The Disinherited (8 page)

“I had a patient,” the nurse was saying, “who thought he was a monkey. That was when I was working out. You wouldn’t believe who his family was, they lived in one of those big stone houses on King Street, and kept him locked up on the third floor. He wouldn’t eat anything except bananas and red river cereal. It was all one big room and he had it done up like a zoo, with wooden huts and sawdust on the floor. He was very clean; he didn’t shave of course but he kept his nails short. His favourite place was a little stool in the corner. He’d crouch on it all day, making funny noises. There wasn’t anything wrong with him either. I guess he made them nervous and they wanted someone to keep him company. I wouldn’t work at night though and that’s the worst when you’re alone.” She rubbed his hand sympathetically. “My husband was a baker at the penitentiary. He had to get up in the middle of the night to go there and start the bread. Then he’d come home at noon and sleep. After a while he started going earlier, playing poker with the guards I guess, so for the last five years I hardly ever saw him. I moved to my mother’s: it was a week before he even knew I was gone. One Sunday he asked me to come back but I wouldn’t. Said I’d rather be alone in my
own
bed if it came to that. I never saw such a man for eating doughnuts.”

Richard had gone to Toronto to visit Erik once. He hardly recognized the city, it had over-run its old perimeters and gutted itself of most of its trees. The house he had lived in, a three
story redbrick house with an always freshly-painted verandah, had been torn down to make way for a zoology building. When Richard Thomas went to university he was older than most of the other students. There had been two winters when it snowed too much for him to be able to get to school. He had spent them with his father, Simon Thomas, on the other end of a bucksaw, taking firewood out of the elm swamp. And the year after he finished high school his mother had been very sick, so he had stayed home that year too. He was to be a lawyer but first, Simon said, knowing but not knowing what it meant, he was to become a gentleman. They studied the university calendar with the same care as the Eaton’s catalogue, trying to familiarize themselves with the whole thing before making a selection: finally history and philosophy were selected as those subjects most conducive to gentility.

“It’s different when you’re young,” the nurse said. “It hurts but you know it’s going to go away. My mother used to say that the grass comes up green every spring. That was before she went strange. She didn’t want me to go back to him, either. She said he was playing around up at the hotel. And here I’d thought he was just playing cards.” She put her hand around Richard Thomas’s wrist again. He could feel her fingers sliding around, dissatisfied with his pulse. “I guess most men are just animals. Even with the monkey-man I didn’t dare turn my back: he was so
fast
, I don’t think there was anything wrong with him at all.”

He imagined his body was divided into zones, like a butcher’s diagram of a cow. But there were only two kinds of zones, pain and numbness, and gradually the pain was migrating through the dotted lines, occupying new territory. His chest was still sore: from shoulder to shoulder and down to the bowl of his stomach. His rib-cage felt like it had been shaken and rattled by a steam drill. His left hip, for no reason at all, seared every time he moved. Perhaps he had been limping on the way home, had somehow irritated a nerve. His legs and arms hardly seemed to exist. He felt the nurse’s touch but from a great distance: he might have been watching it on television. As always when he had a fever, he was strangely aware of the points of connection
between his hair and his scalp. The movement seemed to be downwards. The pain would infiltrate his right hip and then continue down into his genitals and legs. The only place finally exempt would be his left arm. He had tried to move it earlier, for the doctor, and had barely been able to lift it off the bed.

She was speaking again but he couldn’t hear individual words. Her voice jumped and faded, turned harsh and grating, then was just a thin background noise. She was holding a glass of water to his mouth. He could feel the rim cold against his lip. He stuck out his tongue for the pill, dry and chalky, then let his jaw relax so it could be poured down him. He opened his eyes and saw earth banked up on either side of him. There was a slit of light at the top and as he watched it widened into a rectangle of sky with bodies stretching far away from the line where the earth met the air.

“Doesn’t he look nice,” a voice said. Other voices murmured; they bent down to examine him and dark round patches blocked the grey light. They had folded his hands across his stomach, stretching his fingers wide apart so they could be meshed together like a child in prayer.

“Doesn’t he look nice,” Miranda said again. She was dressed in a dark blue suit and stood almost leaning against Richard, her gloved hand squeezing his elbow, supporting herself as they stood at the end of the grave, facing the minister who was mumbling out his words, loud but unarticulated, across the open grave towards them. The sky was grey-yellow, so thick with cloud that none stood out singly.

