by Ben Metcalf
We threw a world down there, or so it seemed to me: every store-bought can scraped clean of its predictable treasure, every glass or dish dropped in numbness or hurled out of anger, every tin tray ruined in the attempt to warm a meal of Banquet fried chicken or off-brand fish sticks, every jar not commandeered to hold the inedible pickles my mother made to show us what a hoot it was to be self-sufficient, every supermarket bottle or foil-lined box of wine she then emptied to demonstrate otherwise, every window fan that had perished in the effort to push a few lungfuls of air through the house, every stretch of mesh pulled away from the back porch or the chicken coop by the wind or the gravity, every load of coals and ash our miserly stove had vomited up into its pail, every tool my father could not salvage with oaths and blows and electrical tape, every car battery he could intimidate no more work out of, every oil can sucked dry by a parched and damned engine, every air filter choked to death by the dust from the roads and the driveway, every cinder block too broken to support its share of a car’s dead weight, every armful of plaster hauled away from my father’s attempt to “remodel” the house’s two front rooms (and so silence at least one of his wife’s complaints), every sheet of tin roofing the shed or the front porch or the outhouse had donated to our embarrassment, every nail or hinge that had managed to loose itself from the pile of boards in the yard, every chunk of cement that had broken free from the mushroom cap over the well and somehow not plummeted down into it, those faucets that had formerly filled the bathroom sink and tub, the sink itself, the tub itself, an old commode, three cheap town bicycles the Virginia dew had corroded and the Virginia hills had anyway rendered useless, a plastic radio or two, a television set, and I seem to recall at least some part of a refrigerator, though a lingering disgust may mislead me there.
I will not pretend that a trash pit in the yard held no attraction for a young boy who now had cause and opportunity, after all, to discover what happened when a glass jug met a toilet bowl at considerable velocity, or to see how deeply a car battery could be made to penetrate a television screen, and who now had something to shoot at with his BB gun besides birds and siblings, just as the latter now had something to shoot at besides him. We took to the hole with air rifles and hammers and even the axe whenever my father was gone, glad to be free of the need to convince him every ten minutes or so of our attention to whatever senseless labor he had assigned us that day, and we aimed every trip to turn the garbage down there into an undifferentiated gravel by means of our violence and our joy.
I trust that our violence would have been adequate to the task, but we were shorted on the joy. We soon enough saw that a country trash pit contained fewer friends than had the underground pipes back in town, and that the promise of a slow death by septicemia was no replacement for the glamour of a quick one by sewer gas. We saw as well that the passerby’s eye sought out signs of humanity in the countryside, rather than the advertised delights of a flora and fauna that in truth only annoyed and oppressed him. Each honk heard from the road below, even when there was no derision in it, reminded us that our debasement in this place was far more public than it ever had been in town. We had supposed ourselves hidden in the wilderness, but we, like those cruel walls we felt thicken each summer and then thin when winter came on, like the cars and the weeds and the wreckage that surrounded our tin-hatted treachery, like the pit in which we cavorted with our waste, were undeniably a spectacle, gawked at like any other. Ridiculed by the ignorant, pitied by the less so, we occasionally met with a certain mortified and honkless recognition.
A judgment
In town we had lived next door to a man who once crashed a stock car so hard that both eyes flew out of the bucket seats in his head and dangled helplessly aware against the stick shift of his nose until a doctor, or else a mechanic, was able to reinstall them, but aside from an intense attention paid those eyes on the few occasions they floated near we never, in my recollection, gave a thought to this man, though our houses shared an oily garage and had yards mere feet apart. In the country there was but one house we could even catch sight of, a small brick sarcophagus up and across the road, wherein a brace of grandparents quietly awaited oblivion, yet no lack of activity there could discourage my interest in their plot, and I knew that unless these people were students only of the trees, and the insects, my wonder over their slow consumption was bound to be returned.
