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

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, thisenemy 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.

Partial birth
    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 eachmorning 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