Against the Country (18 page)

The youngest among them, and to my mind the brightest, was a kid a year or two behind me at school in whose talk and bearing I had detected an insouciance that made it impossible now to accept him as a deliverer of my soul, nor for him to behave as such. He was clearly an old hand at being found out for a missionary, though, and met my awareness of his embarrassment (and delight over it, since it might prevent him from telling tales on my family at school) with a quick nod at me and an interest in something more pressing stage left. While the adults in his party came forward with their handshakes
and jabber about Jehovah and so forth, he disappeared coolly around the back of the house.

A short time later, after I had explained to the others that my parents were not home, and that I was not authorized to make large-scale spiritual decisions on behalf of the family, and had seen them safely back to their car (a nice big Buick, as I remember it, though possibly it was a Monte Carlo), my schoolmate emerged with great fanfare into the side yard, engaged in a deadly tussle with Ginger Snap, the violent little half-bred hound we had adopted almost without knowing it and then, to our eternal regret, ignored. He pulled at something while she pulled too, thrilled by the company and of course by the game, which eventually he won, which I thought a bit hard-hearted, and which success seemed almost to propel him toward me, his face made up in its usual mix of boredom and amusement while the dog leapt after him and failed always to reclaim her prize. When he reached me he handed over (with a new look now of dramatic concern, though it was hardly a match for the dog’s) one of those wedged-shaped boxes of d-Con rat poison my parents had placed in and under and around the house so as to help along the fiction that rats never fancied and overran country homes, especially those occupied by intelligent and well-meaning white people. This accomplished, he said, as he walked past me toward that big Buick (or Monte Carlo, it might have been), “At least we saved your dog.”

What threw me about a troupe of Witnesses descending upon us in or around the summer of 1982, I am ashamed to say, was not really that we were seen (or perhaps only I was) in clothes more ludicrous than what we normally put on for school, or that we had failed to offer these visitors so much as an ordinary glass of water, or that our faith both seemed and was a small thing in comparison with theirs, or that the youngest among them had removed from the mouth of our littlest bitch a box of rat poison whose contents she would otherwise have got at and died from, which incident then became the basis of a semicomic routine between the kid and myself at school, wherein when we passed each other in the hall he would call out, “I saved your dog,” and I would answer, “You saved my dog,” with much laughter on his part, and a lesser amount on mine, until finally, after a six-month run of this inane and almost daily performance, I was taken with a sudden horror at its sameness, and wondered if it did not constitute a hex thrown up between us in order to fill with simulacrum the space where an actual friendship might have formed, whereupon I resolved to break the curse, if it was one, with a threat to kick the boy’s ass could he not come up with something better to say to me at school, after which I was greeted always with the mock tremble of
“But … but I saved your dog,”
to which I had no choice but to
respond, as I did for the remainder of the time we passed and failed to know each other, “But you saved my dog.”

That dog, by the way, met a terrible fate. I would discuss it here except that I do not care to see my personal tribulations shown up just yet by what ordinarily befalls dogs out in the American countryside, where they are commonly assumed to enjoy long and happy and touchingly purposeful lives. My own touching purpose was chores. My happiness, where there was to be had any, was derived from those moments when I found myself able to sneak off into the chicken coop with a pinched cigarette, or else my pinched penis, so as to blow smoke or spermatophore out the mesh-covered window in the southernmost wall. The other walls there were to be avoided, at least by my cigarette, as they had boxes up against them full of books our father had not yet consigned to the maw of his insatiable stove. I recall that Joyce and Pound and Eliot and Stein lay stacked in those cardboard coffins, as did Woolf and Dos Passos and Porter and Hemingway and Faulkner and Fitzgerald and Cather and Ellison and Baldwin and Williams (W. C.). Twain was interred out there too, as were Melville and Hawthorne and Emerson and Thoreau, Whitman and Grant and Howells and Du Bois. Welty and O’Connor; Bellow and Roth; Salinger, Kerouac, Kesey, Vonnegut; Pynchon, Barth, Barthelme, Blake; Shakespeare and Defoe; Carlyle and Dickens; Thackeray, Hardy, Huxley, Waugh: all these and more were given over to the termites and the silverfish and whatever else cared to have at them. The Henry James books alone were so crawled over and bit through that I wondered at the time whether Goochland’s insects did not harbor a particular taste for his prose.

