Against the Country (3 page)

Richmond has since been generous to the eastern part of Goochland, having long ago saturated the intermediate county, Henrico, with the customary gifts of townhouses and strip malls and golf courses and industrial parks, and I hear the Goochland teens are now taught in a modern facility that does not ask them either to confront or to ignore the reality that they attend the white high school, as opposed to the black, which after integration had become their impoverished junior high. Well-paved roads now obtain throughout the county, where dirt and gravel were once the norm, and one may detect a species of progress in the satellite dishes so prevalent on roofs and in yards as to imply that all of Goochland is host to some grand project to contact the aliens, which would interest but hardly surprise me, as I often enough prayed to be abducted myself by spacemen during our time out there.

Yet I do not think that Richmond’s largesse has much affected the westernmost part of the county. The farmhouses there, although approached now and then by more modern dwellings, and surely aware of the subdivisions in bloom just a few miles to the east, seem no less jury-rigged, and no less austere, than they did when we infested a particularly poor example of one thirty years ago. The tar-paper shacks have neither vanished nor abandoned their tradition of yards swept clean of all grass and dwellers swept clean of all hope. The churches seem no less fatigued for the fact that their congregations have lately managed to bankroll a fresh coat of paint, or a course of aluminum siding, or a rather-too-obvious brick façade. The fields offer no indication that they will ever support anything more ambitious than the next shy crop of feed corn or hay, or the next silly ostrich farm, or the next state-sanctioned facility for juvenile offenders, or the next overpopulated boneyard.

In the untamed patches between the fields and the farmhouses, and the shacks and the boys’ homes, and the ostriches and the graves, it is still possible to glimpse something akin to what must have greeted Europas petards as they made their way up the American bowel (with a brief stop at the spot where Richmond herself would metastasize), and it is still possible to imagine the conditions under which these people, or their children, or their children’s children, succumbed to and incubated and spread the pastoral fever that would cheat them of any real chance at happiness, and would in essence enslave them, and would grant increase only to those with the will and the wherewithal to enslave others instead. Such crimes startle but do not concern me. I care only that this fever so boiled the brains of my people that they were disposed, after more than 250 years spent sampling the agricultural brutalities on offer in Maryland and Pennsylvania and Ohio and Illinois and Oklahoma and Illinois again, to prostrate themselves, in Virginia, before the very source of their already rampant infection.

My father, perhaps heedful of the fact that his great-grandpa had been gored to death by an Illinois bull who did not fancy servitude, and having been touched by the poverty that results from such a miscalculation, did not involve us directly with cows, and for that I am grateful. Nor did he purchase a tractor so that it might pin and crush himself, or me, under its weight, as had befallen his mother, who had survived it, and a boyhood neighbor or two, who had not. Then again, he could not afford one. A combine, such as the enormous instrument that gnawed the legs off at least one of his former schoolmates, and for “hours” held the rest of its meal suspended by shoulder strength alone, lest the entrée follow the appetizer, was, thankfully, even further beyond his means. What animals we accoutred ourselves with did not bellow and bawl but only woofed and clucked, and what machines we got hold of, most of them workaday tools lent out by or stolen from Richmond-area construction sites, or else purchased with great reluctance from the southern states cooperative at the county’s sad center, were employed not so much to farm as to create the impression of a farm that had long ago been destroyed.

We were aided in that pursuit by the house itself, which was put up, badly, in the middle of the nineteenth century and looked about ready to fall over, which in truth it was. My father was obliged in time to shove pneumatic jacks under its southerly
side (the structure, longingly, faced west) so that it would not collapse entirely and kill us all in our beds. Otherwise his attentions implied that a partial disintegration would be acceptable and even preferred. The tin roof, where it was not covered by a dull green paint that must have been designed to blister in the sun, was rusted through to an extent that suggested replacement even to a child, but my father made no move to hinder its corrosion and seemed almost pleased with the gothic sentiment it related to the road below. The front porch, which within a few seasons of our introduction to it had chosen to commit suicide, my brother and I tore away from the house completely, and left the detritus to blanch in a pile in the yard. Yet our father neither ordered nor himself began the erection of a new approach there, and so the front door, which without its preface floated a formidable two feet off the wormy ground, was never afterward used. Even company, rare, could see to go around back.

