by Ben Metcalf
I say that if I have any such impulse in me it will show in the paragraph just completed, and not in the gem before that. I say that the truth is, or anyway ought to be, sufficient defense against the charge, and that opposing counsel knows full well where to rank my honesty among humans she has either birthed or ignominiously fled. Do I count myself better than my uncles and aunts and cousins? I know that I was meant to: I know that the primary excuse given by my parents for our removal to the Virginia shitscape was an intention to see my siblings and me reared apart from, and uninformed by, uncles who were soon to lose their small grip on reality, and aunts who were soon to lose their small grip on hope, and cousins who were soon to lose their small grip on cash to what chemical replacements for hope and reality (and cash) could be fashioned in the basements and garages and attics of the middle west.
I intend no objection to this worldview but only cite it here as evidence that I, who am in provable fact blood-related to those fled-from midwesterners, and am no obvious improvement on them, was not by any stretch the first in my circle to grab at a cruel conceit in the pursuit of something higher.
This notion of snobbery
Still, this notion of snobbery does weigh on me, as I bet it weighs on every American who tends to go clownish or stony before what he perceives to be those either better off or worse off than he, lest a word or a gesture (which are anyway the same thing) out of place reveal that he thinks himself better rather than only better off, or worse rather than only worse off, such attitudes being proscribed by his television set yet dependably represented on it, so that in truth he cannot help but think himself better (who would not?), and cannot help but think himself worse (who would not?), and so is forever sent in one direction by his scorn and in another by his bitterness. Were it not for his steadfast avoidance of anyone above or below him in this equation he would probably explode.
For myself, I would like to see the American classes mix more, not because I can foresee a day when my fellow citizen will enter a voting booth or a jury box or a convenience store with some livelier spark in his head than that what matters here is how he feels (not thinks, mind you, because people who think are generally out to make him feel bad for not having thought enough, and he will not be made a fool of, except by himself), nor because I honestly believe the nation would benefit much if its voters and jurists and flip-flopped shoplifters suddenly set aside their feelings, being mostly terror and its satellite states, and adopted the reasoned approach Mr. Jefferson championed publicly (as opposed to the Romantic approach he got wind of privately and, thinking himself better, leaned into), which correction might be worth something had this narcotic land, and the sleepy institutions built upon it, and the nightmarish educators those institutions then produced, eroded no more than our habit of thought and not our actual capacity for it.
No, despite all temptations of politeness I can discover no decent way to vouch for the native intellect, nor do I harbor much hope for its betterment elsewhere, since emigration would, I suspect (or fear, or maybe “feel” is the word I want here), only further accelerate the export of New World stupidity to the Old, or to the older still, and does that commerce not already redound upon us in towering waves? Do we not daily know our stupidity returned to us in blatant echo, here and there honed and amplified? Will we still maintain that we are alone on this planet, and in our homes, and that this aloneness alone is sufficient defense against the backwash of an ignorant self-assertion, when the next wave sees us all drowned together like attic rats?
Is this eschewal of anyone remotely dissimilar, in case we might be forced to interact at the mall with someone we perceive to perceive himself better, or with someone we perceive to perceive himself worse, really the brave individualism we imagine? Or is it instead a collective and thus extra-cowardly form of suicide? And is that eschewal, or that suicide, since it takes as an article of faith that no one should ever dare think himself better, not strangely evocative of the sad drab grays of Communism? And did that go well, for the Communists? Are we to suffer their same fate: a collapsed ideology and a collapsed economy, a twenty-first-century serfdom to potato-fed bullies with guns? Are we to dwell in a land where (and we have already had a taste of this) the oligarch with the most potato guns at his beck is proclaimed (first by himself, and then by all the television channels) to be our “commander in chief”? or is this perilous thought, that no one should ever dare think himself better, safely offset by its very American cousin, that no one could possibly be as good?
These are fascinating questions, I agree, but well beyond my purview here. I leave them to the philosopher, of whom this nation will undoubtedly produce, and then exterminate (or ignore, which amounts to the same thing), many fine examples after my time. My own desire to see the American classes mix more must remain as it always has been: a simple, perhaps even a humble, desire to know whether I am right (if not, I have cause to celebrate; if so, I have reason to cheer!) about my countryman’s innate potentiality to explode.
Flower
In a field to the north of our house, one spring day when I was in my fifteenth year, I saw a figure walking the opposite way of mine, far enough off at first that I could make out only a yellow on top, and a blue green below, and a purer green in flapping fronds to the sides, and I wondered for a moment whether this was not some enormous species of migratory flower I might tackle and subdue and stake a great scientific reputation upon. As it neared, though, I could see that it was only a young man of about twenty or so, with wild blond hair and the start of a beard, done up below in a too-large green tee beneath denim overalls that if washed once or twice might have staved off forever that ridiculous mirage about the flower.
