The Disinherited (18 page)

“We could go to the old barn,” Katherine said. “I’d like to sit down.” So they walk down the road without touching to a place where there is an old gate and a cowpath to the barn where they used to meet in the late summer and fall. Now that she is with him she wishes she’d not noticed the way he’d touched her at the funeral. She sees as she walks that he has come to her this way, by way of the barn, walking fast, bootheels sinking deep into the mud. The land here is higher, there is hardly any snow and on the tops of the knolls there are places where the grass is a different, lighter green, small shoots that are too soon and will be frozen. The barn is warm and seems moist with hay. She pushes her way through the loose bales to a place where the sun comes in, a long wide stripe where there was supposed to be a board. Then crawls to the gap and looks out at the trees that surround the barn, crowding in towards it, beginning to cover a field that
was cleared but then abandoned because the soil was too thin and dry, frosting easy in the spring and fall and burning in the summer. Even ten years ago it had been pasture. She would meet Richard there and the cows would be grazing outside, moving slow and indifferent to the frantic humans in the barn. Her hand touched a bottle and she looked up, surprised, seeing the row of bottles there that she and Richard had drunk, all shapes and sizes, the insides filmed with dirt, all the tops still on. And Richard, touching her arm, offering her another of these unmarked bottles that the old Frank farm seemed to collect so old man Frank could fill them with half-distilled liquor made from anything that once grew:

“It’s one of his better,” Richard said.

“I can’t go home drunk.”

“Old Peter Malone wouldn’t notice if a horse ran over him.”

“If you wanted to have your say,” Katherine said. She took the bottle without looking at him, had forgotten what it was like to run into this Thomas meanness unaware, sudden and unpleasant like, she realized, this terrible wine which was so bad that she spit it out without swallowing, coughing and handing the bottle back to Richard.

“I’m sorry,” Richard said. “I think it froze and then started to ferment again.” They were sitting side by side, facing each other, their legs stretched out flat on the hay. Richard reached down and put his hand on her knee. Something, the way he did it, made her feel like a huge slab of meat. He took his hand away. Her feet felt cold and numb now. She took them out of her boots and rubbed them with her hands, hardly conscious of Richard’s presence, wondering why she could have been so foolish as to walk like this, thirty-nine years old; she didn’t even want him to see her now, veins blue in her belly and thighs, rolls of fat, started to cry and the tears made her face and the inside of her head feel warm, kept crying for the warmth not knowing if she was upset or just cold, not caring, letting her body cry too, warming her, knowing he would use her crying as a way to get by her, not caring that he would or that it was the wrong time of the month and she would have to go home and
do it with Peter Malone, one two three, just the way Simon Thomas told her to once, making his calculations, ordering her body in his universe, Simon Thomas thin and white, making her so angry she swung and almost took his head off with the axe, Simon Thomas, came to her the second night with the snow still falling wet and slow, came to her again as she knew he would, Richard in the bedroom and the ring sitting on the kitchen table, in the middle of the table beside a cutglass ashtray, just inside the circle of lamplight so that he could see it as he pleased, on his knees again with his large palms on her knees, began to speak to her in a low liquid voice, could this be love? Clasped his hands and bowed his head, saying that he would not offer up a prayer to the good Lord that He would see fit to help him in this evening, to help this woman to know that it was His wish that she replace Leah Thomas when He called her, yes, to end this suffered Life on Earth. And then looking mournfully at her and at the ring on the table Simon stood and walked to the wicker chair where he sat down, always the signal that he wanted some tea, took out his knife, the point long and curved just slightly, Damascus steel, cleaned his nails.

“Some stranger leaving footprints in your drive,” Simon said. When he spoke Katherine could see the broken rows of his teeth, the way they had worn for some reason, short and thick with a brown line along the tops and bottoms, teeth short and thick like ancient ruined castles. And his nose now, the bone worn clean, still straight and thin on top but the nostrils puffy and broken-veined with age, moving in and out with his moods like bellows, a family habit he said, descended from a count who droned in his port. “It’s a strange time for a person to be roaming about,” Simon said. “You could never hear him in this snow, he would sneak up to the house and be inside before you knew a thing.” The knife moving in his hand, and eyebrows jiggling as he talked, lines cut into his forehead from all those decades of sleight-of-face and lies.

