Read Online When Autumn Leaves: A Novel by Amy S. Foster - Free Book Online Page B

organic at all. It was a ritual, and nothing like the ones she had seen in church. Looking at her grandmother, she had a feeling that what she was witnessing wasn’t anything Jesus talked about.
    “Well, I ain’t no witch, child,” Pearl said with a great deal of force. “This is a trick passed on from my grandmama and from her grandmama before her, ’til, well, back to the beginnin’ of the Darlings. Ain’t nothin’ evil here. This is to help someone. Folks down in the church may not like it. But since when did I give a hoot what other people think? Besides, you think Jesus cares about a circle made a salt? He got more important things to be busy with.”
    Stella took a step backwards. Pearl was transformed in the dim light, like someone else, a wizened old lady from a fairy tale. It sent a shiver down Stella’s spine.
    “Sugar, look at me.” Pearl said it, knowing it was the last thing in the world Stella wanted to do. “It’s me, your Granny. Baby girl, you listen to me, this here’s earth magic. You get a handle of all that energy, and ya got to make sure you don’t bring the bad in with the good. I promise I’ll explain later. Don’t be afraid, Stella. You were born to this, it’s part a you. If you can’t trust me, trust that. You must feel it, the magic pullin’ at your belly.”
    Stella closed her eyes, and she did feel it. It was like her ears were in her feet, a steady hum coming up through her shoes and winding around her chest. “Granny?” she asked. “What do you mean, build me a door?”
    Try as she might, Stella could never recall in detail exactly what happened inside that circle. She could say the words: “It got darker,” or “The wind picked up and raced through our hair, and our clothes,” or “The hole that Granny dug for the bottle seemed to glow,” but she could not really remember the images. There was a moment when Pearl called down the storm, corralled it with her arms, and a streak of lightning hit the ground. That moment flashed clearly in her memory, but beyond that, she could not remember, as if her young mind had willed itself to forget, as if this thing was too big for her to carry around in her small body.
    Stella never did see the bottle full of lightning. That afternoon when Dolores McDonald returned to the mountain, Pearl immediately pulled her into the house and closed the door. Stella tried to put an ear up to it, to hear what was going on. When that didn’t work, she snuck around the perimeter of the house, standing on her tiptoes to get a peak through a window, but she saw nothing. Dolores emerged a little while later. At first she looked the same, but then Stella caught her eye and was trapped there. The woman kept her in her gaze for a handful of seconds and then let her go. Stella felt strangely disappointed. She was not clear about what she saw there: wisdom, surely, and kindness too, of a sort, but most of all it was defiance, a look as determined as a brush fire. And then Dolores smiled, walked erectly down the stairs and down the path until she disappeared around the bend.
    Stella thought about those fleeting moments for years. Was Dolores truly transformed? Was it only wishful thinking? She never saw Dolores McDonald again, but they received a Christmas card every year, and each year it was from a different place. All that moving around troubled Stella, because she thought the whole point was for Dolores to find her place in this world. But Pearl explained to her that it made a whole lot of sense, because after all, lightning never strikes the same place twice.

    As she grew older, Stella’s restlessness baffled her family and friends. They loved her, they liked her, but they did not understand her, though they didn’t really try all that hard. A chasm grew that began to separate her from the others.
    At least once a month she invented an excuse to go into town. She would walk around the wide streets, go into the stores with fluorescent lights and