Every dish goes down its own way, I suppose, its wriggles or its stoic stillness being the extent to which the devourer’s throat will allow it one last representative gesture. We wriggled; they did not; and unless this was because they were dead already, or close enough to it to preclude further movement, they might now and then have looked out from their living-room window (the larger on the face of their walleyed home) to behold the trash-filled snarl of our pit, and the tasteless mustache of nail-ridden boards in the yard just beyond, and the noseless upper countenance of our obviously insane clapboard tormentor. And if they chanced to see, as I did one morning, a dog of ours with a leg lifted against what had formerly been part of the well cap but was now an open-mouthed absence of concrete, and if they deduced, as I did, that our drinking water had likely been flavored by this animal’s urine since the day the hole was created, then I hope their destruction in that awful little rancher was eased at least by one last belly laugh.
There were others nearby I could not normally see, and who could not normally see me, but I felt a judgment from them all the same, and I sensed that this attitude was but a mask for their own desperation, or at least a useful distraction from it. A more active pair of decrepits farther up the road, future employers of mine who kept a few cows and took an unhealthy interest in the manufacture and storage of hay, limited their social engagement with my family to the odd wave from the field, and the even odder lecture on the dangers of a liberal education, and seemed at all times drunk on a private and unknowable sadness. Across the road from these two sat a sparsely stocked country store that doubled as a post office hardly anyone used but whose lonely proprietors, yet another ancient couple, had discovered that the federal government fixed a postmaster’s salary by the number of boxes at his disposal, whether or not those boxes would ever be filled. To the best of my knowledge, these people, who were polite but embarrassed for us children whenever we visited their wooden fib to buy candy, or else to steal it, retired rich, if no more comfortable, and then died.
The younger couple who had sold us our trees and our clay now occupied a newer, sounder home across the southern pasture and back in the woods somewhat, though they would be delayed no longer by the second trap than they had by the first and would, before their vanishing, provide no particulars as to what wickedness had befallen them, or the idiots who came before, at “our” place. Because of this, and because in the war between persistence and departure they sided with departure and we did not, and because in the gerrymander that forever cleaved our land from theirs they had kept possession of what was our barn in every sense but the legal, and so had saved this structure from the rapacity of our stove and from an afterlife as proof to passersby that we had not even a barn to aid and protect us, my father held these people and their barn to be an insult and a remonstrance, and he gave off an unusual amount of pride, I remember, on the day a dog of ours pranced before us with a dead cat of theirs in its maw.
I have no idea whether these people harbored a remorse at our being the means of their escape, or an anger over the cat (a kitten, really: Boots was its name), but before they fled that land forever I recorded in their stares a note of astonishment at our obvious and immediate washout at squiredom, which must have struck them as willful and even aggressive when measured against their own. The stiff neighborliness extended us whenever they came by (as a confidence man will follow up on his mark to determine if the scheme has been discovered and the authorities called down) hid no better a mix of trepidation, relief, curiosity, and ordinary human concern, which trepidation I scoff at, and which relief I stipulate, and which co
ncern I return unused. Only the curiosity pertains.
These people made no direct mention of the devastation in their former yard, nor did they acknowledge the depressed heap of garbage that was the property’s single recent improvement, but they were aware of our pit and our shame as surely as we were aware of their barn, and our muteness on the barn, and their muteness on the shame, made for what I recall as an almost boisterous conversation. Their side of the silence seemed to convey an amused understanding that our business with the sticks was not about disappearance at all but rather was about a perfectly common wish to be noticed, the fulfillment of which did not normally require an open trash pit in the wisher’s front yard. On our end, if I translate correctly, it was mostly curse words.
