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.
American Civil War historiography and publishing blogged daily by Dimitri Rotov.
9/29/2005
Prime cut of Foote
From Shelby Foote at his peak (1950, Follow Me Down). Just for the hell of it: