The Disinherited (24 page)

“Anyway,” Richard Thomas said, “Erik wants me to give him the farm. He wants me to give him the farm so it will be his, and he can own it.”

“Well,” Pat Frank said.

“It’s a good farm.”

“You’ve got a nice piece along the lake there,” Pat Frank said.

“The land is good.”

“It is,” Pat Frank said. “I hear Peter Malone say he might be going into sheep now. Says that he can’t afford to keep improving the stock of his cows and that beef just isn’t worth it.”

“He’ll make a living,” Richard said. “And no one is going to tell him when to wake up in the morning.”

“They say there’s been more campers than groundhogs this summer.”

“There’s always someone to say that this land isn’t meant for farming or that it should never have been cleared, or that the only future for it is some sort of park, for city people.”

“Well,” Pat said.

“Well goddamn well what?” Richard said loudly, almost shouting, slamming his palm against the mattress.

“Careful.”

“Well
goddamn,”
Richard said. “The reason a person lives this way is, well, because this is the way a person lives. Dumb purple-assed baboon goes to the city and five years later he looks like some piece of shit should’ve been left in the old barn, not yet thirty years old and he can’t hardly piss all the way to the ground.
Goddamn
. Simon was alive he’d die laughing to look at him.”

“If I had children.” Richard tried to imagine that: pink curtains in the windows of the old pig-barn and a woman, smiling and cheerful, standing at the door to welcome Pat home from his trip to the liquor store. “The widow thought she was pregnant once but it turned out she’d just misplaced something.”

“A person might live in the city because they have to,” Richard said. “Like say a person was dumb or crippled or something.”

“Sometimes you’re pretty dumb,” Pat said.

“That’s what they say,” Richard said.

“Erik doesn’t want the farm any more than I do. Not for the money either. Any time he gets within ten miles of the place he starts to twitch and shake.”

“Takes some getting used to,” Richard said.

“First time it happened I thought he’d bit a snake.”

“Goddamn,” Richard said. “And don’t make me laugh or I’ll come apart myself.” And that’s what it felt like too, muscles squeezing and contracting through his chest and stomach. The night nurse came and stood in the door, shook her head, declining, when Pat offered the bottle to her, and then came in the room and held his head in her hands, pressed against her stomach. Fingers lined up on forehead and scalp, still felt sensitive where the hair used to be. The warmth of her belly coming through the starched linen, pressing against the back of his skull and Richard Thomas shoved his head deeper into pillow, rubbing his scalp and flexing the muscles in his neck and back, blood brothers, the tiny crossed scar long since grown over, shallow white ridges.

“Mark’s asleep in the lounge,” Pat said. “I better wake him up to go home.”

“Sure,” Richard said, “anytime.” His eyes closed as easily as they opened, sliding in and out of sleep expertly now, swiftly, each of them needing the other in quick succession. And when they got back to Richard’s room the lights were off and they could see the nurse sitting beside the bed, resting her hand over Richard’s wrist, pressing her case in long low whispers that followed them down the hall, past the empty wheelchair and into the fire exit; and again in the courtyard parking lot Pat Frank thought he could hear her through the open window — her voice, the lake, the hospital machines, all run together and muttering like a river of insects.

