Against the Country

by Ben Metcalf

  Which was the other great subtext at work here, and that Church, and her sense that I sensed how It might one day save me, even when we both knew It would not, so overwhelmed her watching of Brideshead Revisited as to make her gloss over those lovely, crucial speeches by the stuttering homosexual Anthony Blanche, wherein he warns against “charm” (the Flytes’, yes, but then there are so many other kinds (and how akin was this “charm” to Holden’s “phoniness,” so important to both the atheistic and the worshipful elements in my household, and never once ignored there as was charm)), and this moved me, I think, her subterfuge (for my mother was, and is, a charming woman), and beyond anything she wanted me to notice in the episodes themselves sent me up into that choir-loft one Holy Night without television, with a candle in my grateful hand, to look down on the poor chiaroscuros below, and wonder what sins they had committed to gather them all here, and whether these sins could possibly be as bad as mine (and I would like to say that I pondered just then what Waugh or Salinger might have done with a scene such as this, but I am neither phony enough to claim it nor charming enough to pull it off), until someone down below leaned back on the light switch near the entrance and showed, in one ugly flash, our prefab chapel for what it truly was.

  Tin and wood.

  Faded felt displays.

  Mail-order-catalog Stations of the Cross.

  A decades-old course of industrial blue carpeting.

  That light was shut off immediately, of course, but the Spirit had fled us, and for some It never returned. Most stayed until Mass was over, out of phoniness, or charm, but few tarried after. I learned from the stragglers that a sibling of mine was rumored to have tripped the switch in back: both suspects had lingered there at the time, near my mother, and certainly she would have known not to do it. My soon-to-be-fugitive sister denied culpability, and I could see in her eyes that she would have been perfectly proud of the act. (She who would later steal a taxicab in the nation’s capital, and drive around drunkenly taking fares, until a police roadblock was set up, and she was captured, and the offended hack said he would not press charges, and would even drive her home, by which the officers present must have known that he would then attempt to sexually assault her.) By those eyes I knew the truth. My brother, when I asked him about it, stared somewhat coldly at me, and for a moment I thought I was about to be punched, right there in the churchyard. Then he smiled and looked away, as if he had already forgiven me the insult (not of the accusal but of the sheer stupidity), and he put his hand on my shoulder, and his smile went away, and he asked me how that toe was doing.

  Such is how I recall it, the loss of my faith (if never my fear), except that I am convinced now I was thinking, as late as ten paragraphs ago, about the Ascension, not the Assumption, if only mistakenly so.

  Copperhead

  1.

  As I chopped weeds one Sunday, after my midnight escape from the Lord, in that corner of the backyard never asked to grow corn (nor to birth what other foodstuffs we would scrape after dinner onto the enormous pile of rotting garbage my parents told themselves was a “compost heap” and even the dogs would not go near), and swung a scythe through weeds that had caused even the tiller to choke and expire, I felt a garden hose pulled tight against my left heel. I looked back and saw there not a hose at all but rather a full-grown copperhead, rounding one foot and headed directly at the other. Why he (she?) did not simply bite the left, and save himself (herself?) the extra motion, I will never know; snakes, I suppose, make their aesthetic decisions too. I hopped off toward the tail, and he (she?) turned back around at me, and I chopped the top third of him (her?) away with my blade. This made him (her?) overly angry, or at least the top third of him (her?), and he (she?) continued to hiss, and to bare his (her?) teeth, and to inch my vulnerable way, until I had chopped that top third into an additional three pieces, after which his (her?) mouth remained open but mercifully silent.

  I ran up into the house then, and told my brother what had happened, and he seemed honestly intrigued by my story this time around, though he did not, in the end, deem it worthy of his leaving the television set and coming outside to inspect my mess. That mess would have to be dealt with, of course, and soon, before the dogs got at it and one of them, chewing happily on the head, caught a lip or a tongue on a still-venomous fang. I threw the pastel meat up onto the coop roof for the buzzards to have at. The angry head I flushed down the toilet. Afterward I found it a terror to situate myself on that throne or on any other.

  2.

  The great black locust behind the house had finally died. No doubt this was due to desiccation, and heatstroke, and smoke inhalation, and all those pitiable burns; it had stood, the whole of its life, so very near the chimney. (For which see the second, seventh, and fourteenth parts of my fifth attempt to end all this.) My father felled it expertly, and it swung from left to right, as if waving goodbye, before landing, the top third of it, on the very spot where that southbound snake had turned and tried to topple me. Over the next few days we set upon it with axe and chainsaw, glad (my brother and I) finally to have firewood so near the home.

  (Was this before or after my brother joined the football team, as the place had asked of him, and stuck with it just long enough to ask of a particular player out there, “How did you get so goddamned big?” So came the reply: “Hauling the motherfucking wood.” By which we learned for how little a cord of stove-ready staves could be had, and one Christmas we gathered up our dollars and arranged, through this same player’s family business, a whispery delivery the night before, and the next morning we presented the stack to our father as if it were a gift for him and not for us. I remember too well his effortful smile, and his emasculated “Thanks,” and the short-lived triumph, and our long-lived shame.)

