The Disinherited (21 page)

God has said that the land is His
and can belong to no man and therefore
how can one man give what is not
his to another man who cannot possess it.

The poet had had a strange hand, his letters standing straight up and square, sailing across the page like a stubby ship. But the ink was beginning to fade, had turned from blue to brown, and without his reading glasses Richard Thomas could hardly make out the words, preferred to let his eyes relax and see it all as nicely patterned wallpaper, old colours burnt into old paper.

“You have to decide about the farm,” Miranda said. Erik came into the room and pushed a chair over so he could sit beside Miranda. His head seemed big and bird-like, bent forward on his long neck. And his body thin and unbroken, cut off from anything that grew, his sleeves rolled up carelessly, floating about his elbows, virginal bony arms that could belong to a senile old priest, rattling in their sockets, denying everything. Now his head bobbed back and forth, like a puppet’s head with half the strings cut, taking in Richard, Miranda, the dishes overturned on the other bed. His mouth seemed to be moving slightly; he was forming his lips to speak. In fact it was possible.
Richard realized, that his son was talking already, but that he had failed to make his words sound. Erik: Miranda’s son. Always uncoordinated, but now every year in the city seemed to remove him further from his body, every motion and action preceded by that slight hesitation, the time it took to send the signal from wherever he had decided to locate the control centre, as if this was the way it should be done, in full retreat from the front lines, burnishing his mind — an old maid with her tea service. Erik now lit a cigarette. He held the ashtray in the palm of his hand, tipping it back and forth, sliding the match around the inside, turning his head away from him, Richard noticed, blowing the smoke towards the open window. They had taken the stand and the bottle away, but the oxygen tank and mask were still in the corner of the room, determined to keep him alive until he had gone through all the necessary motions and made the gestures, rites of passage, a separate section in the pale blue hospital booklet outlining the rules and regulations application to patients desiring the privilege to die without prior notice, preserving to the last gasp the myth that somewhere in the hospital, in the county at least, there might be one person who would actually take upon themselves the entire responsibility of mopping up the details of their own existence.

“This afternoon, just before supper, you got angry at Erik,” Miranda said. Erik was still sitting there, his head bowed innocently. “Do you remember?”

“No,” Richard said. He bowed his head too, feeling contrite even though he didn’t seem to be able to remember anything at all before the chocolate custard, wondering if this was part of it, some sort of instant senility brought on by the stroke and the flu that would progressively shorten his memory span from hours to minutes to seconds to nothing at all so that his body would then not remember how to function or even stick itself together. He looked up at Miranda again. She was just finishing another sentence, one that he had missed entirely. “Anyway,” Richard said, “I feel all right.”

