Torsade Literary Space All Bedlam Courses Past (part one hundred fifty-seven)
All Bedlam Courses Past
Chapter Six
Short Days
(part one hundred fifty-seven)
It was past twilight, an hour since he’d said, “Bedtime,” to Samuel and turned on his side. He had started a dream, wrangling with Gremot over rebuilding of the stead; Miss Gremot a silhouette sitting in her rig on the hilltop.
Smell of supper still greasing in…annoying the wind could stir like that…
Appetizing too. Too much smoke for a fire gone dead.
Something I have to do first.
Undefined…the thing that would let her, forevermore, tell him all answers to all questions. And a thought he’d started and got distracted from.
If Lidah had not come home, they both would be alive, was that it? How, in religion, meaning your best, taking best advice… How could you be made such an instrument? God’s inscrutable will, no, none of that…
He wanted earthbound impossibility.
He thought of the Johnson children. Two boys, Anthony said, fifteen and nine. Older find work, other tag along most likely. The girl was eight. A mother or a father bent over a bed, looking at the loved-and-needed lost, lost for knowing how to shoulder this.
Was Mangin’s answer the way more often…?
Deaths of self-murder, of shattering grief…
More than records told.
Recordkeeping went to patronage, though—Democrats and Republicans both, making jobs for their own, new inspectors and assessors renaming what was yours already, making you get permission to own it, pay tax for that permission…
Lawrence’s brain was no longer weaving all this into pictures. He was awake.
Eddie stood tetchy and stamping, an odd horse returning the stamps and flinging its tail. The smell was new-cooking pork.
The voice was his brother’s. “So this fellow has a lamb shank roasting on the spit. What a nice touch of the je ne sais quoi, thinks he, to pour a splash of brandy on…”
Lawrence shot up. The horse was dark, glossy, flesh on the ribs, better care than he trusted from Richard.
“There’s Daddy,” Richard said to Samuel.
“You happen to be here.”
“No, I don’t happen to. Where is this godforsaken hump of earth? Could anyone happen to find themselves in the wilderness outside Cookesville, Indiana? I’d figure the only ones…”
Cursed that way, or some such. Richard yawned. His cadence was like a one-man show to Samuel, who giggled for the punchline…fool setting himself afire. Stage comedy, farce.
Lawrence felt the story was over. “Straight answer. You can see for yourself I’m not at home. I don’t know who you’re going begging to. Don’t bother Mama.”
“So you always tell me when we meet.”
“Where’d you steal that horse?”
“I won that horse on a bet. I call him Domino.”
168
Bedlam
All Bedlam Courses Past (part one hundred fifty-eight)
(2024, Stephanie Foster)