As she did any evening she was at her apartment by herself, Flora Hamburger waited for a knock on the door. All too often, the quiet, discreet knock didn't come. There were times these days—and, especially, these nights—when she felt lonelier than she had when she'd first got to Philadelphia almost five years before. That it was a few days before Christmas only made things worse. The whole city was in a holiday mood, which left her, a Jew, on the outside looking in.
She sat on the sofa, working her way through President Sinclair's proposed budget for the Post Office Department. It was exactly as exciting as it sounded. Did the president really need to revise the definitions for third- and fourth-class post offices? At the moment, she hadn't the faintest idea. Before long, though, the bill would come to a vote. She owed it to her constituents— she owed it to the country—to make her vote as well informed as she could.
Someone knocked on the door: the knock she'd been waiting for, the knock she'd almost given up expecting.
She sprang to her feet. Pages of the Post Office budget flew every which way. Flora noticed, but didn't care. She hurried to the door and threw it open. There stood Hosea Blackford. "Come in," Flora said, and the vice president of the United States did. She closed the door behind him, closed it and locked it.
Blackford kissed her, then said, "You'd better have something to drink in this place, dear, or I'll have to go across the hall and come back."
"I do," Flora said. "Sit down. Wait. I'll be right back." She went into the kitchen, poured him some whiskey, and then poured herself some, too.
"You are a lifesaver," he said, and gulped it down.
Flora sat down beside him. She drank her whiskey more slowly. "You look tired," she said.
To her surprise, Blackford burst into raucous laughter. "God knows why. All I do is sit in a corner and gather dust—excuse me, preside over the Senate. There's not much difference between the two, believe me. I've spent most of my life in the middle of the arena. Now ... now I'm a $12,000-a-year hatrack, is what I am."
"You knew this would happen when Sinclair picked you," Flora said.
"Of course I did. But there's a difference between knowing and actually having it happen to you." Blackford sighed. "And I wanted it when he picked me. The first Socialist vice president in the history of the United States! I'll go down in history—as a footnote, but I'll go down." His laugh was rueful. Flora thought he'd ask for another whiskey, but he didn't. All he said was, "I feel like I've already gone down in history—very ancient history."
"If you have so little to do, why haven't you stopped by here more often?" Flora's question came out sharper then she'd intended. After she'd said it, though, she was just as well pleased she'd said it as she had.
He raised an eyebrow. "Do you really want me here crying on your shoulder every night? I can't believe that."
"Of course I do!" she exclaimed, honestly astonished. And she'd astonished him—she saw as much. She wondered if they really knew each other at all, despite so much time talking, despite lying down together in her bedroom.
"Well, well," he said, and then again, in slow wonder: "Well, well." He reached out and brushed the backs of his fingers against her cheek. She didn't know whether to pull away or clutch him to her. Deciding she was lonelier than angry took only a moment. She reached for him at the same time as he reached for her.
Later, in the bedroom, she moaned beneath him, enclosed in the circle of his arms, his mouth hot and moist and urgent on her nipple. His hand helped her along as he drove deep into her. Her pleasure was just beginning to slide down from the very peak when he gasped and shuddered and spent himself.
He kissed her again, then got off her and hurried into the bathroom. From behind the door came a plop as he tossed the French letter he'd been wearing into the toilet. He was careful not to leave them in the wastebasket for the maid to find. Usually, that wet plop made her laugh. Tonight, it only reminded her how wary they had to be. She was a mistress, after all, not a wife.
Usually, she managed not to think about that. Tonight, piled onto everything else, it hit her hard, harder than it ever had before. What had she done to her life, not even realizing she was doing it? While Blackford loosed a long stream into the toilet, she rolled over onto her belly and softly began to cry.
"I've been thinking," he said, and punctuated that by flushing. Flora didn't answer. He opened the door, turned out the light, and stood there for a moment while his eyes got used to dimness again—or maybe his ears caught her quiet sobs first. He hurried over to the bed and set a hand on her back. "What on earth is the matter, dear?"
"Nothing!" Flora shrugged the hand away. She tried to stop crying, but discovered she couldn't.
