Against the Country

by Ben Metcalf

  My intention here is not to advocate the misuse of God’s clown airforce for human gain. I mean to say only that it was right for me, at that particular time, in that particular place. Earlier and elsewhere I might not have punched at those fireflies who invaded the yard on warm evenings, so as to aid along the subtleties of a nerd’s self-defense, and felt such a pride when I popped one just right, and he arced off my knuckles like an errant spark, not blinking any longer but lit up now for good, until the grass at my feet shone with the vanquished and I was half entranced, swiping at the air all around me and able almost to ignore them that then faded in the blades below.

  (Or else began to blink anew …

  (And took miraculous flight …

  (Though never to rise again, it seemed to me, any much higher than my bug-stinky fists.)

  Earlier and elsewhere I might simply have caught these creatures up and smushed them, as American children will tend to do, and spread the now-activated goo in fluorescent bands across my innocent cheeks, and run down the driveway with the rest of the neighborhood, pretending with all my heart to be a Red Indian, as Waugh would have it, or Kafka’s fornicating translators, perfectly aware that distally, four beats back along the proximal line, I actually was one. But then earlier, and elsewhere, and not surrounded by these objects (words, largely, and mold), and under worse conditions (cool enough tonight, I suppose, if a bit muggy), and not given what in the interim I have happily endured, I might have been tempted to lie. I might have been tempted to craft a cute little segue here between fireflies turning on rather than off when killed (or were they?) and my relationship with the Lord our Jesus, said Himself to have died aglow and then, in a blink, arisen.

  I might even have made use of the fact that this metaphor will not hold unless Jesus is continually beat down again by the fists of men, since that would seem to be the Church’s historical argument here, if not exactly its narrative, but in truth I acquired my faith not through metaphorical epiphany but by practical need. I was bored and lonely and afraid during my initial few years out there, and seeing folks on Sunday made me feel less lonely and less bored. (The afraid took somewhat longer.) Pre-rebellion against a gigantic atheist father, I could not fathom why these people would come together each weekend to celebrate the torturing to death of a self-absorbed Nazarene some twenty centuries earlier, even if He had once worked with His hands. Post-rebellion against a smaller threat, and working now gaily with my own hands, I could not fathom why these people would ever do otherwise. I had joined them in a solemn acceptance of, and promised salvation in, the truth that all local life manifested, winged or not, and in perfect imitation of Jesus, a deathwish foretold and pounced upon.

  Cheerios

  The priests kept croaking, for one thing. Clearly they had come out to die among us, none of them being young or bright or worth all that much to the Church, and each of them forced to minister to the prisons all the workweek, which would have sapped even my own joyous spirit. Father X lasted longest. He was a bald zealot with too many ideas about Saint Paul. In time he was reassigned elsewhere, equally desolate, whence he sent weak epistles until his heart exploded. Father Y I saw some promise in. He was a mess with words, but his toe tapped regularly to the music, no matter how experimental, and his eyes had a tendency to roll back into their sockets, which trait I could not help but admire. He died of a stroke my sister described thusly: “He looked up into his skull and decided to stay there.” Father Z was exactly what you might expect on the heels of X and Y: a short and effeminate wag intent on drinking himself to death by his tipple, which was scotch and milk. He achieved, I am told, a fatal infarction within a year or two’s exposure, though by then I was fled from that plot and heard not a word about the martyr who sallied forth to replace him.

  Father Y was the one I told about the flies and sundry, not sure if those were sins, really, but not wanting to chance it. He had no idea what to say but only scanned his frontal lobe throughout our encounter, looking for Jesus up there, I guess, or else for the vascular discrepancy that had first made him want to go fish. In time he came to and said that God loved me, which by then I needed to hear, and he gave me some prayers to say, which I suspect I did, and some penance to do, which was about as likely as my asking an eye-rolling priest if he honestly thought every being we encountered wanted to kill us, granted, but also to die, so plain was that notion to anyone who had persisted even a short time out there.

  (You sad and forsworn country priests: cheerio!)

