An Actual Story...or rather, the first pages of something I've written to hopefully be published

The Christmas Ships
“Now that the salt of their blood stiffens the saltier oblivion of the sea…”-Allen Tate
-I-
They came before the first snowfall, before the first ice, when the ground had hardened in its shell and would not yield beneath the steel of a pick nor the weight of a man; the graves would not be dug, the bodies would lay strewn amidst leaves and they would form the brown crust that littered the late days of November. In the crystalline air that had become suddenly silent after days of skirmishes and infantry, there were few cries from the soldiers who had the misfortune of dying too far from home.

These ships. Brown as the dirt, and nearly as wide as the river, pulling up alongside the scaffolds of the town still recovering from the trauma of another lost battle. Sidling up alongside wooden docks, pushed by poles in the narrows of the Rappahannock, the boats glided silent. They would arrive in the late of the afternoon, when color was draining from the sky and men would sling ropes along metal stays anchoring the docks. Most of the crew would wait below, waiting for the first lanterns to arrive and then would they ascend the short stairs to the surface.
At night, when the candles and oils burnt slow yellow glaze and the breath of moving men hung heavy, the sounds of wooden wheels and metal barrows came slightly. The sound of a faint roll of wood over crushed stone, moving slowly down towards the gathered lights at the river. Only in the clarity of two or more lanterns could one see the movement of limbs, gathering dark branches and laying them on the dockside. Sprawling timber it seemed, stiff, wooden, straight lines against the yellow light. And as one moved closer, to almost hear the tug of cloth and the meeting of bone and earth, one could discern a hand, extended outward, with fingers spread. There was no timber in the wagons; rather, the stiff and the dead, the heavy and awkward weight of a man frozen stiff in the wind and frozen stiff for the grave.

Yet they were not being buried here, near the shallow waters where the boats where pulled tight against the wood. Men in boats gathered them as husks, bound and measured and tugged in to the slippery deck to the hole down beneath. There they were stacked, laid, pushed and turned until they fit almost up to the ceiling. And then lanterns, now almost white as wicks found little to cling to, swung with the walk of men hurrying away in the night. The sound of a pole pushing into narrow waters, moving the boat slowly away from the lights that signaled another visit from the Christmas ships.