Against the Country Read online

  BOOK TWO

  Partial birth

  Rattle

  Balloons

  A fictional magic

  National color wheel

  Bloodless composition

  Brief window

  The confluence of long roads

  (Gestation)

  The second sort of suicide

  Names

  Rifle

  Pistol

  Shotgun

  Sanctuary

  Partial birth

  I could see the yellow beast coming for me a long ways off, as no impediment of trees obtained to the north, only an eerie undulation of pasture that seemed almost in cahoots with the road against it, and when the weather was hot, and the windows were open, the creature’s groan could be heard so far prior to its appearance that I was able to wash and dress and even swallow something before the time came to descend the driveway and be swallowed up myself. When it was cold out, and thin panes obscured the sound but got nowhere with the frost, and shiver fits throughout the night had anyway abolished my dreams, I was often enough still in my bed when I heard the muffled bleat from the road below, and I knew then that I would need to run or else be left behind. Neither snack nor toilet would be mine on those occasions, but I at least had the advantage of being fully clothed and shod inside my sleeping bag, without which foresight I do not think I could have been convinced, or would have been able, to rise at all.

  I wonder: When the great root below us inspired in Thomas Jefferson his idyllic hallucinations, and began to grow its system westward under the Appalachian range (toward the Mississippi snake oil it would require in order to reach and pervert California), did it bestow upon him a vision of the roving metal stomach that would, a century and change after his presidency, gobble up the nation’s schoolchildren by law each morning and vomit them into a freshly graveled parking lot? Did he understand that whereas this process would inflict upon the town child no more than a momentary and perhaps even a healthy terror, it would prove for the rural child a journey so drawn out and confined with the personality flaws of his peers as to allow for the partial birth of those communities his shacks and his farmhouses had tried and failed to form? Was the architect of the American dirt clod aware that these mobile townships would exhibit none of the grace and wholesomeness he had predicted for his agricultural societies, and would in fact be predicated on a hatred of self and surrounds, and would be policed no better than the shacks and the farmhouses themselves? (which, after all, stayed in one place, or appeared to.) Did he know, or care, that the introduction of such a predator into the Virginia hills would ensure that I received my first nonfamilial Virginia whipping, and enough thereafter to make me question my assumption that Virginia homes were to be got away from whenever possible, long before a Virginia schoolhouse had even come into view?

  Almost as soon as I sat down on a Goochland schoolbus I was beaten into tears and rage by a teenage boy who with wide worried eyes yelled, “This ain’t slavery days no more! This ain’t slavery days no more!” which refrain I recall as clearly as I do my confusion about what the statement meant and what action of mine could possibly have prompted either the rhetoric or the volley of blows. Less violent passengers, saints to my mind, pulled me free of those fists, and up off the dull green vinyl where I had uselessly sought shelter, and shoved me aft, toward the equally amused faces of the children who more closely resembled me. I would make a clever reference to Rosa Parks here, but that would find me guilty of a great anachronism: in 1977, enrolled in what the Virginia Commonwealth loosely called the sixth grade, I had no idea who that woman was, nor could I discern much difference between the bow and stern of a vehicle that seemed to me an insult to everyone on it. I found a place in back near my brother, whose size and potential for violence might have protected me had the shock of life in the countryside not rendered him impassive and largely mute until puberty, at that point still as foreign to him as were the ominous firs he watched file past, from left to right, through the dirty windows of what he had instinctively understood to be no better than a cattle car.

  When later I pressed my father for some clues about what had befallen me on the bus, he told me patiently of how the darker people in America had once been slaves to the lighter; of how a great conflagration had been set to free them; of how this effort had been doctrinally successful but not practically so; of how more than a hundred years later the slaves’ descendants remained in social and economic bondage; of how countless men and women had struggled all the while to change this; of how these people had made such a slow progress in their art that as recently as a generation ago, in this part of the country and many others, it was still possible that a brown boy who said hello to a pink girl, or in any way challenged the illegal and immoral order of things, might be set upon by a band of pink boys who would beat him senseless and maybe even to death; of how this notion of justice never seemed to apply to a pink boy who said hello, or did worse, to a brown girl; of how even a secondhand knowledge of that not wholly bygone era was bound to engender a certain resentment in children whose parents and aunts and uncles had themselves been so victimized; and of how none of this was any excuse for a boy of his to lose a fistfight on the bus.

  I had a follow-up question (Why did we move here?), but it went unanswered and probably unheard. Within a day or two my brother and I found ourselves in front of the house with cheap padded gloves on our hands, our father keen to train us up so that we would not be made fools of in what he apparently mistook for the landscape of his own childhood. I remember that I began to cry, mostly out of anticipation, and set upon my brother with swings of the overhand type, which he casually countered with swings of the underhand type, which shortly left me aware of a great sky before me, and the earth against my back, and an intense nausea centered at the base of my skull. To my right, on the perpendicular, my father jutted out, shocked by one son and no doubt ashamed of the other. At my feet, my brother, whom I knew to be upright but who seemed just then to be lying back against the nothingness behind him, stared out, as he often did, at the nothingness above us all.

