The Disinherited (16 page)

       Exorcising as they kill

            Swinging their bodies above his father’s body.

Simon Thomas sent home walking on the old county road he and Henry Beckwith made, with township money, cutting down thin elms and cedar to fill out the wet spots and then dragging wagonloads of sand and gravel from the old mineshaft that still stood open on the Beckwith place.

          Simon Thomas standing with his son in his son’s new field and the newness of it has cut the valley open, exposed it, they can see down its trough from belly to neck. Simon Thomas spits and turns around. The last time he will see this farm.

F
or the first time since he is in the hospital he feels sick: not dying or gothic sick but just an ordinary flu that travels mostly in the skeleton, generating aches and pains and dizziness every time he turns or moves. They are letting him walk a bit now but this fever has addled his sense of balance and when he stands beside his bed, one hand on the rail to steady himself and, with the other, trying to put on his housecoat, he feels like a huge upright walrus, swaying uncertainly in this unnatural two-footed heat. It is already August and the bed beside him is still empty, waiting for him to decide. August: the heat of that month has always been useless to him: less fertile than July it is something inevitable but unnecessary — to be endured in the hope that it will spread into the future and delay the first September frost. He stands beside the bed, one hand on the rail. It feels cold despite the heat. His calluses are beginning to disappear and now he begins to feel things on his palms: temperatures and textures. Last night Pat Frank had come and brought a bottle of wine: while he was raising it up he had noticed a sharp line in his hand, almost like a thin wire. But when he put down the bottle it had turned out to be just the edge of the label, cheap Niagara sherry that even Pat Frank admitted was too sweet to drink. A nurse sees him standing uncertainly by the bed and comes into the room.

“How are we today, Mr. Thomas.” “Would you like to lie down, Mr. Thomas.” “All right, Mr. Thomas, I’ll just shut the
door for you here and come back to check on you in a few minutes.” “Don’t forget, Mr. Thomas, you don’t have to strain.” And in fact she needn’t have said that because his night nurse had told him a long and disgusting story about a patient of hers who had had a stroke while on the toilet, arresting her bowels at the crucial moment so they were paralyzed open (only temporarily of course — the nurse was always careful about his morale) and for several weeks thereafter things just dropped out.

“I hope you don’t mind me talking to you like this,” the nurse would say from time to time, her hand always on him, wrapped about his wrist to check his pulse, holding his hand, moving over his chest and shoulders to apply liniments that would loosen his breathing, stroking his forehead and loosening the muscles of his neck when he couldn’t turn over.

A new point of time had come into existence. Despite all his sluggish efforts to make it his own, it never existed in the present but appeared only in retrospect, like a vehicle moving up quickly in a rear-view mirror: the knowledge that he was going to die in this hospital, that the choice had already been made. Richard Thomas stood beside the bed, the aluminum rail cold and alien in his palm, dizzy with an irrelevant flu and wondering if it would be possible for him to die or if death was just going to happen to him, like everything else. And beneath that, still unsure because they thought otherwise, thought that they were winning against the death (which they too placed in the past, but in a different way). Despite the empty bed and the refusal to say anything definite, they thought he would be going home. They were helping him to walk. They made measurements and graphs of his heartbeat showing the wild skip that had developed — a train racing out of control, but still, the tracks were there. And so he did it all at once: the checking and signing of the will and all the little bits and pieces of paper that Miranda kept bringing to him and the preparations to go home as, hopefully, more than an invalid, a walking, talking perfect imitation of himself who would be allowed to be a spectator at his farm if he controlled his diet and ingested certain quantities of pills on a program that they were now getting ready, a spectator at his farm
who could do anything except work and, of course, the doctor had for some reason blushed while saying this, as though age made it obscene and ideally it would be done only by China dolls at night when the lights were off in the store, sexual relations would have to be curtailed for at least six months; saying this so emphatically that Richard wondered if there was in this doctor’s past some unknown legion of almost-saved patients who had died in each other’s embraces, in unspeakable orgies, in just a quiet goodnight kiss when the wife was least expecting it, scores lost one night in a senior citizens’ drive-in double bill. The nurse came into the room. “Did you go, Mr. Thomas?” She went to check that he had flushed. Then she helped him up into the bed. He could see that she didn’t mind his age and bulk, accepted the challenge and the necessity the same way he did when dealing with a cow that was down and needed to be rolled over and, if it was in the barn and possible, ropes passed beneath its belly so that it could be lifted to its feet again. “Now a horse,” Simon used to say. “Once a horse is down they’ll never get up. You might as well shoot it and save the feed.” The movement and sudden sinking into the mattress had made him dizzy. He knew his eyes were open but he could hardly see her face: it swam distant and out of focus — separated from him by a translucent film that now broke apart into tiny red dots. He knew she was speaking but couldn’t hear her. She was leaning towards him, unaware that anything was different, sliding the thermometer into his mouth and marking down his trip to the bathroom on her chart. The moment was already passed and he couldn’t remember the lesson, whether the mind had survived the failure of the body or whether it had all gone at once. With Simon Thomas, it had all been in his hands, the fingers always restless and moving, long sinewy fingers that could balance a knife or a needle with equal ease, sure and nervous. The same hands as Erik, Richard thought, but Erik seemed to live only through words and his head so that his body was already vestigial, threatening to grow old before it was ever claimed by this world.

