by Ben Metcalf
(And so she would come down to the beach, and sit cross-legged around the fire with the rest of us, in a sweatshirt because it was cold out but still bare enough below to hold our attention, and would not mind any scent of beer or pot she detected, since that was only what she expected anyway, and hours ago might even have encouraged (having been the first in our crowd, or so it was told, to find her way eastward into Richmond by moonlight, with who knows what in tow, to make contact with the riffraff there, and return with talk of new music and genitalia-friendly art films), though if anyone had anything on him that night he would not have brought it out in the presence of such a sudden and obvious adult, who smiled politely while a brother of hers played Beatles tunes on the guitar, keen (she, I mean) to what harmonies might indicate, from across the dune, a bikini bottom pulled off and a baby about to be made.
((I thought then, or should have thought, of that fun little church we all attended, in the fun little hamlet on the fun little hill to the west of our fun little county, and of how much fun it was when the old-lady organist there stabbed out at each note with three or more arthritic fingers, betting that one of these would hit the target and not worrying so much about the others, which ensured that even the most traditional hymn would morph into a modernist free-for-all, with the time signature generally chucked as her phalanges hunted after and failed to locate the melody, which the strongest voices in the chapel did their best to help out with, and also with the tempo, where they had not decided amongst themselves that this one was likely a wash. Now and then, in the midst of this mayhem, I could detect a high warble, not worried so much about the tune, or the beat, but only trying to make music with the crazy old woman, and I knew then that the eldest daughter from the opposite family had returned. From college? From after-college and dalliances there? I did not care: I cared only that she had returned to us with that mind and those lungs. She was considered by most a good sport rather than a good singer, but I knew different, and I suspect the old organist did too.)
(Despite our chaperone hearing no sounds of rape in the dunes that night, or because of it, she arose when she heard the F chord that all but guarantees “Yesterday” and summoned every girl to her bosom, not least my own sister, and lined them up by their differing lengths, and before she led them back to the tents, hand in hand, magnificently as I remember it, she counted them off by touching a comically bent claw to the top of each giggling head. Love, I sometimes think, is that witch finger, and any voice who follows after it.) The point I hoped to make about Tess is that both she and I kept chickens.
A taste for Sousa
Of the many wonderful experiences I had in the natural world, pained though I am to call them that now (see above, and below) but damned if I will tolerate a convenient dishonesty here, none can rival my bond with the beasts of the air. There were those who sat on a telephone wire like quarter notes so that I might end their tune with a slug to the throat, and there were those who sang out even louder to insinuate that I would never destroy them all. There were those who hooted, or screamed, or pecked out their pentagrams on a tree too close to the house (a friend of mine kept a loaded shotgun against his dresser, so that he might raise the morning caws of crows outside his bedroom window with a more vigorous all-in; his aim was not to “learn” these birds, which had been my initial assumption, so much as it was to abolish the whole of their species: does that not qualify, somewhere, somewhere, as wonderful? did van Gogh not envision the same sort of thing before he abolished himself instead?), and then there were those strange little not-birds who gathered in such buzzing number on a classroom windowsill in early fall (or was it late spring?) that I had merely to spit in my palm to attract a candidate I could close my fingers upon, and with a sucked thumb work the tiny head upward until it was exposed, aslant and amazed, at which point I could fasten upon it a slip-knotted leash made out of a strand begged from the scalp of a serious girl who wished not to know what I wanted with her hair.
Hoping to commune with but also to profit from my environs, I conceived of a plan to market my harnessed houseflies as low-maintenance, low-grief pets, and so win the high-school business fair, except that there was no business fair. I planned also to coat myself in a “formula” comprising sugar and buttermilk and cow feces (or human: I had yet to decide), and then “command” these creatures to fetch me something light to which their strings had already been attached (the first-place ribbon, say), and so win the science fair, except that there was no science fair.
After I had learned that there were no betterment fairs at the high school, I tethered these flies to my wrists and shoelaces and even my own tresses, and walked those halls a pariah, whispered to be so evil, or so near death, that the maggots had already got a start on me. A year or two earlier I might have done so out of an anger or a self-pity; I acted now from a joie de vivre. (Around this same time I bet a friend five dollars that within twenty-four hours I could part these same students as if they were the Red Sea, and back them up against their lockers in awe of my passing. I put out the rumor that I had AIDS and by lunchtime the next day had pocketed his money: Tater Tots.) In the bandroom I tied most of these lovelies to the bottom of my music stand, so that they might feed upon what was let loose from the spit valve above, but one favorite I secured to the tubes of my trumpet, so that it might perform its aerobatics while I played, and by chance pass in front of the bell, to be knocked out by the decibels there, and so hang by the neck until it came to, and recollected its capacity for flight, and climbed the air to breach once more the purifying din.