  There was talk, and honest fear, that our father might make us transport the whole of this treasure back across the eastern field, to what wire bounded (and here and there did physically bind) those trees that by this point spelt out God knows what, so that when harsh weather hit he could command us to fetch it up the hill again, and haunt us from the dry side of a farmhouse window while he told himself that we would remember and respect him for making us so powerful. No male in the family, and I include poor vaporized him, is today innocent of a town operation on his spine. I suppose I can remember him for that.

  On the second afternoon of the locust’s agony, my brother chopped into a cave made out of two branches: one broken off against the trunk and one, by stubborn flesh, still held to it. The grass was all but gone there, by the pressure of the tree, and by his movements above and below it, and it is my recollection that he slipped around a great deal in the mud as he chopped away the roof of what had become home to a large and coiled copperhead, which my brother, large and coiled himself, chopped into pieces while his faraway father turned the chainsaw off and yelled a Stop fucking around over there-type sentiment and then heard, by way of a yell back, what had happened, and so came over to inspect the scene, after which he glared down at me as if I had just now nearly cost him the better son. As this ghoul drifted off, and disappeared (almost!) behind the leafless branches at the top of the tree, my brother stared after him and sighed. Then he picked up some chunks of the snake and made for the coop roof. I picked up some others and followed. I shared nothing about what I had done with the previous one’s head.

  Whether it was then or later I do not know. My brother turned to me and said, by that fading gray sky, or by the bare yellow bulb in our intestinal-pink bedroom, The next thing we’ll see is four kings.

  No truths here

  I saw neither king nor copperhead in the yard after that. What I did see were rats, singly or in pairs, taking carefree constitutionals across a lawn they presumed, correctly, to be their own. The dogs mostly let these nature enthusiasts be: I would venture that the amount of d-Con rat poison coursing through their tiny veins had caused any dog who bit down on one to hallucinate and vomit and pray.

  Snakes I saw plenty
of, but these were always on the road, and I could never tell whether they hoped, by crawling out onto the asphalt, to depart this life for good or only that unconscionable county. Every snake I spotted seemed to be headed east, and it would not shock me to learn that all of Ophidia had voted to return to the sea, as the whales had long before them and we monkeys might just yet. Turtles, too, were hep to the highways. I once encountered a “box” variety on 250, turned a tad sideways (or perhaps he was only switching lanes), and as I swerved to locate him safely between my wheels I swear I saw him reach a little dinosaur foot out back to reverse himself, after which I felt his shell crunched at once beneath my right hind tire. Was this another suicide, or had he simply forgotten something back at home? Why did I miss so many of the elongated meat tubes I tried for but could not avoid this one cute lump of a fellow? To what truths are we ultimately beholden?

  No truths here, I am sorry to say, mean anything any longer, except where they apply to the chickens; I have neither the time nor the patience left to swerve. Where once I had allowed myself to imagine these birds adventurous escapees, inspired by and inspiring me (but which came first?), I saw them now as complacent stay-at-homes I was not above pelting with their own eggs for boring me so badly, and for making me smell like chickens, and chicken feed, and chicken shit, as I sat friendless (I was sure) and Godless (I was equally sure) at school and talked about a sentence (or an equation) not even the teacher took much interest in;

  Or on the floor of a Richmond Rite Aid, where my vacuum cleaner had just knocked over a maxipad display, and one of the boxes had come open, and I was yanking pads and carpet fibers out of the machine’s wide mouth when a slim figure slipped around the corner, and stepped over the electrical cord, and snatched up one of the still-intact boxes, and hurried away toward the cash register, and I saw from behind that this was the very girl I was just then in love with, who would be pregnant so quickly, by another, that I might as well have scooped her up a free handful off the floor;

  Or in the passenger seat of an adult I admired, as I asked him whether I should follow my brother to The University or should apply in secrecy to a college up north and in town (my parents had ordered me not to: they deemed the northern application fee an insult, or a hardship (I cannot remember which), and refused to pay it, thinking their hubris might at last put an end to mine), and this man had counseled me to do as I liked, though Virginia parents generally knew best, and he himself had received a fine education from one of the Atlantic Coast Conference schools, on a football scholarship there, and then he stomped on the brake, and grabbed a rifle (or was it a shotgun?) out of the rack behind our heads, and before I knew it had arced around the front of the vehicle, and jumped the ditch, and back-rolled over the barbed wire (I had not seen this maneuver before), and raced across the field after a wild turkey he had no honest hope of catching, and when at last he returned to me, and put the gun back up in the rack, his eyes asked a sympathy of mine that would prove as elusive as had the turkey;

  Or in a booth at the McDonald’s on Patterson, having passed on the way the burial of a child I knew perfectly well, some of whose bereaved, I knew perfectly well, would now filter in, all dressed in black, and await their turn to order Happy Meals and Big Macs, because they knew, perfectly well, given where they had opted to dwell and to die, how long it would be before they had another chance to eat at McDonald’s;

  Or on a couch in the still-usable half of our living room, trying to watch television and awaiting inspection by the parents of my brother’s ambitious new girlfriend, who were visiting their ambitious girl and her new boy at The University, when we heard pressure on the gravel outside, and then a screeching of tires away, and my sister guffawed, and my mother collapsed into her melodramatic tears, and I remembered (how could I not?) that time I caught a ride home from a charitable girl at the high school, and pointed up at the house once we neared the curve that had famously bested all those drunks, and the girl drove right on past.

