Ben Metcalf - Against the Country

He pried, then, while we pulled, careful not to offer our palms to the spiders that frequented the underside of just about every piece of wood in Virginia, and what planks we did not clumsily or spitefully send down into the space below we raised up and spirited to the yard’s green hillock, there to await the frost and the axe and the stove’s pitiless glow. When it was finished, and nothing remained that could be pointed at any longer and called a shed, we could see clearly that what had thrown me was not, at least spatially, a chasm at all but only a foundational hollow of about three feet or so, whose walls of orange and red clay gave a fine indication of the land’s hostility toward us and toward the discarded generations that had come before. I was, and remain, amazed that even a fescue could grow out of that stuff, let alone the more complicated weeds that filled the middle distance.

I suspect that my father considered those walls for some time, and basked in their ability to announce his blamelessness to the world, if also his lack of judgment. For my part I considered mostly the heap of additional boards my brother and I would now have to haul out of that hole and stack among the other scraps bound for the stove. Yet when we stepped down into the wreckage, my eye (I cannot speak for my brother’s) was drawn not to the wood itself, nor to the useless clay that cupped it, nor to the relentless explosion in the sky above, but to the high grass that crested the foundation’s far side. There, in apparent flight from our onslaught, slid a snake so black and shiny that it simultaneously absorbed and repelled what sunlight was not engaged just then in an attempt to burn its way through my skin. I could not make out the head, and so I could not discern the level of the creature’s ire, but I knew at once that we had demolished either its home or its vacation spot, and I knew that the insult would not be allowed to stand.

I did not fully comprehend then that a great sorcery was at work all around us, and intended to inspire in the mesmerized a suicidal result, and had found satisfaction many times over in those addled enough to think the land a precious asset rather than a sadistic foe. We were in no danger on the precious-asset count, as we could see as well as anyone that our particular sliver of earth was worth far less than the meager sum we had proffered to gain it, but to my mind that accrued against the purchaser and not the purchase, as did the generational mortgage by which we had made of the land a debtors’ prison when my parents were unable to pay even the meager sum up front. They might have rented, and for as little as $150 a month provided me with a better home than the sweatbox-cum-windsock in which I would be forced to eat and sleep and feign sanity, mine and theirs, for the remainder of my childhood, but rental would have constituted an impossible admission on their part that they had erred not only in their decision to surround us with spiritual revivals and animal crap but in their shared assumption, with so much of America, that ownership of the land was a natural right handed down from heaven, as opposed to a shameful ruse perpetuated by the banks.

My parents had, it must be said, briefly rented a farmhouse upon our arrival in that accursed county, and in their defense the episode had played out poorly. Although greatly superior to the compromised lean-to we would later inhabit, this house continuously gave off, from the orifices of its sinks and tub, an odor of excrement, and I have yet to meet its better in the art of drawing flies. One afternoon there I encountered a wall so thick with these black and green demons that my attempts to slaughter them left hand-shaped impressions among their number, and the quickness with which these spaces then filled led me to flee the building in horror and disgust. I would not be surprised to hear that a corpse, or several, had been discovered behind that wall, and I am grateful that my own will most likely be allowed to rot elsewhere.

Our landlord, who had grown up in this very house and afterward refused to enter it, owned and operated a pointless gas station, back from which sat the house, and was involved with his brother in a feud that had either resulted in or been set off by the brother’s construction of another pointless gas station across the road from the first. The negligible traffic thus divided, our landlord tried, not without success, to appear at least busier than his unprosperous brother by the regular cremation of dead tires behind his bleak concern, the thick black smoke from which reached us daily and was a welcome distraction from the usual smells. When not at such aromatic theater, this man found time to collect the rent, and to ignore the loss of what firewood my siblings and I were sent out nightly to steal from him, and to explain to my midwestern mother that it might be all right to have “coloreds” around back for a glass of water now and then, but one did not invite them inside. None of which, apparently, was sufficient to shoo my parents not just from this house but from the whole of that Godforsaken land.

So it was that they promised and purchased, and stuck us to our lot, and ensured that we would not escape it until we had found another victim to assume our arrears, as well as our sadness and our terror and whatever additional insults came gratis with the dirt. So it was that whereas we were led to believe we had acquired the land, when in fact the land had acquired us; and whereas the land was, in my estimation, perfectly happy with this arrangement, though in a remarkably short time we were not; and whereas the law in no way met its onus to correct, or at a minimum to address, this injustice as it might any other; therefore my father’s war on the property, and its war on us, could in no way be considered actionable, which left as his only incentive to sue for peace the psychological welfare of his family, which he seemed to regard, if that word even applies here, as no more than an annoyance. So it was that we came to suffer under, if never quite to accept, my father’s intention to use the land not to feed and further us but instead to express several borrowed ideas without practical use save the one to which I am able to put them here. So it was that we stumbled into the country life like an infant who takes his first astonished steps and then, as his frightened grin dissolves, reaches out to catch himself against the side of a red-hot wood stove.

We pretended as best we could that our father meant no more than a vain plea of innocence, but the evidence was against us. He left untouched a charming little slave shack, done up in the same abused white and nauseated green as the farmhouse, which we took to be a perfectly reasonable announcement that no one could be expected to wrest subsistence from this mud without captive labor (I am frankly surprised that I was not immediately installed in that shack), but his decision to spare the old outhouse, if only till a lust for its few stinky planks could overcome him, fairly shouted to all the world that we were not yet sold on the notion of indoor facilities, which could not help but connote a harder sort of pride.

The first sort implied only that my siblings and I would be enlisted now and then to inflict new damage on our position, whereas the second ensured that we would be made to endure the existential threat of a chicken society, and the less abstract menace of a yard mined with dog feces, and the hokum of a pickup truck whose bed we would have cause but no permission to use, and the self-consciously rustic affront of cars being “worked on” next to or in front of the house, and at one point the shock of an entire engine block hung by a chain from a tree, and a record player now enamored of Flatt and scruggs’s banjo travesties, and too often the indecency of a television set that still fancied M*A*S*H , yes, but came increasingly to favor episodes of Grand Ole Opry and Hee Haw .