The Disinherited (23 page)

“To think I’m finally going to be a gentleman,” Richard said. “I hope they let me smoke cigars; I can be like Simon and sit at the head of the table and tell stories.” Looking up at Miranda and seeing the expression of absolute horror on her face. “I never knew you minded it that much.”

“The insides of my cheeks were always cut,” Miranda said, “from biting them to keep from giggling. Simon Thomas, Lord, I don’t know if I would have married you if I would have met him first.”

“He was an old man.”

“He was so afraid of me,” Miranda laughed, “and hated me too. Did you ever notice that he never once spoke directly to me, commented on anything at all, even thanked me for the supper? You would have thought I was your housekeeper, like his. Lord, he never let her out of the house with him unless he needed her to carry something.”

“A person can’t live past their time,” Richard said.

“Your time, look at you, you’re getting better and you don’t even know it, and you’ll be coming home too, you don’t think I’d drive all this way to the hospital, every day for three weeks, just to watch you die, Richard Thomas.” Leaning forward, and laughing as she talked, establishing the new balance, making him feel caught out, sulking, as always knowing how to get by him in that way she seemed to have, almost magical, of knowing what was going on, seeing it as someone else might see an engine. Her eyes were open wide and her pupils green and almost sparkling, as they always were when she was in a good mood, delicate green-grey owl’s eyes; she hunted that way too: sitting still and concealing her target until the last moment.

“I never thought I’d get old this way.”

“Yes, well, me too,” Miranda said. “It might not be too bad though.”

“No.”

“Lord, we could probably go on for twenty years like this, helping each other around the house, having our stupid fights, even last night I was mad at you when Katherine Malone came by with her card, seventy-two years old and fat as a cow but she was all dressed up and had her hair done all special just for you, hoping you’d be home, think, it took her more than thirty years to work up the nerve to come to see you at your house, I should have let her have you.” Her hands and arms moving as she talked, still wearing the small diamond ring he had bought her two years after they were married, when they could afford it, in a jeweller’s shop in Kingston. It seemed so long since he had seen her in a good mood, that morning he had pushed her away, asleep, now it would be six weeks.

“The doctor’s afraid we’ll kill ourselves fucking,” Richard
said, startled at how fast Miranda blushed, snapping red like a light.

“Go on.”

“Well.” Her hand on his leg; it would be possible to feel human again.

“Well,” she said. She went to the door and locked it, and then came back and lay on the edge of Richard’s bed, her head on his chest so he could put his arm around her.

“God,” Richard said, “I’ve really hated this place.”

“I know.” So. He moved his hand on her back, trying to feel her skin through the cotton, encountering buckles and foundation garments. She had her head tucked into his shoulder and the heat of her breath came through there, scalding. “We should have a wider bed,” Miranda said. And as she spoke, as if on a signal, someone came to the door and tried the handle. Then started knocking, sharp authoritative raps in bunches of three with a short pause in between. “All right,” Miranda called. “I’m coming.” Her lips had soaked through his pyjamas; she kissed him, bit through the wet spot. The knocking started again, continued until Miranda opened the door.

“It’s all right,” the nurse said. “It’s time for his afternoon pills.” She brought in a tray with two white paper cups: one large and filled with water, the other small, the size of a cream cup, filled with pills. She stood beside the bed and watched to make sure that Richard swallowed them all. “You don’t want to worry about these things too much,” the nurse said, and then left the room.

