Ben Metcalf - Against the Country

(Among these spectators was a gym-teacher-cum-recess-monitor whose vanity was such that the sound of his own voice, and even the smallest indication that it could still intimidate children of eleven or twelve, was enough to distract him from the severity of our mayhem as he pimped across the blacktop and took account of who took account of him. Now and then, to his credit, he did realize that a football game had been arranged on the field below between a team of brown students and a team of pink, at which point he would stop and yell, “Mix it up down there,” though as soon as the brown team sent over its worst player, and we sent over ours, he seemed satisfied that his authority had been recognized, and he never troubled us again. To my disappointment, and eternal shame, I hoped always that he would look down and record the fact that I had not myself been traded, as this was an occurrence rare enough to invoke in me a pride almost as blind as his own.

(This fraudulent adult was complemented by a math teacher who struck me as a sane and serious gentleman disinclined to notice what ugly plot lines we children wove all around him but who reputedly (I did not see it myself) took a boy out into the hall one day and beat him without mercy, the boy having reputedly (I did not see it myself, nor, I am sure, did the math teacher) raped a young girl. Across the hall from where this alleged beating took place, over an expanse of waxed tile where many others certainly did, there taught, or pretended to teach, a woman whose enormous flaps were supported by stems so thin I thought the whole of her flower sure to collapse one day and crush me in my chair. Her subject was history, or geography, or some apt American amalgam of the two, and her method was another apt American amalgam: of outright violence and the delusion that she was somehow a star. She was forever throwing erasers and chalk at us, lest our attention wander briefly to our studies and we forget to study her. When that approach failed she would bellow out, “I’m a go blerk!” which promised the physical deployment of her bulk against one or more of the children in her care, a situation much feared but of course out of boredom encouraged. (“Blerk” may have been a rural bastardization of “berserk”; that is certainly how it behaved.)

(I remember too, a few years later, a biology teacher who answered someone’s inane or mischievous question with an impromptu lecture on the subject of circumcision, which in her telling involved the removal of a layer of epidermis from the penis and scrotum, so that the entire apparatus was essentially skinned. At first I took this to be a brilliant joke on her part but soon came to realize that it was an actual tenet of her belief system. When I then challenged her interpretation of the procedure, and asked how a person could become a certified teacher of biology in the Commonwealth of Virginia when she could not answer so basic a question about the human anatomy, she explained that she was a married woman and should know. I countered that I was a circumcised man and should know better. (I was not: I was a circumcised boy, the son of an uncircumcised man who could not be bothered to cover, as he stumbled down the stairs toward the stinky little bathroom in which we were all of us forced to empty ourselves at night, an enormous piss erection we would certainly have seen less of in town.) When I went further, and suggested that her husband might have been mutilated in a farm accident he was too ashamed to recount with any accuracy, I found myself in the principal’s office, seated across from a man who for all I knew had forfeited the whole of his genitalia, as he could not be convinced to dismiss this teacher and so spare us the damage of her continued instruction.

(Worse even than these failed chaperones, yet somehow more glorious, was the preacher’s wife who operated, and acted as if she owned, and by any practical measure did indeed possess, our schoolbus. Held in this woman’s compacted frame, and apparent in the herniated vessels of her eyes, was all the western Goochlander’s disappointment and suspicion and rage, concentrated by troubled years out there into a single beam of arbitrary judgment upon everything she thought she saw. When that beam found me in the elongated mirror just above her worried brow, and swept across my face, and probed me for signs of earthly misconduct and spiritual stain, I did my best to remain still, whether I had sinned recently or not, though I could never quite quiet my eyes, which focused alternately on her stare in the glass and that from the trees along the road just beyond. Ultimately this vegetation would show me less kindness than did the woman, but in the moment it could be counted on at least to provide a constancy in its belligerence, whereas the woman seemed almost to flirt with my future, and to play the demiurge with my destruction or survival, and to amuse herself with the question of whether, by her petty rewards and institutional punishments, I would come to recognize her dominion over me and every other terrified creature on the bus. I will allow that I did.

(I will also allow that no one’s anticipation exceeded mine when she pulled her vehicle to the side of the road because of some fight between the older boys, and rose up in her might and her housedress, and indicated by smirk and by beam which combatant she would hold accountable and which one she would likely forgive, though she could not have known any better than we did what had sparked the dispute in the first place, and had caused all those disappointingly muffled impacts of bone-backed flesh upon bone-backed flesh. Hence the mystery of which boy she would finger took on an import, and promised a thrill, that the fight itself could not possibly match. How exciting, I agree, to see a carless twelfth grader beaten into subconsciousness by another carless twelfth grader over some imagined or inflated slight; how much more exciting to know that the dazed teen might then find his world wrecked for good because he had, a day or a week or a month earlier, looked the wrong way at, or dared entirely to ignore, his driver.

(Good on this woman, and good on every country person who does not consult the facts before dispensing justice but insists upon resources more readily at hand. Though those resources be amputated from reason they might still provide, in the interstice between what the land has done to her and what the land has done to her passenger, the possibility that an actual criminal, a true sinner, might be shown a random mercy the courts no longer care to provide. I am that criminal; I am that sinner; and as such I am one who looks back with some fondness on a witch who drafted and applied a personal law to her personal hell, and whose stranglehold on her riders tightened wisely once we had left the theme of the main road and turned off onto those dirt-road digressions that sent pebbles to ping against window and wall, and dust to settle in the folds of our clothes and our memories, and a melody of tortured rubber to harmonize with the basso continuo of an overtaxed engine and, sempre toward the end of our westerly route, the high ostinato of children weeping.

(This woman either heard none of it or was unmoved, seeing as how it was inferior to the music produced by her own son, a particularly gifted soloist, when the sickled cells within his pipes caught and clogged and he sent forth a cadenza, loud and low, which could not help but impress. I do remember that on at least one such occasion, prompted by a private hurt the boy might have understood but the rest of us did not, she answered his groans with a melody of her own. For miles and minutes, as the gravel shot up, and the soil crept in, and the seats jostled, and the engine bucked and pulled, this woman threw her head back and screamed, for anyone who had ears to hear it, “People do they devilment in the dark! People do they devilment in the dark!” Good on her, and good on every country person who insists upon resources more readily at hand.)