Cyprien

Chapter One: Certified Mail

The letter came on a Tuesday, in the kind of July heat that made the mailbox hinge shriek when you opened it.

Loretta Verret stood at the end of her driveway in her work clothes, one hand shielding her eyes, and looked at the green certified slip stapled to the envelope. Nobody in Cyprien got certified mail unless it was bad. Certified mail meant the parish, or the bank, or a lawyer in Thibodaux who wanted you to know he'd tried.

She carried it inside and set it on the kitchen table and made herself a glass of iced tea first, because she was forty-three years old and had learned that bad news waited politely if you asked it to.

The air conditioner in the window rattled and dripped into a coffee can. Outside, the bayou lay flat and brown as gravy behind the Fontaine place. Somewhere down the road a truck went by with its radio up, zydeco spilling out and then gone.

She sat. She opened the envelope with her thumb.

PARISH OF LAFOURCHE — NOTICE OF PLANNED PUBLIC IMPROVEMENT — DRAINAGE AND CANAL WIDENING, DISTRICT 4.

She read it twice before her eyes would let the third paragraph in.

The parcel identified as St. Augustine Cemetery, approximately 2.4 acres, currently unmaintained and presumed abandoned, lies within the project footprint. Any known descendants wishing to arrange for relocation of remains should contact the parish engineer's office within sixty days.

Loretta put the paper down. She looked at the refrigerator, where Damon's high school graduation photo was still held up by a magnet shaped like a crawfish, four years old and curling at the corner.

Presumed abandoned.

Her grandmother Gladys Verret was buried in that ground, under a headstone Loretta had helped pay for with money from her first job at the Winn-Dixie in Raceland. Gladys's mother was buried there. Gladys's mother's mother. Loretta could walk the rows blind and name them: the Verrets, the Guidrys, the Lejeunes, the babies with no first names, only DAUGHTER OF, 1871. Two hundred and eleven graves, give or take, because some of the wooden markers had gone soft and sunk in the fifties and nobody had written down where.

Unmaintained. That part stung worse, because it was half true. The parish had stopped mowing in 2011. Loretta and Camille and a handful of others went out twice a year with a brush cutter and a cooler of Gatorade and did what they could, and the rest of the year the elephant ear and the trumpet vine did what they wanted.

She picked up the phone and called the hair salon.

"Cyprien Beauty, this is Camille."

"They're going to dig up St. Augustine."

A pause. The sound of a dryer hood being lifted. "Say that again, baby."

"The parish. Drainage project. They sent me a letter says the cemetery's presumed abandoned and if I want Grandmother Gladys I have sixty days to come get her."

"Lord Jesus." Camille Lejeune's voice went low and flat, which was how it went when she was getting serious. "Who signed it?"

"Parish engineer. But the project's District Four."

"District Four is Keith Begnaud."

"I know whose district it is."

Camille let out a long breath. In the background somebody laughed, and Camille said away from the phone, *hush, y'all,* and then came back. "Loretta. Listen to me. Begnaud's had that canal on his wish list since he got elected. His daddy's construction outfit is going to eat good off that contract."

"Then he can widen it on the other side."

"The other side is the Robicheaux sugar land and they got lawyers."

Loretta looked at the letter again. Sixty days. She thought of the road out to the cemetery, the shell drive, the iron gate with the letters spelling ST. AUGUSTINE in a curve, one of them hanging crooked since Hurricane Ida's cousin came through in '08.

"So do we," she said.

"We do not."

"Then we'll get some." Loretta stood up, phone against her shoulder, and started rinsing her glass because her hands needed something. "I want a list. Everybody in this town with people in that ground. Everybody who left and still calls home. You know them all."

"I know them all," Camille agreed. "Give me till Thursday."

After she hung up, Loretta sat in the quiet with the air conditioner and the crickets starting up. On the wall by the door hung the only photograph in the house from before, the one she had never been able to take down: two girls, eleven years old, identical as two beans in a pod, standing in front of Gladys's porch in matching yellow Easter dresses. One of them squinting. One of them smiling like she'd been told to.

Loretta looked at it a long moment.

"Well," she said out loud, to nobody, to the picture. "They finally came for the graves."

She called Damon at nine, when she knew his shift at the campus paper would be done.

"Mama."

"Baby, I need you to write something."

She could hear him moving, keys, a door. Twenty years old and already he had that reporter's habit of getting quiet when something was worth hearing. She told him all of it. The letter. Begnaud. Sixty days.

"They can't do that," he said.

"They can do exactly that, and they will, unless somebody makes it expensive for them. Nobody in Baton Rouge knows Cyprien exists. Nobody in New Orleans knows. You've got a newspaper."

"It's a student paper, Mama."

"It's a newspaper."

A long pause. "You want the whole history? Grandmother Gladys, the Verrets, all of it?"

"All of it," she said. "They want to call us abandoned, you put six generations of us in print. You put every name."

What she did not say, what she did not think about at all until much later, was that *all of it* is a bigger country than anybody means when they say it.