9/29/2005

Prime cut of Foote

From Shelby Foote at his peak (1950, Follow Me Down). Just for the hell of it:
Granddaddy's other sleeve flapped loose. It had been that way since Shiloh, his first battle, when he was seventeen. I remember he used to tell about it, how the bonesaw sang when they took off his arm and how they put him in the bed of a springless wagon to ride from the battlefield back to Corinth, twenty miles, alongside a man that had his bottom jaw shot away so that his tongue lolled down on his throat like a bright red four-in-hand tie; hail came down the size of partridge eggs; the boneless stump swung from his shoulder, a little sack of bloody meat. He told me about it on winter evenings when he could feel snow in the air.