The Disinherited (2 page)

When he came back to consciousness, he was lying in the sand. He pushed himself up and wiped his face clean. He felt
better, purged of whatever it had been. He stood up, wobbled briefly, and then started walking back towards the house. The sun was much higher, he thought it must be eight o’clock. They would be wondering where he was. His arm was a bit numb, as if it were asleep, but he knew that the danger had passed.

He wished he had woken Miranda up, made love one last time. “Don’t be stupid,” he said aloud. The sound of his voice startled him, as if he had thought he might be dead already. He felt unfinished, unready to die. A man was supposed to be prepared when his time came. He noticed his left arm was almost without feeling, was swinging vacantly at his side. He forced his hand into his pocket. He tried to imagine Brian running the farm. Brian and Nancy living in the house, making Miranda stay in the trailer. No, that wasn’t fair: they wouldn’t do that. Nancy, who was slow and sullen, sometimes left dishes for days on end. She was taking pills, she had told Miranda, so that they wouldn’t have a baby. She wanted to wait until they had saved some money.

“Why don’t you pay Brian a decent wage?” she had asked him. It was one day when she was hanging up her clothes on the line that stretched from the house to the trailer, the trailer he had bought for Brian when he said he was getting married. They had eaten together the first few months but after that Nancy had said something to Miranda. Every afternoon Nancy would come to the house and take things from the freezer and the shelves for supper. But at noon they all had dinner in the house. Nancy always seemed to be dragging herself around, as if she couldn’t wait to get out.

“She’s just like that,” Miranda said. She hadn’t gotten fat. She refused to eat potatoes and sometimes did exercises in the morning. At the sugar house again, he paused to rest. His shirt and pants were soaked with sweat. His face was wet too. He felt caught out; he had been crying the whole time, like a little boy who had cut his knee and was hobbling home to be kissed.

He had accepted death only once. A few years ago, when he was ploughing, the tractor had hit a rock and started to tip. There was no time to do anything, he could feel the centre of gravity swinging wildly away; he hoped it wouldn’t hurt too
much. Then the plough caught again, and the tractor righted itself. His brother had been killed the same way.

He had started moving again, slowly, keeping his head down and picking his way along the path that should have been familiar. The moisture in his eyes threw everything out of focus. The grass looked disembodied, closer than it should have been, the stalks bending and swaying above the green fallen maple leaves so his shoes, black and soaked through now, seemed up too high, near where his knees should be, moving slowly along the path like a young boy’s shoes, carefully assessing each separate unit of space, considering and deciding exactly what should be crushed and what should be allowed to remain. One of his toes encountered a log, dug into the soft bark and stood still while the rest of him swayed, threatened to pitch over and finally ended up half kneeling, supported by a hand that had found a branch. He pushed against the branch, freed his foot and sat down on the log. That was a mistake, he thought, shouldn’t have sat down. No it was all right; it had been necessary. His vision seemed better, even better than it normally was. The crying had loosened and relaxed the muscles in his face. There was a noise beside him. A partridge emerged from the underbrush. It stopped, looked at him, moved closer, cocked its head. “Come here,” Richard said. The bird stepped forward then stopped again. It flexed its tail feathers and a shudder ran through its wings. Then, almost spastically, it flapped its wings again, twice, and landed on Richard Thomas’s lap. They were both so surprised that they froze. Then it moved again. Its foot landed on Richard Thomas’s hand and the feel of it, damp cold and spiny, startled him and he drew his hand away. Then the bird was gone, leaving more strange sensations where the feathers had brushed across his face.

“And you know it,” Miranda had always concluded her arguments, appealing to the Greater Rationality within him, the part of him she had so painstakingly constructed over the years of their marriage. She was still slim, but she had been taut, suggesting columns and electricity. All her movements fascinated him then: he wanted to know how she could remain and live inside herself. In the early part of her pregnancy, her belly and breasts
resisted swelling. For months she was like an intimate stranger, always in heat. When they made love, colour flushed her skin in slow waves, rising through her throat and turning her face a bright red. When it was finished, she receded, rolled over on her side and drew up her knees. Constantly now he was checking his body, the state of his stiffened arm and hand, the relative measures of pain.