I took him to be a college student (for how many would have reached the age he was and still dressed that way out here?), but even as he passed and met my sullen nod with a vibrant “Hello” (and even as this all but proved he was not of the place, since any local would have known to offer a stranger in a field no better than coiled suspicion) I began to reflect on the fact that there were no colleges to be had for a good fifty or sixty miles all around. Was this an area hippie then, as yet unknown to me and accidentally kind on account of his being “on” something? The clothes only half supported the notion, and anyway such a person, even if (or because) high, would almost certainly have carried a gun. Could this instead have been some new varietal of country homosexual, bred perversely to be sweet to passersby and to show no overt interest in a young country boy come across unplucked in a field? I acknowledge such a circumstance to be possible, but up until then I had encountered no fruit bruised and swollen by the Goochland sun that did not wish to pop annoyingly in my mouth, or to be in some less personal way crushed.
Was I hasty, then, about the college kid? No local son even three or four years removed from those weeds, returned to them unwilling on a break and surely aware that only they, paradoxically, and the surrounding trees, could now provide a haven in which to burn his jay out of sight and smell of his parents, would have been so much as cordial to a passing neighbor boy. But could there not somehow have arisen, out of sight and smell of either one of us, a new strain of student? One liberal enough with his friendship, and conservative enough with his judgment (though most school hippies, I learnt later, went solidly the other way around), that an ostentation of fraternity boys might just, in a brave counterintuition, have adopted him for a mascot, and chanted his name too loudly at parties, and derived a kind of self-affirmation from the very fact of him (and how bad are they, really, who can rally around a creature so obviously unlike themselves?), the hippie having rejected, after all (and is rejection not the mother of courage in America, though more often she behaves like the child?), the mores of his own demographic to pledge?
Perhaps he had not wanted to, had merely hoped to “test expectations” with his happy hello at the open house but was unexpectedly convinced, by the brothers’ beer or his personal dope, to explore a bit further what lay behind that hal
f-friendly greeting: ironically, of course, to begin with but afterward with an earnest and unfolding idea, on both sides, of what American brotherhood might actually mean, until the time came at last (it was tradition) for all pledges to be grabbed and blindfolded and loaded at night into the back of a rented U-Haul, thereby to be left with no resources many miles from home (was a time when even their clothes would be taken), whereupon it would be seen who would or would not make it back in any fit condition, and some brother (let us imagine him a new one, a favorite from the group just “jumped in”) had proposed, before the truck set out, that it might be funny to abandon at least one of the sub-brothers three times as far out as all the others, which would strand him, by the map here, somewhere in Goochland County (“I mean, Goochland—come on!”), after which the boys in the bay felt the truck lurch out onto the interstate, and heard the brothers in the cab begin to chant “Gooch! Gooch! Gooch!” with no understanding on anyone’s part what this word truly meant, or that it had already been decided, ages ago, with no need for a referendum on the matter, which of the cargo would be dropped in a distant hayfield so that he might come across, the following morning, one such as me.
This was fantasy, of course, and must forever remain so, since I received no adequate answer to the question I posed once I had determined that the puzzle in my head would admit of no obvious solution, which saw me stop in my going and trot back the opposite way, there to catch up with the older boy and touch him lightly on the shoulder, which caused him to jerk around almost violently as I asked, “Who are you?” After answering me (a little too quickly, I thought), and then waiting, with folded arms and a forced smile, to enjoy whatever additional language might spring up between us, this hippie set off suddenly, at an impressive clip, for the nearest clump of wood.
Here is how he had answered me (that smile already forming, those arms crossing over his chest in what I initially took for a sign of haughtiness, until they dropped like petals and began to pump like pistons for the trees):
“Who’s to say? Maybe I’m Jesus Christ.”
Here, I swear, is all I had offered in response:
“Then where the fuck have you been?”
BOOK FOUR
Lemonade
Crypt
Arrangement is not creation
How those Witnesses
Beckett
No joke
Inner tube/Loon
To wit
Josh
(On a plane)
As we paused in our chewing
Lemonade
Of all those creatures who wandered past our yard, or were dragged up dying into it, none unnerved me so much as the witnesses who arrived one summer afternoon and began to poke around the place with smiles and gentleness and great wonder, as if they had somehow landed on a moon made out of our spiritual weakness. I remember that my brother was engaged at the time, his every young muscle, with the motorized tiller he was yoked to because he was the eldest and hence the strongest, and that he looked up at these interlopers with a face meant to indicate that he had nothing left to offer them: no interest, no wariness, no phony forbearance, since all he possessed of those qualities was engaged just then in the effort to control, with outstretched and vibrating arms, the ugly metal mule they could each of them see a-buck before him. What earth that tiller scooped up and overturned had long since consumed what was human in him, let alone what was bound to be sociable.
