Ben Metcalf - Against the Country

Yet this cannot have been the case, can it? For the soil (or what we agreed to call the soil: why? why? ) was tilled always at the first hint of springtime, so that our father could be sure his firstborn would be sent out to guide that machine, and the rest of us to drag hoes and sticks, through clay that was not merely hard on its own account but had been given no proper time to thaw. Perhaps they came in springtime, then, these three or four pilgrims to our iniquity, or perhaps it was indeed in summer and my brother was not below them at all; perhaps he was back in the woods envisioning suicide, or out in the barn attempting it (who can say?), and my memory of his being tied to the tiller that day is no more than a ghost impression, of which I am admittedly prone to several. Perhaps my sister, whom I recall as being up in her room that afternoon (or was it morning?), lost in one of those books she relied upon to order the reality beyond her walls (and often enough within them) into a narrative with a conclusion more hopeful than what she could possibly have formulated on her own, was actually out in the yard when the proselytizers made landfall, greeting each of them with a how-do-you-do and a ladylike offer of lemonade.

That is absurd, of course. My sister was ladylike enough for such a scene (which aspect of her seemed forever to escape either parent), but we were not a family to have lemonade on hand for company, nor to accept it when we went visiting, except where pressed (only those who thought themselves truly worse stuck to their refusal after a second offer), whereupon we would grip the glass tightly, lest we drop it and prove our unworthiness even of a glass of lemonade, and would not allow ourselves to risk its contents until well after the sugar had sunk to the bottom, which ensured that we rarely made it past the first predictably sour sip. And yet! And yet! Were there not occasions when I, emboldened by some illusion of superiority to my host, or too parched after a day’s lent-out labor to care who was superior to whom, reached out for and gulped down what paltry drink was offered? Did I care then how the sugar in the glass was apportioned? Did I not sometimes, in my animal thirst, forget to offer even a polite (or was it intended to be a humble?) “Thank you”?

And what would that “Thank you” have meant, exactly? Thank you for the opportunity to jog all day behind the folksy old wagon pulled by the folksy old tractor steered by the folksy old neighbor? Thank you for the opportunity to burn and lacerate my fingers heaving folksy hay bales up onto a folksy old platform baked by the folksy old sun? Thank you for the opportunity to scream myself hoarse in an attempt to be heard over the tractor’s folksy engine, so that the folksy driver might turn around just once and acknowledge my folksy arm signals, which in the folksy parlance of the place conveyed quite fluently the notion Ease it up, coot, or I will climb up onto that tractor and kill you ?

There was no lemon anyway in the Styrofoam jug this decrepit brought out at midmorn for the two of us to share, and no sugar even at the bottom, and no possibility that he would not have touched his papery lips to the spigot before I ever got a go at it, and so deposited his old-man sloughings around the orifice, which convinced me to refuse any interaction with the jug until I had almost begun to hallucinate (and could half envision the tractor tipped over, and the neighbor pulped, and myself happy and explaining to the authorities that it must have been some function of his advanced years, as we certainly had plenty of water), after which, I confess, I did take that thermos up, and sucked like a babe from its crusty hole, only to discover that the water was so warm it could not have been properly cooled to begin with, which discovery, and my alarmed inquiry into the matter, the old man met with a self-satisfied lecture on the need for hot water, not cold, beneath a summer sun, lest a shock to the system occur and accelerate, rather than ward off, your common heatstroke.

Once relieved of this useless lore, and once certain I understood that it was the town people, with their cold water and their lukewarm ideas, who had got it all wrong, he lit up a pipe so as to give me time to drink my fill of his wisdom and his backwash. I remember that he gazed out approvingly over the trees, and helped himself to a puff or two, and then widened his jaw so as to speak again (this time no doubt about how he had learnt that warm-water trick from his father, who had learnt it from his, and so on, until at last I saw how I might one day pass this crappy magic along to some overworked and underwanted son of mine), at which point I threw the jug down and declared him to be an idiot, which outburst he started at, sure, but for the most part pretended not to hear. He simply emptied out the contents of his pipe against what tire was nearest me (the right, as I recall), and got that tractor up and into gear, and for the rest of the day drove it and me so hard across his field that by nightfall I was too tired and too nauseated to care who was the idiot here, or to dwell much more upon murder.

These hands, I submit, were not meant for farmers’ throats, any more than they were meant for the coarse twin loops that encompassed and defined those bales: too loosely here, too tightly there, so that the knee came up under too early or too late, which then caused a great jolt to the spine, and further tear on the fingers, and a resurrected desire to crush for good the old man’s already half-collapsed smokestack. These hands were meant for finer things: for piano keys and pages, for soft cheeks and new hairs, for those parts of people that reward kind pets more than they ever will your numb and calloused scrape. These hands were meant to play, I submit, and one day, God willing, to make something, not to yank up out of the ground something that had long since learned to remake itself, which miracle humans had not caused to happen but only caused to happen here (in this particular field, on this particular patch of grime), so as to aid in a crude vegetation’s slaughter by bushwhacker, and its inept mummification by baler, and its removal by pain and by wooden hearse from a field no one saw for a killing floor to a barn no one saw for a crypt.

Arrangement is not creation. How might sometimes coincide with where, but it will never amount to if. Farmers, or should I say farmers manqué (for how many of us, honestly, take the whole of our living out of the dirt nowadays, or did so even thirty years ago?), are no more the sires of their plants and their cows, or of the milk and meat pulled away from these creatures, than I am of these words I spread around and imagine, for a happy moment, to be mine.

If the thinkers are to be trusted, and supposedly they once were, we are none of us the maker of anything, not even ourselves, but are stardust both in metaphor and in fact, comprising elements far older than the milk or the meat or the words could possibly be. Yet although I see ample reason why this selfless conception of reality might appeal to the Christians infesting what mostly just pretends now to be American farmland, no system by which authorship of the universe is reserved to God alone, and our earthier people receive not even partial credit for what their planet produces (and so no say in who will or will not be going to hell), has ever, to my knowledge, caught on here.

Despite all fashion, then, I will admit to being no maker of reality but only a decorator of its interior, as are all farmers, and certainly all those mall-walking rodeo clowns who are not farmers even in the liberal sense yet stand firm in their belief that by a decision to stand firm in this sort of boot, and to sit pat in that sort of truck, and to cast their vote as if it were a siege weapon against anyone who will not conform to their purchasing patterns, they have sided with the natural folk (whom they greatly outnumber now and have failed even to resemble since at least the 1950s, when it was quickly forgotten that just a generation prior a large number of American farmers professed to be Communists) against the urban, college-boy (and, yes, sometimes Jewish: what of it?) homos who control the media and fail to promote sufficiently the idea that self-congratulatory dirty hands and a penchant for store-bought yellow ribbons wrapped around store-bought flagpoles in support of a tax-bought soldiery whose television-bought purpose and behavior it should by law be considered treasonous to question can be sexy too.