"I've been thinking," Blackford repeated, and then, this time, went on: "I've been thinking we ought to figure out where we're going."
"Where are we going?" Flora asked bitterly. "Are we going anywhere?" She didn't want to roll back over. She didn't want to look at him.
"Well, that doesn't just depend on me. That depends on both of us," Blackford said. He waited for Flora to reply. When she didn't, he shrugged; she felt the mattress shake. He spoke again: "We can't very well get married, for instance, unless you want to marry me, too."
Flora's head jerked up. She swiped at her eyes with her arm— she didn't want to see Blackford, or what she could see of him in the near darkness, through a haze of tears. Gulping to try to steady her voice, she said, "Married?"
Hosea Blackford nodded. She both saw and felt him do that. "It seems to be the right thing to do, don't you think?" he said. "Heaven knows we love each other." He waited for Flora again. She knew she had to respond this time, and managed a nod. That seemed to satisfy Blackford, who went on, "All over the world, you know, when people love each other, they do get married."
"But—" The objections that filled Flora's head proved she'd been in Philadelphia, in Congress, the past five years. "If you marry me, Hosea, what will that do to your career?" She didn't just mean, If you marry me. She also meant, If you marry a Jew.
He understood her. One of the reasons she loved him was that he understood her. With another shrug, he answered, "When you're vice president, you haven't got much of a career to look forward to, anyhow. And I don't think the party will ever nominate me for president—Dakota doesn't carry enough electoral votes to make that worthwhile. So after this term, or after next term at the latest, I'm done."
"In that case, you go back to Dakota and take your old seat back," Flora declared. "Or you could, anyhow. Could you do it with a Jewish wife?"
"I don't know that I particularly want my old seat back. It seems in pretty good hands with Torvald Sveinssen, and he'll have had it for a while by the time I'm not vice president any more," Blackford said. He reached out and put his hand on her bare shoulder. This time, she let it stay. He went on, "All you've done is talk about me. What about you, Flora? How will people in New York City like it if you came home with a gentile husband?"
"I don't think it would bother them too much—the Fourteenth Ward is a solidly Socialist district," she answered. "And you wouldn't be just any gentile husband, you know. You're a good Socialist yourself—and you're the vice president."
"It could be," Blackford said. "I can see how it could be that that would do well enough for your district. But I don't have a lot of family back in Dakota. What will your family think if you go home and tell them you're marrying a gentile?"
Flora rejected the first couple of answers that sprang to mind. Her family might indeed be delighted she was marrying at all, but Hosea didn't have to know that. And her father, an immigrant tailor, might indeed be so awed she was marrying the vice president that he wouldn't say a word even if her fiance were a Mohammedan—but she doubted that. Abraham Hamburger wasn't so outspoken as either Flora or her brothers and sisters, but he never had any trouble making his opinions known.
And the question Blackford had asked cut close to the one she was asking herself: how do I feel about marrying a gentile? Somehow, she'd hardly given that a thought while they were lovers. She wondered why. Because being lovers was impermanent, something she wouldn't have to worry about forever? She didn't think that was the whole answer, but it was surely part.
She ended up answering the question in her own mind, not the one Blackford had asked: "When we have children, I want to raise them as Jews."
"Children?" Blackford started, then laughed wryly. "I'm getting a little long in the tooth to worry about children. But you're not; of course you'll want to have children." Much more to himself than to Flora, he muttered, "I won't be sorry not to wear a sheath any more, that's for sure." After a few seconds' thought, he spoke to her again: "Your faith has a stronger hold on you than mine does on me; I've been a pretty pallid excuse for an Episcopalian for a long time now. If I'm not shooting blanks after all these years, I suppose it's only fair we bring up the children your way."
That was as rational an approach to the irrational business of religion as Flora could imagine. She'd seen in Congress that Blackford approached problems in a commonsense way. She'd seen he did the same in his private life, too, but this was an important proof. She said, "I think my father and mother will get along with you just fine."
"Does that mean you'll marry me, then?"
"I think it does." Flora knew she shouldn't sound surprised at a moment like that, but couldn't help herself.
