The Disinherited (7 page)

“But she let him drink,” Richard had said. “And though she couldn’t cook, he never went hungry.”

“Forty years ago,” said Erik. “In a few years only rich city people will be able to afford to live on this kind of farm. All the food will be grown on huge farms run by businessmen. Or made in factories.” He had heard the story of Richard’s return to the farm dozens of times. The story had evolved and lengthened with the years, but was always climaxed with a romantic epiphany on a streetcar. The exact place had never been stated, but after he moved to Toronto Erik had decided that the streetcar had been moving west along Queen Street. The sun had been setting between the rows of tenements and shops, and the red glow of the sunset had been caught by the rails and reflected down the long corridor of the streetcar like a brief scene from an old movie that
had been burnt at the edges. “I was on my way to visit Miranda,” Richard would say, “to ask her to marry me. I was wearing my suit and my shoes were shined. It came upon me suddenly. I felt out of place in those crazy clothes, sitting in a metal machine running down a piece of pavement. We were being shuttled along like cardboard boxes.…” The image of his father, young and dressed in a suit, always overwhelmed the rest. “In a few years this kind of farm won’t even exist,” Erik said again. “Less families live here than did ten years ago.”

“You sound like one of those government experts,” Miranda said. “I bet you don’t even remember how to milk a cow.”

“Everything’s run down here. You should be spending more on the farm. I’m surprised the barn is still standing.”

“You can fix it tomorrow.” She crossed the room and took one of Erik’s cigarettes. He was still surprised at how easily she had absorbed this death, forgiven it before it had happened. It was impossible to believe in illumination by streetcar. Richard had also once told him that if he stared into the lake long enough it would turn into a fish. Their first central heating was a wood furnace; maple burned the best but they mostly used elm. It never lasted all night and sometimes, if someone was sick, Richard Thomas would stumble downstairs in the middle of the night to keep the fire going. By February, it seemed that winter had existed forever, that it was always late at night, already dark for hours and twenty below zero. And even in March the nights were still cold and frozen. That was the month he learned to tap the trees, pushing the brace with his chest and turning out long spiral worms of white maple. As it grew warmer, the black and grey bark took on shades of green and brown, soaking in the rain that turned the fields and hills into sheets of ice and, later, the roads a foot deep with mud and impassable. Even after the tops of the hills were bare and dried there was still snow three feet deep in the bush. Soft snow with a porous ice crust that broke easily and slid in cold fragments between boot and pantleg. In the spring too the creeks swelled with the melting snow and were triple their summer width, rushing down miniature waterfalls and fallen logs on the way to the lake, with cold still pockets where suckers and pickerel bred. At first with Richard and later
alone they would come to the creek at night with an old potato sack, spears and a flashlight. They would stand for a while in the late twilight, watching the colours of the sun through the boughs of the cedar and still bare elm trees. That was the part Erik liked best, that and the feeling of the water tugging at his boots, in the promise, he used to think, that if he could just find the hidden code he would be carried down the stream into the lake, and along the length of the lake to the sandy narrows where it was joined to another bigger lake that in turn was joined to a system of lakes and canals that could finally lead him to the St. Lawrence River and then to the Atlantic Ocean. But it was Brian who caught the most fish, spearing them quickly and tearing them, flapping and gleaming blood, off the barbed hook and depositing them first into the potato sack and later, when the sack was full, just piling them along the banks of the creek, sometimes not even bothering to snap their spines. When they got the fish home and cut them open the eggs would spill out by the thousands onto the newspaper, tiny black yolks encased in mucus and streaked with blood. And by the time they were finished cleaning the fish, the eggs and the blood and the water and the ink from the newspaper were all smeared and run together on the floor. Erik standing back while Brian kneeled over the fish with his sleeves rolled up, his hand plunged into one stomach after another, the scars from the fire still new and inflamed, running from his wrists to his elbows.

“Yes,” Miranda said, dismissing Erik’s whole conversation about the farm, as if he couldn’t possibly know what rules were operating here.

