Against the Country by Ben Metcalf Read Free Book Online Page A

winter nags from a cheap and imitation riding camp nearby, and knew that this one was “Chief Joe,” and that one “Prince smoke,” and that one “Granny,” but had neither the clearance nor the ability to saddle and ride any of these creatures, let alone call one her own and call herself its, until sent at last by a fugitive kindness to this same cheap and imitation riding camp nearby, where her affection for these animals could not overcome the cheap and imitative quality of the instruction there, or her late introduction to the art, or the degree to which the treacherous land had spooked every animal that walked or ran upon it, and so could not prevent her being thrown one afternoon, and dragged byher pretty heel, and very nearly killed, after which she went in for an altogether different kind of book.
    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 haveextracted 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