The Disinherited Read Free Page B

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.
    Richard Thomas lay down on his back and closed his eyes. He felt cold. He should have brought his jacket. He wondered what it would be like to be dead. He could feel a bug crawling up his leg. He reached out to slap it. When he moved it happened again, fast and harsh. He could feel something inside resisting and being torn apart.
    He didn’t hear the truck at all, but he opened his eyes and tried to help as Brian dragged him into the front seat. They were afraid to move him, so they left him in the truck while they waited for the doctor. He was aware of Miranda sitting beside him, sponging his face and holding his hand. She tried to make him take one of his pills but he couldn’t swallow properly. She put a cushion under his head. “Don’t try to talk,” she said. “Everything is going to be fine.” She rolled up his sleeve. Another pair of hands reached into the truck. He tensed up for the needle and then passed out again.

 
T wo
     
    T here was the time, in the October of his nineteenth year, his second year at university, that Erik came home from Toronto to visit. It was fall already, not quite that stage of the season that is simply a prelude to winter, but a fall that was connected to late summer, and the leaves, still sparsely scattered along the sides of the roads and in the ditches, seemed less a kind of death than an unnamed late harvest, a not necessarily final moment through which the summer would pass before relinquishing its fertility. He had tried to swallow the city whole but it still lay undigested in him, so that being home was uncomfortable for him and he was resentful of the feeling of familiarity, of relief almost, of the way Richard and Miranda and Brian still claimed him for their own, as easily and thoughtlessly as the land. When it was finally afternoon and it was possible for him to leave for a few hours, he went for a drive in Richard’s car, aimlessly following the back roads, watching the leaves change from yellow elm and poplar to the redder maple of the higher land and then back again to yellows and browns and even just greens where he wound around the edges of swamps. He had driven like that, aimlessly and without any real