“They gave you two tranquillizers before supper,” Miranda said. “You’ll probably want to go to sleep soon. We’ll be back in the morning.” She smiled at him. He smiled back. He liked the
way she was talking slowly and carefully again, as if a person in a good mood must be removed from normal humanity. She leaned over and kissed him. He could taste her lipstick, feel the roughness of her lips. She had tiny black hairs now growing around the corners of her mouth and on her cheeks, like an old woman. He had a sudden image of the two of them, the air let out in random places so they were spotted with holes, working their way up the steps of a rooming house. She was standing up now and looking down at him, her hands folded in front of her, crossing the shiny white handbag to her stomach. Her lips opened and closed and he could hear the clicking sound, tongue tapping on the roof of her mouth, her signal that she was going to soon lose her vast and uncountable patience, despite everything, if the world didn’t line up right away, the same sound she had made the night he came home from seeing Katherine Malone in the back barn. He took her wrist and pulled her back towards him, so she sat beside him on the bed. She had already started again, the tears small and delicate this time, making him feel that he had deserted her. The same twinge he had had after separating from Katherine on the old township road; and then going home slowly, feeling he had betrayed Miranda, but at the same time there was something else too, a kind of physical sensation in his mind that he couldn’t identify. And on the way, when he was almost home, he had stopped at the creek and lain down on the high slanted bank, staring up at the sky through what seemed to be an arched cathedral window of branches, the same view he was suddenly sure that his grandfather Richard Thomas had seen, the same view and the same feeling of his back springing out of the earth like the trees, his spine like the wooden tree spines with their wooden nerve arms spoking out for the sun. Orion was visible through the gap in the branches, a winter constellation setting early in the spring: Orion with its sword like his grandfather’s sword. And lying on the high slanted bank of the creek, Richard Thomas could still feel the warmth of Katherine Malone, the impress of her thighs and belly, the fertility that demanded him, even against her own will, leaving him warm and empty, his mind cut loose and cow-like roaming this whole
five hundred acres of forest and swamp and pasture, cut loose and filled with pity for its own death, pity for these strange forest creatures condemned to destroy their own home and place the substitute on the wreckage, new exercises for the new world. But even knowing that he had betrayed Miranda and conceived a child with Katherine Malone, there was still that physical presence in his mind which excused it, something he had known but couldn’t say, that lodged in him even while he was thinking of his grandfather Richard Thomas, and that stayed with him when he got up to go home, stayed with him all night and the next day too as he got up early after lying awake half the night beside Miranda and went out to the barn with the cows, muttering to them, not even bothering to make words, but just uttering strings of sounds, his mind still fastened on it, holding it, not knowing what it was, but holding it. Finally giving up in the middle of the morning and going in for breakfast, not caring anymore, enough blind loyalty, and now, without trying, it was coming to him again and again in the hospital, coming up from behind, and it was nothing, not worth knowing, only the knowledge of his own death; and even that night going home from Katherine Malone he had come upon it, tripped over it, a groundhog that had been killed by a dog when it stuck its head out of its hole, dumb fable mortality. Click, click, Miranda’s tongue, sputtering its morse code signals, unable to say more because now they were all in the room, Brian and Nancy crowding in the doorway just as Erik was trying to get out, Miranda backing away now too, tired of another day of watching him die, one last look, all four of them jostling at the door, waving good-bye so, for no reason, he picked a spoon off his tray and threw it at them, with his left hand, the last bouquet.

