Against the Country (17 page)

Perhaps he had not wanted to, had merely hoped to “test expectations” with his happy hello at the open house but was unexpectedly convinced, by the brothers’ beer or his personal dope, to explore a bit further what lay behind that half-friendly greeting: ironically, of course, to begin with but afterward with an earnest and unfolding idea, on both sides, of
what American brotherhood might actually mean, until the time came at last (it was tradition) for all pledges to be grabbed and blindfolded and loaded at night into the back of a rented U-Haul, thereby to be left with no resources many miles from home (was a time when even their clothes would be taken), whereupon it would be seen who would or would not make it back in any fit condition, and some brother (let us imagine him a new one, a favorite from the group just “jumped in”) had proposed, before the truck set out, that it might be funny to abandon at least one of the sub-brothers three times as far out as all the others, which would strand him, by the map here, somewhere in Goochland County (“I mean,
Gooch
land—come on!”), after which the boys in the bay felt the truck lurch out onto the interstate, and heard the brothers in the cab begin to chant “Gooch! Gooch! Gooch!” with no understanding on anyone’s part what this word truly meant, or that it had already been decided, ages ago, with no need for a referendum on the matter, which of the cargo would be dropped in a distant hayfield so that he might come across, the following morning, one such as me.

This was fantasy, of course, and must forever remain so, since I received no adequate answer to the question I posed once I had determined that the puzzle in my head would admit of no obvious solution, which saw me stop in my going and trot back the opposite way, there to catch up with the older boy and touch him lightly on the shoulder, which caused him to jerk around almost violently as I asked, “Who are you?” After answering me (a little too quickly, I thought), and then waiting, with folded arms and a forced smile, to enjoy whatever additional language might spring up between us, this hippie set off suddenly, at an impressive clip, for the nearest clump of wood.

Here is how he had answered me (that smile already forming, those arms crossing over his chest in what I initially took
for a sign of haughtiness, until they dropped like petals and began to pump like pistons for the trees):

“Who’s to say? Maybe I’m Jesus Christ.”

Here, I swear, is all I had offered in response:

“Then where the fuck have you been?”

Of all those creatures who wandered past our yard, or were dragged up dying into it, none unnerved me so much as the witnesses who arrived one summer afternoon and began to poke around the place with smiles and gentleness and great wonder, as if they had somehow landed on a moon made out of our spiritual weakness. I remember that my brother was engaged at the time, his every young muscle, with the motorized tiller he was yoked to because he was the eldest and hence the strongest, and that he looked up at these interlopers with a face meant to indicate that he had nothing left to offer them: no interest, no wariness, no phony forbearance, since all he possessed of those qualities was engaged just then in the effort to control, with outstretched and vibrating arms, the ugly metal mule they could each of them see a-buck before him. What earth that tiller scooped up and overturned had long since consumed what was human in him, let alone what was bound to be sociable.

Yet this cannot have been the case, can it? For the soil (or what we agreed to call the soil: why?
why?
) was tilled always at the first hint of springtime, so that our father could be sure his firstborn would be sent out to guide that machine, and the rest of us to drag hoes and sticks, through clay that was not merely hard on its own account but had been given no proper time to thaw. Perhaps they came in springtime, then, these three or
four pilgrims to our iniquity, or perhaps it was indeed in summer and my brother was not below them at all; perhaps he was back in the woods envisioning suicide, or out in the barn attempting it (who can say?), and my memory of his being tied to the tiller that day is no more than a ghost impression, of which I am admittedly prone to several. Perhaps my sister, whom I recall as being up in her room that afternoon (or was it morning?), lost in one of those books she relied upon to order the reality beyond her walls (and often enough within them) into a narrative with a conclusion more hopeful than what she could possibly have formulated on her own, was actually out in the yard when the proselytizers made landfall, greeting each of them with a how-do-you-do and a ladylike offer of lemonade.

