The Disinherited (9 page)

The sounds of Simon’s hard-soled boots against the maple floor of the kitchen and then his father sinking down into the wicker chair beside the stove. “You’ll want some tea,” Katherine said. It had been snowing earlier in the evening and Richard knew it was not too cold. He could hear his father groaning and rubbing his hands together.

“It’s good to see you Katherine,” Simon said. He always spoke, but especially in certain situations, with a dry complacency, like a church deacon. “I’ve been worried about you lately.”

“Excuse me a moment,” Katherine said. “I’m freezing.” She went upstairs, her bedroom that winter was directly above the kitchen, and knelt beside Richard on the bed. “I’ll just give him a cup of tea,” she said. “He must be half-dead from cold. You stay here.” She took a sweater from the floor and put it on. On her way downstairs she closed the door softly.

“I didn’t interrupt you, did I?” Richard’s father said. “A person doesn’t always know.”

She said nothing but moved back and forth in the kitchen, preparing tea and cutting a piece of bread. Her slippers rasped as she walked, a thin layer of sand between leather and wood. There were rugs on the bedroom floor but the voices were carried up by the stovepipe.

“I like to trust my friends,” Richard’s father said. “If a man can’t trust his own family and friends, well. People can’t always be checking up on each other. A person should know what honour is.”

“And snooping,” Katherine said.

“You gave me your word,” Richard’s father said. “You gave me your word and I trusted you. Were you not worthy of my trust?”

“Don’t be stupid,” Katherine said. “Now here, drink your tea. You mustn’t be so difficult. Here, I’ll sit beside you.” Their voices grew lower. Richard was alternately afraid and outraged. The wicker creaked.

“Thank God,” his father said a couple of minutes later. “You’re a generous woman Katherine. If it weren’t for you I’d have dried up years ago.” He stood up and composed his clothing. “And it’s a beautiful night tonight. Trouble with my children is that they always want to stay inside.”

“Yes.”

“There’s nothing like exercise. I’m a man who believes in keeping the circulation going. My father did too.”

“Yes.”

“You can’t get too much exercise,” Simon Thomas said. He was fully dressed to go outside but was still standing beside the stove. He had the kettle in his hand and was picking it up and setting it down as he talked. “You see the kettle here,” Simon said. “When it boils dry it burns the pot.”

“Yes,” Katherine said.

“A man’s mind is a very complex thing. I don’t know if anyone really understands how a man thinks.”

“No,” Katherine said. “I don’t suppose they do.”

“According to the Greeks now, a man didn’t think at all. He just remembered everything that he knew, because he used to know everything before he was born.”

“It’s getting late,” Katherine said.

“Now just the other night,” Simon said, “I was reading a book that said there is a mind in your head that you don’t even know of. It has a will of its own and remembers everything you forget. It’s the same idea the Greeks had, only about the lower things in life.”

“I don’t know anything about the Greeks,” Katherine said. “My mother told me that Queen Victoria used to have men come up the back stairs and visit her and when she was finished with them, she would tell them to leave and they would or else she would chop off their heads.”

“It’s a fine life being a queen. While it lasts.”

“Yes.”

“Now this man said there exists in every man’s head the desire to kill his own father.”

“Now.”

“A man brings up his children to honour their parents, not to kill them. And he expects people to honour that enterprise and not to make it difficult.”

“Yes.”

“Well Katherine, you’re a wonderful woman and God knows why I’m saying all of this to you.” He kissed her noisily on the lips. “Thank you for the tea.”

“Say hello to Mrs. Thomas.”

“When he first came,” said Simon Thomas, “he told people he was a poet and because of that and his fancy accent he felt out of place. So the second winter he decided that he would learn how to chew tobacco. Even while he was smoking his pipe, he always had a wad sticking out his cheek or even pushed under his lower lip. People used to like to see how far they could spit their juice. This fellow never learned how; he would just lean over and dribble it out in a thin yellow stream.” The different incidents strung together, beads on a necklace of the poet’s disintegration.

“Now my father, though he could outwork any man in the county, was not in all ways a strong man. Especially as regards my mother whom you never met.” And the poet, alone and trying to
fit his forms and language to a landscape they could not contain, began to turn his attention elsewhere.

Richard’s father, when he told these stories, would be working his hands the whole time: playing with his pipe, rubbing his palms together or sliding them up and down his pant leg, delighting in the inevitable comparison. “And Frederick, of course, in no way resembled me, except for my mother’s ears. Now.” When they visited the hospital, they would have to wait downstairs for Frederick to be brought to them. The lobby had a tile floor, and placed about the walls were long wooden benches, in the style of church pews. In the centre of the lobby was a desk where a woman sat, always the same woman for all the years they visited him, waiting for requests. When someone came to see a patient she would write down the name on a slip of paper and then walk slowly across the room to a door that was latched from the outside. She would open the door and hand the slip of paper to a uniformed person standing waiting on the other side. Then she would return to her desk, her duty accomplished. A few minutes later, Frederick, wearing a shabby double-breasted suit and carrying a rubber-tipped cane, would be led into the lobby. His flesh was white and raw, as if he was never outside, and he seldom spoke except in response to his brother Simon’s questions. Sometimes it was unclear whether he recognized them. Then he would sit obediently on the bench, trying to sense what was expected of him.