  Rattle

  He had lately become host to prophetic dreams, this brother, and for a time his relation of those dreams was our only real conversation. A rattler, he might say, and sit up in his bed, and point at the woods, and although we were far enough east and north to make rattlesnakes a rarity I would nonetheless hear, when I dared approach the patch he had indicated, the distinctive sound all those hopelessness-themed westerns my father watched had taught me to fear. Blackie will vanish, would come his next glimpse, the finger aimed this time at another patch of woods, and although I took comfort in the thought that the nearly human mutt we had brought with us from Illinois would not be killed by a rattler, that evening there would indeed be no bark and run and wiggle when we called the little dog’s name. My sister may have understood that there was a locust or a cicada in these parts whose sound (from a certain distance, and enhanced by the echo chamber of the trees) was very much like a snake’s rattle, and she may have concluded that the dog’s absence was easily explained by his previous attempts to desert us and return to town, or at least to locate a family less obviously doomed than our own, but for my part I put great store in my brother’s weirdness, and I believed that even awake he was especially attuned to the future being urged and constructed in that awful place.

  If his features froze up while we were at play in the trash pit, then I knew a car would soon pass by and see us, or just had, and I knew the family’s already loud reputation was again on the rise. If his eyes sounded anger, with grace notes of resentment and enervation, then I knew we were about to be, or just had been, called upon to perform yet another dirt-intensive labor that would diminish rather than augment our situation. If his eyes read guilt, with descants of panic and rage, then I knew he was about to be whipped, or just had been. If he avoided my presence all day long, and did not simply stand beside and ignore me as he did at most other times, the
n I was probably about to be whipped myself. If, from field or yard, he looked to the house with pursed lips and narrowed lids, or stared hawkeyed and open-mouthed at same, or stayed fixed on his chore, or went slack in the shoulders, or went suddenly rigid, or considered the middle distance, or threw his implement down and wandered off into that middle distance, then I knew our mother was due for, or had just begun, or had just completed, her next hysterical aria in the opera buffa that had resulted when her folk-guitar fantasy of a country life collided with her husband’s more powerful Jew’s harp.

  And if my brother did not show his usual relief when the recitative set in, and if he rocked back and forth on his bed after dinner, and listened through our window to the softer but no less horrible hum of yard and pit and weed and forest, and if he seemed particularly attentive to the silent scream that rose up off the obliging little road in the background of this étude for washboard and moonshine, then our weekend, I knew, was over, and I understood that when I awoke, and perhaps even before, the beast would be here to summon us again with its own despicable music.

  Balloons

  I was more prepared for my second fistfight on the bus but still lost it. A high-school girl who had had a bad day lit into me when some boys in back asked me to get her attention; I did. She had an overhand style that was hell on my ears and the top of my head, and although I caught her here and there on the breasts I was soon overwhelmed and started to bawl, which seemed only to inspire her: the blows came faster and with greater force than they had at the outset, and by the time they tapered off I could not say with any certainty where I was. This girl beat me with such an exuberance that I thereafter conceived of human beings in her part of the world as no more than hatred-filled balloons in search of a rent by which to empty themselves on me. Once delivered of their gasses, these balloons could be reasonable and even kind (such as when this girl phoned our home to apologize for her assault on what was, after all, a blameless boy still in elementary school), but I learned that circumstance soon patched and reinflated them, and caused them to wear again a bloated and uncomfortable look, and ensured that they would be ready to vent themselves on whatever fool was unlucky or unwise enough to nick their rubber the next time around.

  That was my first taste of rural intimacy, and no similar encounter has since outdone it. All the elements were there: the unforeseen approach, the unwilled brutality, the ebb of awareness, the inchoate shame, the fear that abides. Even the apology will not strike the initiate as uncommon and may actually spur in him, as it does in me, a nostalgia for that lull after the passion when, the bruises still fresh on his face and his arms, he reviews the event and searches vainly for a victory in it, and considers what program of defense might at least have eased the defeat, and wonders whether a sudden diplomacy might not have avoided the insult altogether, and asks whether the phoned-in apology was not in itself a variety of insult, and so considers a hopeless revenge (balloons), and so considers a hopeless truancy (balloons at home), and finally ponders the worth of a soothsaying brother who could not be bothered to sit up in his bed and point at the road and say, simply, A high-school girl will beat the shit out of you on the bus.

  While this brother denied me useful intelligence, and for the most part kept to the cocoon our predicament had caused him to spin, and while our sister endured her own haunted hayrides to and from an even smaller brick building in which little was taught and less learned, I became the regular chump in short but violent bouts whose only purse was my all but guaranteed humiliation. No offense on my part was necessary: the schoolday or the night before would see to that, would so swell these creatures, and so fray their fabric, that only the slimmest pretext was ever required for the inevitable breach to be directed at me. I was set upon for being “white” (I was pink), for being “racist” (I feared all the hues I saw equally), for being a “honky” (which word amused me), for “laughing” (I admit to it), for being “funny looking” (fair to say), for being “bucktoothed” (I was never), for having “freckles” (I concede the point), and finally I was called out by a fat boy roughly my own age on the charge of being “skinny.”

