Ben Metcalf - Against the Country

I say again: this is a remarkable record.

We might ask what link could be drawn between the conditions on these moveable villages and those deaths that occur later, in homes (such as the one I was stunted in) where no more than an unlocked closet door ever stands between a child and a rifle or a shotgun or both; or in schools where these guns, which apparently do not kill people themselves, arrive now and then armed with deadly children; or in bars where the prison-like atmosphere of the bus still prevails; or in prisons where the bus-like atmosphere of the bar still prevails; or in cars and trucks whose occupants have just left the bar, or the prison, and know far more about the confluence of long roads and alcohol than they ever will about the confluence of human beings and seatbelts; but we cannot establish beyond a reasonable doubt that our scholastic transport has made any deliberate effort to erase us from this Earth, or that it has been directly responsible for anything more than its own fair share of preventable murders.

That is why I must now raise my voice in approbation of the American schoolbus. That and the luck that I was not killed on or beneath it myself, nor did I die later in a bar or a prison, or on one of those gray asphalt arteries that seem almost designed to connect these sad termini. My death was more spectacular and, as of this writing, has yet to conclude. The cause was self-abuse, and although I learned a good deal about that subject on the schoolbus I am forced to acknowledge that I might not have survived as long as I did, and might already be confined to a hole in Goochland, or in one of its numerous imitators across this dim continent, were it not for the tutelage I received as we rumbled past those sullen pines and along those irate dirt roads.

Do I regret that my education was not of the sort to be had from books but was more in line with the “common sense” half the nation now believes to be of greater value than the ability to read? Let me answer that I was thankful to have gained any wisdom at all out there, seeing as how little was being offered through the schools. Do I count myself a weaker student of the cornpone philosophy because, by the grace of ruined yet thoughtful parents, I came not to fear and avoid the written word but to fear and approach it? From what I saw, the country child fared no better with the land’s lesson than he did with the book’s. True, he tended to announce a mastery over the former when it was clear that he would fail at the latter, but he napped in nature’s classroom as he did in any other, and sought to get by on good attendance alone, and put the whole of his faith in a glib native cleverness he wrongly assumed was not also available to those possessed of a library card and a paid-up residence in town.

I myself blew nearly every test the weeds administered, but out of horror I did remain awake in that place, and worked through the problem sets as best I could, and spent considerable time on the experiments, and just as I will not recognize as my superior in the field the jean-shirted fool who has removed himself from town for moral or aesthetic reasons (which are anyway the same thing) and now pens tone-deaf encomiums to the dirt, I will not bow down before the baseball-capped, goateed man-child who attaches himself by vacuum seal to the government tit yet insists that the nation’s wealth flows like a river from its pristine source (himself) to condescending town, and who will cast his vote in fury for whichever candidate most convincingly implies that Jesus hates all the tax-exempt town fags too.

He had the same schooling as I did, this patriot, and the same long sentence within that mobile metal hull, and the same chance to observe for himself the limits of a life defined by the conviction that town is the source of all hurt known to man, and that Jesus is not the peaceful town Jew we encounter in the New Testament but rather a vengeful country Christian who attends all the gun shows, and that town dwellers would take their punishment right here on Earth (so that heaven-bound country folk could enjoy it too) were it not for a school-bred habit of liberal terrorism against God’s American law. Some part of science is always Satanism, insists this citizen. Wrestling tickets are a thoughtful anniversary present. A ring around the moon means snow.

Except for the ring around the moon, and that part about science, only the notion of an angry country Christ makes any real sense to me now. Had I been dragged from the comfort of town by lesser beings so as to profit a real-estate scam that would never in turn profit me, and would forever cause town people to assume that I hailed from the weeds by personal choice and not by someone else’s criminal action, I might be inclined toward a vengeful attitude myself. I might raise up an army of ignorant orcs to go against those who had so shamelessly enriched themselves by my removal and then shunned me for my provenance, or I might recognize in the orc’s plight something of my own, and so come to pity him in his victimhood, and so come to despise him for his weakness, and so come to torture him by means of an extended and then suddenly withdrawn favor. Energy permitting, I might also do my best to curse, and to salt with humanity’s tears, the land beneath town and country alike, provided I could find a spot that had not already been cursed and salted eons before by another creature of vast and unspeakable consequence, whose motives I could guess at but never quite discern.

The schoolbus was, I have no doubt, a servant of that creature, and oftentimes I took it for, or beheld in its dun and green innards, a physical manifestation of the creature’s great animosity toward me. It ought to count for something, though, that at one point or another I suspected every vehicle and building and plant and person in Goochland of the same, which opinion time has not softened any (and time in town has only ossified), and that none of these entities ever educated me so thoroughly as my schoolbus did, nor showed me so intense a concern, nor suffered from me so grave an insult. I know full well that I owe this benefactor a debt whose principal I will never be able to touch. By my gestures here I hope only to pay down the interest.

Here, then, is what I learned on, or because of, the American schoolbus:

(I should make it clear that what follows is but a sample of the ore I struck there. The lode itself stretched back for acres behind the self-pleased grins of the tormentors on the bus, and for fathoms below the excuses they or their playground counterparts gave on the rare occasion when one was solicited (“We was just playing” or, if there was blood, “He told lies on my momma”), and for light-years beyond the calm with which these overused lies were then accepted by the adults who settled such matters with what at first appeared to be an uncommon laziness of mind and morality but eventually showed itself to be a perfectly common inability on their part to free themselves from the contexts of their own childhoods, which were likely as rude and odiferous as the ones they now failed properly to police.

(Few moments can compare with the realization that one’s state-salaried protector, who stands before one in physical maturity, with children at home, and perhaps another in gestation at eye level, is in fact a huge and brutal child herself, with humiliations to avenge or to reenact so that her bitterness might be alleviated or heightened. In particular I recall an elementary-school teacher who refused to see my mother at a parent-teacher conference because I was “in jail,” by which she meant that I had been suspended from school as a result of my having been stalked, before her rheumy and delighted eyes, by an ambitious classmate who assumed that an initial victory in a playground scuffle entitled him to score additional points on me by insults to my panicked yet conference-attending mother until (it was actually scheduled, this fight) bloody snot issued forth from our nostrils, and saline from our eyes (or was it the other way around?), and we were both of us “jailed” not for our crimes but in order to end the entertainment on a note that promised, to an irresponsible and nostalgic audience of grownups, the best chance of a recidivism.