Against the Country Read Online Free PDF Page A

astonished steps and then, as his frightened grin dissolves, reaches out to catch himself against the side of a red-hot wood stove.

Affront
    We pretended as best we could that our father meant no more than a vain plea of innocence, but the evidence was against us. He left untouched a charming little slave shack, done up in the same abused white and nauseated green as the farmhouse, which we took to be a perfectly reasonable announcement that no one could be expected to wrest subsistence from this mud without captive labor (I am frankly surprised that I was not immediately installed in that shack), but his decision to spare the old outhouse, if only till a lust for its few stinky planks could overcome him, fairly shouted to all the world that we were not yet sold on the notion of indoor facilities, which could not help but connote a harder sort of pride.
    The first sort implied only that my siblings and I would be enlisted now and then to inflict new damage on our position, whereas the second ensured that we would be made to endure the existential threat of a chicken society, and the less abstract menace of a yard mined with dog feces, and the hokum of a pickup truck whose bed we would have cause but no permission to use, and the self-consciously rustic affront of cars being “worked on” next to or in front of the house, and at one point the shock of an entire engine block hung by a chain from a tree, and a record player now enamored of Flatt and scruggs’s banjo travesties, and too often the indecency of a television set thatstill fancied
M*A*S*H
, yes, but came increasingly to favor episodes of
Grand Ole Opry
and
Hee Haw
.
    He also began to whip us for our sins, committed or not, with switches cut by our own hand, which was the country way and I hope still is. That was a tough lesson, because central Virginia is shaded mostly by scrub pine, and no one with a lick of sense wants his legs torn into by a conifer. Something pulled from a conventional bush might suffice, or from a sassafras, though this might be returned for lack of firepower. Most saplings provided an acceptable bite, or a mutant shoot pulled off a full-grown tree. Birch was what was wanted by our father; balsa was what the condemned always sought, though that effect was to be found only in older trees that had died and decayed: I never saw it in anything green enough to pass for a switch. Young maple would do, and walnut of course. I would like to have tried baby oak, out of curiosity, but the earth right around us seemed unfriendly if not openly hostile to acorns. Plum was unthinkable, and cherry, and all the fruit-bearing trees: the sweetness in them promised too much. Magnolias and the like were a gamble: one might come up lucky with a flimsy specimen, but even the smaller armlets could prove deceptively sound. Dogwood held its own special thrill: it was the state tree! Locust was to be avoided, given its thorny bough, and no sane parent would misuse a child with a switch taken from that plant, just as no sane child would retrieve such a thing, unless he had it in mind to euthanize his own backside by seeing it whipped away for good.
    Pride exacts its price, but this was collaboration, and as such we greeted it with the same resistance we had learned to employ on visits to my grandparents’ small farm back in southern Illinois, when for a weekend my father would become feral again and treat us all like stolen mules so that his people would not get the idea that education, and town, had softened himany. I took to pulling on every pair of underpants I could find on those days when I thought myself likely to be laid into, which was often enough, and one of the reasons I still bother to call my father a good man is that when, on a humid spring day in Virginia, this ruse was finally uncovered, and everyone anticipated my screams and my humiliation with that rarefied variety of glee known only within families, he thought to let me be. It is a strange thing to