Against the Country Read Free Page B

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.

Illinois bull
    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 southerlyside (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