Against the Country (16 page)

I bitch now, yes, and with cause, but in the event I made no real complaint. Like most country children, I had come to consider all pain, and all swelling and itch, to be the mere price of admission to this world, and so I wondered no more over what the wasps had done to me than I did over the two-night skin-crawl and inability to breathe properly that had followed my father’s installation, with my conscripted help, of the cheap fiberglass insulation he saw fit to staple into our roof’s underside with the brown paper backing snug to the wood, and the fluffy
pink filaments in and against us, which was surely an error, or else a slow attempt at murder-suicide, though to have voiced such an opinion then would have risked accusations of sabotage and a further suspicion of faggotry.

I shut my mouth too on those occasions when I thought to employ a comb at the pus-speckled bathroom mirror, and felt in my wrist some tension beyond the usual tug and tangle, and reached back to discover a vast tacky wetness there, and a rubberish nubbin attached to my scalp like an aberrant mole, and understood that I had yet again impaled a tick so bloated on what had formerly been my own blood that even a dull plastic tine could pop him. I did not call out for assistance then but simply pulled the wrinkled shell free from its moorings, and tossed it dead or dying into the toilet, and made use of the repatriated sauce to whelm and subdue what strands were closest by, grateful that I would not have to chase after every cowlick this time with ordinary well water and spit. So accustomed had I become to insults of this kind that I went some weeks with a greatly troubled anus and the sight of wriggly white threads in my stool, each seeking hopelessly to regain the warmth it had just now vacated, before I bothered my mother with the news that her second son’s lower bowel had become grossly inhabited by pinworms.

Little white pills from the county clinic, as prepared for this contingency as it was for snakebite and the occasional if suspect chainsaw accident, soon routed the little white worms (for a time I feared that my digestion alone would be required to perform this trick), though I would never quite be cured of the impulse to examine what went into or out of me, and I would be cognizant always of where it was I sat, and what it was I had touched to my lips, lest I swallow again the eggs of this worm, if not some worse, or else hatch and invite its babies up into me, where their forebears had already prepared for them a moist and cozy abode.

Up or up into; down or down into: it mattered less to my turned stomach and itchy crack how these demons got in than that they palpably had, and would be back again shortly if encouraged, and had mapped out well their miserable townships within me, and had determined to start new lives there rather than remain any longer in the dirt below my clenched fundament, or in the weeds beyond my loud mouth, and were harbingers all of more terrible intrusions to come.

From the raids foreshadowed by the worms in my ass I must in all fairness exclude the rats, as they preceded the worms and, despite multiple measures to the contrary, survived them. These traders in filth, these brokers of disease, who in the popular imagination are denizens only of town and hence enough reason to leave it, were so well represented in Goochland’s clearings that I sometimes thought us squatters on their property rather than them on ours. These, and not the heat, and not the constant threat of unsquashed and vengeful spiders, and not the hum and stab of kamikaze wasps, and not the muffled repeat of my father’s stolen staple gun against pink fibers let loose to swirl among the fecal motes we normally inhaled, led me to abandon all hope of a retreat any nearer the sky than I already had. For a while I convinced myself that those peripheral flashes of gray in the attic were indicative of squirrels who had mistaken our house for a wide and hollow tree, and so looked to situate their nuts within its reaches, but the illusion would not hold: whilst arranging boards and boxes in my aerie one night I chanced to corner one of these animals, and noticed that it had an oily string in place of the usual bushy tail, and that its face was thinner than what I had come to expect, and that the dots with which it greeted the world betrayed not squirrelishness at all but rather a keen and unbreakable rage, which in a sudden spurt saw the entirety of its body launched against me.