O Goochland
O Goochland, O county of blood and pus, O breaker of families, O bed of agriculture’s deceit; older creature than the nation you betrayed; promiser of plenty, provider of naught; stalker of happiness, thief of hope; butcher of nerves, baker of brains; proud home of the skill-less, luckless Bulldogs; site of my elementary- through high-school education:
I should have guessed, when first we crossed your bounds, that my father would opt for a performance of his anguish rather than a deliverance from it. I should have seen that your houses did not shun one another but only watched and waved, and struck signal fires, and huddled together in an attempt to form hamlets that by your witchcraft would not take. I should have noticed that your necropoli met no hindrance at all in their efforts to congeal and expand. I should have gathered that your paper-thin infrastructure (a backwater school system, a sparse and unselective police force, a farmer’s bank, a “community” college, an overmatched clinic near the pompous little courthouse, a bloom of schismatic churches, an enthusiasm of volunteer fire and rescue squads, both a men’s and a women’s “state farm”) constituted an equally instinctive, and equally failed, ploy to cover the whole of your population (less than twenty thousand souls, all told, in a space the size of Greater Los Angeles) with a single municipal exoskeleton, so that we suckers, we pilgrims to iniquity, might know what it was like to exchange a settlement at least of sufficient density to keep the pests at bay for one so rudimentary and diffuse that it did not understand this to be town’s purpose.
Could not the same be said of the nation’s farmland at large? Do the kit houses and improvised huts in our clearings not reach out to one another in desperate bids to create and defend communities whose inhabitants insist are unnecessary to their unreal and unearned Edens? Are we to imagine that the pride these people have since shown in their technically townless lot is not a reflex natural to anyone confronted with the terror that accompanies assured defeat but not yet (and here again I must employ the word “technically”) dead? Is this pride not so bitter and so powerful that it has long infected even parts of town with the desire to go without what humble refinements are available there (a superficial proximity to education and the arts, a cinema-learned facsimile of reflection) in order to indulge instead a fancy for mud, pickup trucks, cowboy hats, retribution in Jesus’s name, and the legion twangs and whines of American ignorance?
I honestly do not care. One may strike like a fool at the sprigs of this wrong or one may set at the root, and Goochland County, in whose dirt our national evil was gestated, and out of whose grass it sprung, and on whose stock it immediately fed, and through whose dummies it first worked its cruel ventriloquy, and within whose tomahawk outline can still be found a peopled wilderness more ruinous than just about any other, is where I judge that root to be. I will not stunt my rage with reference to what this prideful and cowardly blight has done to the uppermost boughs of our republic: the reader is free to lift his chin, and expose his neck, and see for himself how pride and cowardice alone are now represented up there. My own aim is the root itself, and my whetstone is the memory of how casually, how mechanically, this entity sent forth its spores to destroy what might have been a perfectly acceptable childhood.
That I have only this mean alignment of words for an edge, and that I can control my axe no better than to bring it down upon those who are of my own blood, and so are due not an accidental violence from me but rather a purposeful love, is a shame we have always with us. Still, I make no apology for the fact that I have raised up and swung. My object is, and only has been, that unclean and hideous root.
Blackberries
I abhor blackberries. I would surely eradicate them if brought to power. My brother might say bees, given all those attacks on him through our screenless windows by what looked to be a mutation of the species, neither bug nor bird but fully three inches long, the boy probably dreaming in his bed of the last time he was stung into surreal and agonized consciousness by one of these winged freaks, which our father called “king hornets” and I at least held to be the result of some experiment gone horribly awry in those abandoned bee boxes in the yard. My sister, sustained if not comforted by her Black Beauty books and her Laura Ingalls wilder, might say horses, given how she was led on always by that promise our parents had made her, and teasingly saw our pasture used to winter nags from a cheap and imitation riding camp nearby, and knew that this one was “Chief Joe,” and that one “Prince smoke,” and that one “Granny,” but had neither the clearance nor the ability to saddle and ride any of these creatures, let alone call one her own and call herself its, until sent at last by a fugitive kindness to this same cheap and imitation riding camp nearby, where her affection for these animals could not overcome the cheap and imitative quality of the instruction there, or her late introduction to the art, or the degree to which the treacherous land had spooked every animal that walked or ran upon it, and so could not prevent her being thrown one afternoon, and dragged by her pretty heel, and very nearly killed, after which she went in for an altogether different kind of book.
