The Disinherited (28 page)

“Won’t blow through these windows anyway,” Miranda said, rapping the thick plate glass with her knuckles, moved away, startled when, as if called to life by her action, a sudden gust of wind rattled the glass in its metal frame.

“Well,” Richard said. “You’d better get started.” He was standing straighter these days, taller than Miranda again, walking
more firmly, no longer looking just fat but also powerful, like he used to, his huge shoulders bulging out of the housecoat, anything he picked up transformed into a delicate and fragile object inside those hands with their extraordinary wide palms and muscular sausage fingers. He could fix things, motors and machines, even clocks. Once Miranda had given him her broken watch and he had taken it apart, using a tiny jeweller’s screwdriver he had found; but when he tried to pick up and manipulate the small pieces he had released, it was impossible, he could hardly feel the small brass workings on his fingers, couldn’t turn or manipulate anything without using a pair of pliers to do it so finally, feeling useless and awkward, clearly having stumbled into a world where he was too gross to function, he had swept the pieces off the table with the side of his hand, off the edge of the table into a small cardboard box and taken it into the Kingston jeweller’s where the man had long thin hands, wore wire-rimmed glasses and listened to classical music on the radio. Looked dispassionately at the remains and told Richard that he had ruined the watch and would have to buy another.

Richard stayed in the lounge while Erik and Miranda went down the hall. They both walked the same, loose-jointed and shuffling. But Miranda, crippled by her high-heeled shoes which were old and too small for her, walked with the dignity of a stoic, staying straight and erect, her head at Erik’s shoulder. Erik’s walk was more casual, dubious. At times it appeared that his knees or elbows would decide to go on their own private journeys. When he turned at the nursing station, to wave goodbye to Richard, he was so surprised by his own motion that he almost lost his balance and Miranda had to grab onto his arm. This would be the first rain for almost two weeks. It had calmed temporarily; the cars were moving more quickly along the lakeshore road. But the sky was ominous, grey-black and the wind still snapping at the building, waiting. It was the kind of weather that the cows wouldn’t like. They would try to get into the barn. Or stand, head to head, in a circle in the cedar grove. Oats and hay from uncut fields would be flattened in this wind, pushed to the ground in all directions, impossible to harvest.

The lake was barely visible beyond the streetlamps and the
headlights. There was something about this storm that made him uncomfortable, had kept him on edge all the afternoon and evening, constantly aware of the wind and looking out at the sky. Mark Frank had lost a barn once, twenty years ago, when the lightning had somehow travelled up a cable and set the hay on fire. That was late one fall, when it was already cold. The next summer the lightning rod salesman had come around, telling everyone, as if it was news, that one of their neighbours had had his barn burnt down. “You don’t have to lose your barn to fire,” the salesman said. “And you know, when the barn goes, you usually lose the animals too. Some animals will come from outside the barn just to get themselves trapped in the flames. Person wouldn’t want to see that.” What he had were little white glass balls, filled with copper, and with a copper finger sticking up into the sky. Soon there appeared, on top of every house and every barn in the township, little copper fingers, each mounted in its own white fist, three to a roof. They were connected to each other by metal cable and then a length of cable was secured to the ground, driven in with a five-foot-long copper stake. The salesman installed the whole apparatus himself, with the help, of course, of whoever was around, all the while congratulating the farmer on this wise investment, telling him how all the other houses looked so good with
their
lightning rods, but, well, not as good as
this
one. “It’s something you owe to your family,” the salesman would say, talking the same way as the insurance man who came around every time someone died. And when he was finished, they stood outside the house, walked around it, looked over at the barnyard, twelve white fists in all, each with its own wavy copper finger aimed straight at heaven. “There’s absolutely no doubt,” the salesman said, “absolutely no doubt at all that Mark Frank lost his barn absolutely needlessly. No it was not an act of God that he lost that barn, but a failure to apply the exact principles of science to his life.” But when Miranda asked him if he could do something about the stove, because she didn’t know if it was safe to stand near it during a storm, the salesman just tapped his fingers together, laughed, turned to Richard and shrugged his shoulders. “You don’t have to worry about your stove,” he said finally, “because it isn’t attached to the
ground.”
Whereas, for example, Mark Frank’s barn was entirely attached to the ground: a scattering of roofing nails and a rectangle of foundation stones.

