Ben Metcalf - Against the Country

Is this eschewal of anyone remotely dissimilar, in case we might be forced to interact at the mall with someone we perceive to perceive himself better, or with someone we perceive to perceive himself worse, really the brave individualism we imagine? Or is it instead a collective and thus extra-cowardly form of suicide? And is that eschewal, or that suicide, since it takes as an article of faith that no one should ever dare think himself better, not strangely evocative of the sad drab grays of Communism? And did that go well, for the Communists? Are we to suffer their same fate: a collapsed ideology and a collapsed economy, a twenty-first-century serfdom to potato-fed bullies with guns? Are we to dwell in a land where (and we have already had a taste of this) the oligarch with the most potato guns at his beck is proclaimed (first by himself, and then by all the television channels) to be our “commander in chief”? or is this perilous thought, that no one should ever dare think himself better, safely offset by its very American cousin, that no one could possibly be as good?

These are fascinating questions, I agree, but well beyond my purview here. I leave them to the philosopher, of whom this nation will undoubtedly produce, and then exterminate (or ignore, which amounts to the same thing), many fine examples after my time. My own desire to see the American classes mix more must remain as it always has been: a simple, perhaps even a humble, desire to know whether I am right (if not, I have cause to celebrate; if so, I have reason to cheer!) about my countryman’s innate potentiality to explode.

In a field to the north of our house, one spring day when I was in my fifteenth year, I saw a figure walking the opposite way of mine, far enough off at first that I could make out only a yellow on top, and a blue green below, and a purer green in flapping fronds to the sides, and I wondered for a moment whether this was not some enormous species of migratory flower I might tackle and subdue and stake a great scientific reputation upon. As it neared, though, I could see that it was only a young man of about twenty or so, with wild blond hair and the start of a beard, done up below in a too-large green tee beneath denim overalls that if washed once or twice might have staved off forever that ridiculous mirage about the flower.

I took him to be a college student (for how many would have reached the age he was and still dressed that way out here?), but even as he passed and met my sullen nod with a vibrant “Hello” (and even as this all but proved he was not of the place, since any local would have known to offer a stranger in a field no better than coiled suspicion) I began to reflect on the fact that there were no colleges to be had for a good fifty or sixty miles all around. Was this an area hippie then, as yet unknown to me and accidentally kind on account of his being “on” something? The clothes only half supported the notion, and anyway such a person, even if (or because) high, would almost certainly have carried a gun. Could this instead have been some new varietal of country homosexual, bred perversely to be sweet to passersby and to show no overt interest in a young country boy come across unplucked in a field? I acknowledge such a circumstance to be possible, but up until then I had encountered no fruit bruised and swollen by the Goochland sun that did not wish to pop annoyingly in my mouth, or to be in some less personal way crushed.

Was I hasty, then, about the college kid? No local son even three or four years removed from those weeds, returned to them unwilling on a break and surely aware that only they, paradoxically, and the surrounding trees, could now provide a haven in which to burn his jay out of sight and smell of his parents, would have been so much as cordial to a passing neighbor boy. But could there not somehow have arisen, out of sight and smell of either one of us, a new strain of student? One liberal enough with his friendship, and conservative enough with his judgment (though most school hippies, I learnt later, went solidly the other way around), that an ostentation of fraternity boys might just, in a brave counterintuition, have adopted him for a mascot, and chanted his name too loudly at parties, and derived a kind of self-affirmation from the very fact of him (and how bad are they, really, who can rally around a creature so obviously unlike themselves?), the hippie having rejected, after all (and is rejection not the mother of courage in America, though more often she behaves like the child?), the mores of his own demographic to pledge?

Perhaps he had not wanted to, had merely hoped to “test expectations” with his happy hello at the open house but was unexpectedly convinced, by the brothers’ beer or his personal dope, to explore a bit further what lay behind that half-friendly greeting: ironically, of course, to begin with but afterward with an earnest and unfolding idea, on both sides, of what American brotherhood might actually mean, until the time came at last (it was tradition) for all pledges to be grabbed and blindfolded and loaded at night into the back of a rented U-Haul, thereby to be left with no resources many miles from home (was a time when even their clothes would be taken), whereupon it would be seen who would or would not make it back in any fit condition, and some brother (let us imagine him a new one, a favorite from the group just “jumped in”) had proposed, before the truck set out, that it might be funny to abandon at least one of the sub-brothers three times as far out as all the others, which would strand him, by the map here, somewhere in Goochland County (“I mean, Gooch land — come on!”), after which the boys in the bay felt the truck lurch out onto the interstate, and heard the brothers in the cab begin to chant “Gooch! Gooch! Gooch!” with no understanding on anyone’s part what this word truly meant, or that it had already been decided, ages ago, with no need for a referendum on the matter, which of the cargo would be dropped in a distant hayfield so that he might come across, the following morning, one such as me.

This was fantasy, of course, and must forever remain so, since I received no adequate answer to the question I posed once I had determined that the puzzle in my head would admit of no obvious solution, which saw me stop in my going and trot back the opposite way, there to catch up with the older boy and touch him lightly on the shoulder, which caused him to jerk around almost violently as I asked, “Who are you?” After answering me (a little too quickly, I thought), and then waiting, with folded arms and a forced smile, to enjoy whatever additional language might spring up between us, this hippie set off suddenly, at an impressive clip, for the nearest clump of wood.

Here is how he had answered me (that smile already forming, those arms crossing over his chest in what I initially took for a sign of haughtiness, until they dropped like petals and began to pump like pistons for the trees):

“Who’s to say? Maybe I’m Jesus Christ.”

Here, I swear, is all I had offered in response:

“Then where the fuck have you been?”

Of all those creatures who wandered past our yard, or were dragged up dying into it, none unnerved me so much as the witnesses who arrived one summer afternoon and began to poke around the place with smiles and gentleness and great wonder, as if they had somehow landed on a moon made out of our spiritual weakness. I remember that my brother was engaged at the time, his every young muscle, with the motorized tiller he was yoked to because he was the eldest and hence the strongest, and that he looked up at these interlopers with a face meant to indicate that he had nothing left to offer them: no interest, no wariness, no phony forbearance, since all he possessed of those qualities was engaged just then in the effort to control, with outstretched and vibrating arms, the ugly metal mule they could each of them see a-buck before him. What earth that tiller scooped up and overturned had long since consumed what was human in him, let alone what was bound to be sociable.