All Bedlam Courses Past (part fourteen)

All Bedlam Courses Past

Chapter One

The Peculiar Nature of Logical Science

(part fourteen)

iv.

April

Too many mornings of his life had begun with birdsong, chattering at the back of consciousness…just that. He didn’t feel aware yet of a state of being, of misery or comfort. He expected the weight to fall soon on the side of misery. What woke Richard was a flicking tail, striking his nose a second time.

Woke enough, at least, to open eyes. He had vomited, and the rat was eating it.

That, to Richard, was the rat’s affair. These riverbank vermin hadn’t the sanguinity of the city rat, that moved from the dead to the drunk to the sleeping, counting all fingers alike.

But he shoved to his knees. He fell over thudding on a slump of ground scaffolded by trailing roots. If he felt strong in a minute, he would climb to the old pine stand, bed where on young summer nights he had, able to dream his mother and father gone.

They were. Not Heaven’s way, but down the hole. Squatting in a shanty.

He had not dreamed the voices. This was Gremot’s land, and Gremot could fairly turn up on it. All the Everards’ old boss had built on the stead’s footstones was an open shelter, a place for a wagon to wait out a thunderstorm.

It happened to be April.

Richard put dates to himself that way. It happens to be the twelfth, and springtime. Happens I’ll be thirty years old in a couple of months. Maybe not.

Everything that happened to be achievable, in a life like his, fell so. Tobacco smoke wafted from the shelter, freshening in the damp, a little heartbreaking. The only money Richard had got hold of since a month ago, he had stolen from Mary Paton’s hidey-hole, between the roof beam and tar paper of her chicken house. Five dollars in jealous coin, half-cents, pennies, nickels, Richard following almost on her heels as she slipped with a jingling apron from the kitchen, passing him blushing, bumping shoulders.

Her cheeks pinkening, no doubt, for some dirty thought of poison in his coffee.

He had weighed his sister-in-law’s purse in a palm…and pocketed it. He couldn’t feel sorry. She had no dear ways about her, Mary Paton; she moved bovine from chore to chore, that free-floating part of her mind that might have journeyed, clouded by a low-boiling temper.

His father would say it. Make this conceit, swallow it in bitterness, never in life having known an intellectual equal. Richard used his father as a character, a repertoire role, now he was shed of the inconvenient wish to be loved by Lawrence. His brother had married Gremot’s house help (granting their enemy the boon of removing her), from a sort of spite, as far as Richard could guess.

But he would pay Mary back one day in labor, if she could look him in the eye and accuse him.

16

Bedlam

All Bedlam Courses Past (part fifteen)

(2023, Stephanie Foster)