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

 

 

 

 

 

All Bedlam Courses Past

 

 

Chapter Seven

Can’t Leave for Staying

 

(part one hundred eighty-two)

 

 

 

---

 

 

 

“And he would walk us to church, one the factory hands went to. First Church of the Messiah on Elkin Street. Pastor Davis.”

All this was enterprising, and struck in Richard a melancholy envy. Bayards had been poor as dirt, but never without a certainty of where to go and what to do.

“How’d your father end up?”

“In a fire with the straw. All the straw they used to pack the barrels.”

“Oh. And Nachfolger…”

An emphatic nod. “Sent a man over to Mother with a hundred dollars.”

A mistiness came over Bayard. There was nothing to doubt in this. Gremot, wanting rid of Everards, had pushed money at every pass.

A hundred seemed cheap…

But it answered. If Bayard could wipe an eye over Nachfolger’s lean effort, his sentiment would never paint his father less than godly.

“Why not a miracle?” Richard asked.

“What’s that?”

“Why couldn’t my father jump up off his cot…” He crouched and put a hand on the chest. “There’s still a little of him in there. Why can’t we pray God heals him? Right now?”

“His will be done.”

“You seen any miracles lately? Johnsons took the typhoid bad, and my brother lost his wife. You put her in the ground.”

Bayard stared and pursed his lips. “Put them in the ground.”

“The girl.” Richard was meeting, somehow, with rebuke. “Not to forget Lidah.”

“No, sir! I seen her and I dressed her.” A piercing, accusatory eye.

“But… God is up there in heaven looking over the sick and saying, no, not that one. This one.”

“Now don’t you get disrespectful.”

Bayard stooped for the Bible on the floor. Richard saw the margins notated in a blocky hand, of misspelled words.

With a strong conveyance of a Job confronted by a satanic persuader, Bayard interpreted: “Lord, my heart’s not haughty, nor my eyes aren’t lofty, nor I don’t concern myself in great matters of things too high for me.”

“You don’t. I might, if I cared to.”

“Everard, that’s the Word.”

Richard took his father’s seat and remembered money. “Where’d that drop of whisky go?”

A single word arrived after a silence: “Strengthening.”

“I gave him a little myself, didn’t perk him up.”

Wiser before his God than to embroider, Bayard nodded, sinning only by omission.

 

 

194

 

 

---

Bedlam

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(2024, Stephanie Foster)