N
ow she is older. The child is older too: this year she is tall and skinny, hanging curiously in the doorways and the halls watching him with her mother; next year she will go to high school. Rose Garnett, polished and controlled, stalks the varnished floors of her expensive house, performs mysterious consultations. She is removed now; Erik can’t believe the memory of her vulnerability. But still, she remembered him too, even the first time he was there, finally playing the game over his tea leaves and then inviting him back the next day for a late supper. Now that she had the child back, the truck was gone. Instead there was a red Italian sportscar. And after supper she said that they should go for a drive before coffee, and took him outside, making him climb into the passenger seat of her red car, driving slowly out of the city and then, on the back country roads, accelerated to ninety on the straightaways, screeching around the curves on two wheels. Slowing down again at the city, she took him inside for coffee and brandy. In her husband’s absence she has become like his machine, the bones of her face narrow arched tubes, the skin stretched over them, smooth silk planes in repose. The hesitation has gone from her walk and there is only a polite and careless restraint. He supposes that her clothes must be expensive. They have their coffee and brandy in the living-room, sitting on a deep upholstered couch. From time to time, during supper, when they are walking back to the house from the car, later when they are sitting down and she is talking, she
touches, casually, purposefully, giving him whatever warning is necessary. When he makes no objection, the omission is registered and she turns down the light. She asks him if he would like to come upstairs. In her bedroom she undresses him while he is standing up, taking her time with buttons and zippers, tiny kisses for his body as it is revealed. Then she takes off her own clothes and leads him to the bed. Her scar has faded and she is tanned with the exception of thin bikini stripes. Her body is now her most elaborate costume, her hair thick and curling from her shoulders, her eyes breaking the tension of her face, deep blue, round. She draws him inside her and he feels nothing more than a vague warmth and a small movement from before to after. They smoke cigarettes and she draws a bath for him. She gets into the bathtub with him, laughing, her breasts clapping together like small porpoises. Her daughter’s name is Victoria. He knows that she is listening to this strange splashing, wondering why her mother and this guest have turned into fish. She wants to come and investigate but perhaps she is afraid of what she will find. Erik is sure that she is awake. Perhaps this happens all the time. Perhaps she has come before and discovered her mother in arcane positions with Kingston’s most respected businessmen, stiff white historians from the university, psychiatrists who have decided to expand their horizons, visiting dignitaries from Mexico who would like to twin with a small Canadian city, a cosmetic salesman with a rare brand of bath oil. Perhaps there are hidden servants who make sure that such misunderstandings do not occur. Before he stepped into the bath they stood side by side in front of the full-length mirror, and she turned to kiss him, knowing he would see the reflection of her back, her calves and thighs rounded with the effort of standing on her toes, her buttocks sectioned into different colours by the sun.

His existence has become simple and easy. In the mornings he wakes up and goes downstairs for breakfast. Everyone else is already eating. Sometimes after breakfast he helps Miranda with the dishes, tries to be useful around the house. But after they have talked about Richard and Miranda has drunk her two morning cups of coffee, she gets restless; he sees this, she is
unaccustomed to having people in the house in the morning. He goes outside. At some point the farm grew away from him. Now he wishes it were a cottage on the lake. He hardly even talks to Brian except to ask, like a woman, what he has been doing today. For a few days he went out with Brian in the mornings, fixing the old cedar rail fences and replacing one section of that fencing with post and page-wire. But one morning Brian just walked from the house to the truck and left without him. Now in the mornings Erik works in the garden: weeding and harvesting. The soil is warm and spongy on his bare feet — curling around the edges, threatening to swallow them entirely. At first he felt out of place, wearing a faded, too tight pair of his old jeans that cut into his belly and made him feel suddenly middle-aged and paunchy. But he left his shirt and shoes off anyway, looking down at himself every few minutes to see if he had been transformed, wondering where his ribs have gone to, looking at what the shoes and the city have done to his feet, turning the toes red and blotchy, twisting the nails, the top of his feet now covered with a ridge of black hairs and mosquito bites. The first week he could only use the hoe for a few minutes at a time, his hands blistering and protesting immediately. Now the blisters are broken and bandaged. He can move up and down the rows of corn, chopping the hoe down into the soft earth, metal into earth, left hand, right hand, each cut bringing blades of pain into his shoulders and back. Periodically, when he straightens up, he looks over towards the trailer and sees that Nancy is looking at him. Sometimes she comes out for a minute to take something in for a salad. He has also become the guardian of the lawn: mowing it, building a patio out back, trimming the grass away from the stone foundations of the house, digging the weeds out from under the lilac bushes in the yard. He wears one of Richard’s old straw hats when he is outside. He takes it off and rubs his arm across his forehead. There are random slapping motions to keep away the mosquitoes and black flies. At the end of each morning he washes himself at the well, splashing the cold water over himself, dissolving the film of soil and grass and insect bodies; and standing on the concrete well-casing, shivering, his skin contracted and purple, he feels it briefly, the body
that has been violated by atrophy and smoke and time, that maybe is somnolent and in the process of being revived or maybe is just a corpse disturbed by all this unexpected activity.

A few days after he left Toronto, he phoned Valerie. He was standing in a pay booth at the edge of one of the shopping centres. It was only a hundred and sixty miles to Toronto but everything made it seem further. “You could come back for a weekend,” Valerie said.

