THE PAST

Robert Hill Long

Greened-over statues hold the city down like paperweights placed on an old treaty. When these effigies were men, their warm hands held maps of the New World flat so the emperor could see all he was signing away. One or two names drying on the parchment might end up in bronze; two centuries past, they were functionaries who shook hands as required, disdaining each other's language.       Some statues survive as local jokes: Silent George pointing to the river, condom on his finger, crumpled beer can in hand. An orator for the defeated rebels, his nameplate lies under some teenage boy's carseat, if it wasn't already tossed off a wharf on a dare one Saturday night.       Each year the cemetery paths get a fresh load of bleached oyster shells, but the open butcher stalls--marble slabs haloed by blackflies--are gone. So, too, the factory specializing in child-sized caskets. The Victorian fashion of bedding the corpse among orchids and plumage almost killed off the snowy egrets. Carts piled with dead birds stopped at the mortician's en route to the millener's, where the rest of the feathers were plucked for ladies' wedding and funeral hats.       But fashion can be defeated, like yellow fever, like the river at flood stage. Above the cash register of the oldest bar in town, there's a photo of a shotgun house half submerged in sun-flattened water. A flatboat's moored to a side stairway; the stairs lead up to a woman. Her embroidered tablecloths and antimacassars drifted out to the Gulf a century ago, but she abides in Sunday whites and feathered hat, resolutely ignoring the bartender and drinkers nursing their rum and colas. For her only the future appeared barbarous.       The slave market, a few blocks past the bar, is preserved not because of the chic boutiques that inhabit its shell, but for a cornice of marble ram-skulls found nowhere else in the south. A block beyond that, a gang of boys light cigarettes and compare knives in a rusted-out sedan on concrete blocks. If it had wheels, they'd all be gone north.

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