The Disinherited (14 page)

And later, the nurse prepared him too. “When you go home,” she said, “it’s important to remember that there are people taking care of you, so you should try to make it as easy as possible for them. Now the monkey-man I was telling you about, for instance. You would have thought he would be just a terrible problem, what with hardly any toilet training and he wouldn’t even speak most of the time. But somehow he seemed to know what a nuisance he was and made it easy on me. Whenever he wanted something to eat he had a way of signalling to me, he was so cute, he liked to get on his knees and wave his arse, like a dog begging I guess, though I never saw a dog beg like that, and if he wanted to be changed or to have something else, he always had a way of telling me — and not at a time when I was busy. I mean sick people often get selfish you know and they forget that other people have a problem looking after them. My husband when he was sick was absolutely impossible; all he wanted to do all day was eat and get me in bed with him, you would have thought it was some kind of special holiday him bothering me like that. Better than when he was working anyway. But don’t you believe that a sick person is just a burden, because they’re not. You take my cousin, her youngest has cerebral palsy and can’t hardly walk or do anything but he’s happy all the time and never complains and I’ll tell you that it’s a lesson to everyone else just to see that child. It even started them going to church again and I didn’t think anything would ever start that, especially after Carrie found out, she’s my cousin, that Herbert the old bugger had been going to the same prostitute every week for four years and, what really made her angry, meeting her in front of the Dominion store
every time so all her friends had known it right from the beginning and never said a thing. Not that Carrie couldn’t make it uncomfortable for
them
.

“Now the best thing would be to put the bed on the same floor as the bathroom. At first you’ll be able to go to the bathroom by yourself and there’s no use in falling down the stairs if you don’t have to. I guess the most important thing is to have the right attitude. Now my mother didn’t have the right attitude at all. Once she started making her mess in her own bed, well, I guess she was senile or didn’t have anything else to play with though, to tell the truth, I’ve never told this to anyone and it sounds dumb but especially after everything else I’ve said, but, anyway, this is the one thing I’d rather you never told anyone, cross your heart, anyway my mother got so I didn’t know what to do and one day I started to go out and buy her toys, like a baby. I mean if a person is just going to act like a baby then that’s the way to treat them. Just like the monkey-man who acted like a monkey. Anyway, I went to the five and dime and I bought my mother some rattles with polka dots on them and some of those toy cars with little steering wheels and even, it was what she liked best, a plastic boat for the bathtub that had a little hole in it so that when you squeezed it, water squirted out. I used to put her in the bath and let her play there for hours, she never seemed to get tired of it. There were some who said she would have been easier to handle if I had given her tranquillizers but Lord knows I robbed the hospital blind for drugs as it was, I mean her at home and me being away so much the best thing was to let her sleep while I wasn’t there otherwise it would just get her upset.

“I guess I complain about it a lot but we really had good times together too. I’d make us a picnic supper and spread it out on the floor on a blanket and we’d both sit there and eat and pretend it was summer. I’d turn on the radio too so we could hear the concerts; my mother loved listening to the Sunday opera and she always liked to sing right along, she had such a good voice and said she was always the best singer in the convent though I’m sure she lied about that just like everything else, and then maybe we’d have a drink or two, and go to sleep
early. She got so cute when she was drunk, I’ll say that for her, she even wanted to dance while she was singing but of course I didn’t let her, that wouldn’t have been responsible, I mean she could have broken a hip or something and then I would have had to put her in hospital and, you know, they didn’t even have insurance in those days; even with keeping her at home and stealing everything I could from the hospital it was costing me a fortune.”

