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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 a copybook from her. I still read that Bible to this day. Jordan was proud of his letters.” Ephraim turned to me as if I, not Percy, had asked the question: “Most of these men couldn’t write nor read. Jordan didn’t just write his own name. He wrote all these names. Each and every one. A new man came in, he would ask the name and put it down as best he could. The list grew as we came and went. Many years’ worth, sir. All the prisoners talked about it, how he did that. He had no pencil or chalk, you know. He made a kind of pen or brush by chewing down sapling twigs to soften their ends. Ink he made all kind of ways. He was very clever about that. Riverbottom clay, soot, blood even. In the autumns the work crews drawing water from the river might find mushrooms which turn black when you picked them, and they brought them back to Jordan—those made fine ink, he said.”
    The pride in Ephraim’s voice was unmistakable. He marched along the wall with his lantern held high so we could see his son’s work in all its complexity. All those names, written in the space between a man’s reach and the floor. The letters were meticulously formed, the lines as level as the sea. Some of the names were whole names, some were single names, some were the kind of whimsical names given to house servants. They all ran together, to conserve space, so that in places you had to guess whether the names represented one person or two.
    . . . John Kincaid Tom Abel Fortune Bob Swift Pompey Atticus Joseph Wilson Elijah Elijah Jim Jim’s Son Rufus Moses Deerborn Moses Raffity . . .
    “I don’t know altogether why he did it,” Ephraim said. “I think it made him feel better to see the men’s names written down. Just so somebody might know we passed this way, he said.”
    Jordan lived in this barracks from eight foot down. And so did shockingly many others.
    “This is why you shot at us,” Percy whispered, a kind of awe or dread constricting his throat.
    “I make it seem dangerous up here, yes, sir, so that nobody won’t come back and take it down or burn it. And yet I suppose they will sooner or later whether I scare anybody or not. Or if not that, then the weather will wear it down. I keep it best I can against the rain, sir. I don’t let birds or animals inside. Or even the daylight, sir, because the daylight fades things, that ink of Jordan’s is sensitive to it. All be gone one day, I suppose, but I will be too, bye and bye, and yourselves as well, of course.”
    “Perhaps we can make it last a little longer,” Percy said.
    Of course I knew what he meant.
    “I’ll need light,” I said.
    The fierce, hot light of the fading day.
     
    Ephraim was anxious to help, once Percy explained the notion to him. He threw open the barracks door. He took down the wood he had tacked over the