"Burial Detail" is about burying bodies after a battle
during the Civil War. The speaker is a young solider (Sidney Lanier) who volunteers for
the burial detail. (The character is real, but the story is by
Andrew Hudgins.)
The process is described: a layer of dead
men is put down and then covered with lime—to stop the outbreak of cholera. Then another
layer of the dead are placed, covered by another layer of lime. The work continues all
day and into the night.
The speaker admits that each of the
dead is supposed to be checked for valuables, but it was enough just to move them and
cover them—anything more would be too much for him to bear. He tries not to look at
their faces, but he catches glimpses of a face that looks familiar—like his father,
cousins, even his mother...and then one that looks like him. He
feels a kinship to these men, though they are strangers.
At
one point, the speaker faints:
readability="10">
Then, my knees gave. I dropped my shovel
and
pitched, face first, into the half-filled trench.
I woke almost immediately, and stood
on someone's chest while tired hands pulled me
out.
Ironically, even in
death, the chests of the dead men were stronger than the mud and muck they had marched
through in Virginia to fight in this place. For almost a week, the speaker is the object
of lame jokes because he fainted, though he was not the only one to do
so.
The stranger seems to think there is some irony is his
fainting:
readability="8">
You'd think I would have fainted for my
father,
for some especially mutilated boy,
for Clifford or my
mother. Not for myself.
The
young soldier describes the relief of a nighttime breeze, from a storm brewing nearby.
It feels good, but the bodies also need moisture to start to decay. This point is
important to him because he and others have argued the point: he believes the dead will
decay and become a part of the earth again, but others say this is not so...the bodies
will remain this way forever. And the young man needs to believe the bodies will become
a part of the land again; he needs to know that when it is his turn to die, he will once
again become a part of the earth: and in this way, he and the dead he buries will be the
same.
As the dawn comes to light the field once more, in
the near-darkness, the soldier sees something beautiful. In the dim and shifting light,
he only sees pale colors, laid out in an abstract sort of pattern that is very
appealing. There are no details, no bodies.
readability="7">
There were a thousand shades of
gray,
with colors--some blue perhaps and maybe green--
trying to
assert themselves against that
gray.
For a brief time, it
does not look like a massive graveyard of humanity. But then the sun comes up, and the
burial detail is clearly able to see what they have done: there is no doubt at the end.
These are the vestiges of war. And if by some miracle there is a moment when the
battered and lonely dead disappear, it is an answer to prayer, but only a brief
one...for the burial detail.
This story was written by
Andrew L. Hudgins, Jr.:
readability="8.4230769230769">
His next book [was] After
the Lost War: A Narrative (1988), [which] explores the post-bellum South
entirely through poet href="http://www.encyclopediaofalabama.org/face/Article.jsp?id=h-2907">Sidney
Lanier's voice, following the Confederate soldier and poet from the first
years of the war to his
death.
Using Lanier's voice,
Hudgins explores the Civil War through the eyes of a long-dead member of the Confederate
army (and poet). The topics of Lanier and Alabama brought to Hudgins "equal parts
respect and bewilderment."
