All Bedlam Courses Past (one hundred sixty-three)

All Bedlam Courses Past

Chapter Seven

Can’t Leave for Staying

(part one hundred sixty-three)

The steps could not be climbed with nonchalance. Silent at his work, Richard heaved to the porch, and found her hand on his chest. “All this come on since Lawrence been away. He’ll just be hearing.”

“The sickness?”

“Your Mama’s keeping on, but we’ve took her to our house. So she don’t crawl herself out of bed and fetch and carry for that old man.”

Punctuating this came a moan of his mother’s name, his father’s voice.

“It’s a job, it’s a job,” Carolina said, this chore. “Libby and Calvin, I sent to Mrs. Metz. I don’t have em helping.”

“Wise…”

Melvins, she told him, were strong against the typhoid. It was typhoid killed a good part of Carolina’s kin, back in settlement days. But not her line, they had come away with that blessing.

“Well, that’s…”

Someone, for Christian decency, needed to be living here, day and night. “No one figured Lawrence be back for weeks.”

“Flood…”

“I heard there was. That’s the Lord’s work. That’s Him setting His path. Now you see if Lawrence won’t come to stay.”

The granddaughter of a Chickasaw chief said this last in an indescribably penetrating way, as though she’d glimpsed the book of the Recording Angel.

“No, I imagine not.”

Dragging out of bed was not easy for a sinner, but working to it by inches, he could build that fire. When the kettle of water had warmed on the stove, he could tidy up his father’s foul person and hunt for another bedsheet.

The selfless act. The hardened heart that buds into a flower of benignity. Mewling humanity transfigured by warm, forgiving love. Richard believed none of this, but the temptation to had never been quite killable. You had to suffer the torments of Job…

The Christian moniker, it turned out, of Preacher Bayard.

God, where’s your sense of humor? I have suffered the torments of Job.

But God would stick to his logical case, that ordinary suffering was not a bargain entered into. If you could not be hungry, yet, without thinking of the hungrier, cold without thinking of the colder, aching without thinking of the bedridden, you had not pledged yourself.

His feet were not well-disposed to bend for him, but the stiffness would go once he’d got them in shoes. “What’d you do, old man? Burn every paper in the house, too lazy to step out your door and rake a few twigs? Your eyes gone bad, you can’t make out words anymore?”

175

Bedlam

All Bedlam Courses Past (part one hundred sixty-four)

(2024, Stephanie Foster)