Against the Country (20 page)

The throng will demand a caesura here, out of respect, or something like it, but I reject that approach as a posture and a
falsehood: the question at hand has not to do with decorum but only with personal taste, and by that I am bound, as I ever have been, to his. My own might allow for a leniency on certain points, or even a brief Christian forgiveness, but my father’s never would, and in this, again, I feel obliged to follow his lead. It should be known to all the world that this man showed but a passing interest in nature’s switches, and before and after that laid into us not with fresh wood but with ancient metal. He started out in town with the twisted grip of a popular make of flyswatter and graduated in the trees to a device he constructed himself, and presumably designed, out of insulated copper wire, which scourge hung with such threat from a nail on the side porch that my brother and I contrived one season to steal and destroy it, only to see a crueler iteration rise up in its stead.

Agriculture has nothing on industry in these matters: a switch will sting and leave its mark, but wire will actually blind for a moment, and will romance blood so near the skin’s surface that the whipped will not afterward touch his buttocks, or the back of his thighs, for fear that any pressure on the welts there will initiate a bleed no country remedy can stanch. I have heard it argued that the mind has the ability to forget pain, if never the insult of it, and if so my own might not work quite right, for I recall the bite as clearly as I do the burn, and neither memory has inspired in me what I suppose my torturer intended.

(Then again, it may be the ass, more so than the mind, that does the real remembering here.)

He loved his wife and was in thrall of her, as we all were, and she loved and was in thrall of him, as we all were, which may have accounted for the fact that she made no honest effort to impede him while he misused her children before her pale and pretty eyes, and never fully withheld her approval of this or any other hurt he dealt us, and in the spaces between his strokes seemed almost to accept the righteousness of what was plainly, to all her issue, no better than a bully’s hand. In her defense, if
I might believably come to that, she did scream and scream throughout these episodes, though I take it that this was only to provide a suitable soundtrack to them, her children’s high squeals and pleas for mercy falling apparently shy of the standard. Should I fault her, then, for a desire, and in truth a fine ability, to cover our novice pipings with a mother’s more practiced howl? Should I count it a cynicism (on her part? on mine?) that in my recollection she managed always to stop her madness exactly where he stopped his, so able an accompanist was she? Should she in turn fault me, or else my musicianship, for the fact that my own screams continued on for some time afterward and will not be silenced to this very day?

A thousand words or more I had planned on those expert wails of hers: the soar and wild melisma of them; the head- and face- and chest-clutching gestures with which they were dependably delivered; my initial assumption that these theatrics were but a means to distract her man from his task, and so spare what skin was left on the already thinned-out ass of her son; my later theory, or hope, that they were instead a ploy to distract not him but me, and so allow me a “psychological space” to escape into, wherein the sufferings of one’s mother far outweighed one’s paltry own and hence were a kind of ballast to the soul (when what was wanted was lift! lift!); my eventual realization that no such space could exist to begin with, in this part of America or any other, so long as there remained even one woman willing to tell tales on her child in exchange for an assurance that the coming week’s labor would see no further lip out of him.

Yet death demands, if we stop to consider it, that we speak ill only of the dead (for what harm could come to them beyond what already has?), while to those left above we owe all our half-meant ruth, and all those presumptions of innocence neither asked for nor earned, and all those domestic attentions that might anyway be charged against us one day, simply
because we were present at, and therefore associated with, and perhaps even implicated in, the murder itself. And so I say to my mother, who has helped out so many but could never quite help herself:
You are blameless in your man’s disintegration. You merely bear some small culpability in mine
.