Richard and Miranda had been placed at the head of the grave as if they were the honoured guests at a dinner, though, as Richard’s father had bitterly pointed out, he had already provided his tithes to God. It was a constant thing with him after his wife died, and when he came to eat he always insisted on saying Grace.

“Oh Lord,” Simon would intone in his dry voice, “accept the homage of us Your humble servants for You have given us this earth that we may feed and love You.” He would laugh selfconsciously and rub his palms together, looking at Richard and
Miranda to see if they might have guessed that everything was not as it should be. Then he would draw his lips back from his teeth — those that remained, since he refused to go to a dentist or get false teeth having said he was done with vanity and pride — and waggle his tongue in anticipation of Miranda’s cooking which, though he never would have admitted it, was the bribe necessary to bring him out to the farm.

The first person to cry at Simon Thomas’s funeral was the housekeeper he had lived with after he moved to town. No one dared say anything against her while he was alive, but now she regarded those at the funeral with pure terror and was down on her knees weeping hysterically. All else stood dry and bored, staring down into the blank grave. They were in that corner of the cemetery reserved for their own family. There was a story that his father’s father, the first Richard Thomas, had not wanted to use the cemetery at all, but had wanted to be buried in the apple orchard behind the house. But his wife had been religious, so he had finally agreed to be buried in the church’s cemetery on the condition that he could plant an apple tree near where his grave was to be. This was what happened, despite the objections that the roots might eventually disturb some insensible skeleton.

Simon Thomas had died in early December, before there was much snow, but after the ground was frozen too hard to dig. So they had saved his body until spring. The grass was thin and lemon green, and the tree, though crippled, turned in on itself and dense with wild grape vines and bittersweet, still produced a few new leaves in spring, each one small and slick-surfaced, new leaves of an old tree. Because of the age of the corpse, they had immediately covered the coffin with a layer of dirt and stones. But the imagined odour made its presence felt. All faced the grave with hypocritical solemnity as the minister worked himself towards the ultimate peroration, the consecration yeast that would make the soul levitate from what remained and begin its long journey in whatever direction God saw fit. The presence of the housekeeper made it apparent that the odds were long, but the minister, perhaps inspired by the difficulty of the case, or perhaps simply remembering certain transgressions that were
known to several of those clustered about this sunken altar, gave it his valiant best. His jaw was long and scarred with cuts where the skin between razor and bone had been too thin to resist his mirrorless efforts, and his eyes, sunk into deep-boned sockets, were so large, they appeared to bulge out of his face like those of an underwater animal.

It was a warm and almost balmy day, though the cemetery made the air seem still. Running along one edge of it was the old unused railway track that had been constructed at the turn of the century to take out white pine and bring in dry goods and tourists. The line had run south to a small town twenty miles east of Kingston, and Simon Thomas had gone on the train, once a year, to visit his half-brother Frederick. In those days the roads had not been very good. But as they were improved and the area was logged out, the train became smaller and emptier with each yearly visit to the hospital. Frederick had died long before the run was discontinued.

Miranda’s hand was tight and damp against Richard’s arm. He looked down and saw that she was crying. She and now everyone else were snuffling and crying over old Simon Thomas who had ended his overlong life living common-law with a woman who couldn’t cook. The minister’s voice had risen and cracked open. He had given up all pretence of words and now moaned and howled, his bulbous eyes wide open and vacant, swaying back and forth at the head of the grave. His throat shook with muscle spasms. He had thrown the book in the grave and had his arms stretched wide, his great scarecrow hands fluttering against the yellow-grey sky, calling for the day of judgment to begin, right now, that the measure of this man’s sins might be taken and forgiven. All had joined the widowed housekeeper and were on their knees, scraping dirt and stones into the grave, the cemetery closing in behind and threatening to enclose them all. Only Richard stood. And as he watched, cold and dispassionate, he could feel the weight of the earth on his body, the moist granules lying on him like a cool and porous blanket that surrounded him but also flowed through him, a medium he could move in if he wanted by sifting and swallowing, using his body to create space like a worm. “Yes,
swallow,” Simon Thomas had told him, “the earth can swallow you like no woman.” And went on to tell about a relative who had come to live on the farm of the first Richard Thomas, to help with the work and escape the damp British winters. “He was a poet,” Simon Thomas told him, showing the book that had been privately printed in England, the leather binding still supple but the sonnets stiff and dead on the pages, birds and flowers shot down in full flight. “They say he was all right the first winter. They kept him inside mostly, trying to get him used to the cold.

