Against the Country

by Ben Metcalf

  I suppose it likely as not that he stayed close pals with that boyhood him, who came to associate “farm” with “work,” yes, but also with a kind of freedom, et into only when he heard his mother’s screams from the fields abutting his wooded playpen, or from farther on up at the house, and knew then to run and fetch her into a vehicle he would by dial or happenstance steer, at nine or ten or eleven (his profligate father away at clocked work on the railroad), into the nearest approximation of town, so that she might there be delivered of a tenth or eleventh or twelfth child those fields could not feed, nor those trees hope to shelter, nor that encumbrance-hating boy ever bring himself fully to ignore.

  He might have maintained a shy contact with that terrified teenage him, tossed too late into a town high school once his parents had concluded that their surviving children would not warrant the epithet much longer without infrastructural assistance. The only fun to be had there was basketball, which an older him admitted the younger him had played poorly. The college-bound him he would have admired and felt a sharp pang for, as I do now, not knowing which response applies more properly to the farmboy muscles, say, secretly acquired in town, or to the south-midland accent dropped in favor of a Confederate professor’s more sonorous snarl, or to the “choice” to attend classes nearby, when he might have gone anywhere, so as to hasten him home each weekend to chop wood on the farm his parents had since, in their stubbornness, returned to, with so many hungry children in tow that he was forced on those occasions to sleep out on straw in the barn.

  Even I would exchange Christmas cards with that him of hims, were I at all the sort to exchange Christmas cards.

  The remainder of my fathers I knew personally, with the possible exception of his sportsfan ghost, and I assume these all to have chatted incessantly: on how best, and how often, to whip an unwanted child; on what it meant, or did not mean, to whip an unwanted child; on whether the whipping of an unwanted child was proof enough, if only for the unwanted child, of the nonexistence of God; on the ways in which psychology might be used to explain away the need to whip an unwanted child, just as philosophy might be used to explain the need to whip away an unwanted God; on how literature (being what psychology and philosophy would ever amount to anyway) might provide any number of neat justifications for it: the whipping, I mean here, not the deity, and certainly not the child.

  I was just fiddling with one of these neat justifications myself when our stove took Romantically ill, and although tamped down for the night, and so shut of any unfresh new air, could not contain what dispute had burgeoned within its belly that day, and so sent great bursts of superheated gas up the stovepipe in a forgivable attempt to relieve itself, which then lent holy succor to the creosotic rebellion that had clung to the house’s butthole in a long and patient abeyance there.

  I both welcomed and feared this coup, and asked that it succeed even as I instinctually fought against it, and crawled out onto the icy tin roof of the side porch, and steadied as best I could a ladder raised high against the roof beams, and helped my sock-footed brother scale those same rungs as his author had, and ferried up to him what pailfuls of water our sister, in perpetual prayer against the chimney’s jet-engine whine, swung out the window to me, whose grip was uncertain, and whose faith in the enterprise slipped a little each time I saw my father, proud and erect above the flames, toss an empty down into the yard for his half-naked wife to dart out and retrieve, and fill once more at the tub’s narrow spigot, and slop up those stairs her man had built because of and despite her, and deliver her load to a daughter who within the hour would play Juliet to volunteer firemen awash in her embarrassment, poking at this brick, and at that patch of siding, and watching where it was they stepped, until at last they had concluded, with no look up at her, that this fire had long since been joined and extinguished.

  We tarried too in her skybox, and waited for the volunteers to make their smug departure, as if this had all been no more than another failed country tent revival, at which point our devil reawoke, and spat its orangey black up at the stars while all those lesser lights meant to save us disappeared around the bend. I remember that I scrambled quickly past her then, and set the ladder up much as I had before, and watched my father, and my brother just after him, climb heavenward to reinstate their hard tribute in water. Our mother went after those empties in the yard now with stronger legs, and with a calmer panic, and I got the sense that she was not acting anymore, or else had achieved some new level to her art: a “realistic” presentation of a woman wholly convinced just then that anything short of a full-on belief in her man, and by extension his miserable children, would surely result in the combustion of her matrimonial bed (being closest to the fire) and, given time, all our littler ones besides.

