Michael Malone - Weebly

way back to Route 3 and his automobile. He sat in his
car a long time, feeling nauseous and faint, before
starting home. His soft leather shoes were ruined, caked
in mud. A sole had torn loose. His soft wool trouser leg
was ripped and snagged with brambles. Staring down
at his leg, Ransom remembered mud-thick boots and a
khaki pants leg shredded and his thigh unbelievably
bright red, wrong-looking, with the bone sticking out of
it.
He remembered how he had stared at the leg, there
at the beach in Normandy in 1944, propped up where
a medic had dragged him. As then, he stared now at his
torn clothes and muddy shoes as if the messy disorder
he saw could be no part of him.
When he reached home that Sunday, Ransom
threw the shoes and pants away and in response to
Priss's shock at his condition, said only that he'd gone
out to walk in Birch Forest and had gotten lost.
He did not tell Priss, or anyone else, what he had
seen. Just as he had never told anyone that in 1969
(three years before negotiations with the state about the
highway began) he had leased that northwesternmost