Against the Country

by Ben Metcalf

  Alternative Two is that they had thought the problem through, as they had all problems prior, and at last dug Old World claws into New World dirt in order to enact an end to the tradition that had sent so many of their cousins out west to comb the continent and die while the cocks who drove them onward grew richer and harder by the mile. (And how many frozen dinners were needed in those passes, Donner and otherwise, to ensure that we could hold and grow waxed Los Angeles, and hairy San Francisco, and pierced Portland, and damp Seattle, and tanned if flaccid San Diego? How many?)

  Some of these chickens, in their unmoving attitudes, seemed almost to regard me; others, more generously, did not. For a moment I froze myself, in a personal regard of them. Then, gently as I could, I laid the mail on the gravel before my feet. (Another torture-gift, that mail, not invented, as is too often claimed, but certainly popularized by Mr. Franklin, and I would not be surprised if he had a hand in the American gravel business as well.) I made no discernable crunch by this action, but a single hen head twitched, near the northwest declension of the bloom, and turned suddenly from a disregard to a regard of me. (or was it the other way around?)

  That was all the dogs required. They collapsed upon the rose’s center and began to kill. I ran into the midst of this mêlée and began yanking hens out of hounds’ mouths, thinking not to save souls here (I confess it) but only livestock, which clawed containers of souls (or not-souls) I threw up one after the other onto the cool tin roof, and tried to keep a running count of, until I saw, peripherally, that these more elevated birds did not care to be detained from their trip and were willfully, even joyfully, jumping back down.

  They leapt in pairs

  I did my best to bat this Wilbur or that Orville back up into the air, but the jumpers soon overwhelmed me. They leapt in pairs, or in trios, and at least once I saw a quad, and then there were not enough of them left to make a quad, or a trio, or even a pair, and the last solo leap happened well back behind me, to be caught up and disposed of by Cooper, while near the compost heap I battled Brown Dog and Ginger Snap, who in turn battled each other, over the rights to a formerly fat fryer who had already become, by the nails and beaks among us, a torn and irredeemable corpse.

  Our town mower, which I pushed later in a trance and a bother, was days in disposing of the evidence. It rendered the feathers into dust easily enough, but it had a tougher time with the flesh and the bone. The buzzards pitched in where they could, and did away with the occasional hunk of chicken meat and sorrow, or with an infarcted yard rat we would none of us miss, but after a week or so (was it the rat blood? was it?) we saw no more of these flying garbagemen. Buttfucker alone survived the cataclysm, by what luck or cleverness I will never know, and was allowed (by the dogs? by the family? by the fungus below?) to roam the yard as if he still had hens left to dominate. By his further actions, and inevitable demise, you would almost think he believed that.

  Pace/Eggs

  Pace my fading father;

  Pace his infested yard;

  Pace what designs those chickens might have had for, or on, their own little pecked-at lives;

  Pace what plans my father might have made for my personal poor story, and I have since drawn out for his;

  Pace those lowly snakes;

  Pace the high-hat buzzards, and the suicide turtles, and the doper rats;

  Pace the Lord our Jesus;

  Not everyone in this scenario needed to die.

  Not everyone.

  One morning, a week or so after the hens had flown, I got it into my head to make eggs. I would argue that I was simply hungry, but in truth it did not seem proper to me that anyone else in the family should consume the last leavings of those birds I had cared so incompetently for. I suppose that might pass for a kind of hunger.

  I set some butter in the skillet to brown, and then, on the lip, I cracked open the first of these eggs (or was it the last?), and felt its innards glop through my fingertips as they waited on a yolk they intended to cradle, so as not to see it burst in the pan. What they felt instead was a sudden simple sharpness, and I pulled the shell apart and took a step backward as butter and egg white splashed out of the pan and onto the floor. I saw then, a-fry in the goo, not a yolk at all but a half-formed chick, pleasantly asleep on her side in this bubbling hell, and I think I stood and stared at that too long.

