan was twelve years old at the time. I don’t know what happened to his mama. We got separated at the Federal camp on the Kansas border. Jordan and I were housed in different buildings.”

He looked around, his eyes abstracted, and seemed to see more than an old and ruined barracks. Perhaps he could see in the dark—it was dark in here, the only light coming through the fractionally open door. All I could see was a board floor, immaculately swept, picked out in that wedge of sun. All else was shadow.

He found an old crate for Percy to sit on. The crate was the only thing like furniture I could see. There was nothing to suggest a family resided here apart from the neatness, the sealed entrances and windows, the absence of bird dung. I began to feel impatient.

“You said your son was here,” I prompted him.

“Oh, yes, sir. Jordan’s here.”

“Where? I don’t see him.”

Percy shot me an angry look.

“He’s everywhere in here,” the madman said.

Oh, I thought, it’s not Jordan, then, it’s the spirit of Jordan, or some conceit like that. This barn is a shrine the man has been keeping. I had the unpleasant idea that Jordan’s body might be tucked away in one of its shadowed corners, dry and lifeless as an old Egyptian king.

“Or at least,” Ephraim said, “from about eight foot down.”

He found and lit a lantern.

One evening in the midst of our journey through the South I had got drunk and shared with Percy, too ebulliently, my idea that we were really very much alike.

This was in Atlanta, in one of the hotels that provides separate quarters for colored servants traveling with their employers.