Ben Metcalf - Against the Country

Which was the other great subtext at work here, and that Church, and her sense that I sensed how It might one day save me, even when we both knew It would not, so overwhelmed her watching of Brideshead Revisited as to make her gloss over those lovely, crucial speeches by the stuttering homosexual Anthony Blanche, wherein he warns against “charm” (the Flytes’, yes, but then there are so many other kinds (and how akin was this “charm” to Holden’s “phoniness,” so important to both the atheistic and the worshipful elements in my household, and never once ignored there as was charm)), and this moved me, I think, her subterfuge (for my mother was, and is, a charming woman), and beyond anything she wanted me to notice in the episodes themselves sent me up into that choir-loft one Holy Night without television, with a candle in my grateful hand, to look down on the poor chiaroscuros below, and wonder what sins they had committed to gather them all here, and whether these sins could possibly be as bad as mine (and I would like to say that I pondered just then what Waugh or Salinger might have done with a scene such as this, but I am neither phony enough to claim it nor charming enough to pull it off), until someone down below leaned back on the light switch near the entrance and showed, in one ugly flash, our prefab chapel for what it truly was.

Tin and wood.

Faded felt displays.

Mail-order-catalog Stations of the Cross.

A decades-old course of industrial blue carpeting.

That light was shut off immediately, of course, but the Spirit had fled us, and for some It never returned. Most stayed until Mass was over, out of phoniness, or charm, but few tarried after. I learned from the stragglers that a sibling of mine was rumored to have tripped the switch in back: both suspects had lingered there at the time, near my mother, and certainly she would have known not to do it. My soon-to-be-fugitive sister denied culpability, and I could see in her eyes that she would have been perfectly proud of the act. (She who would later steal a taxicab in the nation’s capital, and drive around drunkenly taking fares, until a police roadblock was set up, and she was captured, and the offended hack said he would not press charges, and would even drive her home, by which the officers present must have known that he would then attempt to sexually assault her.) By those eyes I knew the truth. My brother, when I asked him about it, stared somewhat coldly at me, and for a moment I thought I was about to be punched, right there in the churchyard. Then he smiled and looked away, as if he had already forgiven me the insult (not of the accusal but of the sheer stupidity), and he put his hand on my shoulder, and his smile went away, and he asked me how that toe was doing.

Such is how I recall it, the loss of my faith (if never my fear), except that I am convinced now I was thinking, as late as ten paragraphs ago, about the Ascension, not the Assumption, if only mistakenly so.

1.

As I chopped weeds one Sunday, after my midnight escape from the Lord, in that corner of the backyard never asked to grow corn (nor to birth what other foodstuffs we would scrape after dinner onto the enormous pile of rotting garbage my parents told themselves was a “compost heap” and even the dogs would not go near), and swung a scythe through weeds that had caused even the tiller to choke and expire, I felt a garden hose pulled tight against my left heel. I looked back and saw there not a hose at all but rather a full-grown copperhead, rounding one foot and headed directly at the other. Why he (she?) did not simply bite the left, and save himself (herself?) the extra motion, I will never know; snakes, I suppose, make their aesthetic decisions too. I hopped off toward the tail, and he (she?) turned back around at me, and I chopped the top third of him (her?) away with my blade. This made him (her?) overly angry, or at least the top third of him (her?), and he (she?) continued to hiss, and to bare his (her?) teeth, and to inch my vulnerable way, until I had chopped that top third into an additional three pieces, after which his (her?) mouth remained open but mercifully silent.

I ran up into the house then, and told my brother what had happened, and he seemed honestly intrigued by my story this time around, though he did not, in the end, deem it worthy of his leaving the television set and coming outside to inspect my mess. That mess would have to be dealt with, of course, and soon, before the dogs got at it and one of them, chewing happily on the head, caught a lip or a tongue on a still-venomous fang. I threw the pastel meat up onto the coop roof for the buzzards to have at. The angry head I flushed down the toilet. Afterward I found it a terror to situate myself on that throne or on any other.

2.

The great black locust behind the house had finally died. No doubt this was due to desiccation, and heatstroke, and smoke inhalation, and all those pitiable burns; it had stood, the whole of its life, so very near the chimney. (For which see the second, seventh, and fourteenth parts of my fifth attempt to end all this.) My father felled it expertly, and it swung from left to right, as if waving goodbye, before landing, the top third of it, on the very spot where that southbound snake had turned and tried to topple me. Over the next few days we set upon it with axe and chainsaw, glad (my brother and I) finally to have firewood so near the home.

(Was this before or after my brother joined the football team, as the place had asked of him, and stuck with it just long enough to ask of a particular player out there, “How did you get so goddamned big?” So came the reply: “Hauling the motherfucking wood.” By which we learned for how little a cord of stove-ready staves could be had, and one Christmas we gathered up our dollars and arranged, through this same player’s family business, a whispery delivery the night before, and the next morning we presented the stack to our father as if it were a gift for him and not for us. I remember too well his effortful smile, and his emasculated “Thanks,” and the short-lived triumph, and our long-lived shame.)

There was talk, and honest fear, that our father might make us transport the whole of this treasure back across the eastern field, to what wire bounded (and here and there did physically bind) those trees that by this point spelt out God knows what, so that when harsh weather hit he could command us to fetch it up the hill again, and haunt us from the dry side of a farmhouse window while he told himself that we would remember and respect him for making us so powerful. No male in the family, and I include poor vaporized him, is today innocent of a town operation on his spine. I suppose I can remember him for that.

On the second afternoon of the locust’s agony, my brother chopped into a cave made out of two branches: one broken off against the trunk and one, by stubborn flesh, still held to it. The grass was all but gone there, by the pressure of the tree, and by his movements above and below it, and it is my recollection that he slipped around a great deal in the mud as he chopped away the roof of what had become home to a large and coiled copperhead, which my brother, large and coiled himself, chopped into pieces while his faraway father turned the chainsaw off and yelled a Stop fucking around over there -type sentiment and then heard, by way of a yell back, what had happened, and so came over to inspect the scene, after which he glared down at me as if I had just now nearly cost him the better son. As this ghoul drifted off, and disappeared ( almost! ) behind the leafless branches at the top of the tree, my brother stared after him and sighed. Then he picked up some chunks of the snake and made for the coop roof. I picked up some others and followed. I shared nothing about what I had done with the previous one’s head.