The Disinherited (15 page)

It was one of the rules that once visiting her he wasn’t allowed to leave until she dismissed him and she, knowing that she held that power over him, would play it subtly, mentioning that perhaps there would be something he could bring her, or something which needed to be done elsewhere in the house, or that soon it would be time for him to go outside and help his father with the chores (as if she ran the house and the farm
from her throne, did all the essential work except for a few unavoidable and undesirable tasks which she relegated to the men — who weren’t suited to anything else anyway — in the vain hope that they might be able to do something
this
simple). The only one who didn’t fear her was Richard’s brother, Steven. What this meant was understood without being spoken. Simon taught it by the way he behaved towards this second son, erased him by ignoring him until finally, when it was evidently incurable, he treated him gently but at a distance, like a giant dog that was a children’s favourite but couldn’t be taught to do anything useful. When the rain came down hard it slid off the young tree in long corded sheets, whipping against the house like movement and voices, the sounds of his mother getting up from her bed and calling to him for help. But if he became convinced and went to check on her, he would find her as always, leaning back against the brass bedstead with her hands moving like puppetmasters beneath her knitting and her eyes staring straight forwards, towards the door, absolutely unbowed by whatever had forced her body to the bed (an illness that never seemed to be named) and planning further strategies in her war against Simon. “Your father,” she would say. “No one understands a thing about your father except for myself.” She would chew at her tongue before continuing, leaving out all the unknown evils he had perpetrated for the sake of Richard’s youth and all their souls. “They say he is a gentle man.” She would repeat that several times, each time pausing at the end of the sentence, giving each vowel its proper hint of British reflection as if she were still teaching school or standing up in front of the parents in one more hopeless attempt to persuade them that the culture of the Empire could not be perpetuated in the fields but had to be brought to the pagans in the classroom, where the monarch’s framed picture could oversee the task, order it, make the glove fit even the most recalcitrant colonials. And when she paused, she would reach over to the bedside table and pick up a linen handkerchief from on top of one of the small bound volumes she kept there (never the poet’s diary, for Simon kept that to himself his whole life and would only recite snatches from it at his leisure) of consumptive verse and cough
lightly into it. “Would you light the lamp please, Richard,” she would say; and then she would wait silently while he cleaned the globe. He would give it to her and she would hold it up against the light to make sure that there were no streaks. While he prepared her room for the night, she didn’t speak, but waited until he was finished to resume her discussion of his father. “They say that Simon Thomas is a gentle man,” she would say, “because he has never killed or beaten anyone.” Here she would cough again, the rhetorical comment of the trained speaker. “The little runt never went to war because he was a coward.” And then, speaking without stopping until she heard the sound of the wagon bringing Simon and Steven home, she would tell the story of how her father, who had named her Leah because she was his first daughter, had forced her and Simon together, against their will. And while she talked, sounding at least half-convinced of the truth herself, Richard listened not to the words, which seemed to be the least essential part of the story, but to the chorus that made up her voice, the army on the move which one day would set out from her bedroom, strike Simon dead, and make things right, once and for all, meting justice and revenge throughout the whole township, this vocal army that was like the lead soldiers he had, their paint still bright over the grey and brittle lead as if this surface should be enough to convince any child. Her family had emigrated from the United States to the area north of Belleville, United Empire Loyalists she said but they had waited until after the revolution. And then, because of some obscure family quarrel to which she would allude but never explain, her own father and his wife had moved away from the family estate and started a new farm, clearing the less hospitable land that was available sixty miles to the east. When she was seventeen, the money appeared to send her to Toronto, to normal school. And when she was there, unmarried and with no further choices, she taught in the school that was, though in the next township, only six miles by good road from her own house. Her family had sent the toy soldiers for Richard, a reminder of the armies of her past: the Colonel who drank tea, had a handlebar moustache, and took his men — all Boston gentry — bear hunting in the Florida swamps to
gain his mastery over them; and the army of British culture which, she said, was the foremost civilization in the world and had conquered the French by sheer manners and a superior command of the English language, and which now, she didn’t need to say specifically, existed in her own being, in the manner of her speech and hands, in the way she had sacrificed her legs for empires so that she might be, as she put it, “a person of dignity and not the common slut your ignorant father would prefer.” And this last in a rising voice, because while the grandfather Richard Thomas had lived, she had been forced to moderate her talk of armies and ignorance, had not, in fact, even been able properly to take to her bed because the old man, walking about the house and the barnyard with his cane and stiff back, as if he had indeed succeeded in creating life in this barren colony and was required now, like God, only to oversee his purvey and punish insects and acts which offended even his benevolence, had never liked her — had taken to wearing his old moth-eaten uniform after he heard her stories about the American colonel, challenging her syntax on obscure grammatical points which he claimed to have learned from a church deacon when he was a child in England, walked every morning from room to room in this old house which he had built, but had now given over to his son and family, and inspected them for cleanliness and order, came into her room, when after one of her fights with Simon she had decided not to get up, and poked the covers off her with his cane — that and every time thereafter so that it was not until he was buried that she could spend even one sick day in bed.

