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

 

 

 

 

 

All Bedlam Courses Past

 

 

Chapter Seven

Can’t Leave for Staying

 

(part one hundred eighty-three)

 

 

 

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“Sheriff Holland brought that by. Now if you could sit with my father, I could go out and get something for the both of us. He gave me a five-note.”

“You do what you think.”

Bayard spoke while Richard was rooting, about to produce the note. A taste of whisky…what a yearning it could stir. Bayard knew, as Richard knew. If the preacher hadn’t showed up, the yearning would. And with the clouding afternoon, the inspiration to show himself at that shuttered house in Dominionville, leave his dying father alone. Do some act he could not well remember.

No. “Bayard, the money’s yours. He meant it to pay for the service.”

“Don’t give it, though.”

Superstition, against touching payment for a living man’s burial. Fair enough. “In good time.”

Gusty Indian summer winds swelled the greasy curtain. Afraid that Bayard would take up his Psalms in order, Richard slipped outside. He wanted his other line of thought. What living could he make, pegged here by the county sheriff as good riddance…

Cookesville had no native acting company; Cookesvillians took to theatricals mildly, rather having their opera house present the new-fangled. Not of entertainments, but inventions, foreign ingenuities of electricity and steel. Nothing had magnetized the town like that travelling demonstration of the telephone.

Songs, music, yes. Jokes, mostly no. Stories…

They would prefer, Richard decided, the gentle wife and blameless babe frozen in MacFaraday’s shanty. A final sermon attended by the mourning party of Mrs. Gibbons and the dog…

“Son!”

 

Richard forgave himself grieving. Lawrence didn’t grieve.

Richard had cleaned up in Cleome Towson’s house, taken a trim and shave, clad himself in her charity scrounge—suit, vest, boiled shirt, the only blocked hat outside Allen’s props he’d ever stuck on his head.

He was spruce; his brother was spruce. Samuel by Pearletta was scrubbed shiny. Mama was unable to attend. She was willing, sitting up in bed, to speak to Lawrence. Richard stood orphaned by the door while Lawrence took the chair.

“My soul went out, and I was with him, and I told him, you rest quiet. You rest quiet. I stayed there til I knew he was gone in peace.”

Richard pricked his ears at this, and by the rigid agony of his brother’s face, guessed she really spoke of a visit to their father in spirit.

 

 

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“Tell me what you want brought,” Lawrence said.

“When I’m up and going, I have to do what I can for Carolina. She been so good.”

“What about the cabin?” Richard stepped back into the room.

“I’m just lazy in bed all day,” their mother said.

He walked out, all the way, to wait on the Chambliss porch. She had never said things that made great sense…it was hard to tell. A puzzle, but not a pain. He could spare visiting or looking after Mama, put all that on Lawrence’s shoulders.

See the last of his brother, for that matter…

If he’d got to be not wanted at home.

He didn’t need to inherit a rattletrap, four shaky walls wanting a hundred chores to prop them up. He knew his brother hadn’t fingered a single buttonhole on his behalf, and no job waited. Already, to avoid him, Lawrence had reviewed scriptures and hymns with Bayard twice, bustling in and out in the awkwardness before Mama woke.

Jethro was a jaunt up the road. They were gathering for a walking procession behind the wagon with the coffin: Everard sons, Samuel, Shad, Junior Clark and Pearletta. That neighbor Anthony, who wished to pay respects, for a reason Lawrence seemed to know.

“Get up there with your Papa and ride. Save your shoe leather, missy.”

“Aw, now, how you think I get around everywhere I go?”

“Under a good head of steam.”

Jollily, the lovers swatted each other. Richard grinned, fiddling with his hat brim to hide it. Junior possessed a mild wit, that passion was in the act of honing. A certain travesty, a lack of solemnity, also, was both deserved by Daddy and would have pleased him.

You could not win them all.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

196

 

 

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Bedlam

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(2024, Stephanie Foster)