Other Earths Read Free Page A

still legible, though the seasons had bleached the letters to ghosts.
    There was also the remains of a wire fence, tangled over with brambles.
    “Stop here,” Percy said.
    “Might be more ahead,” I suggested.
    “This is already more than we’ve seen elsewhere. I want a picture of that sign.”
    “I can’t guarantee it’ll be legible,” I said, given the way the sun was striking it, and the faint color of the letters, pale as chalk on the white wood.
    “Well, try,” Percy said shortly.
    So I set up my equipment and did that. For the first time in a long while, I felt as though I was earning my keep.
    The first book Percy had written was called Every Measure Short of War , and it was a history of Abolitionism from the Negro point of view.
    The one he was writing now was to be called Where Are the Three Million?
     
    I made a dozen or so exposures and put my gear back in the carriage. Percy took the reins this time and urged the horses farther up the trail. Scrub grass and runt pines closed in on both sides of us, and I found myself watching the undergrowth for motion. The landlady’s warning had come back to haunt me.
    But the woods were empty. An old stray dog paced us for a few minutes, then fell behind.
     
    My mother had once corresponded with Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, who was a well-known abolitionist at one time, though the name is now mostly forgotten. Percy had contacted my parents in order to obtain copies of that correspondence, which he had quoted in an article for the Tocsin .
    My mother, of course, was flattered, and she continued her correspondence with Percy on an occasional basis. In one of his replies Percy happened to remark that he was looking for a reliable photographer to hire for the new project he had in mind. My mother, of course, sent him to me. Perhaps she thought she was doing me a favor.
    Thus it was not money but conscience that had propelled me on this journey. Conscience, that crabbed and ecclesiastical nag, which inevitably spoke, whether I heeded it or not, in a voice much like my mother’s.
     
    The remains of Pilgassi Acres became visible as we rounded a final bend, and I was frankly astonished that so much of it remained intact. Percy Camber drew in his breath.
    Here were the administrators’ quarters (a small building with pretensions to the colonial style), as well as five huge barnlike buildings and fragments of paving stones and mortared brick where more substantial structures had been demolished.
    All silent, all empty. No glass in the small windows. A breeze like the breath from a hard-coal stove seeped around the buildings and tousled the meadow weeds that lapped at them. There was the smell of old wood that had stood in the sunlight for a long time. There was, beneath that, the smell of something less pleasant, like an abandoned latrine doused with lime and left to simmer in the heat.
    Percy was working to conceal his excitement. He pretended to be casual, but I could see that every muscle in him had gone tense.
    “Your camera, Tom,” he said, as if the scene were in some danger of evaporating before our eyes.
    “You don’t want to explore the place a little first?”
    “Not yet. I want to capture it as we see it now—from a distance, all the buildings all together.”
    And I did that. The sun, though masked by light high clouds, was a feverish nuisance over my right shoulder.
    I thought of my daughter Elsebeth. She would see these pictures some day. “What place is this?” she would ask.
    But what would I say in return?
    Any answer I could think of amounted to drilling a hole in her innocence and pouring poison in.
     
    Every Measure Short of War , the title of Percy’s first book, implied that there might have been one—a war over Abolition, that is, a war between the states. My mother agreed. “Though it was not the North that would have brought it on,” she insisted. (A conversation we had had on the eve of my marriage to Maggie.) “People forget how