Against the Country

by Ben Metcalf

  I agree that death tends to cut down on the fornication somewhat, but that is about as far as I made it down this particular path, nor did my parents, as thoroughly victimized by the rural myth as anyone else, ever wander off that way. Hence I must conclude that the land does not of itself create the bigotry and the bloodlust, does not of itself conjure murderous notions and place them in the minds of men, does not ever have to. I believe the land capable of such a magic, and of an opinion to work it should a more awesome display of its power become necessary, but for now the American seems complicit enough in his own destruction that he can usually find on him, in some pocket or other of his blue jeans, the seeds of his pride and resentment, which seeds he will sprinkle after him because that is what is normally done with seeds. The land itself, or rather that beast which today feeds everywhere beneath it, need provide only what it has always provided: annoyance and lack and trepidation. What more is asked for our violence to germinate and grow?

  My mother’s ankle

  No such philosophy engaged me then, while I climbed a tree, or splashed in a creek, or peed on the corn, or hid in the trash pit and hoped to be forgotten. Mostly I spent my energies on my parents’ new conception of themselves, and to a smaller extent their children, as real Americans, which was undertaking enough, and looked to my chores, and mostly completed them, and did my best to stay out of the on-deck circle for a whipping, where I never stood less than third in line. My father, enforcer of our common law, had since the incident with the schoolbus stepped up his operation (or had he stepped it down?), and my ass and the backs of my thighs knew better than to deviate from his program of reassimilation into ignorance and want. Although for the life of me I could not see what was to be had from this stance, I stuck to my work out of a respect for him, and with an eye toward what pain he might inflict, and tried not to dwell too much on the intrusions, physical and otherwise, that plainly threatened to thrash us all.

  I am past those denials now, thank God or Goochland, and would like to elucidate just a few of the items I came to pretend made no real difference to me out there. The first was my mother’s ankle. It was a pretty bone, as those things go, long and thin and made of sound Scottish and German stock, never broken to my knowledge, nor tested in the usual manner (with hard kicks from a parent), but only walked upon (I saw it for myself) and danced upon (I have reason to hope) and on occasion crossed coyly over its partner, or else folded up under more precious parts on the couch, as women will tend to do. Said ankle had carried my mother through a clean and middle-class town existence in Columbus, Ohio, to parochial schools and ice-cream socials and half-innocent sock hops, down nature-camp pathways and department-store aisles and newly laid sidewalks to meet a boy or two or three, to numerous prom dates fraught with possibility, from the round seats of automobiles to bright urban eateries and back again, and eventually onto trains one still dressed to board, an example of which would transport and append her to an Illinois farmboy upon whom all her sophistication would be charmingly lost, as would all his on her, and whose sophistication or lack thereof would take her by romance and by U-Haul into the pines and hayfields of south-central Virginia with three hungry children in tow, none of whom knew enough to tell their mother not to work the corn rows wearing only a sundress and sandals.

  The ringworm that took up residence on that ankle, just above the hillock of bone, was not technically a worm at all but rather a species of fungus, a cousin no doubt of that vast system below us, which breached the surface here and there to diminish our minds and our spirits, yes, but also, apparently, our ankles. The primary shades of this insult, as realized upon my mother, were purple and green and yellow, made shinier by the application of town ointments meant to dull and destroy them, the awful ring curled around almost to her calf and shin and easily discernable from up in the yard, where we children pretended to make ourselves busy while we wondered whether, or when, the sundress and the sandals would allow for an infection of the opposite leg.

  Her husband might have explained that only hippie girls on the communes went out to tend crops with no socks or shoes on, their hips bent painfully like my mother’s always were, their feet planted wide so as to draw attention to the Ur-woman authenticity of their labor. He might have mentioned that the hippie girls caught ringworm too, and a hundred other things just as bad as the venereal diseases they famously acquired in town (which were not anyway unknown in the countryside), and that the copperheads would do far worse to that ankle if given half a chance, and that the spiders were not above setting up shop below a tomato. As far as I know he said nothing, or nothing that was heard. Perhaps he did not mind, really, if the dirt branded his woman in this or that ugly way, so long as she learned from her mark that the land could be infectious and cruel, and to expect no further effort out of him.

  Yet should my mother, a woman of high intellect and no small worldliness, not have been able to gather all this and more without her husband’s harsh instruction? should she not have ascertained at once the source of the hideousness on her leg and taken steps to see it subdued, for her children’s sake if not for her own? Was she a stone, then, this woman, or a saint, or a suicide? what was it that sent her back out into those rows, aware, as we all were, that only continued hurt and scarification awaited her there? Was it some latent wish for martyrdom inherent in the Catholicism she had brought with her to Illinois, and now to Virginia, which her father himself had ignored but in his daughter saw strangely flourish? Was it a collapse toward the preordained doom her ostensibly Catholic but secretly Calvinist mother had assumed for herself and all her issue? Had some proud resistance to the obvious, some habit of contrariness for its own sake, sprung up in her after so short a time in that county, trapped as she was among self-destructive hucksters who talked down town but in their own panicked hearts actually longed for it?

