The Disinherited (12 page)

If the boy had lived the question never would have been asked. He would have come to the door with his wide-brimmed hat and crazy scarred mouth and they would have left the farm, hitch-hiked south to Mexico or Peru.

“We could go to Peru,” Brian said.

“What are you talking about?”

“Peru,” Brian said. “It’s a big country with sheep farms and mountains.”

“I’m not going to Peru,” Nancy said. Brian looked at her and saw that she was lighting a cigarette and looking disgustedly at him. He would have moved in an abrupt way, his legs thin and hard and possessed by the spirit of some dismembered desert prophet. Sometimes Ann Cameron had read to him from the bible. Her voice would move light and silver over all the images, lying about them by the way she spoke them. But he and the boy had discussed it one day in the attic: the bible, the boy had said, was created by a group of escaped Roman slaves thousands of years ago. They had broken out of prison and had found a series of old cave dwellings high in the mountains of Northern Italy. They spent years in the caves; they married and had children and grew food on the high mountain plateaus.
Except for the occasional hunting, the women did all the work; the men had made themselves a huge meeting-hall in the back of one of the caves and they spent most of their time there, making up the bible and memorizing it. After it was all done, they taught it to their children and, it had taken twenty years, even to their grandchildren. Then they all went in different directions, hiding every trace of the time they had spent in the caves, spreading the word as they went, passing it on as if it were something everyone knew. They said it was an old religion, some of it so old that it was beyond memory, and that those who practised parts of it were persecuted and put in prison. In the telling, the boy said, was the only true meaning of God; and only God (as He acted through men) could write and re-write history either by words or by deeds. And the sign of the scars he would carry with him was not, he knew, any sign of holiness but a sign that he had tried too much to interfere with the world, that in doing that he had caused the death of the boy — the only one who could have led him to any kind of truth — and in some way his own death. Even Richard had told him, when he was sick, that though every man was mortal it was still true that every man caused his own death — usually not, like the boy, in one movement, but in bits and pieces scattered through his life. He himself, Richard said, had already caused parts of his own death, just as Miranda and Erik and everyone he knew had. And even the earth would eventually die, Richard told him, and when he was better, took him outside and showed him how the earth had scraped and scarred its own skin with ice, the ice that had pushed huge boulders into impossible places, made long twisted scars in the bedrock and stripped it of its covering of soil so that in places now, even millions of years later, the rock showed or, worse, was only a few inches beneath the surface waiting to greet the person who was stupid enough to try and plough it or shape it to his needs. Everything causes its own death and dies of being itself, Richard had said, like the dinosaurs who died because they succeeded in growing huge or even the sun that would die because it was consuming itself. The scar beneath his eye burned for months, imposing itself on every moment, on everything it saw. When it finally stopped, it
seemed that something in him had been exhausted.

“They say,” Nancy said — as she spoke she flicked her half-smoked cigarette into the lake and Brian realized that a certain amount of time had passed since she last spoke and he had said nothing, could not even remember what he had been thinking about and could only remember lying with his eyes closed, a child in bed with Richard sitting beside him — “or maybe
you
should see a doctor.” She looked at him, retreated, changed the subject. “Peru,” she said, pronouncing the alien word as if it might mean molasses, rain in March, anything at all. She had bought him an atlas one Christmas and then watched Brian spend half the afternoon leafing through it, taking everything slowly, in his own literal way. “He treats you like a slave,” Nancy said. She spoke to him carefully, like she would speak to a horse, her hand on his back so she could sense his reactions by the tensings of muscle and spine. “You live on the farm and you work there every day for twenty years. When he passes you in the yard or sits beside you at the table or asks you to pass the salt, he never recognizes you are anything more than a dog. And now that he’s dying he doesn’t even think of you, he only wants to make sure his precious son gets the farm, Erik, the fool who doesn’t even know his own mind.”

