So did Chester. He also started laughing like a maniac. "What was that all about?" Rita asked.
"New contract. Two years. Same terms as the wartime one," Chester got out between guffaws.
"But what's so funny?" Rita demanded.
Chester didn't tell her. One more thing he never intended to tell anybody. The real strike fund was smaller than Harry T. Casson thought, not three times as big. He'd raised Casson with a busted flush, and he'd made the magnate fold. Rain? So what? If this wasn't a good day's work, for him and for everybody else in the union, he'd never done one. The sooner we sign the papers, the better, he thought. But they would. After the war, a contract was…a piece of cake.
E lizabeth clucked at Cincinnatus. "Aren't you ready yet?"
"I been ready for twenty minutes. So has my pa," he answered. "You're the one keeps checkin' her makeup an' makin' sure her hat's sittin' just the right way."
"I'm doin' no such thing," his wife said, and Cincinnatus prayed God would forgive the lie. Elizabeth added, "Not every day you marry off your onliest daughter."
"Well, that's a fact," Cincinnatus allowed. "That sure enough is a fact."
Amanda was at the beauty parlor, or maybe at the church by now. Cincinnatus reached up and fiddled with his tie. He'd never worn a tuxedo before. The suit was rented, but the clothier assured him plenty of white men rented tuxes, too. Seneca Driver wore Cincinnatus' ordinary suit. It was a little big on him, but he didn't have one of his own; he'd got away from Covington with no more than the clothes on his back, and money'd been tight since.
"You look mighty handsome," Elizabeth said.
"Glad you think so. What I reckon I look like is one o' them fancy servants rich folks had down in the CSA," Cincinnatus said. "They're the only ones I ever seen with fancy duds like this here."
His wife shook her head. "Their jackets always had brass buttons, to show they was servants." She snorted. "Like them bein' colored wouldn't tell you. But anyways, they did. Your buttons is jus' black, like they would be if you wore them clothes all the time on account of you wanted to."
Cincinnatus couldn't imagine anybody wanting to. The tux fit well, yes. But it was uncomfortable. On a hot summer day, it would be stifling, with the high wing collar and the tight cravat. He didn't even want to think about that. "I ain't sorry Amanda didn't want to wait till June," he said.
"Do Jesus, me neither!" his wife exclaimed. "She try an' do that, maybe she have herself a baby six, seven months after they do the ceremony. People laugh at you an' talk behind your back when somethin' like that happens."
"They do," Cincinnatus agreed. There was something he hadn't worried about. Well, his wife had taken care of it for him. He sent her a sidelong look and lowered his voice so his father wouldn't hear: "Only fool luck we didn't have that happen our ownselves."
"You stop it, you and your filthy talk," Elizabeth said, also quietly. He only laughed, which annoyed her more. It wasn't as if he wasn't telling the truth. Plenty of courting couples didn't wait till the preacher said the words over them before they started doing what they would have done afterwards.
For that matter, Cincinnatus had no way of knowing whether Amanda had a bun in the oven right now. He almost pointed that out to his wife, too, but held his tongue at the last minute. Maybe Elizabeth was already worrying about that, too. If she wasn't, he didn't want to give her anything new to flabble about.
Someone knocked on the door. "Ready or not, you're ready now," Cincinnatus told Elizabeth. "There's the Changs."
When Elizabeth opened the door, she might have been ready to meet President-elect Dewey and his wife. "Come in!" she said warmly. "Oh, isn't that a pretty dress!"
"Thank you," Mrs. Chang said. She didn't know a whole lot of English-less than her husband-but she understood enough to nod and smile and say the right thing here.
Joey Chang had on an ordinary suit, not a tux-he wasn't father of the bride, only father of the bride's sister-in-law. "I bring beer to reception, right?" he said.
"Right!" Cincinnatus said. Mr. Chang was also one of the best homebrew makers in Des Moines. Since Iowa remained legally dry, that was an important talent. The authorities didn't seem to be enforcing the law the way they had before the war, but you couldn't just go round to the corner package store and pick up a couple of cases of Blatz.
"I do it, then," Chang said. "You have colored people at your wedding, right?"
"Well, I think so," Cincinnatus said dryly.
"You have Chinese people, too." Chang nodded and pointed to himself and his wife. Their and Cincinnatus' grandchildren could have gone into either category. Chang went on, "You have white people, too?"
"Yeah, we will," Cincinnatus replied. "Some of the guys from the butcher shop where Calvin works. Little bit of everything."
"Maybe not so bad," Joey Chang said. Considering how hard he and his wife had resisted Grace's marriage to Achilles, that was a lot from him. He insisted they would have liked it just as little had Grace married a white guy. Cincinnatus…almost believed him. Grandchildren had softened the Changs, as grandchildren have a way of doing.
"We should go," Elizabeth said. "Don't want to be late." The church was a block and a half away, so there was very little risk of that. But Elizabeth would flabble. It was a wedding, after all.
"Long as Amanda and Calvin are there-and the minister-don't hardly matter if we show up or not," Cincinnatus said. He made his wife sputter and fume, which was what he'd had in mind. Joey Chang tipped him a wink. Cincinnatus grinned back.
The Changs made much of Seneca Driver as they walked to church. They took old people seriously. "Mighty nice great-grandchillun," Seneca said. "Mighty nice. I don't care none if they's half Chinese, neither. I wouldn't care if they was red, white, an' blue. Mighty nice."
Cincinnatus wished he could move along with his back straight and without a stick in his right hand. His leg still hurt. So did his shoulder. The steel plate in his skull made mine detectors go off-an amused Army engineer had proved that one day.
Beat up or not, though, he was still alive and kicking-as long as he didn't have to kick too hard. With a little luck, he'd see more grandchildren before long. Compared to most of the surviving Negroes in the conquered Confederacy, he had the world by the tail.
Calvin's father and mother were already at the church. They were pleasant people, a few years younger than Cincinnatus. Abraham Washington ran a secondhand-clothes store. It wasn't a fancy way to make a living, but he'd done all right. Calvin had a brother, Luther, a year younger than he was. Luther wore a green-gray uniform and had a PFC's chevron on his sleeve. He looked tough and strong-and proud of himself, too.
"I didn't see any combat, sir," he said to Cincinnatus. "Heard stories about what you truck drivers went through, though. What was it like?"
"Son, you didn't miss a thing," Cincinnatus answered. "That's the honest to God truth. Getting shot at when they miss is bad. If they hit you, it's worse."
"I told him that," Abraham Washington said. "I told him, but he didn't want to listen. He went and volunteered anyway."
"He got the chance to show he was as good as a white man, and he went and took it," Cincinnatus said. "How you gonna blame him for that?"
Luther Washington grinned from ear to ear. "Somebody understands why I did what I did!"
His father only sniffed. By the way Abraham Washington sounded, his people had lived in Des Moines for generations. He was used to being thought as good as a white man-or nearly as good, anyhow. Having grown up in the CSA, Cincinnatus could see why Luther was willing to lay his life on the line to get rid of the nearly. During the Great War, plenty of Negroes joined the Confederate Army to win citizenship for themselves. Plenty more would have this time around, if only Jake Featherston had let them. That urge to prove himself-that feeling you had to keep proving yourself-stayed strong in Negroes on both sides of the old border.