Against the Country Read Online Free PDF Page B

pole with a rim on it down into the former shed’s foundation, and that he had some method worked out by which we would then flatten the pit’s bottom and so avoid the ruin of our ankles as we ran around down there, and that he planned to circumscribe the whole business with a fence meant to catch the inevitable loose balls as we tried and failed to master this game he thought so highly of, but again our hopes betrayed us. He sent us out instead with shovel and hoe to chop away at the ground just east of where we had murdered the shed, behind it in relation to the road and beside it from the vantage of the house, where by the time we had carved out even a few cubic feet of that hateful clay we were forced to sit and soak our hands and wait for the blisters there to form the calluses he was probably after from the outset. His affection for basketball, and his concernfor the property, and his desire to see us find some pleasure in that hellscape, were all shown to run no deeper than the shallow grave’s worth of Virginia we had displaced before finally being allowed to abandon the job altogether. We nailed the rim to a big maple out front and rarely afterward went near it.
    I know from what followed that our father had conspired with his fear, and in this case with the institution of basketball, to toughen us against what he saw as a formidable opponent, and I will not challenge that call. In the first place it is nice to have been thought of, and in the second the environment would prove itself a threat to his children soon enough: it would extract their blood by stinger and thorn, and would unsettle their innards with parasites, and would puff them up with plant and bug venom, and would cause them to claw at their limbs and to vomit, and would roast their little skulls until they saw dots and more complicated ghosts in the fields, and would leave them in no state to question their father’s wisdom that the proper attitude toward nature was to prepare for her inevitable assault and be watchful. Why he could not have reacquainted himself with this simple truth before his line was marooned out in the hinterland again is beyond me, but he is surely due credit for an eventual grip on the fact that we were in no way wanted as caretakers of the American muck and may even have been intended as hapless sacrifices to it.
    What was to be gained by this sacrifice, aside from the enrichment of those with the effrontery to hype and sell a worthless land that did not anyway belong to them, I cannot say. Perhaps a compact was struck in the olden days to ensure that the bears and the alligators and the snakes and the floodwater would avoid the better settlements, and that lightning and tornadoes would not target them from above, and that earthquakes and sinkholes would not come at them from below, and that ants and termites would not amble in and carry off all that wasedible in the meantime, so long as undesirables were sent out into the desolate places to be drained of their wits, and then of the will to proceed, and finally of life itself. I do not know. Every child, I imagine, would like to believe that it has been thrown away for a higher purpose, as opposed to just thrown away.

Trash pit
    I had seen from the car window where the rural man’s husk went when there was no more work to be had from it: to a sad little churchyard cemetery if he was lucky, or to a smaller and still sadder cemetery in the tall grass behind a farmhouse if he was not, there to explore eternity alongside a wife he could no longer touch, and a mother he could no longer do for, and a father he could no longer hope to impress, and in-laws he could no longer hope to avoid, and siblings he could no longer laugh with, and an uncle or two the drink had taken, and the odd aunt no man would marry, and of course all those infants who might have lived longer had they only been born in town. A bleak country churchyard waited patiently for us all back in southern Illinois,