He knew what she was doing, but couldn’t find the words to speak about it. She had done it different ways different times and he had not spoken about it then either, knowing that each time it went unanswered ensured the next time. “They hypnotize you,” the boy had explained to him. “People try to hypnotize you into believing that what they say is real. They talk about things like walls and tables and you know there are walls and tables and so then they talk about other things and you think that because there are walls and tables there are other things too, that everything they say is as true as one thing they say. They tried to do that to me in school,” the boy said. “They tried to do that to me, so I set fire to the school. Now they leave me alone.”

“And don’t you ever get angry with him?”

“Sometimes I could kill him,” Brian said. But the sound of the words was unconvincing. “I don’t know,” he said.

“He’s afraid of you,” Nancy said. “And anyway, you look more like Richard than Erik does.”

“Sure.” Even Miranda had remarked on it once, watching them come across the field for a drink, both of them square and stocky though Richard was heavier. He had asked them about Ann Cameron on the way home from the fire. They had picked him up at the hospital. His arms were wrapped in gauze and they drove him home that same night. There was salve on his check too; every time he blinked his eyes it would stick to his lash es. But they had said only that they had adopted him from an agency, knowing nothing about his background.

“Anyway,” Brian said, “he’s sick but he’s not dead.” He was still lying on the rock, but the sun was completely gone now, the lake lit only by a faint red rim that circled the horizon and a few clouds that still caught the last bits of reflected light. “I’m already tired of going to the hospital,” Brian said. “He’s only been there a week now. The doctor said it could take six months or more.”

“He could live for twenty years,” Nancy said. “Lots of people are invalids for that long. They would let him come back to the farm and you would have to run the farm and Miranda would have to take care of him like a baby.” She could feel the muscles in his back jumping nervously, making long deep ridges on either side of his spine. “Even now he can’t get out of bed,” Nancy said. “He tried to once and it almost killed him. The doctor said he might be able to walk in a few days but you know they always say things like that. And his arm. I haven’t seen him move that arm since he went to the hospital.”

“You would have liked that, wouldn’t you?” Brian said. “You would have liked me to have left him lie in the fields and die without me going back to the house.” He stood up and spat into the lake.

“God you’re disgusting,” Nancy said. Sometimes he would wake up in the morning hating her. Every movement she made, every place their bodies touched, would make his stomach jump. He would slide out of bed slowly, careful to keep his face turned away from her so it would not betray him. Outside or sometimes even in the next room the feeling would pass. But
then it might come back to him in the evenings, when they went from their house to the trailer for the night. The trailer was too small: a bedroom, a living-room, and a small kitchen that was hardly used. He had meant to build a house, Richard had said he could wherever he wanted, but he had promised him no deed. He put his arms clumsily around her shoulders, unsure of how they had arrived at a standing position already. It seemed to him that he hardly ever wanted her lately, and then only in brief and sudden sparks that passed too quickly for her. But still, sometimes late at night or early in the morning, she would turn to him, her mouth buried in his shoulder and asking only the essentials. “I should have pushed you in after it,” she said. They were standing on the lip of the rock. There was a crescent moon, so diffused in the misty sky that its reflection was only a careless arced smudge on the surface of the water.

“I’m sorry.” In the car he switched on the motor and then sat there, letting it idle, while he smoked a cigarette. “He wouldn’t let that happen, spend twenty years in bed, making other people take care of him.”

“That’s what old people do,” Nancy said.

“Not always. Sometimes they die.” Death, Richard told him, trying again to console him about the fire and the boy, was also an act that people could will.

“Like animals,” Richard had said. “Animals die for their own reasons and always at the right time. Unless someone shoots them.”

“People don’t like to die,” Nancy said. “I’d be afraid to die.”

Brian turned the car around in the dark and began driving out towards the road. All his feelings seemed to be trapped inside his body and his body was trapped in the car with Nancy, in the trailer with her every night, in the routine of going back and forth to the hospital every day. “He hasn’t even decided yet,” Brian said, “whether to live or die.” He opened the window and turned on the radio, driving slowly, drifting through the fog, turned the radio up louder so finally Nancy, as if by automatic reflex cuddled up against him and put her head on his shoulder.