  I took the skillet out back and flung its contents, still sizzling, up onto the coop roof. Then I threw the skillet up there too, and I cursed my mother, and I cursed my father, and I cursed the undead dirt I shook upon, and I vowed never to break another egg again.

  A note on the text

  This text was set in Christ knows what by who knows whom.

  I like for there to be a note on the text in the books I read, so that I might learn something about the typeface employed, if I enjoyed it (the typeface, I mean), and a little of its history, and possibly its designer’s, though I tend to grow sad when it strikes me that the author probably did not write this particular passage (alone, perhaps, among all the others in the book), and so may have had no say whatsoever in the typeface, and the whole operation starts to smell like plagiary.

  Acknowledgments, on the other hand, are most always written by the author, even if the rest of the book was not, and I cannot stomach them. Better to hate at the end of a book, I say, than to love. The one person I care to acknowledge here is that young man who said to me, long ago, “My dick don’t get hard till it sees the pussy.” If he does not greet me at the gates of heaven, or ferry me across the Styx into hell, then I cannot see how my efforts here have been of much worth. Your more discerning reader, bien sûr, will expect me to finger that father I last saw years ago, dying off obligingly in a town rancher (has it taken me this long to be rid of him?) and reminding me somehow of the last time I saw him (really saw him), years before that, as my brother and sister and I headed back to the pond, and he asked where we thought we were going, and we said to play hockey, by which anyone would have known that we intended only to slide around on the ice near the pond’s fat lip, and whack at one another with what sticks as we had gathered along the way, but he insisted he come along too, and make sure it was “safe,” and so we were forced to abandon our game and watch from the shore as he stomped out into the middle of the pond, and looked up at the whitening sky, and brought his sledgehammer down repeatedly on the ice all around him, each of us worried that he might sink himself forever and half praying that he finally would.

  I will acknowledge this. I will also acknowledge that I asked the very earth below his dragon claws to open up and swallow him on that calm afternoon (strung now, forever, somewhere between a stolen country pond and a rented town hospital bed) when he called me on the telephone to acknowledge (not to praise, mind you, but merely to acknowledge) something I had written, whereupon he claimed, with too much pride in a failing voice, that he had “manipulated” me into becoming a writer, and I swore I could forgive him anything but that.

  A note on the people

  I feel obligated, all the same, to provide a note on the people:

  The people these persons put me in mind of I love a great deal. Those people, though, are not these persons. These persons are my personal inventions. Those people, if you ask them, invented me.

  A note on the dogs

  I promised a note on the dogs. (See the second paragraph of the fifth part of my fourth attempt to end all this.)

  BLACKIE O’REILLY (1974–?). Our original town puppy, got from a sex accident on my paternal grandparents’ southern Illinois farm, after a cat we had from there, Hazel, named after a hideous television character my parents said she resembled, had become so suddenly and inexplicably feral that she was returned to the farm, which outpost itself proved too civilized for her, and we last caught sight of this beast, scraggled and enormous, splayed along a dirt-road ditch as we sped away from the countryside with the new puppy alert in our laps, though I may be compressing events there. (Is that what this is still called, comp
ressing? I was so very young then.)

  Adjusted well, this pup, and was an avid snuggler, as we all should be. Was availed of two littermates, that I am aware of: one called, unimaginatively, Snoopy, and given into the care of idiot cousins in whose company he would soon succumb to worms; the other called Tavish, for some reason, by our younger aunts, who encouraged him to run all around, as they themselves did, until he was caught in the woods one night and eaten by coyotes. Said to be part Chihuahua, of all things, on his mother’s side; God knows what he was on his father’s. Weighed a little more than ten pounds, eventually. Was for the most part black but sported a white chest and four white paws, which pattern he would later see repeated in our menagerie to his absolute horror. Had ears like a startled fruit bat.

