Against the Country (21 page)

And did sedition not somewhere inform the truth that these simple ink scratches on a cut of hard paper, when we had not physically made them ourselves, might allow the child to whom they appended (by man’s law alone, of course, not nature’s) the chance to choose for itself a destiny not in accordance with what its father (out of fear) and its mother (out of fear for the father) had so rashly chosen for it? Was a son of theirs (the first, say, whom they had treated in Virginia like a languageless mule, as I have largely here) rightly allowed by such markings to wish for and obtain, from Jefferson’s own university, degrees in both language and the law (the latter being but a paid perversion of the former), after which he would refuse all manner of contact with the countryside and would consent to revisit it only where it might be looked down on from the window of a passing jet? Should their daughter have been availed, by these same poor leavings, of the confidence required to fly her wooden cage at sixteen, once the panties in which her mother dressed by the side of the stove had become too embarrassingly done through with speakeasies for even a sober child to bear, after which she dwelt amid the God-awful racket in Richmond until this mother, in what underwear I cannot say (being by that point flown from those holes myself), sought to reestablish her fiat via an attempt to have this latest escapee committed (by man’s law alone, of course, not nature’s) to a mental home somewhere along the twisted route between them?

My father was by then a teacher, the builder in him having so gleefully demolished his spine that some years prior he, or my mother, had resolved that he should seek out and win a certificate, of all things, that would enable him to teach English and mathematics to the delinquents at her recent place of employment, thereafter
his
, which decision would condemn us all to a belief on his part that he had mastered not only words and numbers now but also
psychology
, since
psychology
was what presumably caused all those pimply-dicked offenders to grow agitated by the semi-confident drone of his voice (as we all had), and to question his legendarily cornfed but actually television-gorged machismo (as we all had), and to throw their books up into the air (as I did myself on more than one occasion) and try to make it out of his classroom, whereupon they found themselves tackled by his bulk and inherent hatred of them (a legal maneuver, he was forever at pains to point out, since the courts’ recognition of his right to employ restraint-type violence against a fed-up JD clearly forgave, and by Benthamesque sliding scale even sanctioned, his more extreme and less rational violence against us), after which these potential “runners” were “held down” and “reasoned with” until a “group meeting” could be called to address the “issues” beneath the “acting out” (never his, mind you, the issues or the acting out), which would (for want of imagination, or for want of language, which is anyway the same thing) be boiled down into an unresolved homosexuality (admittedly an overworked theme here, though only insofar as it was there) or, or
and
, a failure to acknowledge (not merely to recognize but finally to
accept
) an adult’s prerogative to dominate a child for whatever reason the adult saw fit to claim. Which is all anyone needs to know about psychology and the law.

This man did not offer up one word to me, that I can retrieve, on the subject of our fugitive poetess, nor had I honestly expected him to do so, since it was really only the boys he knew
how to pin down against the earth, or the floorboards, or the nearest flower-patterned chair, until a confession could be publicly extracted, which confession was always given (what choice did we have?) but not once ever meant, so that his wife and daughter and spare son (that one not just recently assaulted) might be availed of the opportunity to watch their man swell with a copper’s pride in the time it took him afterward to realize that he had yet again been swindled. Not out of the confession, rest assured, this time any more than the last, nor out of the thrill of natural brutality he imagined himself entitled to by law, but out of that more precious thing he sought: being not nature’s imprimatur, which anyone could see was promiscuously granted, nor the law’s, every bit as whorishly had, so much as it was our own.

What he wanted we withheld, out of umbrage and by a hard-won personal law. Although any local resistance to his rule could be run out of us in a single session, or half that, we saw how the wider-ranging grievances might forever be detained. We saw how this man, no matter how he felt his neck re-redden when he heard our posthumiliation laughter upstairs, and raged not just at us but at the limits set against him by his status, and his statutes, and his not yet wholly intractable nature, would never permit himself the leniency (or was it really only the industry?) to whip a child of his twice in one day.

