All Bedlam Courses Past (part ninety-two)

All Bedlam Courses Past

Chapter Three

An Object in Motion

(part ninety-two)

Daytimes the two of them, the sisters, sat alone but for Mary-Lidah. And if Élucide slipped out for newspapers, Ranilde did not like her reading the town’s doings aloud. And if Élucide wandered as far, for as many hours, as the running of errands could cover, visiting Ebrach’s building site, strolling down to Fannie’s, shopping more broadly than her strict list…

She gadded for boredom. Or something other, the always-at-fault feeling…Ranilde’s bald remarks now, that Élucide didn’t need to be in her house and ought to go home.

Ebrach had taken the Nachfolgers’ guest floor. Seen, he was courteous and proprietous as could be. All Cookesville climbed Arcadia with this hope in mind, of seeing Mr. Ebrach, of being audience to one of his talks. Vanguard and Beacon photographers, apparatuses arranged on the sidewalk, clocked the naked site’s progress—its survey, its fencing, its crated goods rising under canvas drapes.

Mother visited town on Wednesdays to spend two nights, returned to the farm with both girls Fridays, had Papa, Robert, or Ziegler drive them back Sundays. Sundays, Owen’s arm carried his wife to church. The Methodist church of the Gremots, not the Baptist church of his parents.

Instead of hosting Sunday dinners, the family were guests, more often at the Horaces’. (When the Rutherfords hosted, extras, of the town’s odd people, filled the table; and Ranilde sat wilting under the strain.)

“Come, Luce. We’ll go to the backyard and do some tidying.”

It was a February Sunday, not warm enough to thaw. And it was a pretext, soft-spoken…not quite out of earshot. Ranilde was in her chair, a cloth on her eyes. Mother and daughter found a passage under snow, of bricks not leading to the shed; they found on crossing brown weeds humping from the white, the shed dim and occupied by a nest—that snuffled like a wakened sleeper.

They backed, in their dampening skirts, to the kitchen door. “Papa needs to hire a workman. Though I don’t see why Owen can’t put in an hour, mornings, before he goes off…”

Mother thought, and the thought seemed to Élucide to read: Because no one makes him. “I did have it in mind for you to keep Nildie company.”

Oh, me? “But I’m always here.”

“Being that you seem to be everywhere, I think that can’t be true.”

What, then, is anything Nildie would like, that she calls keeping company? Dodging this hazard, Élucide said only: “What should I do?”

“Go to your room in the evenings, and not sit up with Owen. Quit stealing time running errands. You know what I mean. It’s not becoming to dawdle on Arcadia.”

97

Bedlam

All Bedlam Courses Past (part ninety-three)

(2024, Stephanie Foster)