Against the Country (25 page)

(Do not discard me either as an ironist, for God knows I am nothing of the sort. Pretending to pretend I find no more honest, or dishonest, than pretending not to pretend, and neither of these masks will much, of itself, enhance the reality I pretend now to pretend not to pretend to.

(I am after, I hope, what lies beyond these two obvious choices, in that realm where I forever evade one possibility and forever chase after the other, or I guess am hunted, alternately or in tandem, and again forever, by both.

(Do also forgive, while we are at it, this late directness in me, which is meant primarily, if not exclusively, for those still keeping track.)

My subterfuge began with the chickens. We had been reading Hardy in the high school, probably because our teacher, who lived in Richmond’s West End and I believe did her best, thought the pastoral themes in his writing might at long last “speak” to us. She was a close and clever reader of poetry, that I can recall, but she had fallen victim to the delusion that novels were not constructions in the manner of poems, to be clambered over and admired (if not always fallen for), but rather were instructors, such as she imagined herself to be, of how, and why (or was it really only whether?), to stay afloat in the flood of life’s tears.

Jude the Obscure
stood at least a chance of scaring me up out of the water, but it was
Tess of the d’Urbervilles
we were expected to grab onto, and that raft quickly capsized. We were already familiar with the yeoman sort of naturalism, and betrayed by it, so there was no real news there, and we had learnt from the land-puppeted fists of our peers what airs like Tess’s pa put on would get you. Yet our teacher, inferring from our
Yes, and?
looks that most of us had failed even to open the book, which was probably the case, persisted in her mission, and made us watch
Tess
(1979) on a television set rolled in by a kid from the disabled room whose every step held in it more drama than the film ever could.

She then went on to explain, God help her, about the
symbolism at work here, and about how Tess, portrayed by the Kinski girl, whom we had all by then seen with a snake curled around her privates on a friend’s sagging farmhouse wall, was clearly the prey in this situation, driven on every side by malevolent nature, but we understood about that too, and some of us even got that the reason our school emptied out at the start of each deer season was less about hunting than it was about feeling, if only for a day or two, or fourteen, less hunted oneself. This wisdom extended even to the gaudy orange garb those hunters wore: any uniform will make one feel momentarily like a cop, especially with a gun in one’s hands, but in time the truth sets in that orange uniforms are worn far more often, and in vastly greater numbers, by the imprisoned.

I tried to be kind to this teacher, and not lash out at her as I did with most others, since I thought her both smart and pretty (not Kinski-with-a-snake pretty, but still) and only bewitched by the county’s evil, as opposed to willfully ignorant of it, and because she was divorced and unhappy and hence (one can hope) sensitive to all those drowning metaphors of mine. (Some few of us had returned, in loud desperation, to the sea that had delivered our families to this haunted shore in the first place, and saw them off inland to be petrified there (I knew of a Goochlander who sat every day outside a gas station and in seventy years had never caught a ride into Richmond, even when I offered him one. (
HE
:
I wouldn’t impose
.
I
:
It’s no imposition, sir. I’m headed that way myself
.
HE
:
I wouldn’t care for it
.) Williamsburg, and the great Oceanus beyond, must have seemed mere myths to this man!), though to be fair we ourselves approached it only with another family, more sophisticated than we were but in practical terms no better off (being similarly Catholic), so as to save money, and in tents sure to leak because it was sure to rain, as our guardians had elected to wait until summer was over, again to save money, and we ate
cheese sandwiches for our sustenance, and what bits of sand affixed to the cheese and pooled in the bread’s greasy chambers, and for warmth we played grab-ass in the deserted waves with a daughter from the opposite family whose father (our immovable own being planted back in Goochland) then gave us a speech about “respect,” which by grabbing at her ass we assumed we had been showing her, though in truth we hoped primarily to make our intentions known to her older and more experienced sister up on the beach, sunning herself scandalously and noticing how we noticed not to notice her, until she saw her stiff Christian father jog waterward to lecture us, at which point she grinned and rolled over, as if to show us what an ass worth grabbing at actually looked like.

