All Bedlam Courses Past (part one hundred)

All Bedlam Courses Past

Chapter Four

Counterfeits

(part one hundred)

The constable crossed the street, so it sounded. Next the Horace house was the city’s garden park, low brick wall keeping out chickens, crabapple row filtering the Horace’s manure pile. Crusader, whose snuffling nose had come down to the boards, Richard’s fingers answering, was to be pastured out. Copper couldn’t cure his rotting hoof, he couldn’t pull for Dr. Horace, he was old anyway, and stank. Not his fault…not Sanderson’s.

The park was getting fixed. A big new house was getting built, opposite, and Horace (looking forward, with the town) had agreed not to be so rustic. When you slept under a man’s barn, you heard conversations around his yard.

“You don’t think you will?” he heard Virginia Horace ask. Louder-voiced, through her kitchen window.

And Sanderson: “You’d be here by yourself. He might be out there watching.”

Join the hunt.

Why are you stuck in Cookesville? You weren’t born here. They don’t want you here. You don’t love anyone here. Richard said nothing more to himself for a minute, to test this. His mother was the only candidate. But if he pictured her being told, “Richard’s gone away”, he couldn’t picture her…

Picture her, being honest with himself, worried. Changing anything about her days. Enshrining any possession of his left behind. She had lost her mind over Micah’s death, long ago.

And here, he had always felt it…

Love was not, of all things, ashamed. Love, where it lived at all, flung itself into fires and under trains. Did he know a soul who would defy any person on his behalf?

Safe then to let himself remember.

At Lewin’s, she had picked from the bushel baskets, trying her onions by peeling the skins. Her way with potatoes just as bad. Then she was in the alley, walking stop-start, tugging her skirt above her ankles, rounding puddles, eyes guarding her shoes.

Hungry and sorry for himself, Richard had wanted that basket. And where was she going, away from downtown? Past the courthouse, past Nachfolger’s showroom, past the factory making windows, the pottery making pickle crocks? Past the Baptist church, the uneasy dead in the Baptist cemetery, rattled by these noisy places, past the cemetery fence, the ditch and stream, the gasworks. The road leaving town, Lawrence’s farm.

He might tell someone, if asked, that this mapping in his head was not with any notion of where to run. The Opera House had only false windows facing the back of Rutherford’s. A fire ladder came off the Opera; a pair of doors and a platform came off Rutherford’s. He knew already of a grating, pried loose by himself.

Through the basement, you traversed the block. You passed stock boys at their cartons, the boiler room, the office shared by the store detectives. Richard would snag a broom and ply it along the way; he was never after that looked at by anyone.

107

Bedlam

All Bedlam Courses Past (part one hundred one)

(2024, Stephanie Foster)