The Disinherited (13 page)

Later, when he died, Pat Frank and his brother would be asked to carry his coffin from the wagon to the graveyard, to lay him in the ground as if his body still existed and it was finally most important that Richard Thomas be placed in this perspective:

They would carry him to the grave just as automatically as the ground carries dead leaves, or, slaves their master. Richard Thomas would be the last name on that list. Even for his grave they would have to cut away the roots of the apple tree, Miranda would be squeezed in beside him and the plot would be full,
ready to have everything about it forgotten except the names and numbers — statistics to tell how many years each had achieved. “The old ones always go to heaven,” Simon Thomas used to say. Every week after dinner he would lean back in his chair and smoke a cigar with his coffee. He had acquired a striped vest and a pocket watch and, with the thumb of one hand hooked into the watch-pocket and the other busy with the cigar, he would recite his banalities — purposely whistling through the gaps in his teeth Miranda pointed out — knowing that Richard was silent by habit and Miranda frozen by duty. “The old ones go to heaven because sinners all die young, drained by their excesses.” He had told Miranda the story of the poet, and often when he came to supper he would bring one of the diaries with him, reading from it to verify his points as he talked. And what the diary left untold, Simon filled in with an inseparable mixture of his own fabrications and those told to him by his father or, more likely, Frederick Thomas, his half-brother. “After the birth of Frederick,” Simon Thomas said, “the poet began to fall apart. He wanted to follow his son around all the time, because he thought that he must be holy in some way and was waiting for a sign. Frederick was much older than me, but they say that he was strange as a baby, never speaking or crying but only looking out the window as if he too were waiting. The poet was less patient than the child. One day he ran away, taking the child with him. He was two years old then and they didn’t come back for a full year.” And because of a certain incident involving the poet, it was a custom that no member of the Thomas family would touch the coffin of one of their deceased.

These nights in the hospital, Richard Thomas’s sleep was always transparent. The nurse would come into the room and sit with him, his wrist in her hand, her fingers resting lightly like a tollgate on his blood. And when she was sitting there, she talked, talked without stopping, talked endless careless rivers of disorganized words, her voice always at that soft and pulling level that could penetrate his sleep but wouldn’t wake him, long flat stories about people who died and people who refused to die, stories that went nowhere but hung with him on the
edge, making him feel at times that she was allied with Miranda, forcing him to make a choice where there was none, telling him there was something where he thought there was nothing, or just talking and talking endlessly because he was lying still and helpless and she had him as a perfect audience, a living breathing immovable being whose every brain cell could store and record her perfect story, and, if she could make him survive (what kind of audience is it that dies half-way through the performance?) it would somehow justify not only her words, which even she knew were beyond any possible redemption or even forgiveness, but all the ridiculous deaths and near-drownings, misunderstandings and terrible jokes, long horrible nights and sunless days, all the events and years that made up the currency of what she was telling him and, it began to occur to him, made up the inner lives of the people who had passed through her hands. Sometimes it seemed that she was aware of this, of the way she had presented two generations of citizenry as a mass of fears and diseases, last nights and hypochondria, and then she would tell of someone else, someone who, as she put it, came back from the sickbed, like a football player with two broken wrists or the broken-footed hockey player whose father came to visit him every day when he was there and inspired him with true-life tales of athletes who had recovered from off-season surgery, athletes who had survived divorces, car crashes, cancer, broken limbs, arthritis, temporary paralysis, fear of airplanes, almost every affliction and handicap known to man, including even jail sentences, only to come back, like the deaf pianist Beethoven, twice as loud and twice as good as ever.

“Sure,” the hockey player’s father said, “it hurts. I know it hurts. I broke my arm once and it hurt for two weeks.” And he told his son about a basketball player who had lost his wife and two children in a car accident, (as well as breaking his own back and not being able to collect on his insurance policy) and yet, despite everything, this basketball player had come out of his coma and struggled for three years until finally he made it back on the team, married the coach’s wife, and won the league scoring championship. “Of course, you understand,” the father
said, “he wasn’t as fast as he used to be.”

