Against the Country

by Ben Metcalf

  Enough with the pretense that a bouncing back and forth between “brown” and “pink” will suffice here. The boy who brought his pistol to the party was the color of a ghost, or so I was told. The girl whose hair I did my best to aerate was a delicious sort of red-tinged yellow, though I would not think to call her orange. The gentleman who explained what his penis needed to see before it would consent to inflate was the color of well-steeped tea, with milk, and cinnamon freckles. The damsels whose names I reluctantly invoked a few pages back were, in order, shyly tanned cow leather, supermarket honey, and a white rose petal bruised by the sun to absolute perfection. The Ronnies I knew were, respectively, mahogany and young pine.

  Enough with this new little game, which allows me to pretend I saw so many tints out there that in the end I saw none at all, so freethinking was I at twelve or thirteen. Enough with the implication that I paid no mind when these people constantly referred to themselves, and to one another, as “black,” or “white,” or to some dignity-starved variant thereof, and that I made no use of this simple accounting system myself when recording the state of my pregnant friend (white, frightened, beaten), or of the boy who had achieved the impregnation (black, frightened, gone), or of the father who had lashed out at this circumstance with his fists (white, frightened, stupid), or of the suburbanite who had allowed a single taste of intercourse to transform him into a straw-chewing braggart (white, frightened, stupid), or of the boy whose penis had peeked out over the top of his trousers in an attempt to make my acquaintance (white, frightened, not necessarily stupid), or of all those children who believed that AIDS was less to be feared than “the her-pess,” and that despite these diseases the sine qua non of adulthood was always going to be “humping,” and whatever harm went along with that (black, white, most of them stupid, all of them doomed).

  Enough with the implication that in my urge to assimilate and survive in that place I had never succumbed, for a week or two (or a month, or a year), to that style of thought which combines the mysteries of menstruation and lactation into a single, willful act of iniquity (apparently by way of the humping), and considers it a kindness to think the blacks no better off, really, than when they were slaves and did not have to do for themselves, and takes as gospel truth a moron’s worry that her daughter’s titties will droop if sucked on too much, and is somehow able to work the algebra by which a young boy’s masturbatory adventures are worth far more to an older boy who demands to hear about them than they could possibly be to the masturbator himself.

  Enough! Imagine a child in that bind, as often I do, and then saddle him with what idea of success a pair of unsuccessful parents have carried with them out of town, where good grades attract scorn, yes, but tend also to pay off in the long run and are not always taken for signs of arrogance or homosexuality. Give this child to understand that any deviation from his goal of good grades will be met at home with penalties he would gladly trade in for an everyday whipping, and by this method cause him to think his schoolbooks great and impossible charms. In the meantime, sit him on a schoolbus and make him wait.

  Make him wait while the policemen who have followed his bus in anticipation of a scheduled fight there pull up behind its idling hull, and find their unhurried way around to its door, and lumber up its steps, and sidle among the children as if cops were the protagonists here, not the boys who have been fighting, nor the driver who will likely finger the bullied victim as the culprit, nor the former town child who had hoped that this brief cessation of movement might allow him a moment to study a suddenly readable page. Make him wait while the new girl starts to cry as the bus nears the field-bound loneliness of a home in every way superior to his own, and let him glance at the page while she refuses, as usual, to disembark. Make him wait, unable to think at all of the page, while that obese boy in back finds his mournful way up toward the exit, the dark stain at his crotch proof that the rutty roads have yet again bested his kidneys, his head hung low while he passes, as if to say, “I know, I know.”

  Now:

  Steal this waiting child’s books one afternoon under the cover of “play” (the game being never to give them back, though he begs and explains that he has a test the next morning), and push him off the bus and into his driveway with the driver’s full collusion (she will, in fact, fold the bus’s doors on him as he tries to reboard and fight for his property), and leave him standing in a storm of red dust and derision while his future recedes. Allow him more patience than he has heretofore shown, and grant him the knowledge that his schoolbus will disappear down a nearby road for fifteen minutes or so, then return with no intention to stop, only to show him through the windows a familiar tension in the driver’s pursed lips and raised eyebrows, and a mockery of faces fanned out behind her, and a book or two held up in display of what has been lost.