  Ants liked to off themselves in the sugar bowl, which made sweetening one’s Cheerios a challenge. The trick was to extract a spoonful of hardened sugar that did not include an ant dead from diabetic shock. I grew so adept at this procedure that there was some talk of my becoming a famous surgeon. Obviously that did not happen.

  (You failed little country excavators: cheerio!)

  Ticks hitched rides to hell on all five of us, especially newly enthusiastic country boys who ran around willy-nilly advertising themselves for rent (so that when a pig went missing its farmer might appear in the churchyard of a Sunday, just after Mass, and make inquiries, and offer a few dollars apiece, as my brother and I were said to be swift, and despite being Catholic still technically Christian, and unwilling to let a pig go any more than we would a human (and it was known by then that we had once apprehended a runaway delinquent in a field, hoping to make a name for ourselves in the bounty-hunting trade, and thus be availed of the millions we imagined were allocated to the retrieval of harder sorts who broke out from the State Farm every month or so, and fetched all those helicopters overhead, and left the shelter of the trees to approach small children, which dream went unfulfilled, as did my wish to become a repo man later on, when I worked as a teller for the local farmer’s bank and thought I would be better put to collecting debts than to dwelling on assets, but we did catch that one little insult: asked where he thought he was going, the JD said, “Home,” by which he meant Richmond, and my brother explained that Richmond lay many miles to the east, through those endless woods, whereas the JD was oriented north, through those endless woods, and with any luck would reach Washington within a year’s time, to be picked up by the FBI, if he were still alive, and beat on considerably, and sent back here, or else he could come along with us right now, at which point the JD started crying, and on the long walk back to the road I explained that before he set off the next time he might know how many phones were installed in his facility, and where said phones were located, and then just prior to his escape might unscrew the mouthpiece to each, and remove the resonator within, and screw the mouthpiece back on, so that no one his keepers then called would be able to hear anything about a drug problem running through the woods with directional difficulties and dyed-red hippie hair), though I do remember on one such occasion cornering an adolescent pig under the porch of a farmhouse and behaving less than professionally with him: we recounted the “Three Little Pigs,” which seemed to agitate rather than console him, and when he smelled bacon frying brightly in the house above, and heard our stomachs grumble in sympathy below, my brother pointed up at the smell, and then at him, and he bolted and butted the smaller of us full-on in the sternum, which sent me flying ass-backward and greatly extended the chase (through crackly woods and still-dampened grasses: how I miss them now!) until at last we realized that he was playing a game with us too, and actually wanted to be caught, and we formed a stratagem around this idea and brought him in easily, though when we handed him over, wriggling and squealing with self-delight (can I not still feel those precious ribs beneath his skin?), my brother took the farmer aside and explained that this pig should under no circumstance be eaten, as we had God’s hard evidence that it could spell), till word went round that these boys might get the job done, sure, but were not so quick as was claimed, and were unorthodox at best in their approach, and perhaps even liberal, and should probably be confined to tasks that required less sense, or none at all, such as fetching more wood, or putting
up more hay, or digging further postholes, or helping out your obviously insane old farmer (“what would you do if somebody pulled your nuts off? I reckon I’d shoot him. And then I’d shoot him again!”), whose niece, or cousin, or granddaughter, a cheerleader we had admired at the high school, once approached us in the parking lot and said that there was a truckful of wood in need of unloading, and the pay was fifty dollars because it was the bank president, and would we do it? and we said yes we will Yes (apiece?), and then discovered that the wood had been hauled in days ago on an unwashed fish truck, with the refrigeration turned off, which we managed nonetheless to clear, by means of rags strapped across our mouths and our noses, after which we ate crinkle-cut potatoes fried in butter by the bank president’s looker of a wife and barely made it home before the worst of the vomiting began.

  (You retchers into tacked-on toilets: cheerio!)

