Ben Metcalf - Against the Country

Up or up into; down or down into: it mattered less to my turned stomach and itchy crack how these demons got in than that they palpably had, and would be back again shortly if encouraged, and had mapped out well their miserable townships within me, and had determined to start new lives there rather than remain any longer in the dirt below my clenched fundament, or in the weeds beyond my loud mouth, and were harbingers all of more terrible intrusions to come.

From the raids foreshadowed by the worms in my ass I must in all fairness exclude the rats, as they preceded the worms and, despite multiple measures to the contrary, survived them. These traders in filth, these brokers of disease, who in the popular imagination are denizens only of town and hence enough reason to leave it, were so well represented in Goochland’s clearings that I sometimes thought us squatters on their property rather than them on ours. These, and not the heat, and not the constant threat of unsquashed and vengeful spiders, and not the hum and stab of kamikaze wasps, and not the muffled repeat of my father’s stolen staple gun against pink fibers let loose to swirl among the fecal motes we normally inhaled, led me to abandon all hope of a retreat any nearer the sky than I already had. For a while I convinced myself that those peripheral flashes of gray in the attic were indicative of squirrels who had mistaken our house for a wide and hollow tree, and so looked to situate their nuts within its reaches, but the illusion would not hold: whilst arranging boards and boxes in my aerie one night I chanced to corner one of these animals, and noticed that it had an oily string in place of the usual bushy tail, and that its face was thinner than what I had come to expect, and that the dots with which it greeted the world betrayed not squirrelishness at all but rather a keen and unbreakable rage, which in a sudden spurt saw the entirety of its body launched against me.

I blocked the rat’s assault by means of a box thrown between us, but my evenings in the attic were over, and I rarely went up there afterward except to fetch some stored and hard-to-find item, whereupon I announced my arrival with claps and loud whistles, so as to frighten off, if only for a measure or two, what sharpened teeth lay in wait for me there. Each subsequent trip up that yanked-down and unfolded ladder reminded me that where I had failed two uncles of mine, younger brothers of my father, had in their teens made for themselves a fine and rat-free haunt in the eaves of their parents’ Illinois farmhouse, and had music up there, and entertained at least one eventual wife that I can recall (with fondness: she could really dance: Hello, Aunt ____!), and a brother or half-brother of hers, and a girl with him too (whose relation to me is less clear), and had carved out a space where these and more could congregate, and laugh together, and play their records, and smoke their dope, and tease one another, and eventually (if not all at once: who can say?) couple without fear or foreknowledge of the day when they would be led, as a matter of simple need, to take work (after generations wholly aware that their kind could not possibly survive as farmers, even sober and celibate ones) as soldiers and printing-plant workers and long-distance truckers and attendants at the nearby nursing homes.

My mother (not blood-related to these people but obliged nonetheless to represent them in what she has always perceived (rightly) to be their grievance against a social contract both she and they think (wrongly) was rigged long ago by her sort of person (being only by small degrees of politesse, and hardly any more money, removed from their sort of person) for the purpose of holding their sort down (one increment of prosperity being about as far as the nearsighted American now can or cares to see, so that the trailer-homed man thinks it perfectly moral to direct his rage against anyone in a better car, while a helper like my mother suffers physical guilt over the fact that her own children are not, or are no longer, on food stamps), when in fact the contract was rigged long ago (yes, that part is correct) by a sort five or six or ten steps above either one of these sorts (or is it a hundred? or is it a thousand? and does it really matter, given that control of this mechanism has scampered up and down the rope with such agility over the eons, in an effort to obscure and protect itself, yet has never sought, and will never seek, asylum among my own particular sort (or sorts)?)) has on the occasion of paragraphs akin to the previous pronounced me a “snob.”

I say that if I have any such impulse in me it will show in the paragraph just completed, and not in the gem before that. I say that the truth is, or anyway ought to be, sufficient defense against the charge, and that opposing counsel knows full well where to rank my honesty among humans she has either birthed or ignominiously fled. Do I count myself better than my uncles and aunts and cousins? I know that I was meant to: I know that the primary excuse given by my parents for our removal to the Virginia shitscape was an intention to see my siblings and me reared apart from, and uninformed by, uncles who were soon to lose their small grip on reality, and aunts who were soon to lose their small grip on hope, and cousins who were soon to lose their small grip on cash to what chemical replacements for hope and reality (and cash) could be fashioned in the basements and garages and attics of the middle west.

I intend no objection to this worldview but only cite it here as evidence that I, who am in provable fact blood-related to those fled-from midwesterners, and am no obvious improvement on them, was not by any stretch the first in my circle to grab at a cruel conceit in the pursuit of something higher.

Still, this notion of snobbery does weigh on me, as I bet it weighs on every American who tends to go clownish or stony before what he perceives to be those either better off or worse off than he, lest a word or a gesture (which are anyway the same thing) out of place reveal that he thinks himself better rather than only better off, or worse rather than only worse off, such attitudes being proscribed by his television set yet dependably represented on it, so that in truth he cannot help but think himself better (who would not?), and cannot help but think himself worse (who would not?), and so is forever sent in one direction by his scorn and in another by his bitterness. Were it not for his steadfast avoidance of anyone above or below him in this equation he would probably explode.

For myself, I would like to see the American classes mix more, not because I can foresee a day when my fellow citizen will enter a voting booth or a jury box or a convenience store with some livelier spark in his head than that what matters here is how he feels (not thinks, mind you, because people who think are generally out to make him feel bad for not having thought enough, and he will not be made a fool of, except by himself), nor because I honestly believe the nation would benefit much if its voters and jurists and flip-flopped shoplifters suddenly set aside their feelings, being mostly terror and its satellite states, and adopted the reasoned approach Mr. Jefferson championed publicly (as opposed to the Romantic approach he got wind of privately and, thinking himself better , leaned into), which correction might be worth something had this narcotic land, and the sleepy institutions built upon it, and the nightmarish educators those institutions then produced, eroded no more than our habit of thought and not our actual capacity for it.

No, despite all temptations of politeness I can discover no decent way to vouch for the native intellect, nor do I harbor much hope for its betterment elsewhere, since emigration would, I suspect (or fear, or maybe “feel” is the word I want here), only further accelerate the export of New World stupidity to the Old, or to the older still, and does that commerce not already redound upon us in towering waves? Do we not daily know our stupidity returned to us in blatant echo, here and there honed and amplified? Will we still maintain that we are alone on this planet, and in our homes, and that this aloneness alone is sufficient defense against the backwash of an ignorant self-assertion, when the next wave sees us all drowned together like attic rats?