Ben Metcalf - Against the Country

I ought to have yelled up at him there, or beyond him up at her God, that I knew what they both were doing; that I had reconciled myself to the truth that someone Else’s hand might forever stay my own; that there were several on this planet, and at least One up above it, who had me figured for a pawn in their game, unworthy even of the modest bishopric I now played for (queen being quite beyond me by then), so that I might venture out catercorner of an evening to bestow my dull blessing, perchance to imbed a sharp blade.

Here is all I have left for a blessing:

My father, who beat me constantly at chess too, could not possibly have meant for his children to grow up so nostalgically enslaved to the countryside as he himself had been, and to long for it even as they tried and failed to fly its sucking gravity. He could not possibly have intended for his children to linger in that well for the threescore and change allotted them, unable to decide whether Earth’s dumb trial was preferable, in this age of happy moonbounces, to the testy chatter available in town. And so he had resolved to make the tough call for us, in the only way he knew would excuse a wrong answer: He would hurt his children in the woods so as to force their eyes back upon devalued buttcheeks, rather than up at overpriced real estate in the sky. He would lead us not into temptation about the holiness of the trees, as he himself had felt (the temptation, not the holiness), but rather would deliver us, by means of a farm-bound misery, from the evil of thinking no good could ever come from town, where prior to his dying we were each of us ensconced, which then afforded him the defense of thinking that his hand, and our sorry hinds, had somehow achieved a velocity finally sufficient to escape the dirt he need not ever have returned to in the first place.

And if we slowed in that velocity, and sometimes let on about what harm town had lately done us, he would find himself comfortably within his rights (which was the goal here, after all, that comfort, and those rights) to look up at his exasperated wife, and wink, and say, “Well …”

Here, then, is what I retain for a blade:

I ought to have let that ladder go the second time I saw him climb up on it, yelling at me to hold the base steady and oathing that he would break my “scrawny fucking neck” if I failed to do otherwise. I ought, God help me, to have let that ladder go. If for no other reason than that the ersatz country boy atop it, so weak as to surrender every one of us to his personal torturer, and not man enough nearly to plot out the coordinates of a halfway decent escape, once opened a town essay by writing

Since its publication in 1948, Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” has received a large amount of critical attention, much of it concerned with attempts to explain the reason for Seymour’s suicide.

Who would think to ignite a career so coldly? Or to extinguish one mixing memory and desire with disdain?

My brother, at least, might have survived the fall.

Weird county;

Whose dirt was devoid of richness;

Whose humans were despoiled of sense;

Whose name could boast of no increase except in the multifold categories of shame;

Whose foundation of shifty gneiss, exposing itself characteristically near the men’s state prison, so differed from the rest of Virginia that it was chipped at and pored over, this “Goochland terrane,” by geologists who could in no way account for its origin or for its mysterious properties, thought by some to be related to the early formation of Manhattan (of all places) and by others to the breakup of a larger continent, long ago, that otherwise left no foreign elements secreted within our own;

Whose anomalous rock might have come from Mars, for all I care, or been donated by a passing comet, since I personally hold it to be no more, and no less, than the fungal big toenail of Lucifer as he kicks, across eons, at America from below;

Whose abhorrence knew full well what changes might be worked upon a human child who listens too carefully to the trees, and asks why they shudder and whistle and crack as they do, and seem always to be moving closer; and so turns for comfort to a “community” of peers who will lead it, with laudable speed, to accept bias and barbarity as down-homey truths, especially where they lead on to war; and so runs back to a mother who will come to regard it (not unfairly: she, too, is trying to fit in) as a simp and a secularist and a probable faggot; and so seeks wisdom, if no more understanding, from a father intending to workhorse his seed so hard that it will flee not only the land but also the simple notion that it might one day safely return there;

Whose product, I am convinced, and that great fungal toenail has always known, will rebel against nearly everyone in this scenario and will embrace the one apparent refuge left open to it, being unfortunately, and usually for keeps, its natural surrounds;

By which I can mean only Goochland.

Whether my father arranged this horrid twist in me, so that I might learn for myself how devastating even a sham attachment to the dirt would prove; or whether he merely allowed it, half hoping I might come at last (by way of a reverse psychology , which usually worked on the more emotionally disturbed JDs) to adore the dirt as he had always felt forced to; or whether he intended, this teacher of words and maths, only the first derivative (my rebellion against the dirt) and was therefore wholly flummoxed by the second (my rebellion against his plot to have me rebel against the dirt), and so slumped in his underwear and grew ever more despondent while his second son (and what of the first? the first! ) pretended to pretend to be a country boy, and then just pretended, and then just was (or thought he was), I cannot say. Nor does it much confront me. I imagine that our continent has for ages now replenished its rural meatlocker by this same insidious snare.

I would ask my father to comment here, except that I killed him a few pages back, and no ventriloquism of mine (“Hold that fucking ladder or I’ll …”; “Pay some goddamned attention or I’ll …”; “What in the hell is wrong with you?” ) will convince the reader that a pile of cool ashes is able, or willing, to puff straight answers out at anyone. I can only, then, try to be accurate about my own petty motivations:

Had our house up and exploded that chimney-fire night, and caught me out stuck to the roof, of a mind to jump off it but melted there by Judas soles, until the whole of my clothing took fire and I screamed in silence, my breath burnt away, and prayed to get out of those boots before I popped like a kernel and sent all my fluff up to God; had my devout yet town-hip mother been less apt to say, in those days of oaths and accusations (hers, mostly, the accusations), “Don’t be so melodramatic,” which hypocrisy I would gladly excuse, had that little “so” of hers, borrowed along with the rest of the phrase, not itself been so melodramatic (; had I but known then of melodrama’s place in my melodramatic future); had I but resolved, all those decades ago, to remain forever a stranger to that corruptive county and never to allow myself, if only for a year or two or three, by means of a steady retreat down Jacob’s unsteady stair, to be transformed into a proudly defensive, ecstatically religious, uselessly horny, country-smug moron, whose own parents would not have recognized him (though it cannot be said that they tried), we might have made an easier go of it ahead. We might have been able to sustain the fiction that a rhetoric of complaint is the one true path across memories of a perfectly ordinary American childhood, wherein delight and contentment, feigned at first, fine, but for that no less experienced, and no more given over to facile caricature than the complaint thus far has been, offer up their own loud and hair-raising hues.