The Disinherited (3 page)

Richard Thomas lay down on his back and closed his eyes. He felt cold. He should have brought his jacket. He wondered what it would be like to be dead. He could feel a bug crawling up his leg. He reached out to slap it. When he moved it happened again, fast and harsh. He could feel something inside resisting and being torn apart.

He didn’t hear the truck at all, but he opened his eyes and tried to help as Brian dragged him into the front seat. They were afraid to move him, so they left him in the truck while they waited for the doctor. He was aware of Miranda sitting beside him, sponging his face and holding his hand. She tried to make him take one of his pills but he couldn’t swallow properly. She put a cushion under his head. “Don’t try to talk,” she said. “Everything is going to be fine.” She rolled up his sleeve. Another pair of hands reached into the truck. He tensed up for the needle and then passed out again.

T
here was the time, in the October of his nineteenth year, his second year at university, that Erik came home from Toronto to visit. It was fall already, not quite that stage of the season that is simply a prelude to winter, but a fall that was connected to late summer, and the leaves, still sparsely scattered along the sides of the roads and in the ditches, seemed less a kind of death than an unnamed late harvest, a not necessarily final moment through which the summer would pass before relinquishing its fertility. He had tried to swallow the city whole but it still lay undigested in him, so that being home was uncomfortable for him and he was resentful of the feeling of familiarity, of relief almost, of the way Richard and Miranda and Brian still claimed him for their own, as easily and thoughtlessly as the land. When it was finally afternoon and it was possible for him to leave for a few hours, he went for a drive in Richard’s car, aimlessly following the back roads, watching the leaves change from yellow elm and poplar to the redder maple of the higher land and then back again to yellows and browns and even just greens where he wound around the edges of swamps. He had driven like that, aimlessly and without any real sense of where he was, the first summer Richard let him use the car. His drives then took place in some vaguely indistinct geography; he never knew the exact location of what he found except in terms of the mythology he constructed on those hazy afternoons when he wanted only to get away from everything, to have time pass
quickly so that he would be away from home finally, somewhere where he was not known. Sometimes he would come to an abandoned farm or overgrown road that he had not seen before; then he would get out of his car and walk around, enjoying just walking in a way, he didn’t know why, that he never did at home. On one of those drives he had come to an old empty house. The wood, never painted, was weathered grey and the roof was sagged and missing patches of shingles. There was an apple tree beside the house, so close that one of its branches was pushed right through a broken window in the downstairs. For some reason he hadn’t gone inside but instead had climbed up on the roof of the house and sat there in the sun, smoking cigarettes and dropping the butts down the chimney.

In his mythology of escape the old house had endured in his memory as the place where he had most clearly known his own desire to leave the farm. That, and his curiosity about whether he could find it again, were in his mind this particular October afternoon. A few miles north of the farm there was a large section of country that seemed very homogeneous to him. The farms were poorer than his father’s. Much of the land had never even been divided into farms: it had been logged and now supported only rocks and second-growth brush that crowded in on itself and the road. He remembered that the house was shielded from view by an orchard and he drove slowly, not wanting to miss it even though he wasn’t sure whether, in fact, he was on the right road.

He noticed her as he was turning and, because it was so unexpected, he saw her only in passing, a snapshot that had to register to be real: there were no details, only angles and colours framed by the now open door of the school house. When he looked again, the confusion of movement gradually resolved into a small child and the way that the woman walked, a strange swaying stride that should have been a limp, picking her way carefully down the broken steps and then, lifting the child down after her, walking out towards the road. The grass around the house was long and wild but the fence had been fixed and the mailbox was freshly painted. When she came up to the fence, she stood without speaking, looking at him, the jacked-up car,
and the tools and wheel as if they all fitted together in some impossible happening, an apparition from outer space, as if, in fact, the entire occurrence of him and his dissembled machine had struck her speechless. The child too was silent. It was of indeterminate sex, wore diapers and a faded sweatshirt, and stood with one hand in its mother’s and the other rubbing contemplatively against its mouth.

