Against the Country Page 2

  I would add to this list Mr. Whitman, who approached the senator’s war with no more insight than that both the bramble and the self should be celebrated, and came out of it with no better improvement to his art than that putrefaction and “democracy” deserved some say as well. I would also include here the worshipful Mr. Muir, and every pupil of the Hudson School, and every man named Benton who lifted voice or pen or paintbrush in the naturalist cause, and every Joel Chandler Harris who saw fit to attach pretty morals to an ugly rural past, and every Nashville Agrarian who failed, in this same facile nostalgia, to recognize Jefferson and Calhoun as madmen or liars. Special mention is due E. B. white, who prompted the rich to believe that a weekend retreat in the country qualified them for the position of calm rustic sage, and every back-to-the-land hippie who managed to further this absurd idea with his inheritance-funded commune, only to suggest something truer with his California killing spree.

  Whether we were swayed by these particular boosters of the simple life or by others is for my parents to say, not me, though I do think it germane that we found ourselves banished to a desolate Virginia county at the foot of the Piedmont Plateau, to the east of Jefferson’s labor camp on Monticello, and to the west of the Confederate capital Calhoun’s rhetoric made inevitable, and to the south of the wounds Whitman peeled and scraped clean on account of the agricultural lie’s most spirited attempt yet to defend itself. Could chance alone have fetched us to such a nexus? Was it wholly arbitrary that we landed within a wind-aided scream of the very spot where the effort to farm the interior of this continent began?

  I thank God, if He has not by now entirely acquiesced to the rural cause, that we ventured east and not west, as Mr. Greeley would have liked it, because I doubt I would be here to complain had the opposite occurred. That we chose to head south, though, is a blow no God who retained even the smallest affection for His American subjects would have dealt us, and that we settled in so useless a stretch of the kudzu is a masterstroke no combination of Jeffersons could feasibly have arranged. I must therefore conclude, as I was moved at least to suspect during my long years of exile from town, that the land itself, and especially the land of the Virginia Piedmont, wooded and weed-choked and encased in hard red clay where we had been led to expect some semblance of topsoil, was actively, and perhaps even knowingly, involved in our doom.

  More pessimistic circles

  Since those days when England’s rubbishes wagered all they had for the wisdom that they would shortly be dead in the Virginia brush, if not by native axe or flesh scoop then by the bloody flux or some other microscopic remedy to man, it has been the American’s destiny, or else simply his style, to head off into perdition unburdened with the price of a ticket home. Apparently the cost of a single rented U-Haul, as well as the gasoline required to traverse Kentucky’s failed imitation of industry (and then to negotiate the food-stampy hollers and tax-kept scenic viewpoints of the Appalachian range), sufficed to include us in this ritual of diminishment and despair. Even before they had seen for themselves the depletion along the once ballyhooed and now rightfully ignored James River, my parents were tapped out and frightened enough to make for the comparative oasis of Richmond, where a couple of weeks left to amuse ourselves in the parking lot of a waffle house near the motel, while our father looked for construction work and our mother searched in ever more pessimistic circles for an address within our means, made it clear that Richmond cared no more for us than had the decomposing forts back in Southern Illinois. We knew that within a month or two we would need to seek shelter elsewhere, most likely in one of those sad and vacant James-bound counties we had driven through on the way out and already agreed to detest.

  My brother, in what I take to be a stab at kindness, has claimed that our parents could not possibly have intended for their children to come of age so removed from the basic comforts, and so divested of human decency, and were bent for the nearest Kentucky town when, somewhere between Richmond and Charlottesville, the gas money gave out. Against such a theory I would offer our sister’s insistence that throughout this dark time she was continually promised a horse, which would indicate (a) that our parents nurtured a bucolic goal all along and (b) that they meant to have some money left over once their goal had been achieved, which would further indicate (c) that they were in no way impelled but actually chose to raise us in our subsequent isolation and misery. On the other hand, since my sister never received anything like a horse in the Virginia hills, despite the fact that a pony or a half-dead mule could be had out there for as little as fifty dollars, her claims about when the promise was first made, and how often it was repeated, might be considered tainted by a former Black Beauty enthusiast’s understandable thirst for revenge.

  I myself do not care what plans my parents made or unmade or altered or adhered to: no blame can attach to those caught fast in a pit of excrement who flail around for something by which they might pull themselves to safety, or who opt instead to remain immobile so as not to be sucked under any sooner. I do not care whether Richmond was, in fact, the sturdy overhead branch we required at the time. Richmond was, and still is, suited primarily to wealthy people able to tolerate the boredom and tastelessness and humidity that account for most of the culture there. Nor do I care if my parents neglected to make an honest grab for that branch: the countryside to the west of Richmond was clearly the better match for us, being suited primarily to poorer people who could tolerate their own measure of boredom and tastelessness and humidity, or who had no choice but to try. I can find fault with my parents only for their failure to hammer out the terms of our surrender with more finesse, and to recognize that the place one’s children hail from is a tattoo ever afterward, and to steer us with what strength they could still summon into a county with a more agreeable name than the one we would all come to loathe and deny.