The fear came and went but it was already a permanent presence, like the sudden obscure shadows or the feeling, as he drifted to sleep at night, that there was something about the quality of the sleep, about the way he was being pulled, that had to do with being tired but not with any cycle. And although it seemed that he slept because he was tired, the sleeping left him tired too, not because of the nurse who talked to him all the nights or even the drugs, but because somewhere he had been cut off from the sources of renewal. He shaved now with an electric razor that Miranda had given him, a day nurse holding the mirror for him, and when he looked at his face in the glass he kept seeing it as he had seen it that morning, the tired face of an old man. Now even the veneer of sunburn had gone and he was simply pale and veined, his eyes red-rimmed and bloodshot. But looking at his face, finding it old, he could never quite see death in it, or the need for death. On that subject it still seemed to be maintaining a curious neutrality, wondering with the rest of him how he had survived the walk back from the lake, curious to know if there had been some inner reason for all that struggle or whether it was just the instinctive flapping of a body already severed from life.

Sometimes, when he was lying curled into himself in the bed with the lights out, feeling large and fat in this hospital bed which was too narrow for him and had no other body to slide into for warmth so that he was made to know they had placed him on the bed like a large lump on a high ledge, always in danger of sliding off if he kicked or jumped in his sleep, sometimes when he had finally accommodated his mind to his body’s precarious position, it would strike him that the darkness when he closed his eyes would one time be the darkness of death, that it would come over him as a veil and he would never see anything again. And knew that even if behind that veil he was still struggling to see and live, his countenance and body would still be those of a dead man; the nurse would stop talking and they would take him away, embalm him, bury him, cry over him, forget him, all while he was frantically trying to escape. The fear. He envied Simon his all-at-once death, quick and easy in
the rocking chair. Of his family only Frederick had died in a hospital, like him, and his death had occurred before his body stopped functioning, when they had started to give him so many drugs that he was always in a stupor, couldn’t hear and could hardly talk. In the dark he could draw the sheet over his head; like thus it would be. So. Catching himself at what he was doing, coddling himself like a senile old man, such a baby, only sixty-seven years old and already out of juice; or afraid to live. He could remember his grandfather Richard Thomas who, at eighty, still walked stiff and straight, carrying his two years in the army with him all his life because, as he told Richard, “A man can’t believe in himself if he can’t believe in the Queen.” He had lived to be eighty-three years old and, Simon Thomas said,
his
grandfather, Richard Thomas’s father, had lived to be an equal age.

“Any Thomas can live for a long time,” Simon said, “as long as he stays away from tobacco and women.” He himself, of course, had chosen the other route, and in addition to living with his housekeeper, he had been known to make a nuisance of himself at every opportunity. Simon Thomas and his father had been wiry men, and, as he lay in bed comparing his own longevity with theirs, Richard tried to imagine what it would be like to weigh fifty pounds less. The doctors had him on a diet now, but it wasn’t the same, lying in bed, imagining the muscles being starved while the fat remained, as it might have been to lose the weight while he was working. The association of fat with age was so complete it was impossible to conceive of being old and still thin; the matador, he thought, would age like that, staying thin and becoming sinewy and pot-bellied as he grew older, his stomach sticking out as his chest collapsed, like the dessicated history professor he had had, a gentle old man who wore a yellow-checkered waistcoat beneath his pinstripe. Men like the matador, the professor and Simon Thomas (who, though he said he was beyond vanity, was disgusting to behold eating, always having to reach into his mouth with his fingers and poke the food so that it could be reached by all his best teeth simultaneously) seemed to Richard to be almost a different species, having concentrated bulk in some areas of their lives
but never on their own actual persons, of their own actual flesh; and so he would say, when Miranda teased him about getting fat, that he was not afraid to be a man of substance. In fact, he felt himself, by not having limited his size, to have somehow experienced motherhood, the unlimited rule of flesh which had nothing to do with diapers or training but was strictly a quantitative problem and could be measured by the bulk that was fed and cared for, that had to be moved if anything was to move. Of the thin men he knew, only Pat Frank seemed to have any idea of what it was like for him, and he, he admitted himself, experienced the world’s transportation problems through his liver which had been constantly maligned for most of his life.

