Ben Metcalf - Against the Country

Every dish goes down its own way, I suppose, its wriggles or its stoic stillness being the extent to which the devourer’s throat will allow it one last representative gesture. We wriggled; they did not; and unless this was because they were dead already, or close enough to it to preclude further movement, they might now and then have looked out from their living-room window (the larger on the face of their walleyed home) to behold the trash-filled snarl of our pit, and the tasteless mustache of nail-ridden boards in the yard just beyond, and the noseless upper countenance of our obviously insane clapboard tormentor. And if they chanced to see, as I did one morning, a dog of ours with a leg lifted against what had formerly been part of the well cap but was now an open-mouthed absence of concrete, and if they deduced, as I did, that our drinking water had likely been flavored by this animal’s urine since the day the hole was created, then I hope their destruction in that awful little rancher was eased at least by one last belly laugh.

There were others nearby I could not normally see, and who could not normally see me, but I felt a judgment from them all the same, and I sensed that this attitude was but a mask for their own desperation, or at least a useful distraction from it. A more active pair of decrepits farther up the road, future employers of mine who kept a few cows and took an unhealthy interest in the manufacture and storage of hay, limited their social engagement with my family to the odd wave from the field, and the even odder lecture on the dangers of a liberal education, and seemed at all times drunk on a private and unknowable sadness. Across the road from these two sat a sparsely stocked country store that doubled as a post office hardly anyone used but whose lonely proprietors, yet another ancient couple, had discovered that the federal government fixed a postmaster’s salary by the number of boxes at his disposal, whether or not those boxes would ever be filled. To the best of my knowledge, these people, who were polite but embarrassed for us children whenever we visited their wooden fib to buy candy, or else to steal it, retired rich, if no more comfortable, and then died.

The younger couple who had sold us our trees and our clay now occupied a newer, sounder home across the southern pasture and back in the woods somewhat, though they would be delayed no longer by the second trap than they had by the first and would, before their vanishing, provide no particulars as to what wickedness had befallen them, or the idiots who came before, at “our” place. Because of this, and because in the war between persistence and departure they sided with departure and we did not, and because in the gerrymander that forever cleaved our land from theirs they had kept possession of what was our barn in every sense but the legal, and so had saved this structure from the rapacity of our stove and from an afterlife as proof to passersby that we had not even a barn to aid and protect us, my father held these people and their barn to be an insult and a remonstrance, and he gave off an unusual amount of pride, I remember, on the day a dog of ours pranced before us with a dead cat of theirs in its maw.

I have no idea whether these people harbored a remorse at our being the means of their escape, or an anger over the cat (a kitten, really: Boots was its name), but before they fled that land forever I recorded in their stares a note of astonishment at our obvious and immediate washout at squiredom, which must have struck them as willful and even aggressive when measured against their own. The stiff neighborliness extended us whenever they came by (as a confidence man will follow up on his mark to determine if the scheme has been discovered and the authorities called down) hid no better a mix of trepidation, relief, curiosity, and ordinary human concern, which trepidation I scoff at, and which relief I stipulate, and which concern I return unused. Only the curiosity pertains.

These people made no direct mention of the devastation in their former yard, nor did they acknowledge the depressed heap of garbage that was the property’s single recent improvement, but they were aware of our pit and our shame as surely as we were aware of their barn, and our muteness on the barn, and their muteness on the shame, made for what I recall as an almost boisterous conversation. Their side of the silence seemed to convey an amused understanding that our business with the sticks was not about disappearance at all but rather was about a perfectly common wish to be noticed, the fulfillment of which did not normally require an open trash pit in the wisher’s front yard. On our end, if I translate correctly, it was mostly curse words.

O Goochland, O county of blood and pus, O breaker of families, O bed of agriculture’s deceit; older creature than the nation you betrayed; promiser of plenty, provider of naught; stalker of happiness, thief of hope; butcher of nerves, baker of brains; proud home of the skill-less, luckless Bulldogs; site of my elementary- through high-school education:

I should have guessed, when first we crossed your bounds, that my father would opt for a performance of his anguish rather than a deliverance from it. I should have seen that your houses did not shun one another but only watched and waved, and struck signal fires, and huddled together in an attempt to form hamlets that by your witchcraft would not take. I should have noticed that your necropoli met no hindrance at all in their efforts to congeal and expand. I should have gathered that your paper-thin infrastructure (a backwater school system, a sparse and unselective police force, a farmer’s bank, a “community” college, an overmatched clinic near the pompous little courthouse, a bloom of schismatic churches, an enthusiasm of volunteer fire and rescue squads, both a men’s and a women’s “state farm”) constituted an equally instinctive, and equally failed, ploy to cover the whole of your population (less than twenty thousand souls, all told, in a space the size of Greater Los Angeles) with a single municipal exoskeleton, so that we suckers, we pilgrims to iniquity, might know what it was like to exchange a settlement at least of sufficient density to keep the pests at bay for one so rudimentary and diffuse that it did not understand this to be town’s purpose.

Could not the same be said of the nation’s farmland at large? Do the kit houses and improvised huts in our clearings not reach out to one another in desperate bids to create and defend communities whose inhabitants insist are unnecessary to their unreal and unearned Edens? Are we to imagine that the pride these people have since shown in their technically townless lot is not a reflex natural to anyone confronted with the terror that accompanies assured defeat but not yet (and here again I must employ the word “technically”) dead? Is this pride not so bitter and so powerful that it has long infected even parts of town with the desire to go without what humble refinements are available there (a superficial proximity to education and the arts, a cinema-learned facsimile of reflection) in order to indulge instead a fancy for mud, pickup trucks, cowboy hats, retribution in Jesus’s name, and the legion twangs and whines of American ignorance?

I honestly do not care. One may strike like a fool at the sprigs of this wrong or one may set at the root, and Goochland County, in whose dirt our national evil was gestated, and out of whose grass it sprung, and on whose stock it immediately fed, and through whose dummies it first worked its cruel ventriloquy, and within whose tomahawk outline can still be found a peopled wilderness more ruinous than just about any other, is where I judge that root to be. I will not stunt my rage with reference to what this prideful and cowardly blight has done to the uppermost boughs of our republic: the reader is free to lift his chin, and expose his neck, and see for himself how pride and cowardice alone are now represented up there. My own aim is the root itself, and my whetstone is the memory of how casually, how mechanically, this entity sent forth its spores to destroy what might have been a perfectly acceptable childhood.