  Ugliness

  That my siblings and I hail now and forever from Goochland, Virginia, and not from Powhatan, or Chesterfield, or Hanover, or Louisa, or Fluvanna, or Appomattox, or any number of decently named counties within a bankrupt gas tank’s reach of Richmond, is indeed a heavy log to bear, but even here I see evidence of a cause larger than my parents’ inability to consult a map properly and think ahead. For into this same county, which in 1743 encompassed a wider swath of uselessness than it does today, was born Thomas Jefferson himself, and it was within its present bounds that he wasted his childhood among the tobacco plants which prior to our arrival had relieved the soil of what simple nutrients it once possessed. Cornwallis passed through on his way to Yorktown, and later Sheridan on his way to Petersburg, and before him a detachment of soon-to-be-dead Union fools who believed that a tiny band of horsemen could penetrate Richmond’s western defenses and canter away with the Confederate president as a prize, but the county holds real historical worth only insofar as it witnessed the birth and early schooling of that rash ginger prophet who would, through his words and deeds and acolytes, convince millions of Americans to martyr themselves on the altar of an agrarian delusion. No more is wanted: if great holiness can be claimed for Bethlehem and Mecca because of the careers launched there, then surely I am justified in my own claim that a certain unholy ugliness emanated from within the bounds of Goochland County, and commanded our attention, and beckoned us out into those pine shadows and those unremitting fields.

  Richmond has since been generous to the eastern part of Goochland, having long ago saturated the intermediate county, Henrico, with the customary gifts of townhouses and strip malls and golf courses and industrial parks, and I hear the Goochland teens are now taught in a modern facility that does not ask them either to confront or to ignore the reality that they attend the white high school, as opposed to the black, which after integration had become their impoverished junior high. Well-paved roads now obtain throughout the county, where dirt and gravel were once the norm, and one may detect a species of progress in the satellite dishes so prevalent on roofs and in yards as to imply that all of Goochland
is host to some grand project to contact the aliens, which would interest but hardly surprise me, as I often enough prayed to be abducted myself by spacemen during our time out there.

  Yet I do not think that Richmond’s largesse has much affected the westernmost part of the county. The farmhouses there, although approached now and then by more modern dwellings, and surely aware of the subdivisions in bloom just a few miles to the east, seem no less jury-rigged, and no less austere, than they did when we infested a particularly poor example of one thirty years ago. The tar-paper shacks have neither vanished nor abandoned their tradition of yards swept clean of all grass and dwellers swept clean of all hope. The churches seem no less fatigued for the fact that their congregations have lately managed to bankroll a fresh coat of paint, or a course of aluminum siding, or a rather-too-obvious brick façade. The fields offer no indication that they will ever support anything more ambitious than the next shy crop of feed corn or hay, or the next silly ostrich farm, or the next state-sanctioned facility for juvenile offenders, or the next overpopulated boneyard.

  In the untamed patches between the fields and the farmhouses, and the shacks and the boys’ homes, and the ostriches and the graves, it is still possible to glimpse something akin to what must have greeted Europas petards as they made their way up the American bowel (with a brief stop at the spot where Richmond herself would metastasize), and it is still possible to imagine the conditions under which these people, or their children, or their children’s children, succumbed to and incubated and spread the pastoral fever that would cheat them of any real chance at happiness, and would in essence enslave them, and would grant increase only to those with the will and the wherewithal to enslave others instead. Such crimes startle but do not concern me. I care only that this fever so boiled the brains of my people that they were disposed, after more than 250 years spent sampling the agricultural brutalities on offer in Maryland and Pennsylvania and Ohio and Illinois and Oklahoma and Illinois again, to prostrate themselves, in Virginia, before the very source of their already rampant infection.

  Illinois bull

  My father, perhaps heedful of the fact that his great-grandpa had been gored to death by an Illinois bull who did not fancy servitude, and having been touched by the poverty that results from such a miscalculation, did not involve us directly with cows, and for that I am grateful. Nor did he purchase a tractor so that it might pin and crush himself, or me, under its weight, as had befallen his mother, who had survived it, and a boyhood neighbor or two, who had not. Then again, he could not afford one. A combine, such as the enormous instrument that gnawed the legs off at least one of his former schoolmates, and for “hours” held the rest of its meal suspended by shoulder strength alone, lest the entrée follow the appetizer, was, thankfully, even further beyond his means. What animals we accoutred ourselves with did not bellow and bawl but only woofed and clucked, and what machines we got hold of, most of them workaday tools lent out by or stolen from Richmond-area construction sites, or else purchased with great reluctance from the southern states cooperative at the county’s sad center, were employed not so much to farm as to create the impression of a farm that had long ago been destroyed.