  Due to what pressures had built up inside of me, and due to what bus-and-blacktop combat techniques I had picked up from my recent string of defeats, and due also to some weight-bred slowness in the fat boy, I came out the surprise victor in this one, and so began my parents’ sad introduction to our Jeffersonian community, such as it pretended and failed to be. Apparently all was right when I was the victim in these beatings, but as soon as I gained a foothold, and caused a bully to bleed and sob (I am told that toward the end I made a serious bid to break the fat boy’s arm), I was judged a nascent sociopath, the clear instigator of a number of previous disturbances, and there was some talk of my not being allowed to ride the bus at all.

  Because my mother had recently found work at a juvenile-delinquent home nearby, in a forgivable attempt to locate what few town-like elements could survive out there (and in the certain knowledge that we would otherwise all starve); and because this job availed her of a strange new lexicon that considered any child who pled his own innocence to be a potential “incorrigible” who was “putting up a front” in the hopes that he would not be “held down” and made to confront either his “authority issues” or his “homosexuality”; and because my father, although pleased with this sudden brutality in his son, was not fool enough, or man enough (perhaps it is the same thing), to oppose both his wife’s new science and her eternal belief that there was something “off” about her second child; my guilt in the matter was assumed and agreed to, and I found myself treated thereafter as a special case.

  An ad hoc committee of driver and principal and parents decreed that I should sit in the frontmost seat of the bus, on the right, just above the door, and beside me at all times should sit the innocent fat boy. The idea here, I knew (and the fat boy must have), was to force an intimacy between us and thereby a friendship, despite the fact that an intimacy already existed and a friendship never would. He caught me unawares and won our second fight by means of a quick move that saw me pinned beneath his fat; I went for his eyes that afternoon and was able to take the rematch. The fourth or fifth encounter ended with an uppercut to my privates; the fifth or sixth, to his; and so on. Even my brother began to show some alarm at the brute predictability of these bouts, if not also an anticipation of them. As for me, I remember most clearly the long rides afterward, the fat boy and I both in tears as we swore additional violence but mainly stared out in silence at the scrub pine and scrub pasture that were our common yet undeclared enemy.

  A fictional magic

  There were other foes the fat boy and I could not share. The degreed hippie types who worked at the delinquent home, amongst whom my mother believed for a time that she had found an air pocket of sophistication in the gob of tobacco spit that had become her existence and ours; these “group workers” and “group leaders” and so forth who thought that thermal underwear and down vests bought at a Richmond mall, as well as jugs of corn liquor bought off the odd local, put them well in touch with the rural experience but in no way compromised their superiority to it (given the sort of progressiveness that would enable them, for instance, to consider the purchase of a sexually explicit educational film their criminal charges did not require and would not anyway be allowed to see, as it happened to feature one of the degreed hippies); these bearded mediocrities who approached every being they met or engendered as a broken wing they might nobly fail to repair, whose minds were but marginally less dented by drug and drink than were those of the teenagers they cowed and annoyed; who with these marginally better minds perceived only a benevolent and therefore a fictional magic in the earth below, and in the pine needles above, and so were flabbergasted each time yet another boy bolted in yet another frantic attempt to achieve town; these denim-butted frauds who led my mother, and eventually my father (my father!), to half believe all over again that nature could be a palliative to human despair a
nd not merely its origin, which idea would inflict upon us the redundant horror of camping and canoe trips we could not afford to take but for equipment borrowed from the boys’ home and idiocy borrowed from the same; these damp-eyed sensitives; these hypocritical bear-huggers; these vicious pacifists; these martyrs to self-involved frankness somehow convinced my mother that her son’s “antisocial” behavior might predicate a well-meant but legally disastrous physical intervention by the delinquents who, because their keepers were too “understaffed” to school them privately, and because the law demanded (and I believe still does) that criminal children be granted the same poor chance at education as any other American, found themselves shipped daily into the county high school on the very scow that collected me.

  I cannot adequately describe the shock with which I greeted the news that juvenile delinquents rode my bus, but I might do all right with my worry over the fact that I was to be held personally accountable for any damage they caused or caught between their confinement and the high school. Which particular riders these young addicts and stabbers were eluded me for some time, either because they had gone to some effort to disguise themselves or because they were so comfortable with what level of violence presented on the bus that they saw no need to raise it, but I did identify them finally by their utter disregard of me. Destined to disprove the ludicrous theory that delinquents will rise to a runt’s defense, and apparently unaware that they could now beat me themselves without fear that anyone but their victim would be blamed, these T- and flannel-shirted boys, who fancied the same chokers and hickeys as everyone else, and in whose hair could be read the same struggle between the Virginia humidity and the Virginia dirt, gave themselves over to the depressed topography our bus studied twice each weekday and, I imagine, paid particular attention to those spots where a teenage hitchhiker might not seem too great a threat, or a temptation, to a driver whose desperate passenger had no idea in which direction town actually lay.