  Now:

  Permit this child access to his father’s shotguns and ask what you think he might do.

  Sanctuary

  My aim here is not merely to describe how at the age of thirteen or so a frightened and pissed-off white boy held up his mostly black schoolbus with a shotgun, though he did surely do such a thing; nor is it to overstate the worth of those stolen books, for they were of appallingly poor quality either as didactic tools or as objets d’art; nor do I have anything more than a sporting interest, really, in the argument that a child should be held blameless for his sins simply because he has been beaten on the bus, and beaten at school, and beaten at home, and has finally decided to set a few boundaries.

  The crime itself is almost too plain to recount. I stood at the end of the driveway, where the dirt ended, or rather jumped out along the road toward Richmond. (Evidence, I suppose, that since losing town we had been trying always to regain it.) My brother, half hoping to see me kill someone, stood off to the right and behind me, his muteness relieved now and then by bursts of laughter. I took a step forward as the bus neared, the gun not fixed on anyone but only pointed downward, its long eye cradled in the nook of my arm. The wheels stopped shy of where I had expected them to, and a tenth or eleventh grader was sent out, probably by lot, to lay the books on the asphalt (or was it the gravel?), after which he walked backward, slowly, his arms raised, until he reached the door and scrambled up those stairs to what he might have believed was sanctuary.

  At the time I considered those arms a tad dramatic (I had neither lifted the gun nor flirted with the trigger as I planned to), but once I had collected my books, and the bus had sped off, and the afternoon light had dimmed just enough to allow me to reflect on the fact that my parents would soon be home, and I would then have to explain what I had done, that unmeant mimesis of surrender came to represent everything wrong with the place, and with me, and with how I would likely respond when made by our father to pay for my vengeance. Yet my ass was strangely spared that night. Unable to reckon how a boy’s decision to meet his schoolbus with a shotgun could be explained away by either Bob Dylan or Minnie Pearl, my parents entered into a fugue state in which physical exertion was impossible and the rhetoric of my mother’s job at the boys’ home seemed the mind’s only refuge.

  I remember how she worked the phone as the sun went down, sure that she could not get me out of this and in truth not wholly invested in the idea, because even more than she wanted to protect her child (which certainly on some level she did), and even more than she wanted her husband to whip the child (which on some level she always did), and even more than she wanted to reverse an injustice that could legally be charged against her, my mother wanted to be proved right in her fear-wish that an action by one of her children, and not by her man, would ultimately be blamed for the family’s destruction. She seemed almost to look forward to the day when the courts would take her second son away, and would subject him to counseling sessions and restraint holds and whatever other tortures the degreed hippies had devised for their little Jonestowns, and would release him only after his voice had changed and he had completed the steps in some or other “program”
designed to crush any trace of his soul’s dissent.

  Would not such an outcome imply, to anyone who looked into the matter, that this “special” boy had been so rotten as to explain, in an ethical sense, his parents’ previous workhorsing of him, and all those mishandlings he had dared to resent, and the constant belittlement that was his apparent reward for having intruded upon their lives in the first place? The question, happily, was moot. RSVP no, delinquent homes of Goochland County. Regrets, military school (discussed that evening as a “best-case scenario”). Apologies, of course, to my mother, whom I do love, and whose good works are legend, and whose desire to be vindicated at any cost I surely share. Apologies as well to my father, who may secretly have preferred that a son of his gun down an entire busload of children, black or white, rather than allow a few textbooks to be stolen. Apologies to both these fine Americans if today they credit themselves, and a few frantic phone calls, and a borrowed hippie logic, and a half-dead bourgeois courage, with my subsequent freedom, for they would be wrong. It had already been decided, ages before, by the land itself, how a violence such as mine should be treated: delicately, lest in time a greater violence be lost. My mother, the pretty town girl, could not possibly have known this; my farmboy father could not possibly have missed it. Despite what obfuscations town and college had thrown up against him, he knew full well that the greater violence in him was likely to be me.

