Scipio was in love, and wondered why in God's name he'd never been in love before. The best answer he could come up with- and he knew it was nowhere near good enough-was that he'd always been too busy. First, he'd had an education forcibly crammed down his throat. Then he'd been butler at Marshlands, which under Anne Colleton was a job to keep any four men hopping. And after that, he'd been swept up into the affairs of the Congaree Socialist Republic.

Now… Now, as far as anybody in Augusta, Georgia, knew, he was Xerxes the waiter, an ordinary fellow who did his job and didn't give anybody any trouble. And Bathsheba, he was sure, was the most marvelous creature God had seen fit to set on the face of the earth.

He'd never had any trouble finding a woman to bed when he wanted one. But he'd never understood the difference between making love and being in love, not till now. He stroked Bath-sheba's cheek as they lay side by side on the narrow bed in his furnished room. "I is the most luckiest man in the whole wide world," he said-no originality, but great sincerity.

She leaned over and kissed him. "And you are the kindliest man," she said. No one had ever called Scipio anything like that before. He hadn't had many chances to be kindly, either. Now that he did, he was doing his best to make the most of them.

Bathsheba got out of bed and started to dress for the trip back across the hall to her room. "Don't want you to go," Scipio said.

"I got to," she answered. "Got to go clean for the white folks tomorrow mornin'. The work don't never go away."

He knew that. Among the reasons he loved Bathsheba was the solid core of sense he'd found in her. It wasn't that he wanted to make love with her again that made him want her to stay. Since he'd reached his forties, second rounds didn't seem so urgent as they once had. But he enjoyed talking with her more than with anyone else he'd ever met.

He wished he could recite some of the love poetry he'd learned. The only way he knew it, though, was in the educated white man's accent he'd been made to acquire. Using that accent might-no, would-make her ask questions he couldn't afford to answer.

That was the one fly in the ointment of his happiness: everything he said about his past had to be either vague or a lie. Even the name by which she knew him was false. He counted himself lucky that he quickly got used to the aliases under which he protected his real identity. Back in South Carolina, reward posters with his true name on them still hung in post offices and police and sheriff's stations. Some might even have come into Georgia, though he'd never seen one in Augusta.

As if to flick him on that wound of secrecy, Bathsheba said, "One of these days, I'm gonna know all about you-everything there is to know. And do you know what else? I'm gonna like every bit of it, too."

"I already likes everything there is to know 'bout you," Scipio said, and her eyes glowed. As for him, he was glad of the butler's training that let him think one thing and say another without giving any hint of what was going on behind the expressions he donned like convenient masks.

Bathsheba leaned down over the bed and gave him another kiss. "See you tomorrow night," she said, her voice rich with promise. Then she was gone, gently closing the door behind her.

Scipio rose and put on a light cotton nightshirt. In Augusta in early summer, no one wanted anything more. He picked up a fan of woven straw. He wished the roominghouse had electricity: he would have bought an electric fan and aimed it at the bed as he slept. It got every bit as hot and oppressive here as it did over by the Congaree. He'd heard it got even worse down in Savannah. He found that hard to believe, but you never could tell.

His cheap alarm clock jangled him awake the next morning. He yawned, got out of bed, and started getting dressed. He had his white shirt halfway buttoned before his eyes really came open. Bathsheba's door was closed when he left his room, and everything quiet within her place. She got up earlier than he did, to cram the most work she could into a day.

The fry joint where he worked didn't serve breakfast. He got eggs and grits and coffee at a place that did, and paid for them with a $500 banknote. "Need another hundred on top o' that," the black man behind the counter said.

With a grimace, Scipio peeled off another banknote and gave it to him. "Be a thousand tomorrow, I reckons," 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.