Ben Metcalf - Against the Country

(Despite our chaperone hearing no sounds of rape in the dunes that night, or because of it, she arose when she heard the F chord that all but guarantees “Yesterday” and summoned every girl to her bosom, not least my own sister, and lined them up by their differing lengths, and before she led them back to the tents, hand in hand, magnificently as I remember it, she counted them off by touching a comically bent claw to the top of each giggling head. Love, I sometimes think, is that witch finger, and any voice who follows after it.) The point I hoped to make about Tess is that both she and I kept chickens.

Of the many wonderful experiences I had in the natural world, pained though I am to call them that now (see above, and below) but damned if I will tolerate a convenient dishonesty here, none can rival my bond with the beasts of the air. There were those who sat on a telephone wire like quarter notes so that I might end their tune with a slug to the throat, and there were those who sang out even louder to insinuate that I would never destroy them all. There were those who hooted, or screamed, or pecked out their pentagrams on a tree too close to the house (a friend of mine kept a loaded shotgun against his dresser, so that he might raise the morning caws of crows outside his bedroom window with a more vigorous all-in; his aim was not to “learn” these birds, which had been my initial assumption, so much as it was to abolish the whole of their species: does that not qualify, somewhere, somewhere , as wonderful? did van Gogh not envision the same sort of thing before he abolished himself instead?), and then there were those strange little not-birds who gathered in such buzzing number on a classroom windowsill in early fall (or was it late spring?) that I had merely to spit in my palm to attract a candidate I could close my fingers upon, and with a sucked thumb work the tiny head upward until it was exposed, aslant and amazed, at which point I could fasten upon it a slip-knotted leash made out of a strand begged from the scalp of a serious girl who wished not to know what I wanted with her hair.

Hoping to commune with but also to profit from my environs, I conceived of a plan to market my harnessed houseflies as low-maintenance, low-grief pets, and so win the high-school business fair, except that there was no business fair. I planned also to coat myself in a “formula” comprising sugar and buttermilk and cow feces (or human: I had yet to decide), and then “command” these creatures to fetch me something light to which their strings had already been attached (the first-place ribbon, say), and so win the science fair, except that there was no science fair.

After I had learned that there were no betterment fairs at the high school, I tethered these flies to my wrists and shoelaces and even my own tresses, and walked those halls a pariah, whispered to be so evil, or so near death, that the maggots had already got a start on me. A year or two earlier I might have done so out of an anger or a self-pity; I acted now from a joie de vivre. (Around this same time I bet a friend five dollars that within twenty-four hours I could part these same students as if they were the Red Sea, and back them up against their lockers in awe of my passing. I put out the rumor that I had AIDS and by lunchtime the next day had pocketed his money: Tater Tots.) In the bandroom I tied most of these lovelies to the bottom of my music stand, so that they might feed upon what was let loose from the spit valve above, but one favorite I secured to the tubes of my trumpet, so that it might perform its aerobatics while I played, and by chance pass in front of the bell, to be knocked out by the decibels there, and so hang by the neck until it came to, and recollected its capacity for flight, and climbed the air to breach once more the purifying din.

We had lost our original band teacher, a beloved old mustachioed fat man with a taste for Sousa and pedagogical tricks (he dealt with gum chewers by saying that he had once seen a student choke to death on gum while playing “that very same instrument,” giving us all the impression that hundreds of kids must have died on this man’s watch), when it was finally discovered (we had known it for years) that he also taught band in that despicable county just south of the James, which the Rebs had wisely skirted when they fled Petersburg for Appomattox. Made to choose, he chose the despicable county the Rebs had wisely skirted, as it paid him more, and so we were stuck with a humorless young woman from Richmond who wanted to suck the oompah out of our operation entirely, and transform us into a concert ensemble more suited to her sense of self (based solely, that I could see, on Amy Irving’s performance in The Competition (1980)), and would eventually, had I not acted at once, take notice of, and predictable exception to, my flies.

I convinced the trumpeter beside me (a recent recruit from shop) to cut his lip gruesomely on his braces and spend the rest of an afternoon spitting blood down into his mouthpiece. In time the teacher stopped us in our playing, and said that the trumpets sounded “gurgly,” at which point we pushed all the music stands aside, so that she might properly see, and the boy sitting next to me opened his spit valve and produced a lake of crimson gore so large I was forced, as were several others in the vicinity, to lift my feet. Once the deluge had reached our stands, the flies tied to mine, already straining at their hairs, set upon it in dreadful unison. Our teacher flew out of the bandroom then, hand over her mouth, and did not return to us the following semester.

I must tell you, or tell someone, that at times in the process of leashing a fly the wings would come off and one was left, in the patois, with a “walk.” This unfortunate was normally let loose to explore one’s desktop until, say, a teacher tossed a graded paper down onto it—

“On The Tempest ”

A–

Watch those run-ons, and please no more profanity.

— and realized what it was she had just seen (or had she?), and so turned back around, and lifted the paper, and out of human instinct used it to euthanize the pitiful thing that crawled underneath (would that Lear could have come to my aid there, with its “as flies to wanton boys” zinger, but we were not yet acquainted with that play, nor would we be by graduation), my profit on this being the demerits she then dramatically wrote out for me, which forced me to stay after class and explain that although I had admittedly done harm to the fly, and would have to answer for that in Act V (or would I?), I was at least willing to allow it what life was left to it, whereas she had robbed it even of that, and so of the chance (who can say?) to find a mate who did not mind the lack of wings, and possibly even found the look attractive, indicative as outer damage can ofttimes be of inner character, and had decided to make fly babies with this particular one, to the exclusion of all others, but could do no such thing now with the perfectly lifeless smudge we could each of us see before us, right there, on the lip of my desk. I continued along this line until she had torn up my demerits and was weeping so profusely I had to remind her to write me out a tardy slip for the period our intercourse had cut into.

But it is of the birds at home I now wish to speak.

True, I had succumbed at school, and happily, to the rural way, or perhaps it was only the southern, and could boast of numerous people repulsed by my actions there (such as when a principal sought to expel me for having shown my “rear” to a carload of honking Protestants riding behind my slow schoolbus: this man had said, during what he took to be our exit interview, “There’s a time and a place for everything,” which I argued was high school (time) and schoolbus (place), but he resisted this logic and insisted on a face-to-face meeting with my embarrassed mother and infuriated father (or was it the other way around?); I warned him that such a stance would lead on to trouble, to which he responded, “You bet it’s trouble, mister, and you’re in it,” which then led me to explain that it was not me I was worried about, as I was already in constant and excruciating trouble at home, but rather a situation he himself might want to avoid, who had yet to taste the rhetorical wrath of a mother convinced that she alone had any right to judge her children or, beyond that, the narrative vindictiveness of a father seeking to win his wife to him by continual displays of violence against anyone his wife held to be worthless, who, I heard later, launched his sawdusted corpse-in-the-making (he is all dust and no saw now, I assure you: we may begin in earnest to sweep him away) across the principal’s desk in an attempt to close forever the town man’s offending throat, while my mother grabbed at, and pulled against, those same callused fingers she had perhaps that very morning scraped away from her delicate lap, hoping to beat out a last-minute compromise), but I had only then begun to assimilate at home.