Part 2 (1/2)

”I don't like to do that,” the black man said finally.

”There won't be any end to the trouble. But I don't suppose I have a choice, except, as you say, sir, to kill you. And that I cannot bring myself to do.”

He said these words calmly enough, but he had a way of forming his vowels, and p.r.o.nouncing 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 a.s.sailant 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, s.h.i.+fting 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 a.s.sumed without asking that I was the master, and Percy 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 s.h.i.+ngle when we pa.s.sed through that town. Some rural bone-setter, 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. 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, b.l.o.o.d.y 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 ma.s.sive 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 t.i.tle 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 antic.i.p.ated, 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 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. 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 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.

n.o.body wants to see those pictures, Elsebeth whispered.

n.o.body but a few old scolds.

It was too dark in the immense barracks to be certain, but it seemed to me there was n.o.body 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.”