“Even when he came he wasn’t too young, in his thirties, and they say he was thin and stooped too; looked the part. In the spring they started him off easy, working in the garden and other woman’s chores. They say he was always walking about with a notebook, writing things down and making lists. And of course he had read something about the science of agriculture because he always had lots of good advice for my father. It seems he had thought we would have an estate, with servants and riding stables, and whatever he might like. Ten kinds of wine and a fancy cook. So that’s the way he lived anyway. In the winter, every night after he helped with the supper dishes, he would put on a red jacket, the only decent piece of cloth that he had, and sit by the stove, smoking a pipe and reading aloud. And in the summer he would go for a walk or maybe write a letter home to someone saying what a good life he was living.”

The story about the poet had been one of Simon’s axioms of universal behaviour. He told it only a few times, each time in righteous detail. After that he referred to it when necessary, the point already having been made.

The farm had first been settled by Richard Thomas’s grandfather, Richard S. Thomas, the middle initial standing for Simon. That is what he called his first son: Simon. This first Richard Thomas had built the house, married, built three barns, cleared some fields. When he was too old to work, he passed the farm to Simon, who, in turn, married and had children. The first child was male and named Richard, after the grandfather.

“The farm was different then than now,” Simon Thomas would say — it was important to know that this physical universe
was not a constant but an artifact that could only be bought with time and blood — “and near the crest of the hayfield behind the barn was an old willow tree.” Despite the story about the poet, Simon Thomas also smoked a pipe. He refused to carry one on his person but had them scattered all over the house and barns. In his front pocket there was always a package of cigars, but if he was inside or even near any of his outside hiding places for them, a pipe would materialize as he talked, accompanied by a yellow oilcloth pouch and a box of wooden matches. After mentioning the willow tree, he would take his pipe and slide the stem back and forth in his mouth, lean away on one foot, and look carefully at Richard: “Willow trees are pretty but they don’t last long.” When Richard had come back from the store that day he found that his father had died clutching his pipe. He had pried it out of Simon’s fingers, afraid they might snap, and carried it with him from that time until the day of the funeral, undecided whether to keep it or throw it into the grave after him.

“When the poet first came here he was afraid of almost everything that was alive. He would come running from the garden because he had been bitten by a few mosquitoes. And he never wanted to go swimming or even walk in his bare feet for fear of the snakes. He showed us a book he had gotten in England that had a picture of a ten-foot water snake swimming in a lake, its neck three feet out of the water and a head like a heron.”

And it was on the day of Simon’s funeral that Katherine Malone, pushing away the time that had grown between them in layers first soft but then impenetrable and marbled with the ways they had turned from each other so that their memories had become mazes wound and exploded to conceal everything but the nods and false annual jokes, came to stand with him. Her hand, as it always had, remembering ten years by touch, curved within and around his, the fingers long and seeking. While Peter Malone, her husband, was bent down far over the grave, his head gone from sight and his coat slid up past his waist carrying his white shirt with it and showing a wide curved roll of fat where his belt bit into his back. “It took me by surprise,” she said. “Even
though. It doesn’t seem so long since he came to see me.” Not riding in a car, which he didn’t have, or even with a team and cutter, though he went near there every day with the milk, but walking because, Simon said, it was too late for the horses, walking three miles to the big old house where she lived alone that winter and climbing the steep unploughed drive that was several feet deep in snow and had no marks except the soft shallow dents where Richard had walked hours before and then, even though the lights were out, hammering on the door without stopping until finally Katherine, knowing who it was, had gotten out of bed and lit a lamp. At first he refused to speak and just paced about the kitchen belligerently as if he expected to find the evidence in traces of food. “Mostly he liked to have a secret place to come to. He used to bring me presents of food and sometimes cloth. The other thing was so fast. His skin was pure white and dry, crinkled like parchment. He used to sit in the wicker chair near the stove and tell me how he’d thought of me since the last time he came, it wasn’t very often, and you could see it meant so much to him. It was only because I was young, having me was that for him and I didn’t mind it so, I guess I let it go too long, until that night.”