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.
It was my mother who voiced our collective conviction: “It looks like Adam,” she said with reverence. “Not exactly like him, but . . . the spirit of him. We’ll put it in our plot, up on the hill.” My father resisted at first. By that time, he had not merely abandoned the idea of God, but was enraged by it. If his friend’s statue was going into the McEwan family plot, Dad wanted its wings removed, broken off, and the stumps sanded down to hide the fact that they’d ever been there. I could see his point. As beautiful as they might have been on an eagle, the folded wings gave the stone angel a supernatural aspect, whereas without them the figure would have appeared as a strong and handsome boy of about eighteen, the ideal of Greek beauty.
My mother refused to allow it. She said they hadn’t the right to deface Stavros’s sculpture, and besides, the town would probably rise up to prevent the desecration of a holy statue. Without his wings, she said quietly, the boy would possess an almost decadent, earthly beauty. In this he was like Adam, and in the end that may have been what swayed my father to permit this exotic object to become Adam’s memorial, which now—thirty-one years after his death—is one of the most famous landmarks in the town. When I was in high school, I used to come up here alone sometimes, and I saw more than one tugboat captain shine his spotlight up on the high bluff to pick out the angel where it stood sentry duty at the edge of the cemetery.
“What do you think happened to him?” Dad asks. “Most people get found when they die in the river.”
“I don’t know,” I answer warily. “I used to think about it a lot.”
“I like to think he made it all the way down to the Gulf.”
“Me, too,” I confess.
“A river burial,” he mutters. “I don’t like that. They say Hernando de Soto’s men buried him in the river so the Indians wouldn’t realize he was mortal. That was about fifty miles south of here. I like the idea of burial at sea better.”