The Disinherited (17 page)

Richard would come over on Simon’s errands and stay to
listen to the radio, sent, Simon said, because he wanted to be sure that she wasn’t entertaining anyone else. But he must have known what would happen with Richard, uncomfortable at first and even refusing to dance but only wanting to sit in the kitchen until enough time had gone by — seventeen already and already she could see the outlines of the life he would have: square and durable but not too heavy, muscled and strong like any farmer but his mouth and lips uncertain, like a baby who has been kept too close to his mother and now refuses her, to spite himself. His lips and eyes betray the body and with Simon’s challenge she cannot help herself, feels suddenly older than him, a babysitter, tells him all the ghost stories she half believes. All the time he would sit in the kitchen until finally one afternoon she just moved the radio into the living-room and made him dance with her when he came, one two three, dance his own awkward way but she said he would need to know this for college and that she would teach him to be a gentleman so they wouldn’t laugh at him in Toronto. He combed his hair with water before setting out but by the time he got there it was always dried along the sides. With her hand starting at the back of his neck she would have to ruffle it out so in the kerosene light it was finally thick and soft like the coat of an animal and to her he smelled more like the outdoors than the outdoors itself, spending all the day in the sun and wind before coming to her each night. And he came every night that summer, every night for six weeks until he finally admitted that he was frightened of her and didn’t want to come back.

“Surely,” she said, “a Thomas man could not be frightened of a woman.” They were sitting across from each other at the kitchen table and she, six years older than him and unmarried, put out her foot under the table so that it rested, instep curved on his knee. Saw Richard lower his head then raise it again, looking helplessly across at her, not even knowing the question. Then he pushed himself up from the table and was gone, swinging out the screen door of the summer kitchen and running down the drive, she could hear his boots’ slow rhythm on the hard-packed mud. And then the whole night and the next day she was sorry for what she had done, holding the father over
the son that way, as if he would have any strength at all with his mother in bed and a father like Simon Thomas, so jealous of his sons he boxed them in one way after another, trimming them at the edges the same (thoughtless) way he pared his nails at the table. The next night he was back. Stood casually in the kitchen and then as she was walking by grabbed her without any excuse or preamble, grabbed her and dragged her into the living-room and put her on the couch where he lay on top of her without even taking his clothes off, lay on top of her and then with one arm around her neck tried with the other to reach under his own weight and her skirt to pull off her panties until finally, unable to restrain herself and catching her breath, Katherine started to laugh and pushed him onto the floor. Up came his two arms and he pulled her down to the floor with him, her still laughing but his own face grim and solemn, laid her down on the floor beside him and undid her skirt, started to pull it off and she could remember lying on her back, not even thinking about what he might be doing and then felt him tugging again at her skirt, as if this one remark of hers was supposed to have given him ownership, kicked up and pushed at his chest with her feet but he just swept them aside and began tugging again, not knowing how to unfasten it properly and afraid to tear it, kicked him again so he rolled on top of her, stalemated. Then again, the whole time they hadn’t spoken, reached under her skirt to work on her panties, this time figured out to push up his own weight on his elbow so he could have room to work, got them down, then still supporting himself on one elbow, his face red with effort and refusing to look at her, he undid his own pants and pushed them down so that finally he had all the right pieces pressed against each other and could take a rest. Nothing happened.

“Now what?” Richard Thomas said.

“You’re too heavy. Use your elbows, you idiot.”

He rolled off her and stood up. Turning his back to her in the half-light, he did up his pants and tucked in his shirt. Standing at the window, smoking one of her cigarettes, his features shadowed by the dusk, he might have been a modern Casanova, posing for an advertisement between conquests. She
smoothed her skirt out and kicked her panties under the couch, an old horsehair monstrosity covered in scarlet brocade that Henry Beckwith and his wife had bought themselves for their twentieth wedding anniversary from a catalogue. Then she got up and went to stand beside Richard at the window. They went outside to the porch that Henry Beckwith had built, the porch that surrounded the house on three sides, and sat on the steps. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“It doesn’t matter.”

