An Aesthetic Underground

by John Metcalf

  Half the house and farm are hers. She has suffered from a weak heart for more than forty years. Convenient palpitations strike whenever she is crossed or thwarted. She lives to rule poor George and undermine Maureen. Her only other consolation is religion. Nominally she’s a Baptist, but she watches all the TV evangelists of whatever stripe and writes away to Tennessee box numbers for strange pamphlets which she presses on visitors. Sometimes she makes doughnuts for the local children—“fried cakes” she calls them—but Liz won’t eat them because she’s repelled by Mrs. Tetford’s upper arms, by the wobble of the sausage-mottled flab.

  Uncle Willard in his truck leads the procession down to the barn. The hogs are already in the calf box in the back of George’s pickup. George lowers the tailgate and fixes some old boards to form a ramp. He lifts out the battered .22 rifle that’s usually kept in the barn and jiggles a single cartridge into the breech. Then reaching into the cab, he fetches out four bottles of Pepsi, a column of Styrofoam cups, and a bottle of Golden Wedding. Shots of rye are poured for all the men. Uncle Willard opens his box of knives on the hood of his truck and selects one that’s been honed away over the years to a thin and wicked arc. He drinks the rye down neat and sighs.

  “Well, George,” he says.

  George nods.

  “Well, George,” says Uncle Willard, “tell me this, then. Why’s Labatt’s Blue like making love in a rowboat?”

  Uncle Willard’s repertoire is inexhaustible. He’s a fixture at Grinley’s Feed and Seed and at White’s Garage in the village. He often entertains in the back of the hardware store and is frequently to be found with his cronies at the township dump where the dump’s custodian has built a crazy lean-to with scrap board and tin on which he’s nailed a large sign saying: Office.

  While the men are still laughing at the answer to the Labatt’s riddle, George slides up the door on the calf box. The three hogs inside stare up and press back against the box’s rear wall. One of Maureen’s brothers hands up the .22. George shoots one of the hogs between the eyes. Maureen’s brothers get a hook into its mouth and down its throat and rush the body down the ramp and onto the ground where it thrashes and works itself about. Uncle Willard sticks it in the throat and joggles the knife about in the hole so that the still-pumping heart splashes out thick blood. In the November air, steam rises from the pools of it. The hog lies on its side, its legs scoring brown tracks in the turf.

  Liz takes hold of my hand and tugs at me to bend down.

  I put my arm around her.

  “It’s OK,” I say. “The pig’s dead. It isn’t feeling anything. That’s just its nerves. There’s nothing to be frightened of.”

  “I’m not,” she says. Her eyes are alive with pleasure. “Did you hear?” she whispers. “Mr. Tetford? Say the F-word?”

  George secures chains round the hocks and the carcass is hoisted up to hang head-down from the front-end loader. Maureen’s brothers are trying to force another bald tire further into the fire’s centre. The heat is so intense, it’s difficult to get near. The tractor lurches towards the oil drum, the carcass swaying and clanking. After the hog is scalded, George and Uncle Willard select knives and start scraping off the bristles with the concentration and delicacy of barbers wielding cut-throat razors. George works with his mouth open, Uncle Willard hisses through his teeth like an ostler. Some twenty minutes later the hog hangs oddly white in the afternoon light exactly the colour of a peeled mushroom.

  Uncle Willard rests against the pickup and swills Golden Wedding around his teeth.

  “Well, George,” he says. “There were two bulls up on a hill. An old bull and a young bull. And down below,” he says, “there’s a herd of heifers. So the young bull says to the old bull . . .”

  Uncle Willard nods as the others laugh; he keeps his face professionally straight. He seems almost disapproving of their laughter.

  “What’s the difference,” he says, testing the edge of a new knife on the ball of his thumb, “what’s the difference between a recruit into the army and a constipated owl?”

  He makes the first cut.