We had lost our original band teacher, a beloved old mustachioed fat man with a taste for Sousa and pedagogical tricks (he dealt with gum chewers by saying that he had once seen a student choke to death on gum while playing “that very same instrument,” giving us all the impression that hundreds of kids must have died on this man’s watch), when it was finally discovered (we had known it for years) that he also taught band in that despicable county just south of the James, which the Rebs had wisely skirted when they fled Petersburg for Appomattox. Made to choose, he chose the despicable county the Rebs had wisely skirted, as it paid him more, and so we were stuck with a humorless young woman from Richmond who wanted to suck the oompah out of our operation entirely, and transform us into a concert ensemble more suited to her sense of self (based solely, that I could see, on Amy Irving’s performance in The Competition (1980)), and would eventually, had I not acted at once, take notice of, and predictable exception to, my flies.
I convinced the trumpeter beside me (a recent recruit from shop) to cut his lip gruesomely on his braces and spend the rest of an afternoon spitting blood down into his mouthpiece. In time the teacher stopped us in our playing, and said that the trumpets sounded “gurgly,” at which point we pushed all the music stands aside, so that she might properly see, and the boy sitting next to me opened his spit valve and produced a lake of crimson gore so large I was forced, as were several others in the vicinity, to lift my feet. Once the deluge had reached our stands, the flies tied to mine, already straining at their hairs, set upon it in dreadful unison. Our teacher flew out of the bandroom then, hand over her mouth, and did not return to us the following semester.
I must tell you, or tell someone, that at times in the process of leashing a fly the wings would come off and one was left, in the patois, with a “walk.” This unfortunate was normally let loose to explore one’s desktop until, say, a teacher tossed a graded paper down onto it—
“On The Tempest”
A–
Watch those run-ons, and please no more profanity.
—and realized what it was she had just seen (or had she?), and so turned back around, and lifted the paper, and out of human instinct used it to euthanize the pitiful thing that crawled underneath (would that Lear could have come to my aid there, with its “as flies to wanton boys” zinger, but we were not yet acquainted with that play, nor would we be by graduation), my profit on this being the demerits she then
dramatically wrote out for me, which forced me to stay after class and explain that although I had admittedly done harm to the fly, and would have to answer for that in Act V (or would I?), I was at least willing to allow it what life was left to it, whereas she had robbed it even of that, and so of the chance (who can say?) to find a mate who did not mind the lack of wings, and possibly even found the look attractive, indicative as outer damage can ofttimes be of inner character, and had decided to make fly babies with this particular one, to the exclusion of all others, but could do no such thing now with the perfectly lifeless smudge we could each of us see before us, right there, on the lip of my desk. I continued along this line until she had torn up my demerits and was weeping so profusely I had to remind her to write me out a tardy slip for the period our intercourse had cut into.
But it is of the birds at home I now wish to speak.
Americans about it
True, I had succumbed at school, and happily, to the rural way, or perhaps it was only the southern, and could boast of numerous people repulsed by my actions there (such as when a principal sought to expel me for having shown my “rear” to a carload of honking Protestants riding behind my slow schoolbus: this man had said, during what he took to be our exit interview, “There’s a time and a place for everything,” which I argued was high school (time) and schoolbus (place), but he resisted this logic and insisted on a face-to-face meeting with my embarrassed mother and infuriated father (or was it the other way around?); I warned him that such a stance would lead on to trouble, to which he responded, “You bet it’s trouble, mister, and you’re in it,” which then led me to explain that it was not me I was worried about, as I was already in constant and excruciating trouble at home, but rather a situation he himself might want to avoid, who had yet to taste the rhetorical wrath of a mother convinced that she alone had any right to judge her children or, beyond that, the narrative vindictiveness of a father seeking to win his wife to him by continual displays of violence against anyone his wife held to be worthless, who, I heard later, launched his sawdusted corpse-in-the-making (he is all dust and no saw now, I assure you: we may begin in earnest to sweep him away) across the principal’s desk in an attempt to close forever the town man’s offending throat, while my mother grabbed at, and pulled against, those same callused fingers she had perhaps that very morning scraped away from her delicate lap, hoping to beat out a last-minute compromise), but I had only then begun to assimilate at home.
The chickens were a help with that, the assimilation, and I thank them for it. I would also apologize, since there were moments when I sensed that their pleasure did not entirely equal my own. And, of course, because they are now all dead. It is silly, I know, to apologize to the departed with words so few of them made use of while still alive, but we do so anyway, apologize, or refuse to, if we are going to be Americans about it. My already condemned father stood too often at the side porch while the sun went down on him, declaiming (he? it?) against whatever after-school activity had lately kept me away from the stead (if I had come from a “sports-team practice” he would look about ready to disown me (from what? from what?); if I explained that I had just now been with a country girl, and had held her furry crotch in my dirty palm, and had squeezed it till et cetera, et cetera, I might enact a brief pause in his bitching while he gazed up at the purpling sky, and considered whether or not I was lying (invariably I was), or else reminisced (which is more what I was going for there), after which he would catch himself up and continue) when I knew full well that chickens would not eat by the light of the moon. Any child will become exasperated by this sort of thing (or inspired, is my overall point here) and will rejoice in the chance to teach its parent otherwise. I do, though, apologize to the chickens.
