Ben Metcalf - Against the Country

A fly has just now landed on my arm. Why are there still so many flies this far into autumn? Is it only because I am not at a latitude normal to me, nor I suppose at a longitude either, but am down and over and despite myself sweating and remembering, unbidden, the way in which my father’s mother kept a swatter always active in her hand during the summer months, and punctuated her talk with a use of it as easy and as coy as that of any great Spanish lady with a fan, so that when her teenage grandson inquired (cleverly, he thought) about the man who had lately been seen taking her square dancing, widowed the same as she was and soon to marry and disappoint her, she told him swish that he was a farmer like my grandpa had been and that she did love dancing with him, he really whap! knew what he was doing out there, but what most impressed her was that he under whap! stood life as being something precious and short, having seen a child of his cut in half by a seatbelt of all swish swish things, and before that having served his country in the Korean War (did I know about that? whap! that we had a war with Korea?), and having been sitting on a log with a friend of his when a bullet came through and splattered the friend’s brains all over the both of them, and why swish if you think about it, did the good Lord decide it was the friend’s time and not Mr. ____’s? whap! Whap!

How is it that in all my adult life I have never thought to purchase a flyswatter? Is it only because I suspected in my youth, and by now am wholly convinced, that the swatter somehow brings the fly? And for whose sake, regardless, have I refused (or forgotten, which is anyway the same thing) to be seen holding even a fly’s chance at salvation in my no less mortal hand?

How those Witnesses in the yard dealt with life’s little nuisances I cannot say. I can describe only the broader differences between us: We were white; they were black. Our hands were dirty; theirs were clean, that I could see. They wore nice suits; we wore clothes not conscionably to be shown at school, since they were likely purchased on the cheap from the dying grocery store near the dead landing on the decomposing river. They offered us heaven; we offered them nothing. They were morons in our eyes, not on account of their skin or their outfits but because they adhered to a faith less popular even than our own yet took such pains to promote it. As to who was poorer, we were probably a draw there, though certainly we possessed nothing like their suits and had never known anything like their joy.

The youngest among them, and to my mind the brightest, was a kid a year or two behind me at school in whose talk and bearing I had detected an insouciance that made it impossible now to accept him as a deliverer of my soul, nor for him to behave as such. He was clearly an old hand at being found out for a missionary, though, and met my awareness of his embarrassment (and delight over it, since it might prevent him from telling tales on my family at school) with a quick nod at me and an interest in something more pressing stage left. While the adults in his party came forward with their handshakes and jabber about Jehovah and so forth, he disappeared coolly around the back of the house.

A short time later, after I had explained to the others that my parents were not home, and that I was not authorized to make large-scale spiritual decisions on behalf of the family, and had seen them safely back to their car (a nice big Buick, as I remember it, though possibly it was a Monte Carlo), my schoolmate emerged with great fanfare into the side yard, engaged in a deadly tussle with Ginger Snap, the violent little half-bred hound we had adopted almost without knowing it and then, to our eternal regret, ignored. He pulled at something while she pulled too, thrilled by the company and of course by the game, which eventually he won, which I thought a bit hard-hearted, and which success seemed almost to propel him toward me, his face made up in its usual mix of boredom and amusement while the dog leapt after him and failed always to reclaim her prize. When he reached me he handed over (with a new look now of dramatic concern, though it was hardly a match for the dog’s) one of those wedged-shaped boxes of d-Con rat poison my parents had placed in and under and around the house so as to help along the fiction that rats never fancied and overran country homes, especially those occupied by intelligent and well-meaning white people. This accomplished, he said, as he walked past me toward that big Buick (or Monte Carlo, it might have been), “At least we saved your dog.”

What threw me about a troupe of Witnesses descending upon us in or around the summer of 1982, I am ashamed to say, was not really that we were seen (or perhaps only I was) in clothes more ludicrous than what we normally put on for school, or that we had failed to offer these visitors so much as an ordinary glass of water, or that our faith both seemed and was a small thing in comparison with theirs, or that the youngest among them had removed from the mouth of our littlest bitch a box of rat poison whose contents she would otherwise have got at and died from, which incident then became the basis of a semicomic routine between the kid and myself at school, wherein when we passed each other in the hall he would call out, “I saved your dog,” and I would answer, “You saved my dog,” with much laughter on his part, and a lesser amount on mine, until finally, after a six-month run of this inane and almost daily performance, I was taken with a sudden horror at its sameness, and wondered if it did not constitute a hex thrown up between us in order to fill with simulacrum the space where an actual friendship might have formed, whereupon I resolved to break the curse, if it was one, with a threat to kick the boy’s ass could he not come up with something better to say to me at school, after which I was greeted always with the mock tremble of “But … but I saved your dog,” to which I had no choice but to respond, as I did for the remainder of the time we passed and failed to know each other, “But you saved my dog.”

That dog, by the way, met a terrible fate. I would discuss it here except that I do not care to see my personal tribulations shown up just yet by what ordinarily befalls dogs out in the American countryside, where they are commonly assumed to enjoy long and happy and touchingly purposeful lives. My own touching purpose was chores. My happiness, where there was to be had any, was derived from those moments when I found myself able to sneak off into the chicken coop with a pinched cigarette, or else my pinched penis, so as to blow smoke or spermatophore out the mesh-covered window in the southernmost wall. The other walls there were to be avoided, at least by my cigarette, as they had boxes up against them full of books our father had not yet consigned to the maw of his insatiable stove. I recall that Joyce and Pound and Eliot and Stein lay stacked in those cardboard coffins, as did Woolf and Dos Passos and Porter and Hemingway and Faulkner and Fitzgerald and Cather and Ellison and Baldwin and Williams (W. C.). Twain was interred out there too, as were Melville and Hawthorne and Emerson and Thoreau, Whitman and Grant and Howells and Du Bois. Welty and O’Connor; Bellow and Roth; Salinger, Kerouac, Kesey, Vonnegut; Pynchon, Barth, Barthelme, Blake; Shakespeare and Defoe; Carlyle and Dickens; Thackeray, Hardy, Huxley, Waugh: all these and more were given over to the termites and the silverfish and whatever else cared to have at them. The Henry James books alone were so crawled over and bit through that I wondered at the time whether Goochland’s insects did not harbor a particular taste for his prose.