We cherish the little kindnesses, I suppose, in them that are departed. (My father the teacher might insist upon a “those who” there, and also back in the last paragraph of the eighth part of my third attempt to end all this (not to mention the third paragraph of the eleventh part of my second, nor forgetting the second paragraph of the sixth part of my fifth, or is it now the seventh part of my sixth?), but the builder in him would at least acknowledge that the sentiment is right, and so perhaps also the sound.) I would follow this notion further, except that I think it a hair too late to introduce so fraught a motif as is kindness into what has thus far been an uncomplicated remembrance of the man.

It would not be a lie, exactly, to claim that he showed, concurrent with his spleen, some evidence of remorse after his most recent advances against us, and that he was quick to point out (as I have tried to here) what he thought might be amusing to a captive and terrified audience. It would not be a lie, exactly, to insist that we could eventually discern in his manner a more peaceable curiosity about what we were still refusing to learn in that place, with an emphasis shifted eerily one winter onto our reading, which he seemed almost pleased to know we could do, and which he afterward then encouraged with paperbacks only partially destroyed by the critical termites, and the scholarly silverfish, and those insufferable ABD chickens.

It would not be a lie, exactly, to add that he later then asked what was our opinion of these texts, and did not immediately explode if we conceded that we had avoided them altogether, or had read right over this crucial metaphor or that obvious pun, and could demonstrate no more idea of what went for irony in the 1860s than of what went for decency in our own multifarious decade. It would not be a lie, exactly, in craftsman’s terms, to maintain that his words on the original matter (the irony, I mean, not the decency, nor the time, though these are anyway the same thing, or had better be) were years on illuminating, as one might expect of a good teacher, and were in hindsight mostly constructive, as one might expect of a good builder, and were all the more powerful for their being in the moment so annoying.

Yet I do not think those few forced tutorials with a suddenly bookish father ever helped or learned us up so much as did our incessant slave-soldiery in his war against the trees, nor does his death without honor in the fallout from that war justify a perception now that I could see no worth in its waging then, or that I have failed, after years spent in study of this famous defeat, to locate within it some flaw I might in all decency, or in all irony, or perhaps only given the time, call kindness.

We started in early on our thoughts about why a man might have made so outgrabe a persecution of the borogoves, and it is upon this ancient archive of guesswork (I did not know “outgrabe” to be a verb then, past tense, nor “borogove” to denote a fanciful sort of parrot) that I must base my more modern conclusions here, not to mention any subsequent speculation as to why a father might have resolved to deal so harshly with creatures arguably as alive as he once was and inarguably as dead as he is today.

When he had finally regained, by pubescent or literary trial, the human capacity for speech, my brother gave voice to a charming little need-based theory, which held that we would each of us die of frostbite, if not by the wire or worse, did we not line up at the edge of the forest and present ourselves as ready, if not exactly resolved, to shoulder and drag and roll up into the yard, or to kick and curse at and finally (it was inevitable) collapse and weep upon, what hyperbolically large cylinders of wood our father had cut free from his latest self-satisfied kill, so that we might learn by this drudgery how heat is hard, and comfort a ghost, and paternal protection a myth we had best get over right away. My soon to be allegedly insane sister (spared institutionalization (is that the right term here? what I want, more properly, is “the booby hatch,” though by such I intend no judgment upon them that have repaired
there) by a brother’s half-solemn threat to steal her north to stay with a half-frozen him) clove to the proposition, or apologia, that our father meant only to make our backs wide and strong, so that we might not suffer the same as he had, and would not in time (in irony? indecency?) be compelled to despise our own children as we obviously would ourselves, on which new way of thinking my brother and I quickly bet (having crapped out previously on the need-based theory) and stuck to it even when she amended her scheme to include the possibility that because of Frank’s wont to “overdo things,” and owing to his reluctance to “ease off on” any course he believed to run parallel with (if not in fact to
be
) nature’s, our backs would likely shatter even sooner than had his.

(I have named him, yes. I had not meant to, any more than he had meant to die, which of course he always had, and I am ashamed to see that so paltry a trap of diction, met up with fatigue and a hand-me-down languor, has led me now to do so. He was not directly of Frankish heritage, that I can trace, nor was he forthright enough in his motives to deserve that name otherwise, but was only called such as a compromise, since one parent had hoped him christened Claude and the other had said it put him in mind of a clump of dirt, which was nonetheless how the child was then treated, and how he subsequently came to treat all of us: not as walkers upon this Earth but as bothersome detachments from it, to be avoided, or tripped over, or picked up and hurled out of anger and frustration (or hilarity, which may one day prove the same thing), until at last we could be ridden over and ground down into something fine and wet enough to catch hold of his seed, which he had apparently forgotten we already were.)

