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

All Bedlam Courses Past

Chapter Eight

Things Relative

(part one hundred ninety-three)

iii.

Stakes race

“One of Fannie’s speakers, long ago,” she told Weem. “Mr. Collinson visited New Zealand again in ’87. Looking with his own eyes, the terraces had meant so much. I hadn’t thought of him as poetic-souled, and I don’t know that it improves him. Anyway, he said he tried to find a guide, there was a rumor part of the terraces was spared. Let me confess my little escape. I would do what Collinson did, travel the world, make people host me by promising them summonings. If you’ve never seen a picture of the terraces, I can’t describe how fantastic they would have been to look at. I would live there, write my parents they could see me only if they sailed. We would all trek the forest together, and Ranilde would be healed by the waters…

“Please.” She’d caught a glance aside. “You’re lucky I don’t know what you dream about.”

“Very much so.”

Believing in a wonder gone already. The idleness of mistaken years. If it needed the terraces to stir the mourning feeling for her sister, and if this was a sinful misprizing of a life…

Or, if she were writing for her magazine, where Big Thoughts enjoyed their proper framing, epigraph and anecdote made sentiment easier, not harder, to express…she might say I squandered the time, because I thought Nildie needed to buck up, truly; I thought, if my sister could only be a more adult person…

“And there, I’m putting it plainly. I thought my sister malingered, and I thought she’d got used to spoiling. And I thought my little demonstrations of how-to-go-about-simple-chores were too clever to be caught out. I was a nuisance to poor Nildie, and she was very ill. But mostly I thought we’d be different people one day, no plan needed.”

“I never got along with my brother,” Weem offered. “He keeps a sundry store in Albany, New York.”

They had arrived at the county half-miler; their next appointment was a three o’clock trot, a free-for-all.

“Which means?”

“Ringers and dingers, and no stakes.”

“Ah. Which means?”

“In a stakes you pay a fee to enter your horse, and the fees pool to make a purse. Since it costs, it’s not worthwhile putting up a no-chancer.”

She reined, proceeded, for the wagons and buggies, at a walk, skirting farther and farther from the fence.

Where did you go, exactly…? “Weem.”

“You in the stands, you uns?”

Weem leant forward, at this. “Thought we’d watch from the outside. But buy a ticket.”

“No ticket less you in the stands, sir. Go on around.”

206

Bedlam

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

(2025, Stephanie Foster)