Free The Disinherited by Matt Cohen Page B

prayer.
    “Doesn’t he look nice,” Miranda said again. She was dressed in a dark blue suit and stood almost leaning against Richard, her gloved hand squeezing his elbow, supporting herself as they stood at the end of the grave, facing the minister who was mumbling out his words, loud but unarticulated, across the open grave towards them. The sky was grey-yellow, so thick with cloud that none stood out singly.
    Richard and Miranda had been placed at the head of the grave as if they were the honoured guests at a dinner, though, as Richard’s father had bitterly pointed out, he had already provided his tithes to God. It was a constant thing with him after his wife died, and when he came to eat he always insisted on saying Grace.
    “Oh Lord,” Simon would intone in his dry voice, “accept the homage of us Your humble servants for You have given us this earth that we may feed and love You.” He would laugh selfconsciously and rub his palms together, looking at Richard andMiranda to see if they might have guessed that everything was not as it should be. Then he would draw his lips back from his teeth — those that remained, since he refused to go to a dentist or get false teeth having said he was done with vanity and pride — and waggle his tongue in anticipation of Miranda’s cooking which, though he never would have admitted it, was the bribe necessary to bring him out to the farm.
    The first person to cry at Simon Thomas’s funeral was the housekeeper he had lived with after he moved to town. No one dared say anything against her while he was alive, but now she regarded those at the funeral with pure terror and was down on her knees weeping hysterically. All else stood dry and bored, staring down into the blank grave. They were in that corner of the cemetery reserved for their own family. There was a story that his father’s father, the first Richard Thomas, had not wanted to use the cemetery at all, but had wanted to be buried in the apple orchard behind the house. But his wife had been religious, so he had finally agreed to be buried in the church’s cemetery on the condition that he could plant an apple tree near where his grave was to be. This was what happened, despite the objections that the roots might eventually disturb some insensible skeleton.
    Simon Thomas had died in early December, before there was much snow, but after the ground was frozen too hard to dig. So they had saved his body until spring. The grass was thin and lemon green, and the tree, though crippled, turned in on itself and dense with wild grape vines and bittersweet, still produced a few new leaves in spring, each one small and slick-surfaced, new leaves of an old tree. Because of the age of the corpse, they had immediately covered the coffin with a layer of dirt and stones. But the imagined odour made its presence felt. All faced the grave with hypocritical solemnity as the minister worked himself towards the ultimate peroration, the consecration yeast that would make the soul levitate from what remained and begin its long journey in whatever direction God saw fit. The presence of the housekeeper made it apparent that the odds were long, but the minister, perhaps inspired by the difficulty of the case, or perhaps simply remembering certain transgressions that wereknown to several of those clustered about this sunken altar, gave it his valiant best. His jaw was long and scarred with cuts where the skin between razor and bone had been too thin to resist his mirrorless efforts, and his eyes, sunk into deep-boned sockets, were so large, they appeared to bulge out of his face like those of an underwater animal.
    It was a warm and almost balmy day, though the cemetery made the air seem still. Running along one edge of it was the old unused railway track that had been constructed at the turn of the century to take out white pine and bring in dry goods and tourists. The line had run south to a small town twenty miles east of Kingston, and Simon