The nurse brought him a fresh pitcher of water, straightened the sheet and blanket over him, opened the window. The
day staff thought that he would live; they had their charts and their figures to prove it. They treated him with a combination of deference and good cheer now, the shared good fellowship of those who have been to the wall together. The night nurse knew better. She spoke to him in urgent whispers, telling him increasingly outrageous stories of survival. “You can live,” she said over and over again, “you can live if you only want to.” And when she insisted on that Richard would get a picture of her patients, thousands of half-broken metal toys, the paint scraped off and rusted but still recognizable to the trained eye, deciding whether or not to wind themselves up for one more run.

Simon Thomas had never hesitated. He was always busy, connected by those nervous hands and the sound of his own misplaced church deacon’s voice unctuously mouthing his own particular hypocrisies. After he had moved into town he even took up a new trade and began to bind books specially for the town’s historical society library, replacing the broken cloth covers with handsewn calf leather, the names of the books and their authors stamped in gold along the spines. He had bound the poet’s diaries the same way, numbering the volumes and embossing the full name, Reverend William C. Thomas, on the spine of each of the three volumes; but refusing to let the diaries be copied or reproduced in any way but preferring only to attend occasional meetings of the historical society and shock the wives of the doctor and minister by reading out choice excerpts from what Simon considered the poet’s special interest to have been, which was the genealogy of the area seen as a manifestation of God’s Will working its way through those of his creatures who knew it best.

The nurse stood back and inspected her tableau, looking at Richard Thomas in that particular way he had come to associate with the day staff, all of whom had part-time jobs arranging window displays in the shopping centre, then stepped up the aisle between the beds and pulled him forward so she could puff up the pillows, there, and then back to crank up the bed to its mid-morning angle, leaving his good arm in the perfect position to reach for the grey metal night-table with its single drawer and oversize compartment for the bedpan; on the top of the table
Miranda had spread a cloth, red and blue threads needlepointed into Irish linen, a farmhouse and surrounding trees. Every morning when he was well enough Richard Thomas stuffed it in the drawer of the table and every afternoon, before Miranda came, one of the nurses took it out, so the wife of the ingrate sickman wouldn’t be disturbed.

The morning before Simon Thomas’s funeral Richard had unpacked some of the boxes left from Simon’s house in town, finding, among the old pipes and empty tobacco tins, the bound volumes of the poet’s diaries that, despite his habit of reading from them, Simon had refused to show Richard, saying that he would get them in his turn. So, before the funeral, sitting in the living-room and reading these diaries, Miranda scurrying about, getting things ready, telling him the details of the bath he was supposed to take, the shirt he could iron for himself if he didn’t get moving, the dogs that hadn’t been fed for two days. And at the funeral, displaced into the poet’s chain of flesh, Katherine coming to be with him, standing with him over the open grave, swaying …