  I am no stranger to such motivations myself, yet I suspect that my mother’s were simpler still. I believe, or half believe, that she went out into those rows (they could not properly be called fields, nor were they small enough really to be gardens: call them gouges; call them graves) uncovered as she was so as to prove, if only to herself, that any intrusion of the plants into the soil, and any intrusion of the soil into the plants, and any intrusion of the bugs into either, and any intrusion of the bugs or the plants or the soil into her (which, after all, is my ostensible theme here), might eventually be overcome by an intrusion of herself into them. By which I mean only that my mother may at one point have been, despite the preponderance of evidence before her, an optimist.

  On Sundays

  I suppose a stubborn optimism could have led my mother to seek out God in our new artlessness, as she had in our old one back in town, though a stubborn pessimism seemed just the thing to encourage everybody else out there, and I doubt she got any closer to Him than they did while being forced to bear along the handicap of me. I did, here and there, with a smile toward the pews, and a big show of prayer after Communion, make an effort to aid in her advancement, though while employed at said prayer I might have aped too convincingly the young provincial who feels himself drowned each schoolday and so, on the Sabbath, clutches fast to his waterlogged half plank of faith, asking only that he never be inspired to ferry a shotgun with him to Mass. That I found myself unable to locate the joy in this activity as I did in some others was probably related to the fact that I understood my father to be in no mood, and in no moral position, to whip me for an improper attitude toward the Church, no matter how plaintively his wife cared to prosecute the matter.

  This man, our judge and our Zeus, once answered my query about whether he believed in God with a thunderous Hell no! and would never consent to accompany us to services, despite the truth that in order to win his town bride he had promised always to do so. Such an arrangement might have bred strife in lesser couples, but between these two it made for a kind of pact, whereby my father would sleep in on Sundays so as to regain what strength he needed to work his childr
en to death upon their noontime parole from the Lord, at which point my mother would partake of the sleep she had surely earned by ratting us out to the Lord in the first place. I cannot imagine what He got out of this, and we were not anywise the richer for it, but the adults seemed almost pleased with the arrangement, and they pressed on with it until I was nearly grown, by which point whatever idea had caused my mother to believe that there was a God to begin with, and had caused my father to insist that there was none, had worked its way far enough into the wood of their lives that it could no longer rot out the fruit of mine.

  How my brother’s or sister’s walk with Jesus was then, or has been ever since, I am unable to say, but my own was not helped along any by my first trip around what our mother had picked, or been forced to settle on, as our new place of worship: a no-frills wood and tin chapel in a failed riverside hamlet in the next county over, Goochland itself being lousy with the descendants of Huguenots and so inhospitable either to Catholic symbology or to Catholic buildings. Catholic people the place did not seem to mind so much, though I suspect this was due less to an understanding of the dispute between the creeds than it was to a thoroughgoing ignorance of it. Certainly no French-named Goochlander I met ever displayed more than a small awareness of what had denied the Catholics a purchase on their land; I myself learned something of it only because I happened to be born on the Feast of Saint Bartholomew, who was relieved of his skin during the first century AD, in Armenia of all places, but whose name would forever be linked with the day in 1572 when the Parisian Huguenots lost their own skins by a refusal to renounce a newer corruption of the spirit in favor of the old.

  All this was to the detriment of my mother’s plan, for had the American descendants of these people, misled at least as badly as my own kind were, not been driven by my day to consider all history bunk, and all knowledge of history pretension, and to offer up this attitude as proof of their patriotism when in fact it confirmed only their sloth, I might have been availed of some opportunity to defend my particular Jesus against informed attacks, and to develop an honest affection for what it was I defended, rather than being left to resent the exile of my faith as a poorly dressed schoolgirl will resent the fact that she is not more popular. I might have had means to declaim my way out of a situation in the fall of 1978, wherein I was removed from a classroom, to emboldened snickers, by an administrator who thought herself thoughtful, so that I could watch, by the miracle of television, and with too much time and space given over to what mysterious ablutions I might be required to perform, as if I were a Moslem or a Hindoo, the crowning of a brand-new pope. Mindful of this woman’s curiosity, and probable idiocy, I made a deep bow toward the screen, and did a very large sign of the cross, hoping to satisfy her expectations and also to poke some fun at them, neither of which seemed to get through, after which I indicated with a nod that it was now allowed for me to depart from the television set, and in a condescending silence she walked me back to my classroom, where I sat thereafter in a state of irrelevance and rage.

  Was my Jesus not the same as hers, except older and more experienced? Could He not have kicked the ass of hers or any other but for His being settled here late and in chains, a bitched-out serf of the Protestant pretender? Had His first visit to this continent not been as an honest gold- and bloodthirsty tyrant, rather than a slave to the humorless hypocrite who followed? I ask you: Of these two godheads, which was the more forthright in His motives? Is my Roman, Spanish Jesus, earlier arrived and no less cruel, not rightfully to be thought the sovereign here, or at any rate something better than a poor Irish parody of a crude English forgery of a dull German oil? Has He not since been screwed by unfair business practices in the states, which have granted to Protestant adherents all the decent real-estate money, and all the listened-to votes in Congress, and all dominion over the means of war, and all the multiform franchises of usury, until no one but a moron, or else a town-bred fan of medieval folklore, could possibly think to back the original?