  A velocity finally sufficient

  I ought to have yelled up at him there, or beyond him up at her God, that I knew what they both were doing; that I had reconciled myself to the truth that someone Else’s hand might forever stay my own; that there were several on this planet, and at least One up above it, who had me figured for a pawn in their game, unworthy even of the modest bishopric I now played for (queen being quite beyond me by then), so that I might venture out catercorner of an evening to bestow my dull blessing, perchance to imbed a sharp blade.

  Here is all I have left for a blessing:

  My father, who beat me constantly at chess too, could not possibly have meant for his children to grow up so nostalgically enslaved to the countryside as he himself had been, and to long for it even as they tried and failed to fly its sucking gravity. He could not possibly have intended for his children to linger in that well for the threescore and change allotted them, unable to decide whether Earth’s dumb trial was preferable, in this age of happy moonbounces, to the testy chatter available in town. And so he had resolved to make the tough call for us, in the only way he knew would excuse a wrong answer: He would hurt his children in the woods so as to force their eyes back upon devalued buttcheeks, rather than up at overpriced real estate in the sky. He would lead us not into temptation about the holiness of the trees, as he himself had felt (the temptation, not the holiness), but rather would deliver us, by means of a farm-bound misery, from the evil of thinking no good could ever come from town, where prior to his dying we were each of us ensconced, which then afforded him the defense of thinking that his hand, and our sorry hinds, had somehow achieved a velocity finally sufficient to escape the dirt he need not ever have returned to in the first place.

  And if we slowed in that velocity, and sometimes let on about what harm town had lately done us, he would find himself comfortably within his rights (which was the goal here, after all, that comfort, and those rights) to look up at his exasperated wife, and wink, and say, “Well …”

  Here, then, is what I retain for a blade:

  I ought to have let that ladder go the second time I saw him climb up on it, yelling at me to hold the base steady and oathing that he would break my “scrawny fucking neck” if I failed to do otherwise. I ought, God help me, to have let that ladder go. If for no other reason than that the ersatz country boy atop it, so weak as to surrender every one of us to his personal torturer, and not man enough nearly to plot out the coordinates of a halfway decent escape, once opened a town essay by writing

  Since its publication in 1948, Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” has received a large amount of critical attention, much of it concerned with attempts to explain the reason for Seymour’s suicide.

  Who would think to ignite a career so coldly? Or to extinguish one mixing memory and desire with disdain?

  My brother, at least, might have survived the fall.

  BOOK SIX

  Horrid twist

  (For those still keeping track)

  My subterfuge began

  A taste for Sousa

  Americans about it

  Good eating

  Advocate

  Cheerios

  Wonder Bread

  Fun sto
ry

  A litany here

  Want of angels

  Is it possible

  Redemption

  My father’s axe

  Horrid twist

  Weird county;

  Whose dirt was devoid of richness;

  Whose humans were despoiled of sense;

  Whose name could boast of no increase except in the multifold categories of shame;

  Whose foundation of shifty gneiss, exposing itself characteristically near the men’s state prison, so differed from the rest of Virginia that it was chipped at and pored over, this “Goochland terrane,” by geologists who could in no way account for its origin or for its mysterious properties, thought by some to be related to the early formation of Manhattan (of all places) and by others to the breakup of a larger continent, long ago, that otherwise left no foreign elements secreted within our own;

  Whose anomalous rock might have come from Mars, for all I care, or been donated by a passing comet, since I personally hold it to be no more, and no less, than the fungal big toenail of Lucifer as he kicks, across eons, at America from below;

  Whose abhorrence knew full well what changes might be worked upon a human child who listens too carefully to the trees, and asks why they shudder and whistle and crack as they do, and seem always to be moving closer; and so turns for comfort to a “community” of peers who will lead it, with laudable speed, to accept bias and barbarity as down-homey truths, especially where they lead on to war; and so runs back to a mother who will come to regard it (not unfairly: she, too, is trying to fit in) as a simp and a secularist and a probable faggot; and so seeks wisdom, if no more understanding, from a father intending to workhorse his seed so hard that it will flee not only the land but also the simple notion that it might one day safely return there;

  Whose product, I am convinced, and that great fungal toenail has always known, will rebel against nearly everyone in this scenario and will embrace the one apparent refuge left open to it, being unfortunately, and usually for keeps, its natural surrounds;

  By which I can mean only Goochland.