  We were aided in that pursuit by the house itself, which was put up, badly, in the middle of the nineteenth century and looked about ready to fall over, which in truth it was. My father was obliged in time to shove pneumatic jacks under its southerly side (the structure, longingly, faced west) so that it would not collapse entirely and kill us all in our beds. Otherwise his attentions implied that a partial disintegration would be acceptable and even preferred. The tin roof, where it was not covered by a dull green paint that must have been designed to blister in the sun, was rusted through to an extent that suggested replacement even to a child, but my father made no move to hinder its corrosion and seemed almost pleased with the gothic sentiment it related to the road below. The front porch, which within a few seasons of our introduction to it had chosen to commit suicide, my brother and I tore away from the house completely, and left the detritus to blanch in a pile in the yard. Yet our father neither ordered nor himself began the erection of a new approach there, and so the front door, which without its preface floated a formidable two feet off the wormy ground, was never afterward used. Even company, rare, could see to go around back.

  My mother, the town girl, screamed and on occasion effected some small augmentation to, say, the indoor bathroom, which was probably tacked on in the 1950s and, although retiled, could not be made to smell much better than the old outhouse did, or to the kitchen, also tacked on, which because of the distance to the nearest town grocery store (we could not afford the country prices) came to host a freezer the size and shape of two stacked coffins, in which slept quaint venison stews and pig meat got locally, yes, but mostly the frozen pizzas and loaves of processed bread that would become our lifeblood. She also held forth on the house’s airflow, or lack thereof, which my father’s installation of a huge electric fan in the attic did little to revise, unless, like the now greatly agitated black widows and brown recluses, one happened to live in the attic. Apart from these half-answered fits, she adopted a pose not unusual among Americans who have made a dire mistake they cannot pay to unmake: she pretended that our plainly lessened state was somehow a step up from town life, and she insisted, with no real success, that her children back her in this ancient and wearisome falsehood.

  Her face, when not wet and distorted with panic and recrimination, set itself in a smile that managed both to convey and to subvert the notion “Isn’t this fun?” while my father, ensnared in his own attempt to sustain what level of denial was necessary to his pride, worked to erase any hint that the stead was, or ever had been, able to sustain human life. We all allowed, outwardly or inwardly, that our position was sore and liable to worsen, but my father could not be sure that the farm’s inherent limitations would cleanse him entirely of guilt in the tragedy to come. And so he practiced to enhance them for the benefit of anyone who drove or wandered by. That a man would choose to be the direct cause of his decline rather than its mere victim is, after a fashion, admirable, yet this was not the sole, nor even the primary, impulse behind his campaign. An anger at himself, and at his situation, and at the weight of his dependents, caught hold of him too, and where he could not direct that anger at us he moved directly against the property, and brought his wrath to bear especially on its outlying elements, and did not stop to consider how this program of ruin might impact the family’s chances to lay in even a modest store of dignity and hope.

  Sunder

  I recall several days spent in the effort to sunder an ancient gray shed, formerly an icehouse, that had surely done harm to no one, and had probably been of enormous benefit to the beings around it, and did not give over its wood and tin and nails with an ease that implied a welcome end to a worthy term of use. This shed fought us with an obstinacy unlike what would present in the old outhouse, or the remains of the front porch, or the strangely elaborate system of deserted bee boxes near the deserted chicken coop, or the uninsulated walls of what was supposed to have been our living room, and groaned considerably in the struggle, I now believe, to shield us from what lay beneath its cracked and rotted floor. When we had yanked up enough of its boards to enable us to stare down into the chasm below, and to contemplate what might be exposed once we had ripped away the whole of that lid, I told my father we had better let the building be. In my attempt to make out the bottom, I had sensed, and smelled, something of what awaited us among the roots. I was also pretty sure I had seen something move down there.

  Because he was not spurred by vanity and rage alone; and because an attitude of forfeit (which soothed the vanity and excused the rage) was his birthright as a child of the American wilderness, and was his only recourse now that he was trapped out in it again; and because that attitude had already begun to decay into a simple indolence; and because that indolence would cause him to look upon any structure, including the main body of
the house, as ready firewood for when the weather turned against us; and because this lunacy would persist until his sons were of sufficient size to serve as his proxies in the drudgery that would see them carry or push or drag chunks of felled tree from forest to field to yard, there to cleave these burdens with axe and agony into pieces small enough to be consumed by the house’s wood stove (which would, despite its gluttony, heat no more than the room it was in and would actually attack and dissipate, by means of convection and black magic, what few pockets of warmth could be found in any of the others); because of these and other inebriants, my father resolved to wave off my counsel and to apply his crowbar, borrowed or stolen, to what was left of the shed’s floor, as well as to what was left of our claim on self-preservation.

  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.