The Year's Best SF 09 # 1991

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  “Can I come around and talk with you sometimes?” Gerald sat down in a chair.

  “No. I am not Roman Maitland. Get that through your thick skull, Gerald. I am a machine. And my job is finished. Roman didn’t give me any choice about that. And I’m glad. You can write directly on the screen. Write the word ‘zeugma.’ To the screen’s response write ‘atrophy.’ To the second response write ‘fair voyage.’ Goodbye, Gerald.”

  Gerald pulled a light pen from the drawer. When he wrote “zeugma” the parchment sheet said COMMAND TO ERASE MEMORY STORE. ARE YOU SURE?

  He wrote “atrophy.”

  THIS INITIATES COMPLETE ERASURE. ARE YOU ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN?

  He wrote “fair voyage.”

  ERASURE INITIATED.

  The parchment sheet flickered with internal light. One by one, the indicator lights on the field memories faded out. A distant piece of Mozart played on the speakers and faded also.

  “I’ll call the police.” Gerald looked down at his friend’s dead body, then looked back.

  On the sheet were the words COMMENCE ENTRY.

  A JUST AND LASTING PEACE

  Lois Tilton

  New writer Lois Tilton has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Aboriginal SF’, Weird Tales, Women of Darkness, Dragon, Sword & Sorceress, Borderlands II, and elsewhere. Her first novel, Vampire Winter, appeared late last year. She lives in Glen Ellyn, Illinois.

  In the moving and all-too-plausible Alternate History story that follows, she shows us that sometimes the real suffering begins only after the war is over.…

  I remember how my bare feet used to drag in the dust whenever I came up the road to the Ross place, walking slower and slower as I got near to the turn in the road. Let him not be there, I’d be thinking. Just this once. But then the front porch would come into sight, and there he’d be—Nathan’s grandpa, Captain Ross—sitting out in his old cane-bottom chair just like always, black hickory stick across his knees, as ancient as Moses and as close to the Lord.

  I’d come up those steps onto the porch just like I was about to meet the Final Judgment. And in fact, whenever I thought of the Lord, the image in my mind was the face of Captain Joseph Buckley Ross, right down to the flowing white beard and lowering eyebrows. And I figured the punishments of Hell couldn’t be any worse either than the smart of that black hickory stick coming down across the backs of my legs. He kept it by him to beat the daylights out of any Yankee who dared come on his land—or so Nathan said. My ma said it was on account of his arthritis.

  So I flinched at the crack of wood when he banged it down on the warped planks of the porch. “Stand up straight, boy! Put your shoulders back! Can’t tolerate a boy who slouches.

  “Well, what is it?” he demanded when I’d straightened up. “Don’t just stand there with your mouth open! What’s that there you’ve got?”

  “Yes, sir. No, sir.” The empty tin pail I was holding knocked against my shins. “My ma sent me to ask, could she please borrow a pail of molasses?”

  He sat back in his chair and kind of sighed. “You just go back to the kitchen and ask Miss Rachel.”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you,” I said quickly, but before I could escape, the hickory stick lowered to block my way.

  “You know your grandpa served under me in the War, boy. Never a better soldier than Sergeant James Dunbar. A damn shame to see his namesake standing here shuffling and slouching like a mollycoddle. You hear me, boy?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Got to stand up straight, look the damn Yankees right in the eye. Like your grandpa would, if he were still alive.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  When we were both barely out of shirttails, Nathan used to boast all the time about how he was named for General Forrest. Nathan Bedford Forrest Ross, he’d say, drawing out all the names. I was no more than five or six, and a sergeant seemed awfully small to me next to a general, so I’d bragged myself how I’d been named for the James brothers, the ones who shot Old Abe. Only, the next time I came up to the house, Captain Ross laid into me with his stick for denying my own grandpa’s name. Trouble was, I never knew him, nor my pa, neither, not really. Nathan was always as close to a brother as I ever had.

  “Oh, go on, then,” the captain said. “Back to the kitchen.” The stick moved aside to let me pass, and I ran down the stairs, the tin pail racketing.

