The heat forced the decision.
September in the Florida Keys produces daytime temperatures in the upper eighties and nineties, with humidity that holds the air at the saturation point through the afternoon hours and that reduces the overnight cooling to a marginal decline that does nothing to slow the biological processes that the heat accelerates. The decomposition of human tissue in these conditions is rapid. A body exposed to the sun and the humidity on a coral island in September begins to change within hours. Within two days the change is advanced. Within four days the condition of the remains makes handling and transportation hazardous to the living and identification of the dead functionally impossible in many cases.
The storm struck on the evening of September 2. The first rescue parties reached the Keys on September 3. By September 5, three days after the storm, the condition of the unrecovered bodies on the Matecumbe Keys had progressed to the stage where the Governor of Florida — David Sholtz, operating on the recommendation of the military officers and medical personnel managing the relief operation — ordered the cremation of the dead who could not be transported to the mainland for burial.
The decision to cremate was logistical before it was ceremonial. No functioning road or rail remained, boats were limited, tropical heat was rising, and officials feared contamination if bodies stayed where they had fallen.
The cremation began on September 7.
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The first site was at Snake Creek, on the northern end of the corridor, where thirty-eight bodies were collected and burned on a pyre constructed from the debris that the storm had provided in abundance. The process was organized with the military formality that the National Guard units brought to the operation: the bodies arranged, the pyre lit, the burning attended by an officer and by the clergy who had accompanied the relief parties to the Keys. A rabbi. A priest. A Protestant minister. The three faiths that the veterans’ population encompassed were represented at each cremation, the prayers spoken over the pyres in the sequence that the military protocol prescribed.
Rifle salutes were fired.
The military honors were the honors that the veterans had earned by their service — the service that had taken them to the Western Front and back, that had given them the status of veterans and the claim on the federal government that the Bonus March had attempted to enforce and that the camps on the Keys had been the government’s answer to. The men who had marched on Washington demanding their bonus were now receiving their final honors on the coral ground where the government had sent them instead of paying what they were owed. The rifle salutes echoed across the burned landscape of the Keys and dissipated into the salt air and the silence of the emptied corridor.
The cremation continued at sites across the Upper and Lower Matecumbe Keys as the relief teams recovered bodies from the wreckage over the following days. The process was repeated at each site: the collection of the dead, the construction of the pyre, the attendance of the clergy, the rifle salute. The smoke rose from the islands and was visible from the boats that carried the rescue teams and the supplies and the journalists who were arriving in increasing numbers to document the disaster and to ask the questions that the accounting was beginning to make unavoidable.
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The Archivist kept even the cremations because the treatment of the dead told him how humans ranked the dead.
Mass death forces institutions into whatever mixture of ceremony and expedience the damaged place can still manage. Galveston had tried the sea before turning to beach cremations. Okeechobee had used mass graves with unequal care. The Keys would burn their dead on site.
The Keys cremation occupied a different position in the taxonomy of institutional response. The dead were federal employees — veterans receiving federal relief, assigned to federal camps, killed during a federally administered program. The cremation was ordered by the state governor and executed by the National Guard with military honors. The ceremony was more formal than Galveston’s beach pyres. The attendance was more organized. The religious representation was deliberate.
The formality was proportional to the accountability.
The Archivist had seen the pattern before: the more politically visible the dead, the more care institutions showed them afterward.
The cremation was attended. The honors were given. The bodies were burned.
The smoke rose over the corridor.
The Analyst read the handling of the dead as part of the same social arrangement the storm had already exposed.
The smoke dispersed.
The questions remained.