Ben Metcalf - Against the Country

In the untamed patches between the fields and the farmhouses, and the shacks and the boys’ homes, and the ostriches and the graves, it is still possible to glimpse something akin to what must have greeted Europas petards as they made their way up the American bowel (with a brief stop at the spot where Richmond herself would metastasize), and it is still possible to imagine the conditions under which these people, or their children, or their children’s children, succumbed to and incubated and spread the pastoral fever that would cheat them of any real chance at happiness, and would in essence enslave them, and would grant increase only to those with the will and the wherewithal to enslave others instead. Such crimes startle but do not concern me. I care only that this fever so boiled the brains of my people that they were disposed, after more than 250 years spent sampling the agricultural brutalities on offer in Maryland and Pennsylvania and Ohio and Illinois and Oklahoma and Illinois again, to prostrate themselves, in Virginia, before the very source of their already rampant infection.

My father, perhaps heedful of the fact that his great-grandpa had been gored to death by an Illinois bull who did not fancy servitude, and having been touched by the poverty that results from such a miscalculation, did not involve us directly with cows, and for that I am grateful. Nor did he purchase a tractor so that it might pin and crush himself, or me, under its weight, as had befallen his mother, who had survived it, and a boyhood neighbor or two, who had not. Then again, he could not afford one. A combine, such as the enormous instrument that gnawed the legs off at least one of his former schoolmates, and for “hours” held the rest of its meal suspended by shoulder strength alone, lest the entrée follow the appetizer, was, thankfully, even further beyond his means. What animals we accoutred ourselves with did not bellow and bawl but only woofed and clucked, and what machines we got hold of, most of them workaday tools lent out by or stolen from Richmond-area construction sites, or else purchased with great reluctance from the southern states cooperative at the county’s sad center, were employed not so much to farm as to create the impression of a farm that had long ago been destroyed.

We were aided in that pursuit by the house itself, which was put up, badly, in the middle of the nineteenth century and looked about ready to fall over, which in truth it was. My father was obliged in time to shove pneumatic jacks under its southerly side (the structure, longingly, faced west) so that it would not collapse entirely and kill us all in our beds. Otherwise his attentions implied that a partial disintegration would be acceptable and even preferred. The tin roof, where it was not covered by a dull green paint that must have been designed to blister in the sun, was rusted through to an extent that suggested replacement even to a child, but my father made no move to hinder its corrosion and seemed almost pleased with the gothic sentiment it related to the road below. The front porch, which within a few seasons of our introduction to it had chosen to commit suicide, my brother and I tore away from the house completely, and left the detritus to blanch in a pile in the yard. Yet our father neither ordered nor himself began the erection of a new approach there, and so the front door, which without its preface floated a formidable two feet off the wormy ground, was never afterward used. Even company, rare, could see to go around back.

My mother, the town girl, screamed and on occasion effected some small augmentation to, say, the indoor bathroom, which was probably tacked on in the 1950s and, although retiled, could not be made to smell much better than the old outhouse did, or to the kitchen, also tacked on, which because of the distance to the nearest town grocery store (we could not afford the country prices) came to host a freezer the size and shape of two stacked coffins, in which slept quaint venison stews and pig meat got locally, yes, but mostly the frozen pizzas and loaves of processed bread that would become our lifeblood. She also held forth on the house’s airflow, or lack thereof, which my father’s installation of a huge electric fan in the attic did little to revise, unless, like the now greatly agitated black widows and brown recluses, one happened to live in the attic. Apart from these half-answered fits, she adopted a pose not unusual among Americans who have made a dire mistake they cannot pay to unmake: she pretended that our plainly lessened state was somehow a step up from town life, and she insisted, with no real success, that her children back her in this ancient and wearisome falsehood.

Her face, when not wet and distorted with panic and recrimination, set itself in a smile that managed both to convey and to subvert the notion “Isn’t this fun?” while my father, ensnared in his own attempt to sustain what level of denial was necessary to his pride, worked to erase any hint that the stead was, or ever had been, able to sustain human life. We all allowed, outwardly or inwardly, that our position was sore and liable to worsen, but my father could not be sure that the farm’s inherent limitations would cleanse him entirely of guilt in the tragedy to come. And so he practiced to enhance them for the benefit of anyone who drove or wandered by. That a man would choose to be the direct cause of his decline rather than its mere victim is, after a fashion, admirable, yet this was not the sole, nor even the primary, impulse behind his campaign. An anger at himself, and at his situation, and at the weight of his dependents, caught hold of him too, and where he could not direct that anger at us he moved directly against the property, and brought his wrath to bear especially on its outlying elements, and did not stop to consider how this program of ruin might impact the family’s chances to lay in even a modest store of dignity and hope.

I recall several days spent in the effort to sunder an ancient gray shed, formerly an icehouse, that had surely done harm to no one, and had probably been of enormous benefit to the beings around it, and did not give over its wood and tin and nails with an ease that implied a welcome end to a worthy term of use. This shed fought us with an obstinacy unlike what would present in the old outhouse, or the remains of the front porch, or the strangely elaborate system of deserted bee boxes near the deserted chicken coop, or the uninsulated walls of what was supposed to have been our living room, and groaned considerably in the struggle, I now believe, to shield us from what lay beneath its cracked and rotted floor. When we had yanked up enough of its boards to enable us to stare down into the chasm below, and to contemplate what might be exposed once we had ripped away the whole of that lid, I told my father we had better let the building be. In my attempt to make out the bottom, I had sensed, and smelled, something of what awaited us among the roots. I was also pretty sure I had seen something move down there.

Because he was not spurred by vanity and rage alone; and because an attitude of forfeit (which soothed the vanity and excused the rage) was his birthright as a child of the American wilderness, and was his only recourse now that he was trapped out in it again; and because that attitude had already begun to decay into a simple indolence; and because that indolence would cause him to look upon any structure, including the main body of the house, as ready firewood for when the weather turned against us; and because this lunacy would persist until his sons were of sufficient size to serve as his proxies in the drudgery that would see them carry or push or drag chunks of felled tree from forest to field to yard, there to cleave these burdens with axe and agony into pieces small enough to be consumed by the house’s wood stove (which would, despite its gluttony, heat no more than the room it was in and would actually attack and dissipate, by means of convection and black magic, what few pockets of warmth could be found in any of the others); because of these and other inebriants, my father resolved to wave off my counsel and to apply his crowbar, borrowed or stolen, to what was left of the shed’s floor, as well as to what was left of our claim on self-preservation.