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

All Bedlam Courses Past

Chapter Seven

Can’t Leave for Staying

(part one hundred sixty-six)

These tarot layings were Rutherford’s, his potshot at the flamboyance of a Gordon Bennett. The Vanguard, showing a fitting sense of localness and reach-within-grasp, was sponsoring the exploration of a Kentucky cave.

 County wags have named her the Minnoth.

Caves, Richard mused, are shes?

An earthquake had rattled shelves on three farms in southern Vanderburgh county. A farmer near Epsom, with a brother immigrated from Warsaw, confessed to clubbing this brother dead. The farmer kept a housemaid. The younger brother…by some understanding, as she spoke no Polish…had announced himself her new husband.

A rain of fry, about two inches each, had fallen on an Ohio village from a blue sky. A water devil, Cookesvillians were reminded, is not a demon but a twister.

Richard, reading this line, fell blank.

Water, as of Dominion Creek’s, made him check deaths. His Vanguard was a week old, typhoid given by Magnusson as claiming two, ten known sick. Recovery running at two-thirds; Magnusson called this “expected”.

A sound came, but not articulated words. Richard whistled a bit of Camptown Races.

October was the month Lawrence touched up whitewash, climbed a ladder to count his roof slates, cleaned his stovepipes, mended fences…in only the literal sense. Lawrence’s lifelong pace was the mosey; he’d have Sanderson, often, and Samuel at their heels. An hour could drift by, Richard had seen it happen, in discussion, whether a tree was best taken out, stump pulled, soil limed; or just pruned hard…

How much seasoning for applewood, how much harm a sporing blight might do in the smokehouse, ways Sanderson knew of divining bad that didn’t show yet…

Richard closed his eyes and heard the kettle shriek. Whatever he chased wouldn’t come. The paper told Cookesville’s story in gags and curiosities, small pleasures for folks with a temperament born to them.

Put one foot before the other and get the job done.

Or learn what the twist was, and bet on Water Devil.

There were voices in the woods. Richard was stirred by this at last, that his neglect of his father might get him in trouble. He needed the food.

He filled the bucket halfway from the barrel and topped it from the kettle with boiling. He put a hand in, and the water felt warm, the bucket’s tarred seam weeping tolerably. Get the clothes off the bed and dump them in the pond, maybe.

Daddy must lie meek and humiliated, while Richard would say not a word. He changed his mind. “I’m putting you down on the rug. You cold at all?”

178

Bedlam

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

(2024, Stephanie Foster)