BOOK TWO
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 each morning 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 to be got away from whenever possible, long before a Virginia schoolhouse had even come into view?
Almost as soon as I sat down on a Goochland schoolbus I was beaten into tears and rage by a teenage boy who with wide worried eyes yelled, “This ain’t slavery days no more! This ain’t slavery days no more!” which refrain I recall as clearly as I do my confusion about what the statement meant and what action of mine could possibly have prompted either the rhetoric or the volley of blows. Less violent passengers, saints to my mind, pulled me free of those fists, and up off the dull green vinyl where I had uselessly sought shelter, and shoved me aft, toward the equally amused faces of the children who more closely resembled me. I would make a clever reference to Rosa Parks here, but that would find me guilty of a great anachronism: in 1977, enrolled in what the Virginia Commonwealth loosely called the sixth grade, I had no idea who that woman was, nor could I discern much difference between the bow and stern of a vehicle that seemed to me an insult to everyone on it. I found a place in back near my brother, whose size and potential for violence might have protected me had the shock of life in the countryside not rendered him impassive and largely mute until puberty, at that point still as foreign to him as were the ominous firs he watched file past, from left to right, through the dirty windows of what he had instinctively understood to be no better than a cattle car.
When later I pressed my father for some clues about what had befallen me on the bus, he told me patiently of how the darker people in America had once been slaves to the lighter; of how a great conflagration had been set to free them; of how this effort had been doctrinally successful but not practically so; of how more than a hundred years later the slaves’ descendants remained in social and economic bondage; of how countless men and women had struggled all the while to change this; of how these people had made such a slow progress in their art that as recently as a generation ago, in this part of the country and many others, it was still possible that a brown boy who said hello to a pink girl, or in any way challenged the illegal and immoral order of things, might be set upon by a band of pink boys who would beat him senseless and maybe even to death; of how this notion of justice never seemed to apply to a pink boy who said hello, or did worse, to a brown girl; of how even a secondhand knowledge of that not wholly bygone era was bound to engender a certain resentment in children whose parents and aunts and uncles had themselves been so victimized; and of how none of this was any excuse for a boy of his to lose a fistfight on the bus.
I had a follow-up question (Why did we move here?), but it went unanswered and probably unheard. Within a day or two my brother and I found ourselves in front of the house with cheap padded gloves on our hands, our father keen to train us up so that we would not be made fools of in what he apparently mistook for the landscape of his own childhood. I remember that I began to cry, mostly out of anticipation, and set upon my brother with swings of the overhand type, which he casually countered with swings of the underhand type, which shortly left me aware of a great sky before me, and the earth against my back, and an intense nausea centered at the base of my skull. To my right, on the perpendicular, my father jutted out, shocked by one son and no doubt ashamed of the other. At my feet, my brother, whom I knew to be upright but who seemed just then to be lying back against the nothingness behind him, stared out, as he often did, at the nothingness above us all.
Rattle
He had lately become host to prophetic dreams, this brother, and for a time his relation of those dreams was our only real conversation. A rattler, he might say, and sit up in his bed, and point at the woods, and although we were far enough east and north to make rattlesnakes a rarity I would nonetheless hear, when I dared approach the patch he had indicated, the distinctive sound all those hopelessness-themed westerns my father watched had taught me to fear. Blackie will vanish, would come his next glimpse, the finger aimed this time at another patch of woods, and although I took comfort in the thought that the nearly human mutt we had brought with us from Illinois would not be killed by a rattler, that evening there would indeed be no bark and run and wiggle when we called the little dog’s name. My sister may have understood that there was a locust or a cicada in these parts whose sound (from a certain distance, and enhanced by the echo chamber of the trees) was very much like a snake’s rattle, and she may have concluded that the dog’s absence was easily explained by his previous attempts to desert us and return to town, or at least to locate a family less obviously doomed than our own, but for my part I put great store in my brother’s weirdness, and I believed that even awake he was especially attuned to the future being urged and constructed in that awful place.