BOOK THREE
I feared the corn
The child who holds up his schoolbus with a shotgun and does not forthwith find himself confined to a juvenile facility or a mental home might be almost expected to take a friendlier line with his environment, but I cannot honestly say every change in my attitude postdated that grim afternoon when I decided to approach mere children as if they were a cavalry regiment sent out to ransack the farm. Long before this incident I had been exposed by my father to that virus which causes man to believe his health and soul contingent upon a commerce with the elements, and by my mother to that equally powerful contagion Be a good sport, and already the fever was high in me. I ran through the woods and the fields like any child will, and at times I removed all my clothes and leapt into the waterways, never free from worry about turtles and snakes and intestinal parasites and so on, for I was not stupid, but as quick as anyone to get naked and a vigorous if watchful swimmer. Nor was I game only for what nature awaited me below the surface: even prior to my flirtation with closets and shotguns I had begun a close relationship with the trees, or anyway with the more familiar ones near the house, and would climb up into them whether a switch was wanted or not, and would rest in their arms with no thought for their evil and but a small prejudice, really, for the dirt I had escaped by snuggling their bark and their goo.
I was able to put out of my head what an enemy these plants clearly were (and would prove) by a wish not to see my loved ones undone, and myself further shamed, by the loss implicit in our headlong pursuit of simplicity, but whereas the trees could be construed as a benign infestation of the land, in that they seemed to lack any direct capacity to infest me, other potential violators were not so easily dismissed. In particular I feared the corn. We grew tomatoes too, and snow peas, and carrots, and string beans, and lima beans, and beets, and onions, and radishes, and lettuce, and cabbage, and spinach, and green peppers, and red peppers, and eggplants, and potatoes, and cucumbers, and zucchini, and squash, and pumpkins, and cantaloupes, and watermelons, and strawberries, and asparagus, and God knows what else, never enough to sell, of course, but far too much for us to consume naturally, so that when one of these foods came due, and we were sent out to fill grocery bag after grocery bag with it, we could be sure in the knowledge that the coming month’s dinners would force upon and into us so much of this supposed boon that we would eventually gag at the very thought of it.
Still, the corn was more terrible. Beans can take cover in a casserole; peppers will subside in a sauce; lettuce is easily laundered in a salad or a sandwich; any cucumber not bound for the salad can be breaded and fried like a tomato, which will make it either more or less vomitous, depending. Peas and carrots will linger in a stew until you barely notice them. Spinach and squash and cabbage can be boiled down into a harmless mush. Radishes and onions one may politely refuse. Most berries will rot before they can be eaten anyway, and the flies will take care of any melon with its side kicked in. Pumpkins, thank Jesus, are not generally fed to children. Asparagus is prone to mowing accidents. Beets can be avoided altogether if one is prepared to regurgitate them, just once, at the table. No one really minds a potato.
What, though, is to be done with the corn? Unless ground up into a meal it will show itself everywhere: on the cob, where butter and salt cannot hide its babyfood sweetness; on the plate, where it sits hard and wet in an inedible pile; in a stew or a soup, where it represents in such number as to render everything else a mere garnish; in a fruit cocktail, where by rights it does not belong; in a salad, where it seems almost a cancer; in the mouth, where its shell hugs the tooth and slips up under the gum; in the stool, where its constant and undigested presence speaks to how little nutrition is actually to be had from this false and most American of vegetables.
I went out to plant it, though, and to pick and shuck it along with everybody else, none of us possessed of a smile, exactly, for the dumb waxy leaves we would be forced to pull away from each ear, and the little green knobs left behind (which only luck or a very sharp knife could remove), and the thousands of moist silken threads we would yank at and try to rub away but would never be wholly rid of until at last they entered our gobs, and were chewed free of their surrounds, and slid tastelessly down the back of our throats, provided they did not lodge up against our tonsils like flotsam, or catch in our teeth like floss, where because we were not overly familiar with the store-bought variety they tended to rot and remain.
I imagine that we all wondered why the bugs and the deer and the weather could not have got at our crop with more aggressiveness this year, and so spared us the need to stomach so much of it, but were we not also, to a one, availed of some small faith in the notion that in time we would be purified by this ordeal? were we not, in some secret part of ourselves, if not in a perfectly public one, convinced that no family could be expected to endure even our commonplace hardships without being brought closer to the physical truth of existence on this planet, which closeness would imply, if not in fact impart, a wisdom unavailable to those who did not expend a significant part of their life force, and their sanity, planting and tending and picking and shucking and cleaning and chewing and trying to swallow the corn?
That the faith I kept in this enterprise was clearly insufficient, and likely no match for what was being kept all around me, does not mean that I was then, or should now be considered, entirely beyond belief.
American expressions
Fashion reaches out through the weeds with at least as much pull as we feel from the magazines and the television set, and has often enough bent these same media to its purpose (human agony), but can it not be refused? Though the mind be weakened by sun and allergen and ennui, does it not remain, on some low and original level, a mechanism of choice? Though the trees wave us ever onward to our doom, do we not yet fan within us some Tinker Bellish spark of will and revival?
I hope so, as I would hate to see them go blameless who hold that pastoral activities alone deserve heaven’s favor, and that admission there will be greased by a self-consciously nursed rural accent and a conviction that God smiles down upon all American expressions of cowardice and butchery. I would prefer to see them punished who insist that any vengeance grown here must be a holy vengeance, even as it halves and sets fire to the innocent; and who maintain that homosexuals were placed on this earth by Lucifer to rape what few white babies can be saved from the abortionist’s tongs; and who think it the height of nonconformity to hold that many (not all, of course, but more than one is allowed to say) black babies are conceived with a welfare check in mind, which premeditated theft should in all fairness be met with penalties more severe than the mere mass incarceration already under way, which program itself is unethical (that is, inefficient) in that it wastes further tax dollars on the care and feeding of prisoners who will never (studies show) be reformed, and are immigrants anyway, or else the burdensome profligation of same (whether they arrived here in shackles is entirely beside the point), and so are in essence the same thing as enemies of the state, and so really (to make the “tough call” here, to protect society as a whole and not merely its privileged minorities) ought to be killed.