he said.
After considering, the counterman shook his head. 'Not till next week, I don't think,' he answered seriously.
Despite those serious tones, it was funny in a macabre way. Every day, Confederate paper dollars bought less and less. Scipio had just put down six hundred of them on a cheap breakfast. If it was a thousand tomorrow, or a thousand next week at the latest, so what? The printing presses would run off more banknotes with more zeros on them, and another cycle would begin.
The good, sweet smell of baking cornbread filled Scipio's nostrils when he went into Erasmus' fish store and restaurant. The grizzled Negro who ran the place nodded to him and said 'Mornin'.'
'Mornin',' Scipio answered. He grabbed a broom and dustpan and started sweeping the floor. He kept his furnished room as neat as he could, and he did the same here, even though Erasmus had given him no such duty.
Erasmus watched him now as he plied the broom. The cook rarely said anything about it. Maybe he didn't know what to make of it. Maybe he was afraid that, if he said anything, Scipio would quit doing it.
A couple of minutes later, Erasmus took the pan of cornbread out of the oven and set it on the counter to cool. Then he said, 'Make sure nobody steal the store, Xerxes. I'm gonna git us fish fo' today. The ice man come before I git back, put it in the trays there like you know how to do.'
'I takes care of it,' Scipio promised.
Erasmus, by now, had good reason to know his promises were reliable. He headed out the door. A fat bankroll made a bulge in his hip pocket. The roll would be considerably thinner after he came back from the riverside fish market. He'd get good value for the money he spent, though. Even in these times of runaway prices, he always did.
Off he went. Left behind to his own devices, Scipio went right on cleaning. The ice man did come in. Scipio stuck some of the slabs of ice in the display trays and put the rest in the damp sawdust underneath those trays so it wouldn't melt before it was needed. Then he got a hammer and an ice pick and began to break up the ice in the trays from slabs to glistening chunks.
By the time he'd finished dealing with the ice, Scipio wasn't hot any more. His teeth chattered, and he could barely feel his fingers. He wondered if that was what living through a winter up in the USA felt like. He doubted he'd ever find out.
He didn't stay cold for long. Nothing could stay cold very long, not in that weather. He took a little chunk of cracked ice and dropped it down the back of his shirt. It made him squirm and felt good at the same time.
Erasmus came back with a burlap bag slung over his shoulder. He grunted when he saw the ice in the trays. 'Come on,' he said to Scipio. 'Got to clean us these here fish.'
He did most of the cleaning himself. He'd long since seen that Scipio knew how, but he was an artist with the knife; had he had a fancy education, he might have made a surgeon instead of a fry cook. Scipio carried fish and set them on ice. He also carried pink, bloody fish guts out to the alley in back of the shop and flung them into a battered iron trash can. He always hosed the can out right after the refuse collectors emptied it. It still stank of stale fish. Flies buzzed around it. Flies buzzed everywhere in Augusta when the weather was warm.
People knew when Erasmus would be getting back with his fish. Within fifteen minutes of his return, housewives started coming in to buy for their husbands and families. When Scipio first started working there, they'd viewed him with suspicion, as people had a way of viewing anyone or anything new with suspicion. By now, they took him for granted.
One woman, carrying away a couple of catfish wrapped in old newspapers, turned back and said to Erasmus, 'That Xerxes, he jew me down better'n you ever could, old man.'
'It ain't so hard these days, not with money so crazy ain't nobody knows what nothin' supposed to cost,' Erasmus answered. The woman took her fish and departed. Scipio glanced over to his boss, wondering if her comments had annoyed him. Erasmus gave no sign of that; catching Scipio's eye, he grinned at him, as if to say the housewife had paid him a compliment.
Business picked up as noon approached. Men started coming in and having their fish fried in the shop for dinner. Erasmus fried potatoes to go with them, too, and a big pot of greens never seemed to go off the stove. A man could leave the table hungry, but it wasn't easy.
And how the money flowed in! Hundred-dollar banknotes, five hundreds, thousands, even a ten-thousand now and then- Scipio felt like a bank cashier as he made change. He would have felt even more like a bank cashier and less like a poor Negro if he hadn't been making $40,000 a week himself. Next week, Erasmus would probably give him fifty or sixty or seventy. However much it was, it would keep food in his belly and a roof over his head, and it wouldn't go a great deal further than that.
One more reason to marry Bathsheba as soon as he could was that then they'd need only one roof over their two heads, and save the cost of the second-not that anyone could save anything much with prices as mad as they were.
Trouble started about half past twelve. The first hint of it Scipio got was an angry shout from not far away: 'Freedom!' A moment later, it came again, from a lot of throats: 'Freedom!'
'They's buckra!' Scipio exclaimed. 'Why fo' buckra come into de Terry carryin' on like dat?'
'Don't know.' Erasmus tucked a knife into his belt. 'Don't much fancy the notion, neither. They ain't got no business in this part o'town.'
Whether they had business or not, here they came, straight up the street past the cafe: a dozen or so white men, all of them in white shirts and butternut trousers. 'Freedom!' they shouted, again and again. As they shouted, they knocked down any Negro in their path, man, woman, or child.
'What we do 'bout dat?' Scipio said. 'What can we do 'bout dat? I know they's white folks, but they got no call to do nothin' like that. You reckon yellin' fo' the police do any good, Erasmus?'
Erasmus shook his gray head. 'Not likely. Two-three of them fellas, they was the police.' Scipio thought about that for a little while. He thought he'd escaped terror for good when he'd got free from the last wreck of the Congaree Socialist Republic.
Now he discovered he'd been wrong.
'I never thought I'd live to see the day,' Sam Carsten said as the USS Remembrance steamed through St. George's Channel. If he looked to starboard, he could see England-no, Wales. Ireland lay to port.
George Moerlein nodded. 'I know what you mean,' he said. 'Pretty damn crazy, us paying a courtesy call in Dublin harbor.'
'Only way a U.S. warship would've been able to get into Dublin harbor before the war or during it would've been to kick its way in,' Sam agreed. 'Of course, Ireland belonged to the limeys then, and we weren't exactly welcome visitors.'
'Well, we are now,' Moerlein said. 'And if England doesn't like it, let her try and start something. She'll get the idea pretty damn quick after we give her a good boot in the ass.'
Despite that bravado, he looked east more than a little nervously. The Royal Navy had been beaten in the Great War, but it hadn't been crushed. England hadn't been crushed, not the way the Confederate States and France had been. He had no doubt the USA and the German Empire could crush her if they had to. He also had no doubt they'd know they'd been in a scrap by the time they were through.
A destroyer flying a green-white-orange flag with a harp in the middle of the white led the way for the Remembrance. The destroyer had started life as a U.S. four-stacker; dozens much like her had gone into the water during the Great War. Her crew consisted of Irishmen who'd begun their careers in the Royal Navy. Men like that, thousands of them, formed the basis for the Irish Navy.
'I hope they've got a good pilot up there,' Carsten said. A moment later, he added, 'I hope he's got good charts, too.' A moment later still, he made another addendum: 'I hope none of the mines from the fields are drifting loose through the Irish Sea.'
He thought that covered everything, but his buddy showed him he was wrong. 'As long as you're doing all that hoping, hope the limeys haven't snuck out and planted a few of those little bastards right in our path,' George Moerlein said.
'That wouldn't be very nice of them, would it?' Sam grimaced. 'And they could always say something like, 'Oh, we're very sorry-we didn't have any notion that one was there.' How would anybody prove anything different?'