“Your mother was never meant to put up with this world,” Simon said. He had his thumb hooked into his watchpocket and was sucking noisily on his pipe. For once he wanted to go outside and see the farm so Richard, feeling foolish and suddenly an intruder, put on the hat he always wore, a black felt hat to keep away the bugs, and took Simon Thomas back to see the new hayfield he had made out of two smaller ones, clearing and draining the swampy ground that lay between them so that there was now at least one field on the farm larger than ten
acres, large enough even, with its sudden rolls and dips, that there were places in the field where you could stand and not be able to see the fences. And there was a place in that field, a knoll at the beginning of the old swampy section, where they could stand and see the small valley that bisected the field and then, at its edge, ran into a section of second growth bush and continued through the bush and some pasture to a country road that led to Katherine Malone’s. “It’s none of your business,” Simon said, “but your mother would only do it outside.” And he re-lit his pipe, his hand passing quickly over the scar on his jawbone, now pale and almost enclosed by wrinkles, where Richard had cut him the night they had both come home from Katherine’s. The field, newly seeded that spring, was thick with its second growth of clover, dark green and reaching almost to their knees, the thin stems winding about their ankles and shins as they walked. “You’ll watch the cows don’t get in here,” Simon said, in that manner he had always used for giving orders. And again, as he spoke, the hand moved over the scar. A true man with a knife, Simon Thomas, and when a cow bloated they would always call him to cut open its stomach. And when he was finished, he would wipe the blade on his pantleg and slip it back into its sheath, another vanity, that he had sewn for himself out of calf leather. And he still carried that same knife, though the handle had been replaced once, and now pulled it out of its sheath to ream his pipe, spitting the juice into the clover and then detaching the stem from the bowl so he could blow it clear. “A father would not kill his own son,” Simon said. “Not even for a woman would he do that.” And then, the pipe cleaned, he stuck it in his pocket and took out a cigar, splitting open the cellophane with his teeth. “A man would not kill his own son,” Simon said, “but a person might kill his brother for nothing at all, out of carelessness.” A true man with a knife, Simon Thomas, and the support beams of the barn were marked with thousands of tiny little nicks where Simon Thomas, pacing up and down, had thrown his knife, aiming at real and imaginary flies. Before the hayfield was enlarged, the swampy section iced over in the winter and was the best place to skate. After the first snows, but before it got really cold, there would often be
deer tracks to the place, because there was a small spring there that ran most of the year. And if it thawed in January the bears would come too; leaving their marks all about the spring and crisscrossed through the field. As always now, as always since the day when his brother had been killed, Richard let Simon say what he pleased. On the knoll they were still warmed by the sun. And the wind too came off the field warm, warm and slow so they were almost overwhelmed by the scent of clover; and Richard had a sudden desire to let himself be taken over completely by the land, absorbed as if buried, his will tenuous and snapping as the poet had said it must, and could feel it ebbing from him that quickly, as if in one moment of doubt all the energy that kept him able to impose the farm on the land might be dissipated and the land return to its own chaotic intentions, as if the farm was only a thin transparency laid on it like a decal that could be blown off easily by wind and time so that the bodies and the hours and the effort that were buried in the immense fertility of this field would finally be nothing but a brief digression in its existence as a forest and swamp; and the swamp he had spent a month surrounding with ditches so it would drain would reassert itself and then, in its own time, fill in and become part of a meadow which would be no pasture but ground fit only for juniper seeds and sumac trees. And even from where he stood he could see bush where there had once been a field, a field cleared by a cousin of his grandfather’s who had bought the adjoining farm and lived there for twenty years before selling the lot to Richard Thomas for enough money to take his family back to England. And in the centre of that bush, which was over fifty years old and now contained elm trees which rose almost a full hundred feet into the air and maple trees which could give three gallons a day of sap during the first spring run, there was no trace that it had once grown hay and even grain except for several huge piles of stones, scattered like the cairns of dinosaurs through the fields, and an old foundation which no one who did not know its location would ever be able to find, already surrounded and covered by trees that had died and rotted over it. And standing there with Simon on this knoll that now centered his new field, he could not say whether
the new field was a sign that soon there would be more fields, that one day the entire bush would be cleared and all the land that was flat enough and suitable would be part of some unimaginably prosperous farm of which he and Simon and his grandfather, all by then long dead, would be remembered as the founders, or whether the field was just another chapter in the insane struggle to dominate this land in a way which had nothing to do with it, and that the three generations of Thomases would have accomplished nothing except to scar and chop up enough land for their own survival, like any other race too weak or lazy to live by roaming or hunting, like any other race that lived on this patchwork of forest and surface rock that periodically burst forth like a tide to erase all struggles, plots and fornications of the creatures who wrestled with it and then subsided, leaving them their tenuous stage once more so that they could again convince themselves that this time it would be within their power, that they would shape the land to their needs and it would be a once and for all victory after which it would be necessary only to sow and to harvest in some unknown and paradisiacal god-assisted rhythm.

