Above the Salt by Katherine Vaz

Author:Katherine Vaz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flatiron Books

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Captain Lucas Johnson was sent to oversee the 14th’s task of cleaning up. Worn out from hauling bodies, John and Frank wandered far afield, with Frank capturing photographs using a borrowed camera and showing no ill effects of having had a bullet in his arm. By the time they sauntered back to camp, hauling a basket of peaches found in a lean-to, they had missed roll call. Amazed that the captain wanted to confront him for “stealing,” John protested, “There wasn’t exactly anyone selling these peaches.”

Captain Johnson shouted that all laxness weakened the army. When John laughed, the captain ordered Frank to stand on a barrel for two hours while draped with the sign THIEF. And the captain did not like John’s failure to salute his superior officer.

Abner Quimby muttered about “superior.”

“Private,” said the captain to Abner, “you are indicating a problem?”

“Yeah. You, Captain,” said Abner.

Abner and John got sentenced to a horse-burying brigade, along with Mark Robertson and Bill Snow for protesting the captain’s harshness. Early on, white horses got shot by the enemy in droves, their color an easy target along with their riders. The Federals undertook a massive shooting of healthy but pale ones. John had found that hard to swallow, their corpses like regal ghosts. Now, the ones they shot when they ailed or got past their prime were of every color, and no one liked that, either, but often farm boys volunteered, since they were accustomed to mercy killings. A recent session of this had reduced Isaac to clapping hands over his ears, screaming for it to stop.

Four horses of various shades had been shot that morning and were swelling with the humidity. John, Mark, Abner, and Bill tied bandannas around their faces and dug extra wide to avoid the grisly indignity of breaking those agile legs to fit them in. They worked with spades and pickaxes in a rhythm. Mark bashed his shovel at a vulture and yelled, “Goddamn it, I’d rather lick the latrine. Alves, those peaches better taste good.”

They tied ropes to the horses’ legs to drag them into the graves, and one curse of making them deep was the thud when the bodies landed, the flies going in to be buried alive with them. John judged horses the noblest of creatures, with their fleetness and the elongation of their heads. At the last shovelful, the undertakers ripped off their bandannas, and John stood near Frank’s barrel until his punishment ended, with Isaac yawping that John was breaking another rule, to which Captain Johnson hollered, “Shut your bonebox, Unthank. I am plenty tired of this war.”

Souvenir seekers poured in, picking the dead clean of shoes and valuables, using pliers to yank out gold teeth. Wedding rings were prime treasures. Enemy corpses got stacked like rotting firewood in trenches to proceed to hell in a single mass. When individual pits were dug, two bodies got packed in and stomped into mush, the gravediggers screaming that rebs were half men who deserved no better.

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