I blocked the rat’s assault by means of a box thrown between us, but my evenings in the attic were over, and I rarely went up there afterward except to fetch some stored and hard-to-find item, whereupon I announced my arrival with claps and loud whistles, so as to frighten off, if only for a measure or two, what sharpened teeth lay in wait for me there. Each subsequent trip up that yanked-down and unfolded ladder reminded me that where I had failed two uncles of mine, younger brothers of my father, had in their teens made for themselves a fine and rat-free haunt in the eaves of their parents’ Illinois farmhouse, and had music up there, and entertained at least one eventual wife that I can recall (with fondness: she could really dance: Hello, Aunt ____!), and a brother or half-brother of hers, and a girl with him too (whose relation to me is less clear), and had carved out a space where these and more could congregate, and laugh together, and play their records, and smoke their dope, and tease one another, and eventually (if not all at once: who can say?) couple without fear or foreknowledge of the day when they would be led, as a matter of simple need, to take work (after generations wholly aware that their kind could not possibly survive as farmers, even sober and celibate ones) as soldiers and printing-plant workers and long-distance truckers and attendants at the nearby nursing homes.

My mother (not blood-related to these people but obliged nonetheless to represent them in what she has always perceived (rightly) to be their grievance against a social contract both she and they think (wrongly) was rigged long ago by her sort of person (being only by small degrees of politesse, and hardly any more money, removed from their sort of person) for the purpose of holding their sort down (one increment of prosperity being about as far as the nearsighted American now can or cares to see, so that the trailer-homed man thinks it perfectly moral to direct his rage against anyone in a better car, while a helper like my mother suffers physical guilt over the fact that
her own children are not, or are no longer, on food stamps), when in fact the contract was rigged long ago (yes, that part is correct) by a sort five or six or ten steps above either one of these sorts (or is it a hundred? or is it a thousand? and does it really matter, given that control of this mechanism has scampered up and down the rope with such agility over the eons, in an effort to obscure and protect itself, yet has never sought, and will never seek, asylum among my own particular sort (or sorts)?)) has on the occasion of paragraphs akin to the previous pronounced me a “snob.”

I say that if I have any such impulse in me it will show in the paragraph just completed, and not in the gem before that. I say that the truth is, or anyway ought to be, sufficient defense against the charge, and that opposing counsel knows full well where to rank my honesty among humans she has either birthed or ignominiously fled. Do I count myself better than my uncles and aunts and cousins? I know that I was meant to: I know that the primary excuse given by my parents for our removal to the Virginia shitscape was an intention to see my siblings and me reared apart from, and uninformed by, uncles who were soon to lose their small grip on reality, and aunts who were soon to lose their small grip on hope, and cousins who were soon to lose their small grip on cash to what chemical replacements for hope and reality (and cash) could be fashioned in the basements and garages and attics of the middle west.

I intend no objection to this worldview but only cite it here as evidence that I, who am in provable fact blood-related to those fled-from midwesterners, and am no obvious improvement on them, was not by any stretch the first in my circle to grab at a cruel conceit in the pursuit of something higher.

Still, this notion of snobbery does weigh on me, as I bet it weighs on every American who tends to go clownish or stony before what he perceives to be those either better off or worse off than he, lest a word or a gesture (which are anyway the same thing) out of place reveal that he thinks himself better rather than only better off, or worse rather than only worse off, such attitudes being proscribed by his television set yet dependably represented on it, so that in truth he cannot help but think himself better (who would not?), and cannot help but think himself worse (who would not?), and so is forever sent in one direction by his scorn and in another by his bitterness. Were it not for his steadfast avoidance of anyone above or below him in this equation he would probably explode.

For myself, I would like to see the American classes mix more, not because I can foresee a day when my fellow citizen will enter a voting booth or a jury box or a convenience store with some livelier spark in his head than that what matters here is how he feels (not thinks, mind you, because people who think are generally out to make him feel bad for not having thought enough, and he will not be made a fool of, except by himself), nor because I honestly believe the nation would benefit much if its voters and jurists and flip-flopped shoplifters suddenly set aside their feelings, being mostly terror and its satellite states, and adopted the reasoned approach Mr. Jefferson championed
publicly (as opposed to the Romantic approach he got wind of privately and,
thinking himself better
, leaned into), which correction might be worth something had this narcotic land, and the sleepy institutions built upon it, and the nightmarish educators those institutions then produced, eroded no more than our habit of thought and not our actual capacity for it.

