Ben Metcalf - Against the Country

And the goats! My God, but the goats! I knew of a nanny who would position herself into death’s grim profile whenever my friend, her ostensible keeper (or was he my keeper, and her friend?), took a dirtbike out into the fields that surrounded his toiletless home, and revved up the hillocks and jumped, only to find himself suspended, in air and in thought, looking down at a goat who clearly asked to be landed upon, her belly swollen with tumors (or else with a kid who for years refused to come out, as every vet she ever saw had concluded (and were they wrong, these experts? is the leap from kid being born so that it might seek out ways to kill itself to kid choosing not even to be born really so enormous? are our delays in this life, and prior to it, not explained by what awaits us beyond the vulva’s tight grasp?)), until he threw his bike off to the left, and himself off to the right, landing each painfully so as to spare the goat, whom he then took to tying up by the neck in an empty hog pen, where one night she intrigued, by means of her bifurcate paws, to scramble over the southerly side and hang herself.

(The outer boards showed no evidence that she had ever tried to regain her confinement.)

A dog of ours (named by our father Wee Cooper O’Fife, after the Scottish folksong about the wife-beating old barrel maker, and because our part of the county was called Fife, and because that dog was monstrously large, even as a puppy) once employed this same method while tied up “for his own good” on the side porch, except that the barrier he made it over was shorter, or the rope was longer, and so, by this grace, or that devilment, he survived. He had tossed himself in front of a Monte Carlo (which required real forethought, if you think about it, on a road less traveled by), though possibly it was a Gran Torino. The people inside it braked, and said how sorry they were, while the dog lay whimpering in a ditch, and asked was there anything they could do, he came out of nowhere, and I said, “No,” and thanked them, thanked them, and they rolled up their window and drove off at the same suicide-heedless speed as before. Only our “melodramatic” pleas that night, and our “emotionally manipulative” tears, and our “frankly shocking” decision to part with a multigenerational coin collection we had cared not one whit for since leaving the Land of Lincoln, saved that dog from a self-consciously rural bullet to the back of the head and won him a town operation he little wanted and less deserved. After which he sought to hang himself on the side porch and then took primarily to murder.

Another dependent, Brown Dog (so stupid our father had decreed that she did not warrant a proper name), leapt in front of a Wonder Bread truck. Her usual method of curling up on a car roof and frying like an egg until she slid down and shook and barfed in the yard had been thwarted by our usual method of encasing her in a cold-water blanket, and tossing her into the back of the Dodge pickup, and driving her (with more laughter and radio, really, than concern) to the vet for an adrenaline shot. As regards the Wonder Bread attempt, we could scarcely believe that we had seen it, not because leaps in front of vehicles by Goochland’s animals were at all abnormal but because Wonder Bread trucks were such a rarity out there.

Surely they passed by often, with their lively dots, or maybe only this one did, so as to restock the shelves of all those unjust but colorful little country stores, yet we ourselves never saw one without pointing and shouting, as if it were a disorientated celebrity. I cannot say, then, at this remove, that I paid less attention to the truck than I did to the dog’s readying herself to jump in front of it, so as to bounce off the bumper’s bend sinister and be ass-scooted across the gravel below our mailbox, after which we would fetch her up into the yard, and pet her velvet ears back, and pluck the shards from her lacerated haunches, and tell her what an entertaining idiot she had always been to us, all the while looking up and wondering after a turned town conveyance that had neither stopped nor thought to slow.

Fun story:

Irish story:

Eventually our mother used that same car, the one our silliest bitch liked to scale and fry herself upon, to help an Irish setter die.

This dog came at us in a flash of Muppety orange from the right, and caromed off the grille, and landed absurdly far off to the left, grinningly dead, in what we correctly assumed to be its own yard. We braked and reversed and pulled up into the driveway and mounted the step and knocked, and as the screen door opened we pointed at the blood-matted corpse on the lawn and said how sorry we were, it came out of nowhere, and was there anything we could do, and the lady of the house said, “No,” and thanked us, thanked us, and we waddled faux somberly back to her driveway and headed home to what I remember now as a perfectly pleasant evening.

My brother drove us the rest of the way, to be sure, while his mother sat beside him, her seatbelt melodramatically fastened, and kept a moist eye out for any further life seeking to do damage to her car or to her afternoon. (Years later a big buck did it in, this car, and himself, with our vanishing father behind the wheel, but that is neither here nor there now, is it, the car or the buck or the father?) My sister and I sat in back and discussed the idea that the setter lady may have spotted all the paw prints on our hood and windshield and roof, and concluded that we had put them there on purpose, each one representing yet another dog slaughtered for sport along those lawless roads. Was she polite, then, the setter lady, merely as a way of shooing us off before we had time and opportunity (and motive? had not our angry Jesus granted us at least that?) to run down and saint a second sweet puppy of hers?

Our mother fidgeted beneath her belt over the simple likelihood of this. Our brother stiffened adventurously against the wheel.

I might make a litany here of the higher self-death I heard about, or saw for myself, and in due time came naturally to encourage, since God’s plan is God’s plan, after all, and it is not every day, even in Goochland, that He gropes around in His trousers for a treat.

When that seventh grader diced his brains with a shotgun, believing he had just got his girlfriend pregnant, and we gathered in the cafeteria (to the east of our homerooms) and faced a small stage (to the north of our chairs) that had no architectural right to be there (and upon which I would later lose, or had already lost, a spelling bee), and heard from our teachers what a promising (because a “silent”) young man this had always been, and then heard them invoke the word “hero” (which I suppose he was, in the Hellenic sense, but still), I shut my eyes and tried to remember this champion but could conjure no more than his crisp polyester pantlegs, and those spotless if inexpensive shoes, and a desire to dodge his sharp toe on the playground, and an unbidden thrill at what violence he had done himself over so commonplace a seventh-grade worry.

When a friend’s mom, it was rumored (always rumored ), opted for a similar exit strategy, and timed her departure well or poorly enough that her son was able to see her off (the door pushed open with a child’s innocent question; the loud and ruinous retort), I stared (without knowing, of course, and in no real position to ask) into those newly widened eyes whenever they neared, and sought out in them the truth: not of what had occurred with the mother, per se, but the actual truth, the final one. Having failed to find it there, any more than I could spot it in my narrower globes as I bent toward the bathroom mirror and pinched at all those bumps on my forehead, half aware that one day my own skull might fill up with ugliness and, by a tool worse than fingernails, pop, I began to avoid him. Having sensed in my ogle an indication that I was not after anything like the truth here, but only a vulgar entertainment, he began to avoid me sooner.