All Bedlam Courses Past (part one hundred one)

All Bedlam Courses Past

Chapter Four

Counterfeits

(part one hundred one)

He had ways and places all over town. He got into the Methodist bell tower, the station switchbox, the coffin workshop at Snedden’s, Pelle’s cabinet of blue negatives…

At Miss Towson’s doors were never locked. She might be pleased (he believed it) at the martyrdom of “mere things” vanishing, but from curiosity Richard had rifled her bookshelves and writing desk. Miss Towson had no inside to her; it was all religion. He’d explored the crannies of Crownhaven, slept a night in an empty apartment, breathing new paint…thinking of fourteen years past, painting Hopper’s.

He trespassed, and Cookesville sat ignorant. He ate food in people’s Christian homes. He played a game, took a thing and put it elsewhere…a possible where…

A poker just under the fireplace rug, a letter back of the bedstand. A chain with its purple stone dropped to her jewel chest’s bottom. One day Élucide Gremot would say, “Oh, look…!”

She could not be harmed; she would buy two for losing one. Sit pretty, having three.

He gained secrets embarrassing only to Cookesvillians. The literal sweeping of dirt under a rug; church missives buried in a kindling box. Husbands who’d snuck whisky into bottles of hog tonic, lunchers who’d pilfered the Columbia’s cups and saucers.

He padded up to the cabin. Spied on the porch, Daddy laid out like a sunbaked cadaver, clenching every few breaths, hacking without waking. Mama a shrunken doll…a ragdoll flopping to her cot, catching breaths of her own. Ugly, the pair of them. A sight.

I don’t pity them, I don’t care for them. And, too, Richard thought…who would?

He had crushed the girl’s near arm, clamped on the basket handle to pin the other, close to her ear said, “Just be quiet, be quiet.” The purse was on a string, his thumb had hooked it. Happenstance. She went running soon as he let her go, Richard diving under Rutherford’s dock. Hearing her call out when she got to the mouth of the alley.

He wanted to feel this shock on Cookesville justified. A dose of bitters to purge them. Weren’t you meant to punch through delusion, shake sense into the besotted?

Squeezing eyes against the sunset, he felt inclined to sleep. It was a shame though, good money to spend…he would have to rouse up, do the sensible thing. Hopper wouldn’t allow him a tab, else he would not walk twelve miles when four would do. He plodded towards the Dominionville Road and his brother’s farm.

Samuel in the yard fitted apples to a bandanna sling, unable to work his fingers loose of one end. On hands and knees, then, with his dog. “Where’d it go, Gippy?”

“Get over here in the light, and I’ll show you something.”

108

Bedlam

All Bedlam Courses Past (part one hundred two)

(2024, Stephanie Foster)