“We should spend the day together,” Miranda said, “tell Erik to go home with Brian and Nancy; I could even stay at a hotel tonight. Lord, I’m sick of the drive.” But he tired quickly, right after supper, and had to ask her to leave before visiting hours were over. And then, when she was gone, realizing that it was her presence that had been the strain: forced contact. He dozed off and woke up. It was still evening. The nurse had turned off the lights in his room, but the hall lights were on and he could see other patients walking up and down. His window to the courtyard was open but there was no breeze, August heat, feeling close to Miranda the way he used to sometimes when he would go to
bed with her after lunch and then wake up later in the afternoon, alone, under the quilt in the middle of summer feeling absolutely detached from all the work he was supposed to be doing and the constant worry of getting the hay in before it was ruined. It was amazing how easily his illness had pushed them apart. The only other time they had really been separated by anything was the winter Katherine had had her baby, Richard Malone, and Miranda went home to Winnipeg for Christmas, making Richard drive her to the train station over the bare frozen roads, saying that if he wanted to walk all about the township, gloating over his bastard child, he could do it without her having to watch. So strange then to have the house to himself, something that had never happened for more than a day. At first he just moped around, had trouble sleeping, did the chores, felt silly for being alone at Christmas. But soon he was enjoying it, rummaging through the attic and the spare rooms, letting out the ghosts he called it, beginning as soon as he came back from taking Miranda to the station to talk to himself, walking back and forth from the house to the barn remembering his mother Leah Thomas, the invisible iron threads she had woven through the whole house and farm, projecting her presence; and remembered how frightened he was the first few months after she died, so much so he would go to Katherine, who was crazy about ghosts herself, for consolation, thinking that somehow his mother would find a way to take her revenge for his fear and meanness, Simon Thomas drinking every night, released, while Steven, still sick with the knife-wound and crying over his mother, stayed upstairs all the time. Walking about the farm and unravelling the past, not even thinking about why Miranda had left. Only waiting for Katherine Malone to hear that she was gone and come to see him, wondering if she would travel so soon after the baby, sometimes sitting in the kitchen and waiting for her but other times, disgusted with himself for wanting her so much, he would go for walks into the bush, or pour his nervous energy into ridiculous tasks, digging postholes in the frozen ground, spending days with the horses and chains, pulling out stumps and junipers. Katherine never showed, but on Christmas day Peter Malone came to get him for dinner, driving his new grey Percherons and with a flask
of whiskey in his pocket. By the time they got to the Beckwith place, Peter Malone was laughing and slapping him on the shoulder, the flask empty, both of them smoking the special General Store cigars, embers flying back into their face and hair as the horses were galloped full-speed down the road. And after dinner Katherine finally brought him the baby to see, a long thin baby that looked sick already; she handed it to Peter Malone and he handed it to Richard, fat fertile Peter Malone who knew that any child of his would be healthier than this, held the baby out to Richard, as if it had been decided that he could have it. Merry Christmas, the three of them looking at this unattractive child and each other, the best a Thomas could do and lucky if it wasn’t one of those idiot children like Frederick, Peter Malone drunk and with one hand still on the baby and one on Richard’s shoulder looked sideways at his wife and then said he was sorry, passed out on his feet like a movie, swaying back and forth five times before someone finally thought to shove him backwards into a chair. Peter Malone started to snore right away so Richard, still standing with this baby in his arms, the other Malone children all excited now to see their father passed out, the first time in three months, thanked Katherine for the dinner, didn’t know what else to say, walked home drunk in the cold. Then restless in his own house, pacing about the kitchen, drank half a bottle of wine that old Mark Frank had brought him and went outside and saddled up his own horse, a mare he had bought two summers ago for Miranda to ride, whipped it along the road to the Frank place, thinking they would still be up and that he would get drunk with them, but when he got there all the lights were out and he had to go straight home again. And when he got back he took another bottle of wine out to the barn and drank it while he rubbed down the horse, going outside twice to vomit and then coming back into the barn, drinking more, mumbling to himself the whole time, finishing the bottle and then going out into the barnyard, still on his feet, stretching out his arms and spinning around in the space between the barns, stopping dizzy and retching, going to the house for the last half-bottle and bringing it out; half a bottle half a moon, knowing that this would baptize him, reluctant
father, there was nothing left except rubbing alcohol and he didn’t want to have to drink that, walking from the house to the barn taking small sips, no hurry, knowing he was broken already, the last Thomas, they would find him and say that he was crazy anyway, small sips, each one a line from throat to stomach, bile and acid, vomiting it up as he drank it down, blood wine, blood child, and then the bottle was gone and he was sitting down, his back against the horse barn that Simon had given him, lying down on his side and bringing up frequently and casually as if he might have had the hiccups, lying on his side and realizing he was sober, his supper on the ground and on his face, getting up and walking to the well, taking off his jacket and his shirt and his undershirt and splashing the freezing water all over himself, numb sober, going into the house. The furnace and the stove were both out, he couldn’t stop shivering; lit the kitchen stove and sat in front of it, unable to sleep, stunned, unable to walk, sitting and shivering in Simon’s wicker chair waiting for time to pass and then, suddenly, his stomach contracting and cramping, pulling him to the floor, forcing him to shout, pounding the knotted muscles with his fists, what it must be like to have a baby, finally his throat opened and he vomited, vomiting again, a thin bloody stream shot right across the room. The alcohol rushed through his body in waves; he could feel it drenching his cells and then receding, each beat of his heart sending out a fresh supply. He knew he had to be outside, worked his way to his feet, and stumbled out the door, his stomach sore and aching, feeling a sudden affinity for the Frank men, knowing that this was the centre of their experience, drunk white witch doctors staggering around in the middle of winter passing through convulsions for this brief vision, the grey weatherbeaten barnboards pulsing in the winter dawn light, the cows moving slowly in their paddock, stretched out in a line on the hill behind the barn, each cow attended and sucked by its fall calf; the camping place of some nomadic tribe that had escaped the European forest for this new world and its instant hospitality and was strung out with their animals on the ancient glaciated shield of the continent, waiting for history to make them whole again.

