Against the Country (6 page)

For me, though, it is blackberries. I would cite their dull sourness when not perfectly formed (milk and sugar were invariably required to make up the difference), or their metallic sweetness when for a day or two they finally agreed to ripen, or their melodramatic tendency to fall apart and bleed to death if not applauded at once, but in truth my claim against these berries is no more than a tangent to my anger at having been forced to pick them in the first place. From afar a hokey charm attaches to the image of a rosy-cheeked lad sent out to fill his pail with the fruit of a bush whose sole ambition on earth is to serve him as a free and wholesome candy store; up close, a darker scene presents:

This same boy, the red on his cheeks a primer for some future melanoma, holds this candy inferior to what he can steal from the store up the road, and he resents that these distant green bushes have so punctuated themselves with black as to engage the attention of his parents, who surely do not appreciate the cloyingly stupid taste of such nodules any more than he does but are committed to the myth that their sort of person delights in nature’s treats just as it accepts her hardships, which pose will harden the boy in winter, and will make of him a baked and mushy cobbler by blackberry season, and will in fact be so thorough as to qualify less as an acceptance of hardship than a surrender to it, and will never be extended to any hardship inherent in the boy, who were it not for the threat of physical retribution would forgo the sacrifice of his Saturday to the retrieval of a foodstuff he knows no one in the family honestly wants to eat.

Encased in his sweat, a uric bath at most times and a gelatinous bodysuit whenever a cloud stops to sun its back for a moment above his head, he plucks at these berries until he can no longer tell the juice on his fingers from the blood the briars have
extracted in payment for their supposedly free baubles. The wind that animates the piney wood to the north reaches out now and then to give the leaves before him a good shake, but it takes pains not to cool the spot where he himself stands, and he begins to wonder whether the salt in his eyes, or the start of a heatstroke, is not responsible for some perceived instability in the bush. After a particularly violent bustle, which sees the hairs on his arm raised a great deal and the pine needles not at all, he thinks finally to inspect the bush itself. He parts the briars and looks back into them, there to discover the stem of his fear: a long black serpent, unmistakably the old ratter he had seen slide away from the wreckage of that shed not long ago, twisted up in the innermost branches, already in the act of disentanglement and pursuit, its head reared in umbrage, a-hiss.

The boy drops his pail and runs for the house, across a field in which nothing but weeds and snakes and blackberries will ever grow, over ruts that lead back to a tepid and muddy pond where he will learn to seek an impoverished amusement, up a hill adorned with patches where a crude attempt at cultivation is evident, over an orange gouge where a basketball court was once attempted, past a garbage-filled crater that even now is able to holler at him with its shame, and into an unkempt yard where his progress is at last arrested by an impossibly deep bite to the right foot. His horror at this turn is met by a sudden and unwilled admiration for the snake, whose hatred he had not imagined could produce such a speed, yet when he looks down he sees not the snake at all but only a broken gray board, formerly a rib or metacarpal of that doomed old shed, stuck to his sole like an indigent ski.

Afraid to go forward (lest the board’s rusty tooth push its way upward through his tongue), afraid to sit down in the un-chopped grass and work the nail out (lest the snake catch up to a more valuable part of him there), the boy remains upright and frozen, loud but unheard, pinned to this withered ground, this
enemy of humanity, this magnet of despond, all because his parents have agreed to pretend, with hippie and hick alike, that the countryside is an antidote to town and not a poor imitation of it; that town is not anyway a wall thrown up in obvious panic against the wilderness; that a child removed from the protection of that wall is bound to grow stronger by the throb of the nail, and the sting of the switch, and the constant companionship of his own filth; that lies and blood and terror and trash, as well as the eternal war against reality that might erupt in anyone exposed at length to such elements, are therefore a fair exchange for blackberries.