“No, I should stay until things are settled.” Not being able to explain that if he was doing nothing else, he at least would do his duty and, if his father would accommodate the timing to the visiting hours, he would be a good son and go every afternoon for as long as necessary to watch him die.

“It must be awful there,” Valerie said.

“It’s boring.” She didn’t mention again that she might come to visit him. In order to place the call he had to explain things to the operator, have the bill charged to his Toronto phone number. Now for some reason he began to worry about how much this call was costing. After the initial exchanges neither of them were speaking. Behind their own silence and the buzzing static they could hear other voices, the words indistinguishable, but the rhythms clear, decisive murmurs of love and business.

“I guess I should go soon,” Erik said.

“Okay.” He could hear footsteps. One of the noises on the line disappeared and he realized it had been music in her apartment. “I don’t even have your address there,” Valerie said.

“I’ll write you,” Erik said. “Maybe I should get a postal box number in Kingston.” More silence. Erik held the phone to his ear with his shoulder, was using his hands to get out a cigarette. He kept twisting around in the booth, trying to see if Brian and Nancy were finished getting the groceries yet. The booth was hot and airless. He pushed the door open with his foot, letting in the noise of cars wheeling around the parking lot, doors slamming rubber on metal. When the cigarette was lit, he threw the match out the door and closed it again. He couldn’t remember if he was committed to marry her or not.

“Are you still there?”

“Oh yes, sorry,” Erik said. “What was I saying?”

“Nothing.”

“Oh.” Her guest had turned over the record. “Well,” Erik said, “I just thought I’d call and say hello.”

“Okay,” Valerie said. “Keep in touch.”

“Well. All right. Good-bye.” Stepping out of the booth, one hot ear, throwing out his cigarette and lighting another. Two o’clock in the afternoon and his throat was already dry and parched from smoking. The day he phoned Valerie: that was the day Brian had gone away for the morning without him. A week later, suddenly thinking of her, hardly even able to locate the time when he had spoken to her, he wrote her a letter, saying that his father was still hovering, Miranda needed him to be there, it might be some time. It all took less than half the page so he enclosed a key to his apartment and asked her to forward his mail. In due course he received it: a few university circulars and a dentist’s bill.

In the mornings he worked in the garden. Then after lunch, they would drive to the hospital to see Richard Thomas. When he was very sick or unconscious, the four of them could all sit in the room at once, being very quiet, waiting. But when he was awake, all four were too much for him and each other. So they would visit him in platoons of two: Brian and Nancy, Erik and Miranda. After a while each of them developed their own small tasks and roles for the hospital. Miranda was mother: she brought him things to read and wear and eat. She talked to the nurses about his body functions. She bought him an electric razor and some spray-on deodorant. When he refused to be connected to this world, but wasn’t too sick, she would sit beside him and read to him aloud, items out of the newspaper and a historical romance about the slaughter of the Indians in Huron County.

Brian was Richard’s extension at the farm. When he was away from the hospital he did everything himself, shutting off the details of the day from Erik and Miranda, refusing even to talk about it while driving to and from the hospital. But once with Richard, he wanted to consult about everything: each cow’s breeding and slaughter, the possibility that a certain calf might have pinkeye, the need to spend twelve dollars on some hardware and fencing, plans for which fields were to be ploughed in
the fall. And when enough had been settled to get on to the next day, Brian would fall back on the old standard, the idea of getting the machinery for corn and building a silo. “It’s the coming thing,” Brian would say over and over, the exact words the milk inspector had used last time, looking reluctantly at Richard Thomas, both of them, wondering if it was worth the bother to farm this land with modern machinery, the fields so small that there would be hardly room for a tractor and combine to get going before it had to get turned around, the whole technology of modern farming designed for big flat fields with at least a few inches of soil uninterrupted by stones and bedrock. “Look at Peter Malone’s farm,” Brian would say. “Three silos now and he’s never looked back. Course he’s got more fields than us.” And four sons on his farm and two adjoining farms so they could pool the machinery, but that didn’t need to be said. Nor did they mention what they all knew, that the easiest way to make money from the farm would be to sell it to the real estate man for cottage lots and a trailer park, put the proceeds in the bank and live off the interest. The real estate man had come back after the first time. Brian had gone to meet him when he was still in the car, told him to go away.