At first these birds appeared ruffled as the moon lit their dinner, and for a week or two they refused to lay, but I held fast to my schema and soon had them gathering in the coop yard to feed only when moonlight presented, and staying inside their shelter on those occasions when it did not, during which nights I threw feed down onto the coop-house floor, and shone a flashlight in through the mesh, so as to coax along what result I wanted. My success in this experiment spurred me on to several others, hardly more scientific but every bit as fun.
The hens needed their wings clipped regularly so that they would not fly the hexagonal mesh that encompassed, but could not wholly hide from view, their grassless yard. Traditionally one cut the end feathers off the right wing and left it at that, but I wondered whether less standard dos might not produce more glamorous trips. I began to try out various shapes and depths of trim, on both or either wing, and with some rigor I vetted the hypothesis that a certain Bernoulli-friendly styling, accompanied by a hindrance attached to one foot or the other (after seeing my brother lift weights out in front of the house, and me do God knows what out behind it, my father asked what the hell I thought I was doing back there, and I told him my activities were of no concern to a petit-bourgeois arriviste (because a Parisian woman had after the war years married a Goochland farmer, mistakenly thinking she was doing something romantic, there were French lessons offered, if a tad sarcastically, at the high school) who did not even know that chickens prefer to dine by moonlight like everybody else, whereupon he took a step toward me, and I took a step toward him, with the clippers still in my hand, which may or may not have led him to stop, and to consider all the feathers strewn between us, and to say, before he turned and disappeared back into the house, “Those hens are your responsibility”), might produce panicked barrel rolls through the air, and desperate hover-bounces off the coop side, and flapping front backflips with a half twist (I achieved this once, or else the hen I conscripted and handicapped did: when she landed, facing suddenly back at me, she cocked her head and produced the second-best look of astonishment I have ever seen on a chicken), which even Wilbur and Orville (for whom I named most of the lady test pilots in my care) would likely have applauded.
Buttfucker the rooster I determined to mold into an assassin His loss in single combat to that Rhode Island Red, and his subsequent not being eaten for it (see the second paragraph of the ninth part of my fourth attempt to end all this), had caused in him a confusion and, I suspect, a shame. I hoped to rectify that with a program of exercise designed to bolster, over many months, his self-esteem. My method here was to kiss and fondle his hens whenever I stepped into the coop yard, despite what sicknesses they might impart, until he showed even the slightest competitive spirit, at which point I would raise my foot and recommend his face to the clay. (Again, this was a very long-range plan.) In time he learned to attack me as soon as I came in through the gate, and his reward for this acumen was a quick boot to the chest that sent him flying back farther than any hen ever had. He kept at it, though, which pleased us both, and I once kicked my way through the Apostles before he finally stayed put, puffed up and heaving against the dirt, his claws folded under him, his eye a mucilaginous dot of odium.
Certainly my father took some notice of these experiments, but after our contretemps in the yard he made no direct reference to them, except when he returned with a rifle (or was it a shotgun?) slung over his shoulder, after sitting all day in a tree and waiting for a wild turkey to pass by (which normally I would have got after him for), and saw how I had the hood of a car up, and the air filter off and tossed against those cinder blocks he loved so well, and a hen perched precariously on the manifold, so that she might peck at a kernel I had placed on the carburetor’s butterfly valve in an attempt to solve forever, via chicken, the problem of a flooded engine. To his eternal credit, he understood at once what it was I was up to and, leaving aside any complaint about corn down the carburetor, yelled out, just before I cranked the ignition key:
“If that car backfires you’ll blow her fucking head off!”
To which I yelled back:
“She’s been apprised of the risks involved!”
Good eating
So we have swallowed fried chicken we knew b
y name; and ground-up pig we knew by sight, and liked personally; and shreds of deer a-bounce in the bramble at dusk; and cubes of squirrel keeping cozy in the trees; and Lord knows what else we had no honest need of (the outlandish prices charged for outland groceries justifying gas-costly trips into town, yes, but never old goat meat for dinner); and after a spell it is good eating, you hardly notice it.
Advocate
I killed a pregnant lady once. She landed on a paragraph I was trying to construct (Oedipus Rex, I think it was, this time around: “On Oedipus Rex”) and ambled across my lines from left to right. I shooed her away, but she merely rolled off the page, impossibly fat and slow, and I grew irritated by the distraction and smashed her with the heel of my writing hand. Which released, onto palm and desk and page again, a legion of tiny, squirming larvae I had then to scrape into a pile stage left and render into a motionless yet still somehow bothersome paste. To this day I do not know if I did right by that paragraph.