Over Tumbled Graves: A Novel

by Jess Walter

She walked until she reached a park bench overlooking the Mississippi. From here, the river didn’t seem so different from the Spokane. All waters are connected, of course. Burn might as well be in this river as in the Spokane, or the Nile or the Indian Ocean for that matter. And her mother too. Eventually, the water rises up and claims us all and we float away. That fact was inescapable in a city like New Orleans, a city built below the sea. In a city like that, you can’t bury people in the ground and so you shove the bodies into family crypts, two-hundred-year-old marble and granite casings that might hold the remains of a hundred people. They just open the crypt, slide the old dust and bones to the back, and put in the next body. The oldest cemetery in New Orleans was called the City of the Dead and from a distance, that’s what a person saw, a skyline of crypts and statuary that became, up close, a rough assemblage of exposed brick and chipped granite. The cemetery had been full for years and was useful now only as a tourist attraction and a place for muggers to hide in the shadows of the crypts. Let the criminals have it, Caroline thought. It doesn’t matter. Eventually, the water prevails, even in cities of the dead. Eventually, the water comes for us all, washes over the statues and through the crypts, topples the headstones and tumbles the graves.