Against the Country (26 page)

—and realized what it was she had just seen (or
had
she?), and so turned back around, and lifted the paper, and out of human instinct used it to euthanize the pitiful thing that crawled underneath (would that
Lear
could have come to my aid there, with its “as flies to wanton boys” zinger, but we were not yet acquainted with that play, nor would we be by graduation), my profit on this being the demerits she then dramatically wrote out for me, which forced me to stay after class and explain that although I had admittedly done harm to the fly, and would have to answer for that in Act V (or
would
I?), I was at least willing to allow it what life was left to it, whereas she had robbed it even of that, and so of the chance (who can say?) to find a mate who did not mind the lack of wings, and possibly even found the look attractive, indicative as outer damage can ofttimes be of inner character, and had decided to make fly babies with this particular one, to the exclusion of all others, but could do no such thing now with the perfectly lifeless smudge we could each of us see before us, right there, on the lip of my desk. I continued along this line until she had torn up my demerits and was weeping so profusely I had to remind her to write me out a tardy slip for the period our intercourse had cut into.

But it is of the birds at home I now wish to speak.

True, I had succumbed at school, and happily, to the rural way, or perhaps it was only the southern, and could boast of numerous people repulsed by my actions there (such as when a principal sought to expel me for having shown my “rear” to a carload of honking Protestants riding behind my slow schoolbus: this man had said, during what he took to be our exit interview, “There’s a time and a place for everything,” which I argued was high school (time) and schoolbus (place), but he resisted this logic and insisted on a face-to-face meeting with my embarrassed mother and infuriated father (or was it the other way around?); I warned him that such a stance would lead on to trouble, to which he responded, “You bet it’s trouble, mister, and you’re in it,” which then led me to explain that it was not
me
I was worried about, as I was already in constant and excruciating trouble at home, but rather a situation
he himself
might want to avoid, who had yet to taste the rhetorical wrath of a mother convinced that she alone had any right to judge her children or, beyond that, the narrative vindictiveness of a father seeking to win his wife to him by continual displays of violence against anyone his wife held to be worthless, who, I heard later, launched his sawdusted corpse-in-the-making (he is all dust and no saw now, I assure you: we may begin in earnest to sweep him away) across the principal’s desk in an attempt to close forever the town man’s offending throat, while
my mother grabbed at, and pulled against, those same callused fingers she had perhaps that very morning scraped away from her delicate lap, hoping to beat out a last-minute compromise), but I had only then begun to assimilate at home.

The chickens were a help with that, the assimilation, and I thank them for it. I would also apologize, since there were moments when I sensed that their pleasure did not entirely equal my own. And, of course, because they are now all dead. It is silly, I know, to apologize to the departed with words so few of them made use of while still alive, but we do so anyway, apologize, or refuse to, if we are going to be Americans about it. My already condemned father stood too often at the side porch while the sun went down on him, declaiming (
he? it?
) against whatever after-school activity had lately kept me away from the stead (if I had come from a “sports-team practice” he would look about ready to disown me (from what?
from what?
); if I explained that I had just now been with a country girl, and had held her furry crotch in my dirty palm, and had squeezed it till et cetera, et cetera, I might enact a brief pause in his bitching while he gazed up at the purpling sky, and considered whether or not I was lying (invariably I was), or else reminisced (which is more what I was going for there), after which he would catch himself up and continue) when I knew full well that chickens would not eat by the light of the moon. Any child will become exasperated by this sort of thing (or inspired, is my overall point here) and will rejoice in the chance to teach its parent otherwise. I do, though, apologize to the chickens.

At first these birds appeared ruffled as the moon lit their dinner, and for a week or two they refused to lay, but I held fast to my schema and soon had them gathering in the coop yard to feed only when moonlight presented, and staying inside their shelter on those occasions when it did not, during which nights I threw feed down onto the coop-house floor, and shone a flashlight in through the mesh, so as to coax along what result
I wanted. My success in this experiment spurred me on to several others, hardly more scientific but every bit as fun.

