All Bedlam Courses Past (part one hundred nineteen)

All Bedlam Courses Past

Chapter Five

Collecting Debts

(part one hundred nineteen)

i.

Dedication

Weighty things were the theme of January’s hard frost. That country roads be concrete, passable for a custom sledge sporting double sets of steel-rimmed wheels and a deck like a flatcar, mattered to Mr. Rowan…

To the swan song of his ambition. Élucide supposed it didn’t matter to Rowan. Papa went further, saying Rowan sought for trouble. Failure icing on the cake, then, trouble of lip-smacking proportions. As though, if the feud had brought on a fireworks show, the magazine itself would catch and go sky high.

However.

Not even Mr. Lincoln was getting fireworks. The two events were scheduled to compete. Lincoln was heavy; per the Vanguard, fifteen-hundred and sixty-two pounds. He had been crafted in Düsseldorf, had voyaged by ocean-steamer to Baltimore, by rail to Cookesville—a travelogue exotic enough. And he had been expected for three years.

Uncle Henry, gone abroad for a look-see, cabled: “They did him without a beard. About as much like Lincoln as Mary Todd.” He went again, dickering under authority of the Cookesville Civic Committee.

He went a third time. He was courting a Düsseldorf widow, and might be leaving them. If her father went, Polly would. The coveted house would be for sale.

There was little point in minding this.

The city in 1866 had changed Voorhees Street to Lincoln, and in ’79 knocked down two pioneer cabins decaying near the garden park. Richard Everard was said to have squatted in one. The plantings for the center cross waited spring. Virginia and Edith were on the Lincoln Park Garden Committee—because Virginia and Edith, not Fannie. Abrew was another slapping match, Fannie instead on the River Park Beautification Committee. For her acolyte, it was time to choose disloyalty.

Élucide wore the blue rosette of the Temperance Fellows. Muffed and stoled, she watched up Lincoln for the wagons. Disturbance filtered in, and pardon mes. A man inched right-hand, to speak a headline: “Ebrach making a private deal to buy Rowan’s press.”

“Does he say so?”

“I thought you were in it.”

“Party to it? Does that make a difference to you?”

128

Bedlam

All Bedlam Courses Past (part one hundred twenty)

(2024, Stephanie Foster)