Against the Country (19 page)

Mr. Thoreau writes with great delicacy about the “sportsmen” who came out to shoot at the loon that now and then made a pilgrimage to his celebrated hole. He did not take the loon’s part entirely, since that might have shown his self-portrait to be less country than he intended, but he did construct a fair impression of joy over the loon’s ability to fly the bullets, and he certainly went on more about the bird than he did about its executioners. I tell you this: if that loon had set down on our pond it would have been blown into its constituent fat and feathers one hundred percent of the time, not on account of any marksmanship involved but simply because the matrix of drunken blasts in its direction would have been too impossibly thick to survive. If I am alive today (and I have no real proof of that) it is only because my father made a habit of approaching those idiots in the trees and reminding them that there was nothing much in season during the summer months, and that they therefore had no cause to be out here with their guns, after which he may have threatened to kill them (he usually claimed later that he did) if ever he caught them on his property again, which lie, about the property, if not about the proposed murder, they might have believed for the same reason the rest of us did: because he so obviously believed it himself.

I am fairly certain that my father never downed any hunters
in those woods, but I saw for myself that he did run a good number of them off: not so many that we were spared the too-close crack of a rifle, or the undulled boom of a shotgun, as we drifted in our tire intestines, one side freshly bloodied from where a sibling had turned the tube spigot side up as we ran and leapt into it, but enough that when dusk came down, and the blasts grew strangely louder, and we scattered like grapeshot for the shore, the cause of our panic was not gunmen losing the light, and so what remained of their sense and sobriety, but simply that the overstocked fish in that place had come up from the bottom to feed, with hard little lips, on our toes and calves and the innocent half-moons of our asses. At such times our father, out in the middle of this pretty but obviously manmade abomination, could be counted on to slap at the water and laugh and laugh and laugh.

Some part of me wants to applaud this man, and raise his small accomplishments up, and greet him with something better than the blows and disdain with which he too often greeted me. Some part of me wants to excuse him as a clown, if I cannot render him a king, and to argue that his humor might have held in it more fatherly wisdom than ever did his sadness or his fist. That part of me almost seconds his decision to lift a mutt up by the rib cage and fling him like a football out into the middle of the pond, which rise and which stiff-armed plummet were steep enough to make us all grateful when the dog finally regained the surface and paddled his way back to safety, there to shake himself off and be snatched up and tossed out all over again, after which he knew, or I guess remembered, to head for the opposite shore.

Another part of me (specifically that globule of lung I cough up into the sink each morning, and poke at, and squeeze between my thumb and forefinger, and marvel at its awful, perfect brownness before I flick it down toward the drain and start in on yet another round of nearly vomitous hacks, all the while knowing myself to be but a pale imitation of that hacker I hail from, who sold his health with such ease to the weed that had made the Jeffersons so rich, and the rest of us so poor) wants to say that either title, clown or king, might apply to a man who smoked cigarettes as if that were a job, and spent the
last two decades of his life sitting in a chair and waiting to die, and even in happier times could not be expected to inform those who asked permission to swim in “his” pond that all recreants there were liable to be mistaken by drunken hunters for a family of ducks taking an afternoon dip and calling out to one another in plain English.

I never heard him say either that his dogs would be back there shortly to bark and snarl at them, since he would not, or could not, control these as he did his own children, who out of sheer embarrassment would clamber after the dogs until they all, dogs and children, stood in rough formation on the southerly bank, the dogs yapping hell at the invariably black bathers on the northerly, who must have thought not just the dogs but also their keepers gravely prejudiced, as we continually yelled “Blackie! Blackie!” in what our guests could not have known was but an attempt to curb the pack’s foreman (that same small mutt who knew so well the middle and far side of the pond), whose full name was Blackie O’Reilly and was probably only mad at the water.

Our father had a number of such jests, or kingly lessons, to spring upon us, regardless of whether these would stave off or else hasten on our destruction. To wit: He thought it both instructive and funny to let us discover for ourselves that as soon as we waded into a Virginia pond we were bound to be set upon by inch-long biting horseflies, which normally sought out animal shit, if that tells you anything about the water there, or about us. Beyond this exercise he was able to cheer his children with the knowledge that a quick smack might stun these bugs for a moment, during which we could stick long weeds up their asses and then wait for them to come around and take flight, dying in who knows what agony, until at last we could make out only the wobbling shards of pondgrass against the cornflower blue of that sky.

By my father’s way of thinking, almost everything in that place had a josh or a teaching to it, though the josh was cruel and the teaching past taught. When we became again the sort of family that keeps chickens, and I found myself the warden of those prissy influenzas on feet, I soon discovered that the hens sported open and horrible wounds beneath each wing. My father explained that the rooster, a leghorn, was mounting each one of them too often: the sores were where he “grabbed aholt and rode.” He then named this rooster Buttfucker, so that we might never forget (why?
why?
) that the reproductive function of a chicken is contained in its anus, and he lessened (or did he in fact increase?) the chance of any animal being raped to death in our yard by the acquisition of even more hens for me to tend and betray.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, by what I now take to have been his reasoning) these hens, bought or traded for with who knows what, were themselves accompanied by a rooster, a Rhode Island Red, whom Buttfucker quickly separated from the rest of the nighttime delivery and attacked repeatedly until the Red, owing to poor visibility and the strangeness of his new surrounds, balled up and gave way. By the next morning’s sunlight, though, that Red made a complete chump out of Buttfucker and would have killed him outright had our father not stepped in and stopped the duel. After which he put the
decision to us: one rooster would live on and propagate; the other would be dinner. There could not, he explained, be two. We chose in our panic to save the bird we knew at least by name, though the name was not much and its bearer was clearly the worse loser in the fairer fight, whereupon our father seized the still-strutting Red by the shoulders, and laid him out flat before us, and stood on either end of an axe handle across his neck, and pulled the body free from the astonished head.

