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over my leg. I stayed like that, listening for him.
    “I won’t be the only one who will recognize you. You are not easy to miss. You would be better off looking us all in the eye. If you are ashamed, you will not last.”
    I sat up. “I am not ashamed.”
    “Ah, my mistake. I assumed.”
    He had no bags. I watched him stand at the end of the platform, watching the red sun bleed into the horizon. Meanwhile porters scurried to load my great, varnished, ironbound trunks onto the back of a four-in-hand. When he walked over to the stairs and stepped down from the platform, he looked over at me and scanned me from head to toe, as if looking for something. Or judging me. I watched him walk, on fisherman’s legs bow-legged and steady, moving fast down the Shell Road toward the city. He was soon lost in the dust clouds that kicked up in the wind that now rushed in off the lake as the sun disappeared. I never thought to offer him a ride. When my coach passed him on the way into town from the station, he had stepped off the Shell Road to piss. He grinned up at me.
    “Don’t look back, General!” he shouted over the clatter of the horses. He was laughing when we turned out of sight.
    New Orleans was, very simply, the only Southern city that still worked, where a man might still make a dime in those years just after the war. Briefly my mind turned to the subject of money: its acquisition, cultivation, its transformative properties, its promise of freedom. I had never cared much for money before, but war had changed that. Forgive the young general, forgive me.
    I can remember what I thought standing for the first time in the St. Louis Hotel, watching the traders and fixers mingling in the red and alabaster of the lobby, sharing their whiskey and passing around bills of sale. They were smooth-faced and tailored. Their shoes glowed. They moved lightly between couch and chair and bar. I stood on the precipice, a scarecrow, a lump of earth, a pile of broken things, and watched them flow and slip around each other like dancers. They were full of grace, the earthly kind, and I was full of heaviness. No one acknowledged me.
The old man was wrong about that,
I thought then, but now I knew he had been right: I was seen, recognized, and ignored. Negro waiters, wrapped in bright white coats and bearing trays of glasses and tobacco, drifted between knots of men who honked and brayed at each other in pleasure. The waiters bowed and shuffled just as they would have before the war. What had changed? Men laughed, they shook hands. The mirrors were polished, the landscapes framed in bright gold and hung straight. The whole place was
easy,
unperturbed, secure. In that one spot, in that one city in that singular state far from my enemies, this was how things had been, how they were, and how they always would be. I realized for the first time that the war had not been all-consuming. It had consumed me, but not these men whose suits were not pulling apart at the seams and whose legs did not thump and scrape across the gleaming tile. There had been men who had flourished while Chickamauga raged, men who had gone home to their wives and concubines while other men dragged their squadmates off the field at Little Round Top and laid them in bloody piles. I was not angry to realize this, though it was a shock even so. I became confident and certain in this knowledge. I became gleeful at the thought:
These men owe me
. My cause was right, and my cause was not just money but compensation.
Look at my leg,
I thought, pushing through a boisterous group of Creole cotton men and planters in gold cravats.
Who will bid on my leg?

    The city embarrassed me, or I was embarrassed for the city, one or the other. Blacklegs walked the streets like kings, arms thrown over the shoulders of the innocent, hands on the asses of whores. The whores dressed better and spoke more eloquently than the dark-haired and pious wives who spent their days fumbling with beads, their heads