He despised the trees. He would have charcoaled every one on our acreage had he not been so cheated on an allowance of life. I do not refer here to time, exactly, for he had a fair enough grasp and gander at that. (Two years before he was charcoal himself we shared a Christmas Eve conversation out on my brother’s deck, the both of us staring up at the stars with our drinks and our cigarettes and wondering whether mankind would ever break free of its fate, and get far enough gone before this galaxy began to collide with the next one over, which escape might happen only, we posited, given the vast and horrible distances involved, if in the interim we discovered how to harness a propulsive power at least as great as that of our sun, which in all probability would
be
our sun (had it not swelled up and fricasseed the lot of us by then), which after a gulp or two more we concluded, or rather he did, was impossible, since such an undertaking would require the energy of a second sun to pull the first off its axis, and send it spinning out away from the collision with us in tow, and a third to pull the second off its, and a fourth to pull the third off its, and there was not time enough at hand, or nearness,
even if we left right now
, to approach so much as a second sun (or did he call it the last?) in this bright and interminable queue.

(What a venturesome mind he had, this man who had ridden but once on an airplane that I know of, and had
sweated his way throughout even that simple hop, sure all the while that the ground would rise up and smite him for the hubris (he was not disposed to think it a sin) of having put himself aloft in the first place, which only by luck (he would never have called it a miracle) the ground did not, nor did it take any immediate action against him once he had stepped down off that plane and onto a tarmac topping just as sown with hatred and decrease as what he had left behind him an hour or so ago, nor did it target him for cancellation in the hotel bed I can see him renting shyly for the night (was this Canada? Chicago? lovers of the saccharine “literature of place” will insist that the answer somehow matters here: I am confident in my ability to imply that it does not), nor was he thrown and killed later by a bump in or under the road along which he then secured for himself a tortuous if unelevated ride home.

(Nor, I might argue, by what powers of reason he partway encouraged in me, did this one useless trek away from and back to an oily, smelly patch just north and east of big rivers whose waters seemed always (but never quite were: by any measure, by any molecule) the same suffice to widen his own banks much. Nor would he subsequently see, this child of Moses, and of wandering Cain, and of every star shifting away as if his planet had by the mere fact of him committed a gross and terrible fart, how easily, how generously, it might have.) Nor would I call him a feckless man, for he worked hard in Virginia, and demanded that his children work hard also, and was still years away from final capitulation to that chair-bound sickness which slackens and slays so many of our American fathers, whose stores of weekend fury cannot possibly keep apace of their weekday earnings of boredom and injury and defeat. Surely he was symptomatic by then, in that his output ceased abruptly once he had chainsawed his latest victim to death, whereupon our own brutal efforts began, but I defy my
reader to produce a father who, on his way back up to the house, encased as he normally was in sawdust, stopped to gaze out over the trees, and at the children now apprenticed beneath them, with a more thought-out plan and a more thoroughly vigorous intent.

His Franklin stove, which was the house’s sole heat source once our sautéed portion of the planet had finally come to its senses and leaned back away from the sun, he ran like an all-night crematorium (the facility we employed later to dispose of his carcass spelt the first syllable of that word out, to our amused consternation, as “cream”), ayeing it always with an idée that it could and so ought to consume additional plant flesh until its sides glowed their familiar and accusatory orange. Whether we, who were his fetchers of fuel from the dark wet hardness of the yard, stuck fast to our duty or put off his demands while we struggled to complete one last homework assignment, the result was invariably the same: a room off the side porch warmed to an uncomfortable degree while all the jealous rest sucked the life out of any animal who came near, shaking his limbs to stay circulatory and hoping only to acquire his sleeping bag before more rigor was asked or any fresh new mortis set in.

That my father often curled around the claws of this dragon, the better to rouse himself every hour or so and appease it with pine chunks, was to his wife the start of an obsession to be watched and wondered over, and to his children proof of a long-suspected retardation. Had he but known to insulate his walls properly, and to tape plastic over his windows once the temperature had dropped (as the hippies all
seemed to), and to purchase a second stove for the shelter’s front rooms (if by log alone he intended to preserve us), he might have won more hours abed, and not found himself so rigid when a rumor of daylight arrived and he was forced, by want or routine (which he treated anyway as the same thing), to make his way eastward along the roads toward Richmond, dodging deer by the minute, to hear him tell it, there to wreck an already delicate back lifting beams (which are wood) and stretching wire (which is metal) in service of an abstraction (call it town) he had once so hysterically fled.

