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

 

 

 

 

 

All Bedlam Courses Past

 

 

Chapter Eight

Things Relative

 

(part one hundred eighty-five)

 

 

 

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Heshinger walked behind, bending his corn’s ears, his knife flicking earwigs, so he told them. “I go up and down, whenever the silks are on. See that blue jay. Knows what time he gets a snack.”

“The crows on my father’s farm are just the same.”

“Farms tobacco, your father.”

“And hay. Hay is really our crop anymore.”

“Anne-Marie Junot,” Weem read. “Died aged twenty-three, 1816.”

Élucide caught her skirts and flexed her knees, and Heshinger told them about his son. “It was after he went swimming a few summers back, he came down with the paralysis. He’s needed to use those sticks since he was fourteen. I figure he’ll live out his life at home…you’d be surprised, though, how he can get around.”

“We saw.”

Elmer had told them he’d be off to fetch his father, and they had both said, please, no…

“No, he’ll do some work. He can milk the cow. Anything he can sit on a chair. Darns socks for his mother.”

“A story in that,” Weem muttered. He remembered his new career. “Not everyone, of course, likes their name in the papers.”

“I don’t look at those lying rags.”

“Sensible.”

 

Élucide jotted names and dates. Heshinger, mid-story on how vines would cover the stones and took cutting off, not an easy chore to get around to…

Shouted: “Elmer! What you need?” And headed off towards the road.

Arnad Junot…or no, an odd little “u”, superscribed. She had never seen this; possibly a mistake ill-corrected, but Quackenbush would want a rubbing. She inched to a squat. “Weem, unroll a sheet of paper and hold it flat for me.”

“Or the other way around.” He took stabs at catching her elbow.

“Or the way I’ve already started…”

“These your ancestors? I heard about people doing that.”

Noises they’d ignored, soft thuds and drags, arrived at their backs.

“Elmer! Did your father leave?”

“Gone back to walk the rows. We been losing ears this year, that’s the weather. You get rain, and then you get heat, and then you get bugs! These your ancestors?”

“It’s for a friend in Nashville.” Arnaud had been a tidy liver; his dates were 1772-1832. “History, Dr. Quackenbush says, is a compendium of minutiae.”

She aimed this remark at Weem.

Elmer tossed his sticks and let himself fall. “Easier if I do that for you, than you have to be down here in your dress.”

Weem said, “You know anything about these Junots?”

“No, sir. I don’t know much of…” He cut off, then said, “You’re a professor? You teach at a school?”

 

 

198

 

 

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Bedlam

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(2025, Stephanie Foster)