Feeding
by Sarah K. Inman

Holt cemetary, located near Delgado Community College's City Park campus.

We piss away the hot afternoon drinking margaritas at a downtown bar where mail carriers monopolize the video poker machines. The watering hole sits in the shadow of Charity Hospital, not far from the Superdome, land that some believe is cursed.

The heaviness of the air and the certainty of work tomorrow have brought us here. We are lucky to have jobs that don’t require long hours in the hot sun. Every time I see the crouching Mexicans on Franklin Avenue, the ones waiting for roofing work, I remind myself of this simple fact. Life could be much worse. But how much worse for a person like H who lost her house and colony of feral cats to the floodwaters and to the lawless aftermath brought on by the storm?

At seven o’clock we step outside into the heat. A blanket of blue-black cloud moves over the sky, rumbling as it advances. Lightning strikes in big, Biblical bolts, but the rain waits. We drive to Mid-City just ahead of the storm and turn near Delgado Community College’s ruined administration building, a sad, squat structure, and then follow a path into Holt Cemetery, a paupers’ burial ground, one like many that went under the flood waters.

“Yesterday I tripped over a human femur,” H offers.

I stop the car in the middle of the cemetery’s path. We get out and skirt around graves, though it’s hard to tell where one ends and another begins. They overlap, and some don’t have clear markers. Still I try not to disturb the departed. The ground’s uneven, a rolling field of crooked, faded headstones and lumpy dirt. At some gravesites there are flowers, and yes, I see the bones, not whole skeletons, but bits of people on top of people, earth trying to hold it all in.

We side-step two freshly dug graves to reach a spot at the edge of the burial ground, facing a large white house, where a thin creek rolls, and a stone bench sits. The bench was a Katrina find of sorts, a heavy, beautiful object that came unmoored. Sturdier than the headstones, the bench now serves as a feeding marker. I learn that H’s father died while she was still in the womb, which explains why she doesn’t seem nervous among the dead. She’s been visiting cemeteries all her life.

At the sound of a whistle, she appears. She’s small and dark gray like the sky. She’s ready to eat. Her name is Charlene, and as Fancy Feast is put out, lightning strikes not far away.

A slab of wood and random piles of junk provide enough coverage for Charlene to cross the creek without getting her paws wet. Fearful of nature, I move back to the car and watch as H puts out more food for the cat.

*

I agree to visit to Holt Cemetery on days when H escapes her attic apartment to return to the country. Her schizophrenic living arrangements are another consequence of the storm.

Today no thunder clouds float in to take the edge off the heat. I shake the food box and wait. The low, deep “ribbits” of frogs sound, and then comes the rhythmic chirp of something else that inhabits this swampy, hot land, cicadas, perhaps. Since my last visit a fence has been built. It separates the cemetery from the white house. Still, there’s enough room for a cat to crawl underneath.

I continue to call Charlene. Moments of silence punctuate the frog sounds and the rhythmic chirp, and then the noise I wait for--a meow. I move closer to the creek. Her small gray body appears under the fence, crouching to see about supper. She eyes me and stops at the creek, hesitant to cross.

I make a plate of food—the wet canned stuff on top of dry morsels. I pour water into a plastic dish and leave, not wanting to scare Charlene away from her meal.

The next time I return, I bring a hat to shield my skull from the sun’s relentless heat. There’s a severed oak tree near her bench and a few more large trees elsewhere in the burial ground but nothing close to provide shade. This time I call and whistle for what seems like a long while. No Charlene. I pour water in a dish and make a plate of food, hoping the scent will provoke her into crossing the creek. Just as I’m about to leave, I see four legs under the fence, a gray figure. Then another four legs. A masked face peers under the fence, and soon two young raccoons waddle across the creek. I retreat to the car with Charlene’s food and watch as the animals climb the bench, get hind, and sniff the air. In a loud voice I explain to the raccoons that they’re standing on Charlene’s bench and that this is Charlene’s food. Their mother then appears, and sensing I won’t give up the goods, the threesome ambles into the branches of the fallen oak tree.

I stand back for a long time and wait for Charlene in her gray coat of fur, dark like thunderstorm clouds.

*

No sign of Charlene these days, but H informs me of a plastic bag with flies swarming it. It sits under one of the large oaks towards the cemetery’s center. Whatever it is, it’s dark and decomposing quickly. H thinks it’s a human head.

I go to Holt one day when it’s raining, pouring really, and leave some food under the bench. Even in the downpour, I can smell new death. I look for the bag, but give up quickly as the dips in the cemetery fill with water. A vulture swoops down from one of the oaks. From a distance, the creature appears to have scales on its back; its wingspan is enormous.

H tells me about her ex who died of disease in the months following Katrina. Unrelated to the storm, his death provoked tears and days of depression. I mention James Joyce’s “The Dead,” and the protagonist’s wife who pines for her lost lover, Michael Furey. I start to say something about the wonderfully poetic last paragraph of the story, about the snow serving as a metaphor for death, about the insignificance of human life. Then a cat whose facial fur resembles Hitler’s mustache crosses my path. To reach the cemetery, we pass through a neighborhood of strays—Billy Bob and his mother, the lazy, long-haired Siamese, and mangy Rocky.

After the long weekend, the weather has cooled slightly, only in the sense that a small napkin, and not a wash cloth, is needed to keep sweat from dripping into the eyes. H and I head for Holt once more. Nourished by regular rain, the weeds are high. Inside the cemetery I stop occasionally to marvel at a human bone with a bit of decaying material still clinging to it.

“Look at this,” H says, picking up a small piece of someone’s remains and holding it between her fingers.

Some folks placed wood chips on top of graves and there are a few headstones with fresh flowers. These burial spots are few and noticeably different from the mounds of dirt and bone that signify most graves. Wooden rectangles serve as plot markers too, but after the flood they got pushed around, misshapen into flimsy trapezoids. The dates on certain headstones indicate they’ve weathered other storms. Some are snapped in half like cheap china, many lay flat, and still others are so worn the writing is lost.

We move to the large oak in the center of the cemetery, and there, next to several mounds of dirt, I spy the bag, the white plastic kind used to line a kitchen trash can. The intervening rains must have washed away any bad smell. Scattered around the bag are tuffs of black hair, perhaps fur. Up close, H’s hypothesis of a human head doesn’t seem outlandish. I worry, though, when I poke the bag with a stick, and pry at tears in the plastic and find only bones. One looks like a mammal’s femur; clinging to it are dark tuffs of hair, possibly fur. I peek at another angle and see more bones. Nothing but bones and dark hair or fur, flies and maggots. What did I expect? The bones of the mammal seem too large for Charlene’s frame, and the fur’s the wrong color. We debate the likelihood of a big black cat, a small dog, or a raccoon. We consider the possibility of a human head or a tiny person, a child, perhaps.

“Buddhists meditate on death daily,” I point out as we head for the bench. There’s still no sign of Charlene these days. H places only a small amount of food.

“I know someone will eat it,” H sighs, if not the gray cat, then maybe the yellow one that’s rumored to wander here, or a raccoon. If not a raccoon, then perhaps the birds, and if no birds, flies and other insects will surely devour what’s left.

Sarah Inman is the author of Finishing Skills, a novel. She is a regular correspondent for NOLAFugees.com.

photos courtesy NOLAFugees staff.