Year’s Best SF 15 by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer Page A

population (apart from a handful of aged reformers) paid no significant attention.
    â€œWhy dredge up all that ugliness?” Maggie had asked me.
    Nobody wants to see those pictures , Elsebeth whispered.
    Nobody but a few old scolds.
    Â 
    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.
    â€œI 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.
    â€œYou said your son was here,” I prompted him.
    â€œOh, yes, sir. Jordan’s here.”
    â€œWhere? I don’t see him.”
    Percy shot me an angry look.
    â€œHe’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.
    â€œOr at least,” Ephraim said, “from about eight foot down.”
    He found and lit a lantern.
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    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. That was good because it meant Percy could sleep in relative comfort. I had snuck down to his room, which was little more than a cubicle, and I had brought a bottle withme, although Percy refused to share it. He was an abstinent man.
    I talked freely about my mother’s fervent abolitionism and how it had hovered over my childhood like a storm cloud stitched with lightning. I told Percy how we were both the children of idealists, and so forth.
    He listened patiently, but at the end, when I had finally run down, or my jaw was too weary to continue, he rummaged through the papers he carried with him and drew out a letter that had been written to him by Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe.
    Mrs. Stowe is best remembered for her work on behalf of the China Inland Mission, but she came from an abolitionist family. Her father was the first president of the famous Lane Theological Seminary. At one point in her life she had attempted a novel meant to expose the evils of slavery, but she could not find a publisher.
    Percy handed me the woman’s letter.
    I have received your book “Every Measure Short of War,” the letter began, and it brings back terrible memories and forebodings. I remember all too distinctly what it meant to love my country in those troubled years and to tremble at the coming day of wrath.
    â€œYou want me to read this?” I asked drunkenly.
    â€œJust that next part,” Percy said.
    Perhaps because of your book, Mr. Camber , Mrs. Stowe wrote, or because of the memories it aroused, I suffered an unbearable dream last night. It was about that war. I mean the war that was so much discussed but that never took place, the war from which both North and South stepped back as from the brink of a terrible abyss.
    In my dream that precipice loomed again, and this time there was no Stephen