  Ticks are famous, of course, for their propensity to swell up with borrowed blood and bust, leaving behind them, as vigorish, this or that ugly disease, but the majority I encountered in Goochland sought out a very different suicide upon me. In want of more dramatic assignments I had developed a sideline in the repair of barbed-wire fences, contemplative work I figured would at least impede the pigs and the rapists while I made a more intensive study of, and a healthier fellowship with, my surrounds. It was an easier job for two, but my brother had found steady employment to the east, with a twinkling farmer who encouraged him to drive the tractor along Route 6, even when there was no real cause to do so, in order that the tanned and shirtless young man might force to a crawl, and a familiar rage, motorists who otherwise took such political pride in the fact that they lived in a place where one had now and then to wait behind a tractor.

  (You freeway cars and combines: cheerio!)

  Wire and poles, then. Wood and metal. Solitude. The themes are familiar and the work relatively straightforward: one needed no more than a spool of barbed wire, and a wire stretcher, and some clippers, and a bag of bent nails, and a hammer, to remake all of America, which is known for its whitewashed fences, thanks to Twain and Rockwell (though these seem to have painted their pickets somewhat differently), but is more widely, and more accurately, defined by the wire. Still, I intend no abstract on American boundaries here: that has already been tried in our literature. Nor will I indulge my own vanity by making too much of the fact that my first attempt at “creative” writing occurred well within, and of necessity beyond, those exceedingly hurtful constraints.

  (Really this was a trifle. Once I had repaired or replaced the strands along the road, cutting away the kudzu to do so, and hammering fresh or rusted wire into grayed posts that sometimes needed a hand up and help back into the ground, I reached a sharp corner and was forced down east into thick country pine, where the heat let up less than the humidity adhered, and my breathing shallowed of its own accord, and I began to see peripheral flashes of a red I at first thought presaged a stroke (did I in fact die in those woods? am I lying there even today?) but soon understood (I cannot overstate how real this was for me, at that particular time, in that particular place) to be glimpses of the Devil’s own flesh as he stalked me from tree to tree.

  (I hid in a depression behind a briar patch and shook, actually shook, in that hundred-degree heat, so country had I allowed myself to become, or willed myself to be (either way), sure that any moment I would look up and see Satan standing over me, until I remembered how Jesus had not cowered before this hindrance but rather had confronted him, and found him powerless, and had said to him Get thee hence (emphasis mine), who was not anyway painted red until much, much later, whereupon I resolved to rise up and approach him as any Christian properly should.

  (My knees were at first uncooperative in this effort, and there were moments when I thought to shrink again behind the briars, but eventually I reached that point in the middle distance where I judged those flashes of red to have originated. What I saw there both eased my fear and inspired a lifetime’s assurance of it:

  (Tacked to numerous trees, beyond those stapled now with new or ancient wire, were red plastic ribbons, at about head’s height, as if the forest had decided to commemorate something fully half its citizens refused to. This scene extended north for an acre or two, maybe more, and I could not help but consider its beauty, and its possible meaning, and estimate its odd outline, until at last I was able to ask my employer, ridden back toward me on pompous horseback, if he knew anything about the red ribbons, and he told me that his neighbor had paid a university man to tell him which trees ought to be chopped down so that the others might survive, which science he personally put no store in, preferring to leave such matters up to God, and he asked me how the fence was coming, and I said that it would be done on time, and he asked me was I sure, and I said that I was, and he asked me again was I sure, and this time I declined to answer him. As we spoke, or did otherwise, I do not think I took my mind for a moment off those brave and beribboned trunks across the way.

  (I completed my repairs around that old man’s property in a fever, kicking and cursing at his cows to get out of the way once I had made it up into the field, and when it was finished I found myself with a single carved-out weekend to spare, during which time I would be paid to haul my equipment down into those woods, claiming to be doing “touch-up work,” and could hide said equipment in the dent behind those briars where I myself had previously hidden, and could flout the wire and reassign those red ribbons to trees of my choosing, not a university man’s, not yours, and certainly not God’s, so as to spell out into the future, by means of a stranger’s prophesied saw, a sentence the length of two football fields and readable, I prayed, from the vantage of the clouds.

  ((I will not be so crass as to transliterate that early effort here.))