  After excising what he now calls—because all the children have crowded back—the hog’s jimmy-riddler, he knots binder twine around what he calls the waterworks to prevent leaks and dripping. Then he starts to open up the body. As he cuts, the guts start to pile and slobber out against his stomach. He braces up their weight on his forearm so that nothing ruptures, so that the gall bladder or matter in the intestines does not spoil the meat. He cuts the liver free and drops it into a plastic margarine pail. The dogs are watching intently. Rex whines and shuffles nearer on his behind as if he’s suffering from worms. The tricky part over, Uncle Willard lets the guts slop down into the nettles where they shine and subside and spread and settle.

  “What?” he says.

  “Where’s its speaker?” repeats the smallest Howland kid.

  “It’s got eyelashes,” says Liz. “Look, you can touch them. Orange eyelashes.”

  The small Howland scowls.

  “I wanna see it. I wanna see its speaker.”

  “Stereos have speakers,” says Liz. “Microphones have speakers.”

  It is getting colder. The afternoon is drawing in. Liz wanders off and starts to help Maureen’s brothers feed the fire. The second hog is shot and bled. George pulls the pickup closer to where they’re scraping off the bristles and turns the radio to the country music station in Watertown, New York. Lugubrious twanging love songs fill the air, songs of confession and maudlin remorse. The level in the bottle of Golden Wedding is dropping. The carcass slips from the front-end loader and the crumbs of dirt and smudges are wiped off its stiffening whiteness with filthy rags from the milk house.

  I can see that Liz is getting bored. Maureen’s brothers don’t want to roast corn from the crib. They don’t want to cook windfalls on sticks. George has cut the first pig’s head off with a chainsaw but the smallest Howland has got it and is feeding it and won’t share. George’s kids have gone back to the house to watch TV. The other two Howlands are playing a game with offal and a stick.

  I suggest to Liz that it’s getting cold and that we walk home to make hot chocolate. We wave to Maureen’s brothers and say goodbyes to George and Uncle Willard who pauses in his butchering to say, “Now this here’s a golden oldie, John. There was this fellah, his wife had the house painted and as he was getting into bed that night . . .”

  We walked up past the corn crib and Maureen’s garden and the machine shed and into the yard. George’s mother rapped on the kitchen window and beckoned. She’d prepared for Liz a plastic bag of fried cakes.

  “Have you got a kiss for an old woman? That’s it. Isn’t she a little angel?”

  I frown at Liz who is scrubbing at her lips with the back of her hand.

  “Are you good at your books? Oh, I knew it! I just knew it! What a lovely ribbon! A little scholar, is she? Well, then, here’s a nice book for you to read in bed for after you’ve said your prayers.”

  And so we set off along the dirt road to walk the mile or more home.

  In one hand Liz is holding the plastic bag of fried cakes and in the other she is holding a pamphlet entitled:

  WHERE ARE THE DEAD?

  The house towards which we were walking that November afternoon was a stone farmhouse built in the 1840s. In 1900 or thereabouts someone had built on a frame addition. The stone part of the house had a vaguely Georgian look about it though it did not aspire to the limestone elegance of the houses in Kingston. This house was cruder, dumpier, the style debased, a house for farmers, not for gentlemen. The way it sat squat into the land reminded me of stone farmhouses in Wales. Many of the stone houses in the Rideau Lakes area have this sort of look and feel and I’ve heard it said that they were built by masons who’d sought local employment when the building of the locks on the Rideau Canal was finished.

  The locks nea
rest to us were at Jones Falls. We used to take the children there to watch the boats going through and to feed the fish in the fish sanctuary. The children used to sprawl on the low footbridge and plop frothy spit into the water, attracting a frenzy of minnows, and, waggling ponderously up out of the darkness into green and sunlit view, the huge catfish with a white growth on its head like a beret.