(I knew she would sneak out of her tent that humid night, and join us all down on the beach, around what fire my brother had built, and then presumably pissed on, out of what wood could be culled from nearby, though throughout the day she had shown little interest in our plans and our gossip. She might have come anyway, but I am guessing that my mother (who earlier that year had met with a teacher who inquired, as they emerged from their conference, whether her second son was liable to grow as large as the first, which elicited a harsh “No!” from my mare, unwilling to see a foal’s waxing lust collide with a hag’s waning sensibility (I only half mean to imply that this was the same teacher who had exposed us all to Hardy, or even that said teacher was a woman, but in either case my laughter throughout the episode was unwarranted and possibly unwise)) corralled this “mature” girl just after supper, and asked whether she would not mind keeping an eye on the kids tonight (she would have put it that way, my mother, “the kids”) while the grownups gulped wine in their grownup tent and congratulated themselves on allowing their children this “important” and “formative” glimpse of freedom, secure in the knowledge that
the oldest girl at their disposal, no matter how fecund, was sure to trade clumsy relations in for the chance to be treated, finally, by someone not a kid in this calculus, her actual age.

(And so she would come down to the beach, and sit cross-legged around the fire with the rest of us, in a sweatshirt because it was cold out but still bare enough below to hold our attention, and would not mind any scent of beer or pot she detected, since that was only what she expected anyway, and hours ago might even have encouraged (having been the first in our crowd, or so it was told, to find her way eastward into Richmond by moonlight, with who knows what in tow, to make contact with the riffraff there, and return with talk of new music and genitalia-friendly art films), though if anyone had anything on him that night he would not have brought it out in the presence of such a sudden and obvious adult, who smiled politely while a brother of hers played Beatles tunes on the guitar, keen (she, I mean) to what harmonies might indicate, from across the dune, a bikini bottom pulled off and a baby about to be made.

((I thought then, or should have thought, of that fun little church we all attended, in the fun little hamlet on the fun little hill to the west of our fun little county, and of how much fun it was when the old-lady organist there stabbed out at each note with three or more arthritic fingers, betting that one of these would hit the target and not worrying so much about the others, which ensured that even the most traditional hymn would morph into a modernist free-for-all, with the time signature generally chucked as her phalanges hunted after and failed to locate the melody, which the strongest voices in the chapel did their best to help out with, and also with the tempo, where they had not decided amongst themselves that this one was likely a wash. Now and then, in the midst of this mayhem, I could detect a high warble, not worried so much about the tune, or the beat, but only trying to make music with the crazy
old woman, and I knew then that the eldest daughter from the opposite family had returned. From college? From after-college and dalliances there? I did not care: I cared only that she had returned to us with that mind and those lungs. She was considered by most a good sport rather than a good singer, but I knew different, and I suspect the old organist did too.)

(Despite our chaperone hearing no sounds of rape in the dunes that night, or because of it, she arose when she heard the F chord that all but guarantees “Yesterday” and summoned every girl to her bosom, not least my own sister, and lined them up by their differing lengths, and before she led them back to the tents, hand in hand, magnificently as I remember it, she counted them off by touching a comically bent claw to the top of each giggling head. Love, I sometimes think, is that witch finger, and any voice who follows after it.) The point I hoped to make about Tess is that both she and I kept chickens.