No, despite all temptations of politeness I can discover no decent way to vouch for the native intellect, nor do I harbor much hope for its betterment elsewhere, since emigration would, I suspect (or fear, or maybe “feel” is the word I want here), only further accelerate the export of New World stupidity to the Old, or to the older still, and does that commerce not already redound upon us in towering waves? Do we not daily know our stupidity returned to us in blatant echo, here and there honed and amplified? Will we still maintain that we are alone on this planet, and in our homes, and that this aloneness alone is sufficient defense against the backwash of an ignorant self-assertion, when the next wave sees us all drowned together like attic rats?

Is this eschewal of anyone remotely dissimilar, in case we might be forced to interact at the mall with someone we perceive to perceive himself better, or with someone we perceive to perceive himself worse, really the brave individualism we imagine? Or is it instead a collective and thus extra-cowardly form of suicide? And is that eschewal, or that suicide, since it takes as an article of faith that no one should ever dare think himself better, not strangely evocative of the sad drab grays of Communism? And did that go well, for the Communists? Are we to suffer their same fate: a collapsed ideology and a collapsed economy, a twenty-first-century serfdom to potato-fed bullies with guns? Are we to dwell in a land where (and we have already had a taste of this) the oligarch with the most potato guns at his beck is proclaimed (first by himself, and then by all the television channels) to be our “commander in chief”? or is
this perilous thought, that no one should ever dare think himself better, safely offset by its very American cousin, that no one could possibly be as good?

These are fascinating questions, I agree, but well beyond my purview here. I leave them to the philosopher, of whom this nation will undoubtedly produce, and then exterminate (or ignore, which amounts to the same thing), many fine examples after my time. My own desire to see the American classes mix more must remain as it always has been: a simple, perhaps even a humble, desire to know whether I am right (if not, I have cause to celebrate; if so, I have reason to cheer!) about my countryman’s innate potentiality to explode.

In a field to the north of our house, one spring day when I was in my fifteenth year, I saw a figure walking the opposite way of mine, far enough off at first that I could make out only a yellow on top, and a blue green below, and a purer green in flapping fronds to the sides, and I wondered for a moment whether this was not some enormous species of migratory flower I might tackle and subdue and stake a great scientific reputation upon. As it neared, though, I could see that it was only a young man of about twenty or so, with wild blond hair and the start of a beard, done up below in a too-large green tee beneath denim overalls that if washed once or twice might have staved off forever that ridiculous mirage about the flower.

I took him to be a college student (for how many would have reached the age he was and still dressed that way out here?), but even as he passed and met my sullen nod with a vibrant “Hello” (and even as this all but proved he was not
of
the place, since any local would have known to offer a stranger in a field no better than coiled suspicion) I began to reflect on the fact that there were no colleges to be had for a good fifty or sixty miles all around. Was this an area hippie then, as yet unknown to me and accidentally kind on account of his being “on” something? The clothes only half supported the notion, and anyway such a person, even if (or because) high, would almost
certainly have carried a gun. Could this instead have been some new varietal of country homosexual, bred perversely to be sweet to passersby and to show no overt interest in a young country boy come across unplucked in a field? I acknowledge such a circumstance to be possible, but up until then I had encountered no fruit bruised and swollen by the Goochland sun that did not wish to pop annoyingly in my mouth, or to be in some less personal way crushed.

Was I hasty, then, about the college kid? No local son even three or four years removed from those weeds, returned to them unwilling on a break and surely aware that only they, paradoxically, and the surrounding trees, could now provide a haven in which to burn his jay out of sight and smell of his parents, would have been so much as cordial to a passing neighbor boy. But could there not somehow have arisen, out of sight and smell of either one of us, a new strain of student? One liberal enough with his friendship, and conservative enough with his judgment (though most school hippies, I learnt later, went solidly the other way around), that an ostentation of fraternity boys might just, in a brave counterintuition, have adopted him for a mascot, and chanted his name too loudly at parties, and derived a kind of self-affirmation from the very fact of him (and how bad are they, really, who can rally around a creature so obviously unlike themselves?), the hippie having rejected, after all (and is rejection not the mother of courage in America, though more often she behaves like the child?), the mores of his own demographic to pledge?