My own thoughts concerning those trees, and his children’s crusade against them, and what turned soil held these two ruinous concepts fast (three if you count the soil, four if you count the thoughts), were at first a leaning toward, and then away
from, my brother’s confusion, followed by a leaning toward, and then away from, my sister’s, until at last I was flung free of this cracked seesaw and alit in a position to decide for myself, by a more objective subjectivity (or was it the other way around?), what plausible explanation of our reality might suffice. None, I came to worry, ever would.

I had heard our father say, apropos of what I cannot recall, that he felt himself made “claustrophobic” by the trees in Virginia, and out of that small sliver, and out of a supposition that he meant not only the increased number of leaves and needles along the Eastern seaboard but also the great earthen breasts that raised them up over us, and bestowed upon mere hairs such a frightful prominence, I formed an idea that he was simply expressing a nostalgia for the flatter, less festooned vistas of his youth back in southern Illinois, which philosophy saw me through several winters hauling his logs up into that hateful yard, my hands encased in sweatsocks for their protection (he would never consent to see them in perfectly affordable work-gloves) and my mind racing over what cold calculations his own might have made when, with me beside him in the cab one sunset, he came upon a hundred acres or so of what was intended for pulpwood (from which is got paper), burnt and obliterated now by what I hoped to have been a can of gasoline and a JD’s last roach but was probably only God’s latest lucky strike, which vision then caused him to stop, and to extinguish his engine, and to sit in silence before that razed and blackened topography where just the week prior he had known but a daunting sheet of white, shot through with green (lest this sentence run out and convey only part of the pathos I once envisioned
for it, I should mention that my father, like so many others before him, half fancied himself an American bard, despite the fact that his production was limited, that I know of, to a single well-premised note on J. D. Salinger, taken finally, when I was already a belt-beaten six, by the journal
Studies in Short Fiction
, volume 9, number 3 (the ending especially I have returned to eagerly and often, wherein my father’s pride in having all but completed a “publishable” essay has led him to attempt what he assumes will be recognized, and of course loudly applauded, as a well-earned “poetic” dismount—

—but is actually worth only a collective gasp or two, since following the appalling laziness of the “my discussion”/“my argument” switcheroo he finds no better way to achieve his unstuck landing than to lift, in toto, right there before the regrettable tough-guy cliché, a phrase Salinger had
Seymour
Glass, not Buddy, bum off of T. S. Eliot, who himself got it God knows where, and from whom I would not separate my father now as a fan (of Eliot’s, I mean, not God’s), except to say that he (my father), this hanged man who made
us
to stir dull roots with spring rain, or without it, and who in winter never kept us warm, and who showed us fear in a handful of wire, would at least practice later to disguise his stealings rather than invite so wide a scrutiny of them, such as when he kept a hand truck off the U-Haul that had so rudely forced us out into the undead land and, in his paranoia (which even as children we laughed
at, our arms full of wood, our hair wet with snow in this sylvan scene), painted over its telltale orange (why Poe of a sudden? or is it Burgess?) in order that he might, without worry of a knock upon his door (now I see), roll before us an instrument we were forbidden to employ in any wood- or resentment-gathering activities of our own), followed in his middle fifties by an “unpublishable” novel (why is it that I have set this cruellest mouthful in quotes? is it only because I gave matching barrettes to her better-off cousin, above? am I trying, that is, to be fair? and would that not constitute, in this charred and violent hour, a critical fallacy?) on the theme of Jefferson and his own vainglorious self (my father’s, I mean, or mean mostly), once he had squandered off (again, my father), in the near thirty-year interregnum between these disparate efforts (during which he expressed himself primarily through those studied grunts and silences and lashings out), what chance he ever had to grow himself up against the language, and to gain some purchase on it that might have loosened, if not avoided entirely, its kudzu-like purchase on me) where the page before him had rotted with envy and unuse.