Ben Metcalf - Against the Country

His Franklin stove, which was the house’s sole heat source once our sautéed portion of the planet had finally come to its senses and leaned back away from the sun, he ran like an all-night crematorium (the facility we employed later to dispose of his carcass spelt the first syllable of that word out, to our amused consternation, as “cream”), ayeing it always with an idée that it could and so ought to consume additional plant flesh until its sides glowed their familiar and accusatory orange. Whether we, who were his fetchers of fuel from the dark wet hardness of the yard, stuck fast to our duty or put off his demands while we struggled to complete one last homework assignment, the result was invariably the same: a room off the side porch warmed to an uncomfortable degree while all the jealous rest sucked the life out of any animal who came near, shaking his limbs to stay circulatory and hoping only to acquire his sleeping bag before more rigor was asked or any fresh new mortis set in.

That my father often curled around the claws of this dragon, the better to rouse himself every hour or so and appease it with pine chunks, was to his wife the start of an obsession to be watched and wondered over, and to his children proof of a long-suspected retardation. Had he but known to insulate his walls properly, and to tape plastic over his windows once the temperature had dropped (as the hippies all seemed to), and to purchase a second stove for the shelter’s front rooms (if by log alone he intended to preserve us), he might have won more hours abed, and not found himself so rigid when a rumor of daylight arrived and he was forced, by want or routine (which he treated anyway as the same thing), to make his way eastward along the roads toward Richmond, dodging deer by the minute, to hear him tell it, there to wreck an already delicate back lifting beams (which are wood) and stretching wire (which is metal) in service of an abstraction (call it town) he had once so hysterically fled.

I might deem it another joke, or only another sadness, that both wood and wire (if not also abstraction) had conspired in the initial insult to his spine, when he was but twenty or so, and had a college concern cutting staves for the area coopers (how many of these, honestly, could there have been?), and while listening to the car radio had felt, if not actually heard, both legs go out from under him on a patch of Illinois ice, and had felt, if not actually witnessed, the introduction of ass to ice with a log of great concern upon his shoulder, after which for a song cycle or two he could discern no practical feeling below his waist, and so prayed to a God he did not believe in (I refuse to believe he did otherwise) to allow sensation to flow back into him, which after a commercial break or three it finally did, though he may have neglected to ask that no part of said sensation be an undoffable girdle of pain.

I remember how in the evenings, and in the afternoons on weekends, he would kneel like a supplicant before his favorite chair, and would lay his torn torso across its padded seat, and with his head suspended upward and a-drool against what the catalogs still promoted then as a stiff back would try to achieve something like sleep. We pitied him on those occasions, for we were not monsters, or not yet, but of course we rejoiced in the chance to be free of him, and from his arbitrary orders and punishments, and I, for one, being no cynic as he might have been about prayer, asked God any number of times to burden him with what agony could be found at hand, and to cause him to yield his ground-down bone and expanding gut to whatever cushion was nearest by, and to visit him with oblivion especially during the working hours, when we most required our own little inheritance of rest and relief.

Yet our crippled father would not or could not forget, even in his sleep, that for him, and for all those confined to his tragic section of the American cone, working hours took up fully half the clock. He would therefore be damned (or only comically slighted, once we had grown large enough to ignore him) if any child of his had the insolence to board a bus, or to participate in this or that already pilloried after-school activity, so long as there was any “real” work left to be done around the house, which by his crooked ledger there always would be. Neither he nor his helpmeet evinced any hesitation (and, what is stranger, any shame) in their tacit agreement to chastise a child, by withholding permission to engage in whatever function the child had lately been fool enough to admit was most dear to it, for the crime of its having failed to complete a chore that had already, to their own perfect knowledge , been completed. Politest appeal of this decision risked seeing the injustice upheld, and the court costs writ in stripes across the defendant’s spindly legs, by an impartial length of copper wire.

Out of fright, then, or only as a collective-bargaining gesture, we signed up for nearly everything the school had to offer, faking his scribble (or hers: harder) where the authentic item would likely be refused (out of dug-in principle: the principle being that any country adult, by virtue of his decision to remain country, or to become country again, had won the right to interpret the law within his own home any way he saw fit, or to banish it altogether), and by our absence from this team practice and that drab spelling bee, or from rehearsals of a play we had won a small role in and then by a truancy lost, and by our failure to line up for a gymnastic exhibition or a 600-yard dash that I estimate bored even its few tiny entrants, or to board yet another yellow scow that might take us with bumps and misgivings to march with cheap student instruments in one more hopelessly crop-themed parade, sought at last to call the authorities down upon our quaintly corrupted household.

Plenty looked, and some even saw, but no one ever came (save witnesses), and I might make a fuss over that, except that I would then have to explain away all those A’s my siblings and I loudly made, and all those kitsch trophies and poorly lettered certificates we fetched home, which were insisted upon, yes, though only insofar as these accrued to our parents in a public sense while privately they represented yet another level on which we refused to do any “real” work. Once accomplished (the unreal work) and once earned (the marks and the trophies and certificates), this great leap forward in our line’s empty record of achievement met with no better than indifference from parents unable to accept that a child of theirs could somehow succeed in hopping over humanity’s petty obstacles when they themselves had not, or had not bothered to, and no better than outright shock, aped or honest, when it became clear that not one of their children but in fact all three, in open rebellion against a lie we had agreed to as a family , actually would.

And did sedition not somewhere inform the truth that these simple ink scratches on a cut of hard paper, when we had not physically made them ourselves, might allow the child to whom they appended (by man’s law alone, of course, not nature’s) the chance to choose for itself a destiny not in accordance with what its father (out of fear) and its mother (out of fear for the father) had so rashly chosen for it? Was a son of theirs (the first, say, whom they had treated in Virginia like a languageless mule, as I have largely here) rightly allowed by such markings to wish for and obtain, from Jefferson’s own university, degrees in both language and the law (the latter being but a paid perversion of the former), after which he would refuse all manner of contact with the countryside and would consent to revisit it only where it might be looked down on from the window of a passing jet? Should their daughter have been availed, by these same poor leavings, of the confidence required to fly her wooden cage at sixteen, once the panties in which her mother dressed by the side of the stove had become too embarrassingly done through with speakeasies for even a sober child to bear, after which she dwelt amid the God-awful racket in Richmond until this mother, in what underwear I cannot say (being by that point flown from those holes myself), sought to reestablish her fiat via an attempt to have this latest escapee committed (by man’s law alone, of course, not nature’s) to a mental home somewhere along the twisted route between them?