For me, though, it is blackberries. I would cite their dull sourness when not perfectly formed (milk and sugar were invariably required to make up the difference), or their metallic sweetness when for a day or two they finally agreed to ripen, or their melodramatic tendency to fall apart and bleed to death if not applauded at once, but in truth my claim against these berries is no more than a tangent to my anger at having been forced to pick them in the first place. From afar a hokey charm attaches to the image of a rosy-cheeked lad sent out to fill his pail with the fruit of a bush whose sole ambition on earth is to serve him as a free and wholesome candy store; up close, a darker scene presents:
This same boy, the red on his cheeks a primer for some future melanoma, holds this candy inferior to what he can steal from the store up the road, and he resents that these distant green bushes have so punctuated themselves with black as to engage the attention of his parents, who surely do not appreciate the cloyingly stupid taste of such nodules any more than he does but are committed to the myth that their sort of person delights in nature’s treats just as it accepts her hardships, which pose will harden the boy in winter, and will make of him a baked and mushy cobbler by blackberry season, and will in fact be so thorough as to qualify less as an acceptance of hardship than a surrender to it, and will never be extended to any hardship inherent in the boy, who were it not for the threat of physical retribution would forgo the sacrifice of his Saturday to the retrieval of a foodstuff he knows no one in the family honestly wants to eat.
Encased in his sweat, a uric bath at most times and a gelatinous bodysuit whenever a cloud stops to sun its back for a moment above his head, he plucks at these berries until he can no longer tell the juice on his fingers from the blood the briars have extracted in payment for their supposedly free baubles. The wind that animates the piney wood to the north reaches out now and then to give the leaves before him a good shake, but it takes pains not to cool the spot where he himself stands, and he begins to wonder whether the salt in his eyes, or the start of a heatstroke, is not responsible for some perceived instability in the bush. After a particularly violent bustle, which sees the hairs on his arm raised a great deal
and the pine needles not at all, he thinks finally to inspect the bush itself. He parts the briars and looks back into them, there to discover the stem of his fear: a long black serpent, unmistakably the old ratter he had seen slide away from the wreckage of that shed not long ago, twisted up in the innermost branches, already in the act of disentanglement and pursuit, its head reared in umbrage, a-hiss.
The boy drops his pail and runs for the house, across a field in which nothing but weeds and snakes and blackberries will ever grow, over ruts that lead back to a tepid and muddy pond where he will learn to seek an impoverished amusement, up a hill adorned with patches where a crude attempt at cultivation is evident, over an orange gouge where a basketball court was once attempted, past a garbage-filled crater that even now is able to holler at him with its shame, and into an unkempt yard where his progress is at last arrested by an impossibly deep bite to the right foot. His horror at this turn is met by a sudden and unwilled admiration for the snake, whose hatred he had not imagined could produce such a speed, yet when he looks down he sees not the snake at all but only a broken gray board, formerly a rib or metacarpal of that doomed old shed, stuck to his sole like an indigent ski.
Afraid to go forward (lest the board’s rusty tooth push its way upward through his tongue), afraid to sit down in the un-chopped grass and work the nail out (lest the snake catch up to a more valuable part of him there), the boy remains upright and frozen, loud but unheard, pinned to this withered ground, this enemy of humanity, this magnet of despond, all because his parents have agreed to pretend, with hippie and hick alike, that the countryside is an antidote to town and not a poor imitation of it; that town is not anyway a wall thrown up in obvious panic against the wilderness; that a child removed from the protection of that wall is bound to grow stronger by the throb of the nail, and the sting of the switch, and the constant companionship of his own filth; that lies and blood and terror and trash, as well as the eternal war against reality that might erupt in anyone exposed at length to such elements, are therefore a fair exchange for blackberries.