All Bedlam Courses Past (part one hundred forty-three)

All Bedlam Courses Past

Chapter Six

Short Days

(part one hundred forty-three)

All the ride back, blood tonic and bile pills in his pockets, Samuel quiet on a gumdrop, Lawrence chewed over Miss Gremot’s news. He could detect in himself…toyed with, let play a little…a natural aversion that felt…

Like longing. Like being jealous of a longing.

The photographer Pelle liked to say: “Oh, you wouldn’t have heard of the town I grew up in, but it was in Cincinnati that I studied the art.”

Pelle must be thirty-five, thirty-eight…

With a wizened dome of brow, lank curls, a stalk of neck in a tie gone twice round and knotted in a bow, making Lawrence see a famous face, one that turned up odd times in the paper. As he sat abstracted, shuffling memories, a mad whisper slipped the gate, asking that he entertain…

That at thirty, he was the right age. Richard just born, Mama never thinking of another. Folks came and went along the road, didn’t they? Why not a lost little widow, toting a baby she couldn’t keep? He and his brother never had looked much alike…

He was said to favor his dead uncle. Richard looked like Daddy, a fact anyone could see. In the way of worries, a fable, a made-up story, began to nudge Lawrence’s world off-kilter. He found it possible he was not an Everard. And if you were not who you’d supposed yourself at the time, could you still be married?

“You want me, Daddy?”

“No, get on. See what your mother’s up to.”

Oftentimes, Samuel ran out past dark, and Lawrence had no opinion on the good or bad of this. Mary could holler or leave be. He heard the direction of Samuel’s feet, from the barn to the rabbits’ pens, heard the dogs stir on watch.

He took some time over hanging his tackle, racking his saddle. He poured a little oil on a rag and wiped the saddle down. He unhooked the fine-hair brush and buffed.

It was a fair hour for dinner, but he smelled no smoke on the air. No pleasing scent of chicken fat, browning. She might be ill. Samuel ought to come back and say.

He put one foot before the other, repeated this, made past the chicken house, Mary’s vegetable patch, the backyard pump. The screen door stood closed, the kitchen door open. He put his head in at the woodshed. He liked to tidy his kindling in bundles, liked to split logs and stack them. Could teach Samuel nothing about how to place his feet, how to measure his strength swinging the maul…

“Mary!” he called out, standing on the slab.

He had come this far, and could see her boots asplay. She was in a chair at the table.

“Mary, I brung you some medicine. You like to get on to bed? Where the hell’s Samuel?”

“Lawrence, I haven’t got the supper. I’m still fixing the fire.”

154

Bedlam

All Bedlam Courses Past (part one hundred forty-four)

(2024, Stephanie Foster)