The fence was fixed but there was no gate, only an old set of hinges and a rope strung between two nails. She lifted off the rope and came and sat in the grass beside his spare tire, cross-legged, with the child still at her side, holding to her but staring at him gravely as if, perhaps, he might be the answer to the unnamed problem. He wanted to say hello, or make some comment about the weather, or at least have something come out of his mouth that would acknowledge their presence and distract from the crippled machine with its excess parts, but everything about the woman was somehow so uncertain and unexpected that he could only turn his back on them and resume work on his car. The woman let the child go; it wandered about him as he worked, trying to pick things up, dropping them when it succeeded, and sticking its fingers in the holes of the wheel.

It was October, cold enough so that the nightly frosts were beginning to cut down the grass and all but the hardiest flowers. In the morning the mist had been so heavy that he couldn’t even see the barn, but then the sun had burned it away, leaving the day warm and lazy. When he was finished, he stood up and turned around. She was still sitting, her eyes closed against the sun and her hands folded into each other. Unwilling to go home yet and unsure what to do, he sat down beside her. It was impossible to tell her age, he thought she must be a bit older than him but not much. Her hair was blonde and wispy, and enclosed her face in a way he found not attractive but, as with everything else about her, vaguely alienating. “You can come in if you want,” she said. She picked up the baby and led him inside. The school house’s exterior had not been altered but inside the ceiling had been lowered to keep in the heat and the far end had been partitioned off. There was a loom against one wall and, in the very centre of the building, a huge black cookstove. “Sit down if you
like,” she said, gesturing towards the kitchen table. “Would you like a beer?” Her voice was high and pure, like the voice of a young girl, and when she spoke her face also seemed younger than it had.

“Is it your baby?”

“It’s a girl. I didn’t mean to scare you but I haven’t talked with anyone for a few days. It’s just a habit.”

“That’s all right,” Erik said. The bottle of beer was wet from the well. She hadn’t offered him a glass. There was a tea towel draped over the back of his chair; he used it to dry his glass and then put it back. It was the kind of towel that used to come in boxes of laundry detergent and had “Home Sweet Home” stamped on both sides, in red, surrounded by a red outline of a heart with a green vine twined around it. Clusters of grapes hung from the vine. While he drank his beer she moved about the kitchen, cooking dinner for the girl who was now seated in a highchair beside the table.

“Do you want anything to eat?”

“No thanks,” Erik said. There were a man’s hunting jacket and boots near the door, an empty rifle rack on the wall. The partitioned-off section of the school house had two doors in it; one of them was ajar and the other closed with a padlock.

Later, they unlocked the door and stood naked and shivering in the room, holding up a kerosene lantern. The room was filled with an elaborate construction of long hollow joined tubes which were interconnected to each other and slid along tracks which had been bolted to the ceiling. On one wall was a series of jars filled with different colours of paint, and in a corner was a small motor and something that resembled the control panel of a gigantic electric train. “It’s a mechanical painter,” she said. “He spent all last winter building it. He sits in the corner and plays with the controls; the painting comes out on a piece of canvas put in the centre of the floor.”

“I see.”

“No, you don’t. This year he wants to get an automatic pilot.” She locked the door and led him back into the bedroom. “He wouldn’t mind about this, but he’d kill me if he knew I’d shown someone his machine.”

“He shouldn’t have left you a key to the room.”

“He trusts me,” she said. “I only ask him for money.” In the light he had seen how her body had been marked by the child. There was even a scar where the baby had been removed. He had been afraid to look at it closely, but now, in the dark, he traced it with his finger. “Don’t be afraid,” she said. “It doesn’t hurt anymore.” She pinched him suddenly, startling him so much he rolled off the bed. The quilt and then the weight of her body followed; before he could catch his breath, she had wrapped the quilt around his head and was sitting astride him, pounding his chest and shouting. When she stopped, she just let him go and climbed back up onto the bed. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Was it your first time?”

“I guess so.”

“I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“You didn’t.” Erik briefly saw himself as he must appear to her: sitting on the floor, with his knees drawn protectively into his chest, hugging the quilt around his shoulders, rocking back and forth and shivering.