The hens needed their wings clipped regularly so that they would not fly the hexagonal mesh that encompassed, but could not wholly hide from view, their grassless yard. Traditionally one cut the end feathers off the right wing and left it at that, but I wondered whether less standard dos might not produce more glamorous trips. I began to try out various shapes and depths of trim, on both or either wing, and with some rigor I vetted the hypothesis that a certain Bernoulli-friendly styling, accompanied by a hindrance attached to one foot or the other (after seeing my brother lift weights out in front of the house, and me do God knows what out behind it, my father asked what the hell I thought I was doing back there, and I told him my activities were of no concern to a petit-bourgeois arriviste (because a Parisian woman had after the war years married a Goochland farmer, mistakenly thinking she was doing something romantic, there were French lessons offered, if a tad sarcastically, at the high school) who did not even know that chickens prefer to dine by moonlight like everybody else, whereupon he took a step toward me, and I took a step toward him, with the clippers still in my hand, which may or may not have led him to stop, and to consider all the feathers strewn between us, and to say, before he turned and disappeared back into the house, “Those hens are
your
responsibility”), might produce panicked barrel rolls through the air, and desperate hover-bounces off the coop side, and flapping front backflips with a half twist (I achieved this once, or else the hen I conscripted and handicapped did: when she landed, facing suddenly back at me, she cocked her head and produced the second-best look of astonishment I have ever seen on a chicken), which even Wilbur and Orville (for whom I named most of the lady test pilots in my care) would likely have applauded.

Buttfucker the rooster I determined to mold into an assassin
His loss in single combat to that Rhode Island Red, and his subsequent not being eaten for it (see the second paragraph of the ninth part of my fourth attempt to end all this), had caused in him a confusion and, I suspect, a shame. I hoped to rectify that with a program of exercise designed to bolster, over many months, his self-esteem. My method here was to kiss and fondle his hens whenever I stepped into the coop yard, despite what sicknesses they might impart, until he showed even the slightest competitive spirit, at which point I would raise my foot and recommend his face to the clay. (Again, this was a very long-range plan.) In time he learned to attack me as soon as I came in through the gate, and his reward for this acumen was a quick boot to the chest that sent him flying back farther than any hen ever had. He kept at it, though, which pleased us both, and I once kicked my way through the Apostles before he finally stayed put, puffed up and heaving against the dirt, his claws folded under him, his eye a mucilaginous dot of odium.

Certainly my father took some notice of these experiments, but after our contretemps in the yard he made no direct reference to them, except when he returned with a rifle (or was it a shotgun?) slung over his shoulder, after sitting all day in a tree and waiting for a wild turkey to pass by (which normally I would have got after him for), and saw how I had the hood of a car up, and the air filter off and tossed against those cinder blocks he loved so well, and a hen perched precariously on the manifold, so that she might peck at a kernel I had placed on the carburetor’s butterfly valve in an attempt to solve forever, via chicken, the problem of a flooded engine. To his eternal credit, he understood at once what it was I was up to and, leaving aside any complaint about corn down the carburetor, yelled out, just before I cranked the ignition key:

“If that car backfires you’ll blow her fucking head off!”

To which I yelled back:

“She’s been apprised of the risks involved!”

So we have swallowed fried chicken we knew by name; and ground-up pig we knew by sight, and liked personally; and shreds of deer a-bounce in the bramble at dusk; and cubes of squirrel keeping cozy in the trees; and Lord knows what else we had no honest need of (the outlandish prices charged for outland groceries justifying gas-costly trips into town, yes, but never old goat meat for dinner); and after a spell it is good eating, you hardly notice it.

I killed a pregnant lady once. She landed on a paragraph I was trying to construct (
Oedipus Rex
, I think it was, this time around: “On
Oedipus Rex
”) and ambled across my lines from left to right. I shooed her away, but she merely rolled off the page, impossibly fat and slow, and I grew irritated by the distraction and smashed her with the heel of my writing hand. Which released, onto palm and desk and page again, a legion of tiny, squirming larvae I had then to scrape into a pile stage left and render into a motionless yet still somehow bothersome paste. To this day I do not know if I did right by that paragraph.