swinging like the executioner’s pendulum,

Katherine

Malone, born Katherine Beckwith. The parents had died and left her to the care of Simon Thomas, Henry Beckwith’s only true friend in the community, the only man who dared stand up for him. Even at the time of Simon Thomas’s funeral she was still a young woman but her body had grown shapeless from child-bearing and her face, following, had lost its shape too, as a signal, now almost a rounded pudding with only the movements of eyes and mouth to indicate otherwise; sliding her hand into Richard’s arm for support and he, not thinking, putting his hand over hers briefly, knowing and not considering, so now, the day after the funeral, wondering what she would do, went back to the field where he had stood that last time with Simon Thomas and then on down the valley and through the bush to the old country road that led to Katherine Malone’s. It was a slow spring, soft and wet, this day the warmest it had been, melting the snow that was still deep in the shaded places, moats
of it across the hollows of the old road, never ploughed to meet Katherine Malone, barelegged in long skirts and rubber boots, sinking in past the top of the boots in some places, the fields now almost unfamiliar to her, then, when she got to a rock that had melted warm or even a hummock of dry mud and grass, she would take off her boots and shake out the snow and bits of ice. With the sun out it was warm, almost hot. She had taken off her woollen mitts and walked bareheaded on this old road where no one ever travelled any more and she could walk without fear of being seen. Mitts off and the coat too short for her, her arms suddenly appearing to her beyond the soaked frayed cuffs of the coat as they had thirty years ago, the arms of a girl; and remembered that in Kingston she would see women of her age and they were still young, with their one or two children and their new clothes and maybe even a car to drive from home to downtown. And even her cousin who lived in a limestone house in Kingston with its carefully drawn curtains and carpeted rooms, her cousin was her own age and still dressed up Saturday nights, wearing gowns that showed her neck and shoulders and even jewellery to draw attention to the skin which was still smooth like it had always been, only now creamy, as if that husband of hers with his major’s uniform and his money had managed to upgrade her breeding; no, it was true, she was still a young woman. The spring air in her lungs — she could swallow it so it would be in the belly too, rejuvenating; only Henry Beckwith had paid any attention to the old Indian habit of drinking the maple sap straight, without boiling, as a tonic, even fed it to the cows, fifty gallons every morning he drew for them from the bush behind the house. Now she stepped to the side of the road, to a maple that stood there and ran her finger in the cracks of the bark, finding a place where the tree bled naturally out of an old wound, the sap warm and sticky. She laughed and slurped it off her finger as she had always done; she would go home after seeing Richard and go on a diet, move to Kingston and wear fancy clothes, laughed again at the thought of Peter Malone, skipped and bowed, he was inflicted on her body like any other season, could this be love? clapped her hands. Richard would be
coming soon. Not their first spring either but they used to meet here in the spring but only quickly, would do it standing up when the ground was too wet. He would hold her in the air, his weight pressing her against a tree. Simon so thin and white. Or when there was time they would go to the barn. Simon Thomas thin and white. Could this be love? Clapped her hands and hummed, her feet doing a miniature waltz in the rubber boots, she could feel the felt scrunching up beneath her toes. The Beckwiths, because they were near the other township and the school, had gotten hydro ten years before everyone else so Richard used to come over to listen to their radio and then, later, come and sit with her in the parlour, the radio on and she would light the kerosene lamp and she showed him how to waltz in the living-room, one two three, one two three, like an older sister she had been, the same older sister as she had been for him when she stayed at the house for the winter, with Simon always wanting to sneak into her room just to tease her, one step forward and two steps back, she’d let him lead her as soon as he knew the basic step and so he did, his hair watered back and down and his arm out straight, holding her away from him as if his father had stamped her, holding her away from him but curving his own belly towards her, like a child. Katherine Malone took off her mitts and clapped her hands, scooped up some snow and rubbed it into her hands and wrists — spring snow, red hands, red wrists, her arms pink and still too long for her coats, she always had long arms and while they danced she could rest her hand on the back of his neck and caress his hairs there: sexy, Peter Malone called that habit, used to. Found herself giggling and giggled more, sinking down into the snow and laughing out loud at that dumb Peter Malone who thought he knew it all with his city magazines and his two serge suits, set up by Simon she knew but didn’t care, Peter Malone bowing and scraping manure off his boots even while he stood there, a bouquet of flowers in his hand, the only man who ever even knew you were supposed to bring flowers, and while one part of him was responding to Simon’s invitation to this easy township lay, the other stood hesitant and soft with these flowers that were already dying in his hand, the kind of
