Year's Best SF 15 - By David G. Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer Page 0,27

sympathies between us, the fact is, I suspect that in the end you might give the wrong answer to that question—and I expect you think the same of me.”

There was another difference, which I did not mention to Percy, and that was that every time I remarked on our similarities, I could hear my wife’s scornful voice saying (as she had said when I first shared the idea of this project with her), “Oh, Tom, don’t be ridiculous. You’re nothing like that Percy Camber. That’s your mother talking—all that abolitionist guilt she burdened you with. As if you need to prove you haven’t betrayed the cause, whatever the cause is, exactly.”

Maggie failed to change my mind, though what she said was true.

“From about eight feet down,” Ephraim said cryptically, lifting the lantern.

Eight feet is as high an average man can reach without standing on something. Between eight feet and the floor is the span of a man’s reach.

“You see, sir,” Ephraim said, “my son and I were held in separate barracks. The idea behind that was that a man might be less eager to escape if it meant leaving behind a son or father or uncle. The overseers said, if you run, your people will suffer for it. But when my chance come I took it. I don’t know if that’s a sin. I think about it often.” He walked toward the nearest wall, the lantern breaking up the darkness as it swayed in his grip. “This barracks here was my son’s barracks.”

“Were there many escapes?” Percy asked.

I began to see that something might have been written on the wall, though at first it looked more like an idea of writing: a text as crabbed and indecipherable as the scratchings of the Persians or the Medes.

“Yes, many,” Ephraim said, “though not many successful. At first there was fewer guards on the gates. They built the walls up, too, over time. Problem is, you get away, where is there to go? Even if you get past these sandy hills, the country’s not welcoming. And the guards had rifles, sir, the guards had dogs.”

“But you got away, Ephraim.”

“Not far away. When I escaped it was very near the last days of Pilgassi Acres.” (He pronounced it Pigassi, with a reflexive curl of contempt on his lips.) “Company men coming in from Richmond to the overseer’s house, you could hear the shouting some nights. Rations went from meat twice a week to a handful of cornmeal a day and green bacon on Sundays. They fired the little Dutch doctor who used to tend to us. Sickness come to us. They let the old ones die in place, took the bodies away to bury or burn. Pretty soon we knew what was meant to happen next. They could not keep us, sir, nor could they set us free.”

“That was when you escaped?”

“Very near the end, sir, yes, that’s when. I did not want to go without Jordan. But if I waited, I knew I’d be too weak to run. I told myself I could live in the woods and get stronger, that I would come back for Jordan when I was more myself.”

He held the lantern close to the board wall of this abandoned barracks.

Percy was suffering more from his wound now than he had seemed to when he received it, and he grimaced as I helped him follow Ephraim. We stood close to the wild man and his circle of light, though not too close—I was still conscious of his rifle and of his willingness to use it, even if he was not in a killing mood right now.

The writing on the wall consisted of names. Hundreds of names. They chased each other around the whole of the barn in tight horizontal bands.

“I expect the overseers would have let us starve if they had the time. But they were afraid federal men would come digging around. There ought to be nothing of us left to find, I think was the reasoning. By that time the cholera had taken many of us anyhow, weak and hungry as we were, and the rest…well, death is a house, Mr. Camber, with many doorways. This is my son’s name right here.”

Jordan Nash was picked out by the yellow lantern light.

“Dear God,” said Percy Camber, softly.

“I don’t think God come into it, sir.”

“Did he write his own name?”

“Oh, yes, sir. A northern lady taught us both to read, back in the Missouri camp. I had a Bible and