Willard Sloan was not a nice man. Scipio listened to him screaming on the telephone: “You call that lettuce? Holy Jesus, only thing it was good for was wiping my ass! What do I mean? I’ll tell you what I mean. It was limper than an old man’s dick, that’s what, and it looked like the bugs ate as much as you sold me. Nobody pulls that kind of shit on me twice, you hear?” Bang! Down went the receiver.
Sloan might have been nice before the Yankee bullet paralyzed him from the waist down. Or he might have been a son of a bitch from the start. If he’d ever heard the old saying about catching more flies with honey than with vinegar, he didn’t believe it. Maybe he just didn’t like flies.
Most restaurant managers worth their pay had some son of a bitch in them. Jerry Dover sure did. But the new man at the Huntsman’s Lodge took it to extremes. When something made him unhappy, you heard about it, loudly and profanely. Sloan operated on the theory that the squeaky wheel got the grease. He didn’t just squeak-he screeched.
He cussed Scipio out when the black man made mistakes. Scipio did make some-with all the things that went on in a busy restaurant, he couldn’t help it. But he didn’t make many, and Willard Sloan noticed. “Well, looks like Dover knew what he was talking about,” he said one day. “You do know what the fuck you’re doin’.”
“I thanks you, suh,” Scipio said. “You do somethin’, you likes to do it good.”
“Ha!” Sloan said. “Most people”-he didn’t say most niggers, for which Scipio gave him credit-“only want to do enough to get by. You show up every day, and you work like a bastard.”
“I does my job bes’ way I knows how,” Scipio said.
“Well, that’s what you’re supposed to do,” the manager said. “Doesn’t happen as often as it ought to, though. I can hire a hundred people who could wait tables kinda half-assed, you know what I mean? Good enough to get by, but not really good. One of you is worth all of them put together. You’re the kind of waiter a place like this is supposed to have. You’re the kind of waiter who makes the Huntsman’s Lodge the kind of place it is.”
“Thank you, suh. Don’t reckon I hear many finer compliments.” Scipio meant it. Willard Sloan didn’t have to waste praise on him. If Sloan did it, he meant it. Maybe hearing that praise made Scipio rash, for he went on, “How much it matter, though, when they kin ship me off to a camp whenever they please?”
As soon as the words were gone, he wished he had them back. Whining to a white man never did a Negro any good. Willard Sloan didn’t answer for a while. Then he said, “When I got shot, I was out in no-man’s-land, between our lines and the damnyankees’. A nigger soldier brought me back, or maybe I would’ve died out there.”
“What happen to him afterwards?” Scipio asked.
Sloan sighed. “Xerxes, I don’t know. I just don’t know. I don’t know where he’s from. I don’t know his name. I don’t know if he got himself killed next day or next week or next month. I can’t tell you, that’s all. I wasn’t an officer leading colored troops or anything-their sector was next to ours, that’s all. I don’t even know if he was out there already or if he came out to get me. I was in the hospital a hell of a long time after that. I never had the chance to find out.”
“All right, suh.” Thus encouraged, Scipio felt bold enough to add, “If he still ’live now, reckon he either in a camp or worried about goin’ in. Don’t hardly seem fair.”
Sloan sighed again. He spread his hands. “Ain’t much I can do about it. Who pays attention to a guy in a wheelchair who runs a restaurant? Maybe I can help my own people some. I hear tell Dover did. Things are getting tougher all the time. I don’t know if it’ll still work. I aim to try, anyhow.”
“Can’t ask for no more’n dat,” Scipio said. So a human being did lurk under that acid-tongued exterior. Worth knowing, maybe.
Human being or not, Sloan didn’t put up with slackness, any more than Jerry Dover had. When a cook came in late three times in two weeks, he was gone. The Mexican who took his place spoke next to no English, but showed up early every day. He picked up the language in a hurry, especially the obscenities that laced the conversation of the rest of the kitchen staff.
How many Mexicans were in Augusta these days? How many Mexicans were in towns and fields all over the Confederacy, doing what had been nigger work till blacks started getting cordoned off by barbed wire and disappearing into camps? Not so many as the Negroes they replaced, surely. But enough to keep crops coming in, wheels turning, meals cooked and served, hair cut.
They can get along without us. The idea terrified Scipio. He hadn’t thought the Freedom Party could strike at Negroes in any really important way. He hadn’t thought the CSA could do without the hard, unglamorous labor colored men and women provided. He hadn’t thought so, but maybe he was wrong.
One good thing about a busy shift: it left him no time to brood. He was always hopping, taking orders, bringing food out from the kitchen, barking at the busboys, trying to hear the gossip at his tables without letting the whites know he was listening.
Everybody talked about Pittsburgh. The more that people knew, the gloomier they sounded. Some of them sounded very gloomy indeed. “We’re going to lose that whole army,” a colonel home on leave told his banker friend. “We’re going to lose a big piece of Ohio, too. It’s just a mess-a mess, I tell you.”
“What can we do?” the banker asked.
“Hold on tight everywhere else and hope we can ride it out,” the officer answered. “Don’t know what else there is to do. Give up? Not while we’ve still got bullets in the gun. You reckon the last peace was bad? It’d be a walk in the park next to what we’d get from the damnyankees this time around.”
Scipio wished for the destruction of the Freedom Party with all his heart. He had mixed feelings about the Confederate States of America. Every man needed a country, and the Confederate States, for better and often for worse, were his. He’d had no trouble getting along before Jake Featherston took power. Things hadn’t been perfect or even very good, but they hadn’t been so bad, either. He’d known where he fit.
But Negroes didn’t fit anywhere in Featherston’s CSA. And enough whites agreed with Featherston to bring him and his followers into places where they could do something about their ideas. And so…
And so, when Scipio went home that night, he passed the barbed-wire perimeter around the Terry. No street lights inside kept him from tripping. Power had been off for a long time. He stepped slowly and carefully. Falling would be bad, not just because he was an old man and getting brittle but because he might tear his trousers. That would be a real disaster.
He made it back to the apartment undamaged. It was chilly in there. No buildings in the Terry had heat anymore. The handful of people left here used makeshift wood-burning stoves for cooking and heating. One of these days, maybe, a fire would get loose. Scipio dreaded that, but didn’t know what he could do about it.
Bathsheba stirred when he came to bed. “Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t mean to bother you none.”
“ ’S all right,” his wife answered sleepily. “Sunday tomorrow. We kin go to church.”
“All right.” Scipio didn’t argue. He thought God had long since stopped listening to the Confederacy’s Negroes, but Bathsheba still believed. Going along was easier than quarreling.
He thought so, anyway. In the morning, Cassius said, “I ain’t goin’. I got to see some people about some business.”
“What kind of business?” Scipio asked.
His son just looked at him-looked through him, really. Cassius didn’t answer. Some kind of resistance business, then. Scipio sighed but didn’t insist. Bathsheba tried to. It didn’t work. Cassius was going to go his own way. Seeing what things were like these days, Scipio had a harder time thinking him wrong than he would have a couple of years earlier.