The bush was in constant motion, greens and browns flowed into each other, washed across the surface of his vision. Images of Miranda, wearing that blue dress: arms holding Erik high in the air. The bull, panting and sweating, not yet convinced that this was an interesting way to die. “Catch,” Miranda said, and threw him the baby, laughing at the feet kicking out of the diapers and Richard’s outrage. When they used to laugh together it was like sex, without ownership of voice or body. When he wanted her after dinner, he would sit in a particular way, his chair shoved back and his feet up on the table. She was more direct and came to him in the fields and in the mornings. He could still feel the imprint of the bird’s foot on his hand. Toes, partially webbed. Upper surfaces black and corrugated but smooth and cold underneath. He realized that he had misplaced himself, that the log he was sitting on was not supposed to be there, that he had changed direction without knowing it and had circled back towards the lake. It would be impossible to get up. Different currents were moving through his body, claiming the rhythms of his bones and nerves. It would be impossible to get up.

“Don’t be stupid,” he said to himself. The sound of his own voice startled him: it seemed to have broken apart. He closed his eyes and saw himself lying, without a coffin, in an open grave. He pushed and wriggled, making himself comfortable in the soft earth.

“Doesn’t he look nice,” Miranda said.

“Don’t be stupid,” Richard said again, this time more loudly so that his voice sounded stronger. He opened his eyes and looked up to the tops of the trees where the light was filtering through unevenly. He was reminded of the sugar house, his stomach, his father’s cheap cigars. He had tried to take Erik for walks the same way but knew that it wasn’t working.

“A man can’t die before his time,” his father used to say — a statement not of hope, but of duty. It was uttered in only one context; it was an alternative, when he was tired, to taking Richard to the woodshed. Miranda had tried to prohibit that too.

She was crying but it was contained. “It was better this way,” she said. “He would have hated to go in a hospital.” Beside her stood Nancy. She was piously clasping a bible in her hands. Erik and Brian peered over the grave, to make sure he was dead, and then drifted away, with Nancy, so only Miranda was left. “Well,” she said, “what are you waiting for?”

He could feel the moisture between his toes. He took out a cigarette and lit it, promising not to inhale. He looked at the log carefully. There were still marks from the chains. He stood up. He noticed he was hunched forward and he straightened himself, pushing his head and neck until his spine felt centred. His left hand was still in his pocket. He corrected his direction and began walking again. When he came to the path, he dropped the cigarette and pushed it with his foot until the tip was covered with dirt. He kept his eyes up, looking ahead, calculating the distance to the next rise. It had once been a road, but it was ten years since he had driven a tractor or a team over it, and now the alders and aspen were pushing in on it, outgrowing the young maples and being threatened themselves only by juniper bushes. There was no wind but the trees seemed to be swaying, almost fluid. He found that he was holding his arm over his face, to protect himself from snapping branches. To make the kill the matador had plunged the knife into the bull’s neck; a long red antenna had sprung forward, hung over the forehead like a third eye, one that perceived the universe as a punctured spine and a sudden spurt of blood. Richard Thomas stopped. He thought he had heard someone calling his name. He heard it again. He wanted to shout back but could barely raise his voice above a whisper. The bull had slowed down. It wavered past the matador and then sank to its knees. The matador waited until the bull stopped trembling and then walked up to it and cut off one of its ears. He presented it to a black-haired woman who was sitting in the front row. She smiled at him and put her arm on his shoulder.

The real estate man had marked the hydro right-of-way on his map too. It cut from the invisible road, through a stand of basswood, to the waterfront. “They give you seventy dollars for every pole they put up,” he said. “And they’ll saw your trees into five-foot lengths for firewood.” He pushed the map around, so Richard could see it.

“We got an oil furnace,” Miranda said. “Right after we learned how to read. It was advertised in the newspaper, you know.”