That is absurd, of course. My sister was ladylike enough for such a scene (which aspect of her seemed forever to escape either parent), but we were not a family to have lemonade on hand for company, nor to accept it when we went visiting, except where pressed (only those who thought themselves truly worse stuck to their refusal after a second offer), whereupon we would grip the glass tightly, lest we drop it and prove our unworthiness even of a glass of lemonade, and would not allow ourselves to risk its contents until well after the sugar had sunk to the bottom, which ensured that we rarely made it past the first predictably sour sip. And yet!
And yet!
Were there not occasions when I, emboldened by some illusion of superiority to my host, or too parched after a day’s lent-out labor to care who was superior to whom, reached out for and gulped down what paltry drink was offered? Did I care then how the sugar in the glass was apportioned? Did I not sometimes, in my animal thirst, forget to offer even a polite (or was it intended to be a humble?) “Thank you”?

And what would that “Thank you” have meant, exactly? Thank you for the opportunity to jog all day behind the folksy old wagon pulled by the folksy old tractor steered by the
folksy old neighbor? Thank you for the opportunity to burn and lacerate my fingers heaving folksy hay bales up onto a folksy old platform baked by the folksy old sun? Thank you for the opportunity to scream myself hoarse in an attempt to be heard over the tractor’s folksy engine, so that the folksy driver might turn around just once and acknowledge my folksy arm signals, which in the folksy parlance of the place conveyed quite fluently the notion
Ease it up, coot, or I will climb up onto that tractor and kill you
?

There was no lemon anyway in the Styrofoam jug this decrepit brought out at midmorn for the two of us to share, and no sugar even at the bottom, and no possibility that he would not have touched his papery lips to the spigot before I ever got a go at it, and so deposited his old-man sloughings around the orifice, which convinced me to refuse any interaction with the jug until I had almost begun to hallucinate (and could half envision the tractor tipped over, and the neighbor pulped, and myself happy and explaining to the authorities that it must have been some function of his advanced years, as we certainly had plenty of water), after which, I confess, I did take that thermos up, and sucked like a babe from its crusty hole, only to discover that the water was so warm it could not have been properly cooled to begin with, which discovery, and my alarmed inquiry into the matter, the old man met with a self-satisfied lecture on the need for hot water, not cold, beneath a summer sun, lest a shock to the system occur and accelerate, rather than ward off, your common heatstroke.

Once relieved of this useless lore, and once certain I understood that it was the town people, with their cold water and their lukewarm ideas, who had got it all wrong, he lit up a pipe so as to give me time to drink my fill of his wisdom and his backwash. I remember that he gazed out approvingly over the trees, and helped himself to a puff or two, and then widened his jaw so as to speak again (this time no doubt about how he had
learnt that warm-water trick from his father, who had learnt it from his, and so on, until at last I saw how I might one day pass this crappy magic along to some overworked and underwanted son of mine), at which point I threw the jug down and declared him to be an idiot, which outburst he started at, sure, but for the most part pretended not to hear. He simply emptied out the contents of his pipe against what tire was nearest me (the right, as I recall), and got that tractor up and into gear, and for the rest of the day drove it and me so hard across his field that by nightfall I was too tired and too nauseated to care who was the idiot here, or to dwell much more upon murder.

These hands, I submit, were not meant for farmers’ throats, any more than they were meant for the coarse twin loops that encompassed and defined those bales: too loosely here, too tightly there, so that the knee came up under too early or too late, which then caused a great jolt to the spine, and further tear on the fingers, and a resurrected desire to crush for good the old man’s already half-collapsed smokestack. These hands were meant for finer things: for piano keys and pages, for soft cheeks and new hairs, for those parts of people that reward kind pets more than they ever will your numb and calloused scrape. These hands were meant to play, I submit, and one day, God willing, to make something, not to yank up out of the ground something that had long since learned to remake itself, which miracle humans had not caused to happen but only caused to happen here (in this particular field, on this particular patch of grime), so as to aid in a crude vegetation’s slaughter by bushwhacker, and its inept mummification by baler, and its removal by pain and by wooden hearse from a field no one saw for a killing floor to a barn no one saw for a crypt.