I could see the yellow beast coming for me a long ways off, as no impediment of trees obtained to the north, only an eerie undulation of pasture that seemed almost in cahoots with the road against it, and when the weather was hot, and the windows were open, the creature’s groan could be heard so far prior to its appearance that I was able to wash and dress and even swallow something before the time came to descend the driveway and be swallowed up myself. When it was cold out, and thin panes obscured the sound but got nowhere with the frost, and shiver fits throughout the night had anyway abolished my dreams, I was often enough still in my bed when I heard the muffled bleat from the road below, and I knew then that I would need to run or else be left behind. Neither snack nor toilet would be mine on those occasions, but I at least had the advantage of being fully clothed and shod inside my sleeping bag, without which foresight I do not think I could have been convinced, or would have been able, to rise at all.

I wonder: When the great root below us inspired in Thomas Jefferson his idyllic hallucinations, and began to grow its system westward under the Appalachian range (toward the Mississippi snake oil it would require in order to reach and pervert California), did it bestow upon him a vision of the roving metal stomach that would, a century and change after his presidency, gobble up the nation’s schoolchildren by law each
morning and vomit them into a freshly graveled parking lot? Did he understand that whereas this process would inflict upon the town child no more than a momentary and perhaps even a healthy terror, it would prove for the rural child a journey so drawn out and confined with the personality flaws of his peers as to allow for the partial birth of those communities his shacks and his farmhouses had tried and failed to form? Was the architect of the American dirt clod aware that these mobile townships would exhibit none of the grace and wholesomeness he had predicted for his agricultural societies, and would in fact be predicated on a hatred of self and surrounds, and would be policed no better than the shacks and the farmhouses themselves? (which, after all, stayed in one place, or appeared to.) Did he know, or care, that the introduction of such a predator into the Virginia hills would ensure that I received my first nonfamilial Virginia whipping, and enough thereafter to make me question my assumption that Virginia homes were to be got away from whenever possible, long before a Virginia schoolhouse had even come into view?

Almost as soon as I sat down on a Goochland schoolbus I was beaten into tears and rage by a teenage boy who with wide worried eyes yelled, “This ain’t slavery days no more! This ain’t slavery days no more!” which refrain I recall as clearly as I do my confusion about what the statement meant and what action of mine could possibly have prompted either the rhetoric or the volley of blows. Less violent passengers, saints to my mind, pulled me free of those fists, and up off the dull green vinyl where I had uselessly sought shelter, and shoved me aft, toward the equally amused faces of the children who more closely resembled me. I would make a clever reference to Rosa Parks here, but that would find me guilty of a great anachronism: in 1977, enrolled in what the Virginia Commonwealth loosely called the sixth grade, I had no idea who that woman was, nor could I discern much difference between the bow and stern of
a vehicle that seemed to me an insult to everyone on it. I found a place in back near my brother, whose size and potential for violence might have protected me had the shock of life in the countryside not rendered him impassive and largely mute until puberty, at that point still as foreign to him as were the ominous firs he watched file past, from left to right, through the dirty windows of what he had instinctively understood to be no better than a cattle car.

When later I pressed my father for some clues about what had befallen me on the bus, he told me patiently of how the darker people in America had once been slaves to the lighter; of how a great conflagration had been set to free them; of how this effort had been doctrinally successful but not practically so; of how more than a hundred years later the slaves’ descendants remained in social and economic bondage; of how countless men and women had struggled all the while to change this; of how these people had made such a slow progress in their art that as recently as a generation ago, in this part of the country and many others, it was still possible that a brown boy who said hello to a pink girl, or in any way challenged the illegal and immoral order of things, might be set upon by a band of pink boys who would beat him senseless and maybe even to death; of how this notion of justice never seemed to apply to a pink boy who said hello, or did worse, to a brown girl; of how even a secondhand knowledge of that not wholly bygone era was bound to engender a certain resentment in children whose parents and aunts and uncles had themselves been so victimized; and of how none of this was any excuse for a boy of his to lose a fistfight on the bus.