“They say my father caught them in the barn,” said Simon, referring to his mother and the poet. “The next time he went to the store he bought a box of rat poison. A couple of weeks later, at dinner, the poet took the box from the shelf, ripped it open and poured it on top of his food. Then he looked at my father, who was watching my mother, and began to eat. Nothing happened. The second summer he was outside all the time. He even slept in the barn and he used to spend the whole morning walking around with his notebook. Even then he still pretended he was going to write an epic poem about the farm and was always asking questions. I never saw his poem but found some old notebooks that must have been hid.”

Richard could feel the nurse again, the rubber tight around his arm. Maybe I don’t want to die, he thought, and wondered then what would be required to take him out of this hospital, whether there was some disease he had which could be labelled and cured so that he would be restored to some younger self, or whether his body had just somehow derailed and would be placed back on the track, that much further along. The nurse was leaning over and talking to him, her voice so low he couldn’t hear her, only feel her breath, a warm funnel by his ear. This sickness had made his body too large to deal with, so now Richard stripped away the edges, cut whole zones out of consciousness, reducing himself small enough to cup in his own mind. “You don’t ever feel anything,” Miranda would say. But the night of Simon’s funeral Richard cried like a baby, crying and shaking until Miranda started to cry too and both their bodies were covered with sweat and tears and like a baby Richard licked the salt water from her belly, tongue and skin and water, bodies groaning and slapping together like young whales.

He could feel the nurse’s fingers on his wrist again. Like a growth, he thought, demanding life that could be measured, rivers of cells passing by the counting point. That first winter with Miranda was in Toronto and they would walk in the Don Valley, its shoulders open and swollen with snow, lined with makeshift tin-roofed houses and shacks, their windows protected by cloth and cardboard, tin chimneys perched at crazy angles in the cold air, wired onto the walls and eaves. Some were deserted summer cottages and once they went into one with a bottle of wine and a blanket. There were ovals of ice on the windows, orange in the twilight. The floor was covered with old sacking and the blanket stolen from the boarding house. Lit a fire and drank the wine, waiting. She moved first, when it was so late Richard was tired and only wanted to have it over with and marked up — a beginning. The sacking never even unfroze and afterwards he remembered feeling like a goat with scraped red knees and drippings. Then she wanted him again, soft, a onetime expert coming over the trenches.

Inserted in the book of poems was a photograph of the author. He was standing tall and thin, wearing a baggy suit and
carrying a walking stick. He had been posed in front of a large hedge and above him curved a flowering tree. The book was in the same case, hand-made by Simon Thomas, as was the encyclopaedia he had purchased for his children, the family bible, and various historical romances. In the telling of the story the book would inevitably be flourished. The poet had brought the book for his cousin to see. But the diaries were found only by chance: Simon had discovered them hidden in the loft of the old milkhouse. For a long time he wouldn’t show these, but only made references to them, saying they were even worse than the poems. Even when he finally moved to town Simon only let Richard look at them, not read them, saying that he could have them, and the curious ring that was tied to one of their place ribbons, when he died.

In his picture the poet’s face was narrow and sunken, the hair slicked back, parted down the middle and long enough to cover his ears. The author, the poet, claimed to be a relation of the grandfather Richard Thomas, had the same last name himself, Thomas. The Reverend William C. Thomas he had announced to be his name, saying he was not of the ordinary clergy, but one of those who had chosen God of his own free will. And though Simon discovered the diaries shortly after the poet died, he kept them to himself for almost fifty years.

B
rian was dreaming about the fairgrounds, hoping that he might find some trace of the boy there, someone who might have seen him or heard of him. He was dreaming of the fairgrounds and in his sleep he was pressed against the wall of the trailer, hemmed in by the plastic wooden panelling on one side and Nancy’s imagined touch on the other. He slept with one arm outstretched along the wall. There was a map of the world pinned up beside the bed and his fingers rested vacantly on South America, sliding up and down the coastline as he breathed. He was dreaming that he was on a ferris wheel with Nancy, swinging high above the fairgrounds at night, eating an ice cream cone. Every time they came round to the top the wheel paused so he could get a good look at the lights and the people below. Nancy, frightened for some reason, was clinging to him. He kept trying to push her away, say something to her so he could concentrate on the view. Finally she stopped bothering him. She sat quietly in the corner of the seat. When he wasn’t looking she jumped. She never actually landed but only floated endlessly downwards, pointing at him accusingly. Sirens began to whine; their sound sped through the hollow tubes of the ferris wheel, through his bones which now seemed to exist independent of him, like the stand-up skeleton he and the boy had constructed. He was still eating his ice cream, eating it faster and faster so that it would be finished before they got to him. The sirens blended in with shouts and together they deepened and took on the intonations
of a foghorn, of a cow bawling. He was out of bed right away. He put his clothes on in the living-room of the trailer and took the flashlight from beside the door, where he had left it.