And Simon, again passing his hand by the scar in that strange gesture of his, as if a movement of renunciation that would let him swallow time whole, without resisting, swallow it as he had said the earth had swallowed him so that they might all, as he had quoted the poet too who he now claimed as his father along with Richard Thomas, be part of one belly, for God had made man with a mouth, passing his hand by his scar and then reaching into his own mouth for some forgotten piece of food, flicking it into the grass, spitting out the amalgam of saliva and tobacco juice that had been disturbed by his hand and then putting the same hand with a quick motion onto Richard’s arm, claiming him and drawing the line between them as a trajectory of inherited flesh: coded movements and unexpected intersections: the fast movement hissing of a blade through the air and then while it is still vibrating in the wall the feeling of wood rapping against the muscles of the thighs — the table overturned and he is moving forward, the knife already out of the wall and in his hand, Simon’s chair upset and him helpless
on his back, pinned by the table as Richard moves in with the knife …

            Swinging above his father’s head like the executioner’s pendulum.

            Like Katherine Beckwith coming slowly up the stairs after Simon had left, her slippers sharp files against the cold wooden stairs, then padding across the rug, sinking into the bed and under the covers wrapping herself around Richard before he can speak, surrounding him with his own unanswered question, her hands now on Richard’s skin move like tiny scalpels and he knows that it is cut open in sharp curving flaps, these witches’ rites she has learned and practised with her ghosts, her hands moving on him like tiny scalpels exorcising as they kill, springing open cells and floating them in this river of blood he has become, his body has gone and now he has become her, woven into her darkness that is stamped in silhouette against the window, he knows that he is absolutely with her and they are both ecstatically fucking his absence