A Short Story

(This story started out as sort of a test run for a future novel, set on the world of Tryterra. Roughly five drafts later, I’d learned two very important things: 1) This was not the direction I want that future novel to go towards, and 2) The story I wanted to tell in this format really only worked in New Orleans…)

Deadman’s Blues

It takes a certain effronterie to bury the dead above ground.

There are practical reasons to do so, of course. Especially if one insists on building cities on the remains of desiccated swamp land.

Their stagnant waters may be gone, drained off and redirected through the canals towards Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River, but the swamp’s humid air remains, sweltering and sticky, day or night. White-washed stucco covered bricks may resist the decay, but the spaces behind them harbors it tighter than a jilted lover holds a grudge.

Come midnight,  the air is still as sultry as a lone brass horn calling out of the dark from beneath a gas lamp post. It haunts you, reminds you that you’re not alone in the restlessness that grips you at all hours. This place never sleeps, and – if you’re unlucky - neither do you.

Louisiana’s atmosphere acts as accomplice of decay. The air itself fuels the rot. Putrefaction pervades everything, and in bold response, everything that grows here flourishes.

Life in the Big Easy is defined by its joyous defiance, a whispered je vous emmerde in the face of the inescapable and inevitable forces of nature untamed. We do things slow here, taking our time to revel in the passage of every moment, of every second.

Every hurricane season, we come face to face with the truth: This city lives on borrowed time, and the hands of the clock only turn in one direction. When that bell finally tolls and the waters finally reclaim us, we want the world to mark our passage with the same solemn revelry of a second line wrapped around the world.

We bury our dead above ground because they refuse to just lie down and be forgotten.

There are tales here of love and loss. Horror and hilarity whisper around every corner, if you take the time to listen. A lot of our stories can’t be shared; the descendants of the families in them are still fixtures of these neighborhoods, and they deserve the grace of privacy. But, every once in a while, a story turns up that needs retelling, a tale which can only be contained by letting it spread.

Last year, at a park between Rue Royal and Frenchmen Street, I put a wrought iron spike through a man’s heart.

He was a young man – thin but fit, skin darkened from long days spent under the relentless sun, and, judging by the state and style of his clothes, he’d been dead for quite some time.

He writhed against the spike in his chest, so I drove one through each of his wrists and his feet for good measure.

For my own safety, I filleted his jaw loose from his head. Then I cut his hands from his wrists, carefully cut free his tongue, and gently plucked out both of his eyes.

The jaw I discarded, but the rest found a home within the jars of brackish preservative I kept in my backpack; the parts needed to be kept fresh and intact to be of any use later. I doused his body in an accelerant of my own making and, just as the moon reached its summit, I struck a match.

He jerked and twitched, tugging against the spikes. Wet inarticulate words bubbled up from the ruins of his mouth.

I dropped the match and watched as the flames laid him to rest.

After gathering up the ashes, it took me the better part of  the next morning to find and fashion a suitable vessel for his eyes and tongue. Eventually I settled on the discarded head of a mannequin I stumbled across in a bin behind a storefront off of Canal.

A few painted symbols, a little bit of carving, and a careful transplant later, and the makeshift oracular head was ready.

Once the eyes and tongue were in place, like a modern day Orpheus, the head began to sing, crooning:

Well I went down to the city

Had a dollar in my shoes

I said I went down to the city

Only a dollar in my shoes

That devil took my house and my baby

I didn’t have nothin’ left to loose

Caught me wanderin’ down the bayou

Didn’t have no place to run

Got me alone down on that bayou

I didn’t have no place to run

Dragged me cryin’ into the city

Where the hangmen had they fun

Up the river or to the city

Don’t matter what you choose

Go upriver or to the city

They don’t care which one you choose

You keep lookin’ and causin’ trouble

You gon’ get the Deadman’s Blues

When the song finished, I burned the head and let his spirit pass on. I gathered up those ashes as well and carefully stored them with the rest in a sachet that I kept tucked within the small pocket inside mon gilet.

 I sold the ashes to a rootworker I know who runs a store over on the west bank.  The dead man’s hands I have in consignment at a hoodoo shop on Bourbon Street. I traded the song for access to the Jazz Museum’s record archives. The story of how I learned it, I kept for myself.

I make my living conducting foot tours across New Orleans. I like to sprinkle in a little bit of the lives lived beyond the French Quarter, the secret histories of the city’s forgotten and ignored. People come here all the time, drawn to the music, the food, and the stories here to be told.

They rarely come just to see the people. We’re just background characters, colorful extras that only exist in the retelling of their time here. So every time I tell them my story…a version of it, anyway…they carry a piece of me away with them. The story spreads, and a piece of me gets to live on forever.

It takes a certain effronterie to bury the dead above ground. But we bury our dead above ground here because, when they refuse to lie down and be forgotten, they remind us to do the same.

George L. Stewart © 09/21/2026