Ben Metcalf - Against the Country

At the time I considered those arms a tad dramatic (I had neither lifted the gun nor flirted with the trigger as I planned to), but once I had collected my books, and the bus had sped off, and the afternoon light had dimmed just enough to allow me to reflect on the fact that my parents would soon be home, and I would then have to explain what I had done, that unmeant mimesis of surrender came to represent everything wrong with the place, and with me, and with how I would likely respond when made by our father to pay for my vengeance. Yet my ass was strangely spared that night. Unable to reckon how a boy’s decision to meet his schoolbus with a shotgun could be explained away by either Bob Dylan or Minnie Pearl, my parents entered into a fugue state in which physical exertion was impossible and the rhetoric of my mother’s job at the boys’ home seemed the mind’s only refuge.

I remember how she worked the phone as the sun went down, sure that she could not get me out of this and in truth not wholly invested in the idea, because even more than she wanted to protect her child (which certainly on some level she did), and even more than she wanted her husband to whip the child (which on some level she always did), and even more than she wanted to reverse an injustice that could legally be charged against her, my mother wanted to be proved right in her fear-wish that an action by one of her children, and not by her man, would ultimately be blamed for the family’s destruction. She seemed almost to look forward to the day when the courts would take her second son away, and would subject him to counseling sessions and restraint holds and whatever other tortures the degreed hippies had devised for their little Jonestowns, and would release him only after his voice had changed and he had completed the steps in some or other “program” designed to crush any trace of his soul’s dissent.

Would not such an outcome imply, to anyone who looked into the matter, that this “special” boy had been so rotten as to explain, in an ethical sense, his parents’ previous workhorsing of him, and all those mishandlings he had dared to resent, and the constant belittlement that was his apparent reward for having intruded upon their lives in the first place? The question, happily, was moot. RSVP no, delinquent homes of Goochland County. Regrets, military school (discussed that evening as a “best-case scenario”). Apologies, of course, to my mother, whom I do love, and whose good works are legend, and whose desire to be vindicated at any cost I surely share. Apologies as well to my father, who may secretly have preferred that a son of his gun down an entire busload of children, black or white, rather than allow a few textbooks to be stolen. Apologies to both these fine Americans if today they credit themselves, and a few frantic phone calls, and a borrowed hippie logic, and a half-dead bourgeois courage, with my subsequent freedom, for they would be wrong. It had already been decided, ages before, by the land itself, how a violence such as mine should be treated: delicately, lest in time a greater violence be lost. My mother, the pretty town girl, could not possibly have known this; my farmboy father could not possibly have missed it. Despite what obfuscations town and college had thrown up against him, he knew full well that the greater violence in him was likely to be me.

That is the truth of the matter, and that is all I mean to relate. There was even less call for my mother’s panic than there was for my belief that a young man’s raised arms in the road that day had been anything more than a halfway decent attempt at comedy. Fifteen hours after the incident I boarded the schoolbus and told the driver I was sorry for what I had done and would never trouble her again, after which she said, “Well, you see that you don’t.” So evidently normal was my behavior the previous afternoon that she seemed almost annoyed by my apology for it. We proceeded with the usual gossip and drug negotiations to school, where I repeated my speech to a mostly amused principal, did perfectly well on my test, and was neither robbed nor challenged all day long. Later on, the bus dropped me off in the usual spot and pulled away leisurely while I stood affixed to the end of our driveway in something like grace. I listened for the engine’s groan to dissipate, and for the crunch of my brother’s footfalls on the gravel to cease once he had reached the softness of the yard, and for the dogs to quiet once he had entered the house, and then I could hear only the wind through the tops of the trees, and the pants and paws coming back at me over the clay, and I knew that something entirely inhuman had worked to secure my pardon out there, and I was overcome by faith and by fear.

The child who holds up his schoolbus with a shotgun and does not forthwith find himself confined to a juvenile facility or a mental home might be almost expected to take a friendlier line with his environment, but I cannot honestly say every change in my attitude postdated that grim afternoon when I decided to approach mere children as if they were a cavalry regiment sent out to ransack the farm. Long before this incident I had been exposed by my father to that virus which causes man to believe his health and soul contingent upon a commerce with the elements, and by my mother to that equally powerful contagion Be a good sport , and already the fever was high in me. I ran through the woods and the fields like any child will, and at times I removed all my clothes and leapt into the waterways, never free from worry about turtles and snakes and intestinal parasites and so on, for I was not stupid, but as quick as anyone to get naked and a vigorous if watchful swimmer. Nor was I game only for what nature awaited me below the surface: even prior to my flirtation with closets and shotguns I had begun a close relationship with the trees, or anyway with the more familiar ones near the house, and would climb up into them whether a switch was wanted or not, and would rest in their arms with no thought for their evil and but a small prejudice, really, for the dirt I had escaped by snuggling their bark and their goo.

I was able to put out of my head what an enemy these plants clearly were (and would prove) by a wish not to see my loved ones undone, and myself further shamed, by the loss implicit in our headlong pursuit of simplicity, but whereas the trees could be construed as a benign infestation of the land, in that they seemed to lack any direct capacity to infest me, other potential violators were not so easily dismissed. In particular I feared the corn. We grew tomatoes too, and snow peas, and carrots, and string beans, and lima beans, and beets, and onions, and radishes, and lettuce, and cabbage, and spinach, and green peppers, and red peppers, and eggplants, and potatoes, and cucumbers, and zucchini, and squash, and pumpkins, and cantaloupes, and watermelons, and strawberries, and asparagus, and God knows what else, never enough to sell, of course, but far too much for us to consume naturally, so that when one of these foods came due, and we were sent out to fill grocery bag after grocery bag with it, we could be sure in the knowledge that the coming month’s dinners would force upon and into us so much of this supposed boon that we would eventually gag at the very thought of it.

Still, the corn was more terrible. Beans can take cover in a casserole; peppers will subside in a sauce; lettuce is easily laundered in a salad or a sandwich; any cucumber not bound for the salad can be breaded and fried like a tomato, which will make it either more or less vomitous, depending. Peas and carrots will linger in a stew until you barely notice them. Spinach and squash and cabbage can be boiled down into a harmless mush. Radishes and onions one may politely refuse. Most berries will rot before they can be eaten anyway, and the flies will take care of any melon with its side kicked in. Pumpkins, thank Jesus, are not generally fed to children. Asparagus is prone to mowing accidents. Beets can be avoided altogether if one is prepared to regurgitate them, just once, at the table. No one really minds a potato.