by the river; he'd been doing it for a long time, both down in Covington and since moving to his new home here. But he didn't miss an empty wallet, not even a little he didn't.
Early as he was, several other trucks were already waiting for the Chicago and North Western Railroad Line train to pull into the yard. Three or four others came in while he drank lukewarm coffee from a flask Elizabeth had given him. He sat in the cab of the Duryea and yawned. It wasn't so much that he hadn't got enough sleep the night before: more that he was always busy and always tired.
The train pulled into the yard at 6:35, right on time. Then the drivers scrambled to make deals with the conductor, who did the same job as a steamboat clerk and had the same cold blood in his veins.
For a while, Cincinnatus had had trouble getting any work at all from these hard-eyed gentlemen. That was partly because he'd been new to Des Moines and even more because he had a dark skin. He knew as much. He'd expected nothing more.
But he was still here. He'd got his foot in the door, he'd proved he was reliable… and now he was dickering with a conductor over a load of rolled oats for one of the last few livery stables in town. 'Have a heart, Jerry,' he said, putting a hand over his own heart. 'You wouldn't pay that low if I was white.'
Jerry rolled his eyes. 'You're a Hebe in blackface, Cincinnatus, that's what you are. You want me to see if I can get somebody else to haul the stuff for that price?'
'Go ahead,' Cincinnatus said. 'Somebody else wants to lose money on gasoline and wear and tear on his truck, that's his affair. You don't pay me another dollar, it ain't worth my time and trouble.'
'You are a Hebe,' the conductor said. 'All right, dammit, another four bits.'
'Six bits,' Cincinnatus said. 'Six bits and I break even, anyways.'
'What a damn liar you are. Tell me you don't sandbag when you play poker.' Jerry puffed out his cheeks, then exhaled. 'Awright, six bits. The hell with it. Deal?'
'Deal,' Cincinnatus said at once, and went to get his hand truck to move the barrels of oats.
When he got to the livery stable, the proprietor, a big, ruddy, white-haired man named Hiram Schacht, said, 'Stow the barrels in that corner there.' He pointed.
'Will do, Mistuh Schacht,' Cincinnatus answered. From everything he'd seen, Schacht didn't treat him any worse because he was colored. The stable owner approved of anyone who helped him care for his beloved horses. The trouble was, he had fewer horses to care for every month. People kept buying automobiles.
As Cincinnatus rolled barrel after barrel past the old man, Schacht sighed and said, 'Getting harder and harder to stay in business. Back before the war, I'd have gone through an order this size in a week. Now it'll last me two, maybe three.' He scratched at his bushy mustache. 'Pretty soon, I won't need to order any oats at all. That'll cut down on my overhead, now won't it?' His laugh held little mirth.
'Well, suh, you don't see me bringin' you these oats in a wagon with a team pullin' it, now do you?' Cincinnatus said. 'Automobiles and trucks, they're the coming thing.'
'Oh, I know, I know,' Schacht said, unoffended; they'd had this conversation before. 'But I'm heading toward my threescore and ten, as the Good Book says. Up till a couple years ago, I was sure the stable would last out my lifetime, and I was damn glad of it, too: I'm just flat-out crazy about horses. Motorcars have no soul to 'em, and they smell bad, too. Anyway, though, I ain't so sure now. I'm lasting longer than I reckoned I would, and more people are getting rid of their horses faster than I reckoned they would.'
'Can't blame me for that,' Cincinnatus said as he trundled the dolly back out to the Duryea for another barrel of oats. 'Never had me a horse-never could afford one-before I got the chance to buy my truck. By then, I figured a truck'd do me more good.'
'Do your wallet more good, anyway,' Schacht said, and Cincinnatus nodded; that was what he'd meant, all right. The stable owner went on, 'A horse'd do your spirit more good, though. You can make friends with a horse- oh, not with all horses; some of 'em are stupid as fenceposts and a hell of a lot meaner, and God knows I know it- but with some horses, anyways. What can you feel about a truck? When it breaks down, all you want to do is kill it, but you can't even do that, on account of the son of a bitch is already dead.'
Having had the urge to murder the Duryea a good many times since buying it, Cincinnatus could only nod. He did say, 'Man's got to eat.'
