I went back to that cemetery in Breaux Bridge today. Not the white-washed cemetery beside the orange-red brick church by the big steel bridge on Bridge Street. That other, smaller cemetery, maybe a quarter mile down Main Street, by a second, smaller bridge beside a second, smaller church. The light was better today than the last time I visited Breaux Bridge and I wanted another portrait of a statue who lived there. Our Lady of the Brown Mirror, that's my name for her anyway.
Her cloak is royal blue, her skin is cocoa brown. Dark brown locks of hair surround her face almost entirely. A single dark brown slash divides each eyeball horizontally into a pair of closed cocoa brown eyelids. Our Lady has no eyebrows, no lips. I had memorized her features and I saw them in my head as I walked over to where I remembered her to be. She wasn't there. I figured I was mistaken. Had I gone to the wrong address? I combed the radial maze of the cemetery, spiraling outward from that initial position, going around and in between tombs, cutting across the sidewalks, scouring the entire cemetery with the thoroughness of a scientist. Where did Our Lady go?
The sky was half blue, half gray and the light came in and out. In desperation, I returned to where I began, and decided to follow my first hunch once again toward a neighborhood near the center of the cemetery. Halfway there it dawned on me and I ran toward the tomb I remembered, as it turned out, remembered correctly to be the residence of Our Lady. In her place stood a freshly painted statue, a statue freshly painted in white from head to toe, except for one small patch in the hollow of her neck where an earlier coat of paint continued to show through. When I leaned in to take a closer look, I could see that the color was cocoa.
