Ben Metcalf - Against the Country

“Recall,” though, is imprecise here and so really the same as dishonest. I ought better to have written “surmise” or some such, since my recollection of which books were in what box, and what condition they were in, could not possibly have predated the day my father abruptly ordered them all removed from their exile in the coop and set up on shelves in the house’s front room, which action I would like very much to say heralded his return to sanity but I know now resulted only from the fact that the books were proving a confusion to the chickens we had by then, to my detriment, acquired. The one volume I can remember taking out of its box, prechicken, was a paperback of three novels by Samuel Beckett, and I remember this only because I had recently been bused into Richmond to see, in an educational matinée at the Virginia Museum, a performance of his play Waiting for Godot that employed as an actor a live chicken.

We were meant to be impressed by the chicken, even if it did not have one of the speaking parts. In the question-and-answer period that followed the several unasked-for curtain calls, the student actors who had so recently bored us all to death (and besides our meager busload there was only an assortment of pink- and blue-haired old ladies in the rows that day: about an hour or so in we had begun to take bets on which one of their cotton-candy noggins would nod off next) tried to soften up what they apparently mistook for an audience of spellbound suburban teenagers (and recently revived old biddies) by means of a humorous reference to the chicken. They assumed this would lead on to more serious matters; it did not. Being not suburban in our sensibility (though even then we might have been, if you consider all those vehicles afforded us, and those kept-up state roads, and those town jobs to be had for a mere fifty- or eighty-mile round-trip) but dug-in rural, and so bound to be miserly with our trust, and pissed off about the length of the play, and sure to think any farm animal onstage an intentional jab at us, we asked no question that was not along the lines of “Was that a real chicken?” and “How would that chicken know where to stand?” and “Do you ever have to hit it, or does it remember on its own?” and “Do you use the same chicken each time, or do you eat it after and audition a new one?” In time some telepathy between the adults in the room ascertained that the lesson was best ended here, and we were stood up with apologetic glances from our teachers toward the stage and hustled back onto the bus.

Usually I deplore the attitude that turns us away from language on the grounds that most talk, and all writing, is no better than condescension, but in this case I must admit it was real fun, and I can therefore imagine how it might also be fun, and not the grave and patriotic business our louder scolds make it out to be, to vote in such a way that denies funding to our schools (which do at times place a troublesome emphasis on words), and to the too-literate social programs sustaining an overly talkative poor, not despite how this condemns America to ruin but because it does, which I agree is the funnier idea; to swallow and pollute as we do not despite how this will one day erase our kind from the planet but because it will, which, again, is much funnier; to sanction and celebrate, in the meantime, a bacchanal of torture and death not despite how this might lower us in the eyes of an omniscient God but because it will, if He is anything like our rendition of Him, and so might want us to accomplish more with His gifts of life and word and will, and the science and settlements built upon these things, than the mere obliteration of ourselves and all wordless beings besides, however funny that may one day prove to be.

My father, with no joke to bring before God beyond his own discovery that humanity is impossible to abide and somewhat harder to escape, and with no share in the popular gibes of the day (see above, and below) than what deceitful politicians were able by his vote to put him in for, and with no real desire (notwithstanding those oiled and death-ready guns in his closet) to down any complex being save himself, was nonetheless availed of a gaiety that we, who were his children, ordinarily sought to avoid. This attitude was not wanting in and of itself, but we had seen too often the hope of it dashed, with disastrous results for the rest of us, to rekindle and fan it without good provocation.

We had seen him crush out his cigarette and spring up from the table, with fire in his stomach, and a coal on his tongue, and who can say what in his heart, to proclaim before visiting angels the news that this was a house held wholly by Satan, or might as well be, for all it would ever have of God. And we had felt firsthand the darkness that swallowed the rest of his day when these apparitions did not engage him on the matter but simply fluttered away. Given his stance and his temperament, we were not about to inform him of the opportunity he had missed, by mere minutes, to set upon witnesses (not common word-spreaders, mind you, but witnesses, like you might get in town!), now that he was surrounded at last by a landscape capable of supporting his claims. We chose to keep our silence, and to live with the fear that he would somehow discover this treachery, and extract a common payment for it, so long as there remained even a small hope that he might hunt for his amusement elsewhere.

It must have amused our father, on some level, to see his children crawl out a second-story window and hurl themselves off a rusted tin roof; it certainly did us. He might have proscribed such an activity in town, where we were liable to light on concrete, but in the country a child met no worse than clay if he made it past the nail-ridden boards in the yard, and so our “suicide leaps” were generally tolerated and, by that tolerance, encouraged. Tree skinning was also a potential pleaser, even if the skinner had it in mind to throw himself out of the uppermost boughs, provided he went up properly, with arms and legs wrapped around the trunk, and did not simply reach for the lower branches and monkey up that way, which was not so exhausting an enterprise and far less funny when the child finally succumbed to gravity and fell. Our mother, the hydrophobe, played Ophelia whenever one of us spilt blood from a wound that would likely scar, but our father kept his grip then, and by his calm made it clear that he expected and perhaps even wanted the scars, and on that count we dared not disappoint.

This man wished no serious injury upon his children, I am sure, and was not so broken himself as to laugh outright at their hurts, but he did show something beyond the ordinary schadenfreude when one of us (say, I) felt a thorn driven so deeply into a knuckle during a “sword fight” that the quack on call at the local clinic was forced to dig the foreign material out through the opposite side (though that might have happened back in Illinois, at a cut-rate day camp there), or when one of us (we are safely returned to Virginia now) shinnied up the wrong side of a tree, and so found himself overwhelmed by poison ivy, or oak (I could never tell one from the other), which lotions could not tame and even the slightest scratch would spark, until the whole of the body was subsumed by chancres and all chance of sleep was gone, as was all hope of my thinking that tree or any other a friend. Rubbing alcohol, which I had seen my mother use to cut and evaporate the muck that accumulated on her face in the thick southern air, proved the only means of lessening my skin’s whorish welcome to these sores, though I would never quite vanquish them. Almost as soon as they scabbed over there began on my face a new set of eruptions, which heralded the onset of pubescence, a state for which my pornographic rides on the bus had readied me, yes, but had taught me no gentlemanly cure.