C incinnatus Driver was sure he was the happiest black man in Des Moines, Iowa. Des Moines didn't have a whole lot of black men in it, happy or otherwise, but he would have bet he led the parade. The reason he was a man with a song in his heart was simple: he'd just found the perfect Christmas present for his son, Achilles.

The tin fire engine was a foot and a half long, with rubber tires, a ladder that went up almost a yard, a bell that made a godawful racket, and half a dozen lead firemen. He was sure Achilles, who was nine, would play with it not just for hours but for weeks. Grinning, he carried it over to the clerk behind the cash register.

"That'll be a dollar and ninety-nine cents," the woman said briskly.

"Here y'are, ma'am." Cincinnatus gave her two dollar bills. His accent was softer than the sharp local English; along with his family, he'd left Covington, Kentucky, not long after the war ended. He'd hoped he'd left his troubles behind him. So far, his hopes looked like coming true.

"Here's your change." The clerk handed him a penny. She smiled. "I hope your little boy enjoys it."

"Thank you kindly, ma'am." Cincinnatus smiled, too. He wouldn't have got so much politeness from a white woman in Covington. He might not have got it here, either. He'd seen that-some places, they wouldn't sell him things till they saw his money. But, on the whole, Negroes didn't have too hard a time in Des Moines. They were thin enough on the ground here to be reckoned a novelty, not a menace.

Still smiling, Cincinnatus took the fire engine out to his truck. The machine was a beat-up White of Great War vintage. Cincinnatus had driven such snorting beasts all through Kentucky and down into Tennessee during the war, in the service of the U.S. Army. Now he worked on his own behalf-and a White made in 1916 or 1917 was, by the end of 1924, something less than it had been.

He didn't care. The truck was a lot better than the spavined Duryea he'd driven from Covington to Des Moines. It held a lot. He was able to make a good many repairs on it himself; he'd had practice. And, when he couldn't fix the truck, he'd found a mechanic who was both cheap and competent: an immigrant from Italy for whom a black man was but one wonder of a wonder-filled America.

He cranked the engine to get it to turn over. One of these days, I'm going to put a self-starter in this machine. He'd had that thought before, too. But the motor hadn't had a chance to cool down, so cranking it was easy. He got behind the wheel, trod on the clutch, put the truck in gear, and drove off. Night fell as he made his way to the northwestern side of town. The White was of recent enough vintage to have electric headlights and not acetylene lamps; he could turn them on from the cabin, and didn't have to get out and fiddle with matches.

The truck wheezed to a stop in front of the apartment building where his family lived. The motor shook and coughed a couple of times after he took out the ignition key, then fell silent. He got out. Wrapping the toy fire engine in some burlap, he carried it into the building.

In the lobby, Joey Chang, who ran a laundry and whose family lived on the floor above Cincinnatus, nodded to him and said, "Hello."

"Hello, Joey," he answered, doing his best to hide a smile. The Chinaman seemed as exotic to him as a mere Negro did to an Italian immigrant. There might have been a couple of Chinese in Covington back when it was part of the CSA. On the other hand, there might not have, too. He'd never eaten chop suey before coming to Des Moines. He liked Chinese food. It was cheap and good and something out of the ordinary.

As soon as he walked into his own flat, Cincinnatus was glad he'd camouflaged the fire engine, because Achilles sat at the kitchen table doing homework. The boy pointed. "What you got, Pa?"

"None o' your business. Get back to work," Cincinnatus answered. Back in Covington, before the war, there'd been no public schools for Negroes. Finding school not only present but required in Des Moines had made a lot of the hardships in uprooting his family worthwhile. Wagging a finger at Achilles, he went on, "I had to sneak around to learn my letters. You got help. I expect you to take advantage of it."

"I am, Pa," his son said. "But you still haven't told me what you got there." Achilles' accent was an odd mix of Kentucky and Iowa. Cincinnatus knew he would have said ain't told me himself. He also knew that was wrong, but it seemed natural to him in a way it didn't to the boy.

He went into the kitchen, where Elizabeth had a beef tongue boiling in a pot with potatoes and carrots, and with some cloves that gave the air a spicy smell. She too pointed to the burlap-wrapped toy. "What's that?"

Cincinnatus showed her-the fire engine wasn't for her, after all. Her eyes widened. She nodded. He said, "You got a place in here where we can hide this till the day?"

"Right here." She opened a cabinet and pointed to a top shelf. He stood on tiptoe to push the fire engine back as far as he could. That done, he gave her a kiss. She smiled, as if to say something might come of that later on.

Then Amanda toddled into the kitchen and wrapped her arms around his shins. "Dada!" she said. Hard to believe she was a year and a half old now. Above her head, Cincinnatus and Elizabeth exchanged wry, tired grins. Something might not come of Elizabeth's inviting smile, too. Before Amanda was born, Cincinnatus had forgotten, perhaps mercifully, how much of a handful a baby in the house was. She'd reminded him, though.

"Oh, I almost forgot," Elizabeth said. "We got us a letter today."

"A letter?" Cincinnatus said in surprise. "Who from?" Most-almost all-the mail they got was either bills or advertising circulars. Only a few people they knew, either friends or relatives, could read and write.

For that matter, Elizabeth could hardly read and write herself. Till Achilles started going to school, she hadn't even known the ABCs. But he'd taught her some of what he'd learned. Now she said, "It came from Covington, I know that. But I can't make out who sent it, and I didn't open it up. Didn't reckon I could cipher it out myself, and I didn't know if it was anything Achilles ought to see, you know what I mean?"

"Sure do." Cincinnatus looked in the icebox and took out a bottle of beer. Iowa was a dry state that took being dry seriously. The beer was unofficial, illegal homebrew, made by Mr. Chang upstairs. Till he came to Des Moines, Cincinnatus hadn't know that Chinamen drank beer, let alone made it themselves. As he yanked the cork out of the bottle, he said, "Why don't you let me have a look at it now?"

"I do that," she said. When she left the kitchen, her skirt swirled, showing off her ankles and several inches of shapely calf. She'd finally given in to what everyone else was wearing these days. Cincinnatus thought the new styles risque, but that didn't keep him from looking. On the contrary. She brought back the envelope. "Here."

Sure enough, it bore a Covington postmark. Cincinnatus tried to puzzle out the return address, but couldn't. He took a clasp knife from his pocket and opened the envelope. Looking up from the letter, he asked Elizabeth, "You recollect a fellow name of Hadrian, moved next door to my folks a little after the war ended?"

She thought, then nodded. "Believe I do. Never had nothin' much to do with him, though. How come? What's he say?"

"Says Pa's sick, mighty sick, maybe fixin'-to-die sick." Cincinnatus wished he'd never got the letter. He went on, "Says Ma asked him to write me, get me to come back down there 'fore Pa goes." Tears blurred his vision. His father wasn't an old man, but anybody could take sick.

"Mama Livia, she can't very well write you her own self," Elizabeth said. That was true; Cincinnatus' mother and his father, Seneca, were both illiterate. They'd grown up as slaves, back in the days when teaching a Negro his letters was against the law.