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to the school yard on hot days so we needn’t walk home in the heat and dust. It always came on a covered silver tray, cooling things like cucumber on bread and butter and a bucket of cold lemonade. She’d wait under the trees while we ate, then take the bucket and things back home.” Esme sighed over the good old days and nibbled at her charred cookie.
    “Sally does the cooking because Esme never learned how. She was too genteel.” Miss Letty raised her cocktail sausage-sized pinkie in the air.
    “You did learn to cook and look at you now!” Miss Esme counterattacked.
    “Tell me about the historical marker,” Suzanne intervened. “I understand you are responsible for it.”
    “Oh my, yes!” Miss Esme’s face filled with delight again. “We thought up the words, and Brother put up the money. Bronze casting is very costly, you know.”
    “She left off Eli Jefferson and put in the yams,” Letty responded.
    “It was too expensive to have both, and ‘yam’ is a shorter word than ‘Jefferson’, that’s all,” Miss Esme explained.
    “Brother wouldn’t pay for ‘Jefferson’, you mean. Now I say when a feud is over one hundred fifty years old, it has got to stop. Why, Henry and I were just like Romeo and Juliet.”
    “Big, fat Juliet, little, skinny Romeo,” Esme taunted like a schoolgirl. “Traitor to the family!”
    “Now look here, Esme, I tried just as hard as you to get the name of this town changed to St. Julien.”
    “But Georgie’s mother stopped us. What a terrible woman!” Miss Esme leaned confidentially toward Suzanne. The cuff of her pink polyester tunic took a dip in the coffee cup she held in trembling hands. “A disappointed woman.”
    “Well, we were all disappointed in Jacques. We thought Nephew would come back from Vietnam covered with medals and follow in Victoir St. Julien’s footsteps. He looked so handsome in his naval officer’s uniform. All his brothers who hadn’t gone to college were just plain foot soldiers who got drafted. Jacques enlisted, but he went and brought home that woman from Virginia. The only thing she liked about this place was Magnolia Hill,” Miss Letty continued.
    “Oh no!” cried Miss Esme. “She liked one other thing.” The sisters cackled like co-conspirators, both of them turning pink.
    “Jacques was surely a womanizer. He seemed happy to spend his days living off the rents and investments and chasing skirts. Then, he’d go to Joe’s Lounge and drink and tell all about his conquests.”
    “A trial to his family, a trial to his wife. Maybe that’s why she turned so mean,” Letty continued.
    Suzanne wondered if Dr. Dumont knew about Jacques St. Julien’s reputation on his own turf.
    “That’s just family talk. Women loved Jacques, and the men liked him, too. Wasn’t he elected Capitaine of the Courir de Mardi Gras when old Alonzo Guidry died? You say you and Henry wanted to end the feud. Jacques was the one who did it, I say. He drank with the Huvals and the Patouts and the Badeaux boys every night at the Lounge. They got along fine. I think Virginia turned ugly when they took out her female organs. That causes early change of life, you know,” Esme whispered. Suzanne did not contradict her.
    Esme continued working on her theory. “Virginia Lee came here and found out she had married a ‘coonass.’ Forgive me, Letty. I hate that word, too. Cajun was bad enough, then people like the Jeffersons brought back ‘coonass’ from overseas after the war. We should be called Acadians as in that lovely poem, Evangeline by Longfellow,” she instructed Suzanne. “I always had my students read it and memorize the prologue. Are you familiar with the poem, my dear?”
    “Eighth grade English. ‘ List to a tale of love in Acadie, home of the happy .’ Yes, I am.” Suzanne suppressed a wince brought on by middle school memories of Miss Farrell cramming epic poetry into adolescent brains. Secretly, she loved the poem and doted on Romeo and