man ghosts would approve of, crazy and soft but so hopeless in bed, one step forward and two steps back, made her at times even go to Simon just to have it easy and simple though he was not the bull that he thought himself, just easy; not like the gentle Peter Malone whose sex was never quite decided but when it was over he was still with her, still. She stood up and shook the snow out of her coat, shook, feeling the way her flesh lagged behind her bones, whole fields of grain and potatoes trailing on her body. In the winter, the evergreens were dark and layered with snow; but now they were bare and wet, the tamarack, the spruce and the cedar all fighting for space along the fences and the road, their roots rising out of the snow already, melting themselves clean for the summer, digging deeper around the rocks for more soil; they had never struck her, these trees, until she had children and two of her children died; then she began to notice them, hanging tenaciously from impossibly eroded cliffs, growing up strong and healthy from ground too swampy to support anything except useless wet grasses and bullrushes, clumps of them standing nonchalant and accomplished in the midst of rocky mounds, never starved or drowned or dying from pure stubbornness. Snapped off a bit of cedar and crushed it in her mouth to release the smell, good luck to smell cedar in the spring, then reached into her pocket and rummaged around for a package of cigarettes, came to the place where the pocket was torn and pulled her coat up so she could continue the search in the lining of the coat. Found a promising lump and drew it up, yes, and they were wet but not broken, matches stuck into the cellophane, Peter Malone would have a fit if he saw her smoking outside. Could this be love? she sang out the words in her best contralto, rounding her lips and trying to sing from that place in the throat, the music teacher had put her finger there, love, and said sing again, relax and you can feel where it should be coming from, stopped and took a drag from her cigarette, sang again softly letting the smoke trail out with the words, stopped. On a higher section of the road now, the mud unfrozen and soft, unfrozen like the cemetery which they chose because it thawed first, a necessity for such a place because the bodies, once frozen by winter and encased in their pine box
should not thaw before burial, though it was said to the children that cemeteries were thawed not by nature but by the devil who had to create new individual hells in the new world because it was too far to stretch the old one under the ocean, stopped, took her feet out of her boots — red and chafed from the rubber — let them sink into the mud. The tiny surface puddles were hot from the sun, already filmed over with heat and bacteria; lifted her foot and slowly lowered it down onto the mud, slowly and deliberate, like a press, watching it squeeze in slow motion over the sides of her foot and between her toes, crouched down on the road and lowered her hands slowly too, the palms and fingers arched apart, leaving their print in the mud; an instant fossil that made a sharp sucking sound as she drew her hands away, then moved them back, the pores drawn by the mud, pushed her hands deep into the road, letting the mud surround them completely, the cigarette hanging unaided in her mouth so finally she had to take out one hand and wipe it on her coat, waste not want not — Peter Malone with his kitchen table aphorisms to explain everything in this world in the same manner as his own limp fertility, Peter’s Peter, the other hand coming out of the mud, palm towards the sun and flattening out, the liquid breaking apart into thousands of tiny fertile bubbles. Looked up and saw a rabbit hunched up at the side of the road, looking at her, nose twitching like a cartoon and jerking back and forth, one step forward and two steps back, stops entirely so only the hairs on its nose are quivering: the fur is not absolutely white but is spotted with pink and brown, as if it might be shedding its winter coat or is just a particularly mangy specimen. Its eyes jerk back and forth in its head, its head begins its strange dance again, surface body ripples; together they can listen to the water which now seems to roar in the ditch beside the road. She wants to go inspect it for carp and suckers but the rabbit is fighting her off, she looks towards the ditch again and then the rabbit is gone, like an ignored sign arrowed into the cedar bush. Katherine stands up and now there is so much mud along the hem of her skirt that it weights it down, she bends over and squeezes it out in rolls, so when she is finished it is arranged about her in a vaguely
symmetrical ring of twists. Bun in the oven, Simon called it, riding over everything in his own way, but already old beneath it, thin and white like a ghost he would slip into her room and pull the covers over them like a tent so he could whisper without being heard, whisper to her and then come inside her where he would, the first winter, lie without moving, lie it seemed for hours without moving because the moon would come back and it would be visible through the window and then it would pass by and the whole time of the moon passing by the window would be only one small part of the time that he would lie there, sometimes talking to her or asking her questions always in those small white whispers under the tent, the quilted tent that Katherine had brought with her to sleep with and had been made all one winter by herself and her mother. Bun in the oven Simon called it, meaning at first himself and then, years later, the child they conceived the same way, him lying inside her so endlessly that maybe it was only boredom that began to convulse their bodies until finally, out of control but soundless, they could regain themselves. Thin and white just like winter, Simon was always old to her, not middle-age but old, his body without any signs of beauty or even the decay of beauty but the skin already ancient, like winter too and it was only that first winter and the one other time that he was anything but thin and fast, like an injection he needed to dispose of for some forgotten reason, his duty done to her, he said, all that silent winter, he had earned the right to do it as he pleased, an old man leaving God’s message at every available station. The cigarette is now caked with mud too, dried brown along the seam and mud mixed in with the tobacco where she has wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Holds it up in front of her eyes, lets it bisect the sun, sees that it is torn too, laughs and throws it in the air, clapping her hands as it passed through them, watches it land finally on its side in a puddle where it splits open and the tobacco begins to ooze out of the paper like miniature intestines. In India, Simon told her, they take them out and wash them in the river, in the river, inside out, with a long soft rag and handfuls of sand.