All Bedlam Courses Past (part one hundred seven)

 

 

 

 

 

All Bedlam Courses Past

 

Chapter Four

Counterfeits

(part one hundred seven)

 

 

 

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Bayard must be a traveling preacher; in his dry spells, a temperance talker. The cup of bitterness seemed set to overflow, and Richard, not troubling to hear, went about his business.

This was to drag his cot to the far wall, stand on it, and study the view.

He could see a broad brick drive, too little trafficked to fight the grass. Fitzpatrick, he knew (from watching inside Fitzpatrick’s house), ran his push mower over bricks and lawn alike. The drive emptied from the old stable yard, at its terminus a brick lying here, and one there, gullywashed to a short life of independence…

For by coincidence, in the Fitzpatricks’ garden, bricks tilted into a toothy border-in-progress. The sun cast the scene, animated by late-feeding birds and a stir of wind, in orange. Ten minutes or so and the cell would be a cave. Hot, ripe, another of the constable’s buckets the mutual convenience for himself and Bayard. Fitzpatrick and his wife did not keep their jail without regard for the respectability of their town, but they kept it by the hours they worked.

“You know Billy Holdclaw…”

“How would I know Billy Holdclaw?”

“Down in Mexico, had to come back after them Indans wouldn’t let the road go through, broke his leg in a hole, laid days in a ditch. Could look up and see his team just stand there, still yoked to the wagon…”

To endure it, Richard retold the story, omissions and time-lapses corrected. Subject failed at railroading, wanted his mother, and for no good reason to ply at Ziegler’s trade. In Cookesville? Ziegler, if he heard of it, would break that leg himself. Fell in a hole? Or off his wagon, drunk. As for the team’s conduct, mule sense was nothing to its reputation, if the animals truly stood starving…

A bargain-with-God yarn, never a drop of whisky to pass the Holdclaw lips, if the Lord would only deliver. A man who lived in the head of Preacher Bayard.

“What’s Billy up to these days?”

“Joel Allison.”

“Bayard. You want me to say my amens, you gotta listen when I talk.”

“It was that hard winter, year after the Centennial, that big ice storm, you remember.”

“What, seventy-seven? No.”

“Joel Allison was Dr. Kempf’s orderly…”

“Not Dr. Kempf over at the home?”

Bayard’s feet scuffed the floor. “Now, someone had rung the bell…”

“Seventy-eight, you mean?”

 

 

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These badgerings could not plug the flow altogether. Richard had a good sight in his mind of ice, coating every woodland branch around his parents’ cabin…his being there to see it, a discontent to his father. Such beauty, such sumptuous excess, had made him think of Crownhaven, rising in all its curlicues and fripperies.

Seventy-eight? But he was maybe wrong and Bayard right. “You got some good ones, Bayard,” he cut in.

“These are all true salvations, or I wouldn’t tell em.”

Richard thought how his mother would eat this up. “Say, you ever seen Dominionville?”

“I live in Dominionville.”

In the dark, he could not take a better look at Bayard’s face. But a lantern’s beam came bobbing though the crack of the outside door. Noises of a key being fit. The door swinging back. A figure setting the lantern at his feet, holding up the ring of keys by the one he’d used, until of three or four, he found another he wanted.

He was not Fitzpatrick.

“Preacher Bayard, I’m Everard’s counsel. I’m taking him off now.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Bedlam

All Bedlam Courses Past (part one hundred eight)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(2024, Stephanie Foster)