Ben Metcalf - Against the Country

(Or else began to blink anew …

(And took miraculous flight …

(Though never to rise again, it seemed to me, any much higher than my bug-stinky fists.)

Earlier and elsewhere I might simply have caught these creatures up and smushed them, as American children will tend to do, and spread the now-activated goo in fluorescent bands across my innocent cheeks, and run down the driveway with the rest of the neighborhood, pretending with all my heart to be a Red Indian, as Waugh would have it, or Kafka’s fornicating translators, perfectly aware that distally, four beats back along the proximal line, I actually was one. But then earlier, and elsewhere, and not surrounded by these objects (words, largely, and mold), and under worse conditions (cool enough tonight, I suppose, if a bit muggy), and not given what in the interim I have happily endured, I might have been tempted to lie. I might have been tempted to craft a cute little segue here between fireflies turning on rather than off when killed (or were they?) and my relationship with the Lord our Jesus, said Himself to have died aglow and then, in a blink, arisen.

I might even have made use of the fact that this metaphor will not hold unless Jesus is continually beat down again by the fists of men, since that would seem to be the Church’s historical argument here, if not exactly its narrative, but in truth I acquired my faith not through metaphorical epiphany but by practical need. I was bored and lonely and afraid during my initial few years out there, and seeing folks on Sunday made me feel less lonely and less bored. (The afraid took somewhat longer.) Pre-rebellion against a gigantic atheist father, I could not fathom why these people would come together each weekend to celebrate the torturing to death of a self-absorbed Nazarene some twenty centuries earlier, even if He had once worked with His hands. Post-rebellion against a smaller threat, and working now gaily with my own hands, I could not fathom why these people would ever do otherwise. I had joined them in a solemn acceptance of, and promised salvation in, the truth that all local life manifested, winged or not, and in perfect imitation of Jesus, a deathwish foretold and pounced upon.

The priests kept croaking, for one thing. Clearly they had come out to die among us, none of them being young or bright or worth all that much to the Church, and each of them forced to minister to the prisons all the workweek, which would have sapped even my own joyous spirit. Father X lasted longest. He was a bald zealot with too many ideas about Saint Paul. In time he was reassigned elsewhere, equally desolate, whence he sent weak epistles until his heart exploded. Father Y I saw some promise in. He was a mess with words, but his toe tapped regularly to the music, no matter how experimental, and his eyes had a tendency to roll back into their sockets, which trait I could not help but admire. He died of a stroke my sister described thusly: “He looked up into his skull and decided to stay there.” Father Z was exactly what you might expect on the heels of X and Y: a short and effeminate wag intent on drinking himself to death by his tipple, which was scotch and milk. He achieved, I am told, a fatal infarction within a year or two’s exposure, though by then I was fled from that plot and heard not a word about the martyr who sallied forth to replace him.

Father Y was the one I told about the flies and sundry, not sure if those were sins, really, but not wanting to chance it. He had no idea what to say but only scanned his frontal lobe throughout our encounter, looking for Jesus up there, I guess, or else for the vascular discrepancy that had first made him want to go fish. In time he came to and said that God loved me, which by then I needed to hear, and he gave me some prayers to say, which I suspect I did, and some penance to do, which was about as likely as my asking an eye-rolling priest if he honestly thought every being we encountered wanted to kill us, granted, but also to die, so plain was that notion to anyone who had persisted even a short time out there.

(You sad and forsworn country priests: cheerio!)

Ants liked to off themselves in the sugar bowl, which made sweetening one’s Cheerios a challenge. The trick was to extract a spoonful of hardened sugar that did not include an ant dead from diabetic shock. I grew so adept at this procedure that there was some talk of my becoming a famous surgeon. Obviously that did not happen.

(You failed little country excavators: cheerio!)

Ticks hitched rides to hell on all five of us, especially newly enthusiastic country boys who ran around willy-nilly advertising themselves for rent (so that when a pig went missing its farmer might appear in the churchyard of a Sunday, just after Mass, and make inquiries, and offer a few dollars apiece, as my brother and I were said to be swift, and despite being Catholic still technically Christian, and unwilling to let a pig go any more than we would a human (and it was known by then that we had once apprehended a runaway delinquent in a field, hoping to make a name for ourselves in the bounty-hunting trade, and thus be availed of the millions we imagined were allocated to the retrieval of harder sorts who broke out from the State Farm every month or so, and fetched all those helicopters overhead, and left the shelter of the trees to approach small children, which dream went unfulfilled, as did my wish to become a repo man later on, when I worked as a teller for the local farmer’s bank and thought I would be better put to collecting debts than to dwelling on assets, but we did catch that one little insult: asked where he thought he was going, the JD said, “Home,” by which he meant Richmond, and my brother explained that Richmond lay many miles to the east, through those endless woods, whereas the JD was oriented north, through those endless woods, and with any luck would reach Washington within a year’s time, to be picked up by the FBI, if he were still alive, and beat on considerably, and sent back here, or else he could come along with us right now, at which point the JD started crying, and on the long walk back to the road I explained that before he set off the next time he might know how many phones were installed in his facility, and where said phones were located, and then just prior to his escape might unscrew the mouthpiece to each, and remove the resonator within, and screw the mouthpiece back on, so that no one his keepers then called would be able to hear anything about a drug problem running through the woods with directional difficulties and dyed-red hippie hair), though I do remember on one such occasion cornering an adolescent pig under the porch of a farmhouse and behaving less than professionally with him: we recounted the “Three Little Pigs,” which seemed to agitate rather than console him, and when he smelled bacon frying brightly in the house above, and heard our stomachs grumble in sympathy below, my brother pointed up at the smell, and then at him, and he bolted and butted the smaller of us full-on in the sternum, which sent me flying ass-backward and greatly extended the chase (through crackly woods and still-dampened grasses: how I miss them now!) until at last we realized that he was playing a game with us too, and actually wanted to be caught, and we formed a stratagem around this idea and brought him in easily, though when we handed him over, wriggling and squealing with self-delight (can I not still feel those precious ribs beneath his skin?), my brother took the farmer aside and explained that this pig should under no circumstance be eaten, as we had God’s hard evidence that it could spell), till word went round that these boys might get the job done, sure, but were not so quick as was claimed, and were unorthodox at best in their approach, and perhaps even liberal, and should probably be confined to tasks that required less sense, or none at all, such as fetching more wood, or putting up more hay, or digging further postholes, or helping out your obviously insane old farmer (“what would you do if somebody pulled your nuts off? I reckon I’d shoot him. And then I’d shoot him again! ”), whose niece, or cousin, or granddaughter, a cheerleader we had admired at the high school, once approached us in the parking lot and said that there was a truckful of wood in need of unloading, and the pay was fifty dollars because it was the bank president, and would we do it? and we said yes we will Yes (apiece?), and then discovered that the wood had been hauled in days ago on an unwashed fish truck, with the refrigeration turned off, which we managed nonetheless to clear, by means of rags strapped across our mouths and our noses, after which we ate crinkle-cut potatoes fried in butter by the bank president’s looker of a wife and barely made it home before the worst of the vomiting began.