“Do you want me to say that I love you?”

“No,” Erik said.

“But you’d feel better.”

“I don’t care,” Erik said. “I think I’d better go home.” She had felt strange, her skin loose and pliable as if it might pull away from her body.

“But you’d feel better,” she said. “It wouldn’t be right if I had just walked outside and accosted you for no reason at all except, say, that my husband was away.”

“Anyone can get lonely.”

“I wasn’t lonely.” When they went outside, the dew on their feet was wet and cold. They walked around the old school house, peering in the windows, sliding along the grass, looking for ghosts and other clues. “Before we bought it, an old man lived here. It was the school he used to go to, and all his friends who were still alive would come and visit him so they could sit in their old school house and drink. He was really small, about five feet tall and thin too. He told us that he had been brought up by a family down the road. They let him live there as long as
he liked but they never paid him a cent. He couldn’t ever afford to move out until he started getting the pension.”

“My brother is adopted.”

“It can be different now. The only chance this man ever had was to go to war. He would have been all right if he’d gone to the war. If he’d come back. Then he would have had some money saved. At least he would have known there was something else.” They were standing still, on the front steps of the school house. Erik was getting cold again. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I guess I just don’t like sex. I need it but I don’t like it.”

“Forget it.”

“My husband got to know him somehow; they were distant relatives. We used to come and see him sometimes. Then he died and we bought the place.”

“What a depressing story,” Erik said.

“Yes,” she said. “I guess I’m like that.” She held the door open for Erik. “It’s funny, you know, you hardly talk at all for a while and then once you get going it’s really important. Sometimes when I haven’t seen anyone for a few weeks I start talking to myself. Late at night, after she’s in bed, I walk round and round the school house, explaining things to myself or telling stories or even, what’s best of all, having conversations with people. Sometimes, say, with my parents or Jim, but then I get bored with them, maybe I was already bored with them, and I talk to people I haven’t seen for years, like someone I was in public school with and hardly ever knew or the guy that took me to my first drive-in movie, I couldn’t stand him, he had bad breath and he kept wanting to kiss me, or to this girl I used to know in high school but then she moved away and I never found out her new address, anyway I talk to her, as if I was writing a long letter. After talking to her, I always have this warm feeling, as if we’d just seen each other and been really close. I guess it’s easy in a way, getting that kind of satisfaction from people without them even being there, it’s like dreaming about someone without their permission, and sometimes I think the world would be a lot better if everyone knew how to do that though, for all I know, everyone does it all the time. Maybe that’s even the problem: everyone’s so busy having all these
imaginary conversations, they don’t ever, you know, consult each other. Like even right now, here I am talking to you, I hardly know you, well, we slept together but that wasn’t very important, we both just did it because we were supposed to in some way, telling you these things which make no sense to you at all. The funny thing is I don’t even care if you’re listening, I mean I hope you are but I’m not worried about it, not in the way I used to be with my husband. I guess that was because I was afraid he would listen; that was the only thing that really bothered me about him, that he might kill me. He always looked at me, not like you are now but with his eyes pushed round and open, like they were made out of glass and he was
blind;
he didn’t do it to be mean or anything, it was just his idea of a joke. What he liked best was having a wife, someone to take care of him and cook and help fill up the space when he felt empty. Once I gave him an inflatable doll for his birthday. The only time he could feel anything for me was when I was asleep. He was always asking me if I was tired yet. Just to please him sometimes I would pretend I was and go to bed. He would sit up for a while, playing solitaire and having a few drinks, maybe cleaning one of his guns or working on his machine. Then he would turn off all the lights and come to bed. He would get under the blankets very carefully, he didn’t want to wake me up, and then he’d try to have me. At first I didn’t mind, I guess I felt sorry for him and anyway, I wanted it too, even if I had to pretend I didn’t, but after a few months I just learned to sleep with my legs crossed. Anyway, it’s over. Some people would even say that because it’s gone I shouldn’t talk about it, as if nothing had ever happened and each second was altogether new and cut off.”