  That is the truth of the matter, and that is all I mean to relate. There was even less call for my mother’s panic than there was for my belief that a young man’s raised arms in the road that day had been anything more than a halfway decent attempt at comedy. Fifteen hours after the incident I boarded the schoolbus and told the driver I was sorry for what I had done and would never trouble her again, after which she said, “Well, you see that you don’t.” So evidently normal was my behavior the previous afternoon that she seemed almost annoyed by my apology for it. We proceeded with the usual gossip and drug negotiations to school, where I repeated my speech to a mostly amused principal, did perfectly well on my test, and was neither robbed nor challenged all day long. Later on, the bus dropped me off in the usual spot and pulled away leisurely while I stood affixed to the end of our driveway in something like grace. I listened for the engine’s groan to dissipate, and for the crunch of my brother’s footfalls on the gravel to cease once he had reached the softness of the yard, and for the dogs to quiet once he had entered the house, and then I could hear only the wind through the tops of the trees, and the pants and paws coming back at me over the clay, and I knew that something entirely inhuman had worked to secure my pardon out there, and I was overcome by faith and by fear.

  BOOK THREE

  I feared the corn

  American expressions

  My mother’s ankle

  On Sundays

  As to God

  Faggotry

  Patterson

  Fraudulence

  I was not sickened

  In my room

  Harbingers all

  A box thrown between us

  This notion of snobbery

  Flower

  I feared the corn

  The child who holds up his schoolbus with a shotgun and does not forthwith find himself confined to a juvenile facility or a mental home might be almost expected to take a friendlier line with his environment, but I cannot honestly say every change in my attitude postdated that grim afternoon when I decided to approach mere children as if they were a cavalry regiment sent out to ransack the farm. Long before this incident I had been exposed by my father to that virus which causes man to believe his health and soul contingent upon a commerce with the elements, and by my mother to that equally powerful contagion Be a good sport, and already the fever was high in me. I ran through the woods and the fields like any child will, and at times I removed all my clothes and leapt into the waterways, never free from worry about turtles and snakes and intestinal parasites and so on, for I was not stupid, but as quick as anyone to get naked and a vigorous if watchful swimmer. Nor was I game only for what nature awaited me below the surface: even prior to my flirtation with closets and shotguns I had begun a close relationship with the trees, or anyway with the more familiar ones near the house, and would climb up into them whether a switch was wanted or not, and would rest in their arms with no thought for their evil and but a small prejudice, really, for the dirt I had escaped by snuggling their bark and their goo.

  I was able to put out of my head what an enemy these plants clearly were (and would prove) by a wish not to see my loved ones undone, and myself further shamed, by the loss implicit in our headlong pursuit of simplicity, but whereas the trees could be construed as a benign infestation of the land, in that they seemed to lack any direct capacity to infest me, other potential violators were not so easily dismissed. In particular I feared the corn. We grew tomatoes too, and snow peas, and carrots, and string beans, and lima beans, and beets, and onions, and radishes, and lettuce, and cabbage, and spinach, and green peppers, and red peppers, and eggplants, and potatoes, and cucumbers, and zucchini, and squash, and pumpkins, and cantaloupes, and watermelons, and strawberries, and asparagus, and God knows what else, never enough to sell, of course, but far too much for us to consume naturally, so that when one of these foods came due, and we were sent out to fill grocery bag after grocery bag with it, we could be sure in the knowledge that the coming month’s dinners would force upon and into us so much of this supposed boon that we would eventually gag at the very thought of it.