"Bully!" Blackford said softly. He took her in his arms. She felt his manhood stir a little against her flank, and tried her best to revive him. Her best turned out not to be good enough. He made a joke of it, saying, "See? This is what's liable to happen when you have an old man for a husband." Under that light tone, though, she could tell he was worried.
"It's all right," she said, but it plainly wasn't all right. She cast about for a way to reassure him, and finally found one, even if it meant coming out with the most risque thing she'd ever said in her life: "Your tongue never gets tired." She was glad the only light came from a single lamp in the front room; he couldn't possibly see her blush.
"Yes, some parts do still work better than others," Blackford said, doing his best not to sound as if he were taking things too seriously. But, however hard saying that had been, Flora was glad she'd done it. She knew she'd eased his mind.
"I didn't really expect—this," she said, and then, "I didn't expect any of this, not when I first came down from New York City. I was green as paint."
"I didn't know what to expect, either, when I met you at the Broad Street station," Blackford answered. "Lord knows I didn't expect this—but then, I didn't expect any of the wonderful things you turned out to be, in Congress or out of it."
Nobody else said things like that about Flora. She didn't know how to take them. "Thank you," she whispered. She said it again, on a slightly different note: "Thank you." The day had been long and boring. The night had been even longer, and lonely. Going to sleep was the most she'd had to look forward to. Now, in the space of an hour, her whole world had changed. That had happened once before, when she was elected to Congress. She looked forward to these changes even more.
Judge Mahlon Pitney slammed down the gavel. He looked every inch a jurist: a spare, erect, handsome gray-haired man in his early sixties, his gray eyes clear and alert. "Here is my verdict in the action Smith v. Heusinger," he said, with a glance toward the court clerk to make sure that worthy was ready to record the verdict. "It is the decision of this court that title to the property at issue in the above-entitled action does rightfully rest with the plaintiff, John Smith, who has shown right of possession sufficient to satisfy the court."
Letting out a whoop would have been undignified, unprofessional. That very nearly didn't stop Jonathan Moss, who instead reached out and shook hands with his client. John Smith looked more nearly amazed than delighted.
On the other side of the courtroom in Berlin, Ontario, Paul Heusinger stared daggers at Moss. Well he might have: Moss had just shown Judge Pitney he did not have good title to the land on which he'd built his office building—the building in which Moss had his law office. "You're gone," Heusinger mouthed. Moss nodded. He'd known he was gone whichever way the case went. At least he was going out a winner.
John Smith tugged at Moss' sleeve. "Will he appeal?" the mousy little Canadian whispered.
"Can't say for sure now," Moss whispered back. "I'd guess not, though. I think we have a solid case here—and appeals are expensive"
Back in the spectators' seats, a couple of reporters scribbled furiously. They'd been covering the case since it first showed up on the docket; occasional man-bites-dog stories appeared in the Berlin Bulletin and, Moss supposed, some other papers as well. He didn't mind—on the contrary. The stories had already brought him three or four clients much more able to pay his usual fees than John Smith was.
But for the reporters, the spectators' gallery was empty. As far as Moss could tell, Heusinger had not a friend in town. Smith probably had had friends here, but those who weren't dead were scattered. The war had been hard on Berlin.
One of the reporters asked, "Now that you have your property back, Mr. Smith, what do you aim to do with it?"
Smith looked amazed all over again. "I don't really know. I haven't really thought about it, because I didn't believe the Yanks would play fair and give it back to me. I don't suppose they would have without Mr. Moss here."
"No, that's not true, and I don't want anyone printing it," Moss said. "Americans respect the law as much as Canadians do. It wasn't a judge who said Mr. Smith has good title to that land. It was the law. And the law would have said the same thing regardless of whether Mr. Smith's attorney came from the United States or Canada "
The reporters took down what he said. If they didn't believe him, they were too businesslike to show it on their faces. John Smith, less disciplined, looked highly dubious. Moss felt dubious himself. One of the things he'd already discovered in his brief practice was that judges were not animate law books in black robes. They were human, sometimes alarmingly so.