Yet this cannot have been the case, can it? For the soil (or what we agreed to call the soil: why? why?) was tilled always at the first hint of springtime, so that our father could be sure his firstborn would be sent out to guide that machine, and the rest of us to drag hoes and sticks, through clay that was not merely hard on its own account but had been given no proper time to thaw. Perhaps they came in springtime, then, these three or four pilgrims to our iniquity, or perhaps it was indeed in summer and my brother was not below them at all; perhaps he was back in the woods envisioning suicide, or out in the barn attempting it (who can say?), and my memory of his being tied to the tiller that day is no more than a ghost impression, of which I am admittedly prone to several. Perhaps my sister, whom I recall as being up in her room that afternoon (or was it morning?), lost in one of those books she relied upon to order the reality beyond her walls (and often enough within them) into a narrative with a conclusion more hopeful than what she could possibly have formulated on her own, was actually out in the yard when the proselytizers made landfall, greeting each of them with a how-do-you-do and a ladylike offer of lemonade.
That is absurd, of course. My sister was ladylike enough for such a scene (which aspect of her seemed forever to escape either parent), but we were not a family to have lemonade on hand for company, nor to accept it when we went visiting, except where pressed (only those who thought themselves truly worse stuck to their refusal after a second offer), whereupon we would grip the glass tightly, lest we drop it and prove our unworthiness even of a glass of lemonade, and would not allow ourselves to risk its contents until well after the sugar had sunk to the bottom, which ensured that we rarely made it past the first predictably sour sip. And yet! And yet! Were there not occasions when I, emboldened by some illusion of superiority to my host, or too parched after a day’s lent-out labor to care who was superior to whom, reached out for and gulped down what paltry drink was offered? Did I care then how the sugar in the glass was apportioned? Did I not sometimes, in my animal thirst, forget to offer even a polite (or was it intended to be a humble?) “Thank you”?
And what would that “Thank you” have meant, exactly? Thank you for the opportunity to jog all day behind the folksy old wagon pulled by the folksy old tractor steered by the folksy old neighbor? Thank you for the opportunity to burn and lacerate my fingers heaving folksy hay bales up onto a folksy old platform baked by the folksy old sun? Thank you for the opportunity to scream myself hoarse in an attempt to be heard over the tractor’s folksy engine, so that the folksy driver might turn around just once and acknowledge my folksy arm signals, which in the folksy parlance of the place conveyed quite fluently the notion Ease it up, coot, or I will climb up onto that tractor and kill you?
There was no lemon anyway in the Styrofoam jug this decrepit brought out at midmorn for the two of us to share, and no sugar even at the bottom, and no possibility that he would not have touched his papery lips to the spigot before I ever got a go at it, and so deposited his old-man sloughings around the orifice, which convinced me to refuse any interaction with the jug until I had almost begun to hallucinate (and could half envision the tractor tipped over, and the neighbor pulped, and myself happy and explaining to the authorities that it must have been some function of his advanced years, as we certainly had plenty of water), after which, I confess, I did take that thermos up, and sucked like a babe from its crusty hole, only to discover that the water was so warm it could not have been properly cooled to begin with, which discovery, and my alarmed inquiry into the matter, the old man met with a self-satisfied lecture on the need for hot water, not cold, beneath a summer sun, lest a shock to the system occur and accelerate, rather than ward off, your common heatstroke.
Once relieved of this useless lore, and once certain I understood that it was the town people, with their cold water and their lukewarm ideas, who had got it all wrong, he lit up a pipe so as to give me time to drink my fill of his wisdom and his backwash. I remember that he gazed out approvingly over the trees, and helped himself to a puff or two, and then widened his jaw so as to speak again (this time no doubt about how he had learnt that warm-water trick from his father, who had learnt it from his, and so on, until at last I saw how I might one day pass this crappy magic along to some overworked and underwanted son of mine), at which point I threw the jug down and declared him to be an idiot, which outburst he started at, sure, but for the most part pretended not to hear. He simply emptied out the contents of his pipe against what tire was nearest me (the right, as I recall), and got that tractor up and into gear, and
for the rest of the day drove it and me so hard across his field that by nightfall I was too tired and too nauseated to care who was the idiot here, or to dwell much more upon murder.
Crypt
These hands, I submit, were not meant for farmers’ throats, any more than they were meant for the coarse twin loops that encompassed and defined those bales: too loosely here, too tightly there, so that the knee came up under too early or too late, which then caused a great jolt to the spine, and further tear on the fingers, and a resurrected desire to crush for good the old man’s already half-collapsed smokestack. These hands were meant for finer things: for piano keys and pages, for soft cheeks and new hairs, for those parts of people that reward kind pets more than they ever will your numb and calloused scrape. These hands were meant to play, I submit, and one day, God willing, to make something, not to yank up out of the ground something that had long since learned to remake itself, which miracle humans had not caused to happen but only caused to happen here (in this particular field, on this particular patch of grime), so as to aid in a crude vegetation’s slaughter by bushwhacker, and its inept mummification by baler, and its removal by pain and by wooden hearse from a field no one saw for a killing floor to a barn no one saw for a crypt.