  In the evenings, the locks were often deserted and silver under the green gloom of the trees. The thick scrub and bush on the far bank would be turning black in the gathering twilight and I was always moved by thinking of the immensity of effort involved in building this canal and by the grandeur of the engineering. The great dressed blocks of stone, the massiveness of the gates, the lines of defence falling back to the lockmaster’s fortified house—all this classical military architecture conjured up Colonel By and his engineers and sappers and beyond them the shade of the Marquis de Vauban and Europe in its days of might and glory.

  WHERE ARE THE DEAD?

  Visiting the United States and Canada in 1913, writing travel pieces for the Westminster Gazette, Rupert Brooke said of North American landscape:

  It is an empty land. A European can find nothing to satisfy the hunger of his heart. The air is too thin to breathe. He requires haunted woods, and the friendly presence of ghosts . . . The maple and the birch conceal no dryads, and Pan has never been heard amongst these reed-beds. Look as long as you like upon a cataract of the New World, you shall not see a white arm in the foam. A godless place. And the dead do not return. That is why there is nothing lurking in the heart of the shadows, and no human mystery in the colours, and neither the same joy nor the kind of peace in dawn and sunset that older lands know. It is, indeed, a new world.

  Certainly the land is not as thickly haunted as the English countryside and probably never will be. Canada is too vast to become so minutely groomed and annotated. But Rupert Brooke was certainly wrong about this countryside. Here the dead are all around us. They are part of us and we of them. We walk a land they shaped.

  Across the road from my house, up on the edge of the rocky pasture, ancient cars sit in the scrub and bush. Bees nest in the rotted upholstery. The magnificent ruin of a combine harvester seems to melt and settle with each passing year. Low juniper bushes are growing through sheets of tin rusted to the thinness of leaf. My daughter thinks of this as an archaeological site.

  In my own back field she unearths from an old domestic garbage dump patent medicine bottles which must date from the eighties and nineties of the last century. These she washes and ranges on a bench in the garage along with particularly valuable stones.

  In the woods there are indications even older. Foundations of cut blocks. Lilac bushes. Apple trees grown wild. This is a hard country to farm and these abandoned sites mark discouragements, debts called in, drought, the death of a wife.

  The land reveals itself slowly to the newcomer. Our ghosts are in its shapes. Rocks are never far from the surface here. Fields are simply soil in pockets. This field before us is shaped in this particular way with a protruding promontory of trees making ploughing difficult because under those trees the rock has surfaced in a sheet. Over there, water sits well into summer because it cannot drain away. Pasture, plough, swamp, and sugar bush—these were the shapes and uses forced by soil and rock upon the settlers. I’ve walked the land about here for miles in all directions mapping it with my muscles. I’ve come to understand it. I’ve come to understand the fearsome effort that went into its clearing and shaping. And I’ve come to love it.

  And this small child with whom I’m walking, this much-loved daughter, what does she make of this place, this people, this daughter who is only a summer and occasional visitor?

  Her maps are more intense than mine. Her maps are summer maps and magical. They show the course of the stream and where the banks of wild mint grow you can walk through up to your waist and the crushed smell of it. Her maps show where the felled and rotting elms lie and where under the fungus-smelling bark the salamanders live. Her maps show the old dry manure pile at Mr. Tetford’s where a pair of milk snakes live and the wooden veranda at the side of the Howland house where the great black rat snake basks in the morning sun.

  Noted on her maps are ponds of leopard frogs, the platform of twigs where the red-tailed hawk is nesting, the patches in the vast cathedral sugar bush where wild garlic grows, the dead swamp trees where great blue herons sit pretending to be branches.

  Her maps record the sites of panic terror.

  That place along the dappled path where the partridges explode from beneath the elderberry bushes and stop your heart in your mouth.

  That clearing in the birch trees where there’s the footprint of a building, tumbled masonry, raspberry canes gone wild, and the shrill-ing of the cicadas building to an electric whine and then in the still heat and sudden silence the leaves on the birches turn and tremble though there’s not a breath of wind.

