The Disinherited (30 page)

“Well.”

“And my heart,” Mr. Zeller said. “I have a good heart. No offense, you understand. They don’t use them for very long anyway, the second time around.”

“It’s all right,” Richard said. “I never thought about it.”

“Some people are very sensitive about their organs. My wife is like that. The very first time I met her, she bragged about her kidneys. She can still hold it for almost twenty-four hours. Remarkable in a woman her age. Even the doctor agrees.” His pipe had gone out and Mr. Zeller took it from his mouth and tapped it in the ashtray. When that didn’t work, he slapped it into the palm of his hands, the bowl making hollow sounds against his cupped skin, then pulled it away, a plug of ashes and tar having been yielded, complete, out of the pipe. He put the plug in the ashtray and pushed at it with his pipe. The outside layers were fine grey ash: inside the tobacco was sticky and wet, charred and only partially burned. “You understand,” Mr. Zeller said, “I wouldn’t want to be taken apart by some medical student who didn’t know what he was doing. But I thought that someone might want my eyes.” Mr. Zeller’s eyes were blue. They matched his dressing gown. Sexless blue eyes that were undefined and liquid. Like the eyes of the matador, opened and indifferent to the camera. Like Simon’s eyes had been when Richard returned with the doctor, Leah Thomas dead already, Steven Thomas passed out on his bed, Simon calm and covered with blood: his hands and arms, his neck and the whole front of his shirt, even his pants: eyes blue and blank that knew everything and nothing, could even ignore his broken leg swelled up inside his pant-leg like a split sausage. Like Simon’s eyes must have been a year later when he sat down and wrote Richard in Toronto, telling him that Katherine Beckwith was engaged to marry Peter Malone, the new hired man.

“Gentlemen.” The voice of the night nurse startled Richard. It would be possible to die at home too. The next time he was in the hospital it would be more difficult. He would wake up and see the tubes leading to and from his body and that would be it, they would leave him there, locked into the jaws of their plastic and metal machines. The night nurse was pointing at her watch.
They were supposed to be in bed by the time she came on duty. They went to the window for one last look at the sky. In the window he could see his reflection. Now it seemed as if his stroke had hardly happened. One eyelid was slightly drooped; it was imperceptible, he had already forgotten what it used to be like; and his arm did everything again, in every direction, but was somehow weaker, less in control, as if some nerves and connections had been burned out. The night nurse switched off the overhead light, letting them see outside. It was still raining, but the dense cloud cover had broken apart; there were fragments of open sky, signs that a moon would emerge into one of these gaps. The evening traffic was almost done. Cars moved sparsely along the lakeshore road, their lights white and steady in the easy rain.

“Well,” Mr. Zeller said, turning from the window and walking to the door of the lounge where the nurse still stood, her hands on her hips and her head cocked to one side in the attitude of the indulgent television mother, “to sleep, perchance to dream. Goodnight sweet lady.” And with his cane hooked over his arm, Mr. Zeller bent and took the nurse’s hand in his own, kissed it. And with a nod to Richard, he was on his way down the hall, pipe in his mouth, carved walking stick tapping along the tile floor, thin chicken legs wide apart, spare hand in his dressing gown, calming the afflicted spot.

