Against the Country

by Ben Metcalf

  That thought is surely unkind to the girl, and possibly also to the drunk, but it does take us, with a considerable savings in pain, to the point where both I and the reader might be done with this trial, and its pretense, and its foolishness, were pain

  and pretense and foolishness not the only themes still available to the honest American writer. Excepting, of course (though it is painful to bring up, and certainly a little foolish, and bound to be called pretentious by someone), honesty itself. I see, for instance, that I have avoided any mention of that distasteful episode wherein I attempted, in a moment of late-onset religiosity (which in human terms covered the better part of three years but here, I promise, will not last out the next paragraph), to convert my gay friend and informant to the one true path, which involved (the attempt, not the path, though I suppose the latter might also be depicted in this way) mornings with him in the high-school parking lot, and my indication of this (male) and that (female) ass, followed by the practical inquiry “Well, which is it?” I highly recommend this method to anyone who hopes to iron out the dimples in a friend’s sexuality, but in my case the interview was conducted unfairly, and made it clear that the female ass was what we were after here, which answer he dutifully gave, and which answer I did not believe, and which lie then caused me to question him further, and to judge his constant and exuberant singing of spirituals on bus trips (especially “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” his curtain call) to be a barb and a blasphemy aimed in my personal direction, until at last I took him to see the wisest, most righteous adult I knew, and waited outside for him to emerge from this sit-down with the news that my mother had counseled him not to deny his inner gayness and had remained oddly silent on the question of whether his obvious interest in her second son was likely to bear him any fruit.

  Because my theme for the moment is honesty, or else fraudulence (either one), I would like to confess, before I conveniently decide that my self-portrait here will only be damaged by further embellishments to its already broad strokes, that (a) the young man of whom I write was not the same country queen as I later encountered in the Regency Square Hardee’s (I allowed the reader to guess that he was, and I did so on purpose, and I am almost sorry for it); that (b) the above (“(a)”) is in no way meant to diminish my admiration for the talented Hardee’s worker, who was, to be clear, short and white and applaudingly cruel, whereas the friend I mean was tall and black and mostly kind and never, that I saw, went around barefoot (though by this I intend no judgment upon them that did); that (c) I am, or rather my extreme provincialism is, entirely at fault for any lapse in, or discontinuation of, whatever friendships I enjoyed then or have tolerated ever since, including that with this particular friend, who by geographical accident was able to transfer into a high school better able to teach him, and to appreciate his gifts, and perhaps even to accommodate his blackness, than the one he and I had hated together; that (d) nearly twenty years would then pass before I chanced to see him again, in a Richmond parking lot, whereupon I was relieved to learn that he was now living happily with a man, and so had taken my mother’s kind advice after all; except that (e) prior to this arrangement he had cohabitated with a woman, and had fathered a child by her, and although he loved the child, and was boastful of it, and would see to its well-being ever after, was fated to find disappointment in the company of the woman, and so was forced to quit it altogether; by which I came to understand that (f) to the debasement of himself, and to numerous others besides, he might just have opted, for a brief but crucial moment in an already delicate development, to prize my wisdom over that of my mother, which idea could not help but sicken me.

  * * *

  2 And some liner notes.

  I was not sickened

  Even here, though, my fraudulence betrays me, or else my honesty does, for I was not sickened on account of what harm I might have done a forgotten friend, nor because those charming country convictions I held in decades past were by now so inconsequential to my own experience that I was wholly unprepared for the impact they may at one point have had on someone else’s. Nor was I thrown, exactly, by the realization that this rider may have struck out for the false haven of heterosexuality regardless of what shove I ever gave him (which scenario would grant him all agency in the matter, yes, but anyhow fail to absolve me). No, what sickened me was not any one of these possibilities but rather the overall unknowability of the problem: I could not be sure that my mother’s good counsel had been either followed or ignored; I could not be sure that my own had been heard at all; I could not guarantee that this young man had for one moment sought out his way in any sinner save himself, and, honestly, who would? Ergo, I would never be able to trust in that faint yet sweet note of triumph (over my mother? over nature herself?) which sounded within me one sunburnt parking-lot day. That this is what sickened me, finally, ought to sicken just about anyone.

  One last confession, before I cut short this shortcut across time’s mined macadam: the word “sicken,” and any variant of that marker lately employed to describe how at the moment of composition I thought and felt about memories of how I once thought and felt when certain other memories (progenitors at best of those above) first put out their feeble roots within me, now strikes me as so melodramatic as to be counted, if only by the calculus of an ever less dependable fraudulence, an ever more dependable lie.

  In my room

  Back, then, scurrying with shame and regret, to my little room, where at twelve or so I sat in the dark (by which I mean the literal and not the metaphorical dark, or not merely) until my brother moved in, his own room having been surrendered to our sister (and hers to the myth that endless work on an ancient and uninhabitable farmhouse will somehow elicit a charm that had never taken up residence there in the first place), and asked why I sat so in the shadows, and was told that the overhead was done in, whereupon he reached up and brushed it, just once, with his magical palm, and Lo! Light! I was plainly astonished by this twist after a year’s worth of evenings spent seated or prone in my doorway, trying to read by the bulb in the hall, which was not a hall so much as it was a four-by-four-foot square of bad wood at the top of a rickety staircase eventually destroyed altogether and replaced by newer steps my father came out of his depression to build, impressively and well, in a single weekend, when we had all of us resigned ourselves to the indefinite use of a ladder.

