There are basically two ways to get from the hospital to the Bienville Cemetery, and they take roughly the same amount of time. Most people would take the bypass to the river, then drive along the bluff, through the Garden District, and up to the cemetery. But you can also skirt the town until you hit Cemetery Road, then drive in east to west, the way farmers and soldiers and slave traders came in during the heyday of the town. I choose that route, because it will take us past many of the landmarks of our lives, both nostalgic and sorrowful.
Dad doesn’t speak as I take Highway 61 around the eastern edge of town. He shifts in his seat as I turn onto Cemetery Road, which grumbles under the tires, a dozen layers of too-thin asphalt and pothole patches, eroding under the weight of log trucks rumbling between the Matheson sawmill on the river and the north-south artery of Highway 61. In a few minutes we’ll pass the turns for the barn and my parents’ neighborhood. Then we’ll enter the city proper, transect the northern quarter of town, and arrive at the rear of the cemetery, where the road sweeps in a great circle around the lush green hills of the graveyard. An unbroken wall of gray cloud stands to the west, towering over the river. I hope the rain will hold off until our pilgrimage is concluded.
Without turning to Dad, I say, “Sometimes I feel like Cemetery Road is the only road in this whole town. You know?”
He grunts but doesn’t comment.
“No matter where you’re going, you either cross it or end up taking it at least part of the way.”
“Seems like,” Dad whispers, and then he coughs hard, struggles to swallow.
I’ve become somewhat accustomed to his illness over the past months, but there’s no denying that last night’s coronary knocked him down hard. He doesn’t seem to notice the turn for his neighborhood when we pass it.
“I have some really good memories of this road,” I tell him. “On our end of town, anyway. The old Weldon barn, and Delphi Spring out at Parnassus Hill. But the other end you can have. The cemetery and the river. This is a road with life at one end and death at the other.”
Dad grunts again, and before I realize where we are, we’re bumping over the railroad tracks where his wife and daughter died, and where Jet disposed of Max’s gun and bloody hammer.
“We’re all on Cemetery Road,” Dad rasps, turning his head enough to see the kudzu-choked ravine drift by under the gray sky. “All the time. Some of us are still near enough to that spring to pretend the road leads somewhere else, or maybe goes on forever. But we’re all headed to the graveyard sooner or later. Or that river.”
I turn and find him looking at me, his jaundiced eyes filled with the pain of all his years in a bottle. But beneath the glaze of exhaustion, I see a faint remnant of the dreams he once had, and memories of heroic things he accomplished before violence and death came into his life.
“They tried to change the name of this stretch once,” he says, looking forward again. “Where the accident happened. Goddamn Chamber of Commerce. Called it Azalea Boulevard. What a crock. They even put up signs, but it never took. Everybody knew they were on Cemetery Road. Might as well call it what it is, right?”
Right.
“What do you want to do out here?” I ask as the green hills of the cemetery come into sight.
“Just sit,” he says. “I don’t think I can walk. Even with your help.”
“We’ll just park under the statue then, and stay in the car.”
“Look at the river some.”
Great, I think, feeling my stomach roll.
I pull through the rear entrance of the cemetery, a massive wrought-iron gate set on masonry pillars. The asphalt lane beyond the wall is smooth but narrow, maintained by the Bienville Cemetery Association. Under the steely sky, I drive slowly through cuts between gentle hills covered with marble stones, obelisks, crosses, and mausoleums that range in size from garden sheds to small houses.
Turning toward the river, we ascend the long road to Laurel Hill, the westernmost redoubt of the graveyard. Standing on one of the highest stretches of the Bienville bluff, it towers 250 feet above the Mississippi River. The McEwan family plot has occupied part of this ground since the 1840s.
“There it is,” Dad says, pointing with his shaking hand.
The shoulders and head of Adam’s statue have become visible above the stones on the back side of the hill. Strangely nervous, I drive the last hundred yards to the edge of the hill, then park on the grass before the brick-and-marble base that supports the monument. From the passenger seat, Dad can glance to his right for a full view of Adam, but in general he’s facing Louisiana and the river.
From this spot, if you look upstream and down, you can see almost fifteen miles of the Mississippi. Looking westward over the delta fields, now planted with cotton and soybeans, you can see to where the land falls away with the curvature of the earth. To the south I see the great towers that carry the electrical cables across the river; the one on this bank is where Adam danced atop the pinnacle while I clung to the ladder in terror, four hundred feet below.
“Well, here we are,” Dad says softly. “Good old Stavros.”
This statement doesn’t puzzle me as it would others. The origin of Adam’s statue has been the grist for a dozen local legends. The truth is simple enough. During his work as a reporter for the army, Dad served as a correspondent in Italy for a year, and he took his chance to see all he could of the ruins of the classical world. He made friends everywhere he went, and one man he became close to was a sculptor. Half Greek and half Italian, Stavros Romano began his career as a promising artist, but by the time Dad met him he was sculpting memorial pieces for the private cemeteries of wealthy families. Several of his statues had been cast in bronze or concrete and were sold as copies around the world.
Shortly after Adam died, Stavros somehow heard of his passing. Five months after the memorial service, a large crate arrived on a freighter at the Port of New Orleans. There it was transferred to a barge headed upriver. Five days later, I drove my father and mother down to the Bienville port to see what Stavros Romano had sent them.
Inside the crate was a life-size marble angel of breathtaking beauty. The angel, a young male, sat on a stone with an air of weary melancholy, as though exhausted from dealing with the travails of the earthly realm. The statue had been hand-sculpted, and I was too young to grasp what that would have cost had my father commissioned it. My parents were so stunned, they weren’t sure what to do with it. The magnitude of the gift seemed too great to accept. And yet, somehow the statue seemed to fit the hole that Adam’s death had blown in our lives.