Wilderness Run by Maria Hummel

yard.
    â€œAnyways, I think I seen one flap.” The boy’s voice was coppery and final, like a penny falling to a table.
    Laurence lowered his head. “I saw it, too,” he said, although he knew they both were lying.

Chapter Nine
    By the sloped light of midmorning, the regiment reached a stream with a hill swelling behind it, dotted with sweet gum and sycamore. The trees cast a serene, speckled shadow down on the rail fence that crossed the hill. Only the loud racket coming from the other side made it possible for Laurence to believe that this was the entrance to his first battle.
    All day, the companies had heard fighting, but it remained in the distance, someone else’s story, and while the men told jokes and poked one another with their muskets, Pike and Laurence drifted out of line to gather blackberries, cursing as thorns scraped their wrists. Laurence was gnawing on his last sweet handful when the soldiers’ chatter was silenced by Davey’s shout to march quick, and then double quick.
    In a chaos of yelling and splashing, the troops crossed a shallow ford. When he reached the soft grass beyond, Laurence looked at the faces of the captains, guessing by their desperate glares that the soldiers had taken more time than the battle plans had allotted them. He wondered where the generals were, with their field glasses and maps. Could they see the outcome already? Double quick, double quick. Laurence tossed down his knapsack and bedroll with the others and charged up the hill. His canteen tolled against his chest.
    â€œWe’ll hang Jeff Davis from a sour apple tree,” sang Pike, speeding ahead of Laurence, the soles of his brogans already worn and flopping off.
    â€œâ€˜My soul is among lions,’” Gilbert muttered before hurrying after his brother.
    Up the hill, the scene changed abruptly, as if a storm had swept across the land but reached no farther than the green summit, the white church rising above it. Everywhere, there were bodies, some scattered, some lined up in rows, and ladies who had come to worship that day in their pastel Sunday dresses were bent over men they had never seen before, trying to keep them from death.
    When he reached his first casualty, Laurence halted for a moment, transfixed by the red shell hole gouged in the man’s belly and the soft squelching noise that rose out when he tried to breathe. A woman walked by the dying soldier with a pail of water, her stride unbroken by his cries. The man continued to call out after she passed, but when he saw Laurence’s eyes on him, he averted his face, ashamed. Behind his ear, a bullet had carved a pathway to his glistening gray brain. Shards of skull lay matted in his hair.
    Addison sprinted by, cuffing Laurence on the shoulder, and he started forward again to reach the crest of the hill. Across from him, the white smoke of the rebels’ guns puffed up just after the crack of fire. Minié balls whistled past his ears. Suddenly, Laurence was thrown to the ground. Pasture grass ripped at his cheek, cutting the skin.
    â€œI’m shot,” he said. He could not feel any pain, but he had read that some fatally injured men went into shock and did not suffer before they died.
    â€œNo, you ain’t shot yet, you goddamn fool,” Addison yelled in his ear. He was lying beside Laurence. “I knocked you down so you wouldn’t be. Now load. Davey’s about to call the order to fire.”
    Laurence thought he heard the woman with the water pail scream as he rammed a ball down the barrel of his gun, but when he looked back, he could not see her. Ahead of him, a white house stood on the hill between the armies. Its walls lay in pieces on the ground, boards showing their mottle and knots, bits of glass blinking among them. He finished loading the gun and aimed just to the south of it, toward the Confederate army.
    â€œFire!” Captain Davey yelled from a few yards away. Addison felled a