All Bedlam Courses Past (one hundred fifty-one)

All Bedlam Courses Past

Chapter Six

Short Days

(part one hundred fifty-one)

Mangin led his horse, and the two walked, Lawrence at a ponderous gait. He wanted to ask the doctor, this doctor, this sympathetic man…

He did not want to ask Mr. Hardy, who would advise on his soul.

He did not want to ask at all.

You told me Mary’s fever wasn’t the worst.

…she knows her own bed, knows you and Mrs. Clark. She has a spirit to get herself up, though she hasn’t the strength. I don’t speak medically of encouraging signs so early in a case, but I have seen poorer cases…

His mother had told him stories from the war, how parents stared from windows, how a mounted man in blue would slowly ride the hill down to Chambliss, passing this house and the next. So much terror at whose door he’d knock. Mangin, a doctor, might say yes, shock has killed. His interest was not in proving everyone sick.

“Mary didn’t seem kindly taken with you.” Lawrence found himself saying this.

They stood where they could see one box loaded already in the cart. Bayard was in the house, saying loud things to his daughters.

And: “Boy, you go tie up that dog!”

They could move no further with any hope of privacy.

“I don’t know how stories get round. Her people may have bent that way. I mean, Mr. Everard, to the rebel cause. Twenty years past! But you see, I was not a Mudd. I had two of Morgan’s boys, one tubercular and no help for it… The other with a ball in his thigh, and I took it out. I took it out, but I sent my nurse to fetch an officer, the Army of the Ohio being camped thereabouts. Why, it’s not much of a choice. Do you treat the patient? Of course you do. Do you hand over the traitor? Of course you do.”

Gippy came bounding, spotted a horse he was uncertain of, flattened his front half and crept. Samuel followed, sleeving away tears and the drippings of his nose. Over-curious, putting himself indoors to see the bodies…there were proper bearings for motherless children, ways a boy this age ought to have a notion of, of keeping solemn-faced…

Out from underfoot. But Mangin dug a handkerchief, saying, “Here, blow your nose. And keep that,” while Samuel stood dumb. “Now, Samuel. Have you two guardian angels in Heaven, a mother and a sister? Of course you do.”

He had got himself into this vein of speech. But it was speech, more than Lawrence could produce, and all the dealings for the funeral yet to be entered.

“Dear ones at the foot of the Lord are only a blessing. You mustn’t mind, mustn’t dwell too much…you won’t, now, will you? There. They have gone to a great peace, son.”

Practice. Practice at doing right, even when commonplaces meant little…and less than that…

“Is it an orchard? A kind of orchard?” Samuel asked. “God’s piece?”

“Yes, just so,” said Mangin.

162

Bedlam

All Bedlam Courses Past (part one hundred fifty-two)

(2024, Stephanie Foster)