Ben Metcalf - Against the Country

A mosquito has just now managed to kill itself in my drink. Am I to conclude from this that the creature was overly attracted to sweetness and so doomed to die sooner or later in someone’s pool of poison? Or am I to conclude that this bug thought itself more clever than the usual bug and so deserved to be shown that it was not? Was this action, in other words, a display of hillbilly derring-do, or was the mosquito being uppity? Is the second sort of suicide to be judged less ignorant than the first, and is it therefore to be called more sinful? Does the soul contained in the first mosquito repair to heaven, where its death is applauded for a lack of pretense (even if that lack was plainly contrived), while the second goes directly to hell? will the first return as something better than a mosquito? will either be among the next wave of tiny winged demons that stab and sicken and annoy me? Perhaps I should simply pour out the contents of my glass and begin again.

Some years had passed before I was able to understand that the odd adult who pestered me was not my teacher per se but was more properly a lesson to be learned. I did, now and then, come to think of one full-grown Goochlander or another as an angel sent to deliver me, but even the angels out there could be sobering examples of what a country boy might turn into, and so I tended to study them rather than give myself over to their care. My true schoolmaster, and I imagine everyone else’s, was that fungal entity beneath our feet, that foul root whose works now surpass those of the hopeful republic which once sprang up in opposition to it (and not, as fools have commonly supposed, in communion with its opposite) and then began to wilt. My classroom was everything this entity had managed in the meantime to touch and taint: farm and family, field and tree, stillborn neighborhood and ubiquitous church, playground and parking lot, road and rut, bike and car and truck and bus. My schoolmarm was that child who sat beside me and chided, or a few seats before me and wept, or anywhere near and threw fists down upon me, or across the aisle with her back against the hull, her jaw engaged with gum or cud, her eyes in search of a vessel into which she might pour what helpful knowledge she had gained in that place but never found cause to employ.

Long before I knew what the continuation of the species entailed I was privy to its utter debasement (both the species’ and the continuation’s) by my supposedly wholesome young instructors, each of whom was, and probably still is, a fine advertisement for why humanity might just as well be allowed to peter out. I was grabbed by an older boy and asked, or told really, “You play with it, don’t you? You rub it till it feels good,” and not released until I had answered in the confused affirmative. Another boy taught me (I had asked him nothing) that there were “two holes, and you put it in the top one,” which even then struck me as unimaginative. A girl of fourteen or so informed me that her “titties” now drooped (I could not make out either one) because she had allowed too many boys to suck on them, according to her mother . And here is a taste of what country children had by my day accomplished with the Socratic method, which blessed me with a number of practical insights: “Why did the farmer trade his wife in for an outhouse?” “What is transparent and lies in a ditch?” The answer to the first question was, apparently, “Because the hole was tighter and it smelled better.” The answer to the second was “A nigger with the shit beat out of him” or, for extra credit, “A nigger with the shit fucked out of her.”

I do not mean to propose that a town education at the time would have been any classier, only that it might have lacked the particular nuance we enjoyed out in the country. The town child was not, I imagine, presented each day with the theory that brown people are lazy and stupid and so worthy either of pity (from the pink person whose heart is open) or ridicule (from the pink person whose mind is closed). (Or was it the heart that was closed and the mind that was open? And did the heart not then go in for the ridicule, and the mind the pity?) The town child was not likely to hear menstruation referred to as a “nursing period” with no lack of comprehension on anyone’s part, or to learn that a high-school girl’s pelvis had been “shattered” the night before in the backseat of a car parked on a dirt road near one’s home, or to hear a father say to his son outside a rural grocery store, “I wouldn’t fuck her with your dick,” and to know personally the twelve- or thirteen-year-old girl under discussion. The town child was presumably spared the indignity of involvement in a half-hour-long debate about whether “the man” or “the woman” does “the humping,” with only some of the participants familiar with the gerund and the rest somewhat too familiar. The town child was not eventually confronted, as I was on a schoolbus in the early 1980s, with the metaethical horror of the following exchange:

He: You got AIDS.

She: Well, you got the her -pess.

(Understood, the latter, by all who heard it, and held to be a great victory over the original statement.)

I doubt the town child normally smelled marijuana smoke as it infused a junior-high classroom in which the great-grandmotherly teacher was too blind and too daft to regulate, or even to locate, the smokers, though obviously they were situated in back, as where else would they be? I doubt the town child ever turned around in such a situation to behold a teenager who already lacked teeth he had but recently grown, his pale lips in league with the rotted or punched-out dentition to form a grin of great contentment, his shirt open, his shoes removed, the waistband of his jeans, at which he pointed helpfully with the hand not involved with the joint (or with the hand that was: I do not recall), breached by the tip of a full-on erection.

This young man deserves, I know, and may even expect, to be spared my derision, as he was likely the product of a true poverty, as opposed to the simple poorness my own family had caught, but what was the place in all this of the erection? What was its purpose? Why did it demand my attention, that ordinary barb attached to an ordinary child? why do I pay it any now, thirty-some years after our initial acquaintance? Why must I remember that it followed me out into the hallway when class was over, and might have pinned me against the wall had its host not been forced to ferry it off to a remedial lesson elsewhere? Why must I suspect that its object was, by force of will, or by divine intervention, to join with me there, or with some notion of what I might become, and thus fail, not for the first time, and certainly not for the last, to crawl up out of what generational ignorance hole had prompted it to peer out over the top of its jeans in the first place?

Because these words could refer to an actual boy, with an actual penis, which at one point reared up at me during my actual childhood, I might be expected to name the boy, or else his penis, but I think that neither necessary nor wise. “Boy” and “barb” and “teen” and “penis” will suffice here, being names enough to identify what animated our rural societies then and mostly animates them now; names enough for what the land regularly charms and deploys against invaders old and new; names enough for what put those deep bruises on a bus-mate’s face after her father discovered that a brown boy had caused her pink belly to swell (the issue here being not the swelling so much as the brownness that had gone into her and would eventually have to come back out); names enough for what prompted a newly nonvirginal idiot I knew, by birth and inclination a suburbanite, to crow like a perverted farmhand after only a few short months in that place, “You ain’t never had none o’ that stuff, han ya boy?” We called him Han Ya Boy for the next two years.