Katherine moving neutral in the kitchen, building up the fire and preparing the teapot. And Simon, sitting in the wicker chair near the stove, the bits of fire flashing through the grate, the light working up and down his body, slow fire on a windless
night, elm fibres hissing out their moisture, crackling in their own heat. “I’m cold, Simon,” Katherine said and, before he could use it as an excuse was on her way up the stairs, beginning to panic, imagining that Richard would jump out at her and force her into screaming but then she was in the bedroom and he was curled under the covers like a baby, scared to death of his own old father, so she came to him and sat beside him, her hand on his forehead like he was sick and took a sweater from the floor. And down quickly again to Simon, afraid suddenly he would be the one to force it, to come up and find Richard like this, afraid. And when she was downstairs again and poured the tea for Simon and gave him cream and sugar to go with the tea and a spoon to stir it with, Simon put the cup on the table and picked up the ring, balancing it in his palm, and asked her if she would come to live with him when Leah Thomas died. And when she said no he asked her again, talking in a voice that was very unusual for him, low and humble, and insinuating voice that had the gall to say she could believe the lie because she was a woman and had no choice. And when she said no a second time he got up and lifted the kettle from the stove so the fire leaped up, the flames on his red face and white hair making him look like an ageless skinny devil, and with his free hand tossed the ring into the fire. Then sat down again and began to drink his tea, moving the cup up and down quick and nervous, drinking it so hot he had to blow away the steam before each sip. And then two rapid steps to where she was sitting and pulled her, lifting her by the waist and sitting her down again, on his lap in the wicker chair, his arms wrapped round her like steel cords, cutting off her breath and squeezing her ribs. And when he finally left and she went upstairs Richard was still in bed, undressed, waiting. She had the lantern with her and set it down near the door, sits down beside him but he has retreated, wraps the quilt around him and sits up in bed to smoke, his mouth pouting, his body closed in on itself. Younger then, hair long and thick she liked to bend her head, break up the light in the veiled fall of her hair, leaning over Richard and hugging him, forcing him to open so she can lie on him and feel him against her, a bath to wash away Simon Thomas, his
bony ancient body with its pockets of stain and decay, parchment skin like dry paper, Simon Thomas thin and white, forcing him to open so she can lie on him and feel him against her, a bath to wash away the winter, Peter Malone one two three, could this be love?

Opens her eyes and sees that she has covered Richard’s face with tears, licks them off, her eyes still crying and her nose running but she can feel herself unclenched and licks his eyelids, the corners of his eyes, lets the point of her tongue trail salt along his eyebrows, along his new hairline, further back than she has seen it and thinner, along the red mark left by the hatband, testing out to see if he has washed his ears and then sliding her hands up into his shirt, one step forward and two steps back, Henry Beckwith and his pipedreams left his own and only daughter to his best friend, God rest his soul, God rest their souls, Richard’s beard in her neck, his chin rasps, flipping her up and over so he is on top, bits of straw forced through her skirt and coat, sewing skin to bone, hard and bumpy not like Peter Malone, Peter pillowman, propping her up so he can fall in effortlessly, still. Ten years of Peter Malone and his impossible litters. Waking up some mornings with Richard’s image fixed before her eyes, stuck to the day like a transparency, twisting everything into the ten-year gap. One two three, now the back of his neck is barbered too and bristly, shaved fresh for the funeral, unbuttons her blouse and pushes it back, exposing a line from neck to shoulder, runs his teeth along the flesh, flesh to bone, do corpses fuck? she wonders as he pushes himself inside her, and she, afraid at first but then curious again, to know what it might feel like to be filled this way helps him, her arms around his back, pulling him towards her, her fingers hooked in his belt-loops, one for the dead. And loosened later by the wine, two for the living.

