*012226-Cemetery on the Move* 

We were driving the Jazz and Blues Byway, the road unspooling slowly through cypress and flat water, the radio breathing out old brass and a lazy drumbeat. Somewhere near a nameless town, the crossing lights began to blink. The gate dropped. We stopped.

A train crawled past—no hurry to it at all.

On the first flatcar sat a row of old wooden coffins, weathered and gray, like props borrowed from a forgotten play. My wife leaned forward.

“That’s strange,” she said.

“Mardi Gras,” I offered. “Probably parade props. Someone’s getting ambitious.”

She didn’t answer. The next car rolled by, and this time the coffins were marble—white, heavy, unmistakably serious. Names etched faintly into stone. Dates that ended long ago.

I felt my joke fall apart in my mouth.

“Why would they be moving coffins?” I asked.

She considered it. “Maybe Confederates. Reburial or something.”

“No,” I said, watching the wheels turn, slow and deliberate. “This is Louisiana. The water’s rising. They’re moving the dead to higher ground.”

The train kept coming, car after car, a quiet procession of the past being relocated. No one waved. No one hurried. Even the music on the radio seemed to soften, as if it knew better.

Then the last car passed. The gate lifted. The lights stopped blinking.

We drove on.

The byway opened up again—fields, sky, and a river glinting just out of sight. The radio brightened, and just then the horns came in:

When the saints go marching in…

We didn’t say anything. We just kept driving, the living following the road, the dead taking the rails, all of us heading—slowly, inevitably—upland.