Against the Country

by Ben Metcalf

  When he had finally regained, by pubescent or literary trial, the human capacity for speech, my brother gave voice to a charming little need-based theory, which held that we would each of us die of frostbite, if not by the wire or worse, did we not line up at the edge of the forest and present ourselves as ready, if not exactly resolved, to shoulder and drag and roll up into the yard, or to kick and curse at and finally (it was inevitable) collapse and weep upon, what hyperbolically large cylinders of wood our father had cut free from his latest self-satisfied kill, so that we might learn by this drudgery how heat is hard, and comfort a ghost, and paternal protection a myth we had best get over right away. My soon to be allegedly insane sister (spared institutionalization (is that the right term here? what I want, more properly, is “the booby hatch,” though by such I intend no judgment upon them that have repaired there) by a brother’s half-solemn threat to steal her north to stay with a half-frozen him) clove to the proposition, or apologia, that our father meant only to make our backs wide and strong, so that we might not suffer the same as he had, and would not in time (in irony? indecency?) be compelled to despise our own children as we obviously would ourselves, on which new way of thinking my brother and I quickly bet (having crapped out previously on the need-based theory) and stuck to it even when she amended her scheme to include the possibility that because of Frank’s wont to “overdo things,” and owing to his reluctance to “ease off on” any course he believed to run parallel with (if not in fact to be) nature’s, our backs would likely shatter even sooner than had his.

  (I have named him, yes. I had not meant to, any more than he had meant to die, which of course he always had, and I am ashamed to see that so paltry a trap of diction, met up with fatigue and a hand-me-down languor, has led me now to do so. He was not directly of Frankish heritage, that I can trace, nor was he forthright enough in his motives to deserve that name otherwise, but was only called such as a compromise, since one parent had hoped him christened Claude and the other had said it put him in mind of a clump of dirt, which was nonetheless how the child was then treated, and how he subsequently came to treat all of us: not as walkers upon this Earth but as bothersome detachments from it, to be avoided, or tripped over, or picked up and hurled out of anger and frustration (or hilarity, which may one day prove the same thing), until at last we could be ridden over and ground down into something fine and wet enough to catch hold of his seed, which he had apparently forgotten we already were.)

  My own thoughts concerning those trees, and his children’s crusade against them, and what turned soil held these two ruinous concepts fast (three if you count the soil, four if you count the thoughts), were at first a leaning toward, and then away from, my brother’s confusion, followed by a leaning toward, and then away from, my sister’s, until at last I was flung free of this cracked seesaw and alit in a position to decide for myself, by a more objective subjectivity (or was it the other way around?), what plausible explanation of our reality might suffice. None, I came to worry, ever would.

  “The patterns, incidents, and images noted do exist”

  I had heard our father say, apropos of what I cannot recall, that he felt himself made “claustrophobic” by the trees in Virginia, and out of that small sliver, and out of a supposition that he meant not only the increased number of leaves and needles along the Eastern seaboard but also the great earthen breasts that raised them up over us, and bestowed upon mere hairs such a frightful prominence, I formed an idea that he was simply expressing a nostalgia for the flatter, less festooned vistas of his youth back in southern Illinois, which philosophy saw me through several winters hauling his logs up into that hateful yard, my hands encased in sweatsocks for their protection (he would never consent to see them in perfectly affordable work-gloves) and my mind racing over what cold calculations his own might have made when, with me beside him in the cab one sunset, he came upon a hundred acres or so of what was intended for pulpwood (from which is got paper), burnt and obliterated now by what I hoped to have been a can of gasoline and a JD’s last roach but was probably only God’s latest lucky strike, which vision then caused him to stop, and to extinguish his engine, and to sit in silence before that razed and blackened topography where just the week prior he had known but a daunting sheet of white, shot through with green (lest this sentence run out and convey only part of the pathos I once envisioned for it, I should mention that my father, like so many others before him, half fancied himself an American bard, despite the fact that his production was limited, that I know of, to a single well-premised note on J. D. Salinger, taken finally, when I was already a belt-beaten six, by the journal Studies in Short Fiction, volume 9, number 3 (the ending especially I have returned to eagerly and often, wherein my father’s pride in having all but completed a “publishable” essay has led him to attempt what he assumes will be recognized, and of course loudly applauded, as a well-earned “poetic” dismount—

