I agree that death tends to cut down on the fornication somewhat, but that is about as far as I made it down this particular path, nor did my parents, as thoroughly victimized by the rural myth as anyone else, ever wander off that way. Hence I must conclude that the land does not of itself create the bigotry and the bloodlust, does not of itself conjure murderous notions and place them in the minds of men, does not ever have to. I believe the land capable of such a magic, and of an opinion to work it should a more awesome display of its power become necessary, but for now the American seems complicit enough in his own destruction that he can usually find on him, in some pocket or other of his blue jeans, the seeds of his pride and resentment, which seeds he will sprinkle after him because that is what is normally done with seeds. The land itself, or rather that beast which today feeds everywhere beneath it, need provide only what it has always provided: annoyance and lack and trepidation. What more is asked for our violence to germinate and grow?
My mother’s ankle
No such philosophy engaged me then, while I climbed a tree, or splashed in a creek, or peed on the corn, or hid in the trash pit and hoped to be forgotten. Mostly I spent my energies on my parents’ new conception of themselves, and to a smaller extent their children, as real Americans, which was undertaking enough, and looked to my chores, and mostly completed them, and did my best to stay out of the on-deck circle for a whipping, where I never stood less than third in line. My father, enforcer of our common law, had since the incident with the schoolbus stepped up his operation (or had he stepped it down?), and my ass and the backs of my thighs knew better than to deviate from his program of reassimilation into ignorance and want. Although for the life of me I could not see what was to be had from this stance, I stuck to my work out of a respect for him, and with an eye toward what pain he might inflict, and tried not to dwell too much on the intrusions, physical and otherwise, that plainly threatened to thrash us all.
I am past those denials now, thank God or Goochland, and would like to elucidate just a few of the items I came to pretend made no real difference to me out there. The first was my mother’s ankle. It was a pretty bone, as those things go, long and thin and made of sound Scottish and German stock, never broken to my knowledge, nor tested in the usual manner (with hard kicks from a parent), but only walked upon (I saw it for myself) and danced upon (I have reason to hope) and on occasion crossed coyly over its partner, or else folded up under more precious parts on the couch, as women will tend to do. Said ankle had carried my mother through a clean and middle-class town existence in Columbus, Ohio, to parochial schools and ice-cream socials and half-innocent sock hops, down nature-camp pathways and department-store aisles and newly laid sidewalks to meet a boy or two or three, to numerous prom dates fraught with possibility, from the round seats of automobiles to bright urban eateries and back again, and eventually onto trains one still dressed to board, an example of which would transport and append her to an Illinois farmboy upon whom all her sophistication would be charmingly lost, as would all his on her, and whose sophistication or lack thereof would take her by romance and by U-Haul into the pines and hayfields of south-central Virginia with three hungry children in tow, none of whom knew enough to tell their mother not to work the corn rows wearing only a sundress and sandals.
The ringworm that took up residence on that ankle, just above the hillock of bone, was not technically a worm at all but rather a species of fungus, a cousin no doubt of that vast system below us, which breached the surface here and there to diminish our minds and our spirits, yes, but also, apparently, our ankles. The primary shades of this insult, as realized upon my mother, were purple and green and yellow, made shinier by the application of town ointments meant to dull and destroy them, the awful ring curled around almost to her calf and shin and easily discernable from up in the yard, where we children pretended to make ourselves busy while we wondered whether, or when, the sundress and the sandals would allow for an infection of the opposite leg.
Her husband might have explained that only hippie girls on the communes went out to tend crops with no socks or shoes on, their hips bent painfully like my mother’s always were, their feet planted wide so as to draw attention to the Ur-woman authenticity of their labor. He might have mentioned that the hippie girls caught ringworm too, and a hundred other things just as bad as the venereal diseases they famously acquired in town (which were not anyway unknown in the countryside), and that the copperheads would do far worse to that ankle if given half a chance, and that the spiders were not above setting up shop below a tomato. As far as I know he said nothing, or nothing that was heard. Perhaps he did not mind, really, if the dirt branded his woman in this or that ugly way, so long as she learned from her mark that the land could be infectious and cruel, and to expect no further effort out of him.
Yet should my mother, a woman of high intellect and no small worldliness, not have been able to gather all this and more without her husband’s harsh instruction? should she not have ascertained at once the source of the hideousness on her leg and taken steps to see it subdued, for her children’s sake if not for her own? Was she a stone, then, this woman, or a saint, or a suicide? what was it that sent her back out into those rows, aware, as we all were, that only continued hurt and scarification awaited her there? Was it some latent wish for martyrdom inherent in the Catholicism she had brought with her to Illinois, and now to Virginia, which her father himself had ignored but in his daughter saw strangely flourish? Was it a collapse toward the preordained doom her ostensibly Catholic but secretly Calvinist mother had assumed for herself and all her issue? Had some proud resistance to the obvious, some habit of contrariness for its own sake, sprung up in her after so short a time in that county, trapped as she was among self-destructive hucksters who talked down town but in their own panicked hearts actually longed for it?
I am no stranger to such motivations myself, yet I suspect that my mother’s were simpler still. I believe, or half believe, that she went out into those rows (they could not properly be called fields, nor were they small enough really to be gardens: call them gouges; call them graves) uncovered as she was so as to prove, if only to herself, that any intrusion of the plants into the soil, and any intrusion of the soil into the plants, and any intrusion of the bugs into either, and any intrusion of the bugs or the plants or the soil into her (which, after all, is my ostensible theme here), might eventually be overcome by an intrusion of herself into them. By which I mean only that my mother may at one point have been, despite the preponderance of evidence before her, an optimist.
On Sundays
I suppose a stubborn optimism could have led my mother to seek out God in our new artlessness, as she had in our old one back in town, though a stubborn pessimism seemed just the thing to encourage everybody else out there, and I doubt she got any closer to Him than they did while being forced to bear along the handicap of me. I did, here and there, with a smile toward the pews, and a big show of prayer after Communion, make an effort to aid in her advancement, though while employed at said prayer I might have aped too convincingly the young provincial who feels himself drowned each schoolday and so, on the Sabbath, clutches fast to his waterlogged half plank of faith, asking only that he never be inspired to ferry a shotgun with him to Mass. That I found myself unable to locate the joy in this activity as I did in some others was probably related to the fact that I understood my father to be in no mood, and in no moral position, to whip me for an improper attitude toward the Church, no matter how plaintively his wife cared to prosecute the matter.