I might deem it another joke, or only another sadness, that both wood and wire (if not also abstraction) had conspired in the initial insult to his spine, when he was but twenty or so, and had a college concern cutting staves for the area coopers (how many of these, honestly, could there have been?), and while listening to the car radio had felt, if not actually heard, both legs go out from under him on a patch of Illinois ice, and had felt, if not actually witnessed, the introduction of ass to ice with a log of great concern upon his shoulder, after which for a song cycle or two he could discern no practical feeling below his waist, and so prayed to a God he did not believe in (I refuse to believe he did otherwise) to allow sensation to flow back into him, which after a commercial break or three it finally did, though he may have neglected to ask that no part of said sensation be an undoffable girdle of pain.

I remember how in the evenings, and in the afternoons on weekends, he would kneel like a supplicant before his favorite chair, and would lay his torn torso across its padded seat, and with his head suspended upward and a-drool against what the catalogs still promoted then as a stiff back would try to achieve something like sleep. We pitied him on those occasions, for we were not monsters, or not yet, but of course we rejoiced in the chance to be free of him, and from his arbitrary orders and punishments, and I, for one, being no cynic as he might have
been about prayer, asked God any number of times to burden him with what agony could be found at hand, and to cause him to yield his ground-down bone and expanding gut to whatever cushion was nearest by, and to visit him with oblivion especially during the working hours, when we most required our own little inheritance of rest and relief.

Yet our crippled father would not or could not forget, even in his sleep, that for him, and for all those confined to his tragic section of the American cone, working hours took up fully half the clock. He would therefore be damned (or only comically slighted, once we had grown large enough to ignore him) if any child of his had the insolence to board a bus, or to participate in this or that already pilloried after-school activity, so long as there was any “real” work left to be done around the house, which by his crooked ledger there always would be. Neither he nor his helpmeet evinced any hesitation (and, what is stranger, any shame) in their tacit agreement to chastise a child, by withholding permission to engage in whatever function the child had lately been fool enough to admit was most dear to it, for the crime of its having failed to complete a chore that had already,
to their own perfect knowledge
, been completed. Politest appeal of this decision risked seeing the injustice upheld, and the court costs writ in stripes across the defendant’s spindly legs, by an impartial length of copper wire.

Out of fright, then, or only as a collective-bargaining gesture, we signed up for nearly everything the school had to offer, faking his scribble (or hers: harder) where the authentic item would likely be refused (out of dug-in principle: the principle being that any country adult, by virtue of his decision to remain country, or to become country again, had won the right to interpret the law within his own home any way he saw fit, or to banish it altogether), and by our absence from this team practice and that drab spelling bee, or from rehearsals of a play we had won a small role in and then by a truancy lost, and by our failure to line up for a gymnastic exhibition or a 600-yard dash that I estimate bored even its few tiny entrants, or to board yet another yellow scow that might take us with bumps and misgivings to march with cheap student instruments in one more hopelessly crop-themed parade, sought at last to call the authorities down upon our quaintly corrupted household.

Plenty looked, and some even saw, but no one ever came (save witnesses), and I might make a fuss over that, except that I would then have to explain away all those A’s my siblings and I loudly made, and all those kitsch trophies and poorly lettered certificates we fetched home, which were insisted upon, yes, though only insofar as these accrued to our parents in a public sense while privately they represented yet another level on which we refused to do any “real” work. Once accomplished
(the unreal work) and once earned (the marks and the trophies and certificates), this great leap forward in our line’s empty record of achievement met with no better than indifference from parents unable to accept that a child of theirs could somehow succeed in hopping over humanity’s petty obstacles when they themselves had not, or had not bothered to, and no better than outright shock, aped or honest, when it became clear that not one of their children but in fact all three, in open rebellion against a lie we had agreed to
as a family
, actually would.