  At day’s end I would climb up exhausted into the yard, and sit on the cinder-block step to the cluttered old side porch, and slop a lazy finger of kerosene into a rusted Campbell’s soup can, and remove my boots and socks, and roll up my trousers, and use a pocketknife to shave my shins and calves clean of the ticks who had assembled there so thickly that I could not always see the blade’s surface as I scraped it against the inner lip of the can. I hoped then that these beasts would at least be granted a final wish, and drown in the kerosene, before I had time to drop a lit match down onto their still-struggling number.

  (You flames and far-off trepidations: cheerio!)

  Wonder Bread

  Was it the Word or only the Wafer that was meant to save me? For a stretch I believed it was both, and was pleased. A happiness to hear the Word; a happiness also to taste the Flesh, since I knew It at least by name, if not by sight, and had decided already, long before any Church-prescribed “retreat” to a half-defunct summer camp nearby (where some few of us had previously been day campers, to be lashed out at and spit upon by town kids whose parents lacked either the money or the intel not to board their angry issue out there, and one summer only after we had weatherproofed its failing cabins in the offseason, without having first been warned that what we slathered on the siding would raise welts and blisters where it touched our skin and then met sunlight, which it seemed almost to seek), to like It personally.

  We were meant to admire the Jesus counselors because they were older, of course, but also because they took us all seriously, and thought us more “mature” than our parents ever gave us “credit for”; and because they played guitar, which our age group was known to “respond to”; and because they were not at all “uncool” about playing only “God’s music” on their “axes” (and what a joy it was when we finally convinced that one counselor to play “Whole Lotta Love” on his, even though he did it wrong, and everyone, even the other counselors, joined in!); and because they were always “on call” for late-night “rap sessions” a full quorum of them might accidentally happen to attend, and then, with patient impatience (or was it the other way around?), continually steer the conversation back toward Jesus while the annoying teen in their trap r
efused to stop rhapsodizing about all the different ways rabbits knew how to kill themselves.

  And the goats! My God, but the goats! I knew of a nanny who would position herself into death’s grim profile whenever my friend, her ostensible keeper (or was he my keeper, and her friend?), took a dirtbike out into the fields that surrounded his toiletless home, and revved up the hillocks and jumped, only to find himself suspended, in air and in thought, looking down at a goat who clearly asked to be landed upon, her belly swollen with tumors (or else with a kid who for years refused to come out, as every vet she ever saw had concluded (and were they wrong, these experts? is the leap from kid being born so that it might seek out ways to kill itself to kid choosing not even to be born really so enormous? are our delays in this life, and prior to it, not explained by what awaits us beyond the vulva’s tight grasp?)), until he threw his bike off to the left, and himself off to the right, landing each painfully so as to spare the goat, whom he then took to tying up by the neck in an empty hog pen, where one night she intrigued, by means of her bifurcate paws, to scramble over the southerly side and hang herself.

  (The outer boards showed no evidence that she had ever tried to regain her confinement.)

  A dog of ours (named by our father Wee Cooper O’Fife, after the Scottish folksong about the wife-beating old barrel maker, and because our part of the county was called Fife, and because that dog was monstrously large, even as a puppy) once employed this same method while tied up “for his own good” on the side porch, except that the barrier he made it over was shorter, or the rope was longer, and so, by this grace, or that devilment, he survived. He had tossed himself in front of a Monte Carlo (which required real forethought, if you think about it, on a road less traveled by), though possibly it was a Gran Torino. The people inside it braked, and said how sorry they were, while the dog lay whimpering in a ditch, and asked was there anything they could do, he came out of nowhere, and I said, “No,” and thanked them, thanked them, and they rolled up their window and drove off at the same suicide-heedless speed as before. Only our “melodramatic” pleas that night, and our “emotionally manipulative” tears, and our “frankly shocking” decision to part with a multigenerational coin collection we had cared not one whit for since leaving the Land of Lincoln, saved that dog from a self-consciously rural bullet to the back of the head and won him a town operation he little wanted and less deserved. After which he sought to hang himself on the side porch and then took primarily to murder.