All Bedlam Courses Past (part one hundred thirty-eight)

All Bedlam Courses Past

Chapter Six

Short Days

(part one hundred thirty-eight)

i.

A periodic scourge

October. Chores easing up; easier, with the coolness, getting done. Mornings showing frost. Afternoons dry, dry and warm. Mary through a low-voiced ramble setting clouded coffee, unsieved of grounds, with a knock against the cloth. Sloshing tepid spots onto Lawrence’s legs.

“My mother knew Wallaces. Oh, hmm.” Nod, nod. “You saw the newspaper taking confessions, Lawrence. Samuel and Mary-Lidah’s father was an Andrew. Why’d he go off looking where they hid what they took from him?” Nodding again. “Righteousness is in the timing of the Lord. We never heard about that child til they found the whole house of em dead. That there is the story…” (Her emphasis mighty.) “I can swear I seen his face.”

She was intent on it. The typhoid had preyed on a family of darkies, strangers to Lawrence but close neighbors, Dominionville.

“Did those children have a name, Lawrence? Did they say?”

“I don’t hear from the people you been talking to.” Nobody, he thought. Your imagination.

The Vanguard wanted any person able to shed light on a boy or girl, born thirty years past, whose father might have been a laborer, might have been named Wallace, certainly had died of the typhoid, to write a P. O. box in full confidence of discretion, identity withheld.

Making himself, he told his wife, “I think they got a few people write them so far.”

A degraded print of Wallace had been published July, side by side with the skull. The full portrait, now, by an artist Miss Gremot said was her cousin, sat in the Vanguard’s window. The Unknown Wallace eyed the street, eerie in his looks…

Spying after you, everyone said.

Sanderson had a story about a mine fire to raise up the hair on your neck. After the smoke died and they got the shaft opened, a man was sent down on a swing chair. Time passed, then a tug came on the rope. Or did it? One thought yes, the other no. But they hauled him up, and there he sat in his coveralls, neckerchief over his nose and mouth, hat slumped down…the little flesh of a face that showed, or what ought to been a face…

Wasn’t right seeming. One of the men slapped him on the shoulder, and like that, the thing in the chair crumbled, laid itself flat. The hat rolled away. No man inside those clothes, just a heap of ash.

Trying to picture without picturing it, where the bones would go, Lawrence said to Sanderson, “I don’t think that’s true.”

“My Uncle Kane saw it. With his eyes.”

Lawrence, who knew farming, reckoned Elkanah Sanderson had had more time to be everywhere seeing everything than his own piece allowed. He tamped the spilled coffee with the tablecloth. Mary, he tried, was in a mood…

Moods she always took. Always got herself red in the face, always bent over a boiling pot, between the cooking and the washing. These remarks of his wife’s he decided no foggier than usual.

“What if I cut out the brush in that vegetable patch?”

“Don’t get in there. Leave that alone.”

149

Bedlam

All Bedlam Courses Past (part one hundred thirty-nine)

(2024, Stephanie Foster)