  Still, the corn was more terrible. Beans can take cover in a casserole; peppers will subside in a sauce; lettuce is easily laundered in a salad or a sandwich; any cucumber not bound for the salad can be breaded and fried like a tomato, which will make it either more or less vomitous, depending. Peas and carrots will linger in a stew until you barely notice them. Spinach and squash and cabbage can be boiled down into a harmless mush. Radishes and onions one may politely refuse. Most berries will rot before they can be eaten anyway, and the flies will take care of any melon with its side kicked in. Pumpkins, thank Jesus, are not generally fed to children. Asparagus is prone to mowing accidents. Beets can be avoided altogether if one is prepared to regurgitate them, just once, at the table. No one really minds a potato.

  What, though, is to be done with the corn? Unless ground up into a meal it will show itself everywhere: on the cob, where butter and salt cannot hide its babyfood sweetness; on the plate, where it sits hard and wet in an inedible pile; in a stew or a soup, where it represents in such number as to render everything else a mere garnish; in a fruit cocktail, where by rights it does not belong; in a salad, where it seems almost a cancer; in the mouth, where its shell hugs the tooth and slips up under the gum; in the stool, where its constant and undigested presence speaks to how little nutrition is actually to be had from this false and most American of vegetables.

  I went out to plant it, though, and to pick and shuck it along with everybody else, none of us possessed of a smile, exactly, for the dumb waxy leaves we would be forced to pull away from each ear, and the little green knobs left behind (which only luck or a very sharp knife could remove), and the thousands of moist silken threads we would yank at and try to rub away but would never be wholly rid of until at last they entered our gobs, and were chewed free of their surrounds, and slid tastelessly down the back of our throats, provided they did not lodge up against our tonsils like flotsam, or catch in our teeth like floss, where because we were not overly familiar with the store-bought variety they tended to rot and remain.

  I imagine that we all wondered why the bugs and the deer and the weather could not have got at our crop with more aggressiveness this year, and so spared us the need to stomach so much of it, but were we not also, to a one, availed of some small faith in the notion that in time we would be purified by this ordeal? were we not, in some secret part of ourselves, if not in a perfectly public one, convinced that no family could be expected to endure even our commonplace hardships w
ithout being brought closer to the physical truth of existence on this planet, which closeness would imply, if not in fact impart, a wisdom unavailable to those who did not expend a significant part of their life force, and their sanity, planting and tending and picking and shucking and cleaning and chewing and trying to swallow the corn?

  That the faith I kept in this enterprise was clearly insufficient, and likely no match for what was being kept all around me, does not mean that I was then, or should now be considered, entirely beyond belief.

  American expressions

  Fashion reaches out through the weeds with at least as much pull as we feel from the magazines and the television set, and has often enough bent these same media to its purpose (human agony), but can it not be refused? Though the mind be weakened by sun and allergen and ennui, does it not remain, on some low and original level, a mechanism of choice? Though the trees wave us ever onward to our doom, do we not yet fan within us some Tinker Bellish spark of will and revival?

  I hope so, as I would hate to see them go blameless who hold that pastoral activities alone deserve heaven’s favor, and that admission there will be greased by a self-consciously nursed rural accent and a conviction that God smiles down upon all American expressions of cowardice and butchery. I would prefer to see them punished who insist that any vengeance grown here must be a holy vengeance, even as it halves and sets fire to the innocent; and who maintain that homosexuals were placed on this earth by Lucifer to rape what few white babies can be saved from the abortionist’s tongs; and who think it the height of nonconformity to hold that many (not all, of course, but more than one is allowed to say) black babies are conceived with a welfare check in mind, which premeditated theft should in all fairness be met with penalties more severe than the mere mass incarceration already under way, which program itself is unethical (that is, inefficient) in that it wastes further tax dollars on the care and feeding of prisoners who will never (studies show) be reformed, and are immigrants anyway, or else the burdensome profligation of same (whether they arrived here in shackles is entirely beside the point), and so are in essence the same thing as enemies of the state, and so really (to make the “tough call” here, to protect society as a whole and not merely its privileged minorities) ought to be killed.