All Bedlam Courses Past (part fifty-two)

All Bedlam Courses Past

Chapter Three

An Object in Motion

(part fifty-two) 

A decent, if dry, beef roast; potatoes, rolls, skinned tomatoes. Thacker salted. He wedged in a fork.

“Mr. Thacker. You haven’t been in Cookesville too many years, have you?”

“Not so far, ma’am.”

Fannie sparkled. The little joke had somehow put him in a camp.

Edith said: “Dr. Bliss says the president’s coming all the way back. That was in the paper, a day or two ago.”

She paraphrased, a touch liberal with it. The woman at Thacker’s side was thirty, tall, stout, hard-battened in her corset. She would part seas for her preacher mate, Thacker could well believe.

And Weller had the advantage of knowing how this pitch curved. “Thus our democracy may emerge unscathed, the stronger for this second outrage.”

The maid, cornered in a niche between two windows, shuffled her feet in a tortured way. Thacker began to see Fannie’s object. His breed sat low-middle on the social scale…

But he could play this role.

Edith set her beau’s stage with a vocal sigh. Weller’s chest gave an oratory swell, and Thacker raised his rump, hooking two fingers towards himself. Restaurant manners. Under the clatter of Thacker’s second hunk of roast, the preacher deflated. Rutherford, in a way the girl understood, grunted, and for a minute or two seconds went round the table.

Weller chewed, sipped his tea, willed his masticating apparatus free of crumbs, perhaps…

And spoke: “Mr. Lincoln’s point being that war had birthed this nation, and war has cemented her Union, yet these eruptions were trials, merely, to prove our mettle. We Americans are in peaceful times the most pacific of peoples, the most welcoming, the most trusting of the stranger…”

He trailed into pulpit-fodder. Justice swift and terrible, when roused…

Thacker sopped a roll in gravy.

…assassinated by a malcontent, the bad seed of a respectable family…

“You know these Booths? I thought they were theater folk, from Baltimore, is it?”

A brief retreat. But Weller, a stump speaker who knew his hecklers, returned armed. He blinked; he scratched his ear and seemed to wake. Here was a stranger. The stranger, he thought, had said something.

“I’m sorry. I believe I missed your name, sir.”

“William Thacker. With the Vanguard.”

Weller inclined himself, not resting ill-bred hands on the table linen. This you-and-I intimacy established, he said chiefly to Edith:

“And Guiteau’s father, a businessman I believe, has disavowed him.”

“You’re a kind of genealogist, Mr. Weller. Interesting hobby.” Thacker bit his tongue, on the brink of saying he’d met such a person, not long past.

“No.”

“But they were all, at Oneida, being cruel to him, weren’t they? Those ladies, calling him Git-Out.” Fannie laughed.

Thacker laughed (though feeling for Guiteau, on this matter alone, a faint sympathy).

57

Bedlam

All Bedlam Courses Past (part fifty-three)

(2023, Stephanie Foster)