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

All Bedlam Courses Past

Chapter Seven

Can’t Leave for Staying

(part one hundred seventy-five)

He had toted along his books, to Fletcher’s disdain. Fletcher, demonstrating what good a book was, snatched one from under the fifteen-year-old’s eyes, and tossed it in the river.

“Stand up and shift that pole through them narrows. Have us aground, passenging along like a dandy.”

The book, hide and vellum, got fished back. More hand motions. The voice by now coming parched.

“Winters I worked for Fletcher, did his figuring, ledgered his orders. Summers alongside Lawrence.”

“Everard! Your mother says eats on the table. Bread and water.” A moment’s distraction on the question of what he would cram into his father, if he won. “Thou must take nourishment, for thou shalt journey far tonight.”

“Verbena, I’m off.” A thrash and subsidence, head fallen over the cot rail, mouth fallen open.

He wasn’t dead.

“Well, damn you.” No bread, then, just a rag soaked in coffee dregs. Richard squeezed this over the mouth…drop by drop some liquid, at least.

And wiping hands, standing, waking to the pall of time…half past seven it might be, sun not long down, cold in this room, stinking,…Richard found his mood hellacious.

He kicked quilts into a nest, and lay, needing a story to tell himself.

He had been for Allen two things and many things. Man-of-a-thousand roles onstage (though every astonished bystander, bartender, policeman, neighbor, shopkeeper, was the identical man, and spoke the identical lines); yokel on the street, in too-new clothes, pockets stuffed with banknotes. Stopping to scratch his head, drop his valise to check his watch, make off chin-up, sure of the hotel he wanted…

“Mister! Hey, Mister!”

But time enough to thank this Samaritan with a drink, or a sandwich…towns varied on wet or dry…

Larcenous thoughts brought his mother to mind. Did she squirrel away Towson’s charity coins? He tried the math. To reach Hopper’s just at closing, just…

Watching stragglers clear off, til he could buttonhole Hopper alone.

The gown impeded his following Hopper, who snuffed lamps, darkening into whispers. Anne lifted a sneering glance, turning in her hands his grandmother’s arsenic green silk, her nails raking a tobacco stained lattice. She flung to the window a billow of catching wings, a strange light showing spiders eating strips of silk, curling to the floor.

He woke, the sensation of being bit by fleas authentic.

The thirst was not a thing to philosophize away. The beauty in a bottle was its simplicity…the task done sitting, even lying, rewarding in its slow culmination. The more often you poured a glass and drank it down, the more your brain required little else of you. You knew at length that finishing what you’d started was the only task.

187

Bedlam

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

(2024, Stephanie Foster)