“I’s powerful sorry, suh,” he said. “I tries to do better.”
“You read and write and cipher?” Ogelthorpe looked as if anything but a no there would have surprised him, too.
But Scipio read the names and prices of the soups and sandwiches and stews and meat dishes on the wall. He found a pencil and a scrap of paper on the counter and wrote his name and Fabius’ and Ogelthorpe’s in his small, precise script. Then he handed Ogelthorpe the paper and said, “You write any numbers you wants, an’I kin cipher they out fo’you.”
He’d wondered if his demonstration would make Ogelthorpe not bother, but the white man scrawled a column of figures-watching, Scipio saw they were the prices of items he served-and thrust back the sheet and the pencil. “Go ahead-add ’em up.”
Scipio did, careful not to make any mistakes. “They comes to fo’ dollars an’ seventeen cents all told,” he said when he was done.
Ogelthorpe’s expression said that, while they did indeed come to $4.17, he rather wished they didn’t. Fabius, on the other hand, laughed out loud. “You got anything else you want to give him a hard time about, boss?”
“Don’t reckon so,” Ogelthorpe admitted. With a sigh, he turned back to Scipio. “Pay’s ten dollars a week, an’ tips, an’ lunch an’ supper every day you’re here. You play as good a game as you talk, I’ll bump you up a slug or two in a month. What do you say?”
“I says, yes, suh. I says, thank you, suh,” Scipio answered. He wouldn’t get rich on that kind of money, but he wouldn’t starve, especially not when he could feed himself here. And he’d be able to get out of the grim Terry flophouse and into a better room or even a flat.
Ogelthorpe said, “You can tell me I’m crazy if you want, but I got the idea you ain’t got a hell of a lot of jack right now. You’re clean enough, I’ll say that, but I want you to get yourself black trousers an’ a white shirt like Fabius is wearin’, and I want you to do it fast as you’re able. You don’t do it fast enough to suit me, back on the street you go.”
“I takes care of it,” Scipio promised. He thought Fabius was dressed up too fancy for the kind of food the place dished out, but realized his own tastes were on the snobbish side. One more thing I can blame on Miss Anne, he thought. Maybe, now that he was outside of South Carolina, she wouldn’t be able to track him down. He hoped to Jesus she couldn’t.
Outside, a clock started chiming noon. A moment later, two steam whistles blew. “Here comes the lunch crowd,” Ogelthorpe said. “All right, Xerxes, looks like you get baptism by total immersion. Me, I got to get my ass back to the stove.” He disappeared into the rear of the restaurant.
Fabius just had time to hand Scipio a Gray Eagle scratch pad before the place filled up. Then Scipio was working like a madman for the next hour and a half, taking orders, hustling them back to Ogelthorpe, carrying plates of food to the customers, taking money and making change, and trading dirty china and silverware for clean with the dishwasher, an ancient black man who hadn’t bothered to come out and see whether he’d be hired.
Some of the customers were white, some colored. By their clothes, they all worked at the nearby hash cannery or the ironworks or one of the several factories that made bricks from the fine clay found in abundance around Augusta. Whites and Negroes might come in together, sometimes laughing and joking with one another, but the whites always sat at the tables on one side of the restaurant, the blacks at those on the other.
Scipio wondered if Fabius would wait on the whites and leave the Negroes for him. The whites would undoubtedly have more money to spend. Scipio presumed that would translate into better tips. But the two waiters split the crowd evenly, and Scipio needed less than half an hour to find out his idea wasn’t necessarily so. The idea of tipping a colored waiter had never crossed a lot of white men’s minds. When they did tip, they left more than their Negro counterparts, but the blacks were more likely to leave something, if often not much. Taken all together, things evened out.
By half past one, after the last lunch shift ended, the place was quiet again, as it had been before noon. Panting like a hound, Fabius said, “Reckon you see why Mistuh Jim hired hisself a new waiter. We got more business’n two can handle, let alone one like I was doin’.”
“You one busy nigger ’fore today, sure enough,” Scipio said.
“You done pulled your weight,” Fabius said. “Never had to hustle you, never had to tell you what to do. You said you know about waitin’ on tables, you wasn’t lyin’.”
“No, I weren’t lyin’,” Scipio agreed. “We git our ownselves somethin’ to eat now? Plumb hard settin’ it in front o’ other folk wif so much empty inside o’me.”
“I hear what you say.” Fabius nodded. “I done et ’fore the rush started, but you go on back there now. Mistuh Ogelthorpe don’t feed you good, you take a fryin’ pan and whack him upside the head.”
Ogelthorpe also nodded when Scipio did head back to the cooking area. “You know what you were doin’, sure as hell,” he said.
“Yes, suh,” Scipio said. Compared to the fancy banquets Anne Colleton had put on, this was crude, rough, fast work, but the principles didn’t change.
“Chicken soup in the pot,” Ogelthorpe said. “You want a ham sandwich to go along with it?”
“Thank you, suh. That be mighty fine.” Scipio had carried a lot of ham sandwiches out to hungry workers. He knew they were thick with meat and spears of garlicky pickle and richly daubed with a mustard whose odor tickled his nose. He’d just ladled out a bowl of soup when Ogelthorpe handed him a sandwich of his own.
The first bite told him why people crowded into the restaurant. Miss Anne would have turned up her nose at such a rough delicacy, but she wasn’t here. Scipio was. He took another big bite. With his mouth full, he said, “Suh, I’s gwine like this place jus’ fine.”
“Here you are, ma’am,” the cabbie said to Flora Hamburger as he pulled to a stop at the corner of Eighth and Pine. “Pennsylvania Hospital.”
“Thank you,” she answered, and gave him half a dollar, which included a twenty-cent tip. That was enough to make him leap out of the elderly Duryea and hold the door open for her with a show of subservience that made her most uncomfortable. Socialism, to her, meant equality among all workers, no matter what they did.
But she had no time to instruct him, not now. She hurried past the statue of William Penn toward the front entrance to the hospital, whose cornerstone, she saw, bore an inscription dating from the reign of George II.
A soldier walked past her, smiling and nodding as he did so. By his stick and the rolling gait he had in spite of it, Flora knew he was using an artificial leg. Because of what he’d gone through, she smiled back at him. Without that, she would have ignored him, as she was in the habit of ignoring all the young men who smiled and nodded at her.
She went up the stairs to the second floor. One wing had private rooms; the best doctors gave the patients in them the best care they could. That was an advantage David Hamburger would not have had without his sister’s being in Congress. Using it went against every egalitarian instinct she had, but family instincts were older and deeper.
She almost ran into a nurse coming out of her brother’s room. The woman in the starched gray and white uniform with the red cross embroidered on the breast gave back a pace. “I’m sorry, Congresswoman,” she said. “I didn’t realize you were coming in.”
“It’s all right, Nancy.” Flora knew a lot of the nurses who helped take care of David. She came to the Pennsylvania Hospital as often as she could. She felt bad about not coming more often than she did, but sitting in Congress and handling the endless work that went along with sitting in Congress was a trap with huge jaws full of sharp teeth.
David lay quietly in the bed, his face almost as pale as the white linen of sheets and pillowcases-being at war with the CSA and the British Empire had made cotton scarce and hard to come by. Under the covers, the outline of his body seemed unnaturally small-and so it was, with one leg gone above the knee. But the rest of him seemed shrunken, too, as if losing the leg had made him lose some of his spirit. And if it had, would that be so surprising?