Against the Country (12 page)

That is the truth of the matter, and that is all I mean to relate. There was even less call for my mother’s panic than there was for my belief that a young man’s raised arms in the road that day had been anything more than a halfway decent attempt at comedy. Fifteen hours after the incident I boarded the schoolbus and told the driver I was sorry for what I had done and would never trouble her again, after which she said, “Well, you see that you don’t.” So evidently normal was my behavior the previous afternoon that she seemed almost annoyed by my apology for it. We proceeded with the usual gossip and drug negotiations to school, where I repeated my speech to a mostly amused principal, did perfectly well on my test, and was neither
robbed nor challenged all day long. Later on, the bus dropped me off in the usual spot and pulled away leisurely while I stood affixed to the end of our driveway in something like grace. I listened for the engine’s groan to dissipate, and for the crunch of my brother’s footfalls on the gravel to cease once he had reached the softness of the yard, and for the dogs to quiet once he had entered the house, and then I could hear only the wind through the tops of the trees, and the pants and paws coming back at me over the clay, and I knew that something entirely inhuman had worked to secure my pardon out there, and I was overcome by faith and by fear.

The child who holds up his schoolbus with a shotgun and does not forthwith find himself confined to a juvenile facility or a mental home might be almost expected to take a friendlier line with his environment, but I cannot honestly say every change in my attitude postdated that grim afternoon when I decided to approach mere children as if they were a cavalry regiment sent out to ransack the farm. Long before this incident I had been exposed by my father to that virus which causes man to believe his health and soul contingent upon a commerce with the elements, and by my mother to that equally powerful contagion
Be a good sport
, and already the fever was high in me. I ran through the woods and the fields like any child will, and at times I removed all my clothes and leapt into the waterways, never free from worry about turtles and snakes and intestinal parasites and so on, for I was not stupid, but as quick as anyone to get naked and a vigorous if watchful swimmer. Nor was I game only for what nature awaited me below the surface: even prior to my flirtation with closets and shotguns I had begun a close relationship with the trees, or anyway with the more familiar ones near the house, and would climb up into them whether a switch was wanted or not, and would rest in their arms with no thought for their evil and but a small prejudice, really, for the dirt I had escaped by snuggling their bark and their goo.

I was able to put out of my head what an enemy these plants clearly were (and would prove) by a wish not to see my loved ones undone, and myself further shamed, by the loss implicit in our headlong pursuit of simplicity, but whereas the trees could be construed as a benign infestation of the land, in that they seemed to lack any direct capacity to infest me, other potential violators were not so easily dismissed. In particular I feared the corn. We grew tomatoes too, and snow peas, and carrots, and string beans, and lima beans, and beets, and onions, and radishes, and lettuce, and cabbage, and spinach, and green peppers, and red peppers, and eggplants, and potatoes, and cucumbers, and zucchini, and squash, and pumpkins, and cantaloupes, and watermelons, and strawberries, and asparagus, and God knows what else, never enough to sell, of course, but far too much for us to consume naturally, so that when one of these foods came due, and we were sent out to fill grocery bag after grocery bag with it, we could be sure in the knowledge that the coming month’s dinners would force upon and into us so much of this supposed boon that we would eventually gag at the very thought of it.

Still, the corn was more terrible. Beans can take cover in a casserole; peppers will subside in a sauce; lettuce is easily laundered in a salad or a sandwich; any cucumber not bound for the salad can be breaded and fried like a tomato, which will make it either more or less vomitous, depending. Peas and carrots will linger in a stew until you barely notice them. Spinach and squash and cabbage can be boiled down into a harmless mush. Radishes and onions one may politely refuse. Most berries will rot before they can be eaten anyway, and the flies will take care of any melon with its side kicked in. Pumpkins, thank Jesus, are not generally fed to children. Asparagus is prone to mowing accidents. Beets can be avoided altogether if one is prepared to regurgitate them, just once, at the table. No one really minds a potato.

What, though, is to be done with the corn? Unless ground up into a meal it will show itself everywhere: on the cob, where butter and salt cannot hide its babyfood sweetness; on the plate, where it sits hard and wet in an inedible pile; in a stew or a soup, where it represents in such number as to render everything else a mere garnish; in a fruit cocktail, where by rights it does not belong; in a salad, where it seems almost a cancer; in the mouth, where its shell hugs the tooth and slips up under the gum; in the stool, where its constant and undigested presence speaks to how little nutrition is actually to be had from this false and most American of vegetables.

I went out to plant it, though, and to pick and shuck it along with everybody else, none of us possessed of a smile, exactly, for the dumb waxy leaves we would be forced to pull away from each ear, and the little green knobs left behind (which only luck or a very sharp knife could remove), and the thousands of moist silken threads we would yank at and try to rub away but would never be wholly rid of until at last they entered our gobs, and were chewed free of their surrounds, and slid tastelessly down the back of our throats, provided they did not lodge up against our tonsils like flotsam, or catch in our teeth like floss, where because we were not overly familiar with the store-bought variety they tended to rot and remain.

I imagine that we all wondered why the bugs and the deer and the weather could not have got at our crop with more aggressiveness this year, and so spared us the need to stomach so much of it, but were we not also, to a one, availed of some small faith in the notion that in time we would be purified by this ordeal? were we not, in some secret part of ourselves, if not in a perfectly public one, convinced that no family could be expected to endure even our commonplace hardships without being brought closer to the physical truth of existence on this planet, which closeness would imply, if not in fact impart, a wisdom unavailable to those who did not expend a significant
part of their life force, and their sanity, planting and tending and picking and shucking and cleaning and chewing and trying to swallow the corn?