  The patterns, incidents, and images noted do exist; and while I might be accused of committing a critical fallacy in supposing that Salinger consciously planned them along the line of my discussion, they do offer themselves to my argument, whatever Buddy Glass, mixing memory and desire, might want to say about it.

  —but is actually worth only a collective gasp or two, since following the appalling laziness of the “my discussion”/“my argument” switcheroo he finds no better way to achieve his unstuck landing than to lift, in toto, right there before the regrettable tough-guy cliché, a phrase Salinger had Seymour Glass, not Buddy, bum off of T. S. Eliot, who himself got it God knows where, and from whom I would not separate my father now as a fan (of Eliot’s, I mean, not God’s), except to say that he (my father), this hanged man who made us to stir dull roots with spring rain, or without it, and who in winter never kept us warm, and who showed us fear in a handful of wire, would at least practice later to disguise his stealings rather than invite so wide a scrutiny of them, such as when he kept a hand truck off the U-Haul that had so rudely forced us out into the undead land and, in his paranoia (which even as children we laughed at, our arms full of wood, our hair wet with snow in this sylvan scene), painted over its telltale orange (why Poe of a sudden? or is it Burgess?) in order that he might, without worry of a knock upon his door (now I see), roll before us an instrument we were forbidden to employ in any wood- or resentment-gathering activities of our own), followed in his middle fifties by an “unpublishable” novel (why is it that I have set this cruellest mouthful in quotes? is it only because I gave matching barrettes to her better-off cousin, above? am I trying, that is, to be fair? and would that not constitute, in this charred and violent hour, a critical fallacy?) on the theme of Jefferson and his own vainglorious self (my father’s, I mean, or mean mostly), once he had squandered off (again, my father), in the near thirty-year interregnum between these disparate efforts (during which he expressed himself primarily through those studied grunts and silences and lashings out), what chance he ever had to grow himself up against the language, and to gain some purchase on it that might have loosened, if not avoided entirely, its kudzu-like purchase on me) where the page before him had rotted with envy and unuse.

  Within this dilated moment, as we stared out over the jagged black remains of a hundred-acre wood (poor Pooh! poor Piglet!), and took in that panel of red and gold sky newly visible just beyond it, I swear I could almost smell the synapses firing within my father’s brain so as to tug toward his skull what rainbow array of wires our great God-arsonist had laid beneath his cheeks all those fond years prior, which gift and which foresight produced a smile I think anyone would want to call explosive.

  An excellent theory

  An excellent theory, and one we might still hear raised by the surviving members of our party, but I ask you this:

  What claustrophobe, really, would have shown such a calmness as my father did when the snow came down like a beeless quilt over house and yard and field and tree, and put an end to any long-term thinking on his part or on our
s, and by the hush that followed drew all near to all? what claustrophobe would not have lumbered away from that hokey gulag after the first foot had fallen, rather than slump beside a stove whose fumes (and those of the cigarettes he lit one after the other with matches scraped across her pouty lower lip) robbed him breath by breath of the wind required to order his children out into the yard to gather what scraps of firewood there could still be construed as dry? what claustrophobe would not have gone naked and expansively mobile at these times, rather than swaddle himself fashionably in layers of flannel and denim and down, and tuck himself supine into a dirt-backed snow, and offer his beard to a lowering sky determined by its flakes to cover him completely? what claustrophobe would then have so stoically scooted, with atrophied legs, the whole of his torso up under a house he knew all the while to be sinking down onto him, there to tarry in that tomb for hours and for eras, melting with a blowtorch what ice had formed in, and clogged, and threatened as usual to burst (though we had left all the faucets trickling at night, as he ever commanded we do), a hieroglyph of town pipes his floor had neither the aptitude to decipher nor the historical expectation to suspend?