From his bed Richard Thomas could hear the night nurse making her rounds, whispering to the patients before coming in their doors, her rubber soles squeaking as she worked her way up and down the hall. He could hear the wind too, still moving briskly in the courtyard, but all the threat gone now. The rain had taken the temperature down and the breeze was sharp and cool through his window. He swung his feet out of bed and pushed the window so it was nearly closed. He liked the way these hospital windows worked, sliding up and down easily, to the touch, weights concealed in the sashes. The windows at the farm had to be pried open every spring, were put in their permanent summer positions with the first hot weather, screens propped under them. There was one beam in the basement that
had rotted, chunks of dry wood and sawdust falling out every time it was touched. And one corner of the foundation that was beginning to crack. But it hadn’t settled yet; the floors were warped but not tilted, and the doors still hung true. In the spring, sometimes, if there had been a lot of snow before the ground froze deep, there would be water in the basement, coming in the north wall, flowing through the mortared joints of the foundation stones, along a channel he had dug in the floor of the basement, out a pipe that had been jammed through the wall at ground level. The floor had always been dirt when Simon lived there, but Miranda hadn’t liked it, had said she would be afraid to go down there unless there was a new floor. So he had had a cistern put in, a big one reinforced with iron rods, and covered the earth with a thin layer of concrete. Now the concrete was wearing away. They would have to do it again, properly. Erik was always saying that he would come home for the summer sometime, take out the old floor and put down gravel and then cement, surround the basement with drainage tile too, so that it wouldn’t get wet in the spring. The house looked like it would stand forever, couldn’t possibly fall down from its own weight or simply rot away like other houses did. The only thing that seemed to threaten it were the mice that ran incessantly in the walls and attic, eating away old wood, grout and twigs. Simon had hated cats, never had one in the house. But Miranda let them in sometimes and once or twice, without asking her, Richard had stuck a couple of cats up in the attic, intending to leave them there for a few days. But the noise always woke them in the night and Miranda would make him go and drag the cats away, put them outside. Mr. Zeller had shown Richard pictures of his house, a long low split-level home on the St. Lawrence River, twenty miles outside of Kingston. His daughters and wife were sitting on the front steps. In the background could be seen a flash of blue from the river, a corner of the boathouse roof. On one side of the house, in front of the picture window, was parked Mr. Zeller’s car, long and low like the house, shining blue-black, its finish so highly polished that the sun glinted off the car’s surface like gunmetal, too much for a mere camera to contain. Mr. Zeller had once pointed the car
out to Richard when they were standing in the lounge. It had tinted glass and an air-conditioning unit. His wife wore her own sunglasses, drove with the windows sealed shut, slow and stately along the lake and then turned it, in the same dignified way, like a boat, a diplomatic envoy, going up the drive that led to the hospital parking lot. “That’s my wife,” Mr. Zeller had said, as if it was clear that this whole apparition, lacking only wreaths of white mums and marigolds, must surely belong to him and needed only the final detail to be clarified. As it turned out his wife grew orchids in the basement, raising them in hot glass boxes filled with water vapour and spiders. “This is an orchid,” Mr. Zeller had announced, pointing to an incredibly bright and ugly plant that was on his bedside table. The next day it died.

His mattress was still up at an angle. Richard Thomas got up and out of his bed, cranked it down so it was level. Back under the covers, with his eyes closed, he stretched his legs and back, muscles tired from the day, feeling so much better tired than they did when he had just lain sick, doing nothing, only moving when he was exhausted from maintaining the same position. The sheets were crisp and fresh from the cool breeze. He pulled them around his shoulders, adjusting everything so the thin hospital blanket wasn’t against his skin but contained by the sheet, pushed his toes down until they were at the end of the bed frame and then pushed against it, flexing his feet and calves, letting the blood and fatigue move up his body in waves, long sensuous waves like a child’s night. He could smell the cool air. It would be fall soon, end of August approaching and in another couple of weeks the leaves would begin to turn. It would be a long season, he could feel it already, the days warm and crystal blue, the nights dipping below freezing at first, then the frosts extending straight through the dawn to the morning, lying thick and white on the grass like its own kind of foliage. In the afternoons he would sit outside on the new patio Erik had made. New boots and thick socks. There was something he wanted to do, a project, he would re-copy the poet’s diaries before they faded beyond recognition. Maybe when he was better Brian could drive him to the back of the hayfield in the
truck. He could walk back into the maple bush, find the log where he had tripped, swayed, decided to come up alive. The imprint of the bird’s foot was still on his hand, stamped onto the nerves and small bones, thin spiny toes, ridged on the top but damp and slick underneath, live black needles, stamped on the same hand where they had inserted the intravenous, the bird’s motion stopped only briefly then started again, showing Richard the hidden underfeathers of its wings, panic at discovering the animal was human. In the fall there would be time to walk and think. He would go back to the lake and sit on the beach again, maybe row out on the water with Brian, fishing. Walk along the old country road to the Beckwith place. Peter Malone was always saying they should go hunting together. Even in the fall the maple bush was like a jungle, vines and berries and different coloured maple leaves scattered everywhere in total profusion, layers thick on the ground, swept by the wind to hollows where they were as high as a boy’s waist. When they used to tap the trees there, he would go back, every fall, with Brian and Erik, to cut the wood for the following spring, always trying to stay two years ahead, the cords stacked in long narrow rows leading away from the sugar house, like spokes. Erik and Brian, more trouble than help, Brian finally mastering the rhythms of the saw, pushing back and forth, not trying to do it all, Erik’s body always working against itself, making things twice as hard as they had to be, taking only short turns at the cutting and then preferring to spend his time walking about dragging his feet through the sawdust and bark, kicking them, finally given the job of carrying and stacking the wood. Brian always taking things with complete seriousness, his scars pink oases in his summer-tanned skin, shoulders wide and square even as a boy, arms short and choppy, muscular, like a miniature replica of Richard, imitating everything he did. For sitting outside he would have a plaid flannel shirt, yellow and red, the kind the tourists wore with white buttons at the sleeves and a hem along the bottom, so it could be used as a jacket. Richard Thomas, farmer turned tourist, living off the farm run by his adopted son. Simon would never take a cent from him, not only refusing money but also vegetables or even wood for his stove.
Richard would bring things in to him though, give them to the housekeeper. When Simon died she was left the house in town and the insurance policy. They had her out to dinner once but everyone was uncomfortable. And when Miranda went to town to see her, she stood at the door, asked her what she wanted and refused even to invite her in for tea.