He pushed himself up into a sitting position. With his eyes closed he might be back at the farm, sitting in his own bed. From there, if the outside light were on, he would be able to see the maple tree and the tin roof of the summer kitchen. And he would be able to hear the wind threatening the leaves and branches, sweeping through the long grass of the spring pasture. The hospital was entirely surrounded by concrete. Though the lake was visible from the lounge, he was, in his room, cut off from all outside noises except the sounds of wet car tires when it was raining and the nightly uncertain movements of wind through the courtyard. When he opened his eyes, these nights, there was often nothing at all; the whole world disappeared into the dark, a mistake, stopped in a trance, the way Simon used to sometimes find him, sitting in the barn or on the ground somewhere, staring off into space. And when he came across him like that, Simon would shake him awake, accuse him of being a slug, feeling sorry for himself. Miranda too: she would come up behind him and kiss him on the neck. “It’s not so bad,” she would say.

“No,” Richard would agree, “it’s not. I’m just thinking.”

As Simon described his own activity when he sat on his porch in town, he in his armchair and Richard in an old straight-backed wooden chair wired together, drinking the strange berry wine that old Mark Frank used to bring to Simon Thomas every week as payment for some old forgotten favour.

“You know,” Simon said, about to divulge the product of all this cogitation, “I remember every woman I’ve ever had.” He spoke in his usual self-righteous way, as if he was proudly reciting his prayers. “And in my opinion,” he smacked his lips, “the best time to have a woman is in the morning, in winter, before or after the milking, it doesn’t matter.” Richard’s mother hadn’t died until the winter before he went to university, but for the decade leading up to that she had been sick most of the time. During those years it had been necessary to have a woman at the farm to help with the cooking and the chores and, in the winters, when there were no city relations or schoolgirls to spare, Simon had an arrangement with Katherine’s parents, Henry and Elizabeth Beckwith who were first generation Scots and ran the school from the time Simon got married to the day it burned down during spelling. In the morning, in winter, the floors would be so cold that they would snap instead of creak, sounding like frozen branches underfoot when Simon got up to tend the fire, or go from Katherine’s room back to his wife. “The first woman I ever had,” Simon said, “or perhaps she had me — a gentleman must know the meaning of the difference — with the exception of your mother, God rest her soul for she was more interested in His world even when she was alive — was not in the barn like so many of the rabble that populate these parts, but in the carriage house of a bishop.” Although it was not the local custom to boast of chastity, Simon Thomas was considered to be somewhat exceptionally descriptive in his talk, especially at community gatherings where many of the apparent subjects of his anecdotes were present, along with their husbands. But no one ever got angry or even believed him, except for Peter Malone who threatened to set fire to Simon Thomas’s house if he was ever caught talking to Katherine again. Katherine Malone, born Katherine Beckwith. Who entered their life when Leah Thomas, Simon’s wife, got sick. And stayed between Richard and Simon like a fulcrum, the currents between them to be measured in her terms, balanced thin as Simon’s knife.

Brian came almost every day. “How’s the farm?” Richard would demand. Or ask after a particular cow that was due. Brian would
talk to him in monosyllables, answering questions, asking questions. And when Erik and Brian were there together Richard could see how they were defeated by each other, nothing between them except automatic and sterile violence.

“It’s not so bad,” Miranda said.

“No.”

“The doctor says that in another week or two you should be able to come home. We’ll put the bed downstairs, in the living-room, so you’ll be able to walk to the bathroom.”