After a little more back-and-forth with the reporters, Moss reclaimed his overcoat, hat, and galoshes from the cloakroom. In a pocket of the overcoat were mittens and earmuffs. He put them on before venturing outside. Even so, the cold tore at him. The coat that had been better than good enough for winter in Chicago was just barely good enough for winter in Ontario. He wished for a nosemuff to go with the earmuffs.
He also wished for taller rubber overshoes. As he kicked his way through the new-fallen snow toward his apartment, some of the freezing stuff got over the red-ringed tops of the galoshes and did its best to turn his ankles into icicles. He wished he would have driven his motorcar over to the courthouse. If he had, though, it was only about even money the Bucephalus would have started after sitting so long unprotected in the snow.
The people of Berlin took the weather in stride in a way even Chicagoans didn't. When it stayed this cold this long, people in Chicago complained. Complaining about the weather was as much Chicago's sport as football was America's. People up here simply went about their business. Moss didn't know whether to admire them for that or to conclude they hadn't the brains to grumble.
He hurled coal into the stove when he got into his flat, then stood in front of the black iron monstrosity till he was evenly done on all sides. He didn't have a whole lot of room to stand anywhere in the apartment. Ever since he'd started the action against his landlord, he'd been moving crates of books out of his office, anticipating that Paul Heusinger or his own client would give him the bum's rush.
"Tomorrow," he said, having picked up the habit of talking to himself down in Chicago, "tomorrow I get to find myself some new digs. Then maybe I'll be able to turn around in this place again."
He took some pork chops out of the icebox, dipped them in egg and then in flour, and fried them in a pan on the hot stove. He fried potatoes in another pan at the same time. Practice had made him a halfway decent cook—or maybe he just thought so because he'd got used to eating what he turned out.
He didn't go office hunting the next day, nor the several days after that, either. The blizzard that roared through Berlin kept even the locals off the streets. It was the sort of blizzard that sent Americans running back over the border. Moss didn't think of leaving—not more than a couple of times, anyhow—but he was damn glad he had plenty of coal in the scuttle.
"Have to start burning books if I run out," he said. He had enough books in the flat for... He looked around. "Eight or ten years, is my guess."
Despite the dreadful weather, he did get some work done. He'd already seen that the Canadians were good at keeping telegraph and telephone lines up and functioning in the teeth of the worst winter could do. The telephone in his flat rang several times a day. Somehow, the newspapers had gone out, and with them word of his victory for John Smith. Other Canadians with similar problems wanted him to give them a hand, too.
He had just headed for the bathroom to dispose of some used coffee when the telephone jangled yet again. He thought about ignoring it—anyone who really wanted him would call back— but duty defeated his bladder. Stepping over a crate, he went back to the telephone. "Jonathan Moss, attorney at law."
"Hello, Mr. Moss. I called to congratulate you for getting Mr. Smith what belongs to him."
"Thank you, ma'am." He wondered where the woman was calling from. The line had more clicks and pops on it than he would have expected from a call placed inside Berlin, but the storm might have had something to do with that, too. He waited for the woman to say more. When she didn't, he asked, "Can I do anything else for you?"
"I don't think so," she answered. "I've already found out that you aren't what I thought you were during the war. No—you may be what I thought you were, but you're more than that, too."
Moss almost dropped the telephone earpiece. "Laura," he whispered.
He didn't know if Laura Secord would hear him, but she did. "Yes, that's right," she said. "When I found out what you had done, I knew I had to come into Arthur to ring you up and say thank you."
He hadn't stirred out of doors since coming home from winning the case. Did that say she was hardier than he, or just that she was out of her tree? Moss couldn't make up his mind. Whatever else it said, it said she'd very badly wanted to telephone him. "How are you?" he asked.
"Well enough," she said. "As well as I can be with my country occupied. I'd heard you'd set up in Empire"—she would be one not to call it Berlin—"but I didn't know what sort of practice you had, and so I didn't think it right to speak to you. From the way you lent me money, I thought you were a decent man, and I am glad to see you proved me right when you had nothing else on your mind."
"Ah," he said. Then he shrugged. She could hardly have helped knowing what he'd felt about her. He'd gone up to Arthur in weather almost this bad—Christ, had it been three years ago?— to tell her so. And she'd told him to get lost.
