“The Wounded Soldier” was originally published and collected in Cold Ground Was My Bed Last Night (1964). It is currently most readily available, in a slightly revised text, in the sixth edition of The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction (W. W. Norton).

I had been to the University of Alabama, upon the invitation of their Writing Program, so that we could look each other over, as it were. Two days of visits with faculty, with the Dean, and with students. I gave a reading, and answered questions, and there was a polite party at the end of the whole thing. George Garrett had been at the University all fall, as a resident writer, and we were driving north together. He was hard at work on The King of Babylon Shall Not Come Against You, and had large parts of it in various disorganized-looking folders, in a satchel, that he had shoved into an overnight bag and put with all his other stuff, when we packed the trunk of the car.

It was almost Christmas. Everybody had been pleasant; the students were particularly kind. We'd said our good-byes at the party, and headed out fairly late in the evening. I'd had a little bourbon, and I could feel it behind my eyes—a warm glow. There were Christmas lights off in the dark, on either side of the road. We drove through a fine mist, talking.

We had been on the road together many times before, and I knew what to expect: stories spinning inside stories, jokes, streams of satire on the various kinds of culture-folly we live with—from bad movies and television, to monstrously shallow celebrities, to the bad councils of local and national governments, and—oh!—all the deplorable pieties of the idiotic present.

Laughs all the way, of course. Lots of those. Great talk, about everything. But mostly laughs. For a while we talked about a novel of Stephen Becker's, set at the end of the Civil War, and then we talked about Becker for a while: his fine translation of André Schwarz-Bart's The Last of the Just.