“Recall,” though, is imprecise here and so really the same as dishonest. I ought better to have written “surmise” or some such, since my recollection of which books were in what box, and what condition they were in, could not possibly have predated the day my father abruptly ordered them all removed
from their exile in the coop and set up on shelves in the house’s front room, which action I would like very much to say heralded his return to sanity but I know now resulted only from the fact that the books were proving a confusion to the chickens we had by then, to my detriment, acquired. The one volume I can remember taking out of its box, prechicken, was a paperback of three novels by Samuel Beckett, and I remember this only because I had recently been bused into Richmond to see, in an educational matinée at the Virginia Museum, a performance of his play
Waiting for Godot
that employed as an actor a live chicken.

We were meant to be impressed by the chicken, even if it did not have one of the speaking parts. In the question-and-answer period that followed the several unasked-for curtain calls, the student actors who had so recently bored us all to death (and besides our meager busload there was only an assortment of pink- and blue-haired old ladies in the rows that day: about an hour or so in we had begun to take bets on which one of their cotton-candy noggins would nod off next) tried to soften up what they apparently mistook for an audience of spellbound suburban teenagers (and recently revived old biddies) by means of a humorous reference to the chicken. They assumed this would lead on to more serious matters; it did not. Being not suburban in our sensibility (though even then we might have been, if you consider all those vehicles afforded us, and those kept-up state roads, and those town jobs to be had for a mere fifty- or eighty-mile round-trip) but dug-in rural, and so bound to be miserly with our trust, and pissed off about the length of the play, and sure to think any farm animal onstage an intentional jab at us, we asked no question that was not along the lines of “Was that a real chicken?” and “How would that chicken know where to stand?” and “Do you ever have to hit it, or does it remember on its own?” and “Do you use the same chicken each time, or do you eat it after and audition a
new one?” In time some telepathy between the adults in the room ascertained that the lesson was best ended here, and we were stood up with apologetic glances from our teachers toward the stage and hustled back onto the bus.

Usually I deplore the attitude that turns us away from language on the grounds that most talk, and all writing, is no better than condescension, but in this case I must admit it was real fun, and I can therefore imagine how it might also be fun, and not the grave and patriotic business our louder scolds make it out to be, to vote in such a way that denies funding to our schools (which do at times place a troublesome emphasis on words), and to the too-literate social programs sustaining an overly talkative poor, not
despite
how this condemns America to ruin but
because
it does, which I agree is the funnier idea; to swallow and pollute as we do not
despite
how this will one day erase our kind from the planet but
because
it will, which, again, is much funnier; to sanction and celebrate, in the meantime, a bacchanal of torture and death not
despite
how this might lower us in the eyes of an omniscient God but
because
it will, if He is anything like our rendition of Him, and so might want us to accomplish more with His gifts of life and word and will, and the science and settlements built upon these things, than the mere obliteration of ourselves and all wordless beings besides, however funny that may one day prove to be.

My father, with no joke to bring before God beyond his own discovery that humanity is impossible to abide and somewhat harder to escape, and with no share in the popular gibes of the day (see above, and below) than what deceitful politicians were able by his vote to put him in for, and with no real desire (notwithstanding those oiled and death-ready guns in his closet) to down any complex being save himself, was nonetheless availed of a gaiety that we, who were his children, ordinarily sought to avoid. This attitude was not wanting in and of itself, but we had seen too often the hope of it dashed, with disastrous results for the rest of us, to rekindle and fan it without good provocation.

