Thrown-away Child

of everything we passed. Everything but a certain two monuments.
    I asked Joe about the first one, a tall marble tomb with Greek columns in front and a dozen people huddled around it, tourists in sneakers and crinkly Gore-Tex outfits. The tourists were chalking Xs on the sides of the tomb, crossing themselves like Catholics even if they were not, turning around three times and counting off in Spanish— unos, dos, tres. Joe Never Smile pointed at the tomb with his dumper. “That there is Marie LaVeau resting place. You hear of her?”
    I told him I had.
    “All kind of strangeness come around to visit that old dead voodoo queen,” Joe said. “Heavy-metal musical types, they come by to worship her, like this cemetery a church. I ain’t lying. Then you got your Bible crowd, also your motorcycle crowd. They convinced for different reasons that Satan live right in that tomb along with Marie. No lie. So all these fools they come round here throwing little gifts up top of the tomb.”
    Joe elevated his dumper. “Look up, see what I mean?”
    I saw beads on strings drooping over the sides of the flat-topped marble slab—rosaries?—and also the heads and limbs of dead, moldering animals. Chickens mostly, also rats and cats and maybe a goat. I said, That’s got to be one disgusting mess up there.”
    “Prob’ly so.” Joe shook his head. “Old bloody bones is laying up there, beads from Mardi Gras coins, bricks wrapped in tin foil, hanks of dead folks’ hair, cats been swung by the neck ’til they dead-—and mouses eaten up by flies. All that stuff, the voodoo folks they call it gris-gris. S’posed to have powers. Shoo!”
    Joe lowered his clumper, but raised it again to point out the very next tomb. This was less grand than the one for New Orleans’ most famous voudouienne, but not by much.
    “Dutch Morial lying cold inside of that one,” Joe said. “That’d be Ernest Morial, first Negro elected mayor here. Looked white, but Jim Crow say if you got one thirty-second of African blood don’t matter how you look—you black, that’s it. I know Dutch when he was a young man bragging on how he pass. Then come the civil rights movement, so-called. And Dutch—oh man, he suddenly the ace of spades.”
    We slowly made our way through the rest of the cemetery. We were quiet about it, except for our shoes and the dumper making thick echoes in the narrow brick paths bordered by marble and limestone monuments.
    Finally we stopped at a gray tomb the size of a refrigerator. It looked as common and unassuming as a refrigerator, too, until Joe raised up his dumper and motioned me to take a closer look.
    There was a small inlay on the front, which was a stone door. The inlay replicated a hearse drawn by a pair of swayback horses, driven by a stern-faced black man. Below the inlay were a pair of chiseled words, JOE and MOMS. And at the top of the door, where chrome script on a real refrigerator might have spelled out Kelvinator, an inscription had been cut into the slate: IT’S THIRTEEN O’CLOCK—DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOUR CHILDREN ARE?
    “What is this?” I asked, turning to Joe Never Smile. He crossed himself. I did the same, and felt thumping in my chest. And around us a crushing quietude, silence so complete I could hear the tourists counting in Spanish from halfway across the cemetery. Uno, dos, tres...
    “This here where we come yesterday to put to rest the ashes of that tragedy boy,” Joe said. He stepped close to the tomb and pulled open the stone door, left unsealed from the day before. Inside was a maze of cubicles—some empty, others occupied by cremation urns. The urns had metal strips stamped with dates, though not with names. “This here’s where they all are, leastwise the tragedies come to my personal attention.”
    “In this tomb...?” My throat went too thick for talking. And suddenly the waxy odor of lilies seemed as heavy and threatening as thunderclouds, though neither flowers nor clouds were anywhere in sight.
    “Ain’t too fancy, as you see plain,” Joe said, not looking back at me, leaning on the dumper with both his gnarled hands. He sniffed at the cemetery air.
    “Thirteen o’clock,” I said, slowly grasping the unusual charity run by the father of us all. “Meaning time’s run out?”
    Joe’s face brightened. He turned to me. “Not too many understand my joke.”
    “No.”
    “I had this tomb put here some years ago, intending it for my ownself when I’m called to glory. But