Arrangement is not creation. How might sometimes coincide with where, but it will never amount to if. Farmers, or should I say farmers manqué (for how many of us, honestly, take the whole of our living out of the dirt nowadays, or did so even thirty years ago?), are no more the sires of their plants and their cows, or of the milk and meat pulled away from these creatures, than I am of these words I spread around and imagine, for a happy moment, to be mine.

If the thinkers are to be trusted, and supposedly they once were, we are none of us the maker of anything, not even ourselves, but are stardust both in metaphor and in fact, comprising elements far older than the milk or the meat or the words could possibly be. Yet although I see ample reason why this selfless conception of reality might appeal to the Christians infesting what mostly just pretends now to be American farmland, no system by which authorship of the universe is reserved to God alone, and our earthier people receive not even partial credit for what their planet produces (and so no say in who will or will not be going to hell), has ever, to my knowledge, caught on here.

Despite all fashion, then, I will admit to being no maker of reality but only a decorator of its interior, as are all farmers, and certainly all those mall-walking rodeo clowns who are not farmers even in the liberal sense yet stand firm in their belief that by a decision to stand firm in this sort of boot, and to sit
pat in that sort of truck, and to cast their vote as if it were a siege weapon against anyone who will not conform to their purchasing patterns, they have sided with the natural folk (whom they greatly outnumber now and have failed even to resemble since at least the 1950s, when it was quickly forgotten that just a generation prior a large number of American farmers professed to be Communists) against the urban, college-boy (and, yes, sometimes Jewish: what of it?) homos who control the media and fail to promote sufficiently the idea that self-congratulatory dirty hands and a penchant for store-bought yellow ribbons wrapped around store-bought flagpoles in support of a tax-bought soldiery whose television-bought purpose and behavior it should by law be considered treasonous to question can be sexy too.

A fly has just now landed on my arm. Why are there still so many flies this far into autumn? Is it only because I am not at a latitude normal to me, nor I suppose at a longitude either, but am down and over and despite myself sweating and remembering, unbidden, the way in which my father’s mother kept a swatter always active in her hand during the summer months, and punctuated her talk with a use of it as easy and as coy as that of any great Spanish lady with a fan, so that when her teenage grandson inquired (cleverly, he thought) about the man who had lately been seen taking her square dancing, widowed the same as she was and soon to marry and disappoint her, she told him
swish
that he was a farmer like my grandpa had been and that she did love dancing with him, he really
whap!
knew what he was doing out there, but what most impressed her was that he under
whap!
stood life as being something precious and short, having seen a child of his cut in half by a seatbelt of all
swish swish
things, and before that having served his country in the Korean War (did I know about that?
whap!
that we had a war with Korea?), and having been sitting on a log with a friend of his when a bullet came through and
splattered the friend’s brains all over the both of them, and why
swish
if you think about it, did the good Lord decide it was the friend’s time and not Mr. ____’s?
whap! Whap!

How is it that in all my adult life I have never thought to purchase a flyswatter? Is it only because I suspected in my youth, and by now am wholly convinced, that the swatter somehow brings the fly? And for whose sake, regardless, have I refused (or forgotten, which is anyway the same thing) to be seen holding even a fly’s chance at salvation in my no less mortal hand?

How those Witnesses in the yard dealt with life’s little nuisances I cannot say. I can describe only the broader differences between us: We were white; they were black. Our hands were dirty; theirs were clean, that I could see. They wore nice suits; we wore clothes not conscionably to be shown at school, since they were likely purchased on the cheap from the dying grocery store near the dead landing on the decomposing river. They offered us heaven; we offered them nothing. They were morons in our eyes, not on account of their skin or their outfits but because they adhered to a faith less popular even than our own yet took such pains to promote it. As to who was poorer, we were probably a draw there, though certainly we possessed nothing like their suits and had never known anything like their joy.