Joseph

Two

Convenient Graves

All Saints’ Day. The gloves on his hands, the stockings doubled in his shoes, do nothing for the chill that seeped this morning from the deep corners of the doctor’s house and took ahold of his fingers and toes and hasn’t yet let go. Not when he, dressing for the day’s duty of visiting graves, held them before the fire stoked by one of the doctor’s aged slaves. Not when he rubbed his hands together on the ride across town, back into the neighborhood where he used to live, kneading and pinching so much that the doctor—mistaking the chill for ­nervousness—said, Come on now. It’s not as though you haven’t been here before. And not when he stopped at the cemetery gate, feigning that his laces were untied and, while the doctor strode heedless ahead with the beaded immortelle wreaths and bundled candles tucked under his arm, Joseph touched the sun-warmed leather of his shoes and tried to mash the heat into his stiffened toes.

Now, dragging feet that might as well be asleep, he hurries through the gates into the cemetery. Like all grounds in the city holding Catholic bones, Saint Louis no. 1 has undergone its annual transformation from a rank and weedy collection of monuments occasionally strung with flowers and haphazard mementos into a wildly bedecked shrine. Today the living pour into the cities of the dead and offer wreaths and light, favorite treats and articles, maintain vigils over souls both saintly and not. High-hatted men hang back from the flocks of black-veiled women knelt before the tombs. Joseph hears their murmurs, their clockwork prayers, the chewing noise of hundreds of feet on the oyster­shell walks as he and the doctor near the Sabatier tombs. He keeps his head down to avoid the sight of the veiled women, all of whom, give or take pounds and posture, could be his mother. If she were here and wearing black, not on an island in the Gulf, her dress white as the sand.

This is how he imagines her: white and furious, immutably blanched. And imagination is all he has—for his letters go unanswered. The doctor has written to the commandant of the island, who vouched that there have been no deaths among the female prisoners and the dearth of mail is inexplicable. A matter for the postmaster.

Unlike their neighbors, the Sabatier tombs are not freshly whited, their roofs—steeply sloped and pintellated with cruciform spikes—are overgrown with weeds. The doctor throws open the low iron gate and steps into the familial ground. Joseph looks to the downspouts at the feet of the tombs—grotesques whose open mouths are gagged with wet leaves. Glancing up from the hideous faces, he watches the doctor hang upon each house one of the ready-made immortelles he bought this morning on the way. This accomplished, the doctor turns about without a moment’s pause and walks out. A pair of old women crouched at a nearby obelisk scowl and shake their heads when the doctor loudly heels shut the gate. Dusting off his hands as though from a great labor, he nods Joseph in the direction of the ovens. The beads of the deposited immortelles are still clacking against the moldy faces of the tombs when they set off.

Through corridors of crypt where families share pieces of chicken from wicker baskets and solitary men sit on the steps of graves slowly swirling bottles between their knees. Beneath bright garlands stretching from statues to stone urns, and miniature Parthenons whose columns writhe with blooms. Narrow vaults whose doors are embossed with swords or cannons. The tomb of an actress who died young, its pediment piled with roses and slips of poetry.

“I wonder,” Joseph says. “What sort of grave I’ll have.”

Lately he’s grown accustomed to voicing his thoughts to the doctor, who claims to enjoy them. What the doctor truly likes is to hear in Joseph’s voice an echo of his own. A tone or turn of phrase Joseph never knowingly assumes, yet there it is all the same. He opens his mouth and there is this man’s voice, where once had been his father’s, sitting like a coal-fleck on his tongue.

“A little premature for that, my boy.” The doctor smiles. “You won’t have to worry about graves for”—his eyes glint—“no. Go on wondering. When I was your age, or maybe younger, my father would tell me not to think darkly. Dark thoughts, he believed, were unmanly. Of course, that was on the rare occasion I spoke in his presence.”

Joseph knows what it means to occupy a corner of silence at the dinner-table, as was the rule when his father sat down with them. But he didn’t hate his father for it; nor does he hate him now. At least not the way it seems Dr. Sabatier hates his.

“My dark thoughts served me well, and I believe you’ll profit just as much from yours.” The doctor taps his brow, a knowing nod. “You have the mind for them, you do.”