His back propped against the bales and his hand on her knee. The bottle is only half-empty but she is asleep and he puts the cap back on the bottle and sticks it up on the beam with the others, this one new style, dark green translucent, and he can put his eye to the bottle and see the sun dead level through it, the trees still naked in the spring. Stands up slowly, careful not to disturb
Katherine and pulls his pants up to his knees, bends over to pick the straw away from his underclothes and skin, so many million sperm to be discharged in secret from Miranda, whole populations and races passed through in an afternoon, leaving no trace but a few bits of dead grass stuck to him and to each other. His pants on, he lowers himself down the ladder of the barn, his muscles pulled out of shape and exhausted, wondering why a strange body takes such a greater toll than the familiar, wondering why he didn’t marry Katherine and move to the Beckwith place where the fields were flat and deep-soiled and ran in long well-drained slopes towards the road. Three silos, Peter Malone had; three silos and three bank accounts. Standing outside he can see where the ice and wind have worked away the sheathing at one corner leaving the post exposed, now dark brown with water soaked into it. The air is still warm, even warmer than it was in the afternoon when the sun was higher, a slow breeze moving across the hollows from the west. Near the barn is a small pond, and he goes and sits beside it, letting the sun tip and reflect into his face. No splashes or fish in this pond though later, briefly, there will be frogs and bullrushes before it dries up for the summer and grows its useless marsh grass. Moored to a tree at its edge is an old row-boat, its bottom resting on the bottom of the pond, waterlogged twenty years almost exactly, twenty years since he and his brother built it from scrap lumber for the barn and stuck it in the water where it sank immediately. They tied it with a rope to the tree, Richard explaining that the wood needed water to swell it and press it together. When the rope rotted, Richard had thrown a chain around the boat, securing it more permanently to the tree so it could not, should it finally achieve its watertight destiny, drift away and become hopelessly lost on this quarter-acre pond that was up to three feet deep in its centre channels. Katherine Malone, née Katherine Beckwith, bearing children easily, all shapes and sizes, while he and Miranda were still waiting for their first. Peter Malone who always bragged he couldn’t get it up but rushed home whenever someone told him that Simon’s black Ford was parked in front of the old Beckwith place. Half the time to find Simon just sitting in the car, smoking his pipe and reading a book. “A man gets moved from his own ancestral home,”
Simon liked to say, “and he needs to be able to go out and visit.” For his house in the town Simon did what was necessary: in the winter he would shovel out the drive every day, snow or not, and stack his bought wood neatly in the front yard. And in the summer, every Tuesday and Friday evening, he would mow his lawn, wearing a special peaked cap he had purchased for these occasions and taking exactly the length of a cigar to do it.

Richard stretched, looked back in the barn to see if Katherine was stirring, walked a bit on the path near the barn. He felt drowsy and lethargic, wished it were possible to sleep before walking Katherine home and then going home himself. Ten miles: Miranda would be wondering where he was. The path wound between hickory and aspen, young maples seeded from the sugar bush and a few pine trees that still stood. Eventually it widened from a cowtrack to two wagon wheelruts — now gouged so deep that they were useless for everything except frogs, who bred in them every spring, leaving their eggs in tangled silver strands. Then the ruts turned into an old dirt road that led to the big field he had cleared and the valley that cut right through it. The first summer he started seeing her he liked to walk to her place the long way, this way, preferring the anticipation to the event. But after that, in the winter, he always went as quickly as possible, going right to the old road, keeping a path between the two farms.

Richard saw Katherine standing by the barn, watching him as he moved indecisively up and down the path, inspecting to see if summer was really about to happen, poking aside bushes with a long stick he had picked up, then, in between, using it as a cane, the black felt hat pushed back on his head. Walked down towards her, seeing the barn and imagining near it, up on the knoll that overlooked the spring pond, a house that was made out of fieldstone but resembled an English cottage with its elaborate patios and leaded windows. And although the house wasn’t there, his grandfather, Richard S. Thomas, as part of some elaborate forgotten scheme, had made sketches of the hybrid, planned the garden and the apple trees which would have honeysuckle and bittersweet wrapped round them — had even planted those trees, on the knoll and near the barn, and
dug a foundation and well for the house, both lined with stone, so now it looked as if it had all existed and burned away, the foundation overgrown and falling in from the top rows and the trees already long past their prime, twisted together with other, younger generations of apple trees or even attempting spectacular miscegenations with cedar and spruce. Katherine coming up to meet him, barefoot and her skirt covered with mud and hay: so much less ordered than Miranda, good-natured body that let itself be pulled out of shape by circumstance. And stands facing her, she is almost as tall as he is, her hand inside his arm, carrying herself unprotected from things, the opposite of Miranda who will go into the garden when it is warmer with her bright kerchief wrapped around her hair and her tennis shoes, lotion on to keep away the bugs and cotton gloves to save her hands from blisters — Miranda knowing which side is which and gradually taking the city to the country with lilac bushes in the front yard and sneaking flowers in among the vegetables.