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?'
