Against the Country (30 page)

Still and all, I would surely have said something at dinner one night about how we needed more hens, and been told that there were not funds enough on hand for that, and argued, despite a dispassion any town or country fool could pick up on, that there was clearly enough corn on hand to make a trade, and that even chickens deserved better than the septic death this ignorance condemned them to (and been told that I was exaggerating again, and agreed that I did have that tendency, and admitted that the hens seemed oddly less bothered by their sores this time around), had I not been preoccupied just then with the suppurative wound my right foot had recently sustained, in an increasingly common moment of distraction, from that same axe I had used to slay, and so rob us all of, the king.

Do I lie here? It is possible, even likely, that I received my wound the spring previous, and so had healed, at least in the physical sense, by the time I betrayed all those chickens? Or had I yet to suffer this injury, and so possess no real excuse for my failure to stand between these birds and their oblivion? What else might I lie about here, or remember wrongly, which is anyway the same thing?

I recall that the trucks began to turn over around this time, one after the other, on the perfectly negotiable curve in front of our house, the inevitably drunken pilots inside seeking comfort in our grass and, where they could make it, the room off the side porch, while we called the volunteer rescue squad, and said who we were, and had no need to say more. Yet the apotheosis of these wrecks, as I recall just as clearly, was when an entire dump truck of state-bought sand tipped over in that very spot, and the stupefied driver climbed out the side window/sunroof, and we laughed and laughed because my sister had made a crack about how we now owned beachfront property, and that would have happened during the Ice, and the Ice had long receded by the time of the chickens.

These were the days as well of hunters parking pickups along the ditch to the north of our land, and setting up lawnchairs and coolers in the truck beds while the short straw took the hounds around back, behind those woods that hid our father’s
unpurchased pond, and said something sad into a walkie-talkie, after which a whistle was blown to summon the dogs (our own being tied up on these occasions and evincing a touchingly desperate fascination with the scene), who then ran happily through the trees toward their masters, flushing does and fawns out into the field that fronted the road, all of whom were then laid low, along with the occasional dog, by gunmen who never raised, that I saw, one hemisphere of ass up out of those sagging lawnchairs.

But that also would have been in the winter months, and was too common a sight anyway for even a selective memory to assign to a particular year, let alone to a short span of months. And the Assumption (or that particular Holy Night I most associate with this period, when my faith and fervor were at their hormonal apices, and my unsanctioned communion with the land was at its most perilous height, and I had become humble where the land had wanted me humble, and smug where the land had wanted me smug, and abstemious where the land had wanted me abstemious, and profligate where the land had wanted me profligate, and I trusted more in Bible than in bile, though these were often enough the same thing): When did that occur? when exactly?

I know by my calendar that The Mother of God is sucked up into heaven each year on August 15, nine days shy of my birthday, except that it felt no worse than spring when those chickens (and I) suffered as they (and I) did, and we drove (short a disintegrating father) along the cool road to the west one starry night, and up the hill that held the hamlet, so as to park in the gravel parking lot and be astonished by the glow of candles stuck into the ground and shielded from the wind by white paper bags, which intrigue lit our path to the church door, where we were met and handed candles of our own, with doilies around them to catch the wax, so that we might illuminate by flicker the glorious cavern within.

Do I fabricate now what I felt then, with that soft candle in my hardened hand, as I climbed (briskly? painfully?) the stairs to the choir loft, where I knew there still to be seats, and looked up into the rafters above, and down onto the congregation below, and felt the Holy Ghost surge into me where before It had merely licked at my sides? Did I not wonder then why It had done neither that foggy morning when I went out to chop wood, and paid too little attention to my task, and let the axe glance off the rounded barkside of an already split segment and lodge, the far corner of the blade, so neatly in my shoe? Did I not stare down at where the axe had entered, near the tip, and pull on the handle and feel, admittedly, a tug but no pain? Did I not toss my implement aside, and kneel down to examine that tear in the upper? (Was this a boot? Was it a slipper? A boot, surely, but can that matter now, since said boot was not availed of a perfectly affordable steel toe?) Did I not pull the hole apart and look down into it, and was I not at once struck in the face by a warm geyser of my own blood?