  She assumed I was joshing, of course, and what pains me, in retrospect, is that I was. I meant only, by my pointing, that “here” was where I, and my little sister (who had recently been menaced by a boy at the high school and, before I could “have a word with him” (by which I mean attack him in one of those hideously tiled bathrooms I had avoided myself since at least the seventh grade), struck him in the face with a steel-toothed hairbrush she had ferried in her purse to school, reportedly with such force that it remained lodged in the poor boy’s cheek as she turned back around to smile at the teacher whose job it had been, theoretically, to protect her all along; later, when inquiries were made, neither this teacher nor her charges would admit to having seen a hairbrush, nor to hearing any hypothetical screams), would be forced to sleep tonight, and eat our victuals, and do our chores, and compose a few paragraphs where such were asked, and set out for school the next morning worse people.

  It was absurd to imply that human beings actually lived in that place. (Philosophically, there is no sound argument to be made that anyone ever lived there, or that the house itself ever existed, or the county, or the commonwealth, or the self, or that I in fact exist today, comprising as I can but these few paltry words (or are there too many?), which, again, seem real enough to me (see the fifth through the eighth paragraphs of the eleventh part of my fifth attempt to end all this), but what if I have that all wrong?) There was (psychologically speaking), for at least one of us in the car that evening, a visceral certainty (could we not smell it, the viscera, if not the certainty?) that chickens did indeed exist up there, next to a house haunted by an uncertain farmboy who half believed in that house, and in that county, and in that commonwealth, and who could not decide whether, to be free of his dragons, he would have to fly those birds or those birds would have to fly him.

  Compass rose

  I let my guard down, re the chickens. I see that now.

  I took their quietude for serenity, when I should have taken it for what American country quietude (or town loudness, either way) has always hidden: further subterfuge. So what if I had seen them bunch up against the coop wire in seasons previous, and tear at the opening they had initiated there? By this fuss they had wanted not freedom but snake blood, and by my father’s axe I had given them that. So what if they seemed thereafter to want nothing? I was a fool to think the matter, or themselves, the least bit settled.

  One vernal eve, with the moon fat and jaundiced over Richmond, and the sky gone a gulp past grape soda, I stood and watched a lone hen peck at the loosened flap behind the feed trough/chicken toilet, and I wondered whether she had not been driven insane. By fear, perhaps, and this was then an autonomic echo of how she, and her kind, had dealt with insecurity in more serpentine times. By grief, perhaps, and this was then a senseless ritual: the pecking out of a passageway to the afterlife for every sweet little sister she had lost to the king. I wondered how she would react if I seized her now, and brought her up into the yard, and laid the axe handle across her neck, and pulled the body loose from its troublesome head. Would the body run back down, past the asparagus patch, and ghost-peck dutifully at the unfinished hole? Or would it die here in the yard, crestfallen, as the head already had?

  Currently I have this hen figured for an agent, likely one of several whose work I was not meant to see, nor ever fully to understand. A week or so later, as I climbed the hill from our mailbox one ponderously green afternoon, having checked to see whether I had been asked yet to a college up north and in town (I had not), I saw in my periphery, laid out true across the front yard, a wide and fetching compass rose. The cardinal points of this compass were vacant, I will allow, unless you want to count nail-ridden boards and the odd rat lookie loo, but the ordinals there were well-enough represented: Brown Dog, as I remember it, held the southeast position; Ginger Snap, the southwest; Cooper held the northwest position and promised, by his quick musculature, that he could cover the northeast as well. That would have been Blackie’s spot, had the pines not claimed h
im years before.

  The center of this compass was a perfect bloom of leghorn white.

  The chickens, by which I mean every one of them who had survived their captivity, and their sores, and the snake snacks, and my grievous experiments, now held perfectly still, and I had never seen them do that except when roosting on the diagonal lattice I had built, with my own unsteady hands, against the wall where once repaired my father’s books. For a moment I thought, or hoped, that each bird was lost in an intense consideration of where it might like to travel next. To this day I sometimes think that, or hope it, when I flap past maudlin and find the alternatives too awful to consider.

  Alternative one is that they had not thought the problem through. Id est, they were chickens, and so were, whatever their gifts of wanderlust and courage, inherently stupid. Hence they were bound to perish, in the American fashion, almost as soon as they stepped foot in a front yard so foreign to them it might as well have been another continent. (And has it not recently been confirmed that the colonists at Jamestown, from which sprang Richmond, from which sprang Goochland, from which sprang Jefferson, from whom sprang our country and western pride, once resorted to cannibalism, and gobbled at the flesh of a fourteen-year-old girl (and here I cannot help but think of the young Tanya Tucker: “Then a man of low degree stood by her side”) so as to retain a foothold in this exotic lawn, and follow the sun across it, looking always for nuggets of gold, as opposed to animal crap, so that other little girls might be eaten along the way?)