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

All Bedlam Courses Past

Chapter Six

Short Days

(part one hundred forty-nine)

Pearletta was beating rugs, a chore to keep busy during the vigil…a death vigil not quite…

A waiting, to hurry Samuel back to Clarks, if he wandered home and wanted to put his head in his mother’s room. Lawrence was home with Edwin Snedden’s card; with, penciled on the back: Job Bayard Will collect, dress, and inter as desired.

Junior on his front step. “Tell me anything wants done.”

“I’m not sure…” Hating, here again, the stumbling widower Junior’s sad face reflected, Lawrence took a grip. “I don’t know how to find a man named Bayard, does undertaking out of Dominionville.”

“Oh, that’s Pearletta’s daddy. I’ll run get him.”

To his word, Junior loped off. Lawrence walked soft-footed through his door, cracked open. Every window open. He feared her, Mary lying dead. All the terrors of childhood, the corpses with staring eyes, came trembling into his fingertips.

And the mantelpiece clock chimed a half hour. He almost wished for Samuel. The clock a fine thing of Mary’s (reminiscent of a fine thing glimpsed once, in a parlor belonging to Gremot). He sat on the rocker, tried to see a man go to his dead wife’s bedside, take her dead hand, say…

Goodbye. Fare thee well. Make promises, how she’d be well cared for, in the ground. A good box…

A voice: “Mr. Everard, if you all don’t want to be in the house, no need.”

Lawrence straddled a sill. “Is that Bayard?”

Bayard said: “Hush, girl.”

“Oh, I been crying.” Pearletta and another young woman stood in Bayard’s mule cart. They hoisted ends of a pine box Junior maneuvered to take singlehanded. Pearletta’s face was dust and tears. “I been crying. Bee, what if I took that bottle?”

“You never would. Why didn’t he think of it, if people was gone to think of it?”

“Mr. Everard,” Bayard said. “You go tend your business.”

Lawrence had none, but left by the kitchen. He heard Samuel talking to Gippy.

“That’s Preacher Bayard’s mule. You know what’s different about a mule from a horse? A mule is halfway a horse…”

Gippy was an educated dog, to the extent Samuel had come across any fact in his life. “Mama and Lidah has to go off now and be buried. The mortal remains, Gippy.”

Mortal remains.

Could he ask his mother…? Maybe more proper to ask her, come live, now, in my house. (Let Daddy be.) This what-to-do about Samuel weighed like an anvil, the boy’s prattle making him sad, he could not tell why.

160

Bedlam

All Bedlam Courses Past (part one hundred fifty)

(2024, Stephanie Foster)