I hopped up to the house then, and screamed to my brother that I had murdered myself, and this formerly prophetic being, who was by this point merely magical, and blessed with the knowledge that no matter what happened to the rest of us he and his seed would find a way to survive (which, I agree, is magic enough), responded that he was “busy” watching television. (should I call him today (
he is bless’d still!
) and ask which program?
Should I?
I should call him.) In time he left
Good Morning America
and found me in the bathtub, which was by then painted red, to match my eyes, the second toe on my right foot split brutally from pristine nail to half-cloven metatarsal. “Wrap that up in something,” he said, “and I’ll drive you in.” I thought he meant to Richmond, but he meant only to the county clinic, where a medic numbed my toe, and reconstituted the spread-out knuckle, and sewed the little piggy back up while my disinterested savior looked on.

I spent the next two months, as was ordered, with my foot elevated and kept dry, and we watched, late at night,
The Benny Hill Show
and, in the afternoons,
General Hospital
and, where we could get it to come in,
Soccer Made in Germany
. We also watched, because our Anglophilic mother always insisted,
Breakfast at Wimbledon
. (Vitas Gerulaitis! Or had he asphyxiated by then? And why was the breakfast not “made” at Wimbledon, as opposed to the soccer, in Germany? Might not this simple difference account for at least two world wars?) It was during this period, so late in our life together, that I learned my mother was the absolute best person in the world to watch television with. I have not encountered her equal since, and I expect I never will. Her comments hugged and enhanced the words from the set, and the gestures on it, and never once ran over either, and we watched all of
Brideshead Revisited
together (I suppose I could look up now when that first aired in Virginia, and be done with this charade of not knowing, except that I refuse to cheat where I might not appreciate the answer) while she explained, by her side notes, and her own delicate gestures toward the screen, and those throaty little laughs, what subtexts even a literate country boy (who had himself, quite recently in her memory, walked around with a teddy bear in his arms, and had just now done a ridiculous injury to his foot that demanded he be coddled and looked after, though our family could not afford to put up with that for as long as the Flytes) might miss out on: being, primarily, homosexuality among “creative” young types, which, she made it comfortably clear, she was open to having a frank and nonjudgmental discussion about, though how does one confess to one’s mother that one wishes she had been special enough to produce something so interesting as a homosexual, one truly does, but this angel had passed over her, and her boy was but a boy, interested in homosexuality, as was Waugh (and as was she, if she only stopped to think about it), largely for its value as a literary trope (for which see the sixth
through the eighth parts of my third attempt to end all this), and so was unable to grant her recourse to that convenient sin by which she might believably make her protagonist long for redemption via the joyous sacrifice of natural desire that was, and remains, her Catholic Church.

Which was the other great subtext at work here, and that Church, and her sense that I sensed how It might one day save me, even when we both knew It would not, so overwhelmed her watching of
Brideshead Revisited
as to make her gloss over those lovely, crucial speeches by the stuttering homosexual Anthony Blanche, wherein he warns against “charm” (the Flytes’, yes, but then there are so many other kinds (and how akin was this “charm” to Holden’s “phoniness,” so important to both the atheistic and the worshipful elements in my household, and never once ignored there as was charm)), and this moved me, I think, her subterfuge (for my mother was, and is, a charming woman), and beyond anything she wanted me to notice in the episodes themselves sent me up into that choir-loft one Holy Night without television, with a candle in my grateful hand, to look down on the poor chiaroscuros below, and wonder what sins they had committed to gather them all here, and whether these sins could possibly be as bad as mine (and I would like to say that I pondered just then what Waugh or Salinger might have done with a scene such as this, but I am neither phony enough to claim it nor charming enough to pull it off), until someone down below leaned back on the light switch near the entrance and showed, in one ugly flash, our prefab chapel for what it truly was.

