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

All Bedlam Courses Past

Chapter Six

Short Days

(part one hundred fifty-two)

Launched in, Preacher Bayard could thank Jesus plenty. He had preached at the gravesite, though Hardy shortly appeared. Mary’s minister surprised, all this organized in a rush. For the public health, yes, and what could be done? But he had expected to make the arrangements, sit down with you, Mr. Everard.

Hardy led a prayer, said more of the appropriate…it had come to some jostling between the two. Samuel a deal overcome, at seeing the coffins lowered. Lawrence felt nearest choking, too, at this sight. He had never seen family spaded over.

He caught himself. Mary, at God’s foot, might allow, he did all right by me… Possible she did not wish him ill. Lawrence did all right by me, Lord, but was he a good husband?

“Why they put people in a hole?” Samuel asked, on Eddie’s back, riding home.

“Cause…”

Because, what a mockery. What condemnation, an unburied corpse. A pretty young woman, a young soldier like Micah. Rotting off the bone, sockets picked hollow by crows. His father, like a mummy found in a cave. But alive yet, a flinch to behold, a ghoul of squandered life inflicting itself on two disappointing sons…

“There’s nothing else to be done. Dead folks have to go out of the way.” He amended: “Your Mama can’t feel being buried. She’s left, long since.”

“Why did Lidah get buried?”

“Samuel, you remember Mrs. English?”

“No.”

“Yes you do. Can’t be you don’t. You lived at her house up in town. You must have stayed two or three years. Your auntie.”

“I don’t have any aunt.”

“Well, what’d your Mama tell you? Who she was.”

Any hope, a relative? Mrs. English had charged Mary a good third her wages; that tight bind of money…and the children, what life could be when they were grown…had fleshed Mary’s first confidings to Lawrence.

“Some old lady we had to live with, and she wanted me to carry logs, and fill up the sink with water, and if she was going down any stairs she called me to come hold her arm. And I went in the cellar so I couldn’t hear when she was yelling. Is it those McClurkins? Is sweeping up for them a disgrace?”

“Shut your mouth a while.”

Until the barn was in sight, he held Samuel to this, felt the sticky hand wiped on his coat back… Disgrace. Whose mouth put gossip about that girl…nothing different from anyone else, now she was in the ground…in front of her brother? A child.

He told Samuel: “Don’t be saying anything, any bad talk, about McClurkins. And mind what the doctor said, boy. Don’t sit back there blubbering.”

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Bedlam

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

(2024, Stephanie Foster)