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

 

 

 

 

 

All Bedlam Courses Past

 

Chapter Six

Short Days

(part one hundred thirty-nine)

 

 

 

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“I’ll go clean up. Head to town.”

He was in his long johns…and would have put on trousers, shod himself, done such as needed til dinnertime. Lawrence had never found it profitable to keep a milk cow, bought a half hog a few times from Shad Chambliss. But Samuel’s care of the rabbits took looking over; he had to eye Mary’s chickens, subtract eaten ones…

If she counted them herself, she didn’t say. Today the needed would be pruning branches that hadn’t borne, raking and burning sticks and leaves. Putting Samuel with a sack to carry off windfalls, to the woods well clear of the grove, where Lawrence had a couple of blinds constructed.

He wanted no smut on his trees, but deer would come to those apples. Time soon to take Samuel and the dogs, throw another few sacks over a shoulder, fill with hickory nuts…

The creek, Dominion Creek, flowed out of Dominionville and crossed his property. Mary did some of her washing down creekside. He breathed a moment, gazing at the basin. Pump water. He felt for crumbs around his mouth, brushed his hair and beard, gave consideration to a smarter suitcoat he’d come to own.

Miss Gremot could be run across near the Columbia now and then.

 

Samuel came at a skid down the slope from the barn loft.

“Go see your Mama. No, hang on. Help me saddle up.”

“I can ride in with you?”

The question held a terrible…what, Lawrence asked himself? Discomfort. His own, not the boy’s.

“Daddy?”

He was going nowhere, really, to no purpose. “Well, I’ll let you. Tell your Mama.”

Samuel was off like a shot, looking back, stumbling. Soon angering Mary in some way, her voice flying from the kitchen window. By this, Lawrence judged her in typical fettle, and relaxed. She would be alone for a few hours.

He saw she had slicked the hair, scrubbed a rag over the face, patches on the boy’s cheeks still rosy. The bare feet still manure-caked.

“Don’t you have shoes to put on?”

“My feet don’t fit em no more.”

Maybe true. An irritation. “Go look under that bed your uncle was using. If you find any two, have em.”

He sat Samuel on the horse’s rump, where Samuel would, as Lawrence knew, burst reverie with a thing noticed twenty fence-posts back. He snugged Richard’s bootlaces tight. “You speak up, I mean that, if one falls off somewheres.”

He said again, mounting, “Samuel, I don’t want you playing along the creek.”

He felt a twist behind, a hasty clutch at his coat.

“But if Mama sends me after water…”

“You tell her what I said. Don’t do nothing along the creek.”

“But Gippy.”

“Dogs don’t get the typhoid.”

This felt certain to Lawrence. Dogs maybe took themselves in the woods with it and died, as with all things that ailed a dog.

 

 

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Bedlam

All Bedlam Courses Past (part one hundred forty)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(2024, Stephanie Foster)