One of the first things I fell in love with in New Orleans was its cemeteries. The house I lived in on Dryades when I first came here had one nearby, a block of gravesites smack in the middle of street after street of houses and apartments, with a low brick wall and, just beyond, a border of the tiers of vaults here called ovens-all of it white and dazzling in the sunlight. There was at the same time such gravity and such lightness to it; and ever since, when things crowd too closely in upon me, I tend to head to the cemeteries for a strange solace I find nowhere else.
The largest (though really it’s a blur of many smaller, distinct ones) is at Canal and City Park, a wilderness of tombs stretching far into the distance, a sprawling city of the dead. Many older crypts have sunk almost completely into the ground. And above them, as though reaching for sky, loom thickets of crosses, angels, statues large and small, figures of women shrouded in grief.
The oldest is on Basin Street, St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, at what was long ago the edge of town and later the edge of Storyville. Marie Laveau, Paul Morphy and the city’s first mayor dwell there now. Occupying but a single square block, it’s pure chaos: a riot of twisted pathways that end as often as not in cul-de-sacs. Tombs sit askew, at every conceivable angle and tilt, the lower corners of many of them wrenched free of the ground.
My personal favorite is on Washington. It fills two or three blocks in a well-decayed part of town, chockful of gravesites in a bewildering jumble of styles, size and age, cut through by narrow, corridor-like paths, yet in its own way rigidly symmetrical: disorder’s cur brought to heel. Whenever I’m down that way, I make a point of going by.
Which I did that afternoon on the way home, wandering its pathways for half an hour or more, reading off names at random. Intimate stories began unfurling. Then I moved on to the next, or the one after.
Finally I left and ambled along Washington. Stopped off at a corner grocery for a quick po-boy and beer. Took the beer with me to finish as I walked up La Salle, jagging from sidewalk (where there was one) to street (where there wasn’t, or where, from blockage or a quakelike upheaval of tree roots, it proved impassable).
A couple of blocks up, I turned into an alley between shoulder-to-shoulder doubles to trash the Dixie bottle. Most of the places along here seemed to be occupied-presumptive Christmas decorations hung on some abbreviated porches, leftover Halloween skeletons on one-but the houses either side of this particular alley, for whatever reasons, had been scuttled. One, to the left, once lime-green, had all windows and doors boarded over; its yellowish neighbor lacked windows and doors entirely and was heaped with refuse ranging from rotting lumber and linoleum to remains of impromptu parties (fast-food bags, bottles, candles) and grocery sacks of garbage, perhaps from adjoining quarters.
I lifted the lid of one of the bins, La Salle painted on in red, and saw just beyond, at the back of the alley against the latticework wall, a body. A woman’s, I confirmed, stepping closer. She lay face-down, skirt thrown up over back and head. Pale, bloody rump in open air.
Twentyish, I decided, after turning her over. And dead. Possibly from a blow to the head: temples were spongy, eyes pushed forward and swollen. Possibly from a knife held against the neck as they butt-raped her, nicking a carotid.
Not that it mattered.
I knocked on the nearest occupied door, pushed my way in before the woman who answered could protest or ask questions, and dialed 911.
“Walsh,” I told them.
“We’ll have to get your name, number and location,” the guy said.
“Walsh-or I hang up. There’s a body. You decide.”
Two minutes later, Don was on the line.
I spent an hour or so answering the usual array of police-type questions to at least three different groups of people, then went home. Later that night I sat with a glass of gin, neat, one of my own books face-down, unheeded, against my thigh, open to a particularly violent scene. I didn’t need to read it, I knew it-by heart, as they used to say.
For years now, sequestered in this house, the one Vicky and I lived in together, the one Verne often visited, I had written book after book about street life, crime, about violence both random and purposeful, about frustration and despair and, occasionally, vengeance. But what I wrote, all those supposed “realistic” scenes, were only a kind of nostalgia, a romancification, sheerest dissembling; I could never portray what it was really like out there.
It wasn’t that, in the years of my retreat, violence and pain had grown; but that I myself, believing I understood, believing I was saying important things, huddled down there, had steadily grown smaller.
I did not and do not understand. I will never understand.