He noticed how he thought about that as if it were in the past tense. And, he realized, some of it was. He'd been surprised — hell, he'd been flabbergasted—to have her call, but some of what he'd felt, or thought he'd felt, was missing. That flabbergasted him, too. Where did it go? Into the place where everything that doesn 't work outgoes, he thought.
Now she'd been waiting for him to say something more, and seemed nonplussed when he didn't. "When the weather gets better, maybe you could come up for a picnic, if you care to," she said. "We haven't seen each other in a long time."
Moss didn't know whether to laugh or to weep. Had she said that in 1919, he would have driven his Bucephalus through fire, never mind ice, to go to her side. But it was 1922. He'd got over some of his infatuation without quite noticing he was doing it. While he was doing that, had she grown interested in him? So it seemed.
"I'll sec what I can do," he said, which was polite, even friendly sounding, and committed him to nothing.
"All right," Laura Secord said. "I hope to see you. I'd better go now. Good-bye." She hung up. The line went dead.
Slowly, Moss set the earpiece back on its cradle. He stood staring at the telephone for a long moment before his body reminded him of what he'd been about to do before the phone rang. He took care of that, then went into the kitchen, which wasn't so overrun with books and crates as the rest of the apartment. To make up for that, it did contain several bottles of whiskey. He picked one, yanked out the cork, and looked around for a glass.
He didn't see one. "Hell with it," he said, and took a long pull straight from the bottle. He coughed a couple of times, drank again—not so much—and set the bottle down. He started to pick it up once more, but changed his mind. Instead, he shoved in the cork and put it back in the cupboard, where it would be out of sight.
"Laura Secord," he said. "My God." He started to giggle, which was surely the whiskey working. "That telephone call would shut Fred Sandburg up forever all by itself."
He didn't need Fred to tell him he'd been foolish to fall so hard. He'd figured it out all by himself. And now, if he wanted to, he had the chance to make his dreams turn real. To how many men was that given? Of them, how many would have the sense to steer clear?
He laughed out of the side of his mouth. He wasn't nearly sure he would have the sense to steer clear, or even that it was sense. As the snowstorm howling through Berlin attested, picnic weather was a long way away. Now his mind would start coming back to Laura Secord, the way his tongue kept coming back to a chipped front tooth. It hardly seemed fair. Just when he'd thought he was over her at last. ..
He'd known Arthur wasn't that far from Berlin when he started his practice here. He'd figured the John Smith case would draw wide notice. Had he hoped Laura Secord would be one of the people who noticed it? Maybe he had. He shook his head. He knew damn well he had, even if he hadn't admitted it to himself.
She'd been in his mind for five years. Now he was in hers. "What the hell am I going to do?" he muttered. "What the hell am I going to do?" His tongue found that chipped tooth again. He got very little work done the rest of the day.
Scipio hardly thought of himself by the name he'd been born with these days. His passbook called him Xerxes. His boss called him Xerxes. His friends called him Xerxes. Most important of all, his wife called him Xerxes. Bathsheba had no idea he'd ever owned another name.
Bathsheba knew very little about his life before he'd come to Augusta. One day, she asked him point-blank: "Why don't you never come out an' say where you was from and what you was doin' when you was there?"
He wondered how she'd react if he answered her in the accent of an educated white, the accent he'd had to use while serving Anne Colleton at Marshlands. He didn't dare find out. He didn't dare tell her of his days on the plantation, or of the blood-soaked time in the Congaree Socialist Republic that had followed. As long as only he knew, he was safe. If anyone else found out— anyone—he was in trouble.
And so he answered as he usually did: "I done what I done, is all. Never done nothin' much." He tried to soften her with a smile. "You is the best thing I ever done."
It worked—to a degree. Eyes glinting, Bathsheba said, "I bet you done ran away from a wife an' about six children."
Solemnly, Scipio shook his head. "No, ma'am. Done run away from three wives an' fo'teen chilluns."
Bathsheba stared. For a moment, she believed him. Then, when he started to laugh, she stuck out her tongue. "You are the most aggravatin' man in the whole world. Why won't you never give me no straight answers?"