At noon, when Brian and Nancy came back from their shopping, Miranda had stood up and said that she and Erik would go to lunch. When they got to the car she stopped outside the door on the driver’s side, opened her purse and gave two dollars to Erik. “Meet me downstairs in an hour,” she said. She looked at Erik and flushed guiltily. “There are some things which are too important to talk about.” Then she climbed in the car and closed the door, hardly waiting for Erik to get out of the way before backing out of the parking space.

The second day, the old woman was still stationed beside the fire exit. She was wearing the same bright robe but her hair had been pinned up and contained in a blue net. She beckoned to Erik as he passed, and then reached one hand up and leaned it against his chest. She looked at him closely, this time her pupils seemed tiny and sharply focused, then turned her head and pushed him away. “I’m sorry,” Erik said. The hockey player was back. He lay on the bed, his foot encased in a white cast which was placed in a sling hung from the ceiling. There wasn’t enough room for everyone to sit around Richard’s bed, so Brian and Nancy sat beside the hockey player and talked about cars. Richard seemed better. There was only a temporary inconvenience. He spoke of hiring the Frank brothers after he got home, to help out for a few weeks. His arm was still motionless but he could use his hand to hold the corner of the magazine.

At noon Erik went outside. The morning, warm and still at the farm with the first shadows lying long and transparent across the fields, had been destroyed by the city, turned into a hot and dusty day that couldn’t be absorbed by the lake and now eddied about the brick and limestone towers of the city’s buildings — hospitals and prisons. He followed the directions Miranda had given him, walking to Rose Garnett’s past a playground that had been turned into a daycamp, and a factory where he could see loaves of processed bread passing by an open window. The house was on a corner near the lake: cold sharp limestone that had faced down the water and the cold winter winds without yielding or even softening its edges in the time that had passed since it was built, his mother reported to him, by a retired British army colonel who had been attracted to Kingston by its peace and propriety. The lot was closed in by a thin wrought-iron fence, which appeared as much an unnecessary afterthought as the few rosebushes that bloomed unconvincingly in the shadows of the house.

He had not imagined how she would look, but expected her to have become a hazy replication of his mother, a middle-aged woman fortified by money and religion. Instead she was as she had been, a plain light-haired woman who moved and spoke without ceremony, as if she were an assistant in someone’s
office and knew nothing of any God or the glib magics that can be dispensed in the afternoon. “What can I do for you?” she wanted to know, as if it wasn’t obvious that he must want something more dramatic than could be named, everything or nothing. She brought him tea and sat down beside him on the couch, her legs crossed under the long dress, the bones of her hands and arms slender and quick, fine like the tips of her hair and the shadows that defined her face. She looked at him again and he saw that she hadn’t really aged, only become polished and taut, living removed from the background of long grass and unpainted wood.

H
er flashlight was hooded with green plastic so that she came to him as a cyclops swimming through his dreamless sleep. He left his eyes open for her, knowing she would see he was awake and stop by his bed. It was only his second night, but already she was familiar to him, a part of his new world.

“Are you awake, Mr. Thomas?”

“Yes.” Her hands were pushing up the sleeve of his pyjamas, wrapping his arm in the soft rubber. She inserted a thermometer in his mouth: he had learned to sense the closeness of her hand and lift his tongue. The rubber tightened round his arm. Then the pressure held and was slowly released. The rubber was unwound. It left his arm feeling cold and exposed. She pulled down the pyjama sleeve and held his hand. Everything was simple and known. She took her hand away and withdrew the thermometer from his mouth. The light shone again as she wrote down his blood pressure in her notebook.

“Does your chest hurt, Mr. Thomas?”

“Just a bit,” he said. He didn’t know if he was lying. It wasn’t so bad that he wanted to scream. When it was that bad he asked for a pill. But he couldn’t imagine moving. He had become accustomed to it already, along with everything else. He remembered reading that intelligence is the ability to adapt to new situations. The boy in the next bed groaned and rolled over in his sleep. The nurse swung her flashlight. Then, satisfied that he was asleep, she sat down in the chair beside Richard
Thomas’s bed. Casually, as if he was not supposed to know that she was measuring his pulse, she took his wrist in her hand. “It’s still going,” Richard Thomas said.

