All Bedlam Courses Past (one hundred seventy-two)

 

 

 

 

 

All Bedlam Courses Past

 

 

Chapter Seven

Can’t Leave for Staying

 

(part one hundred seventy-two)

 

 

 

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He skimmed, tried humming a few bars, remembered whistling was more annoying than humming, tried this, but could not fit any song he knew.

The drunken father was visited by a Mrs. Gibbons. (MacFaraday had a Decline and Fall near his composing desk.) Gibbons gave a purse of money, to be spent on coal for the stove, bread for the table, medicine for the youngster.

 

Thee I dare trust, for the heart of no man,

Would fail to be moved by the sufferings of kin.

 

Spake she so, but Papa launched a bender. Richard flipped again, looking for the advertisement. Surely the whole exercise was advertising. The ballad rehearsed the past: an innocent courtship, a blooming bride…

He sang aloud, to a tune invented.

 

O! Blushing maid of gentle mien

O! Dainty step and silken gown

O! Magnet to all friendly eyes

And yet no rescuer espies

How aptly do the borrowed clothes

The ruffian and cad within expose!

 

He quit at the promising delight of the cooing infant. If this child had lived, if life had made her what MacFaraday would naturally call a slattern…

Her bad luck would mitigate nothing. The teetotaler’s fight was for the saloon, not the family shanty-house.

A memory came. Micah, sixteen, wanting for some friend this nine-year-old who could read big books, to show off. Richard struggled after a smelly volume (its red cover smearing in his sweat), titled Judgments of the Governor’s Court.

While he knelt and slid from his father’s desk, a few sheaves unbound themselves.

The friend picked one up. “There was a, a some kind of… Don’t laugh. I’m doing good, cause it ain’t English.”

Micah leaned. “A Roman known as Cato the Wise. That word’s a-fightin you. You read, Richard.”

Cato had a neighbor Dentatus, a general famous for his battles, but living in a cottage, growing turnips. Some persons called Samnites visited while he peeled, asking why. Dentatus told them a man who can be satisfied with turnips doesn’t need gold.

(Some hapless plaintiff of the Massachusetts Colony having got this anecdote, rather than 20 shillings lost labor, and a new hasp for a fence-gate.)

 

 

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Bedlam

All Bedlam Courses Past (part one hundred seventy-three)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(2024, Stephanie Foster)