Because if I did, I might end up standing against a wall with a blindfold on my face. I wonder if they would waste a cigarette on a nigger before they shot him. As usual, he heard his thoughts in the educated dialect he'd been made to learn. He sighed. That was a straight answer, but not one he could give Bathsheba. He tried jollying her once more instead. Batting his eyes, he said, "I gots to have some secrets."
His wife snorted and threw her hands in the air. "All right," she said. "All right. I give up. Maybe you done crawled out from under a cabbage leaf, like folks tell the pickaninnies when they're too little to know about screwin'."
"Mebbe so," Scipio said with a chuckle. "My mama never toF me no different, anyways. Don't matter where I comes from, though. Where I's goin' is what count."
Bathsheba snorted again. "And where you goin'?"
"Right now, sweet thing, I believe I's goin' to bed." Scipio yawned.
In bed, in the darkness, Bathsheba grew serious again. "When the Reds rose up, what did you do then?" She asked the question in a tiny whisper. Unlike so many she'd asked earlier in the evening, she knew that one was dangerous.
But she didn't know how dangerous it was. Scipio answered it seriously without going into much detail: "Same as mos' folks, I reckons. I done my bes' to hide a lot o' the time. When de buckra come with the guns, I make like I was a good nigger for they, an' they don' shoot me. Wish the whole ruction never happen. Do Jesus! I wish the whole ruction never happen." There he told the complete truth. He set a hand on her shoulder. "What you do?" If she was talking about herself, she couldn't ask about him.
He felt her shrug. "Wasn't so much to do here. A couple-three days when folks done rioted and stole whatever they could git away with, but then the white folks brung so many police and sojers into the Terry, nobody dared stick a nose out the door for a while, or they'd shoot it off you."
"Damn foolishness. Nothin' but damn foolishness," Scipio said. "Shouldn't never've riz up. The buckra, they's stronger'n we. I hates it, but I ain't blind. If we makes they hate we, we's sunk."
Bathsheba didn't say anything for a while. Then she spoke two words: "Jake Featherston." She shivered, though the February night was mild.
Scipio took her in his arms, as much to keep himself from being afraid as to make her less so. "Jake Featherston," he echoed quietly. "All the buckra in the Freedom Party hates we. They hates we bad. An' one white man out o' every three, near 'nough, vote fo' Jake Featherston las' year. Six year down de road, he be president o' de Confederate States?"
"Pray to Jesus he ain't," Bathsheba said. Scipio nodded. He'd been able to pray when he was a child; he remembered as much. He wished he still could. Most of the ability had leached out of him during the years he'd served Anne Colleton. The Marxist rhetoric of the Reds with whom he'd associated during the war had taken the rest. Marx's words weren't gospel to him, as they had been to Cassius and Cherry and Island and the rest. Still, the philosopher had some strong arguments on his side.
Outside, rain started tapping against the bedroom window. That was a good sound, one Scipio heard several times a week. He wished he hadn't been thinking about the Red rebellion and the Freedom Party tonight. He couldn't find any other reason why the raindrops sounded like distant machine-gun fire.
"The Freedom Party ever elect themselves a president, what we do?" Bathsheba asked. Maybe she was having trouble praying, too.
"Dunno," Scipio answered. "Maybe we gots to rise up again." That was a forlorn hope, and he knew it. All the reasons he'd spelled out for the failure of the last black revolt would hold in the next one, too. "Maybe we gots to run away instead."
"Where we run to?" his wife asked.
"Ain't got but two choices," Scipio said: "the USA an' Mexico." He laughed, not that he'd said anything funny. "An' the Mexicans don't want we, an' the damnyankees really don't want we."
"You know all kinds of things," Bathsheba said. "How come you know so many different kinds of things?"
It wasn't what he'd said, which was a commonplace, but the way he'd said it; he had, sometimes, a manner that brooked no contradiction. Butlers were supposed to be infallible. That he could sound infallible even using the Congaree dialect, a dialect of ignorance if ever there was one, spoke well of his own force of character.