As we bit into the Red that evening, we did so in relative silence, and I doubt any person in the room, child or adult, could ignore the tough and sinewy reality of an unfairly got carcass. The joke of a victorious death had bled too easily into the tragedy of an inedible meal, and we had all of us learned, yet again, that the outside world would not, and perhaps even should not, be stayed by simple human insistence. I cannot say whether the rain came down that night, and beat out its propaganda against the rusted tin crown of our shelter, but if there was any poetry to that place (or justice, which is anyway the same thing) it might have done so, and kept us up thinking, though I half recall the skies just then as suspiciously cloudless and uncaring.

(I have lately learned that my father is dying. He telephoned to say that the cancer is in an organ with a 95 percent mortality rate, and in another with a 100 percent mortality rate, which, he explained, “means I have a hundred and ninety-five percent chance of dying.” I am on a plane now with my brother and sister. When we arrive our mother will pull me aside and say that after I got off the phone she had the following exchange with her husband:

(Funny, but this happens, is happening, will have happened, years ago by the time anyone reads this. Funny that it happened in the first place, as we ate and drank and smoked in the next room over, between doses of morphine, while our mother re-taught us all to play bridge. Funny that once, on the night shift, while I prepared his hemlock, my father stirred in his rental bed, and looked over at me, and said, “Josh?” which I took to be a reference to a brother of his he had said I resembled or else to the situation itself. “Yes,” I said, either way, and he went back to sleep. (Or was this the same night he had said that his bones felt “all wrong,” and could I lift him up, and shake him out, and
lay him back down now, and pull the covers over him, he felt cold, never once asking for the medicine I had entirely forgotten to give him ten minutes before?) Funny, but I am unable, after so long a procrastination, to say just when this was, or to feel all that bad about it.)

Are we to check the date? I do not know it, nor can I pinpoint exactly when it was that we gathered around that table in yet another silence, eating this time out of an orange and greasy casserole dish (the dried-up chicken blood on my “lucky” pants still apparent but eliciting no comment either at home or at school), and noticed that the frill my mother had purchased in her hopeless optimism from Penney’s or Sears, and hung with something similar from a dirt-encrusted curtain rod to the north of us, had begun a wild agitation not assignable to what breeze the window normally let in, nor to what eddies were achieved by the cracks around the door. What we saw there, as we paused in our chewing and hastened to look up, is not often believed by those who hear this tale, but it happened nonetheless, and I am therefore bound to repeat it:

The rod itself was soon a-tremble, and the right wing of the curtain dependent began to buck and bulge, as if this mall-bought flap were set to defecate or, in the language of the chickens, to give birth. Those nearest the disturbance (my sister and I) scooted back away from it, while those more removed (my mother and father) scooted forward, so that we were nearly in a pile upon my frozen brother when a dark and coiled lump dropped down out of the cloth and landed with a thud on the old deacon’s bench below, and with a softer thud acquired the floor, and we beheld at once a great blacksnake very much like,
if not the same as
, he who had chased me away from those blackberry bushes all those months ago.

My sister stood up and, graciously, opened the door. The rest of us watched, and I at least followed, as the snake slithered out onto the side porch past the dogs, who seemed not angry at the intruder but familiar with and almost fond of him. That they rose and sniffed at this passerby at all, tails a-wag and paws bent playfully to swipe at him, was due more to my sister’s presence, and to mine, than it ever was to his, and by the time he rolled down onto the concrete-block step, and out into the yard, they had forgotten even what part of their interest was supposed to have been unfeigned.

Perhaps they understood, being relegated to the out-of-doors themselves, that a meal of house rat, poisoned or no, will attract any number of nature’s visitors. Perhaps they understood that this predator would be back again shortly to retry his mission, as would all the others, and that on his way off the property, this time or the next, it might finally occur to him to grab a bite of petrified chicken at the noisy and feathered drive-thru to the side of the house. Had I but understood this then, and realized what inaction might cost me, I would have stomped down harder on the back of that snake, and not just sped him off but rather pinned him to that porch, the better to get at and destroy a shown and constant enemy.

My father has lately achieved his great goal in life, which was a quick and pauperish exit from it, and as you might well imagine I am both happy for the remains and proud. (I make a doomed attempt here, I know, though by my own count only for the second time, to invoke an actual flesh-bound father, as opposed to that word-bound shade I call up elsewhere, out of hazy anecdote and too-garish gripe, or perhaps he is better thought of as an effigy I stuff and sew, so that I might whack at him with the sticks of my sentences (which also, to be fair, did most of the sewing) before I gather these up into neat little fagots and set him spectacularly on fire.) He did not put the stem of a shotgun into his mouth, as our mother had warned us he might do, but rather succumbed to a cancer he had always reached out for, which began to our surprise in the Hamiltonian pancreas and not, as he and we had long predicted, in the fibers of his more Jeffersonian lung. He soured (the man, I mean, though possibly also the metaphor) somewhere toward the offer of lemonade and was ashes before we had paused in our chewing. My mother described him in his obituary as “a builder and a teacher,” and I would not think to improve upon that, except to add that he was also an accomplished ass-beater and occasional puncher of his children’s smart mouths.