Richard Thomas turned over in his bed, flapped the sheet around his shoulders so the air could get in, settle next to his body. Occasionally it was possible to hear a dog barking outside the hospital, or cats in heat. But the life with power here was microscopic, tiny germs and cancers that could only be seen through microscopes or deduced from the bodies where they had taken hold. But that wasn’t his problem, the doctor had said. It was the parts that worked only sporadically, the pancreas that didn’t quite know how to deal with sugar and the heart that was wearing out from having to supply such vast territories. Well. Medical science would have to progress without the remains. Or they could come and get him, dig him up from his corner of the cemetery, rebuild the tracks and take him away in a special railway car. In the lounge they had a library for the patients, a rack supplied with newspapers and magazines.
Mortality Is Just A Disease
, headlined one article, taken from a medical conference where doctors said that one day they would be able to re-supply people with a brand new version of their own bodies. And went on to describe how thousands of people believed in this, had themselves and their relatives frozen in anticipation of as yet undiscovered miracle cures. Maybe they would be able to resurrect logs into trees, marshes into lakes, cities into dark long-limbed forests veined by streams and rivers, all ages of animals brought back into simultaneous existence, dinosaurs living side-by-side with polar bears and deer, pterodactyls nesting in rusted Model T’s. In the fall he would not feel so useless. All the crops would be in and he would be doing what was normal, walking around, making sure things were ready for the winter. They would let him help with the ploughing, that was nothing, sitting on a tractor pulling levers, turning the earth over in long black strips, always looking so fertile and promising when it was just newly ploughed and disced, hard to
believe the crops would barely pay for the seed and gas. In the fall, the weather was always good. The rains were long and steady, destroying nothing, wetting the earth down for winter, pushing up the levels of the lakes and creeks so the fish could survive, so nothing would freeze right through. In the fall, the summer swarms of bugs that surrounded and tormented the cows in clusters about the eyes and nose and mouth thinned out, disappeared with the cold. The animals’ coats thickened and they were sleek and contented with themselves, happy to spend the afternoons lying on hills and taking in the last days of warm sun, filing lazily to the back of the farm to drink from the lake, beginning to hang around the barn in the evenings, get accustomed to humans again, their constant touch, vague memories of snow and grain.

“Where was I?” was what the night nurse asked him, sitting down by the bed. Even now that he was better she followed the familiar nightly rituals, taking his temperature, wrapping his arm with her inflatable tube and testing his blood pressure. Miranda would have to do this too, check on him every night, take his temperature, count the pills to make sure the right amounts were there and gone. She would watch over his diet, regulating sugar and checking things off on the big mimeographed sheets they had already given her to paste up in the kitchen. The metal of the thermometer under his tongue was becoming the most familiar taste of all, sharper and more disagreeable every day as the anaesthetic of nicotine and tar wore away. The desire to smoke was occasional but not bothersome. The nurse said it was usually like that with the good patients, not much trouble, and besides, there were all the other drugs to adapt to, substitute. The air hissed out of the tube and she took it off his arm. “Soon you’ll be normal,” she said. “Just like anyone else.” More figures were entered into her book, would later be put on the big chart at the nursing station. There was an intern who came up twice a week and copied the numbers from the chart, drew them into graphs. He had a part-time job working for a drug company and one day all these averages and trends would appear in a medical magazine, part of an advertisement for heart drugs. Richard could remember reading one of these magazines in a waiting
room: most of the advertisements were taken up with possible side effects and, with every drug, they seemed to be the same, ranging from dizziness to nausea to sudden death. The nurse extracted the thermometer from his mouth, the metal clicking against his bottom teeth, faint twinge of an old filling, metal on metal. “There,” she said, “that’s enough.” She put her notebook away, sliding it into a pocket of her starched white dress. She had a vast supply of these dresses, all exactly the same, and cardigan sweaters she wore over them, different colours. In the pockets of her uniform dresses she kept the equipment that was part of her job: notebooks and thermometers, pills and candies for recalcitrant patients. In her sweater she kept her personal items: a pocket-size packet of Kleenex, a cigarette case and matching lighter, a tube of lipstick. Richard could never remember what colour it was but she put in on constantly, even in the dark, puckering her words as she rubbed it on, sliding her lips against each other in a motion Richard took to be common to all women, characteristic, like the grimaces that accompanied each plucked hair. The wind still rose in occasional spurts, scattering bits of water against the glass, whistling high and hollow through the narrow gap between the window and the ledge.