Of the many wonderful experiences I had in the natural world, pained though I am to call them that now (see above, and below) but damned if I will tolerate a convenient dishonesty here, none can rival my bond with the beasts of the air. There were those who sat on a telephone wire like quarter notes so that I might end their tune with a slug to the throat, and there were those who sang out even louder to insinuate that I would never destroy them all. There were those who hooted, or screamed, or pecked out their pentagrams on a tree too close to the house (a friend of mine kept a loaded shotgun against his dresser, so that he might raise the morning caws of crows outside his bedroom window with a more vigorous all-in; his aim was not to “learn” these birds, which had been my initial assumption, so much as it was to abolish the whole of their species: does that not qualify, somewhere,
somewhere
, as wonderful? did van Gogh not envision the same sort of thing before he abolished himself instead?), and then there were those strange little not-birds who gathered in such buzzing number on a classroom windowsill in early fall (or was it late spring?) that I had merely to spit in my palm to attract a candidate I could close my fingers upon, and with a sucked thumb work the tiny head upward until it was exposed, aslant and amazed, at which point I could fasten upon it a slip-knotted
leash made out of a strand begged from the scalp of a serious girl who wished not to know what I wanted with her hair.

Hoping to commune with but also to profit from my environs, I conceived of a plan to market my harnessed houseflies as low-maintenance, low-grief pets, and so win the high-school business fair, except that there was no business fair. I planned also to coat myself in a “formula” comprising sugar and buttermilk and cow feces (or human: I had yet to decide), and then “command” these creatures to fetch me something light to which their strings had already been attached (the first-place ribbon, say), and so win the science fair, except that there was no science fair.

After I had learned that there were no betterment fairs at the high school, I tethered these flies to my wrists and shoelaces and even my own tresses, and walked those halls a pariah, whispered to be so evil, or so near death, that the maggots had already got a start on me. A year or two earlier I might have done so out of an anger or a self-pity; I acted now from a joie de vivre. (Around this same time I bet a friend five dollars that within twenty-four hours I could part these same students as if they were the Red Sea, and back them up against their lockers in awe of my passing. I put out the rumor that I had AIDS and by lunchtime the next day had pocketed his money: Tater Tots.) In the bandroom I tied most of these lovelies to the bottom of my music stand, so that they might feed upon what was let loose from the spit valve above, but one favorite I secured to the tubes of my trumpet, so that it might perform its aerobatics while I played, and by chance pass in front of the bell, to be knocked out by the decibels there, and so hang by the neck until it came to, and recollected its capacity for flight, and climbed the air to breach once more the purifying din.

We had lost our original band teacher, a beloved old mustachioed fat man with a taste for Sousa and pedagogical tricks
(he dealt with gum chewers by saying that he had once seen a student choke to death on gum while playing “that very same instrument,” giving us all the impression that hundreds of kids must have died on this man’s watch), when it was finally discovered (we had known it for years) that he also taught band in that despicable county just south of the James, which the Rebs had wisely skirted when they fled Petersburg for Appomattox. Made to choose, he chose the despicable county the Rebs had wisely skirted, as it paid him more, and so we were stuck with a humorless young woman from Richmond who wanted to suck the oompah out of our operation entirely, and transform us into a concert ensemble more suited to her sense of self (based solely, that I could see, on Amy Irving’s performance in
The Competition
(1980)), and would eventually, had I not acted at once, take notice of, and predictable exception to, my flies.

I convinced the trumpeter beside me (a recent recruit from shop) to cut his lip gruesomely on his braces and spend the rest of an afternoon spitting blood down into his mouthpiece. In time the teacher stopped us in our playing, and said that the trumpets sounded “gurgly,” at which point we pushed all the music stands aside, so that she might properly see, and the boy sitting next to me opened his spit valve and produced a lake of crimson gore so large I was forced, as were several others in the vicinity, to lift my feet. Once the deluge had reached our stands, the flies tied to mine, already straining at their hairs, set upon it in dreadful unison. Our teacher flew out of the bandroom then, hand over her mouth, and did not return to us the following semester.

I must tell you, or tell someone, that at times in the process of leashing a fly the wings would come off and one was left, in the patois, with a “walk.” This unfortunate was normally let loose to explore one’s desktop until, say, a teacher tossed a graded paper down onto it—