All Bedlam Courses Past (one hundred sixty-seven)

All Bedlam Courses Past

Chapter Seven

Can’t Leave for Staying

(part one hundred sixty-seven)

His father was dirty-faced, flushed…

Was that right, Richard wondered? Wasn’t it afternoon fever with the typhoid? Abashed. He chuckled. For clean, he laid out the Vanguard’s advertisements, saving one page of news.

“Get the drawers off you.”

He tugged his father naked. He chuckled the more. His father lay making grunts of disgust and fury. “Get you all freshed up and propped on your pillows.”

Richard took the lower garment…there being no upper…rolled it into the thin quilt that covered the mattress (not keeping liquids off the ticking), found the upper quilt reasonable, left it…

Scuttled the hill with the soilage at arm’s length. The pond was all a pond might be, for cattails and scum, but Richard jumped the washing up and down until the things could be said to have taken on a new character. Maybe bucket-rinse them, and let nature do the rest.

“You still need the pot?”

“I do not.”

For twenty minutes of abandonment, his father continued stiff, naked, appalling, but a living corpse with its dignity.

“Need to tamp you down with a rag…water’s warm. You got other drawers?”

“Look under the bed.”

Richard peered. It seemed true. His mother kept stacks of clothing there, as she kept quilts in the corner, making a soft seat for a guest. Where there was no furniture, she produced neat square proportions in mimicry of it. He crouched with the rag, sluiced it over the down-unders, dunked it in the bucket. When he stood and stretched his back, and when his hands had dropped, the tongue of Gippy filled the left.

Lawrence put his head in. He saw his father undressed, and vanished.

“Come on in, son, if you walked up for a how-do. And give me a hand.”

The porch was empty. It took stepping all the way out, following where Gippy led, to a tip under pines, of stove ash, peelings, and eggshells. In a red-faced quality of suit jacket and vest, that spoke of visiting someone more honored than Daddy, stood his brother.

“Give me a hand.” Richard pinched a sleeve, and got a disgusted swat.

“Don’t touch that.”

“If you’re going to town…”

“I’m going to church. It’s Sunday.”

“Hell,” Richard said. “Can’t go with a bad conscience. Better get the old man set up for the day.”

Lawrence, thirty years old, was just the sort of helper Lawrence in his teens and twenties had been. He had the build of a middle-aged man, the prosperity of a middle-aged man. Burdened with Samuel (estimated eleven or twelve), he enjoyed a middle-aged man’s state of fatherhood. But the grip and the amount of back he put into lifting and heaving were a baby’s.

179

Bedlam

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

(2024, Stephanie Foster)