Ben Metcalf - Against the Country

I would not be held accountable for my actions during that time, just as I would not see my father held accountable for his, though he did take an unworthy interest in this new set of blemishes on me, and poked much fun at them, and in time pronounced them evidence of his theory that we should each of us bathe less often, lest we relinquish to the creek, or to the sump (where, really, did all that water go?), our “essential oils.” Whether this thought resulted from an honest consideration of the evidence before him, or from a madness brought on by the land’s constant pestering, I do not know, but I did notice that he seemed never to apply his new science to the pond just behind and to the north of us.

Being on someone else’s property, and so not by law afforded him, this pond yet attached itself to my father by another law. Not a law above mankind’s, exactly, as the God-fearing folk will always cite, but a law deeper than and far, far below it, by which not only that forfeited barn across the southern pasture testated to him but also what inheritance had been frittered away all those miles and years to the west. By this law he decreed that his children should cast themselves upon those waters whenever the heat oppressed, and at other times besides, and would not retreat from that position even when he heard gunplay in the woods all around and remembered that this was an acreage owned, according to man’s law, by an inebriation of weekend hunters too daft or too blind to tell a deer in a field from a child in an inner tube on a pond.

Mr. Thoreau writes with great delicacy about the “sportsmen” who came out to shoot at the loon that now and then made a pilgrimage to his celebrated hole. He did not take the loon’s part entirely, since that might have shown his self-portrait to be less country than he intended, but he did construct a fair impression of joy over the loon’s ability to fly the bullets, and he certainly went on more about the bird than he did about its executioners. I tell you this: if that loon had set down on our pond it would have been blown into its constituent fat and feathers one hundred percent of the time, not on account of any marksmanship involved but simply because the matrix of drunken blasts in its direction would have been too impossibly thick to survive. If I am alive today (and I have no real proof of that) it is only because my father made a habit of approaching those idiots in the trees and reminding them that there was nothing much in season during the summer months, and that they therefore had no cause to be out here with their guns, after which he may have threatened to kill them (he usually claimed later that he did) if ever he caught them on his property again, which lie, about the property, if not about the proposed murder, they might have believed for the same reason the rest of us did: because he so obviously believed it himself.

I am fairly certain that my father never downed any hunters in those woods, but I saw for myself that he did run a good number of them off: not so many that we were spared the too-close crack of a rifle, or the undulled boom of a shotgun, as we drifted in our tire intestines, one side freshly bloodied from where a sibling had turned the tube spigot side up as we ran and leapt into it, but enough that when dusk came down, and the blasts grew strangely louder, and we scattered like grapeshot for the shore, the cause of our panic was not gunmen losing the light, and so what remained of their sense and sobriety, but simply that the overstocked fish in that place had come up from the bottom to feed, with hard little lips, on our toes and calves and the innocent half-moons of our asses. At such times our father, out in the middle of this pretty but obviously manmade abomination, could be counted on to slap at the water and laugh and laugh and laugh.

Some part of me wants to applaud this man, and raise his small accomplishments up, and greet him with something better than the blows and disdain with which he too often greeted me. Some part of me wants to excuse him as a clown, if I cannot render him a king, and to argue that his humor might have held in it more fatherly wisdom than ever did his sadness or his fist. That part of me almost seconds his decision to lift a mutt up by the rib cage and fling him like a football out into the middle of the pond, which rise and which stiff-armed plummet were steep enough to make us all grateful when the dog finally regained the surface and paddled his way back to safety, there to shake himself off and be snatched up and tossed out all over again, after which he knew, or I guess remembered, to head for the opposite shore.

Another part of me (specifically that globule of lung I cough up into the sink each morning, and poke at, and squeeze between my thumb and forefinger, and marvel at its awful, perfect brownness before I flick it down toward the drain and start in on yet another round of nearly vomitous hacks, all the while knowing myself to be but a pale imitation of that hacker I hail from, who sold his health with such ease to the weed that had made the Jeffersons so rich, and the rest of us so poor) wants to say that either title, clown or king, might apply to a man who smoked cigarettes as if that were a job, and spent the last two decades of his life sitting in a chair and waiting to die, and even in happier times could not be expected to inform those who asked permission to swim in “his” pond that all recreants there were liable to be mistaken by drunken hunters for a family of ducks taking an afternoon dip and calling out to one another in plain English.

I never heard him say either that his dogs would be back there shortly to bark and snarl at them, since he would not, or could not, control these as he did his own children, who out of sheer embarrassment would clamber after the dogs until they all, dogs and children, stood in rough formation on the southerly bank, the dogs yapping hell at the invariably black bathers on the northerly, who must have thought not just the dogs but also their keepers gravely prejudiced, as we continually yelled “Blackie! Blackie!” in what our guests could not have known was but an attempt to curb the pack’s foreman (that same small mutt who knew so well the middle and far side of the pond), whose full name was Blackie O’Reilly and was probably only mad at the water.

Our father had a number of such jests, or kingly lessons, to spring upon us, regardless of whether these would stave off or else hasten on our destruction. To wit: He thought it both instructive and funny to let us discover for ourselves that as soon as we waded into a Virginia pond we were bound to be set upon by inch-long biting horseflies, which normally sought out animal shit, if that tells you anything about the water there, or about us. Beyond this exercise he was able to cheer his children with the knowledge that a quick smack might stun these bugs for a moment, during which we could stick long weeds up their asses and then wait for them to come around and take flight, dying in who knows what agony, until at last we could make out only the wobbling shards of pondgrass against the cornflower blue of that sky.

By my father’s way of thinking, almost everything in that place had a josh or a teaching to it, though the josh was cruel and the teaching past taught. When we became again the sort of family that keeps chickens, and I found myself the warden of those prissy influenzas on feet, I soon discovered that the hens sported open and horrible wounds beneath each wing. My father explained that the rooster, a leghorn, was mounting each one of them too often: the sores were where he “grabbed aholt and rode.” He then named this rooster Buttfucker, so that we might never forget (why? why? ) that the reproductive function of a chicken is contained in its anus, and he lessened (or did he in fact increase?) the chance of any animal being raped to death in our yard by the acquisition of even more hens for me to tend and betray.