Against the Country Read online

  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.

  A great sorcery

  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.

  Affront

  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.

  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

  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.

  What was to be gained by this sacrifice, aside from the enrichment of those with the effrontery to hype and sell a worthless land that did not anyway belong to them, I cannot say. Perhaps a compact was struck in the olden days to ensure that the bears and the alligators and the snakes and the floodwater would avoid the better settlements, and that lightning and tornadoes would not target them from above, and that earthquakes and sinkholes would not come at them from below, and that ants and termites would not amble in and carry off all that was edible in the meantime, so long as undesirables were sent out into the desolate places to be drained of their wits, and then of the will to proceed, and finally of life itself. I do not know. Every child, I imagine, would like to believe that it has been thrown away for a higher purpose, as opposed to just thrown away.

  Trash pit

  I had seen from the car window where the rural man’s husk went when there was no more work to be had from it: to a sad little churchyard cemetery if he was lucky, or to a smaller and still sadder cemetery in the tall grass behind a farmhouse if he was not, there to explore eternity alongside a wife he could no longer touch, and a mother he could no longer do for, and a father he could no longer hope to impress, and in-laws he could no longer hope to avoid, and siblings he could no longer laugh with, and an uncle or two the drink had taken, and the odd aunt no man would marry, and of course all those infants who might have lived longer had they only been born in town. A bleak country churchyard waited patiently for us all back in southern Illinois, ripe with the remains of my cousins and ancestors, but
I worried that my father might turn that invitation down and send his children out to scare up something more expedient in the Virginia weeds. I planned to argue, if he had such a thought, that we should dig our graves in the hole where the shed had been, as the work there was already half done.

  Neither graveyard nor basketball court would occupy that space, though, nor would this depression manage to transform itself, despite any machinations of mine, into a swimming pool. It would morph instead into something poor and strange: an emblem of my father’s imbalance during those regrettable years, a testament to the family’s continued tradition of inelegance and despair, hard evidence of our failure to live any more decently in the country than we had back in town, a catalogue of all we had consumed there in order to survive. It would prove a fester on my childhood unequaled by any other, and an embarrassment not even the stripes on my legs could outshine. It would become, from the moment we first asked what to do with that refuse we could not burn off illegally in the rusty old oil drum just beyond the aborted basketball court, and our underwear-clad father looked up from his umpteenth cigarette and answered with a finger thrust in the direction of the by-now overly familiar crater that abutted the twin ruts we had consented to call a driveway, that darkest of all country landmarks: it would become, though I would not have imagined such a thing possible, even in that county, an enormous open-air trash pit.