She was ironing again. She didn’t want to talk about his father. She said, “Seems to me your mama was maybe right.”

“What’s that mean?”

Picking her way. “It don’t mean nothing. Just, things change. Folks get used to most anything.”

He was quiet a little while, watching her. She was wet under her arms and could smell herself and guessed he could too. After a bit he said, “Know what I saw coming back down home?”

She folded the shirt and turned to the stove with the iron and set it there and turned back, standing now before the stove, a pace away from the table. “What’d you see?”

“Come across a pair of wagons. Hooped over with canvas covers, a skinny old team of oxen hitched up to each wagon. The wagons filled up with house stuff, feather ticks and furniture, nothing too big but all of it looked nice what I could see. Old men and little children and women in the wagons. Six men bareback on mules carrying pitchforks and hog-butchering knives, one with a scythe. What do you think of that?”

“I don’t think nothing. Lots people moving round now.”

“They was all niggers. A whole troop of niggers. Heading north in broad daylight. In ox wagons with pilfered belongings. Going what? Six-eight miles a day? Some great old escape. A dash to freedom. Two of the ones on muleback rode up with their rusted weapons with edges whetted to shine like water and sat there and asked me what I was doing. ‘What you wanting here white boy,’ they said to me. ‘Jus keep moving on,’ they said. ‘Jus keep one foot front of the other and you’ll get your little white ass on home.’ And I didn’t say nothing to em, just kept walking right on by those spavined mules and them old wagons and them oxen near dead anyhow and didn’t look back at em, the whole time feeling those pitchfork tines running right on through my lungs, knowing they was looking at me like they’d like to do that. I went on all day until it was dark and never met anybody looking for em at all. Them out there in broad daylight, brazen as that. Like they was riding angels not oxen to the skinny bosom of Lincoln himself. Like there wasn’t near the whole state of Virginia to get through and it filled up with thousands of men all too happy to shoot runaway niggers. They going along serious but easy too, like it was just what they was doing. I bet them women and old men setting up there on those ticks even went along singing. What do you think about that?”