Ben Metcalf - Against the Country

(You retchers into tacked-on toilets: cheerio!)

Ticks are famous, of course, for their propensity to swell up with borrowed blood and bust, leaving behind them, as vigorish, this or that ugly disease, but the majority I encountered in Goochland sought out a very different suicide upon me. In want of more dramatic assignments I had developed a sideline in the repair of barbed-wire fences, contemplative work I figured would at least impede the pigs and the rapists while I made a more intensive study of, and a healthier fellowship with, my surrounds. It was an easier job for two, but my brother had found steady employment to the east, with a twinkling farmer who encouraged him to drive the tractor along Route 6, even when there was no real cause to do so, in order that the tanned and shirtless young man might force to a crawl, and a familiar rage, motorists who otherwise took such political pride in the fact that they lived in a place where one had now and then to wait behind a tractor.

(You freeway cars and combines: cheerio!)

Wire and poles, then. Wood and metal. Solitude. The themes are familiar and the work relatively straightforward: one needed no more than a spool of barbed wire, and a wire stretcher, and some clippers, and a bag of bent nails, and a hammer, to remake all of America, which is known for its whitewashed fences, thanks to Twain and Rockwell (though these seem to have painted their pickets somewhat differently), but is more widely, and more accurately, defined by the wire. Still, I intend no abstract on American boundaries here: that has already been tried in our literature. Nor will I indulge my own vanity by making too much of the fact that my first attempt at “creative” writing occurred well within, and of necessity beyond, those exceedingly hurtful constraints.

(Really this was a trifle. Once I had repaired or replaced the strands along the road, cutting away the kudzu to do so, and hammering fresh or rusted wire into grayed posts that sometimes needed a hand up and help back into the ground, I reached a sharp corner and was forced down east into thick country pine, where the heat let up less than the humidity adhered, and my breathing shallowed of its own accord, and I began to see peripheral flashes of a red I at first thought presaged a stroke (did I in fact die in those woods? am I lying there even today? ) but soon understood (I cannot overstate how real this was for me, at that particular time, in that particular place) to be glimpses of the Devil’s own flesh as he stalked me from tree to tree.

(I hid in a depression behind a briar patch and shook, actually shook , in that hundred-degree heat, so country had I allowed myself to become, or willed myself to be (either way), sure that any moment I would look up and see Satan standing over me, until I remembered how Jesus had not cowered before this hindrance but rather had confronted him, and found him powerless, and had said to him Get thee hence (emphasis mine), who was not anyway painted red until much, much later, whereupon I resolved to rise up and approach him as any Christian properly should.

(My knees were at first uncooperative in this effort, and there were moments when I thought to shrink again behind the briars, but eventually I reached that point in the middle distance where I judged those flashes of red to have originated. What I saw there both eased my fear and inspired a lifetime’s assurance of it:

(Tacked to numerous trees, beyond those stapled now with new or ancient wire, were red plastic ribbons, at about head’s height, as if the forest had decided to commemorate something fully half its citizens refused to. This scene extended north for an acre or two, maybe more, and I could not help but consider its beauty, and its possible meaning, and estimate its odd outline, until at last I was able to ask my employer, ridden back toward me on pompous horseback, if he knew anything about the red ribbons, and he told me that his neighbor had paid a university man to tell him which trees ought to be chopped down so that the others might survive, which science he personally put no store in, preferring to leave such matters up to God, and he asked me how the fence was coming, and I said that it would be done on time, and he asked me was I sure, and I said that I was, and he asked me again was I sure, and this time I declined to answer him. As we spoke, or did otherwise, I do not think I took my mind for a moment off those brave and beribboned trunks across the way.

(I completed my repairs around that old man’s property in a fever, kicking and cursing at his cows to get out of the way once I had made it up into the field, and when it was finished I found myself with a single carved-out weekend to spare, during which time I would be paid to haul my equipment down into those woods, claiming to be doing “touch-up work,” and could hide said equipment in the dent behind those briars where I myself had previously hidden, and could flout the wire and reassign those red ribbons to trees of my choosing, not a university man’s, not yours, and certainly not God’s, so as to spell out into the future, by means of a stranger’s prophesied saw, a sentence the length of two football fields and readable, I prayed, from the vantage of the clouds.

((I will not be so crass as to transliterate that early effort here.))

At day’s end I would climb up exhausted into the yard, and sit on the cinder-block step to the cluttered old side porch, and slop a lazy finger of kerosene into a rusted Campbell’s soup can, and remove my boots and socks, and roll up my trousers, and use a pocketknife to shave my shins and calves clean of the ticks who had assembled there so thickly that I could not always see the blade’s surface as I scraped it against the inner lip of the can. I hoped then that these beasts would at least be granted a final wish, and drown in the kerosene, before I had time to drop a lit match down onto their still-struggling number.

(You flames and far-off trepidations: cheerio!)

Was it the Word or only the Wafer that was meant to save me? For a stretch I believed it was both, and was pleased. A happiness to hear the Word; a happiness also to taste the Flesh, since I knew It at least by name, if not by sight, and had decided already, long before any Church-prescribed “retreat” to a half-defunct summer camp nearby (where some few of us had previously been day campers, to be lashed out at and spit upon by town kids whose parents lacked either the money or the intel not to board their angry issue out there, and one summer only after we had weatherproofed its failing cabins in the offseason, without having first been warned that what we slathered on the siding would raise welts and blisters where it touched our skin and then met sunlight, which it seemed almost to seek), to like It personally.

We were meant to admire the Jesus counselors because they were older, of course, but also because they took us all seriously, and thought us more “mature” than our parents ever gave us “credit for”; and because they played guitar, which our age group was known to “respond to”; and because they were not at all “uncool” about playing only “God’s music” on their “axes” (and what a joy it was when we finally convinced that one counselor to play “Whole Lotta Love” on his, even though he did it wrong, and everyone, even the other counselors, joined in!); and because they were always “on call” for late-night “rap sessions” a full quorum of them might accidentally happen to attend, and then, with patient impatience (or was it the other way around?), continually steer the conversation back toward Jesus while the annoying teen in their trap refused to stop rhapsodizing about all the different ways rabbits knew how to kill themselves.