  What claustrophobe, I ask you, would have shown so cramped a mercy as he did when it was finally uncovered that his sons floated close to their bedding of a frigid night, and emptied themselves (shyly at first, though later in more expressive torrents) against what breach had formed, almost conveniently, between the upper and lower sashes of a chattering window in their chamber, so as to cause (or by these efforts contribute to) a frozen yellow seepage that began well within the confines of the capsule itself and proceeded, seeking gravity and some semblance of atmosphere, down the outer face of the bottom pane and along a sloping sheet of metal miles below (or was it inches? we could not tell), at whose far end it terminated, on your colder orbits anyway, in a stalactite depending from, and drawing special attention to, a stopped if formerly earthbound gutter?

  What claustrophobe, or besides that what agoraphobe (what flasher, i.e., what slinker? what promoter of his children? what tucker away of them? what facilitator, by word, of their passage through this void? what destroyer, by wire, of any hope they may have had not to fear its wide expanse?), mindful that our little rock-candy formulation might be spotted easily from the road below and denounced for the shamelessness of its artistry, with perhaps some few points tacked on for the veracity of the statement being made (or was it the statement that would call down the censure, on account of a gaucherie, with some ground given grudgingly on the more delicate matter of form? one could never be sure), would not then have whaled on his sons for such an offense, and held them in suspicion ever after, and laid upon them a penance more severe than the quiet moonlight removal, by stick and stove-boiled water, of what sculpture their penises had planned out (on the theme of mortality and immediate need), and by a personal warmth carved into, across a rusted stretch of porchtop their father would in time demand rent from his sight and appraisal altogether?

  There persists a desire

  If he was a claustrophobe, then, I cannot show it to my satisfaction, nor I expect to anyone else’s, since the replays here will tend to confuse. His one recorded text, entitled “The Suicide of Salinger’s Seymour Glass,” and afforded four whole pages in the aforementioned Studies in Short Fiction (summer 1972; Newberry College; Newberry, South Carolina), strikes me as a little like that: it counts itself bold where it has been only careful; it holds itself safe on innovation’s bag where it has been called out paragraphs ago, by contact with any number of missed opportunities, such as when my father came up short in this inning yet awarded himself a remarkable run:

  All that is left to explain is the cause of Seymour’s suicide, and that explanation, I believe, is evident. The nearly conscious desires expressed in his bananafish story and in his erotic pretense with the girl are made fully conscious to him by Sybil’s innocent responses to his story and to the kiss on her foot. The only solution for Buddy’s saint is suicide.

  The first sentence there is a perfunctory swing whose back half is convinced that it has reached base easily, I suppose on an error. The next is so steeped in a dead Viennese’s weak tea, or deprived of his cocaine, as to be judged no better than an understimulated attempt to steal second. (That high-school hop from “nearly conscious” to “fully conscious,” and of course the tossing off of “erotic pretense” and “kiss on her foot,” could not help but stay even the swiftest runner.) (So why do I pursue this? Under whose aegis? Chasing what result? My father did not follow, nor that I know of know the first thing about, baseball, and so the fun that it is by far the least claustrophobic of our national sports can earn me next to nothing here, whereas his already established interest in basketball, America’s purer pastime and a much more intimate undertaking, might at a minimum allow me to ask how closely he ever observed that game’s playing, and how consciously he ever considered its less crickety metaphor to hug our more crickety predicament. Perhaps I should have gone instead, as he surely would have, with a literary analogy, or a theft: Would not the time-honored, or -forged (or is it really only the imitated?), Odyssey have gone better in this spot? Better even than the more Iliadic to-and-fro of basketball? Or of that girded and chaotic scrum we call football, which I never once watched him watch? Would it not have smacked the ear sounder, this round and salty sea tale, than ever could the squared-off, corn-syrup argument of baseball?) That last sentence there is your classic bunt: well executed, I agree, but not subtle enough to promote a player already thrown out at first all the way to third, let alone to bring him triumphantly (or was it really only vengefully?) home.

