Page 50 - SpringBoard_ELA_Grade8_Flipbook

aCTIvITy 1.6
continued
3 His face, alert or at rest, was solemn. It was indeed a solemn night for a boy just turned fourteen in the peach field near the Owl Creek not far from the church at Shiloh.1
4 “...thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three...”
5 Unable to see, he stopped counting.
6 Beyond the thirty-three familiar shadows, forty thousand men, exhausted by
nervous expectation, unable to sleep for romantic dreams of battles yet unfought, lay crazily askew in their uniforms. A mile yet farther on, another army was strewn helter- skelter, turning slow, basting themselves with the thought of what they would do when the time came: a leap, a yell, a blind plunge their strategy, raw youth their protection and benediction.
7 Now and again the boy heard a vast wind come up, that gently stirred the air. But he knew what it was—the army here, the army there, whispering to itself in the dark. Some men talking to others, other murmuring to themselves, and all so quiet it was like a natural element arisen from South or North with the motion of the earth toward dawn.
8 What the men whispered the boy could only guess, and he guessed that it was: “Me, I’m the one, I’m the one of all the rest who won’t die. I’ll live through it. I’ll go home. The band will play. And I’ll be there to hear it.”
9 Yes, thought the boy, that’s all very well for them, they can give as good as they get!
10 For with the careless bones of the young men harvested by the night and bindled
around campfires were the similarly strewn steel bones of their rifles, with bayonets fixed like eternal lightning lost in the orchard grass.
11 Me, thought the boy, I got only a drum, two sticks to beat it and no shield.
12 There wasn’t a man-boy on the ground tonight who did not have a shield he
cast, riveted or carved himself on his way to his first attack, compounded of remote but nonetheless firm and fiery family devotion, flag-blown patriotism and cocksure immortality strengthened by the touchstone of very real gunpowder; ramrod, Minié ball and flint. But without these last the boy felt his family move yet farther off away in the dark, as if one of those great prairie-burning trains ha d chanted them away never to return—leaving him with this drum which was worse than a toy in the game to be played tomorrow or some day much too soon.2
13 The boy turned on his side. A moth brushed his face, but it was peach blossom. A peach blossom flicked him, but it was a moth. Nothing stayed put. Nothing had a name. Nothing was as it once was.
14 If he lay very still when the dawn came up and the soldiers put on their bravery with their caps, perhaps they might go away, the war with them, and not notice him lying small here, no more than a toy himself.
15 “Well ... now,” said a voice.
16 The boy shut up his eyes to hide inside himself, but it was too late. Someone,
walking by in the night, stood over him.
Word CoNNeCTIoNS
Etymology
In the past, people would test the quality of gold or silver by rubbing a stone across it and analyzing the color of the streak it left. The 15th-century Middle English word touch meant “to test,” so this stone became known as a touchstone. This term
is now a metaphor for any
1 Shiloh (n.): site of a Civil War battle in 1862; now a national military park in southwest
Minié ball: a type of rifle bullet that became prominent during the Civil War something else.
method used to test the
2 Tennessee quality or effectiveness of
Unit 1 • The Challenge of Heroism 23
romantic: fondly imaginary helter-skelter: in a confused or disorderly way
benediction: a prayer or blessing
bindled: held together in a sack
immortality: the ability to live forever
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