private cemeteries of wealthy families. Several of his statues had been cast in bronze or concrete and were sold as copies around the world.
Shortly after Adam died, Stavros somehow heard of his passing. Five months after the memorial service, a large crate arrived on a freighter at the Port of New Orleans. There it was transferred to a barge headed upriver. Five days later, I drove my father and mother down to the Bienville port to see what Stavros Romano had sent them.
Inside the crate was a life-size marble angel of breathtaking beauty. The angel, a young male, sat on a stone with an air of weary melancholy, as though exhausted from dealing with the travails of the earthly realm. The statue had been hand-sculpted, and I was too young to grasp what that would have cost had my father commissioned it. My parents were so stunned, they weren’t sure what to do with it. The magnitude of the gift seemed too great to accept. And yet, somehow the statue seemed to fit the hole that Adam’s death had blown in our lives.
It was my mother who voiced our collective conviction: “It looks like Adam,” she said with reverence. “Not exactly like him, but . . . the spirit of him. We’ll put it in our plot, up on the hill.” My father resisted at first. By that time, he had not merely abandoned the idea of God, but was enraged by it. If his friend’s statue was going into the McEwan family plot, Dad wanted its wings removed, broken off, and the stumps sanded down to hide the fact that they’d ever been there. I could see his point. As beautiful as they might have been on an eagle, the folded wings gave the stone angel a supernatural aspect, whereas without them the figure would have appeared as a strong and handsome boy of about eighteen, the ideal of Greek beauty.
My mother refused to allow it. She said they hadn’t the right to deface Stavros’s sculpture, and besides, the town would probably rise up to prevent the desecration of a holy statue. Without his wings, she said quietly, the boy would possess an almost decadent, earthly beauty. In this he was like Adam, and in the end that may have been what swayed my father to permit this exotic object to become Adam’s memorial, which now—thirty-one years after his death—is one of the most famous landmarks in the town. When I was in high school, I used to come up here alone sometimes, and I saw more than one tugboat captain shine his spotlight up on the high bluff to pick out the angel where it stood sentry duty at the edge of the cemetery.
“What do you think happened to him?” Dad asks. “Most people get found when they die in the river.”
“I don’t know,” I answer warily. “I used to think about it a lot.”
“I like to think he made it all the way down to the Gulf.”
“Me, too,” I confess.
“A river burial,” he mutters. “I don’t like that. They say Hernando de Soto’s men buried him in the river so the Indians wouldn’t realize he was mortal. That was about fifty miles south of here. I like the idea of burial at sea better.”
“I do, too.”
“I like the British navy burial service.”
This conversation is surreal, but I suppose I should have expected something like it. “I think I remember some of that from Patrick O’Brian’s books.”
“Master and Commander,” he says. “Think of it. Wrapped in your hammock and weighted with cannonballs. That’s the way to go.”
“Do you remember the words? I think they’re from the Book of Common Prayer.”
“Nothing’s perfect,” Dad grumbles. “I remember some—leaving out that nonsense about Christ.”
“Say them,” I tell him, feeling butterflies in my stomach. “This can be Adam’s real funeral. For you, me, and him.”
“The McEwan men, eh? Why not?”
He raises a trembling hand to his mouth and clears his throat. Then, in the strongest voice I’ve heard him use since I returned home, he recites, “We therefore commit his body to the deep, to be turned into corruption . . . looking for the resurrection of the body, when the sea shall give up her dead.”
In the silence that follows, I hear the cry of a far-off bird, the groan of a truck’s engine down on Cemetery Road. “I like that,” I tell him. “It’s fitting.”
Driving out here, I intended to repeat the explicit apology I made to Dad while he