Richard Thomas looked up to see Pat Frank sitting at the end of his bed, the chair pushed up against the wall and his feet on the aluminum bedstead. He had long bony legs and his shapeless grey-brown pants hung from them in wrinkles and folds. With one hand he steadied himself against the wall. The other was wrapped around a brown paper bag, tipping it back into his mouth. Pat Frank’s head was large and fragile, the bald sunburned scalp framed by wisps of hair, entirely overwhelmed by the face, absolutely skeletal, flesh stripped away by years of drinking and eyes far apart and huge, only made bearable by the surrounding bone which somehow reduced them, made them just another extraordinary feature in this grotesque drunk’s face. “My own stuff this time,” Pat Frank said, offering the bottle to Richard.

“Jesus,” Richard Thomas said, “a person would have thought you were trying to kill me with that other.”

“I’m a failure,” Pat Frank said. He spoke with that strange baritone rasp which seemed to stamp his family. His father, old Mark Frank, had put some clothesline in a glass of alcohol once to demonstrate the science of the conditioning of the vocal chords. His other son, and twin brother, also Mark Frank, spoke the exact same way. The only one of the three of them that could vary their own sound effect at all was, in fact, Pat Frank himself, who was able to rasp in his throat and whistle through his nose at the same time.

Richard looked at the clock beside his bed. Two o’clock in the morning. “Won’t even let a man sleep,” Richard Thomas said.

“Couldn’t sleep myself,” Pat Frank said. “So damned hot up there. Nothing to do but sit inside and listen to that damned brother of mine panting and sweating.”

“A man is practically dead and his own neighbours come and wake him up in the middle of the night to measure him up for his coffin.” He took a small drink from Pat Frank’s bottle, made a face and passed it back. “Jesus,” Richard said. “I’d sure like a cigarette.”

“They say Erik has a job in Alberta.”

“That’s what they say.”

“Not everyone is meant to live on a farm.”

“Jesus.” Richard Thomas said. And maybe it was true, if everyone at birth was issued little cards with their destiny written on in God’s Own Indelible Hand.

“I guess I’m just an old drunk now,” Pat Frank said.

“Yes,” Richard said, “I guess you are.” The bottle rose and fell, maneuvered inexorably in Pat Frank’s steady hand, waxing and waning like any other natural cycle.

“Old Simon was a stubborn bugger.”

“I guess he was,” Richard agreed.

“Two weeks after your mother died he came down to the house and got drunk. Then he offered us half the farm if we’d kill you.”

“Old Simon Thomas,” Richard said. “He always got his way.”

“Not always.”

“No.”

“Whole family is dumb and stubborn,” Pat Frank said. “All of you got heads like cedar posts. If Erik hadn’t gone to the city the two of you would have been fighting like dogs the whole time. Worse than you and Simon.” Those huge eyes swimming in alcohol and skin and Richard could see passing across them the acknowledgement of the unsaid accusation, old Mark Frank who’d lost his farm because his sons were too busy drinking to make the farm go, the father and the two sons, each resenting the irresponsibility of the others, so that not one thing could be done on the farm without all three doing it at once, each watching the other to make sure that the work was meted out equally. And if one got angry he would begin to drink. Begin to drink in the morning or the afternoon or the evening or even the middle of the night when he woke up suddenly from a dream that told him that he was being exploited and he would drink everything that was in the first bottle that he happened to see and then he would drink the contents of every bottle he could find in or around the house, stopping only to pass out or eat a sandwich, keep drinking until the easy supply was gone and then hitch a ride to town where he would spend all the money he had and could find in the house on wine and drink that, and then go
around to all the neighbours who might owe him money or a favour, or be willing to be owed money, and drink what might be procured there. The average drunk lasted therefore from a minimum of a couple of hours to a maximum of a month. By that time, having made himself entirely unbearable to live with, other members of the family would have begun to resent him, then mistreat him, and then, unable to change his course by any other means, joined him. Thus it happened that for ten years running no field was seeded on the Frank farm and for four of those years, the indiscretion that finally made it impossible to continue, the hay was never fully taken in, tempers flaring before it had even been brought to the barn or, sometimes, cut in the fields; and then, inevitably, the talents of the family were turned in a more profitable direction and they began manufacturing the wine in wooden kegs and eventually, at the height of their ambition, running a still in the back woods of the old farm that everyone knew about but wouldn’t complain, even the police who visited once a year to pick up their supply of what passed for cherry brandy,
la crème de la crème
, old Mark Frank used to call it on the days that he could speak.