“You’re doing very well,” the nurse said. She put his arm back on the covers and wrote down more figures. Then she took his hand again. The first night he had been awake the whole time, unable to sleep in this strange place, unsure whether this was all just a brief prelude to dying. The drugs and the illness combined to make him feel old and doting, foolish already. The nurse kept asking him questions, sitting by the bed and trying to make him talk. Now she was asking him about his children, his two sons. She said she had seen them when they were visiting that night. “Look alike too,” she had said, as if there could possibly be much resemblance between Erik, tall, thin and awkward, and Brian, stockier and dark, looking more like Richard Thomas than Erik did even though it was Brian who was adopted.

“They were always playing tricks on me,” Richard Thomas said, searching for whatever she would expect, trying as soon as he had said that to think of something they had never done together. “When they got old enough to pitch hay I used to work the farm on shares with them during the summer. One month I got the bill for tractor gas and it was a hundred and seventy-six dollars. You couldn’t burn that much gas if you ran the tractor twenty-four hours a day. A hundred and seventy-six dollars. I even bought a lock for the gas drums. What happened was that every night, while I was doing the milking, the boys would fill up my car so they could spend the night driving around the county. I was paying them too, good wages. Their mother knew the whole time but she didn’t say a thing. Carried the key around in my pocket after that. Those little buggers. They should have known I’d catch up with them.” He was running short of breath and he stopped. He had left out the most important part, but he didn’t know how to put it into words. It had something to do with the look on their faces the night they found he had locked the drums. The nurse had her fingers on his wrist again.

“You should try to sleep,” she said.

He couldn’t imagine moving. Pain had made everything false and instantly fitted him into a new history.

“It’s the sleeping pills,” the nurse said.

“Nothing else,” he said. The sentence dissolved his present, and left him standing on a Toronto street corner with Miranda, declaiming with a sweeping gesture that included the whole city, the lake which had brought it into being as a one-night stop-over for weary canoeists. Miranda took his outstretched hand and held it to her mouth. She ran her tongue along the tips of his fingers and nibbled gently at his veins.

“It’s the sleeping pills,” the nurse said. “It takes a while to get used to them. Sometimes, when I change shifts, I take one the first night.”

“The day my father died I was in town, visiting him. He asked me to go to the store, to get some soup. When I came back he was dead. The doctor said he’d had a heart attack. It wouldn’t have mattered if he’d been there, he said. There was nothing to be done. Ripped his chest right apart.”

“My mother died the same way,” the nurse said. “She was eighty-six years old and had gone senile. She wouldn’t walk to the bathroom anymore. She did it on the bed and then crawled around in it, on all fours, playing with it. I have some pills at home and if I ever start to get like that I’ll know what to do. I guess she was happy though.”

“They were always trying to sneak one over on me,” said Richard. “One time we planted two acres of tomatoes, one for me and one for them. The night before we picked them, it rained so hard they were all nice and clean. Worked all day putting them into wooden crates to take to the cannery. At the end of the day, we’d picked it all, and I noticed that they had more crates than I did. Little buggers, when I wasn’t looking they were stealing my tomatoes. I didn’t say anything though, until I’d made them load their share into the truck.”

“You see?” Erik had said. He was standing beside the truck and had just passed the last crate up to Brian. “I told you he’d figure it out if we took too many.” For his answer Brian jumped onto Erik from the tailgate and they both went sprawling in the dust. There was a moment: they were rolling over on the ground wrestling when suddenly Erik was on top of Brian with his
hands around his neck. “I could kill you,” Erik whispered. He was thirteen and Brian was fourteen. They had long ago traded their toy pistols for real .22’s and boxes of brass bullets.

“I dare you,” Brian said. He stopped resisting, stretched his long scarred arms out on the ground, and smiled confidently up at Erik. Erik hesitated; this was unexpected. The scars on Brian’s arms showed pink through the dust. Three scars: one on each arm and one on his left cheek, a pink triangle. He could remember when they had brought Brian home, his arms bandaged and the burn on his face bright red, like fire. “Chickenshit,” Brian shouted, clapping his hands into Erik’s face.