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

 

 

 

 

 

All Bedlam Courses Past

 

 

Chapter Seven

Can’t Leave for Staying

 

(part one hundred seventy-seven)

 

 

 

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Morning, his eyes opened to fog, inside the cabin and out. He put off clammy blankets, shifted cats of his mother’s who’d clustered between his legs. He crawled and then walked out stiffness.

“Sun’s up, rise and shine!”

The figure on the cot, Richard enclosing the neck in his hands for a sign of life, felt sheened with this damp, and not warm. Or warm in a decisive way. To his knowledge he had never touched a fevered brow.

Not dead. Playing possum.

“I have a chore of yours to get done before I heat up the stove. Then we’ll see what’s next.”

Tools were not at hand, so with a wooden spoon Richard scooped ash into the iron skillet. He left this to drain of malice a day longer, leery of throwing sparks into pine straw. He found without surprise that the stovepipe was fixed in a crevice between the cabin and a boulder, that he must wedge in to detach it, but that the metal was dewed, so gloves would be needed.

Indoors, gloves were absent. Outdoors, he used a leather belt to work apart the pipe, and his naked arm to clear it. He stomped soot loose on the porch, the exercise a dance of wrath…

Foolishness that wanted only a female witness. “Don’t track inside. I’ll set you out a bucket of water.”

Bucket, rag, his trousers and coat, and a look away.

But from the room: “I brung a cooked chicken, yourn. Stewed up some hearts and livers for your dad. How’d he take to the milk mush?”

“Oh, ma’am, he won’t eat.”

He heard his father tell Carolina they’d been in the woods all night, and he was grateful to be in bed again. His son had been making him work at a number of chores, singing church hymns the while…

“Get you plumped up on your pillows,” Carolina said. “Have a little drink of broth.”

A panic, that she might believe any of this, passed to revulsion, pity for himself, for his father. The words were lamb-mewlings, the speaker a wretch. Nor was Daddy feverish…and so his brain must have cracked.

Still with the humiliation of changing clothes within earshot of a woman who knew he was changing clothes, Richard sidled in. His father was managing to refuse the broth.

“Apologize for the hymn singing.”

She smiled faintly. “Take a look at his hands.”

He saw the fingertips were blue to the knuckle.

“What’s it mean, ma’am?”

“Leaving.”

“If someone could fetch the doctor.”

Or, Richard was about to say, I’ll go, if you can stay.

But Carolina had seen lives end in bed. “Might send Shad, but you decide. There’s others need the doctor.”

 

 

189

 

 

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Bedlam

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(2024, Stephanie Foster)