I had a follow-up question (
Why did we move here?
), but it went unanswered and probably unheard. Within a day or two my brother and I found ourselves in front of the house with cheap padded gloves on our hands, our father keen to train us up so that we would not be made fools of in what he apparently
mistook for the landscape of his own childhood. I remember that I began to cry, mostly out of anticipation, and set upon my brother with swings of the overhand type, which he casually countered with swings of the underhand type, which shortly left me aware of a great sky before me, and the earth against my back, and an intense nausea centered at the base of my skull. To my right, on the perpendicular, my father jutted out, shocked by one son and no doubt ashamed of the other. At my feet, my brother, whom I knew to be upright but who seemed just then to be lying back against the nothingness behind him, stared out, as he often did, at the nothingness above us all.

He had lately become host to prophetic dreams, this brother, and for a time his relation of those dreams was our only real conversation.
A rattler
, he might say, and sit up in his bed, and point at the woods, and although we were far enough east and north to make rattlesnakes a rarity I would nonetheless hear, when I dared approach the patch he had indicated, the distinctive sound all those hopelessness-themed westerns my father watched had taught me to fear.
Blackie will vanish
, would come his next glimpse, the finger aimed this time at another patch of woods, and although I took comfort in the thought that the nearly human mutt we had brought with us from Illinois would not be killed by a rattler, that evening there would indeed be no bark and run and wiggle when we called the little dog’s name. My sister may have understood that there was a locust or a cicada in these parts whose sound (from a certain distance, and enhanced by the echo chamber of the trees) was very much like a snake’s rattle, and she may have concluded that the dog’s absence was easily explained by his previous attempts to desert us and return to town, or at least to locate a family less obviously doomed than our own, but for my part I put great store in my brother’s weirdness, and I believed that even awake he was especially attuned to the future being urged and constructed in that awful place.

If his features froze up while we were at play in the trash pit,
then I knew a car would soon pass by and see us, or just had, and I knew the family’s already loud reputation was again on the rise. If his eyes sounded anger, with grace notes of resentment and enervation, then I knew we were about to be, or just had been, called upon to perform yet another dirt-intensive labor that would diminish rather than augment our situation. If his eyes read guilt, with descants of panic and rage, then I knew he was about to be whipped, or just had been. If he avoided my presence all day long, and did not simply stand beside and ignore me as he did at most other times, then I was probably about to be whipped myself. If, from field or yard, he looked to the house with pursed lips and narrowed lids, or stared hawkeyed and open-mouthed at same, or stayed fixed on his chore, or went slack in the shoulders, or went suddenly rigid, or considered the middle distance, or threw his implement down and wandered off into that middle distance, then I knew our mother was due for, or had just begun, or had just completed, her next hysterical aria in the opera buffa that had resulted when her folk-guitar fantasy of a country life collided with her husband’s more powerful Jew’s harp.

And if my brother did not show his usual relief when the recitative set in, and if he rocked back and forth on his bed after dinner, and listened through our window to the softer but no less horrible hum of yard and pit and weed and forest, and if he seemed particularly attentive to the silent scream that rose up off the obliging little road in the background of this étude for washboard and moonshine, then our weekend, I knew, was over, and I understood that when I awoke, and perhaps even before, the beast would be here to summon us again with its own despicable music.

I was more prepared for my second fistfight on the bus but still lost it. A high-school girl who had had a bad day lit into me when some boys in back asked me to get her attention; I did. She had an overhand style that was hell on my ears and the top of my head, and although I caught her here and there on the breasts I was soon overwhelmed and started to bawl, which seemed only to inspire her: the blows came faster and with greater force than they had at the outset, and by the time they tapered off I could not say with any certainty where I was. This girl beat me with such an exuberance that I thereafter conceived of human beings in her part of the world as no more than hatred-filled balloons in search of a rent by which to empty themselves on me. Once delivered of their gasses, these balloons could be reasonable and even kind (such as when this girl phoned our home to apologize for her assault on what was, after all, a blameless boy still in elementary school), but I learned that circumstance soon patched and reinflated them, and caused them to wear again a bloated and uncomfortable look, and ensured that they would be ready to vent themselves on whatever fool was unlucky or unwise enough to nick their rubber the next time around.