In the fall and winter, while school was on and it was cold, Simon officially shared his wife’s room, keeping her warm, as he would say, but really just keeping himself warm by being that much closer to Katherine’s bed. But in the spring and summer, when Katherine lived at her own house, Simon would sleep downstairs on the sofa. In those seasons Richard remembered his mother’s room as surpassing the kitchen as a source of odours, strange pseudo-alcoholic vapours and camphors being exuded from the rows of bottles she kept on the floor by her bed, each bottle different, each one with its own long list of benefits and testimonials, pictures of frock-coated doctors or relieved patients framed and brown-toned on each label, the entire collection telling its own separate story of sickness converted to money. And in the summer, once the roads were passable, Simon would go into town every afternoon that it rained. He would take, alternatively, Richard or Richard’s brother Steven, one being left at home to be with his wife, Leah Thomas,
Lee-aah
all the neighbours called her when they enquired after her health — seldom visiting her, as if her stint of teaching school had set her apart from the rest of the community and now, in punishment for having corrected the grammar and manners of those she taught, she deserved to be left alone to suffer in her particular grammarian’s purgatory.

When it was his turn to stay at home, Richard would help his father and brother hitch the horses to the wagon and, dreading those afternoons which seemed to have an existence entirely apart from any other aspect of his life, ride with them from the barnyard to the end of the driveway, always looking up and down the road as they came to it, in the impossible hope that some neighbour would just chance along, in the rain, wanting to visit
his mother so that he would be sprung free for the afternoon. When they came to the road, he would jump off the wagon and walk back slowly, protected from the rain by the huge maple trees that the poet and his grandfather Richard Thomas had planted together, lining the drive on either side as a suitable prelude to the mansion that was supposed to have replaced the original house, which, with its limestone walls and winecellars, marked the prosperity of this farm. But the original house still stood, buttressed and augmented, and the maple trees were themselves the main attraction, growing huge and healthy in the clay loam soil and more renowned for their yearly run of sap than for the farm which they announced. The two rows of trees had stretched and touched in the middle, so he could walk back along this protected line, following the small streams and ponds that were eroded into the drive, trying to fit his feet into the sand so the varying textures of wet and dry would match his soles exactly, looking for places where the waters had been diverted by the imprints of the horses’ hooves or the long deep cuts of the wagon wheels, which he followed in turn, squeezing and narrowing his feet so he could walk in the cold water like a tight-rope artist. And when he came to the end of the trees he would run past the house into the yard and then the barn, always with the excuse to himself that there was a bridle or harness that had been dropped and must be returned to its nail, that it was time for him to shovel the shit out of the horsebarn. Knowing that his mother was already aware of this avoidance, that he would have to list his rainy-day duties for her when he finally went upstairs. So he would hang up the harness and throw a few shovelfulls out into the hayfield, through the tiny window sized for a small pitchfork that was deemed to be the ultimate weapon for sheepshit in 1914 and then, in what seemed to be the most horrible moment of those wet afternoons, go to the door of the barn and stand there, leaning on the shovel and looking towards the house, imagining that Simon and his father would never come back and that somehow the farm would be suddenly his to take care of, all the details and the work suddenly bequeathed to him along with his mother. With the rain protecting him in long beaded chains he could see her window, and hear again Simon speaking to him when he had first stood
there, resting after helping with the horses; his back snugged into the frame and his eyes blinking in the new outside light, everything re-seen after working with Simon in the half-darkness: Simon, talking while he worked, telling him of the poet who had helped to build the barn and then decided to live in it, all one winter with his child, for the child was holy and Jesus too had walked among sheep.