Tin and wood.

Faded felt displays.

Mail-order-catalog Stations of the Cross.

A decades-old course of industrial blue carpeting.

That light was shut off immediately, of course, but the Spirit had fled us, and for some It never returned. Most stayed until
Mass was over, out of phoniness, or charm, but few tarried after. I learned from the stragglers that a sibling of mine was rumored to have tripped the switch in back: both suspects had lingered there at the time, near my mother, and certainly
she
would have known not to do it. My soon-to-be-fugitive sister denied culpability, and I could see in her eyes that she would have been perfectly proud of the act. (She who would later steal a taxicab in the nation’s capital, and drive around drunkenly taking fares, until a police roadblock was set up, and she was captured, and the offended hack said he would not press charges, and would even drive her home, by which the officers present must have known that he would then attempt to sexually assault her.) By those eyes I knew the truth. My brother, when I asked him about it, stared somewhat coldly at me, and for a moment I thought I was about to be punched, right there in the churchyard. Then he smiled and looked away, as if he had already forgiven me the insult (not of the accusal but of the sheer stupidity), and he put his hand on my shoulder, and his smile went away, and he asked me how that toe was doing.

Such is how I recall it, the loss of my faith (if never my fear), except that I am convinced now I was thinking, as late as ten paragraphs ago, about the Ascension, not the Assumption, if only mistakenly so.

1.

As I chopped weeds one Sunday, after my midnight escape from the Lord, in that corner of the backyard never asked to grow corn (nor to birth what other foodstuffs we would scrape after dinner onto the enormous pile of rotting garbage my parents told themselves was a “compost heap” and even the dogs would not go near), and swung a scythe through weeds that had caused even the tiller to choke and expire, I felt a garden hose pulled tight against my left heel. I looked back and saw there not a hose at all but rather a full-grown copperhead, rounding one foot and headed directly at the other. Why he (she?) did not simply bite the left, and save himself (herself?) the extra motion, I will never know; snakes, I suppose, make their aesthetic decisions too. I hopped off toward the tail, and he (she?) turned back around at me, and I chopped the top third of him (her?) away with my blade. This made him (her?) overly angry, or at least the top third of him (her?), and he (she?) continued to hiss, and to bare his (her?) teeth, and to inch my vulnerable way, until I had chopped that top third into an additional three pieces, after which his (her?) mouth remained open but mercifully silent.

I ran up into the house then, and told my brother what had happened, and he seemed honestly intrigued by my story this time around, though he did not, in the end, deem it worthy of his leaving the television set and coming outside to inspect my mess. That mess would have to be dealt with, of course, and soon, before the dogs got at it and one of them, chewing happily on the head, caught a lip or a tongue on a still-venomous fang. I threw the pastel meat up onto the coop roof for the buzzards to have at. The angry head I flushed down the toilet. Afterward I found it a terror to situate myself on that throne or on any other.

2.

The great black locust behind the house had finally died. No doubt this was due to desiccation, and heatstroke, and smoke inhalation, and all those pitiable burns; it had stood, the whole of its life, so very near the chimney. (For which see the second, seventh, and fourteenth parts of my fifth attempt to end all this.) My father felled it expertly, and it swung from left to right, as if waving goodbye, before landing, the top third of it, on the very spot where that southbound snake had turned and tried to topple me. Over the next few days we set upon it with axe and chainsaw, glad (my brother and I) finally to have firewood so near the home.

(Was this before or after my brother joined the football team, as the place had asked of him, and stuck with it just long enough to ask of a particular player out there, “How did you get so goddamned big?” So came the reply: “Hauling the motherfucking wood.” By which we learned for how little a cord of stove-ready staves could be had, and one Christmas we gathered up our dollars and arranged, through this same player’s family business, a whispery
delivery the night before, and the next morning we presented the stack to our father as if it were a gift for him and not for us. I remember too well his effortful smile, and his emasculated “Thanks,” and the short-lived triumph, and our long-lived shame.)