  Taken by my brother to a pet show being staged at a local town park. Sparked a small controversy when it was explained that pets needed to be registered beforehand to participate, whereupon the boy held his puppy up and asked what kind of pet show was this. Returned home, hard boy and triumphant dog, with jury-rigged award for “cutest pet.” slept always with his little head on a third of my brother’s pillow. Knew his mealtimes, and became enraged when these were not strictly adhered to. Made the most religious effort I ever saw in a nonhuman to acquire language, so that all attempts at cleverness around the subject of food failed, as we sent one another the code f-e-e-d t-h-e d-o-g, or m-e-a-l, or a-n-i-m-a-l m-o-u-t-h, and then had to dodge the little fur missile, whose speed and vertical leap were by then legendary, as he hurled himself directly at our hands and our faces.

  Was allowed after mealtimes to roam free, as we all were, which my town-caught father insisted was the natural order of things, his town-raised wife disagreeing, and while we formed our little packs and explored the town sewer pipes, never knowing what backyard we would pop up into next, our dog followed a different sort of scent, and soon half the town was abloom with his babies. If asked about this, we were instructed to blame the poorer family around the corner, whose numerous mutts were also black, with white on their chests and their paws, and to lie and say that these were born before we ever moved into the neighborhood.

  Situated himself on the corner, when there was no heat on the air, and waited for challengers to come up the hill on Harrison, or to top the sad crest on Tenth, and gun their motors against him, after which he set off like a mechanical rabbit, holding to the sidewalk while the muscle cars and the motorcycles ran him down, the perpetual complaint being that just when they finally caught him he would leave off, self-satisfied, so as to remain, if but technically, undefeated. This brought, understandably, a certain reckless (one might even say a stupid) element to the street, and there began to be horrific crashes in front of our home. A car (it looked to me to be a Pontiac, though I might be mistaken there) collided with a large tree in the yard opposite, and I (and probably the dog) first learned the word “hematoma.” Not long after, a motorcycle spilled into that same yard, and the stupefied driver said that a little black mutt, “the fast one,” had come directly “at” him. He stayed locked away in our basement for the next two weeks (the mutt, I mean) while we more than once denied knowing him. Shortly thereafter we agreed, as a family, to move to Virginia.

  Chased cows in Goochland, and was spanked by our father for doing so, which we thought was the funniest thing we had ever seen. Ran away from us then, and stayed away until my brother took out an ad in the local paper depicting what looked to be the head of a black devil-bat, with ears twice as long and pointy as the real ones were, above the caption Have You Seen This Dog? whereupon a local farmer returned him to us, gladly, within a few days. Stayed with us for a stretch after that, and bullied the puppies we had begun by then to accumulate, as country people will tend to do, with the obvious aim of teaching these mutts to respect him even after they had grown to two or three times his size. Must have known, on some level, that this project would fail, having been teased, and kicked at, and spanked, and picked up like a football and thrown out into the middle of a pond by a man who demanded respect from those all around him but would not receive it even from his tiniest dog.

  Eventually made trips, on a daily basis, to a gas station roughly a mile off, behind which we had quartered when we arrived in that awful place. At first we assumed this was so that he might hassle the Holsteins along the way. They were black, as was he, with patches of white, and once, when spotted from the road by my parents, and fearing another spanking, he stopped suddenly and began to graze as if he were one of the cows: to this day I am not sure whether this demonstrated a mastery of perspective or a total misunderstanding of it. Soon became clear that he was not headed to the gas station on account of the cows, nor because he expected from the small commerce there a substitute for town, but because he wanted to huff the fumes, as the lower denizens of the station embarrassingly explained it to us, and we began to make regular stops to fetch him, goggle-eyed, home.

  Sat like a human on the couch, upright, with his little hands and legs out in front of him, watching TV with one wandering eye and looking, with the other, to participate in our chat by means of his protovocalizations. Had the music of it right, toward the end, but he only ever made imperfect sense. Disappeared for good sometime in the early eighties, in search of what fumes we can never know.

  Unclear whether he raced all those soon-to-be crumpled cars and trucks into the perfectly negotiable curve in front of our Virginia home.

