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buildings and now this, butchered and torn men, men with parts coming out of them, dragging on the ground, dying, screaming.
    Lucy her smile was gone and she must have been thinking like me because she said, “Freedom sure costs a heap, don’t it?”
    I thought we ought to go help. Either side it didn’t matter. Men treated that way need help, some comfort, but two wagons camefrom around the hill said Ambulance on the side in big letters and started picking up wounded men from both sides.
    “We’ll go now, I ’spect,” I said, and stood and started walking. Lucy she hung back a bit then caught up with me and her eyes were shining again only this time for different reasons. Crying, soft tears. She didn’t say anything about it for over a mile, walking south, and then she just repeated herself.
    “Freedom sure costs a heap.” And she never talked on it again. I wondered how it could be that grown men could stand not forty paces apart and shoot each other down, just stand and shoot and reload and shoot until a bullet finds you. Seems nothing would be worth that.
    We walked until the sun was overhead, heading south, and finally came on somebody who told us where to go. There’d been people moving on the road all along. Soldiers running this way or that, horses with officers galloping up and back and twenty or thirty black people. They weren’t moving like the others, not aimed at going anywhere, just most of them away.
    One man stopped us. Old man, shiny black with almost white hair and he waggled a finger at us. “It ain’t going to last.”
    “What ain’t going to last?” Lucy asked him.
    “This freedom. The South will take it back soon as the war is over. They get done killing each other we going back to chains.”
    Wasn’t true of course and I knew it then too, knew it would last. But not all the Northerners were friendly when they went by. There was some to call us bad names and would have kicked us hadn’t we moved off the road and that made people worry that as soon as the fighting was done things would all go back the way they were.
    “Where is New Orleans?” I asked the old black man.
    “New Orleans? Child, why do you want to know that?”
    I told him about my children. “I’m going to get them back.”
    He nodded. “I hope you do. I hope you do. I don’t know where it’s at, New Orleans. I think it’s south and west about the same amount and it must be a far piece because my master went there once and was gone near half a year getting there and back. I recollect he said it was south and west about the same amount. Is that ham I smell in the sack?”
    Had to give him a piece. I wasn’t against sharing but most we met were hungry and did they see it the ham would go faster than grease on a griddle. He chewed slowly because he didn’t have any teeth, only gums, and Itook the time to ask him, “What is New Orleans?”
    I didn’t know much but one thing I did know—no excuse for not knowing when you could ask a question.
    “Why, child, it’s a city. A big city. My master he told us it was so big you couldn’t see it all in a day. A big, big city …”
    We set to walking again and an officer on a horse came along presently and stopped us and asked after the Glenrose plantation. I remembered the name on a burned gate.
    “It’s about three miles back,” I said. “Would you know how to get to New Orleans?”
    “New Orleans? You don’t want to go there—it’s still in rebel hands. Not all of the South is free yet.”
    “I’ve got children sold there …”
    “Ahh. I see. God, this whole thing is … an abomination. Well, as the crow flies, which is I imagine the direction you’ll walk, it’s about three hundred and fifty miles almost due southwest.”
    I thought on it and couldn’t make the number work in my mind. “How far is that—three hundred and fifty miles?”
    He looked at my legs. “You can probably walk, at a steady pace, thirty-five miles a day. That means it