The poet had died praying. This was Simon’s favourite story, the final fantastic justice of the Reverend William C. Thomas, Englishman and poet, down on his knees at the grave of Elizabeth Thomas, wife of Richard Thomas and mother of Simon Thomas himself, the poet down on his knees on a summer’s day when there were daisies and buttercups in the grass that grew on and between the graves, a warm yellow summer day early in July when there could be no danger from anything. In his last years the poet had grown disreputable. No longer attractive to the local women he had been forced to venture further and further for solace, always taking with him his motherless son, sometimes gone for weeks at a time. If he kept diaries for those last years, they had all been lost. “They say he even forgot how to talk,” Simon Thomas exclaimed, slapping his knee, making it clear that he was the true keeper of the legend of this eccentric family member. But Herman White the lawyer had said the same thing, claimed he used to meet the poet occasionally in town, where he would wander about, going from house to house, asking for food in exchange for a brief visit with Eternity in the form of His Own Words. His son was always with him then, Frederick, a large quiet boy with a head so big it was out of proportion, shaped like a water-filled egg, quiet, never spoke at all until the poet got him going. Then, in the town, standing on someone’s front steps or in their kitchen, the poet would start singing, stamping his foot and clapping his hands as he sung some bible marching hymn, emphasizing the vowels in the guttural voice he had, English vowels heightened by some vague Scots inflection. And while the poet sang, softly at first, he would look at the boy, smiling and encouraging him as if he was a baby. And finally the boy would give some sort of smile back, the open infantile smile that everyone noticed, that the poet called God’s Grace but the townspeople saw as proof of his innocence, though none was needed, and the boy Frederick Thomas would start to sing along, his mouth open all the time so he wasn’t actually singing the words but only
reproducing some aspect of their sound at a remove known only to himself. They said he had a high pure voice, no edge on it at all, open round, the kind of voice a baby would sing with if it wanted to. When they found the poet, dead on his knees, the boy was sitting beside him, undisturbed, singing in his way, shapeless tunes that were easily absorbed in the summer grass and clover. “A man dies praying and it makes you wonder,” Simon said, settled with his old man’s stiffness into his wicker chair, Miranda’s cooking tucked safely in his stomach which now, in his closing years, was beginning to bulge, sitting beneath his summer waistcoat like a ripening watermelon. He carried his knife with him all the time, to the end, always cleaning his nails or his pipe with it, holding it in his hand and looking guilelessly across the table at Richard, his eyes old and watery blue. Once the poet had his son singing, he himself would change tactics, following Frederick’s example, grunting rhythmically so that his throat, stomach, hands and feet all became a percussive accompaniment to Frederick’s angelic raptures. For these performances the poet would dress in his original red smoking jacket that he had brought from England — by now soiled and covered with patches which were themselves torn and mended again — a homespun shirt, and a few days growth of grey and dirty beard. “Drunk with God,” Simon would say. But when Elizabeth Thomas died and was buried, the poet broke down at the funeral, threw himself in the open coffin and had to be pried away by the mourners. At that time nothing further was said. But the poet was punished when he died. They buried him away from the Thomas family plot, finally rid of him, off in a corner of the cemetery that was mostly weeds and rocks.

William C. Thomas
Father of Frederick Thomas

And when in his turn Frederick died, Simon wasn’t going to pay to have his body transported from the asylum, said they could bury him right there. But finally he relented and had the coffin brought up in the train. It was just like after the war, when they used to bring the bodies from the hospital to the cemetery, the
train tracks going right to the back edge. The whole town turned out to see it come, not so much for Frederick Thomas, whom few of them remembered, but because it was such an occasion to have the train at the cemetery again.