The barn had belonged to the poet because he had helped Richard S. Thomas to build it and then he had lived in it. And it belonged to his child Frederick Thomas because the child too had lived in it and the poet wanted to share it with him. And after it belonged to the poet, William Thomas, and his son, Frederick Thomas, it belonged to Simon Thomas. He kept it for himself and then he tore out the stanchions and pens that had been placed there for sheep and took out the old box stove and chimney that the poet had put there for himself — and the sheep and the ducks and chickens and rabbits and sick birds and snakes and foxes and even groundhogs that he had befriended and taken into the barn with him for the education of the imbecile Frederick Thomas — and then for two years left it empty. At the end of that two years, an old barn near the maple bush that had been used for storing the horse-drawn grain harvester (which still existed like a huge and rusted side-saddle windmill in another barn that was built long after but now itself threatened to collapse) was burned down during threshing and Simon decided to convert half the poet’s barn into a machine shed. So he put a wall down the middle and tore out half the west side of the barn and then, in the remaining closed-in half, constructed stalls and put in a cement floor so that the horses and their machines could be housed together in an absolutely modern manner. Because the poet and Richard Thomas had perhaps more than a few points of conflict, they had taken their time constructing this barn, each attempting to outdo the other in care and permanence, so this barn that was once the poet’s house and was later the first building that Simon dared to change to his own needs, still stood, supported vertically and horizontally by long hand-squared beams which were fastened together with wooden pegs, having survived generations of
other barns without any sign of crack or rot.

In this way it became known that the barn was the wedge to ownership of the farm just as once the cleared field had been that wedge. And it was therefore understood that Simon intended that the farm be passed to Richard because that particular barn was Richard’s responsibility: every night in the winter he would have to go out and feed the horses and put down fresh straw for them, and in the summer he was made to stand in the loft of the barn and supervise the storing of the hay. And after the hay was in the barn, Simon would make him go up to the loft every day and rummage in the hay, checking for dampness and heat, poking in a drugstore thermometer tied to a long stick. In the rain, the barn was almost black: the windows were always dirty with bits of straw and manure, and the doors, swollen with moisture, refused to open more than part way. But after the first winter the barn was his, the proportions and sense of space entirely familiar and he could move in it equally adept in light or dark.

Standing in the doorway with his hand on the wooden latch, he could see his mother’s window through the curtain of rain and know that she would be sitting up in her bed, her back supported by two red satin cushions which she had been given when she retired from teaching to marry Simon, sensing his presence and waiting for him. Then, feeling like a puppet on the end of a string, he would move slowly towards the house, dragging himself through the rain, his stomach in revolt against the fact that it was possible to grow old and sick. And Richard, now in his hospital bed and looking out into the courtyard with its wet cement surfaces and lights, given haloes by the rain, was reminded again that he could be forced to choose — or see himself in that same bed, the lifeline to the trailer reversed, the days spent listening to Miranda’s footsteps in the house, the minutes of presence that would be calculated as what was necessary until she too got sick, and they could be moved into a home, like Frederick Thomas, a place where they would be issued a permanent dressing gown and given a few flowers to tend, man become boy again. And even when Richard Thomas had gotten to the house, he had stayed outside
in the rain, standing under the maple tree that was then sixty years younger and straighter, barely reaching over the summer kitchen to the top of the house, its leaves coming out each spring before any other of the older trees that lined the drive, snapping out of their buds like rifle shots green and turgid, bursting with eagerness to get on with the summer but still unable to match or even evoke the massive spreads that the older trees would finally achieve, their leaves and branches spread in ponderous arches vulnerable to August storms so that each year they would lose limbs to lightning and wind. He would stay outside in the rain, leaning against the wall of the summer kitchen or sitting on the steps of the old milking platform that had been converted to a laundry stoop, rather than go inside and face his mother alone, the look she could give him of absolute need and longing as if she knew the power that her sickness had over him, the way she possessed him entirely by her total plea.

In her presence he felt her need enter his veins and arteries like a foreign army. Then she would speak, and her voice, soft and not asking anything but only suggesting by its every intonation and nuance, by its silences and the way it moved through the vowels like a general inspecting the dead in the field, that it had exactly surrounded what it didn’t do, avoided asking anything at all but only laid siege to the enemy in this honourable and gaudy silence that was strewn between them in broken and evoked colours; her voice terrified him so that he was routed — disorganized, broken apart and stampeded into an unruly retreat to the past which was, between them, a long chain of unconnected resentments and needs, all of them to his mind trivial and insufficient to explain the way she could move her voice within him at will.