  Yet this is precisely what my mother chose, or was convinced, to do. She sickened herself on a lesser American Jesus, as I did to the aforementioned degree, and as my brother and sister did to an unknown extent, and as millions of others have besides, and I tell you this: that particular Jesus, with no influence whatsoever in the provinces (and only enough in town, really, to save for His faithful a seat at the kiddie table in Rome), might as well have been an Ali or a Vishnu for all the happiness He won us out there, and for all the help He was with the corn, and for all the good He did us as we attempted both to grab and to avoid the notice of smug Protestant neighbors too stupid to understand what ritual gave rise to their own, or whence sprang their perpetual state of kindly contempt.

  As to God

  As to God in general, I will assent to the trope that says there must be some mystery to His ways, seeing as no one would possibly lend Him money otherwise, and I will temper this only with the thought that I might therefore do well to inject a little mystery into mine. Like any child engaged in the effort to ignore the birdsign of disaster all around him, and to show himself a good enough egg to be allowed around the shotguns again, I learned early on how to split the difference between a country boy’s atheism and a town girl’s faith, and although by this formula I earned the approval of no one, and did not help my ass out any in the meantime, I insist that I worked the numbers correctly and that my answer was at least as good as yours.

  The God I arrived at was not the inhabited absence my father always held to (for most atheists will not theorize a true lack of God but will instead make a bold gambit in the negative column, so as to balance out better the annoying belief on the positive side), nor did He at all resemble the abundance of goodliness my mother always prayed to (so that she might hope, in the fullness of time, to fail it), nor was He anything so plain as a mere compromise between the two, which would have left me only at the zero sum, too clever by half, that most Americans now unwittingly and unwisely promote.

  And Who would that God be? Why, He would be the God we have worshipped all our lives: He would be the omnipresent God Who has licensed the use of His name to all comers, as if He were the worst sort of whore, but Who, as any Republican or Democrat will tell you, would never consent to a personal appearance down here. He would be the omniscient God Who renounces all knowledge because He has apparently risen above it, as plenty of the hippies will contend (not knowing that they do), or because He has come to see knowledge as a terrible weapon used by college-trained “elites” upon His innocent Christian soldiers, whose attendance at these very same colleges is safely mitigated by the fact that they bravely refuse to learn anything there. He would be the omnipotent God who was tamed long ago, either by the majesty of our own aesthetic and political achievement, as the artist and the philosopher might have it, or because He was recently invited to waive, out of a fairness that pleases both the neoconservative (still hoping that his rhetoric sways God) and the neocommunist (still hoping that his rhetoric slays God), any further intervention on behalf of any person at any time for any reason. What fun.

  As to God in particular, let me say that the above configuration is not my God, nor was He ever, nor will He ever be, unless or until I become so old and infirm that the continent finally overwhelms me, and I am unable to resist the enormous intellectual snooze button that is at once my curse and my birthright. Before the alarm goes off, and the mediocrity sounds, let me try to record some approximation of my position on the matter. My God was not some dull stasis point between the twin poles of belief and denial, of church-taught faith and home-schooled despair, but was rather a violent oscillation between the two, a rapid and continual change of mind so that a kind of frequency was set up: a tone that vibrated within me, and found a natural sympathy there, and hummed each sunset, and grew louder each weekend, and I trust can be heard to this day.

  Said tone was liable to change, of course, being subject to how my parents pulled at and retuned the string, but no matter how the
wave may have tensed or slackened over the years I am confident that I can find it still, this peripatetic channel, this pirate whine, over which a great number of things reached out at me in my childhood, none of them in any way, and all of them in every way, related to the Lord our God.

  Hark! There it is! There it is!

  Faggotry

  My father was greatly concerned in those years that I might turn out to be a faggot, though only marginally more so than my mother seemed to be, the two of them sharing, through the auspices of my mother’s work with juvenile offenders (and my father’s long congress with tool-belted speed freaks), a perfectly common suspicion that the root cause of all deviation from the familial norm, and certainly of all “attention-seeking antisocial behavior,” was bound to be drug use and, beneath that, a latent homosexuality. As such he was forever at the entrance to the stuffy, low-ceilinged room where I slept with my brother (innocently) and masturbated (I confess it!) and, yes, sometimes (though only on the rarest of occasions, and then only out of the rarest of boredoms) harbored contraband, to ask, or to demand, really, “What’s going on in there?” My stock answer to this humorless and always tardy question was “Nothing.” By night he would frown and stare, and weigh this empty if loaded word for a moment, and amble off with an unsatisfied grunt. By day he would order me back outside and to work, which was his usual remedy for anything: a flu, a nail through the foot, a crushing sadness, assumed drug use, and now, apparently, the specter of an unauthorized faggotry.