“We’re honest,” the real estate man said. He pulled a brown paper bag out of his briefcase and dumped its contents on the table. There were, held together by blue elastics, twenty bundles, each composed of ten one-hundred-dollar bills. “I didn’t come here to waste your time,” he said. He spread the bundles in a neat row across the kitchen table. When Brian came in for dinner, the real estate man was still there. He had put away his money and his maps and was working on a bottle of rye and a package of cigars. “Pleased to know you,” he said, when Brian was introduced to him. After dinner, when he had persuaded Brian to take a cigar, he handed him the lighter with the naked lady. “Ever see one of these?”

He turned towards the camera and Richard Thomas saw him for the first time. He was very young, just beginning to grow a moustache, and with sideburns that lightened at the tips. His face was tanned and oval and his eyes were shining like those of a newly ascended angel. The last scene showed the crowd singing and drinking at an outdoor café. The young matador was seated at the best table, surrounded by admirers. Beside him, but completely removed from everything, the black-haired woman waited.

Each step separated into its components: a survey of the ground for rocks and branches; a motion through the pain and back down again; a new beginning. He was certain that he would make it if he didn’t fall; it was only necessary to repeat the cycle over and over. Then he was propped against the gate to the hayfield; his muscles had collapsed and the wood pressed into the bones of his arm. He heard the voice clearly now. He looked up and saw Brian running through the field towards
him, waving and shouting. He waved back at him. Brian seemed upset. His face was all red and he was running so fast that he was tripping all over himself. Richard Thomas wiped his face and took out a cigarette. It was a beautiful morning. He was glad the hay was all in and he didn’t have to work today. He waved at Brian again. It was too hot to run. Brian slowed down. When he got to the gate, his face was flushed and sweating. He looked embarrassed. Richard remembered the time he had walked into the barn and caught Brian with Katherine Malone’s youngest daughter. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Brian said. “Miranda was worried about you.”

“I decided to go for a walk. I woke up early.” They were leaning on the gate. Everything was normal. “Did you do the chores?”

Brian nodded. Richard noticed that he was still smoking the cigarette. His left arm was stiff and he had the hand stuck into his pocket. He put his cigarette in his mouth and with his right hand he reached into his shirt, to offer Brian the package. “Cigarette?” he asked. As he spoke, his own cigarette fell out of his mouth onto the ground. He put his foot over it casually.

“No thanks,” Brian said. He saw the sand on the side of Richard’s face.

“I went to sleep down by the lake,” Richard said. “I haven’t been sleeping well.” He stepped back from the gate, so Brian could open it. Brian was staring at him. “I was just on my way home. I thought we’d take down that old maple tree today.” Now Brian was looking down at the ground. “It’s all right,” Richard said. He noticed that he had dropped the package of cigarettes too. He stood, waiting for Brian to do something. Brian seemed oblivious to everything. “Open the gate,” Richard Thomas said. Brian lifted the gate open and Richard walked through. “I dropped my cigarettes.”

“Yes,” Brian said. He retrieved the package and then closed the gate. They stood in the hayfield.

“It has to be ploughed in the fall,” Richard said. “We’ll plant corn. We should have built a new silo years ago.” He looked around the freshly cut field, imagining it was August and the corn was ripe. “What do you think?”

“The barn roof needs fixing,” Brian said. “The beams are starting to rot.” He began walking across the field. After a few steps he turned around. Richard hadn’t moved. “Do you want me to get the truck?”

“No rush,” Richard said. “It’s a beautiful day.” He looked up at the sky. It was almost noon. “After lunch we’ll measure up the roof and then tomorrow we can drive to town and get the materials.” The long sentence left him winded. The motion was disturbing his stomach but he knew he could make it home. He would tell Miranda that he had the flu and would go to sleep. In the middle of the field he stopped again. He felt dizzy. “I think I’ll sit down,” he said. He used Brian’s arm for support and lowered himself carefully to the ground. “It’s a beautiful day. No point rushing to work.” He gestured vaguely, indicating that Brian should sit down. “How about a cigarette?” he asked.

Brian crouched down beside him and started to take the package out of his pocket. He hesitated and looked at Richard Thomas again. “Jesus,” he whispered, “you fooled me. I thought you were drunk.” He got up and started running across the field, towards the house “Don’t move,” he shouted back.