He shook his head and shivered, as if coming down with the influenza. When I show that, I put a noose around my neck. He knew what a good servant he made. If he started playing the butler again, word would spread among the rich whites of Augusta. Old So-and-So's got himself a crackerjack new nigger, best damn butler you ever saw. Word wouldn't spread only in Augusta, either. St. Matthews, South Carolina, wasn't that far away. Anne Colleton would hear before too long. And when she did, he was dead.

She'd gone back to helping the Freedom Party. He'd seen that in the newspapers. She wouldn't have forgotten him. So far as he knew, she hadn't tried very hard to find him after he'd escaped South Carolina for Georgia. But if he did anything to bring himself to her notice, he deserved to die for stupidity's sake.

Erasmus reached into the cash box and took out two brown twenty-dollar banknotes. He thrust them at Scipio. "Here you is," he said. "Wish it could be more, but I druther give it to you than to them Freedom Party trash."

Pride told Scipio to refuse. He had no room in his life for pride. "Thank you kindly," he said, and took the money. "God bless you."

"He done bless me plenty," Erasmus said. "Hope He watch out for you, too."

Someone else had pressed money on Scipio when he lost a job waiting tables. He snapped his fingers. "Reckon I go see me Mistuh John Oglethorpe. Anybody in this here town got work, reckon he know 'bout it."

"Good idea." Erasmus nodded. "Not all white folks is Freedom Party bastards."

These days, Scipio ventured out of the Terry only with trepidation. He didn't like the way white men looked at him when he walked along the streets outside the colored district. They looked at him the way they had to look at possums and squirrels and raccoons when they hunted for the pot.

Freedom Party posters and banners and emblems were everywhere. He saw several white men with little enamelwork Freedom Party pins-those reversed-color Confederate battle flags-on their lapels. More than anybody else, they glared at him as if he had no right to exist. He kept his eyes down on the sidewalk. Giving back look for look was the worst thing he could do. If one of those pin-wearing fellows decided he was an uppity nigger, he might not get back to the Terry alive.

When he walked into Oglethorpe's restaurant, Aurelius was taking care of the breakfast crowd. Whites sat on one side of the room, Negroes on the other. They'd always done that. It wasn't law, but it was unbreakable custom. Scipio perched at a small table. Aurelius nodded when he recognized him.

"Ain't seen you in a long time," he said. "What kin I git you?"

"Bacon and eggs over easy and grits and a cup o' coffee," Scipio answered. "I see Mistuh Oglethorpe when things slows down?"

"I tell him you's here," Aurelius said. "How come you ain't at Erasmus' place?"

"He shuttin' down," Scipio said, and the other man's eyes widened in astonishment. In a voice not much above a whisper, Scipio explained, "They wants too much money for he to stay open." He didn't explain who they were. Aurelius would know.

"Hey, Aurelius!" a white man called. "I need some more coffee over here."

"Comin', Mr. Benson." Aurelius hurried off to take care of the customer, and then another one, and then another one after that.

He didn't get back to Scipio's table till he set plate and coffee cup in front of him. "Thank you kindly," Scipio said, and dug in. John Oglethorpe was in no way a fancy cook, but few of his kind could match him. The breakfast was easily as good as any Erasmus made: high praise indeed. Scipio hadn't eaten grits in his days as Anne Colleton's privileged servant; he'd thought of them as fieldhands' food. He'd remade their acquaintance since, and found he liked them.

With Aurelius filling his cup every time it got low, he hung around in the restaurant till the rush thinned out. John Oglethorpe emerged from the kitchen then. His hair had gone gray and pulled back at the temples. He wore thick bifocals he hadn't had before, and was thinner and more stooped than Scipio remembered.

"What's this nonsense I hear about Erasmus goin' out of business?" he demanded. "He can't do that. He's been cooking even longer than I have."

"No mo'," Scipio said. "Freedom Party fellas, they wants too much money from he."

"Oh. Those people." The white man's voice went flat and hard. "I've always been a Whig, and so was my pappy, and so was his pappy-well, he was a Democrat before the War of Secession, but that doesn't count. Some people, though-some people think yelling something loud enough makes it so."

"Free dom!" Aurelius didn't yell it, but the scorn in his voice ran deep.

Scipio blinked. The cook and the waiter had worked together for God only knew how many years. Even so… As far as Scipio could remember, this was the first time-outside the brief, chaotic madness of the Congaree Socialist Republic-he'd ever heard a Negro mock a Confederate political party where a white could hear.

"Yellin' ain't all them Freedom Party fellas does," Scipio said. "Erasmus reckon somethin' bad happen to he if he don't pay, so he done quit."

"That's a shame and a disgrace," Oglethorpe said. "That is nothing but a shame and a disgrace. This town needs hardworking folks like Erasmus a hell of a lot more than it needs blowhards like those Freedom Party yahoos."

Did he know Gulliver's Travels? Or was he using the word as a general term of contempt? Scipio didn't see how he could ask. That might involve trying to explain how he knew Gulliver's Travels. He kept trying to bury his past, but it lived on inside him.

All he said was, "Yes, suh." And then he got down to the business that had brought him out of the Terry: "Mistuh Oglethorpe, I gots me a family to feed. I been workin' fo' Erasmus a good long time now. Ain't like you an' Aurelius, but a long time. You know somebody lookin' for a waiter? I does janitor work, too, an' I cooks some. Ain't as good as you an' Erasmus, but I ain't bad, neither."

Oglethorpe frowned. "I was afraid you were gonna ask me that. Why else would you come up here?" Scipio's face heated. The restaurant owner only shrugged. "I don't mind. If you know somebody, you better ask him. Only trouble is, I can't think of anyone who's short of help right now. What about you, Aurelius? You know the Terry a damn sight better than I do."

"I ought to, boss, don't you reckon?" But Aurelius' smile didn't stick on his face. "No, I don't know nobody, neither. Wish to heaven I did."

"Damn." Scipio spoke quietly, but with great feeling.

"May not be so bad," Oglethorpe said. "This isn't like some businesses-slots do open up now and again. You pound the pavement-you'll find something. You can use my name, too. Don't reckon you'll need to, though. You tell people you worked for Erasmus all these years, they'll know you're the straight goods."

"Hope so. Do Jesus, I hope so." Scipio drummed his fingers on the tabletop. "Hope somethin' come up pretty damn quick. Don't wanna end up in no Mitcheltown."

As soon as he said the word, he wished he hadn't. It wasn't that he didn't feel that fear. He did. But the shantytowns named after the Confederate president were a judgment on the Whigs. Calling them by that name-even thinking of them by that name-only helped the Freedom Party. Trouble was, everyone in the Confederate States called them Mitcheltowns, just as they were Blackfordburghs in the United States. Whoever chanced to be in power when the disaster struck got the blame.

"Good luck, Xerxes," John Oglethorpe said. "Wish to God I could do something more for you."

"Thank you kindly, suh," Scipio answered. "I thanks you very kindly. An' I wishes you could, too."

A s Hipolito Rodriguez had seen when he went up north to fight in Texas, spring could be a wonderful time of year, a time when the land renewed itself after the chill and gloom of winter. It wasn't like that in Sonora. Here, it was the time when the rains petered out. The weather got warmer, yes, but it had never really turned cold. He'd seen snow in the trenches of Texas. The memory still appalled him.