  BROWN DOG (1979–1988). The prettiest animal I have ever laid eyes on and also, by a wide margin, the stupidest. Given various names by my sister (I remember “Maggie” and, in a more desperate attempt, “Lolla-Lee-Loo”), all of which our father disallowed, arguing that a dog so stupid ought to be known only by some physical characteristic that distinguished it from the others. Became known, then, as Brown, or Brown Dog, when in fact she was spectacularly golden. I do not know why we never thought of “Goldie” for this sweet, furry shepherd-retriever collision.

  Sat, out of fear, or ignorance, on the roof of a car in the driveway, like Snoopy on his doghouse, which may have spooked passing motorists, or at least distracted them, as they headed into the otherwise perfectly negotiable curve in front of our house. Caught heatstroke up there and gave us much joy in watching her shake and vomit in the yard. Survived, barely, an apparent suicide attempt by wonder Bread truck, though later we wondered whether this had been, in fact, an attempt simply to race the vehicle, following after Blackie’s faster example.

  Was a big one for hugs and pets, and often, even after she was spayed, showed menses down the back of her pretty yellow haunches.

  Sat and watched, mesmerized, as the deer roamed the corn rows and chewed, happily and unbothered by her, on the ears.

  Died, suddenly and mysteriously, shortly after we had all left home. As our father explained over the telephone, “The bitch just up and died.” Might have been snakebit. Was buried, unceremoniously, in what was left of the hole that had formerly been the old outhouse.

  GINGER SNAP (1981–?). The product of a black-and-tan hound who had got loose from a hunting pen and impregnated a small, reddish housepet across the road from some friends in the eastern part of the county. Was unusually worried by, and about, herself. Fancied play, and the wedge-shaped boxes of d-Con rat poison my parents put around the place, but would go deathly still whenever I went out behind the house, of a quiet evening, and gazed out over the fields, and into the woods beyond, and gave a sharp yell to awaken, from every angle, the hunting dogs in the kennels all around. Then she would bark and howl back at them, and would look at me as if she did not know what was happening to her, and would not quiet down until I had taken her into my arms, and got inside a car, and shut the door against the world outside.

  Asked always, by her eyes, about her true nature, but received no straight answer. Sat and listened, more than any other dog of ours, to the trees, and would jump if the wind shifted suddenly, and would snarl and snap at the air, but was perfectly happy again if you dangled a
toy, or else a box of rat poison, in front of her. Was well liked, this dog, but misunderstood. We were never quite sure whether her agonized barks and squeals on the side porch, as her kin chased deer through the trees and into the northern clearing to be slaughtered, perchance to be slaughtered themselves, constituted an alarm so much as it did a cheer.

  Disappeared sometime in the middle 1980s. We assumed she had been found in the woods, ours or someone else’s, and taken off by a hunter to live and run and die with those kennel-bound cousins of hers. She had a good enough nose for danger, after all, and a loud enough bark, and she always chased the deer away from the corn.

  JACKIE (1977–?). Not properly a dog at all but rather a gray tabby, come with us from Southern Illinois to teach us something about misery. Had free run of the place until she dared lash out at a puppy we had recently agreed, at our father’s urging, to call Cooper, sweet and round, who climbed the concrete step to the side porch, looking to make friends, and had his left eye scratched by the cat. Was forced thereafter to watch said pup grow into an enormous and unforgiving beast, who more than once stood with a feline corpse in his jaws and glared up at where she now lived, on top of an old wardrobe on the side porch. Spent the rest of her life, that I know of, without once risking the ground again. When not on the wardrobe, or clinging to the mesh of a window screen, or in the leapt-to branches of the magnolia tree in the side yard, she sometimes vanished for weeks. It was rumored that she had managed somehow to access the walls of the house. On one occasion I was sure I heard her in the attic, as no assembly of rats could possibly have made such a racket up there. Whether she hunted these rats, and, if so, what their tainted blood might have done to a creature already mad with fear, I cannot say.