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

All Bedlam Courses Past

Chapter Six

Short Days

(part one hundred forty-seven)

ii.

Tend your business

It was a great deliverance, Mangin himself finding them. Lawrence thought so in a spirit hopefully devout. He allowed God might count him failed. He had kept to his chores, kept out of the indoors all morning. Not ignorant of duty, but well intending, leaving the house to the women.

Mrs. Clark had kept up a spate of baking, Junior delivering, Pearletta coming along, from wherever she came in the first place. But for Lidah’s time, coming only to scrub and tidy and take up sheets. Laundry was her normal occupation.

Lawrence and Samuel tucked in, mealtimes, gaining by the day in old wool blanket and manure straw. Pearletta’s nose, though, was countrified; she chattered and poured out coffee, carried off plates to the sink, asked, “More them biscuits? I’m pretty good with biscuits. I could fix up half what Mrs. Clark puts herself out for. You just say, Mr. Everard, and I’ll tell Junior tell his mother, Pearletta’s cooking now. I’d still let Junior come walk me down, though…”

Mary and Lidah spoke in murmurs, a sickly one and a dull one, heard from the bedroom. “Why’s that, she wants you back?”

“Mama, she wants me gone.”

“Lawrence said…”

“That’s if you could give me something. You pay Pearletta, you could pay…”

Pearletta began to hum. Lawrence sat only perking ears at his own name, still to fathom none of Lidah’s troubles.

“There’s many of them swallow carbolic acid. A terrible death, but they will. She was too many months forward…I would expect five, where a pregnancy’s not to be hidden. Wiser…” Mangin choked a bit on this, and finished. “To dress the body as it is and close the casket. I’m a bit surprised that Mrs. McClurkin…”

Don’t bring her back here. What…if by springtime the baby was out? Mary would decide. She would not have wanted raising it. What, then…?

To show himself not lost, Lawrence shook this, saying, “Mrs. McClurkin knew. Maybe it’s Gremots she’d have taken it up with, if the typhoid never came in.”

“Well, that house is a hive, what with Callum’s sons and Michael’s, and that parade of political cronies. If the girl had a mother living… But it will be for you, Mr. Everard. You’ll have to think it over what you’ll say to them. I can’t see the burying of this sin.”

Mangin quoted proverbs: “If thou sayest, Behold, we knew it not; doth not he that pondereth the heart consider it? and he that keepeth thy soul, doth not he know it? and shall not he render to every man according to his works?”

The doctor was sincere in his faith, in his teetotling. It puzzled all the more, the despise for a kind, upright man. But Lawrence might have the secret out of McClurkins themselves, along with the worst, since he could not respect them.

158

Bedlam

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

(2024, Stephanie Foster)