That the faith I kept in this enterprise was clearly insufficient, and likely no match for what was being kept all around me, does not mean that I was then, or should now be considered, entirely beyond belief.

Fashion reaches out through the weeds with at least as much pull as we feel from the magazines and the television set, and has often enough bent these same media to its purpose (human agony), but can it not be refused? Though the mind be weakened by sun and allergen and ennui, does it not remain, on some low and original level, a mechanism of choice? Though the trees wave us ever onward to our doom, do we not yet fan within us some Tinker Bellish spark of will and revival?

I hope so, as I would hate to see them go blameless who hold that pastoral activities alone deserve heaven’s favor, and that admission there will be greased by a self-consciously nursed rural accent and a conviction that God smiles down upon all American expressions of cowardice and butchery. I would prefer to see them punished who insist that any vengeance grown here must be a holy vengeance, even as it halves and sets fire to the innocent; and who maintain that homosexuals were placed on this earth by Lucifer to rape what few white babies can be saved from the abortionist’s tongs; and who think it the height of nonconformity to hold that many (not all, of course,
but more than one is allowed to say
) black babies are conceived with a welfare check in mind, which premeditated theft should in all fairness be met with penalties more severe than the mere mass incarceration already under way, which program itself is unethical (that is, inefficient) in that it wastes further
tax dollars on the care and feeding of prisoners who will never (studies show) be reformed, and are immigrants anyway, or else the burdensome profligation of same (whether they arrived here in shackles is entirely beside the point), and so are in essence the same thing as enemies of the state, and so really (to make the “tough call” here, to protect society as a whole and not merely its privileged minorities) ought to be killed.

I agree that death tends to cut down on the fornication somewhat, but that is about as far as I made it down this particular path, nor did my parents, as thoroughly victimized by the rural myth as anyone else, ever wander off that way. Hence I must conclude that the land does not
of itself
create the bigotry and the bloodlust, does not
of itself
conjure murderous notions and place them in the minds of men, does not ever have to. I believe the land capable of such a magic, and of an opinion to work it should a more awesome display of its power become necessary, but for now the American seems complicit enough in his own destruction that he can usually find on him, in some pocket or other of his blue jeans, the seeds of his pride and resentment, which seeds he will sprinkle after him because that is what is normally done with seeds. The land itself, or rather that beast which today feeds everywhere beneath it, need provide only what it has always provided: annoyance and lack and trepidation. What more is asked for our violence to germinate and grow?

No such philosophy engaged me then, while I climbed a tree, or splashed in a creek, or peed on the corn, or hid in the trash pit and hoped to be forgotten. Mostly I spent my energies on my parents’ new conception of themselves, and to a smaller extent their children, as real Americans, which was undertaking enough, and looked to my chores, and mostly completed them, and did my best to stay out of the on-deck circle for a whipping, where I never stood less than third in line. My father, enforcer of our common law, had since the incident with the schoolbus stepped up his operation (or had he stepped it down?), and my ass and the backs of my thighs knew better than to deviate from his program of reassimilation into ignorance and want. Although for the life of me I could not see what was to be had from this stance, I stuck to my work out of a respect for him, and with an eye toward what pain he might inflict, and tried not to dwell too much on the intrusions, physical and otherwise, that plainly threatened to thrash us all.

I am past those denials now, thank God or Goochland, and would like to elucidate just a few of the items I came to pretend made no real difference to me out there. The first was my mother’s ankle. It was a pretty bone, as those things go, long and thin and made of sound Scottish and German stock, never broken to my knowledge, nor tested in the usual manner (with hard kicks from a parent), but only walked upon (I saw it for
myself) and danced upon (I have reason to hope) and on occasion crossed coyly over its partner, or else folded up under more precious parts on the couch, as women will tend to do. Said ankle had carried my mother through a clean and middle-class town existence in Columbus, Ohio, to parochial schools and ice-cream socials and half-innocent sock hops, down nature-camp pathways and department-store aisles and newly laid sidewalks to meet a boy or two or three, to numerous prom dates fraught with possibility, from the round seats of automobiles to bright urban eateries and back again, and eventually onto trains one still dressed to board, an example of which would transport and append her to an Illinois farmboy upon whom all her sophistication would be charmingly lost, as would all his on her, and whose sophistication or lack thereof would take her by romance and by U-Haul into the pines and hayfields of south-central Virginia with three hungry children in tow, none of whom knew enough to tell their mother not to work the corn rows wearing only a sundress and sandals.

The ringworm that took up residence on that ankle, just above the hillock of bone, was not technically a worm at all but rather a species of fungus, a cousin no doubt of that vast system below us, which breached the surface here and there to diminish our minds and our spirits, yes, but also, apparently, our ankles. The primary shades of this insult, as realized upon my mother, were purple and green and yellow, made shinier by the application of town ointments meant to dull and destroy them, the awful ring curled around almost to her calf and shin and easily discernable from up in the yard, where we children pretended to make ourselves busy while we wondered whether, or when, the sundress and the sandals would allow for an infection of the opposite leg.

Her husband might have explained that only hippie girls on the communes went out to tend crops with no socks or shoes on, their hips bent painfully like my mother’s always were, their
feet planted wide so as to draw attention to the Ur-woman authenticity of their labor. He might have mentioned that the hippie girls caught ringworm too, and a hundred other things just as bad as the venereal diseases they famously acquired in town (which were not anyway unknown in the countryside), and that the copperheads would do far worse to that ankle if given half a chance, and that the spiders were not above setting up shop below a tomato. As far as I know he said nothing, or nothing that was heard. Perhaps he did not mind, really, if the dirt branded his woman in this or that ugly way, so long as she learned from her mark that the land could be infectious and cruel, and to expect no further effort out of him.