She reached over to him and undid the top button of his pants. “You take everything so seriously,” she said. “A gentleman never takes anything seriously.”

“I thought, you know, that all you had to do was get things started.”

They got up again and walked down to the road, and then back up to the house again, up and down the long driveway that Henry Beckwith had so admired about the house originally, a log house when he came there that stood at the top of the hill and looked down on the road as if this was possibly a real house overlooking a boulevard teeming with carriages and parasols, the Champs Élysées of Eastern Ontario that required only the density of time to manicure all the details and bring it to life so that one morning finally, in six months or a thousand years, Henry Beckwith would step out of his house wearing his red satin smoking jacket and carrying one of the special leather-bound books that Simon Thomas had made him and go sit beneath the willow tree on a stone bench and watch the young people, former pupils become Prime Ministers and explorers, school girls out for a ride between lessons, men of his own age already dressed for the day and tapping their way along with silver-tipped canes, silver on stone. The moon was almost full and she could see him well, re-seeing him because where once he had seemed helpless there was now the question of restraint. Now in the driveway she could believe her own ghost stories. And half-see her mother bending over the well, the pump handle worn and split, held together with baling wire, hear their voices which came to her now not in words but disguised in smells; each tree and bush and flower seemed to have its own
distinct odour, sweeping across her in sequence, each one total and distinct, each entirely erasing the last and urging her to bond herself to this man as she was to this place so that every moment would be veiled by the other’s presence. The skin on his back was smooth, smooth like Simon’s but deeper and newer, and the muscles too were different than Simon’s, fluid and alive where his were pocked and knotted, permanently strained. His back and his eyes were all she could remember from that first time: his eyes because she noticed that their colour was still steady and deep, not yet burned out and lightened from the sun, like those of the older men, like his own later became, changing from blue with green flecks at the edges to a grey-green that at times could be shallow as cats’ eyes.

The sun is hotter, higher now and spring is here, not just signalled. Katherine crouching by the side of the road, leaning forward to see into the stream that now runs full tilt in the ditch, snow still along the shaded bank but the water is cutting it away from underneath so that now it is beginning to fall into the stream, drowning of its own weight and the water still so cold it doesn’t melt instantly but is carried down the stream a few feet where each small snow boat then smashes apart on a curve. Kneels by the side of the stream and lumps up small balls of snow and tosses them in to watch them be swept to the curve, wondering if she can make a snow-jam there, then leaning at different angles to see if the sun can illuminate more of the bottom of this stream which is shaped not only by the ditch but by all the branches and rocks which have been pushed or have fallen into it. Simon thin and white. Simon white and dead. Simon one winter night coming to the house. Stream cold and silver she cups her hands and puts them into the water, leaves them watching the water turn her skin transparent, webbed bones draw the water to her mouth. Simon white and dead, on his knees, half-mocking; his hands surround hers like a large dry bird with a ring in its craw. The same ring, he says, that the poet took back from the body of Elizabeth Thomas. Simon white and dead kneels and asks her to marry him and when she won’t answer tries to cry but can’t. Warm winter night then and it had begun to snow, would snow for one day
and two nights in the exact same large sloppy flakes falling slowly to the ground, gradually piling up and drifting slowly in the slow warm wind. On the first night Simon came and asked her. Finally they went into the living-room and she gave him what was possible. He left the ring on the table. Not a wedding ring at all but a strange gold ring that had a small green stone set into its crown, a ring that must have belonged to some forgotten secret society, the inside worn smooth and silvery but the outside finework tiny miniatures of tangled snakes and tongues on either side of the stone, still pure in colour with very thin green lines in the crevices where Simon’s hand had not been steady enough to follow with the needle. The next day too it snowed, so slow and each flake so large and far apart that it seemed the ground and sky were in some conspiracy of grey light, and that evening Richard came to see her, saying his mother was sick again. Sees the ring on the table and picks it up, barely able to even slip it over the first knuckle of his little finger where it sticks briefly, looking as if it belongs there.