Thinking that spring night that he was thirty-three years old and still alive, healthy, already too old to be forced to war, even this war which they said was coming in Germany and France. Leaning on a rail gate and looking down into the small valley where the house and barns were cupped together, the lights on in the house and knowing Miranda would be wondering where he was. There was still enough light in the sky so that the house’s fresh white
paint glowed clean and new, painted last summer by him and Miranda, still believing that summer that she might get pregnant and that they could have children; and then turning and looking across the fields, they had fields in France too, wondering what this terrain would be like scarred by trenches and shells. America, they would come from the south and be unsure what to capture, what to do with it when it was theirs: the best tactic would be to draw them north into nowhere, a hundred miles north and let them freeze their asses off in the bush. Maybe they would just leave things as they were and be content to collect taxes and men, raising armies like Britain did for the Boer war and the Great War, whole generations of men taken off the land like so many feudal serfs, Richard S. Thomas the soldier stuck straight up for the Queen all his life, royal posture and rhyming Kipling dinosaurs. Thirty-three years old and the wind mixed cold and warm coming up from the west, blowing through his hair, thinner now, the first time he had felt it on his scalp that way. Thirty-three was the age when Christ had died; the poet had said in his diary that men who lived beyond the age of Christ’s death were old enough to know better, whatever that was supposed to mean. Thirty-three the afternoon he came back from seeing Katherine, halfway through that year of his life. His birthday had fallen two days after Simon’s death — and that day he had driven into town with Miranda to see the lawyer about the will. Everything in the office was leather: the black couch which Herman White had for his clients, the old harnesses and buggy whips he kept hanging from his walls, the desk top, and, of course, Herman White’s shiny black shoes which he had polished every morning and every evening. Herman White made them listen to his interminably boring stories before he would get on with it, each story with its own little moral, his voice even more unctuous than Simon’s, but without the bite — so that afterwards Richard couldn’t help telling Miranda the rumour that Herman White the lawyer paid his cleaning woman ten dollars a week to come in every day at two o’clock and spank him with the buggy whips — sallow indoors skin and jet black hair, the hair on his head straight and oily, black hair coming out of his white shirt cuffs, his beard thick and bristly already at eleven o’clock in the morning, telling them
his stories and then telling even more, and patently untrue stories about himself and Simon, whom he now made out to be his best friend even though it was common knowledge that Simon had claimed that once, while Herman White was in Kingston, his wife had invited him to tea. And when he went there she had propositioned him, saying that Herman White didn’t know how to do anything any more. Simon had gone upstairs with her, but when they got into the bedroom and she took off her clothes, he saw that Herman White the lawyer’s wife had hundreds of little red, blue and gold stars pasted over her body in an unprecedented milky way corset that extended from her shoulders to her knees, the stars arranged in horizontal colour bands, three rows thick, with little gold bursts at her nipples and navel — and the proof was that the stars were exactly the same as Herman White always used, in his appointment books and in his legal textbooks, marking off one paragraph from another. When they had been to the lawyer’s office and the inheritance was transmitted in this official manner, they turned around and went home again, the deed in their hands, now owning the farm in some different way than previous; Simon having passed on to them not only the farm but the duty of finding someone else to give it to when they were finished. Thirty-three years old: four years older than Miranda who still looked like a young woman, but, trim and preserved already her body would soon begin to go its own way, without children, as if sterility were permissible on this farm. “He did his duty,” Herman White had said of Simon, as if it were for him to say, and that now, unlikely as it was, Richard Thomas would have his turn to do his, it being left unclear whether there was any larger possible purpose or simply the holy mission of colonizing the earth: generations of men to be beaded out along the land like so many successive waves of trees and vegetation. There was some money too, so on their way home they went to the bank and then to the hotel to eat. When they were ready to leave it was already late in the afternoon, getting dark and the November sky grey and overcast, promising a bad winter. And remembering the poet’s words as they drove the horses home, thought maybe they were true and that once again history would be repeated, and like Abraham and Sarah in their new possession of this land they would be able
to have children. Or else be condemned to a purposeless self-preservation, to milk the land every year, enough to fill their bellies and their bank balance, nothing more, a straight trade, body for earth, three generations of bones to feed the land like so many fallen trees, animals. Knowing with Simon dead he owned the past now, his mind already turning to Katherine Malone and deciding to wait, one more winter, there was nothing but time.

“I’m sorry about yesterday,” Erik was saying. Sitting beside him and drinking coffee out of a waxed paper cup. He was holding the cup near his face and Richard could see that his hands were getting marked with blisters and cuts. In the morning he had gotten up and shaved himself, standing in front of the mirror wearing his reading glasses and using the electric razor. After breakfast, he had walked with the nurse down the corridor to the lounge and back. His first time out of the room since he had come to the hospital. Still, the bed beside him was kept empty. And while they walked, the nurse had said that he should tidy things up now, when there was nothing to worry about.

“It’s good to see you doing some work.”

“Just shovelling shit,” Erik said. He crossed the room to get an ashtray and Richard could see he was wearing sandals.

“You want to watch you don’t get stepped on,” Richard said, regretting it immediately, seeing Erik’s head bob up and down, the same dipping motion that Simon used to make, but with Erik it was more elongated and hesitant, unaccompanied by the habitual reaching for the knife or cigar.

He watched Erik carefully opening his package of cigarettes, peeling off all the cellophane and then slitting the black government seal with his thumb-nail, neatly, along the edge of the cardboard.

“The others won’t be here for a while,” Erik said. He got up from his chair and went to stand beside the window where he lit his cigarette. “I’m supposed to talk to you about the farm and, before we get into a fight, I just want to say that I think you should leave it to Miranda and quit worrying about it.”