'Oh, no doubt about it,' Schacht said. 'I don't begrudge folks their autos and their trucks-well, not much I don't, anyways. But back when you were a pup, everybody had horses-near enough everybody, I guess I ought to say-and motorcars were toys for rich men. By the time you get as old as I am, it'll be the other way round, I bet: everybody'11 have himself a motorcar, but only rich folks'll be able to keep horses.'
'Could be so,' Cincinnatus agreed. In fact, he found it very likely, and likely to happen sooner than Schacht had predicted, too. He wouldn't have been surprised to find out that the livery-stable man thought the same thing.
'You take care of yourself, Cincinnatus,' Schacht said after he'd brought in the last barrel of oats, 'and take care of that rattletrap contraption you drive.'
'Thank you kindly, Mistuh Schacht.' Cincinnatus touched the brim of his cloth cap in salute. 'Hope it's me bringin' your oats next time you need some.'
'I wouldn't mind.' Schacht scratched at that walrus mustache again; he didn't bother waxing it up into a stylish Kaiser Bill. As Cincinnatus fired up the Duryea, the stable owner added, 'By the time you get as old as I am, folks will be trading in their autos for flying machines-but rich folks'11 still keep horses.' He shouted to make himself heard over the thunderous roar of the engine.
'Flying machines,' Cincinnatus said to himself. All he knew about them was that he didn't want to go up in one; the miserable things were too likely to fall out of the sky, with gruesomely fatal results the newspapers liked to play up. Maybe they'd solve all the problems by the time Achilles was an old man. Maybe they wouldn't, too. Either way, it would be for his son to worry about.
He picked up another hauling job when he went back to the railroad yard, and then another one. That one took him through his own neighborhood-right past the school where Achilles went. The kindergarten classes were just letting out as he drove by: sure enough, there was Achilles along with his schoolmates, who included blacks, whites, and the daughter of the Chinese laundryman upstairs. In Kentucky, Cincinnatus would never have dreamt that his son would go to a school whites also used. Iowans seemed to take it for granted.
Cincinnatus squeezed the bulb of the Duryea's raucous horn. All the little kids looked his way. 'That's my pa!' Achilles squealed, loud enough for Cincinnatus to hear him over the Duryea's motor.
'Wow! What a swell truck!' a white boy exclaimed, also loudly. Cincinnatus laughed, waved, and drove on. Only to a six-year-old would this truck have seemed swell. Had the kid said funny-looking or beat-up^ he would have been closer to the mark. But Cincinnatus had succeeded in impressing one of his son's pals, so swinging by the school had been all to the good.
'Pals.' Cincinnatus spoke the word he'd just thought. Could a Negro boy in Des Moines have real white friends? He'd probably have to be able to, if he expected to have more than a handful of friends: there wouldn't be enough other colored boys to go around. But, for a Negro from Covington, it was a strange and troubling notion. Cincinnatus would have been willing to bet it was a strange and troubling notion for a lot of whites from Des Moines, too.
When he got home that evening, Achilles was still bubbling over with pride. 'Louie Henderson and Joey Nichols both said that was the swellest truck they ever saw,' he reported.
'That's good,' Cincinnatus said. He paused and listened again in his mind to what his son had just told him. When he'd been Achilles' age, back before the turn of the century, he would surely have said they ever seen. He still said things like that every now and then, or maybe more often than every now and then. Achilles had said them, too, till he started going to school: he'd listened to his mother and father and, while they were still down in Covington, to his grandmother as well. Now he listened to his teacher and to the boys and girls in class with him.
'Yeah, he's learnin' to talk like a Yankee, all right,' Elizabeth said when Cincinnatus remarked on it over supper. 'I seen that myself.' She didn't notice her own slip. To her, it wasn't a slip: it was just the way she talked. It had been the same for Cincinnatus, too, but it wasn't any more. The more like a white he talked, the less likely people here-even other Negroes here, he'd seen- were to reckon him a dumb nigger. Not being thought of that way usually worked to his advantage.
After supper, Achilles read aloud from his primer and Cincinnatus read to him from an abridgement of Robinson Crusoe he'd picked up for a dime in a secondhand store. The sentences in the primer and the story of the
