Gettysburg: July 1, 1863

The young man, hardly more than a boy, who fired the shot had looked at him with an air not of anger but of concentration, as if he were surveying a road, or feeding a length of wood into a saw: It had to be done just so. The bullet passed through his upper chest, below the collar bone. The pain was not what he might have feared. Strangely exhilarated he staggered out of the pasture and into a grove of trees. He pressed and pressed the wound, trying to stanch the blood, but he could only press what he could reach, and he could not reach his back, where the bullet had exited. He lay on the earth smelling the leaves and mosses, musty and damp and cool after the blaze of open afternoon. How good the earth smelled, as it had when he was a boy hiding from his father, who was intent of strapping him for doing his chores late one time too many. A cowbird razzed from a rail fence. It isn't mockery, he thought, no malice in it. . . just a noise. Stray bullets nicked the oaks overhead. Leaves and splinters fell. Someone near him groaned. But it was his own voice he heard. His fingers and feet tingled, the roof of his mouth, and the bridge of his nose. . . . He became dry, dry, and thought of Christ, who said,I thirst. His man-smell, the smell of his hair and skin, his sweat, the salt smell of his cock and the little ferny hairs that two women had known left him, and a sharp, almost sweet smell began to rise from his open mouth in the warm shade of the oaks. A streak of sun climbed the rough trunk of a tree, but he did not see it with his open eye.