We had seen him crush out his cigarette and spring up from the table, with fire in his stomach, and a coal on his tongue, and who can say what in his heart, to proclaim before visiting angels the news that this was a house held wholly by Satan, or might as well be, for all it would ever have of God. And we had felt firsthand the darkness that swallowed the rest of his day when these apparitions did not engage him on the matter but simply fluttered away. Given his stance and his temperament, we were not about to inform him of the opportunity he had missed, by mere minutes, to set upon witnesses (not common word-spreaders, mind you, but witnesses, like you might get in town!), now that he was surrounded at last by a landscape
capable of supporting his claims. We chose to keep our silence, and to live with the fear that he would somehow discover this treachery, and extract a common payment for it, so long as there remained even a small hope that he might hunt for his amusement elsewhere.

It must have amused our father, on some level, to see his children crawl out a second-story window and hurl themselves off a rusted tin roof; it certainly did us. He might have proscribed such an activity in town, where we were liable to light on concrete, but in the country a child met no worse than clay if he made it past the nail-ridden boards in the yard, and so our “suicide leaps” were generally tolerated and, by that tolerance, encouraged. Tree skinning was also a potential pleaser, even if the skinner had it in mind to throw himself out of the uppermost boughs, provided he went up properly, with arms and legs wrapped around the trunk, and did not simply reach for the lower branches and monkey up that way, which was not so exhausting an enterprise and far less funny when the child finally succumbed to gravity and fell. Our mother, the hydrophobe, played Ophelia whenever one of us spilt blood from a wound that would likely scar, but our father kept his grip then, and by his calm made it clear that he expected and perhaps even wanted the scars, and on that count we dared not disappoint.

This man wished no serious injury upon his children, I am sure, and was not so broken himself as to laugh outright at their hurts, but he did show something beyond the ordinary schadenfreude when one of us (say, I) felt a thorn driven so deeply into a knuckle during a “sword fight” that the quack on call at the local clinic was forced to dig the foreign material out
through the opposite side (though that might have happened back in Illinois, at a cut-rate day camp there), or when one of us (we are safely returned to Virginia now) shinnied up the wrong side of a tree, and so found himself overwhelmed by poison ivy, or oak (I could never tell one from the other), which lotions could not tame and even the slightest scratch would spark, until the whole of the body was subsumed by chancres and all chance of sleep was gone, as was all hope of my thinking that tree or any other a friend. Rubbing alcohol, which I had seen my mother use to cut and evaporate the muck that accumulated on her face in the thick southern air, proved the only means of lessening my skin’s whorish welcome to these sores, though I would never quite vanquish them. Almost as soon as they scabbed over there began on my face a new set of eruptions, which heralded the onset of pubescence, a state for which my pornographic rides on the bus had readied me, yes, but had taught me no gentlemanly cure.

I would not be held accountable for my actions during that time, just as I would not see my father held accountable for his, though he did take an unworthy interest in this new set of blemishes on me, and poked much fun at them, and in time pronounced them evidence of his theory that we should each of us bathe less often, lest we relinquish to the creek, or to the sump (where, really, did all that water go?), our “essential oils.” Whether this thought resulted from an honest consideration of the evidence before him, or from a madness brought on by the land’s constant pestering, I do not know, but I did notice that he seemed never to apply his new science to the pond just behind and to the north of us.

Being on someone else’s property, and so not by law afforded him, this pond yet attached itself to my father by another law. Not a law above mankind’s, exactly, as the God-fearing folk will always cite, but a law deeper than and far, far below it,
by which not only that forfeited barn across the southern pasture testated to him but also what inheritance had been frittered away all those miles and years to the west. By this law he decreed that his children should cast themselves upon those waters whenever the heat oppressed, and at other times besides, and would not retreat from that position even when he heard gunplay in the woods all around and remembered that this was an acreage owned, according to man’s law, by an inebriation of weekend hunters too daft or too blind to tell a deer in a field from a child in an inner tube on a pond.