“Drive faster,” she said, “and maybe we’ll have time to stop
at Pat Frank’s for a drink.” She had her head on his shoulder and her hand on his leg, rubbing up and down from his thigh to his knee. “We should go to bed early,” she said.

“Sure.”

“Do you like this?”

“Sure,” Brian said. But her hand made him fidget, blocked the connection he felt with the car and the road. He reached for a cigarette and then, while he was pushing in the cigarette lighter, he brushed her hand off his leg, casually, as if it was accidental.

“Jesus,” she said. “Maybe you
should
see a doctor.”

“Jesus,” Brian shouted. “Jesus Christ.” The car was skidding along the gravel; he had one hand on the wheel and the other at Nancy’s throat, gathering her sweater and pushing her against the door. When the car stopped it was sideways across the road, its lights pointed into a swamp. He held her at arm’s length, letting her gouge her nails into his arm. “Just stop it,” was all he could say. “Just stop it.” He took his arm away. The blood was flowing freely down his forearm. “Jesus,” he said. “You sure know how to scratch.” He looked at Nancy and saw that she hadn’t softened at all: she was leaning against the car door with her mouth open.

“Don’t tell me.” She got out of the car and then slammed the door behind her.

“Stupid bitch,” Brian said. She was running down the road. He straightened out the car so that the lights were aimed towards her. He noticed that she ran like a man, her heels coming up straight behind her legs, not kicking out like a woman’s. Then he gunned the accelerator, pinpointing her in the high-beams before swerving to one side.

F
rom his bed Richard could see the empty courtyard. It was lit by a single street lamp and the windows that faced inwards. The hockey player had been cured already; now Richard had the bed by the window. They said they would leave the other empty for a while, that business was slow in the summer, that, without words, it wasn’t nice to make a new patient share a room with someone who might actually die without warning. His body had completely betrayed him and become a battlefield of competing pains. With his eyes closed, he could make his retreat from the edges, find places to rest and curl about his fear, like a small child with a summer illness. Other times it seemed that each incision was fresh and new; the nerves retained every memory and could live now only on the edge of initial feeling. He would wake up shaken with them all at once, unsure whether he was trapped in his own flesh or forced back forty years into Katherine’s bed, her shadow wavering above him as she performed her own rites of exorcism. Miranda only held him in the present. He felt obliged to stay awake while she visited. “Are you afraid,” she asked once, when the others were out. He said no; but the question disturbed him, made him aware that he could be forced to choose.

His fear came and went. Sometimes it fluttered within him, spurting through his nerves like a caged bird. Or he would see something move out of the corner of his vision: a chair suddenly placed differently, a small animal darting through the room.

Katherine had believed in ghosts. Both her parents died within a year, leaving her alone and still unmarried in the big unpainted frame house her grandfather had built. “It doesn’t matter when someone dies,” she explained. “It feels the same to them except it’s easier without a body. After all, most people are sick when they die. They don’t want their body any more so they just float away and leave it behind. It takes a long time for them to leave their houses though; that’s because without a body a person doesn’t have very much to do so they like to stick near the familiar.” When Richard came to see her, she would often be pacing through the big house, talking aloud. “Of course you don’t have to talk loud like that; they can hear you without sound and even without words. They don’t speak to me at all in words, but I feel their presence all the time, like a wind.” She was in her early twenties then; there was nothing acutely wrong with her and it was unusual to be unmarried at that age. But her parents had been invalids and she had stayed in, taking care of them, never (as Simon Thomas pointed out to Richard in his unctuous way) having a chance to become a woman and left alone for two whole winters with no one to help except, of course, Simon Thomas. “The best way to do it,” Simon Thomas told Richard, in the only advice he ever gave on the subject, “depends on whether it’s during the day or during the night.”