All Bedlam Courses Past (part ninety-five)

 

 

 

 

 

All Bedlam Courses Past

 

Chapter Three

An Object in Motion

(part ninety-five)

 

 

 

---

 

 

 

“What,” she asked her mother, “was Lisette’s maiden name?”

Élucide had found a Lizette in the Armour Bible, spelt that way (which for having decided it wasn’t, seemed not right), but no surname. The verse it was margined alongside held a message, a way Judge Armour’s sister chose to view this new bond, her niece Fern to Alain Gremot’s son.

 

And when ye reap the harvest of your land, thou shalt not rid cleanly the corners of thy field when thou reapest, neither shalt thou gather any gleanings of thy harvest. Thou shalt leave them unto the poor and to the stranger

Lizette His mother

 

“What was grandfather Gremot like?”

Mother let the page drop. “Give me a chance to think again. You can take this back upstairs.”

Geneva said: “I will, ma’am. I’m going.”

No buffer in the room, then. “He spoke English and all.”

“Oh, yes. Not altogether. He was…jocular.”

“He lived with you?”

“We lived in his house.”

“Do you mean ours, in Indianapolis?”

“No, Luce. The farm was outside Jasper.”

“And… Papa still has it?”

“No. He sold all that land. He didn’t want to raise stock.”

Other questions were less seemly, and wouldn’t be answered. Did he inherit money as well as land? Did Grandfather Alain impose his will? Jolly about it, like Uncle Henry? Implacable, like a tyrant…

It was a sort of lieutenantship, her mother’s attitude to married duty. You didn’t undermine, contradict. You stood with.

“You met Papa…at a bonfire? Didn’t you say?”

“I wasn’t expecting all this! Why so curious?”

Because it was curious, the lack of Armour cousins, or cousins-by-marriage, Appletons. Was there an Appleton clan in Jasper? Hadn’t something been wrong with Aunt Zeldy’s son?

Maybe there were no cousins. Little Lisette (easy to imagine her this way, a woman like Clotilde, fluttery and wanly pretty), with no ties and no friends, breaking new farmland in the middle of an old French territory. With an almost-old husband, a jocular thirty-nine when Papa was born.

 

 

100

 

 

---

 

 

The Armour Bible supplied the year of Alain’s birth, 1794. But not the Christian names of his mother and father. And how could her great-grandfather (who seemed of ages past, could plausibly have been born a century-and-a-half ago), not be…surely he had been…Gauthier? Gauthier, because why would the name of Honoré’s father be precious to Alain, who seemed to have despised his brother? But he would take this back, redeem it for himself, attach it to his own son.

Somewhere near Jasper…or another place, and moved there, Papa born in 1833. Lisette dead by 1838.

“Not so curious, but I do ask. Because if I knew it all, I wouldn’t.”

“Well! Enter it into the record that Élucide does not know it all.” Mother tried to engage Ranilde, and Ranilde turned her face to the window.

“Cidering time, Luce, there’d be get-togethers, and going round the houses. My father would have tables laid in the barn. We were…prominent, and the town expected it, plenty of food, plenty of baskets to go home with. In those days, the parents of a son and daughter might find a little chore they could do off by themselves. It was a boy named Hiram I was set to watch the fire with…we could have a fire, if we’d got rain. Hiram’s father was a good Whig, and Father liked him for a son-in-law, but Hiram wasn’t ready.”

“And so…Papa was your neighbor. He was Hiram’s friend?”

No, the Gremots cidered alone, it seemed. They were not Methodist, not churchgoers at all.

“Walter was there to collect money from a man, no other reason.”

You, of course, suspected nothing thrilling in your parents’ love story.

But it was picturable, a meeting worthy of the stage. A green limb and a shower of sparks. Unready Hiram rabbiting here and there, Papa’s casual boot ending the fright. Mother, young marriageable woman, had not feigned. She had let herself be held for comfort; it was difficult, after, to be high and mighty with the horse trader’s son.

“Walter was a bit dark for my taste. I didn’t think my father would care for it, and he didn’t.”

Well, then, as to taste, Papa must have grown suited.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

101

 

 

---

Bedlam

All Bedlam Courses Past (part ninety-six)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(2024, Stephanie Foster)