  Miss Rachel, Nathan’s ma, was alone in the kitchen around the back of the house, putting up butter beans. It sure looked like hot, steamy work, standing over those boiling kettles. Her dress had a dark, damp splotch all the way down the back. I said, “Miss Rachel,” and when she turned around, I could see how her hair, going gray, was plastered against her forehead with sweat. She straightened with a hand in the small of her back, brushed her hair back, then wiped her hands on her threadbare, stained apron.

  “Afternoon, Jamie,” she said, her eyes resting on the pail. “Your ma send you?”

  “Yes, ma’am. She said to ask, could you please spare a pail of molasses?” Nervously glancing behind me to make sure no one was spying, I reached into my overall pocket and took out a single tattered greenback, folded small so you couldn’t see President Charles Sumner’s Yankee face on the bill. Looking as guilty as me, she took the money, tucked it away into an inside pocket of her apron.

  “Come on,” she said then. “I’ll get your ma her molasses.”

  I followed with the pail, trying not to look back behind me. Old Captain Ross hated the sight of the occupation currency, swore he wouldn’t have a greenback on his place. Which was just one more burden on Miss Rachel and Mr. Jeff, the ones who had to do all the work around the place. Like my ma told me, “You can’t eat pride, Jamie, no matter what men like Captain Ross will tell you. All you can do is choke on it.”

  So I stood uncomfortably shifting from one foot to the other till Miss Rachel handed back my pail, heavy now. “Careful,” she warned me. “That lid doesn’t fit quite tight.” There was something defiant in her face that reminded me of my own ma, and so I just ducked my head and said, “Yes, ma’am,” and lit out of there careful not to spill the molasses. I went around the back, to keep out of the captain’s eye, and find Nathan if I could.

  Out by the barn, I ran into Jefferson Ross bringing the mule in from the field. The mule’s head was hanging low, and I wondered how much longer it would hold out. “Afternoon, Mr. Jeff,” I called out to him, but, like always, he never said a word. Dawn to dusk he worked that farm, Mr. Jeff did, but you might not hear a word out of him from one Sunday to the next, no more than Captain Ross would ever say to him, on account of he thought his son was a coward. They were a peculiar bunch, the Rosses, that was for sure, and it made me glad sometimes that it was just Ma and me at home.

  I found Nathan like I thought I would, out in the field picking beans. He was eighteen months older than me, Nathan was, though he liked to raise it to two years, and he was starting to stretch out to the height of a grown man, all arms and legs and bones. He straightened up when I called out to him, pulled off his hat to wipe the sweat out of his face. He was a redhead, with freckles the size of dimes all over his face and arms.

  “Sure is hot!”

  “Sure is,” I agreed, and when his eyes went to the pail, I explained, “Came to borrow some ‘lasses.”

  He nodded, letting me know he knew about the greenbacks, but that he’d keep it to himself, since I was really only a go-between, anyway. “Listen, Jamie—” I could see he was all excited about something and bursting to tell it to somebody. The handle of the molasses pail was cutting into my fingers, and I set it down, right next to his half-full sack of beans. “If I show you something, you got to swear to keep it a secret.”

  “What’s the matter, don’t you trust me?”

  “All right, then, come on.” He glanced around to make sure nobody was watching us, and we lit out, going through the cornfield, the ears all swelling in the summer heat, and down into the belt of woods by the creek. It was
cool in the woods, and I thought we might go down to the creek and splash around some in the water, but instead, Nathan led me upstream a ways, to a place where the bank had been worn away to expose a shelf of limestone.

  “We’re off our property here,” he said, with the low bitterness in his voice there to remind me, in case I could forget that all this land had once belonged to Captain Ross, hundreds of acres on both sides of the creek and upstream for more than a mile. But these days, what it meant was that whatever Nathan had hidden here, the Yankees couldn’t prove who it belonged to.

  Carefully, he knelt down and lifted up a slab of the stone, revealing a narrow opening as deep as a man’s arm and maybe twice as long. There was a bundle inside, done up in oilcloth, and Nathan pulled it out, started to undo the wrappings. There was only one thing it could be, that size and shape, and it made my heart hammer, knowing I was so close to it.

  “Look at her!” Nathan pulled aside the last wrapping.

  I caught my breath. “A Sharps repeater!”

