Page 29 - SpringBoard_ELD_Grade8_Flipbook

bindled: held together in a sack
immortality: the ability to live forever
aCTiViTY 1.3
continued
interpret the Text Using Close reading
my notes
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 ball2 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 had 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.
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.
17 “Well,” said the voice quietly, “here’s a soldier crying before the fight. Good. Get it over. Won’t be time once it all starts.”
18 And the voice was about to move on when the boy, startled, touched the drum at his elbow. The man above, hearing this, stopped. The boy could feel his eyes, sense him slowly bending near. A hand must have come down out of the night, for there was a little rat-tat as the fingernails brushed and the man’s breath fanned his face.
19 “Why, it’s the drummer boy, isn’t it?”
20 The boy nodded not knowing if his nod was seen. “Sir, is that you?” he said.
21 “I assume it is.” The man’s knees cracked as he bent still closer.
22 He smelled as all fathers should smell, of salt sweat, ginger, tobacco, horse, and
boot leather, and the earth he walked upon. He had many eyes. No, not eyes—brass buttons that watched the boy.
23 He could only be, and was, the general.
24 “What’s your name, boy?” he asked.
25 “Joby,” whispered the boy, starting to sit up.
2 Minié ball: a type of rifle bullet that became prominent during the Civil War 6 SpringBoard® English Language Development grade 8
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