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"I live in New Iberia, but I've served with the Sanitary Commission in New Orleans. I'm looking for a Southern officer who's been listed as missing in action."
"We're a burial detail. The two men in chains are convicts. I recommend you not get within arm's length of them," the officer said.
The wind gusted out of the south, flapping the tarp on the wagon. An odor like incinerated cowhides struck her nostrils. The lieutenant walked back to his horse and returned with a pair of saddlebags draped over his forearm. He untied the flap on one of the bags and shook fifteen or twenty wooden and tin identification tags onto the carriage seat.
"These are the Rebs we've buried in the last week. I haven't been through the effects of the people in the wagon," he said. His eyes lost their focus and he gazed down the bayou, his face turned into the breeze.
"You said 'people.'"
"A number of them may be civilians, but I can't be sure. Some Rebs were in a house we raked with grape. It caught fire."
She picked up each identification tag individually and examined the name and rank on it. Some of the tags were scratched with Christian crosses on the back. Some of them stuck to her fingers.
"His name isn't among these. I'd like to look in the wagon," she said.
"I don't think that's a good idea," the officer said.
"I don't care what you think."
The officer rotated his head on his neck as though his collar itched him, then brushed at a nostril with one knuckle.
"Suit yourself," he said, and extended his hand to help her down from the buggy.
The officer gestured at the two convicts, who lifted the tarp by its corners and peeled it back over its contents.
The dead were stacked in layers. The faces of some had already grown waxy, the features uniform and no longer individually defined. Others bore the expression they had worn at the exact moment of their deaths, their hands still clutching divots of green grass. The body of a sergeant had been tied with a shingle across the stomach to press his bowels back inside the abdominal cavity. Those who had died in a fire were burned all the way to the bone. A Negro child lay on top of the pile, as though he had curled up there and gone to sleep. The convicts were watching her face with anticipation. "Want to put your hand in there?" one of them said. "Shut up," the officer said.
"Where are your own dead?" Abigail asked.
"In a field mortuary," the officer replied.
"Does the little boy's family know?" she asked.
"I didn't have time to ask," he replied.
"Didn't have time?" she said.
The officer turned back to the convicts and the black laborers. "Get them in the ground," he said.
One of the convicts picked the Negro boy off the pile by the front of his pants and lifted him free of the wagon. The boy's head and feet arched downward, his stomach bowing outward. His eyes were sealed as tightly as a mummy's. The convict flung him heavily into the pit. "You bastard," Abigail said.
"Show some ca
re there," the officer said to the convict. "And, madam, you need to step out of the way or take your sensibilities down the road."
She stood aside and watched the laborers and the convicts lay the bodies of the dead side by side in the bottom of the pit. The black men and the convicts had all tied kerchiefs across their faces, and some of the black men had wrapped rags around their hands before they began pulling the dead out of the wagon by their feet and arms. The rain dripped through the canopy overhead and began to pool in the bottom of the pit.
But none of the dead, as least those who were recognizable, resembled Willie Burke.
"I hope you find him," the officer said.
"Thank you," she said.
"Where was he fighting?" he asked.
"On the rear guard."
"Well, those who serve there are brave fellows. Good luck," he said.