  All this, the smells and shapes of it, its textures and its lovely endless detail—this mushroom-coloured pig, those three scabbed and yellow apples high in the November branches of a roadside tree as we walk homewards on this cold afternoon—all this will haunt her. This country has possessed her. When she is grown and living in some distant city, she will walk this countryside again in dreams. These “beauteous forms,” as Wordsworth calls them, will be the bedrock of her life.

  When the children were on holiday we spent most of the time going for walks, catching leopard frogs, exploring surrounding villages, fishing in Upper Beverley Lake for sunfish, swimming, sitting empurpled in the tree in front of the house gobbling mulberries.

  When the children were in school I was working on a book that was published by Oberon in 1978. The book contained two novellas, “Private Parts: A Memoir” and “Girl in Gingham.” The book was published as Girl in Gingham. I had been working on the title novella in Montreal in 1975 and finished it in a rented cabin in a neighbour’s sugar bush in 1976.

  While I’d been working on “The Lady Who Sold Furniture” and teaching myself how to write dialogue I’d also come to revel in the theatricality of what I was about. In the setting-up of scenes, their juxtapositions, their starting in medias res with their implications emerging from dialogue and action—I was playing with all the lessons I’d absorbed from the auteur film directors and from Degas’s paintings. The novella form fascinated me because it could be tightly controlled—page by page—as a short story could, yet at the same time was expansive enough to allow for theatrical effects. Individual scenes could be built with lyric intensity and then juxtaposed with broad comedy. Broad comedy could be tempered to become intensely moving. Writing novellas was a particularly joyful kind of playing.

  Novellas, the poetic kind I was interested in, were as dense and rich as Christmas puddings. And as time went on I beat more and more candied fruits and angelica into the mix. These novellas make concentrated demands on readers but I believe the pleasures are commensurate. I used dialogue to set scenes and reveal character. The dialogue was edgy, nervous, demanding the reader’s committed attention. I was not unaware of Beckett, Pinter, and the absurdist verbal pratfalls of N. F. Simpson. My dialogue was intended as pure theatre.

  As an example, here’s the opening of a section from “Polly Ongle.”

  “Tabourouette!” said the waitress, depositing on their table a bowl of potato chips. “Me, I’m scared of lightning!” Turning the glass vase-thing upside down, she lighted the candle inside.

  “Cider?” she repeated.

  “No?” said Paul.

  “Oh, well,” said Norma. “I’ll have what-do-you-call-it that goes cloudy.”

  “Pernod,” said Paul. “And a Scotch, please.”

  “Ice?”

  “They feel squishy,” said Norma, stretching out her leg.

  “Umm?”

  “My sandals.”

  He looked down at her foot.r />
  What is so pleasing to me about a passage like this is that the lines of non-speech are really a continuation of the dialogue though unspoken, pleasing also that the dialogue between them while seemingly about drinks and sandals is really both character description and a silent dialogue of eroticism, seemingly entirely innocent but not. And all driving forward crisply.

  As the English music-hall comedian Max Miller used to say to the audience after telling one of his more salacious jokes, “Yes, that’s right. Oh, yes, it’s continental stuff I’m giving you.”

  I ended “Polly Ongle” with its protagonist pursuing an intimate, elegiac “conversation” with a statue of General José de San Martin in a public park. It’s a scene that would translate without the slightest distortion into gorgeous film. And was conceived in exactly those terms.

  I have never been troubled by critics, academic or otherwise, who regard stories and novellas as a minor form. I pursued this argument with Professors Sam Solecki and W. J. Keith in our book Volleys. I simply cite as iron-clad refutation of their position Death in Venice and V. S. Naipaul’s In a Free State, another book which flared out over my literary landscape illuminating much and filling me with delight and awe. In a Free State appeared in 1971 and was described as a novel but its compression and its lyrical method of movement mark it clearly, in my opinion, as a novella. V. S. Naipaul is also a wonderful story writer, a genre in which he’s been undervalued. I always recommend A Flag on the Island and claim the story “The Nightwatchman’s Occurrence Book” as one of the funniest stories in English.