Ben Metcalf - Against the Country

He also began to whip us for our sins, committed or not, with switches cut by our own hand, which was the country way and I hope still is. That was a tough lesson, because central Virginia is shaded mostly by scrub pine, and no one with a lick of sense wants his legs torn into by a conifer. Something pulled from a conventional bush might suffice, or from a sassafras, though this might be returned for lack of firepower. Most saplings provided an acceptable bite, or a mutant shoot pulled off a full-grown tree. Birch was what was wanted by our father; balsa was what the condemned always sought, though that effect was to be found only in older trees that had died and decayed: I never saw it in anything green enough to pass for a switch. Young maple would do, and walnut of course. I would like to have tried baby oak, out of curiosity, but the earth right around us seemed unfriendly if not openly hostile to acorns. Plum was unthinkable, and cherry, and all the fruit-bearing trees: the sweetness in them promised too much. Magnolias and the like were a gamble: one might come up lucky with a flimsy specimen, but even the smaller armlets could prove deceptively sound. Dogwood held its own special thrill: it was the state tree! Locust was to be avoided, given its thorny bough, and no sane parent would misuse a child with a switch taken from that plant, just as no sane child would retrieve such a thing, unless he had it in mind to euthanize his own backside by seeing it whipped away for good.

Pride exacts its price, but this was collaboration, and as such we greeted it with the same resistance we had learned to employ on visits to my grandparents’ small farm back in southern Illinois, when for a weekend my father would become feral again and treat us all like stolen mules so that his people would not get the idea that education, and town, had softened him any. I took to pulling on every pair of underpants I could find on those days when I thought myself likely to be laid into, which was often enough, and one of the reasons I still bother to call my father a good man is that when, on a humid spring day in Virginia, this ruse was finally uncovered, and everyone anticipated my screams and my humiliation with that rarefied variety of glee known only within families, he thought to let me be. It is a strange thing to esteem a man for his decision not to raise welts on the skin of a defenseless child, but there it is. I would probably seek to deify him if I did not suspect that what had saved me was only that the indolence in him had temporarily outclassed the rage.

I might blame rage for his decision to whip us, and indolence for those times he did not; and I might blame a blend of these and other elements (pride, an urge to self-destruct) for his decision to store his books out in the chicken coop, and thereby feed his former sense of himself to the rats and the termites and the silverfish and even, in time, the chickens; and I might blame a similar blend for his decision to have his sons tear up patches of an acreage he should never have bought in search of a topsoil he hoped never to find; but a worse ailment surely underlies the style at work here. In my recollection, no banjos accompanied the howls of a child being tortured in our house, yet I do not think a father’s pride or rage or indolence or death wish can fully account for the presence of such insults, musical or otherwise, elsewhere in our lives. Something more is asked to explain why a man would not stomach a grocer between his mouth and an egg, or a mechanic between himself and any motor that came near, or an abattoir between himself and his meat, or an ordinary household item between his arm and my ass.

Call it fear, because fear surely lurks somewhere beneath all matters of style. Call it fear because fear surely engendered, if it did not merely masquerade as, the pride and the rage and all the rest of my father’s afflictions. Call it fear because I do not care to imagine that a man’s taste and intelligence and morality can be sucked out of him so quickly by something entirely external, as opposed to being chased out of him by an internal and possibly even sane response to that external something.

The public-broadcasting set never tires of the conceit that one can look out over America’s hills, and through her swamps and forests, and across her valleys and plains and deserts, and sense in those features a presence far greater than one’s own. I do not deny it: there is definitely something out there. I doubt, though, that these people would be so dug in about the supposed goodness of that presence, and would so easily claim a “profound respect for,” or even a “love of,” an entity concerned primarily with their destruction, and would roam so far afield as to speculate that this entity might be “God,” could they be prevailed upon to spend more than a long weekend or two away from the uterine comforts of town each year. Nor am I impressed with their ability to identify and implicate those rural folk whose brains have been sufficiently cooked by the sun’s radiation, or by the waves of their own fear, so as to leave them happy to testify to the truth of this or any other fairy tale. Despite all protestations to the contrary, God does not wait for us out in those trees.

Fear made my father believe, or pretend to believe, that we needed a basketball court; I am sure of it. He may also have realized that his devaluation of the property required in recompense some small improvement to it, or that his devaluation of the children required some small improvement to them, or he may simply have come to understand that we would require a better distraction than the switch if we were not to shy on him one day when told to break more wood and hack more weeds and till more soil and sow more corn. For all I know, he may have fled for more obscure reasons toward a half-remembered and wholly midwestern idea that “real” American farms have a basketball hoop on them somewhere, but it was certainly not from a position of courage that he informed us one morning of his intention to devote our strength to the manufacture of a facility we had neither the talent to make use of nor the inclination to enjoy.

Our assumption was that he meant to have us drive a pole with a rim on it down into the former shed’s foundation, and that he had some method worked out by which we would then flatten the pit’s bottom and so avoid the ruin of our ankles as we ran around down there, and that he planned to circumscribe the whole business with a fence meant to catch the inevitable loose balls as we tried and failed to master this game he thought so highly of, but again our hopes betrayed us. He sent us out instead with shovel and hoe to chop away at the ground just east of where we had murdered the shed, behind it in relation to the road and beside it from the vantage of the house, where by the time we had carved out even a few cubic feet of that hateful clay we were forced to sit and soak our hands and wait for the blisters there to form the calluses he was probably after from the outset. His affection for basketball, and his concern for the property, and his desire to see us find some pleasure in that hellscape, were all shown to run no deeper than the shallow grave’s worth of Virginia we had displaced before finally being allowed to abandon the job altogether. We nailed the rim to a big maple out front and rarely afterward went near it.

I know from what followed that our father had conspired with his fear, and in this case with the institution of basketball, to toughen us against what he saw as a formidable opponent, and I will not challenge that call. In the first place it is nice to have been thought of, and in the second the environment would prove itself a threat to his children soon enough: it would extract their blood by stinger and thorn, and would unsettle their innards with parasites, and would puff them up with plant and bug venom, and would cause them to claw at their limbs and to vomit, and would roast their little skulls until they saw dots and more complicated ghosts in the fields, and would leave them in no state to question their father’s wisdom that the proper attitude toward nature was to prepare for her inevitable assault and be watchful. Why he could not have reacquainted himself with this simple truth before his line was marooned out in the hinterland again is beyond me, but he is surely due credit for an eventual grip on the fact that we were in no way wanted as caretakers of the American muck and may even have been intended as hapless sacrifices to it.