Against the Country Read Online Free PDF

esteem a man for his decision not to raise welts on the skin of a defenseless child, but there it is. I would probably seek to deify him if I did not suspect that what had saved me was only that the indolence in him had temporarily outclassed the rage.
    I might blame rage for his decision to whip us, and indolence for those times he did not; and I might blame a blend of these and other elements (pride, an urge to self-destruct) for his decision to store his books out in the chicken coop, and thereby feed his former sense of himself to the rats and the termites and the silverfish and even, in time, the chickens; and I might blame a similar blend for his decision to have his sons tear up patches of an acreage he should never have bought in search of a topsoil he hoped never to find; but a worse ailment surely underlies the style at work here. In my recollection, no banjos accompanied the howls of a child being tortured in our house, yet I do not think a father’s pride or rage or indolence or death wish can fully account for the presence of such insults, musical or otherwise, elsewhere in our lives. Something more is asked to explain why a man would not stomach a grocer between his mouth and an egg, or a mechanic between himself and any motor that came near, or an abattoir between himself and his meat, or an ordinary household item between his arm and my ass.

Call it fear
    Call it fear, because fear surely lurks somewhere beneath all matters of style. Call it fear because fear surely engendered, if it did not merely masquerade as, the pride and the rage and all the rest of my father’s afflictions. Call it fear because I do not care to imagine that a man’s taste and intelligence and morality can be sucked out of him so quickly by something entirely external, as opposed to being chased out of him by an internal and possibly even sane response to that external something.
    The public-broadcasting set never tires of the conceit that one can look out over America’s hills, and through her swamps and forests, and across her valleys and plains and deserts, and sense in those features a presence far greater than one’s own. I do not deny it: there is definitely something out there. I doubt, though, that these people would be so dug in about the supposed goodness of that presence, and would so easily claim a “profound respect for,” or even a “love of,” an entity concerned primarily with their destruction, and would roam so far afield as to speculate that this entity might be “God,” could they be prevailed upon to spend more than a long weekend or two away from the uterine comforts of town each year. Nor am I impressed with their ability to identify and implicate those rural folk whose brains have been sufficiently cooked by the sun’s radiation, or by the waves of their own fear, so as to leave them happy to testify to the truth of this or any other fairytale. Despite all protestations to the contrary, God does not wait for us out in those trees.
    Fear made my father believe, or pretend to believe, that we needed a basketball court; I am sure of it. He may also have realized that his devaluation of the property required in recompense some small improvement to it, or that his devaluation of the children required some small improvement to them, or he may simply have come to understand that we would require a better distraction than the switch if we were not to shy on him one day when told to break more wood and hack more weeds and till more soil and sow more corn. For all I know, he may have fled for more obscure reasons toward a half-remembered and wholly midwestern idea that “real” American farms have a basketball hoop on them somewhere, but it was certainly not from a position of courage that he informed us one morning of his intention to devote our strength to the manufacture of a facility we had neither the talent to make use of nor the inclination to enjoy.
    Our assumption was that he meant to have us drive a