Kneeling by the stream, splashes water on her face, cold water in the pockets of her eyes, on her forehead, cold fingers pushing channels through her hair, takes off her coat and splashes the water on her neck and shoulders, everywhere the water touches is stunned by the cold, falling through the lake ice once they took her home and she was actually blue, her skin taut and rough turned blue-purple with cold. Simon thin and white. Simon lived and died. Simon lived on four hours sleep all the first winter her parents were dead, coming to her house late at night or just after dawn, stomping through it like a skinny bull outraged at death and ghosts, covering the floors with snow and mud, sawing wood for her and leaving it stacked outside the door, the big elm logs on top with the sharpened axe for her to split them with, starting fights and then when he had sucked her in and got her angry at him laughing at her anger, gleefully jumping up and down and pushing her about the kitchen forcing her to admit she was alive, bringing her kittens and puppies to be saved, a cow that was in calf, chickens that demanded more work than the eggs were worth and then so pleased with his plan to save her life that in the spring he brought her a goat
and left it downstairs early one morning before the sun came up and she woke up to the sound of the goat going crazy in the kitchen, trotting back and forth chopping at the floor with its sharp hooves, knocking down the butter and the lard, leaving plates shattered on the kitchen floor, so much noise she thought it must be Simon drunk and then after calling and getting no answer for once really believed in her dumb ghosts and finally working up her courage and going downstairs to see this monster, boarded in from the living-room so that it was only the kitchen floor, the hardwood maple floor that was covered in broken dishes, grease and goatshit.

Searching in her coat again for a cigarette and this time finds a better one, her hands dry now and clean, puckered white at the fingertips, along the edges of the tiny blisters she always got on her fingers when she was nervous; Richard’s blisters this time, his touch at the funeral. She finds the box of matches and fumbles with it momentarily, decides to open it upside down

Canada’s longest covered
bridge is in New Brunswick

reads the motto, the blue ink threatening to run on the cardboard. Three matches before one lights. Leaves them on the road, letting them roll into the mud, too removed from the stream now to bother floating them. He could have taken her there, to New Brunswick. She knew nothing about it: forest and railway tracks. But she could remember Ottawa, where the match company was, the match company that ate the logs they floated down the river every spring and at night sent its sulphur fumes rolling across the river, so sharp it made you gasp and when you did you could feel the acid scissor into the lungs. Mustard gas, Henry Beckwith used to say. Seven brothers dead of it in the war. Simon would come up to visit him and they would sit on the porch steps telling each other their favourite lies. Wine and tobacco. Exhales the smoke, blue-grey and in the perfect circle learned from Henry Beckwith’s pipe, her coat wrapped around her now, cold from the water and the snow, walking faster, arms swinging in time to the sucking sounds of
the boots in the mud, looks up the road to see Richard Thomas standing there, in the middle of the road with his hands in his pockets and his wide floppy pants too long for his legs and rooted straight to the ground, his hands in his pockets and a blue and red checked flannel shirt twice as wide as his father, now begins walking towards her too, begins in a way that makes her think he has been standing there half the afternoon, watching her skip and stumble all over the road. Looks down and sees her skirt still standing out in little spiked twists, mud all over her boots and coat, her arms raw and too long, swinging out of the frayed cuffs, stops.

“I didn’t think you’d come,” Richard Thomas said. His voice is thin and formal. They are standing face to face, stopped six feet apart on the road. Simon white and dead. Lived his exact seventy-year span. He is wearing the black felt hat she gave him ten years ago. Now it is crumpled and water-stained. His face is thicker and redder than it was. Flesh has begun to gather along the lines of his jaws. He had shaved for the funeral and there are still tiny cuts on his throat. This isn’t how it was supposed to be. She smiles and starts again. Curtsies to show off her muddy skirt and boots. As she flexes her knees and bows, her mittens, soaked and crumpled into wads, fall out of her coat pocket into the mud.