The Cutting Season by Attica Locke

Author:Attica Locke
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780061802058
Publisher: Harper
Published: 2012-09-11T07:00:00+00:00

15

The Feast of St. Joseph Holy Trinity Church sat on the south side of Lessard Street. Caren remembered it from the photograph, the one Detectives Lang and Bertrand displayed in her office, the snapshot of Inés Avalo and the dark priest, she in a bright dress, those star-shaped earrings catching the sunlight. She was smiling then.

The church was small and built of shale stone and painted wood. Its one front-facing window was a high arch of colored glass set in beveled panels, displaying the image of a cross beneath a yellow sun. Caren sat quiet for a moment, staring at the color and light, the way the shifting clouds made play of the sacred scene. She didn’t see Owens’s car, not on the street or in the parking lot next to the church, which was paved with crushed oyster shells and outlined by a rusting chain-link fence, the gate of which was propped open with a loose brick. She’d lost him somewhere on the drive. He was nowhere in sight. But as she sat now, alone in her car, he almost felt like an afterthought. Strange as it seems, she felt as if the church itself had called her here.

St. Joseph’s was not particularly pretty, but it was quaint and welcoming. The front lawn was dotted with wet, fallen leaves from a pecan tree overhead. The double doors were made of arched wood, with twin cast-iron knockers on either side. And just to the right, beside the church’s two front steps, sat a tiny, bare-limbed birch tree, its branches adorned with glass bottles of cobalt and sea green, red and ginger brown, all of them in the shape of old soda bottles. It was an unexpected sight, nestled here at the threshold of a Catholic church; it was the kind of thing you could still find in the back swamps, in the desolate, rural haunts of deep Louisiana, parts of which seemed untouched by time and the march of history. The origins of the bottle tree were African, Helen had once told her; it was a folk tradition brought to this country by slaves, who, working with whatever materials were at hand, devised a crude method of catching and trapping malevolent spirits, to prevent their passage through human doors. The colored glass chimed in the light afternoon wind, its empyreal music calling. Caren answered the sound by opening her car door.

She crossed Lessard on foot, stepping into a cold wind that wrapped itself around her arms and legs. Her cheeks flushed, and she felt a dull ache in her chest the closer she got to the front steps. She hadn’t been inside a church since her father’s funeral—a cold February morning during Morgan’s second year. After the church ceremony, she and Eric had stood awkwardly in the family home, where she finally met her brother and sister, and six of their kids, one of whom looked remarkably like Caren. They’d left before the food was served, when it was clear that her presence was making everyone uncomfortable.

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