My mother, the town girl, screamed and on occasion effected some small augmentation to, say, the indoor bathroom, which was probably tacked on in the 1950s and, although retiled, could not be made to smell much better than the old outhouse did, or to the kitchen, also tacked on, which because of the distance to the nearest town grocery store (we could not afford the country prices) came to host a freezer the size and shape of two stacked coffins, in which slept quaint venison stews and pig meat got locally, yes, but mostly the frozen pizzas and loaves of processed bread that would become our lifeblood. She also held forth on the house’s airflow, or lack thereof, which my father’s installation of a huge electric fan in the attic did little to revise, unless, like the now greatly agitated black widows and brown recluses, one happened to live in the attic. Apart from these half-answered fits, she adopted a pose not unusual among Americans who have made a dire mistake they cannot pay to unmake: she pretended that our plainly lessened state was somehow a step up from town life, and she insisted,
with no real success, that her children back her in this ancient and wearisome falsehood.

Her face, when not wet and distorted with panic and recrimination, set itself in a smile that managed both to convey and to subvert the notion “Isn’t this fun?” while my father, ensnared in his own attempt to sustain what level of denial was necessary to his pride, worked to erase any hint that the stead was, or ever had been, able to sustain human life. We all allowed, outwardly or inwardly, that our position was sore and liable to worsen, but my father could not be sure that the farm’s inherent limitations would cleanse him entirely of guilt in the tragedy to come. And so he practiced to enhance them for the benefit of anyone who drove or wandered by. That a man would choose to be the direct cause of his decline rather than its mere victim is, after a fashion, admirable, yet this was not the sole, nor even the primary, impulse behind his campaign. An anger at himself, and at his situation, and at the weight of his dependents, caught hold of him too, and where he could not direct that anger at us he moved directly against the property, and brought his wrath to bear especially on its outlying elements, and did not stop to consider how this program of ruin might impact the family’s chances to lay in even a modest store of dignity and hope.

I recall several days spent in the effort to sunder an ancient gray shed, formerly an icehouse, that had surely done harm to no one, and had probably been of enormous benefit to the beings around it, and did not give over its wood and tin and nails with an ease that implied a welcome end to a worthy term of use. This shed fought us with an obstinacy unlike what would present in the old outhouse, or the remains of the front porch, or the strangely elaborate system of deserted bee boxes near the deserted chicken coop, or the uninsulated walls of what was supposed to have been our living room, and groaned considerably in the struggle, I now believe, to shield us from what lay beneath its cracked and rotted floor. When we had yanked up enough of its boards to enable us to stare down into the chasm below, and to contemplate what might be exposed once we had ripped away the whole of that lid, I told my father we had better let the building be. In my attempt to make out the bottom, I had sensed, and smelled, something of what awaited us among the roots. I was also pretty sure I had seen something move down there.

Because he was not spurred by vanity and rage alone; and because an attitude of forfeit (which soothed the vanity and excused the rage) was his birthright as a child of the American wilderness, and was his only recourse now that he was trapped out in it again; and because that attitude had already begun to
decay into a simple indolence; and because that indolence would cause him to look upon any structure, including the main body of the house, as ready firewood for when the weather turned against us; and because this lunacy would persist until his sons were of sufficient size to serve as his proxies in the drudgery that would see them carry or push or drag chunks of felled tree from forest to field to yard, there to cleave these burdens with axe and agony into pieces small enough to be consumed by the house’s wood stove (which would, despite its gluttony, heat no more than the room it was in and would actually attack and dissipate, by means of convection and black magic, what few pockets of warmth could be found in any of the others); because of these and other inebriants, my father resolved to wave off my counsel and to apply his crowbar, borrowed or stolen, to what was left of the shed’s floor, as well as to what was left of our claim on self-preservation.