My intention here is not to advocate the misuse of God’s clown airforce for human gain. I mean to say only that it was right for
me
, at that particular time, in that particular place. Earlier and elsewhere I might not have punched at those fireflies who invaded the yard on warm evenings, so as to aid along the subtleties of a nerd’s self-defense, and felt such a pride when I popped one just right, and he arced off my knuckles like an errant spark, not blinking any longer but lit up now for good, until the grass at my feet shone with the vanquished and I was half entranced, swiping at the air all around me and able almost to ignore them that then faded in the blades below.

(Or else began to blink anew …

(And took miraculous flight …

(Though never to rise again, it seemed to me, any much higher than my bug-stinky fists.)

Earlier and elsewhere I might simply have caught these creatures up and smushed them, as American children will tend to do, and spread the now-activated goo in fluorescent bands across my innocent cheeks, and run down the driveway with the rest of the neighborhood, pretending with all my heart to be a Red Indian, as Waugh would have it, or Kafka’s fornicating translators, perfectly aware that distally, four beats back along the proximal line, I actually was one. But then earlier, and elsewhere, and not surrounded by these objects (words, largely, and mold), and under worse conditions (cool enough tonight, I suppose, if a bit muggy), and not given what in the interim I have happily endured, I might have been tempted to lie. I might have been tempted to craft a cute little segue here between fireflies turning on rather than off when killed (or
were
they?) and my relationship with the Lord our Jesus, said Himself to have died aglow and then, in a blink, arisen.

I might even have made use of the fact that this metaphor will not hold unless Jesus is continually beat down again by the fists of men, since that would seem to be the Church’s historical argument here, if not exactly its narrative, but in truth I acquired my faith not through metaphorical epiphany but by practical need. I was bored and lonely and afraid during my initial few years out there, and seeing folks on Sunday made me feel less lonely and less bored. (The afraid took somewhat longer.) Pre-rebellion against a gigantic atheist father, I could not fathom why these people would come together each weekend to celebrate the torturing to death of a self-absorbed Nazarene some twenty centuries earlier, even if He
had
once worked with His hands. Post-rebellion against a smaller threat, and working now gaily with my own hands,
I could not fathom why these people would ever do otherwise. I had joined them in a solemn acceptance of, and promised salvation in, the truth that all local life manifested, winged or not, and in perfect imitation of Jesus, a deathwish foretold and pounced upon.

The priests kept croaking, for one thing. Clearly they had come out to die among us, none of them being young or bright or worth all that much to the Church, and each of them forced to minister to the prisons all the workweek, which would have sapped even my own joyous spirit. Father X lasted longest. He was a bald zealot with too many ideas about Saint Paul. In time he was reassigned elsewhere, equally desolate, whence he sent weak epistles until his heart exploded. Father Y I saw some promise in. He was a mess with words, but his toe tapped regularly to the music, no matter how experimental, and his eyes had a tendency to roll back into their sockets, which trait I could not help but admire. He died of a stroke my sister described thusly: “He looked up into his skull and decided to stay there.” Father Z was exactly what you might expect on the heels of X and Y: a short and effeminate wag intent on drinking himself to death by his tipple, which was scotch and milk. He achieved, I am told, a fatal infarction within a year or two’s exposure, though by then I was fled from that plot and heard not a word about the martyr who sallied forth to replace him.

Father Y was the one I told about the flies and sundry, not sure if those were sins, really, but not wanting to chance it. He had no idea what to say but only scanned his frontal lobe throughout our encounter, looking for Jesus up there, I guess, or else for the vascular discrepancy that had first made him
want to go fish. In time he came to and said that God loved me, which by then I needed to hear, and he gave me some prayers to say, which I suspect I did, and some penance to do, which was about as likely as my asking an eye-rolling priest if he honestly thought every being we encountered wanted to kill us, granted, but also to die, so plain was that notion to anyone who had persisted even a short time out there.