Against the Country by Ben Metcalf Read Free Book Online

necropoli met no hindrance at all in their efforts to congeal and expand. I should have gathered that your paper-thin infrastructure (a backwater school system, a sparse and unselective police force, a farmer’s bank, a “community” college, an overmatched clinic near the pompous little courthouse, a bloom of schismatic churches, an enthusiasm of volunteer fire and rescue squads, both a men’s and a women’s “state farm”) constituted an equally instinctive, and equally failed, ploy to cover the whole of your population (less than twenty thousand souls, all told, in a space the size of Greater Los Angeles) with a single municipal exoskeleton, so that we suckers, we pilgrims to iniquity, might know what it was like toexchange a settlement at least of sufficient density to keep the pests at bay for one so rudimentary and diffuse that it did not understand this to be town’s purpose.
    Could not the same be said of the nation’s farmland at large? Do the kit houses and improvised huts in our clearings not reach out to one another in desperate bids to create and defend communities whose inhabitants insist are unnecessary to their unreal and unearned Edens? Are we to imagine that the pride these people have since shown in their technically townless lot is not a reflex natural to anyone confronted with the terror that accompanies assured defeat but not yet (and here again I must employ the word “technically”) dead? Is this pride not so bitter and so powerful that it has long infected even parts of town with the desire to go without what humble refinements are available there (a superficial proximity to education and the arts, a cinema-learned facsimile of reflection) in order to indulge instead a fancy for mud, pickup trucks, cowboy hats, retribution in Jesus’s name, and the legion twangs and whines of American ignorance?
    I honestly do not care. One may strike like a fool at the sprigs of this wrong or one may set at the root, and Goochland County, in whose dirt our national evil was gestated, and out of whose grass it sprung, and on whose stock it immediately fed, and through whose dummies it first worked its cruel ventriloquy, and within whose tomahawk outline can still be found a peopled wilderness more ruinous than just about any other, is where I judge that root to be. I will not stunt my rage with reference to what this prideful and cowardly blight has done to the uppermost boughs of our republic: the reader is free to lift his chin, and expose his neck, and see for himself how pride and cowardice alone are now represented up there. My own aim is the root itself, and my whetstone is the memory of how casually, how mechanically, this entity sent forth its spores to destroy what might have been a perfectly acceptable childhood.
    That I have only this mean alignment of words for an edge, and that I can control my axe no better than to bring it down upon those who are of my own blood, and so are due not an accidental violence from me but rather a purposeful love, is a shame we have always with us. Still, I make no apology for the fact that I have raised up and swung. My object is, and only has been, that unclean and hideous root.

Blackberries
    I abhor blackberries. I would surely eradicate them if brought to power. My brother might say bees, given all those attacks on him through our screenless windows by what looked to be a mutation of the species, neither bug nor bird but fully three inches long, the boy probably dreaming in his bed of the last time he was stung into surreal and agonized consciousness by one of these winged freaks, which our father called “king hornets” and I at least held to be the result of some experiment gone horribly awry in those abandoned bee boxes in the yard. My sister, sustained if not comforted by her
Black Beauty
books and her Laura Ingalls wilder, might say horses, given how she was led on always by that promise our parents had made her, and teasingly saw our pasture used to