  Whether approached by rung or by step, this platform up top gave onto two other rooms, both of them well lighted and occupied by people unconcerned, or unaware, that one of their number had so little by which to illuminate his homework, which he was expected to do well on despite his numerous privations, which task he accomplished only insofar as the standards of his education allowed for the misreading of a line here and there without too much being taken off for it. I might also point out, in case these efforts will themselves be graded on a curve, that my privations were as nothing compared with those suffered elsewhere in the county, which were as nothing compared with those suffered elsewhere in the world. Yet should my hurts, on account of their relative smallness, be ignored? should a preventable wound, because it is shallower than the next, be entirely excused and forgotten?

  I wish now that my brother had never healed the fixture in my room. By sunlight the faded and peeling pink wallpaper, which of course there was no money to change, caused only a passing fright, but by tungsten its advances were bolder still, and conveyed a sense of old and pungent desperation in that place, of existence clutched at too long or too easily snuffed out, and attached to me an idea, and withal an actual scent, of sweetened rot, such as a poor woman’s corpse might bestow upon a grave robber who has not bothered, or yet discovered how, to do his homework.

  I would prefer to call my room a friend. I know that sort of thing is popular with the modern reader, who wants always to remember childhood that way, even if an extended program of rape occurred there. (Does this crime not nowadays count double against the assailant, for its being a violation not only o
f the little one’s trust but also of her refuge?) My own tale, alas, is this chestnut in a mirror, for although I went unraped in my room, that I know of, the footage itself never behaved even cordially toward me, nor am I willing to fib now and say that it did. Those walls neither promised nor provided me safe harbor but acted instead very much as they looked: like an ancient bowel unaccustomed to light and intent on a slow (that is to say, an American) digestion of its contents, so as to leave almost nothing behind when those contents finally reached seventeen and were forced out of that farmhouse forever, to negotiate their way through this land’s pinched sewers, by which I mostly mean town.

  Harbingers all

  We possessed no basement to which I might repair, as the town kids all seemed to, for our house was put up directly onto the soil, and so what sunken living space we implied to the road below was only that part of the foundation time and gravity and the Virginia mud had conspired by then to swallow. Also there was no garage. I might pen a trite little treatise here about why a garage is preferable to a basement from the American teenage perspective, or why a basement is preferable to a garage, but in either case an extended encounter with one or both is required, and so I am bereft. We did, on the other hand, have an attic. By chance or by fate there was, toward the southerly end of my room, a pull-down entrance into the addled brainpan of our jailor, which held only fear for me until my brother moved in, after which it beckoned me up always into its gray rafters, bare in spots but elsewhere laid over with planks enough that a child might easily gather what was needed to suspend a habitat there.

  This attic was uncommonly warm in summer, despite or perhaps because of the enormous fan our father had placed in the house’s northern aperture, which contraption seemed somehow to pull the hot air toward us rather than fulfill its mission to push the stuff back out, and which, due to the requirements of its oversized motor, produced such a heat on its own account that I sometimes wondered whether it would not catch fire some dry night and burn us all alive. Still, for companionship I ranked this machine above most parents I knew, for there was little chance that one of its blades would come loose of an afternoon and strike me for no good reason, and so raise yet another welt, and so raise yet another resentment, and so raise yet another sentence, and if it turned to arson while I was near I would at least be the first one alight and so, by my screams, might warn all the others. Who knows but by a shrieking, embarrassed death I might have attained a heroism that will forever now elude me in this shrieking, embarrassed life.

  A preponderance of wasps and spiders presented up there, but in my desperation I imagined that these could be warded off with pluck and a plan. I was wrong, of course: the spirit of a spider is broken soon enough, and if not one can generally smash her and all her issue with a shoe, but wasps are another matter. Wasps are a resistance movement, and they will fight, to a wasp, to the last. Most town dwellers can probably count, or anyway estimate, the number of times some cute little honeybee has pricked and annoyed them over the course of forty or fifty summers; I could not begin to count even the number of wounds I received, to my neck and arms and fingers (as they waved frantically in front of my face), on the single afternoon when I resolved to evict these assassins, with swats aimed in the general direction of the fan, from what I mistakenly assumed to be not their home but mine.

  I bitch now, yes, and with cause, but in the event I made no real complaint. Like most country children, I had come to consider all pain, and all swelling and itch, to be the mere price of admission to this world, and so I wondered no more over what the wasps had done to me than I did over the two-night skin-crawl and inability to breathe properly that had followed my father’s installation, with my conscripted help, of the cheap fiberglass insulation he saw fit to staple into our roof’s underside with the brown paper backing snug to the wood, and the fluffy pink filaments in and against us, which was surely an error, or else a slow attempt at murder-suicide, though to have voiced such an opinion then would have risked accusations of sabotage and a further suspicion of faggotry.