Passing now twinned plinths bearing the names of pairs of husbands and wives, he sees Marina laid upon a bier, the way she likes to do when they act out death-scenes from her play. The pirate witch is always dying, always coming back to life. Only the death of Marina’s uncle put her away; and then but for a time. Now she is the pirate witch in black, even their acting must be quiet so as not to disturb Mademoiselle. The pile of stiff rags remain still unfound.

At the stretch of ovens bordering Bienville they must shoulder through the crowded mourners to reach his father’s home. In the time since the funeral his name has been etched in a brass plate along with his impossible years: 1784–1862. The doctor waves to be handed the wreath slung over Joseph’s shoulder.

“I can reach,” Joseph says, more than a little proud. The doctor is not a tall man, and in the last four months he has grown within an inch of his height. The spurt began with pain, bone-deep, on the first night he spent in the doctor’s house. And for a time he thought his aches were in sympathy with the coughs and moans of the sick woman upstairs. He felt himself changing apace, his spurts attuned to rustles and agonies of the doctor’s wife as summer wore into fall. By the time the woman died, Joseph’s ankles showed past his cuffs. The bottom has fallen out of his voice, like a rotten floor. He is beset by an oppressive need for sleep. Easily attained, for there are so many cool dark places in the doctor’s house and no one but the occasional slave with a duster to disturb him. And it is as though he’d needed the house in order to grow; or that it needed him to raise up and fill its emptiness. But there are times at night and even midday (the shadows do not care) when he isn’t enough, and his fresh height, what he can encompass in his new arm-span, is not enough and the house swallows him. And when he feels enfolded by that vast darkness, he understands what it means for a house to have wings.

Now whenever he meets Marina he must look down; Mlle Pichon he may look in the eye. And if his father weren’t encased behind these bricks with so many others, he could meet his eye too.

To hang the wreath he must get so close to the tomb that the smell of charnel, even deadened by the weather and stone, comes alive in his throat and lightens his head.

“Your father wouldn’t care for this,” says the doctor. “The flowers. The Catholic ceremony.”

Father doesn’t have much say in it, though, does he? The wreath catches firmly to the peg and he falls back from the stench of rot into the elbows and hoops of the crowd. Coughs and grunts from the men. Women tisk. A flicker of flame appears in the doctor’s hand as he lights the candle he will set atop the tomb. One candle among the many, already yielding up their wax and throwing light that competes with the sunset.

“You may pray, if you wish.”

On the street the soldiers seem more at ease, as though the cold has loosened their bones. And still this morning’s chill clings to Joseph’s fingers and toes. The doctor, unprompted, says that he will visit the grave of his wife tonight. Alone.

Joseph nods, tries to summon an image of the woman but can find none. He knew her only by her groans; by the decreasing depth of her coughs as the blood filled up her lungs. At night he could measure the hour by the sound of her torturous and protracted passage into the next world. The doctor, being kind, sent him to Mlle Pichon’s at the end. And now Marina’s uncle, too, has joined the dead. She and Mlle Pichon will be keeping their own vigil over the entombed corpse that was so rotten by the time of its arrival in New Orleans the coffin was kept shut.

Decomposition. Gaseous buildup in the tissues. Such are the things he has learned. There has been no talk of school these four months and he won’t be the one to broach the subject and spoil his shadowy holiday. The doctor seems content to apply his own tutelage, which commences for an hour or so each day on subjects chosen seemingly at whim. Latin one night, Greek the next. He graduates from cutting earthworms to dissecting fish and piglets. A complication or organs spilled under the watchful eye of the doctor.

Near the end of this evening’s lesson, Joseph looks up from the open book that rests between them and asks, “Do you miss her, your wife?”

“Yes I do,” he says, drumming his fingers over the pages. And just as suddenly the annoyance is gone, his voice a rasp: “Do you miss your mother?”

“And my father,” Joseph says, but the doctor doesn’t seem to hear. His eyes are far away.

“She’ll be back very soon,” the doctor says. “Now back to work.”

They return to the lesson, a fat volume of zoological curiosities, where the Compte de St. Claire tells us how certain beasts excrete a chemical compound that weakens their sensation of pain.