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

 

 

 

 

 

All Bedlam Courses Past

 

 

Chapter Seven

Can’t Leave for Staying

 

(part one hundred seventy-four)

 

 

 

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But for having thought, you had to act. You could not tempt God when you knew you walked angel-less. Richard hated his father a notch more for leaving odious chores to others. Lying there and saying he only wanted to die.

Well. The bright boy’s champion was his Reuben. The letter of recommendation… Then only money, a few coins in a handkerchief for earnest, a promise of labor.

A calculation begun in sarcasm fell out suddenly at the bottom.

He saw himself away at school that day. It would have been Lawrence helped Mama.

“Lawrence,” Richard said aloud, “done a better job, too. Mama lay and bleed and tell him she wasn’t too bad off… My brother’d take her at her word. Go sit, soon as someone else lent a hand. She told me she had an accident, Daddy.”

“No, I won’t. I was just stopping by.”

Richard pushed himself kneeling and keyed the lamp higher. “Won’t sit? Come on, suppertime. We got a place for you over there, next to Mrs. Gibbons.”

“No, thank you, ma’am,” his father said.

Richard pitched his voice up. “Mr. Everard, won’t you help finish off that pie? I’m a poor widow alone by myself in this drafty old house. What a shame, good food go to waste!”

Their eyes met. With no opposition to owning his jest, Richard saw his father’s hands operate, a clutching and jogging motion, his hard look not one of consciousness.

“Slow that wagon down, mister.”

“Slow enough. Can’t stop it.”

“Let me take over the reins. You get in back.”

This seemed in conflict with whatever delirium passed behind his father’s lids. The hands dropped the reins. The legs spasmed, and the head lifted from the pillow.

“Mr. Everard. Did you tell me your father taught you at home?”

“My father was a private tutor, employed by three families in Inverness. Inverness…you see, he was a Scot…”

“You had an older brother, Lawrence.”

“Now I have got the same fever myself. They make me stay in this bed, though my mother needs me at home.”

“I’ll read to you. What sort of books does your father keep in his library?”

“Get the botany. I tore a page from it.” A strange laugh, prolonged. “I know he hides it in the loft. Get that.”

“He was proud of you, you being a learner. That’s why he figured to send you off to school.” Richard tried an Ebrachian diction: “Mr. Everard, return!”

“I have a place east, in Marietta, at Fletcher’s house. I have to go with him.”

“Who is Fletcher?”

Fletcher was a purchasing agent, his house being his business quarters in Marietta, O, and his purchases, of salt and tobacco. It seemed true…there was no higher education for a Kentucky farm boy of the 1820s. Daddy was prenticed into clerking, the job old Malcolm had done for Sartain.

 

 

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Bedlam

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(2024, Stephanie Foster)