"I knows what's so," he said, "an' I knows what ain't." He slid his hand under the hem of Bathsheba's nightgown, which had ridden up a good deal after she got into bed. His palm glided along the soft cotton of her drawers, heading upwards. "An' I knows what I likes, too."
"What's that?" Bathsheba asked, but her legs drifted apart to make it easier for his hand to reach their joining, so she must have had some idea.
Afterwards, lazy and sated and drifting toward sleep, Scipio realized he'd found the best way to keep her from asking too many questions. He wished he were ten years younger, so he might use it more often. Chuckling at the conceit, he dozed off. Bathsheba was already snoring beside him.
The alarm clock gave them both a rude awakening. Scipio made coffee while Bathsheba cooked breakfast. Erasmus trusted Scipio with the coffeepot, but not with anything more. Scipio occasionally resented that; he could cook, in a rough and ready way. But both Erasmus and Bathsheba were better at it than he was.
When he got to Erasmus' fish market and fry joint, he found the gray-haired proprietor uncharacteristically subdued. Erasmus was never a raucous man; now he seemed to have pulled into himself almost like a turtle pulling its head back into its shell. Not until Scipio pulled out the broom and dustpan for his usual morning sweep-up did his boss speak, and then only to say. "Don't bother."
Scipio blinked. Erasmus had never encouraged him to keep the place tidy, but he'd never told him not to do it, either. "Some-thin' troublin' you?" Scipio asked, expecting Erasmus to shake his head or come back with one of the wry gibes that proved him clever despite a lack of education.
But the cook and fish dealer nodded instead. "You might say so. Yeah, you just might say so."
"Kin I do anything to he'p?" Scipio asked. He wondered if his boss had been to a doctor and got bad news.
Now Erasmus shook his head. "Ain't nothin' you can do," he answered, which made Scipio think he'd made a good guess. Erasmus continued, "You might want to start sniffin' around for a new place to work. I be goddamned if I know how much longer I can keep this here place open "
"Do Jesus!" Scipio exclaimed. "Ain't nothin' a-tall the doctor kin do?"
"What you say?" Erasmus looked puzzled. Then his face cleared. "I ain't sick, Xerxes. Sick an' tired, oh yes. Sick an' disgusted, oh my yes. But I ain't sick, not like you mean." He hesitated, then added, "Sick o' white folks, is what I is."
"All o' we is sick o' the buckra," Scipio said. "What they do, make you sick this time?"
"After you go home las' night, these four-five white men come in here," Erasmus said. "They tell me they's puttin' a special tax on all the niggers what owns business in the Terry here. Now I know the laws. I got to know the laws, else I find even more trouble'n a nigger's supposed to have. An' I tell these fellers, ain't no such thing as no special tax on nigger businesses "
Scipio had the bad feeling he knew what was coming. He asked, "These here buckra, they Freedom Party men?"
"I don't know yes and I don't know no, not to swear," Erasmus answered. "But I bet they is. One of 'em smile this mean, chilly smile, an' he say, 'There is now.' Any nigger don't pay this tax, bad things gwine happen to where he work. He still don't pay, bad things gwine happen to him. I seen a deal o' men in my day, Xerxes. Don't reckon this here feller was lyin'."
"What you do?" Scipio said.
Erasmus looked old and beaten. "Can't hardly go to the police, now can I? Nigger complain about white folks, they lock him in jail an' lose the key. Likely tell they beat him up, too, long as he there. Can't hardly pay this here tax, neither. I ain't gettin' rich here. Bastards want to squeeze a million dollars out of every three million I make. That don't leave no money for me, an' it sure as hell don't leave no money to pay no help. You work good, Lord knows. But I don't reckon I can keep you."
"Maybe you kin go to the police," Scipio said slowly. "Freedom Party done lose the election."
"Came too close to winning," Erasmus said, the first time he'd ever said anything like that. "An' besides, you know same as I do, half the police, maybe better'n half, spend their days off yellin' 'Freedom!' loud as they can."
It was true. Every word of it was true. Scipio wished he could deny it. He'd been comfortable for a while, comfortable and happy. As long as he had Bathsheba, he figured he could stay happy. If he lost this job, how long would he need to get comfortable again? He hoped he wouldn't have to find out.