  Whether my father arranged this horrid twist in me, so that I might learn for myself how devastating even a sham attachment to the dirt would prove; or whether he merely allowed it, half hoping I might come at last (by way of a reverse psychology, which usually worked on the more emotionally disturbed JDs) to adore the dirt as he had always felt forced to; or whether he intended, this teacher of words and maths, only the first derivative (my rebellion against the dirt) and was therefore wholly flummoxed by the second (my rebellion against his plot to have me rebel against the dirt), and so slumped in his underwear and grew ever more despondent while his second son (and what of the first? the first!) pretended to pretend to be a country boy, and then just pretended, and then just was (or thought he was), I cannot say. Nor does it much confront me. I imagine that our continent has for ages now replenished its rural meatlocker by this same insidious snare.

  I would ask my father to comment here, except that I killed him a few pages back, and no ventriloquism of mine (“Hold that fucking ladder or I’ll …”; “Pay some goddamned attention or I’ll …”; “What in the hell is wrong with you?”) will convince the reader that a pile of cool ashes is able, or willing, to puff straight answers out at anyone. I can only, then, try to be accurate about my own petty motivations:

  Had our house up and exploded that chimney-fire night, and caught me out stuck to the roof, of a mind to jump off it but melted there by Judas soles, until the whole of my clothing took fire and I screamed in silence, my breath burnt away, and prayed to get out of those boots before I popped like a kernel and sent all my fluff up to God; had my devout yet town-hip mother been less apt to say, in those days of oaths and accusations (hers, mostly, the accusations), “Don’t be so melodramatic,” which hypocrisy I would gladly excuse, had that little “so” of hers, borrowed along with the rest of the phrase, not itself been so melodramatic (; had I but known then of melodrama’s place in my melodramatic future); had I but resolved, all those decades ago, to remain forever a stranger to that corruptive county and never to allow myself, if only for a year or two or three, by means of a steady retreat down Jacob’s unsteady stair, to be transformed into a proudly defensive, ecstatically religious, uselessly horny, country-smug moron, whose own parents would not have recognized him (though it cannot be said that they tried), we might have made an easier go of it ahead. We might have been able to sustain the fiction that a rhetoric of complaint is the one true path across memories of a perfectly ordinary American childhood, wherein delight and contentment, feigned at first, fine, but for that no less experienced, and no more given over to facile caricature than the complaint thus far has been, offer up their own loud and hair-raising hues.

  (For those still keeping track)

  (Do not reject me, please, for what joy I am about to express, or pretend to express (see above, and below), in Goochland’s gross particularities. Is there a child born of woman who will not seek out pleasure where it can? Is there a child born to man who will not doubt that same pleasure?

  (Do not discard me either as an ironist, for God knows I am nothing of the sort. Pretending to pretend I find no more honest, or dishonest, than pretending not to pretend, and neither of these masks will much, of itself, enhance the reality I pretend now to pretend not to pretend to.

  (I am after, I hope, what lies beyond these two obvious choices, in that realm where I forever evade one possibility and forever chase after the other, or I guess am hunted, alternately or in tandem, and again forever, by both.

  (Do also forgive, while we are at it, this late directness in me, which is meant primarily, if not exclusively, for those still keeping track.)

  My subterfuge began

  My subterfuge began with the chickens. We had been reading Hardy in the high school, probably because our teacher, who lived in Richmond’s West End and I believe did her best, thought the pastoral themes in his writing might at long last “speak” to us. She was a close and clever reader of poetry, that I can recall, but she had fallen victim to the delusion that novels were not constructions in the manner of poems, to be clambered over and admired (if not always fallen for), but rather were instructors, such as she imagined herself to be, of how, and why (or was it really only whether?), to stay afloat in the flood of life’s tears.