  “Grandpa gave her to me last week on my birthday. He says next spring after the planting, I can go down to Texas.” He stood there holding the rifle, glowing with pride, and I felt, like I was expected to feel, no more than a little kid next to him. He was all of thirteen and with a gun of his own, just about nearly a man and joined up with the Raiders, or at least he would be come next spring. He sighted down the barrel. “My brother Jeb says there’s a place for me in his company. My pa’s old company,” he added in a lower tone of voice.

  I nodded solemnly. This was the bond between us, that both of our fathers had been killed fighting for the Cause—mine before I was even born, his just six years ago, hanged after the raid on Shreveport. It was worse for Nathan, I think, because he could remember his pa, and his Uncle Andy, too, who was in the Yankee prison at Lexington. Of all Captain Ross’s sons, only Jeff had stayed home to work the farm, and on account of that, the captain hadn’t spoken a civil word to him since the day Nathan’s pa was hanged. “Though he’ll eat the food on his table,” my ma had said sharply once, defending Mr. Jeff.

  The trouble with Ma was, she made too much sense. But next to an almost-new Sharps repeating carbine, her words might as well have been in some foreign tongue. “Can I hold it?” I dared to ask Nathan. “Is it loaded?”

  He put it into my hands, and I held it briefly, tasting the bittersweet pangs of jealousy.

  “Come on,” Nathan said suddenly, retaking possession, and I followed him up the bank, moving Indian style like hunters through the trees and brush. The thrill of danger raced through my veins, knowing it meant prison if the Yankees ever caught us with the gun—that is, if we weren’t shot on sight. But I suppose Nathan’s father and uncles must have hunted these woods when they were boys, back before the Surrender. My own pa hadn’t even been born yet then, not until after my Grandpa James had come back from the Yankee prison camp at Fort Douglas, already half-dead with consumption, so that he died before my pa was one year old.

  We came out of the woods into a strip of hayfield, full of heat and sunshine, with grasshoppers whirring and flying up into my face. I knew where we were, and I whispered to Nathan, “Careful,” but he just shook his head for me to be quiet and follow him, and we crawled through the hay on our bellies, up to the edge of the cotton field. Down at the other end of the row, there was the figure of a black man with a hoe in his hand, chopping up and down, up and down under the hot sun.

  This was land where the Rosses had planted cotton before the War, but the captain wouldn’t grow it now—most of the white farmers wouldn’t, called it nigger’s work, even though they could have gotten a pretty good price, a lot higher than corn, anyway. Yankees had taken the land after the Surrender, parceled it out to the Rosses’ slaves, but it had long since been lost to Yankee tax speculators who hired it out on shares to grow cotton. Truth to tell, I don’t think those sharecroppers were all that much better off than we were, but that didn’t mean anything to Nathan. All he could see was the nigger on his grandpa’s land.

  Ahead of me, he was bringing up the rifle, sighting down the barrel at the man at the end of the row.…

  Oh God! The metal taste of real fear came into my mouth, and I jerked hard on Nathan’s leg, anything to stop him. Shooting a nigger, that was almost as bad as shooting a Yankee. If Nathan pulled that trigger, there’d be bluecoat soldiers everywhere like the locust plague in the Bible—beatings, jailings, and the rest of it. They’d tear the whole neighborhood apart looking for the gun, and the Ross place first of all—it being closest, and the Yankees knowing how many of the Rosses had gone off to ride with the Raiders. Nathan’s brothers both had a price on their heads, a bounty on them dead or alive. The least the bluecoats would do was burn down the barn, and most likely the house, too, even if they didn’t find anything.

  Nathan just couldn’t do it. And of course he knew it, too, and he finally lowered the gun and turned back to face me, and if I’d seen his face before, I’d have been even more scared. “It’s our land,” he whispered, almost like a hiss. “Our land!”

  My ma told me once it was the worst thing the Yankees had done, taking the land. Worse even than the vote—but then she had to explain to me about voting, how the Yankees pick who’s going to be president. But with the land gone, it was like the men had no choice but to keep on fighting, even after the Surrender. And her eyes had got that look in them that I knew she was thinking of my pa.