He pried, then, while we pulled, careful not to offer our palms to the spiders that frequented the underside of just about every piece of wood in Virginia, and what planks we did not clumsily or spitefully send down into the space below we raised up and spirited to the yard’s green hillock, there to await the frost and the axe and the stove’s pitiless glow. When it was finished, and nothing remained that could be pointed at any longer and called a shed, we could see clearly that what had thrown me was not, at least spatially, a chasm at all but only a foundational hollow of about three feet or so, whose walls of orange and red clay gave a fine indication of the land’s hostility toward us and toward the discarded generations that had come before. I was, and remain, amazed that even a fescue could grow out of that stuff, let alone the more complicated weeds that filled the middle distance.

I suspect that my father considered those walls for some time, and basked in their ability to announce his blamelessness to the world, if also his lack of judgment. For my part I
considered mostly the heap of additional boards my brother and I would now have to haul out of that hole and stack among the other scraps bound for the stove. Yet when we stepped down into the wreckage, my eye (I cannot speak for my brother’s) was drawn not to the wood itself, nor to the useless clay that cupped it, nor to the relentless explosion in the sky above, but to the high grass that crested the foundation’s far side. There, in apparent flight from our onslaught, slid a snake so black and shiny that it simultaneously absorbed and repelled what sunlight was not engaged just then in an attempt to burn its way through my skin. I could not make out the head, and so I could not discern the level of the creature’s ire, but I knew at once that we had demolished either its home or its vacation spot, and I knew that the insult would not be allowed to stand.

I did not fully comprehend then that a great sorcery was at work all around us, and intended to inspire in the mesmerized a suicidal result, and had found satisfaction many times over in those addled enough to think the land a precious asset rather than a sadistic foe. We were in no danger on the precious-asset count, as we could see as well as anyone that our particular sliver of earth was worth far less than the meager sum we had proffered to gain it, but to my mind that accrued against the purchaser and not the purchase, as did the generational mortgage by which we had made of the land a debtors’ prison when my parents were unable to pay even the meager sum up front. They might have rented, and for as little as $150 a month provided me with a better home than the sweatbox-cum-windsock in which I would be forced to eat and sleep and feign sanity, mine and theirs, for the remainder of my childhood, but rental would have constituted an impossible admission on their part that they had erred not only in their decision to surround us with spiritual revivals and animal crap but in their shared assumption, with so much of America, that ownership of the land was a natural right handed down from heaven, as opposed to a shameful ruse perpetuated by the banks.

My parents had, it must be said, briefly rented a farmhouse upon our arrival in that accursed county, and in their defense the episode had played out poorly. Although greatly superior to
the compromised lean-to we would later inhabit, this house continuously gave off, from the orifices of its sinks and tub, an odor of excrement, and I have yet to meet its better in the art of drawing flies. One afternoon there I encountered a wall so thick with these black and green demons that my attempts to slaughter them left hand-shaped impressions among their number, and the quickness with which these spaces then filled led me to flee the building in horror and disgust. I would not be surprised to hear that a corpse, or several, had been discovered behind that wall, and I am grateful that my own will most likely be allowed to rot elsewhere.

Our landlord, who had grown up in this very house and afterward refused to enter it, owned and operated a pointless gas station, back from which sat the house, and was involved with his brother in a feud that had either resulted in or been set off by the brother’s construction of another pointless gas station across the road from the first. The negligible traffic thus divided, our landlord tried, not without success, to appear at least busier than his unprosperous brother by the regular cremation of dead tires behind his bleak concern, the thick black smoke from which reached us daily and was a welcome distraction from the usual smells. When not at such aromatic theater, this man found time to collect the rent, and to ignore the loss of what firewood my siblings and I were sent out nightly to steal from him, and to explain to my midwestern mother that it might be all right to have “coloreds” around back for a glass of water now and then, but one did not invite them inside. None of which, apparently, was sufficient to shoo my parents not just from this house but from the whole of that Godforsaken land.