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

All Bedlam Courses Past

Chapter Seven

Can’t Leave for Staying

(part one hundred sixty-five)

Richard recalled his mother spit-wiping her skillet clean, rag always tucked in an apron band. Good enough, but no rag…

Have to try a pillowcase. One egg he cracked against the heel of a shoe. Shrugged and cracked another. “Got any strength to sit yourself up?”

Noises, an earnest stirring.

“Help me with the pot,” his father said, subdued.

“One thing at a time. I can’t leave the eggs to burn.”

“I don’t want eggs. I want the pot.”

Say please. Say thank you. Richard hadn’t thought of how to get eggs out of a skillet. A thatched cottage creamer, cracked, sat on a shelf. A tea strainer, copper and very bright. A copper soup ladle. The polishing of bright things a small religion.

Couldn’t hurt a china dish to scrape a skillet, could it? He took a saucer and scooped browning chunks onto a plate.

They did not look scrambled.

There might be more to scrambled eggs than eggs alone…

His father now flailed after the pot himself, sputtering noises coming from his nether end, and stink, in waves. But truth to tell, Richard thought, the smell mixed in pretty close with the egg. “You stay there. I’m going on the porch.”

Since Allen had given him the boot, Richard’s habits were vagabond. Not only to the extent of sucking filched eggs raw, soaking field corn in the river, to get some chew from the kernels rather than break another tooth, but even, having startled a barn cat into dropping her mouse, learning what roasting one on an ember would yield. He was prepared to eat this breakfast. He still had a nice loaf of bread in the basket, his lunch and supper.

October could be generous to the poor. Sunny, warm afternoons, plenty light for reading the news—and that too, was too much for Daddy, who was getting religion or nothing.

No noise through the open door. Well, the old man could lay in his shit, pride carrying him along. Recovery, Richard read, of the De Long party. This very month last year they had been dying in the Arctic, one by one, De Long making notes in his diary.

A steamer called Chesmina gone aground, off-course and seeking shelter from a hurricane. Chesmina, like Pandora, who became the USS Jeanette, De Long’s boat, had her name changed by a new owner, an invitation to bad luck. Two life boats got off before the ship pitched to her side, all decks flooded, thirty-nine passengers drowned, eleven crew. Link to a New York newspaper baron, said through wanton speculation to endanger his holdings; a sister’s daughter-in-law, Alice Baies Pimlott (if Cookesvillians cared), taken aboard a second steamer, the Orlou…

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Bedlam

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

(2024, Stephanie Foster)