  There persists a desire in children, however damaged (the children or the desire), for their parents to be, in some inevitable way, right. I cannot with much probity pooh-pooh that hope, having once been a child myself, nor can I overlook now, out of childish sentiment, the blur in its pus-speckled mirror: that there persists in adults a desire, however damaged (the desire or the adults), for their children to be, in some inevitable way, wrong. My own close shave with American parents has led me to conclude that these images might be interchangeable, insofar as they come up against (if from different angles, and at different times) the same impassable barrier across what still (faint flashes!) exists of my moral-aesthetic continuum. I too find it repulsive to blame a parent in and by our literature for any crime perpetrated against a young and defenseless (or was it really only a memorable?) me, but I find it equally repulsive to pardon a parent in and by that same literature, comprising as it can but impressions of thoughts about memories of thoughts about memories of events I may not have remembered all that well to begin with, or thought about with any great clarity since.

  With that baseball foolery, for example (let’s play two!), I was probably only groping at, or toward, as I completed the loop metaphorically but left metaphysical matters caught in a rundown between second and third, untrustworthy thoughts about untrustworthy remembrances of untrustworthy objects being hurled at my unmetaphorical (at the time) and (at the same time) unmetaphysical head like nature’s outré chin music. That is, my father would, on occasion, fell a tree whose chunks were not so easily split as were pine’s into pieces small enough for the stove’s little strike zone to admit, which decision would see us out swinging exhaustedly in the yard for hours on end, using his maul to drive iron wedges into the petrified wood until it spread open like a schoolgirl beneath the bleachers at the bottom of the seventh (“Which wedge did it? Really? I thought sure you’d put that in the wrong crack”), or else seized up and blew one of these intrusions past our iced and idiot skulls at an audible velocity, in what I took at the time to be a willful attempt by God, or by the log, but surely not by our own manager, to brain us.

  (Forgive me)

  Still, this manager would, I know, could I cool his ash down and interview it (postgame) on the matter, be forced, out of a lingering American parenthoodness, to quibble with me there: not so much on the particulars of my
conclusion, which he would get at soon enough, as on its pretense to being, by way of that patently faked desperation, and that hardly-to-be-humored-anymore anger, and that damnable glibness, an innocent string of guesses, as opposed to what it more obviously was: a couched and perverted stab at him.

  (My father, forgive me, was a man to toss homegrown insults around, and puppies, but never a factory-stitched ball.)

  Malocchio

  Stabs, perverted or no, he could stomach and even admire, whether directed at his individualistic fat (now rendered) or at yours. Guesses he would cock an atheistic eye (hole? pearl?) at and pay no further attention to, so long as these could be imagined (by a once imaginative brain, now simple salts and vapors) to be, after the fashion then (which I hear tell is the fashion yet again), “genuine.” A couched anything, easily tolerated in his personal misbehavior, and absolutely prized in the work of those “real” writers he referenced or read out loud to us (through a vicarious vanity of his own, I imagine, or I guess), tended nonetheless to confound him in any doing of ours, as if both doing and doer were akin somehow to that overrun (or was it already a granulated?) beachhead in his spine, which joist (or which column, or which question mark) would shortly go the same fiery way as all the meat that had dared to conceal it, and all the flab that had hidden away all the meat, and all the thinness of skin that might have encouraged, rather than hindered, his turning a hot head around to cast one last melting malocchio upon a stretch of oily back a-blister like a curtain pushed playfully from behind by the company cutup and then caused, by way of a single faulty footlight (pop!), too dramatically, if alas too tardo, to immolate.