Summoner’s Sunday
From The Archivist
They say a town like Belle Perdue doesn’t hold secrets for long—but that’s not exactly true. What it does hold is space: space for rituals to grow, for lost things to come back around, and for old stories to find new corners to echo through.
Every Sunday afternoon, just after the lunch rush winds down at Taylor’s Dossie Doe, and just before the heat gives up trying to prove anything, Louis Bertrand takes his seat on the splintered bench outside Emile’s Barbershop. He doesn't make an entrance. He just shows up. Sometimes he's already there when folks glance up. Like a shadow that sat itself down before the sun figured out where to land.
Nobody quite remembers when the ritual started. Some say Louis found his neighbor’s lost wedding ring without ever leaving his porch. Others swear it began the summer someone’s great-aunt’s teeth were retrieved from the gutter behind the feed store—just hours after Louis muttered something about “false prophets in the gravel.” Whatever the origin, it’s been long enough that no one questions it now.
The rules are simple: one townsperson per week brings Louis something lost. A missing key, a misplaced ledger, a broken heart looking for its other half—he doesn’t draw lines between objects and omens. First come, first served. And by 1:30 p.m., half the town is already watching to see who steps up with their mystery.
And the rest? They follow. Some out of habit. Some out of hope. Some because there’s nothing quite like seeing a grown man chant to a set of garden shears while a child offers their last piece of gum as tribute.
They call it Summoner’s Sunday now—though Louis himself never did. He just shrugs when asked. “I listen,” he says. “Sometimes things call back.”
That week, the procession moved slow and thick through town, humidity clinging to shirts and forearms, curiosity pulling everyone forward like a rope of invisible twine. Miss Lettie had already whispered her pick—her watering can, missing since the Tuesday storm—and folks at Dog River Café had started their usual bets. Odds were high on the mayor’s glasses, second only to Old Rosie’s travel mug, the one with the faded LSU sticker and the leak nobody could find.
But the stakes changed when Jack Boudreaux appeared.
He wasn’t part of the usual crowd. Not yet. Just a man with sea-salted boots and a duffel bag that thudded heavy when he set it down near the stoop. He watched the gathering like someone watching a dream he’d forgotten having. And he didn’t ask questions. Not right away.
Jack had arrived the night before, pulling up quiet behind Taylor’s Dossie Doe in a boat shaped like it remembered more than it was built to carry. The bayou had ushered him in, the same way it ushers in everything Belle Perdue doesn’t know it’s missing until it shows up.
When he finally asked what was going on, one of the old-timers just tipped his hat and said, “It ain’t church, son. But stay long enough, and something might get resurrected.”
Jack stayed.
That Sunday, Louis lifted his long arm and called out, “Watering can, make yourself known.”
The wind changed.
A rustle came from down near the steps of the post office. Metal on concrete. A clang, light and unmistakable. Then silence.
And then—Miss Lettie, framed by her nieces, let out a laugh that turned into a sob, right there in the street. “Well I’ll be,” she said, and nobody dared fill the silence that followed.
Jack didn’t say anything either. He just looked down the block where the sound had come from, then up at the man on the bench. And in that look—half awe, half recognition—you could almost see it land for him: this town ran on more than logic. It ran on memory, on ritual, on people showing up when it mattered.
Louis stood slowly. “That’s enough for today,” he said, though he didn’t look tired. Just full. Like the cup had refilled itself again.
The crowd lingered, as they always did. Some went to Martha Belle’s for lemonade. Others to Dog River to start the betting early for next week. Jack wandered with them, but kept glancing back at the bench like it might speak again.
He didn’t know it yet, but the town had already decided. Next Sunday’s petition? It’d be his.
Something lost had come home, sure enough. And everyone could feel it—Belle Perdue had just gotten a little bigger. A little stranger. And a whole lot more itself.
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