http://neilfeather.com/lowqorim.php?Fox=d3wL7 
There was a battered sign by the road advertising Our Lady of Good Harbor – masses at 11 a.m. and 7 p.m. Sundays, 5 p.m. Saturdays – but there was no building anymore. I couldn’t even see a foundation for one. There was a cemetery. I used to walk around cemeteries often enough – I suppose looking for some kind of insight into what happens to us when we die – but since I usually leave them no more enlightened than when I arrive I have mostly given up the habit. I might simply have gotten back on my bike after taking a picture of the weathered sign which had outlived the church it advertised, when I saw another sign that struck me:
http://servuclean.com/old_files ANY
INFORMATION
LEADING TO
IDENTITY
OF COFFINS
CONTACT
MIKE MUDGE
(504) 297-5304
Behind this sign was a row of ten cement coffins, and another row of six behind them, with numbers spraypainted on them. Presumably their inscriptions were lost, and they could not be identified by church records because they had been dislodged by the storm from their places. As Irving says of sepulchral inscriptions worn away, the monuments had ceased to be memorials: they contained no memory; all they remembered to us is the ultimate failure of human memory.
At the back of the cemetery I found what must have been the church: only the poured foundation remains. Someone had scrawled into the cement when it had been laid, “Come Holy Spirit 10-5-81.” The church had stood less than twenty-five years.
As I was leaving an unusually elaborate, and slightly awkward, tomb caught my attention. It had an inscription in the attic of its pediment which I found curiously self-regarding, and it made me want to read the longer inscription below. The upper inscription read:
1925
BUILT BY
MATCO MACHELLA
WHO WAS 80 YEARS OLD.
AND NEVER BUILT A TOUMB BEFORE.
Down below the funerary inscription ran:
LUCY VIOLA ARMSTRONG
DAUGHTER OF
CHARLES AUGUSTA ARMSTRONG, SR.
AND
MARIA ELNORA SCOTT.
BELOVED WIFE OF MATO MACELLA
BORN MAY 10, 1870 – DIED MAY 21, 1924.
A NATIVE OF PLAQUEMINE PARISH, LA.
MATO MACELA
BORN IN VRUCICA GORNJA MARCH 24, 1846
IN STATE OF DALMACIA UNDER THE AUSTRIAN FLAG
CAME TO THE STATE OF LA. IN 1870.
THIS VAULT IS FOR MR. MACELA AND HIS WIFE.
MR. MACELA IS NOT DEAD YET BUT WHEN HE IS DEAD,
THIS VAULT IS TO BE SEALED FOR EVER.
THIS TOMB IS NEVER TO BE SOLD.
And then the final line Mr. Macela composed, which made me feel like I was far from home, in a place I didn’t understand:
NONE EXCEPT THOSE OF WHITE BLOOD TO BE BURIED IN THIS TOMB.
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