"Throw it on the fish-wrappin' pile, then," Erasmus said.
As Scipio did, he asked, "What you think 'bout de for'ard pass, boss?"
"Bunch o' damn foolishness, you ask me," Erasmus answered. "Anybody got the time to git all hot and bothered about it gots too goddamn much time, an' dat's the Lord's truth. Devil fill up your time just fine, you bet. Forward pass?" He rolled his eyes. "Might as well worry over that other damnfool damnyankee game-what the hell they call it? Baseball, dat's the name."
Scipio had never seen a baseball game, or even a baseball, in his life. Because he was-or rather, had been-widely read, he knew the sport was played in the northeastern part of the United States. But it had never caught on all across the USA, the way football had. And it certainly hadn't caught on in the Confederate States.
Erasmus eyed him. "You got any more ways o' wastin' time 'fore you starts earnin' what I pays you?"
"Only one," Scipio said with a grin. He grabbed a mug and poured it full of coffee from the big pot on the stove, then added cream and sugar. But he didn't sit down to drink it. He carried it with him as he started sweeping and tidying up. Erasmus had a steaming mug at his side, too. As long as Scipio worked hard, the older man didn't mind coffee or things like that.
The first breakfast customer came in a couple of minutes later. "Mornin', Aristotle," Scipio said. "How you is?" By now, he knew dozens of regulars by name and preferences. "You wants de usual?"
"Sure enough do," Aristotle answered. Scipio turned to Erasmus, who was already doing up a plate of ham and eggs and grits. Erasmus knew his customers even better than Scipio did. They were his, after all.
After the breakfast rush petered out, Scipio washed a young mountain of dishes and silverware, then dried them and stacked them neatly to get ready for lunch, which would be even more hectic. Once he'd done that, he helped Erasmus clean catfish and crappie. The proprietor would fry a lot of them during lunch, and even more during dinner. Erasmus was a wizard with a knife. Every cut he made was perfect, and he moved as fast as any slicing machine. Scipio…
"You makes me 'shamed," Scipio said, for Erasmus could clean three fish to his one, and do a neater, better job on them to boot. "Watchin' you makes me 'shamed."
"Shouldn't ought to," Erasmus answered. "You is doin' the best you kin. Good Lord don't want no more'n dat from nobody. I been cuttin' up fish for a livin' since I was ten years old. Maybe you went fishin' couple-three times a year, gutted what you cotched. It make a difference, it surely do."
"Mebbe." Scipio would have thought Erasmus was humoring him, but Erasmus had no sense of humor when it came to work, none at all.
And now his boss said, "You's better'n you was, too, an' dat's a good thing. You didn't get no better, don't reckon I'd let you mess around with knives no more."
Scipio looked at his hands. He had a couple of cuts, along with several scars he'd picked up earlier. Seeing what he was doing, Erasmus held out his own hands. He had more scars than Scipio could count, a maze, a spiderweb, of scars, new, old, short, long, and in between. "Do Jesus!" Scipio said softly.
Erasmus only shrugged. "Ain't nobody perfect, Xerxes. Ain't nobody even close to perfect. Yeah, I's pretty damn good. But I been doin' this goin' on fifty years now. Every so often, the knife is gonna slip."
"Uh-huh." Scipio couldn't take his eyes off those battered hands. He'd noticed them, but he hadn't really studied them. They repaid study. Like so many who did something supremely well, Erasmus had suffered for his art. Scipio kept looking at them till a fat woman came in and asked Erasmus for three pounds of crawdads.
What have I got that shows what I've done with my life? Scipio wondered. Only one thing occurred to him: the way he talked, or could talk if doing so wouldn't put him in mortal danger. He felt smarter when he talked like an educated white man than he did using the thick Congaree River Negro dialect that was his only other way of putting his thoughts out for the world to know. He didn't suppose he actually was smarter, but the illusion was powerful, and it lingered.
Erasmus wrapped the crawdads in the Augusta Constitutionalist Scipio had been reading that morning. The woman paid him, said, "Thank you kindly," and left.
"I been tellin' you and tellin' you," Erasmus said, "you ought to save your money and git yourself your own place. You end up doin' a lot better working for your ownself than you do when you works for me."
"Don't like tellin' folks what they gots to do," Scipio answered, not for the first time. "Reckon I kin"-if he'd run Marshlands for Anne Colleton, he could surely manage a little cafe for himself-"but I don't like it none."
"You gots to have some fire in your belly to do a proper job," Erasmus agreed. "But you gots to have some fire in your belly to git ahead any which way."
He eyed Scipio speculatively. Scipio concentrated on cleaning a catfish. He was better at doing what others told him than at telling others what to do. Back at Marshlands, he'd had Anne's potent authority behind him. If he started his own business, he'd be the authority. No, he didn't care for that. Still feeling Erasmus' eye on him, he said, "I gits by."
He sounded defensive, and he knew it. Erasmus said, "Any damn fool can get by. You could do better, an' you should ought to."
Scipio didn't answer. Before too long, the first dinner customers started coming in. He hurried back and forth from the stove to the tables out front. The sizzle and crackle of fish going into hot oil filled the place. He served and took money and made change and then did endless dishes, getting ready for the next morning. When he finally left, Erasmus stayed behind, still busy.
And when he got back to his flat, Bathsheba was waiting at the door to give him a kiss. Her eyes glowed. Scipio hoped he knew what she had in mind, and hoped that, after a long, hard day, he could perform. He turned out to be wrong-or, at least, not exactly right. She took his hand and set it just above her navel. "We gonna have us a young 'un," she said.
All of a sudden, Scipio discovered he might have fire in his belly after all.
H ipolito Rodriguez knew he should have counted himself a lucky man. For one thing, he'd come through the Great War without a scratch. If that by itself wasn't enough to make him light candles in the church in the little mining town of Baroyeca, he couldn't imagine what would be.
And, for another, Baroyeca lay in the Confederate state of Sonora, not in the Empire of Mexico farther south. It was close enough to the border to hear the echoes of the civil war that convulsed the country of which Sonora had once been a part, but not close enough to have let any of the fighting come near.
Nothing bothered Baroyeca very much. A couple of men hadn't come home from the war in the north. A few others had come home, but maimed. Mostly, though, days went on as they always had. Rodriguez's farm outside of town yielded no better crops than it ever had, but he managed to keep his wife, three sons, and two daughters fed.
And, every so often, he had enough money left in his pocket to go into town and spend some time at La Culebra Verde -the Green Snake-the cantina across the street from the church where he lit candles to thank God for his salvation. Having been preserved alive, didn't he have the right to enjoy himself every once in a while?
"Why not?" Carlos Ruiz said when he posed the question out loud one day. Carlos was his age, and had fought in Tennessee, where things had been, by all accounts, much worse than his own experience in Texas. Ruiz asked his counterquestion in English, not Spanish.
" Si, why not?" Rodriguez agreed, the last two words also in English. He dropped back into Spanish to continue, "My children speak as much of the new language as of the old. Ten million devils from hell take me if I know whether to be glad or sorry."