All Bedlam Courses Past (part one hundred eighty-one)

All Bedlam Courses Past

Chapter Seven

Can’t Leave for Staying

(part one hundred eighty-one)

These thoughts galvanized Richard. On his feet, noting Bayard had made the last half-inch of whisky vanish, and knelt companionably into the story of Billy Holdclaw, he changed his mind.

Stroll down to the pond and avoid the salvations. Why throw Bayard out, while Daddy lay captive? Maybe hearing every word.

A big snapper basked, turning a slow eye to the boot-leather its beak, Richard had always been told, could slice like a hot knife through butter.

He found a removed spot to drop his rear. He had that night at Haws on his mind.

What do you need to know, son? Let me tell you what you need to know. That your father is not a pitiful weakling, but a man strong enough to smash the lip of a tiny woman, yank her by the arm and swing her down the stairs. Given your simplicity and scant experience of life, you may suppose that seeing equals believing—

But I shall relate to you a struggle of Titans, a Prometheus against the very Powers of Darkness. I knew myself. I abominated myself. But I could not stop myself. I feared I had done murder. But…had he really said it? Richard remembered differently now. Daddy had shied from the word. His excuses for not killing himself, that he daren’t go back for the gun, could not drown to perfection in the shallow creek…

Were so many blocks malleted into a monument.

In light of which, Gremot’s jabs, his exasperation deployed and not the Remington, were looking like acts of charity, his sparing nine years to a failed Christian experiment almost heroism, short-fused as nature had made him.

Richard tried to feel if loss stirred anywhere, if reading together in Peggy’s room, digging in cuttings side by side, sharing a laugh at Mama’s preachers, Daddy’s appraisals hadn’t always spoiled, spoiled beforehand—

Many such scenes. Let them pass.

Time had passed; and Bayard hadn’t called.

Richard leaned at the door. “Hey, there! How’d you get on with your old man?”

“Ain’t come,” Bayard said, waking. “But listen to that there, it’s the rattle. Every so often he’ll give a heave.”

“Preacher Bayard,” Richard said. A snort came like a cannon shot, and the chest arched and fell. “You were a boy once. How’d you get on with your old man?”

“When I’d go to the factory to sweep, that’s when I’d see him.”

“Waiting with open arms?”

“He was a packer, under the foreman’s eye.”

“You mean to say Nachfolger’s? The glass factory?”

“He didn’t like it when the county passed the law about schooling. Winter months we lived out at the farm, had to that way, so we couldn’t come stay at Cooley’s.”

Papa lived in a flop bedding a dozen, blankets and pillows their own supplying. Cooley’s was a house of a different stripe, with rooms to clean, stoves to tend, a washtub over an outdoor fire, where Job’s sister Esther stood on a stool and stirred the linens; where upstairs and down, Job and the girls did chores as told, their father coming Sundays to collect their wages.

193

Bedlam

All Bedlam Courses Past (part one hundred eighty-two)

(2024, Stephanie Foster)