The road to this home of the Mother of God runs straight down the highway next to duckweed-brushed Bayou Lafourche.

  Mary, most pure. Mary, most gracious. Seat of Wisdom. O clement, o loving, o sweet Virgin Mary. Now and at the hour of our death, Amen.

  The business signs speak of where you are: Benoit’s Tobacco, Plaisance Produce, Hebert’s Body Shop.

  Alma Mater, Queen of Angels, Mother of Mercy, Coeli Porti (Gate of Heaven), Stella Maris (Star of the Sea). And in the Eastern Rite liturgies, the names are even more poetically soaked: Living and Copious Fountain, Perfume of the Universal King, Rehabilitation of Adam.

  Past fields of wind-stirred cane as high as cathedral doors. Past blinking-white cemeteries – this one named St. Mary’s of the Nativity. Commemorating a woman of whom we know nothing of where or when she entered and left the world. It’s even argued impressively on both sides of the question whether or not she bore other sons and daughters as "brethren of Jesus."

  What is surer is what she has come to represent for centuries of uncounted people: the reconciliation of the irreconcilable concepts of "virgin" and "mother." And not only "Mother of God," but "Mother of Sorrows" as well. At the presentation in the temple, old Simeon predicted a "sword of sorrow will pierce your heart" – and who knows a mother exempt from this wound?

  Among the clapboard homes that hug the bayou are her cement and ceramic sisters, guarding the tiny yards in her various guises: Our Lady of Fatima, Our Lady of the Rosary, Our Lady of Mount Carmel. In a thousand years, excavations will unearth her as they now unearth from the Fertile Crescent innumerable statues of a female, theorized to be Magna Mater, the Great Mother. And all part of a basic need to view the divine in the light of total human experience, which of course includes the female experience.

  A basic need, yes. But the honoring of that need seems most acute here in New Orleans and south Louisiana. The Blessed Virgin is, of course, The Fixer, which in a town where it is considered a social boon and family heirloom to "know" someone in traffic court or assessor’s office, Mary is the Ultimate Insider, the person truly In the Know.

  She is all that and more, nature passed pure through her body and yet nature circumvented. Life created without the help and hindrance of males – yet dependent for her identity on a patristic Lord. All resonating in the Queen City of the South, but nothing resonating more than that she is, finally, mama.

  And so, on countless lawns and yards and patios, greater by far than the numbers of flamingos and Gentilly gazing balls and courting ceramic frogs, rules the mysterious Mother Mary. She of the Seven Sorrows.

"Religious items are our biggest sellers," declares Mike Dubois, waving his arm over the acres of 3,400-pound gorillas, rhinos, armadillos and, yes, Venuses and Dianas that comprise the D&D Ornamental Concrete yard astride Highway 308 in Napoleonville.

  Dubois doesn’t disparage the secular cement figures his workers pop out from D&D’s thousand-odd molds. They sell well, especially from March until early June, when the yard is open seven days a week and everything sells.

  "But Marys and angels sell day in, day out, and all year long. It’s a worship thing, sure, but when hurricanes come around …."

  Mike pauses. He has the rugged color of a man who lives his life in the sun and he’s not especially superstitious, yet … when Hurricane Andrew came nosing around the D&D yard and blew a large shed tail over teacup out onto the highway, the only things left standing were statues of Mary and her Son.

  Mary is here in many manifestations. She can be had in sizes of 18, 21, 33, 43 and 60 inches. Our Lady of Lourdes comes with or without rosary. Our Lady of Guadeloupe with or without sun rows. Our Lady of Grace with or without snake under her heel. And all versions can be had with or without an external heart. "The older people usually like it without the heart."

  Other diversities can be gotten from the paintbrushes of Janis Naquin, who will customize the color of your Madonna. She is well-acquainted with the practice of painting the face and hands black for black customers.

  Customers of all colors now come to D&D in numbers unimagined when the 42-year-old Dubois got into the business 14 years ago. There were only 10 molds on hand then. Mike’s parents helped sell statues out of a van, and his wife Patricia kept things going in the daytime while Mike kept to his day job as an oilfield rigger.

  Now his yard is the largest operation of its kind in the state and gets a good amount of mail-order and tourist business. But it’s his handiwork that he sees as he drives around south Louisiana that means the most to him. "When I pass Marys on people’s porches and their yards, I know that 90 percent of them are mine and in 30 years they’ll still be there.

  "I never went up on the Mary pieces for eight or nine years until this year when I went up five bucks because I had to hire Janis Naquin to do the painting. (Three-foot statues retail for around $55.)

  "I just don’t want anyone who wants a Mary statue not to have it because they can’t afford it."

  And those who want them? People who many might judge to be gullible or imitative, but at some central place, they are unassailable. There’s one right down the road.

Straight down the highway from D&D in Raceland live some people who wear their religion on their front yard. Out in front of Malcolm Zeringue’s place are four brightly painted life-size statues of the Holy Family plus St. Francis, shoulder to shoulder under a rose-cloaked trellis.

  "People from everywhere – Georgia, Kansas, Philadelphia – they stop their cars here and pray," says Zeringue, who stays astonished by it all. "Baptist people, colored people, they all kneel down here and pray."

  How this shrine of Highway 308 came to contribute so much to the area’s cultural morale is a story from a few years ago, though Zeringue tells it in the pure present.

  "I had dug up some potatoes to cook up some salt meat with, because that fat gives a good flavor to the potatoes. But about 9:30, I went outside to sit on the swing and I start swelling up and I fall down and crawl in the house and yell for my boy to drive me to the hospital.

  "He’s got a town car and I ask how fast that thing go? And he say a 110 and I say, ‘Press it.’ And we get there and I’m smothered and the doctor he get all the way up on the bed with me. Then my body lifted up and I am walking in the fields and there is gold lights and angels flying around and it is beautiful."

  By this point, the memory of his out-of-body experience has filled up Malcolm Zeringue’s blue eyes and he dabs at them with a big grape-colored bandana.

  "And I wanted to stay – because I knew that right here is hell. But there was a big door and when I reach for it, the Blessed Mother is there and she catches me by the wrist. And she says, ‘No, not yet. You have to stay here and care for your wife.’ My wife got arthritis so bad she can hardly get out of the bed.

  "So, I told Mary, ‘I will buy the family.’ And I did."

  Zeringue goes over to the swing and looks on his shrine with the assurance of a man who has seen the future and likes what he’s seen.

  "Sometimes at night I come out here and I go over and kiss them statues. Because I have been there and there’s a better place waiting."

  So Malcolm Zeringue rocks lightly on his swing, looking at his statues, his faith concrete-hard, weeping and unassailable. .