  Jude the Obscure stood at least a chance of scaring me up out of the water, but it was Tess of the d’Urbervilles we were expected to grab onto, and that raft quickly capsized. We were already familiar with the yeoman sort of naturalism, and betrayed by it, so there was no real news there, and we had learnt from the land-puppeted fists of our peers what airs like Tess’s pa put on would get you. Yet our teacher, inferring from our Yes, and? looks that most of us had failed even to open the book, which was probably the case, persisted in her mission, and made us watch Tess (1979) on a television set rolled in by a kid from the disabled room whose every step held in it more drama than the film ever could.

  She then went on to explain, God help her, about the symbolism at work here, and about how Tess, portrayed by the Kinski girl, whom we had all by then seen with a snake curled around her privates on a friend’s sagging farmhouse wall, was clearly the prey in this situation, driven on every side by malevolent nature, but we understood about that too, and some of us even got that the reason our school emptied out at the start of each deer season was less about hunting than it was about feeling, if only for a day or two, or fourteen, less hunted oneself. This wisdom extended even to the gaudy orange garb those hunters wore: any uniform will make one feel momentarily like a cop, especially with a gun in one’s hands, but in time the truth sets in that orange uniforms are worn far more often, and in vastly greater numbers, by the imprisoned.

  I tried to be kind to this teacher, and not lash out at her as I did with most others, since I thought her both smart and pretty (not Kinski-with-a-snake pretty, but still) and only bewitched by the county’s evil, as opposed
to willfully ignorant of it, and because she was divorced and unhappy and hence (one can hope) sensitive to all those drowning metaphors of mine. (Some few of us had returned, in loud desperation, to the sea that had delivered our families to this haunted shore in the first place, and saw them off inland to be petrified there (I knew of a Goochlander who sat every day outside a gas station and in seventy years had never caught a ride into Richmond, even when I offered him one. (HE: I wouldn’t impose. I: It’s no imposition, sir. I’m headed that way myself. HE: I wouldn’t care for it.) Williamsburg, and the great Oceanus beyond, must have seemed mere myths to this man!), though to be fair we ourselves approached it only with another family, more sophisticated than we were but in practical terms no better off (being similarly Catholic), so as to save money, and in tents sure to leak because it was sure to rain, as our guardians had elected to wait until summer was over, again to save money, and we ate cheese sandwiches for our sustenance, and what bits of sand affixed to the cheese and pooled in the bread’s greasy chambers, and for warmth we played grab-ass in the deserted waves with a daughter from the opposite family whose father (our immovable own being planted back in Goochland) then gave us a speech about “respect,” which by grabbing at her ass we assumed we had been showing her, though in truth we hoped primarily to make our intentions known to her older and more experienced sister up on the beach, sunning herself scandalously and noticing how we noticed not to notice her, until she saw her stiff Christian father jog waterward to lecture us, at which point she grinned and rolled over, as if to show us what an ass worth grabbing at actually looked like.

  (I knew she would sneak out of her tent that humid night, and join us all down on the beach, around what fire my brother had built, and then presumably pissed on, out of what wood could be culled from nearby, though throughout the day she had shown little interest in our plans and our gossip. She might have come anyway, but I am guessing that my mother (who earlier that year had met with a teacher who inquired, as they emerged from their conference, whether her second son was liable to grow as large as the first, which elicited a harsh “No!” from my mare, unwilling to see a foal’s waxing lust collide with a hag’s waning sensibility (I only half mean to imply that this was the same teacher who had exposed us all to Hardy, or even that said teacher was a woman, but in either case my laughter throughout the episode was unwarranted and possibly unwise)) corralled this “mature” girl just after supper, and asked whether she would not mind keeping an eye on the kids tonight (she would have put it that way, my mother, “the kids”) while the grownups gulped wine in their grownup tent and congratulated themselves on allowing their children this “important” and “formative” glimpse of freedom, secure in the knowledge that the oldest girl at their disposal, no matter how fecund, was sure to trade clumsy relations in for the chance to be treated, finally, by someone not a kid in this calculus, her actual age.