“He must have been really crazy,” was all that they could say about Frederick Thomas, recalling stories their parents had told them about the poet and Elizabeth Thomas, the rumour that they had had a son, a half-brother to Simon, and that Simon visited him every week at the insane asylum in Brockville. “He must have been really crazy,” they would say, accompanying the words with an underground giggle, half-laughing at the idea of someone being unable to keep up the necessary pretences, half-attracted to the possibility of letting oneself collapse into the landscape; and then trying to imagine how crazy it would be necessary to be, the exact details, the exact day-to-day, moment-to-moment details of being crazy enough so that they would have to be taken away — Frederick Thomas, solely distinguished by being the only person in the area who had ever achieved sufficient craziness to have been put in a special place. After Frederick Thomas was brought home in the train (the train making its special stop at the back of the cemetery so they could slide his body in its unvarnished pine casket out of the box car), they stood around the grave and gossiped about him, no one listening to the minister as he rattled through the abbreviated sermon, no one questioning the justice of the burial off to one side, his dead geography to be the same as his live geography, re-inventing the story of what had happened to him after the poet had died, in this same graveyard; because in between the time when the poet died and Frederick Thomas got sent to Brockville, a few years had passed, and in that time Frederick Thomas refused ever to go into the house, living in the barn at first, then finally roaming the fields and the township like any other animal, his hair growing thick and matted like fur, stealing food out of the fields and gardens in the summer and then foraging for berries and frozen potatoes in the winter, like a bear who couldn’t hibernate. And after he had been brought up from the insane asylum to the cemetery, it was as if his exile was over. People began to talk about him, make him into part of their history, forgive him.

Richard Thomas pushed and twisted himself around in his bed, slid his feet down to the floor and into his slippers. He could stand up straight now, arch his back, stretch his hands high into the air and bend down again. His back felt thick and stiff, as if the bones were buried hopelessly in mounds of flesh and disused muscle. He tried to touch his toes but could only reach part way down, his fingers wrapping around his ankles. His robe had fallen open and he could see himself, a tangle of hair and fat, his pyjamas knotted around his stomach with a big bow. Looked again and saw that something was different, the bow of his pyjamas, realized he was actually seeing past his stomach, twenty pounds lighter they had said. Stood up and tried to believe he really would get better, thinner. Wondered about the exact measure of his sins, what his body represented in extra helpings of boiled new potatoes, pies with fillings of raspberries, blueberries, wild strawberries that Brian and Erik would spend a whole day collecting in quart baskets, the black thimbleberries that came after the others were over, long elongated berries that left dark purple stains on the hands and lips. “Open up,” Miranda would call, throwing the berries at his mouth. They would walk to get them, in a stand of bushes that was near the house, taking Brian and Erik with them, carrying them at first, later walking them, then his hand, so wide, had enclosed Erik’s entirely, his hand and half his arm so, Miranda said, when the two of them walked through the field together it looked as if Richard was eating Erik, had a big mouth at the end of his arm and had him half-swallowed already. Kissing Miranda and they would push the black pulp back and forth until finally one of them spat it out or ate it. The wind had come up again, steady now, not gusting. Now that he had noticed it, he would be unable to shut it out. He wondered how that worked, why it was that things swam in and out of focus that way, out of control; the magazine was lying open on the bed where he had dozed off reading it, he couldn’t remember a word, might have been dead for all it mattered now. Miranda had said he should rent a television for his room but it was too late to bother. Erik and Miranda would be home, eating and planning the changes in the house. He could hear an elevator door opening, the squeaking wheels of the food cart. They
would be bringing toast and beverages. They wouldn’t let him have jam any more, it wasn’t on his diet, but he was allowed marmalade. He hated the rinds: when only one arm worked he had to stare carefully at the plate and pick them out with his finger. Now he could use a plastic knife and fork, it was all right. They had told him not to use cream either; then they had put coffee on the forbidden list. The doctor had talked to him about diabetes but there were only pills, no needles. And there was something about blood sugar, eating more protein in the morning. With his meals, between them, in the morning when he woke up and at night before he went to sleep, there were pills, handfuls of pills, pills that came in slick candied tablets with their bright red and green surfaces and pills that were utterly serious, tasted awful, were covered with fine beige powder that stuck to the tongue and throat, pills that weren’t tablets at all but multi-coloured capsules whose contents were designed to go off a bit at a time, like a continuous supply of seltzer, pills to do things and pills to undo the side effects.