  But Nathan lowered the gun and followed me when I started to crawl away into the woods, and I could see when he caught up that he was looking kind of pale and scared himself. “Best get this put back away,” he said. “My ma’ll whip the hide off me if I don’t get those beans picked.”

  And then of course I recalled the pail of molasses that I’d left sitting out there in the field, and we hurried to cache the gun again and get back before we could get into even more trouble.

  On the way home, I waved to Captain Ross, but he never saw me. He was facing off into the distance beyond the creek, and I knew he was staring at the dead black chimney stacks of the big house on the land he’d owned before the War. That was another story I knew, how he came back home after eight years in the prison camp along with my grandpa, and found the Yankees had burned it down to the ground. After that, there was no forgiving for the captain, not ever, so long as he drew breath.

  It was about a week or so later when I asked my ma if I could ride into Covington with Nathan the next Saturday, it being the big market day there.

  She was at her sewing machine. “You’ll do all your chores here around the house before you go.”

  I nodded, because it was only me and Ma there in the house, and she worked too hard already—ten hours a day at the Yankee cotton mill and sewing half the night besides, mostly fancywork for rich Yankee ladies, to get a few dollars extra.

  “All right, then,” she said, keeping her eyes on her work. I glanced over at the machine, saw the white stars on blue, the red field. It was prison if she was caught making that flag, and yet never once had she hesitated to do her part, as she called it.

  “Ma?” I asked after a few minutes.

  “Jamie?”

  “Ma, in a year or so, when I’m grown … well, do you suppose I’ll go off to fight with the Raiders?”

  The treadle-driven machine never slowed as she said, “Oh, you’ll go, all right. Just like your pa did before you.”

  Somehow that answer raised more misgivings than it put to rest. “But Ma, what I mean is … would that be right?”

  This time she did look up. There were frown lines between her eyes. She was shortsighted from all her years of close work, though now that I come to think of it, she’d married my pa when she was sixteen, had me at seventeen, and so she wasn’t even thirty years old.

  “Leaving you here all alone.” I didn’t say, like Pa did. “Isn’t that what you say, that some men have to stay home? Like Mr. Jeff Ross?”

  The sound of the treadle slowed. She h
esitated, looking down at the flag she was sewing and up at me. “Jefferson Ross,” she said finally, “is an exceptional man. Enduring what he does.…”

  “But Ma, don’t folks call Mr. Jeff a yellow coward for not going off to fight?”

  “Folks know how to use their tongues more than their brains, too.” She gave me a sharp look. “I suppose you’ve been talking with Nathan, is that it?”

  “Well, yes, I guess so. Nathan’s already thirteen.”

  She sighed. “Listen, Son,” she said softly, “I never wanted your pa to go fight, either. Especially once I knew I was—you were on the way. And he promised me he wouldn’t. But we aren’t always given a choice in these things. That’s why I won’t ask you for any promises, one way or the other. One day, if you have to go, then you’ll know. And I’ll understand.”

  I swallowed. “All right, Ma.”

  She turned back to her machine. “As long as you’re going to Covington, I could use half a dozen number twelve needles. I’ll give you the money come Saturday.”

  “All right, Ma.”

  “Good, then.”

  * * *

  Come Saturday, I was over at the Ross place by sunup, in time to help Mr. Jeff load up his last few sacks of corn into the wagon. It was sweet corn, the first of the season, picked just the night before, and he looked to get a good price. There were taxes owing on the farm and supplies needed. I had my ma’s greenback folded tight in my overall pocket, there with old Captain Ross out on his chair on the porch, even that early, keeping watch in case any Yankees came down the road.

  I climbed up onto the wagon seat next to Nathan, we waved good-bye to Miss Rachel and Nathan’s sisters, then Mr. Jeff, without a word, slapped the reins down on the mule’s rump, and we were on our way.

  It was the middle of the morning before we got to Covington, all the pace the Rosses’ broken-winded old mule could manage. I’d only been to the city twice before, and I was staring around at everything: the fancy carriages, all the fine houses, the gaslights in the streets. And the tall brick smokestacks of the cottonseed mill, the big freight wagons with their teams of six, eight horses all harnessed up together. Black men driving them, too, though I knew it was the Yankees who owned the mills, just like at home.