Ben Metcalf - Against the Country

Whether approached by rung or by step, this platform up top gave onto two other rooms, both of them well lighted and occupied by people unconcerned, or unaware, that one of their number had so little by which to illuminate his homework, which he was expected to do well on despite his numerous privations, which task he accomplished only insofar as the standards of his education allowed for the misreading of a line here and there without too much being taken off for it. I might also point out, in case these efforts will themselves be graded on a curve, that my privations were as nothing compared with those suffered elsewhere in the county, which were as nothing compared with those suffered elsewhere in the world. Yet should my hurts, on account of their relative smallness, be ignored? should a preventable wound, because it is shallower than the next, be entirely excused and forgotten?

I wish now that my brother had never healed the fixture in my room. By sunlight the faded and peeling pink wallpaper, which of course there was no money to change, caused only a passing fright, but by tungsten its advances were bolder still, and conveyed a sense of old and pungent desperation in that place, of existence clutched at too long or too easily snuffed out, and attached to me an idea, and withal an actual scent, of sweetened rot, such as a poor woman’s corpse might bestow upon a grave robber who has not bothered, or yet discovered how, to do his homework.

I would prefer to call my room a friend. I know that sort of thing is popular with the modern reader, who wants always to remember childhood that way, even if an extended program of rape occurred there. (Does this crime not nowadays count double against the assailant, for its being a violation not only of the little one’s trust but also of her refuge?) My own tale, alas, is this chestnut in a mirror, for although I went unraped in my room, that I know of, the footage itself never behaved even cordially toward me, nor am I willing to fib now and say that it did. Those walls neither promised nor provided me safe harbor but acted instead very much as they looked: like an ancient bowel unaccustomed to light and intent on a slow (that is to say, an American) digestion of its contents, so as to leave almost nothing behind when those contents finally reached seventeen and were forced out of that farmhouse forever, to negotiate their way through this land’s pinched sewers, by which I mostly mean town.

We possessed no basement to which I might repair, as the town kids all seemed to, for our house was put up directly onto the soil, and so what sunken living space we implied to the road below was only that part of the foundation time and gravity and the Virginia mud had conspired by then to swallow. Also there was no garage. I might pen a trite little treatise here about why a garage is preferable to a basement from the American teenage perspective, or why a basement is preferable to a garage, but in either case an extended encounter with one or both is required, and so I am bereft. We did, on the other hand, have an attic. By chance or by fate there was, toward the southerly end of my room, a pull-down entrance into the addled brainpan of our jailor, which held only fear for me until my brother moved in, after which it beckoned me up always into its gray rafters, bare in spots but elsewhere laid over with planks enough that a child might easily gather what was needed to suspend a habitat there.

This attic was uncommonly warm in summer, despite or perhaps because of the enormous fan our father had placed in the house’s northern aperture, which contraption seemed somehow to pull the hot air toward us rather than fulfill its mission to push the stuff back out, and which, due to the requirements of its oversized motor, produced such a heat on its own account that I sometimes wondered whether it would not catch fire some dry night and burn us all alive. Still, for companionship I ranked this machine above most parents I knew, for there was little chance that one of its blades would come loose of an afternoon and strike me for no good reason, and so raise yet another welt, and so raise yet another resentment, and so raise yet another sentence, and if it turned to arson while I was near I would at least be the first one alight and so, by my screams, might warn all the others. Who knows but by a shrieking, embarrassed death I might have attained a heroism that will forever now elude me in this shrieking, embarrassed life.

A preponderance of wasps and spiders presented up there, but in my desperation I imagined that these could be warded off with pluck and a plan. I was wrong, of course: the spirit of a spider is broken soon enough, and if not one can generally smash her and all her issue with a shoe, but wasps are another matter. Wasps are a resistance movement, and they will fight, to a wasp, to the last. Most town dwellers can probably count, or anyway estimate, the number of times some cute little honeybee has pricked and annoyed them over the course of forty or fifty summers; I could not begin to count even the number of wounds I received, to my neck and arms and fingers (as they waved frantically in front of my face), on the single afternoon when I resolved to evict these assassins, with swats aimed in the general direction of the fan, from what I mistakenly assumed to be not their home but mine.

I bitch now, yes, and with cause, but in the event I made no real complaint. Like most country children, I had come to consider all pain, and all swelling and itch, to be the mere price of admission to this world, and so I wondered no more over what the wasps had done to me than I did over the two-night skin-crawl and inability to breathe properly that had followed my father’s installation, with my conscripted help, of the cheap fiberglass insulation he saw fit to staple into our roof’s underside with the brown paper backing snug to the wood, and the fluffy pink filaments in and against us, which was surely an error, or else a slow attempt at murder-suicide, though to have voiced such an opinion then would have risked accusations of sabotage and a further suspicion of faggotry.

I shut my mouth too on those occasions when I thought to employ a comb at the pus-speckled bathroom mirror, and felt in my wrist some tension beyond the usual tug and tangle, and reached back to discover a vast tacky wetness there, and a rubberish nubbin attached to my scalp like an aberrant mole, and understood that I had yet again impaled a tick so bloated on what had formerly been my own blood that even a dull plastic tine could pop him. I did not call out for assistance then but simply pulled the wrinkled shell free from its moorings, and tossed it dead or dying into the toilet, and made use of the repatriated sauce to whelm and subdue what strands were closest by, grateful that I would not have to chase after every cowlick this time with ordinary well water and spit. So accustomed had I become to insults of this kind that I went some weeks with a greatly troubled anus and the sight of wriggly white threads in my stool, each seeking hopelessly to regain the warmth it had just now vacated, before I bothered my mother with the news that her second son’s lower bowel had become grossly inhabited by pinworms.

Little white pills from the county clinic, as prepared for this contingency as it was for snakebite and the occasional if suspect chainsaw accident, soon routed the little white worms (for a time I feared that my digestion alone would be required to perform this trick), though I would never quite be cured of the impulse to examine what went into or out of me, and I would be cognizant always of where it was I sat, and what it was I had touched to my lips, lest I swallow again the eggs of this worm, if not some worse, or else hatch and invite its babies up into me, where their forebears had already prepared for them a moist and cozy abode.