The Unstruck Sound

Chapter 2

Chapter 2

Everything Saj knew about death, she knew from Mr. Montegut's eighth grade Louisiana Studies class. It was such a small school that all the administrators taught at least one class. Mr. Montegut, a history teacher before he became headmaster, enjoyed telling the students about the gruesome nature of death in old New Orleans, the plagues, the rot, the stench in the streets during yellow fever and cholera epidemics.

He had taken her class on a field trip to the nearby St. Louis I Cemetery, the oldest cemetery in New Orleans. He was so old that her classmates had giggled about him dying on the way, but he was surprisingly fit, striding down N. Rampart St. at the head of the class.

He called the cemetery "the city of the dead" because the mausoleums looked like houses. Bodies had to be buried above ground in New Orleans because coffins would pop out of the swampy soil when it flooded. Some of the tombs even had porches and iron fences around them. They stopped near the grave of the Widow Paris. The famous voodoo queen Marie Laveau was said to lie there. It was adorned with offerings left by those who wanted favors from her: flowers, Mardi Gras beads, coins, empty liquor bottles, candles and folded pieces of paper. On the sides of the ancient brick structure, people had marked orange Xs. It was said that if you knocked three times, turned around three times, and marked three Xs with an old brick, she would grant your wish. Saj knew Bon Coeur kids who had done it.

Saj had only one wish. She wished she could find her parents. She didn't know her mother or her father's names. She had never seen a picture of either of them.

Mr. Montegut explained how families shared the tombs. When a family member died, the remains of the last person to be buried in the tomb was taken out and placed in a burial bag. The old coffin was burned to make way for the newest dead person. Mr. Montegut laughed when he described how sometimes they would skip that step and jam the bones and old wood out of the way with the incoming casket.

He showed them his family tomb, with the names of many Monteguts etched into the faded marble. He chuckled that he would soon be joining them.

She must have known since then that he would, in fact, die one day, but death wasn't real to her. She wanted to ask Devi and Hasneem what they believed happened to people after they die, but she was ashamed to admit her own ignorance. Devi and Hasneem came from large families; they spoke several languages, they believed in obscure religions, they had traveled all over the world. They had somehow known the meaning of the chant, "om moni padme hum."

Saj had barely ever left the Bon Coeur campus.

When she was a very little girl, she would sometimes spend the weekend with Mrs. Irmine Hebert, one of the custodians of Bon Coeur. She had a vague impression of being in a church with loud music and a man preaching about how you had to be good to get into heaven. If there was a heaven, Mr. Montegut would be there. He was the best person Saj had ever known.

In fourth grade she had gotten into an argument with the troubled boy, Hunter. A group of children was on the playground discussing what happens when you die. Saj said that whatever you believed in was what would happen to you. If you believed in reincarnation, you would be reincarnated. If you believed in heaven, you would go to heaven. And if you believed in nothing, then you would just die. Hunter kept insisting that reincarnation was real. He got so angry that he threw a rock at her, and the teacher hauled him off to Mr. Montegut's office. She had hoped he was right, and she was wrong, so that she could be reincarnated as a cat. She'd always wanted a cat, but she couldn't have one in the dormitory.

Saj kept thinking she'd seen Mr. Montegut in the hallways of Bon Coeur, turning into a classroom or rounding a corner. He didn't seem all the way dead. Maybe that was why she couldn't cry. She was afraid if she got started, she might not be able to stop. All around her, students were grieving, crying in classrooms, putting their heads down in class, not talking in the lunchroom. Mrs. Hebert wept openly as she cleaned, and teachers were solemn and didn't assign homework.