  I shut my mouth too on those occasions when I thought to employ a comb at the pus-speckled bathroom mirror, and felt in my wrist some tension beyond the usual tug and tangle, and reached back to discover a vast tacky wetness there, and a rubberish nubbin attached to my scalp like an aberrant mole, and understood that I had yet again impaled a tick so bloated on what had formerly been my own blood that even a dull plastic tine could pop him. I did not call out for assistance then but simply pulled the wrinkled shell free from its moorings, and tossed it dead or dying into the toilet, and made use of the repatriated sauce to whelm and subdue what strands were closest by, grateful that I would not have to chase after every cowlick this time with ordinary well water and spit. So accustomed had I become to insults of this kind that I went some weeks with a greatly troubled anus and the sight of wriggly white threads in my stool, each seeking hopelessly to regain the warmth it had just now vacated, before I bothered my mother with the news that her second son’s lower bowel had become grossly inhabited by pinworms.

  Little white pills from the county clinic, as prepared for this contingency as it was for snakebite and the occasional if suspect chainsaw accident, soon routed the little white worms (for a time I feared that my digestion alone would be required to perform this trick), though I would never quite be cured of the impulse to examine what went into or out of me, and I would be cognizant always of where it was I sat, and what it was I had touched to my lips, lest I swallow again the eggs of this worm, if not some worse, or else hatch and invite its babies up into me, where their forebears had already prepared for them a moist and cozy abode.

  Up or up into; down or down into: it mattered less to my turned stomach and itchy crack how these demons got in than that they palpably had, and would be back again shortly if encouraged, and had mapped out well their miserable townships within me, and had determined to start new lives there rather than remain any longer in the dirt below my clenched fundament, or in the weeds beyond my loud mouth, and were harbingers all of more terrible intrusions to come.

  A box thrown between us

  From the raids foreshadowed by the worms in my ass I must in all fairness exclude the rats, as they preceded the worms and, despite multiple measures to the contrary, survived them. These traders in filth, these brokers of disease, who in the popular imagination are denizens only of town and hence enough reason to leave it, were so well represented in Goochland’s clearings that I sometimes thought us squatters on their property rather than them on ours. These, and not the heat, and not the constant threat of unsquashed and vengeful spiders, and not the hum and stab of kamikaze wasps, and not the muffled repeat of my father’s stolen staple gun against pink fibers let loose to swirl among the fecal motes we normally inhaled, led me to abandon all hope of a retreat any nearer the sky than I already had. For a while I convinced myself that those peripheral flashes of gray in the attic were indicative of squirrels who had mistaken our house for a wide and hollow tree, and so looked to situate their nuts within its reaches, but the illusion would not hold: whilst arranging boards and boxes in my aerie one night I chanced to corner one of these animals, and noticed that it had an oily string in place of the usual bushy tail, and that its face was thinner than what I had come to expect, and that the dots with which it greeted the world betrayed not squirrelishness at all but rather a keen and unbreakable rage, which in a sudden spurt saw the entirety of its body launched against me.

  I blocked the rat’s assault by means of a box thrown between us, but my evenings in the attic were over, and I rarely went up there afterward except to fetch some stored and hard-to-find item, whereupon I announced my arrival with claps and loud whistles, so as to frighten off, if only for a measure or two, what sharpened teeth lay in wait for me there. Each subsequent trip up that yanked-down and unfolded ladder reminded me that where I had failed two uncles of mine, younger brothers of my father, had in their teens made for themselves a fine and rat-
free haunt in the eaves of their parents’ Illinois farmhouse, and had music up there, and entertained at least one eventual wife that I can recall (with fondness: she could really dance: Hello, Aunt ____!), and a brother or half-brother of hers, and a girl with him too (whose relation to me is less clear), and had carved out a space where these and more could congregate, and laugh together, and play their records, and smoke their dope, and tease one another, and eventually (if not all at once: who can say?) couple without fear or foreknowledge of the day when they would be led, as a matter of simple need, to take work (after generations wholly aware that their kind could not possibly survive as farmers, even sober and celibate ones) as soldiers and printing-plant workers and long-distance truckers and attendants at the nearby nursing homes.

  My mother (not blood-related to these people but obliged nonetheless to represent them in what she has always perceived (rightly) to be their grievance against a social contract both she and they think (wrongly) was rigged long ago by her sort of person (being only by small degrees of politesse, and hardly any more money, removed from their sort of person) for the purpose of holding their sort down (one increment of prosperity being about as far as the nearsighted American now can or cares to see, so that the trailer-homed man thinks it perfectly moral to direct his rage against anyone in a better car, while a helper like my mother suffers physical guilt over the fact that her own children are not, or are no longer, on food stamps), when in fact the contract was rigged long ago (yes, that part is correct) by a sort five or six or ten steps above either one of these sorts (or is it a hundred? or is it a thousand? and does it really matter, given that control of this mechanism has scampered up and down the rope with such agility over the eons, in an effort to obscure and protect itself, yet has never sought, and will never seek, asylum among my own particular sort (or sorts)?)) has on the occasion of paragraphs akin to the previous pronounced me a “snob.”