Harbingers all
We possessed no basement to which I might repair, as the town kids all seemed to, for our house was put up directly onto the soil, and so what sunken living space we implied to the road below was only that part of the foundation time and gravity and the Virginia mud had conspired by then to swallow. Also there was no garage. I might pen a trite little treatise here about why a garage is preferable to a basement from the American teenage perspective, or why a basement is preferable to a garage, but in either case an extended encounter with one or both is required, and so I am bereft. We did, on the other hand, have an attic. By chance or by fate there was, toward the southerly end of my room, a pull-down entrance into the addled brainpan of our jailor, which held only fear for me until my brother moved in, after which it beckoned me up always into its gray rafters, bare in spots but elsewhere laid over with planks enough that a child might easily gather what was needed to suspend a habitat there.
This attic was uncommonly warm in summer, despite or perhaps because of the enormous fan our father had placed in the house’s northern aperture, which contraption seemed somehow to pull the hot air toward us rather than fulfill its mission to push the stuff back out, and which, due to the requirements of its oversized motor, produced such a heat on its own account that I sometimes wondered whether it would not catch fire some dry night and burn us all alive. Still, for companionship I ranked this machine above most parents I knew, for there was little chance that one of its blades would come loose of an afternoon and strike me for no good reason, and so raise yet another welt, and so raise yet another resentment, and so raise yet another sentence, and if it turned to arson while I was near I would at least be the first one alight and so, by my screams, might warn all the others. Who knows but by a shrieking, embarrassed death I might have attained a heroism that will forever now elude me in this shrieking, embarrassed life.
A preponderance of wasps and spiders presented up there, but in my desperation I imagined that these could be warded off with pluck and a plan. I was wrong, of course: the spirit of a spider is broken soon enough, and if not one can generally smash her and all her issue with a shoe, but wasps are another matter. Wasps are a resistance movement, and they will fight, to a wasp, to the last. Most town dwellers can probably count, or anyway estimate, the number of times some cute little honeybee has pricked and annoyed them over the course of forty or fifty summers; I could not begin to count even the number of wounds I received, to my neck and arms and fingers (as they waved frantically in front of my face), on the single afternoon when I resolved to evict these assassins, with swats aimed in the general direction of the fan, from what I mistakenly assumed to be not their home but mine.
I bitch now, yes, and with cause, but in the event I made no real complaint. Like most country children, I had come to consider all pain, and all swelling and itch, to be the mere price of admission to this world, and so I wondered no more over what the wasps had done to me than I did over the two-night skin-crawl and inability to breathe properly that had followed my father’s installation, with my conscripted help, of the cheap fiberglass insulation he saw fit to staple into our roof’s underside with the brown paper backing snug to the wood, and the fluffy pink filaments in and against us, which was surely an error, or else a slow attempt at murder-suicide, though to have voiced such an opinion then would have risked accusations of sabotage and a further suspicion of faggotry.
I shut my mouth too on those occasions when I thought to employ a comb at the pus-speckled bathroom mirror, and felt in my wrist some tension beyond the usual tug and tangle, and reached back to discover a vast tacky wetness there, and a rubberish nubbin attached to my scalp like an aberrant mole, and understood that I had yet again impaled a tick so bloated on what had formerly been my own blood that even a dull plastic tine could pop him. I did not call out for assistance then but simply pulled the wrinkled shell free from its moorings, and tossed it dead or dying into the toilet, and made use of the repatriated sauce to whelm and subdue what strands were closest by, grateful that I would not have to chase after every cowlick this time with ordinary well water and spit. So accustomed had I become to insults of this kind that I went some weeks with a greatly troubled anus and the sight of wriggly white threads in my stool, each seeking hopelessly to regain the warmth it had just now vacated, before I bothered my mother with the news that her second son’s lower bowel had become grossly inhabited by pinworms.
Little white pills from the county clinic, as prepared for this contingency as it was for snakebite and the occasional if suspect chainsaw accident, soon routed the little white worms (for a time I feared that my digestion alone would be required to perform this trick), though I would never quite be cured of the impulse to examine what went into or out of me, and I would be cognizant always of where it was I sat, and what it was I had touched to my lips, lest I swallow again the eggs of this worm, if not some worse, or else hatch and invite its babies up into me, where their forebears had already prepared for them a moist and cozy abode.
Up or up into; down or down into: it mattered less to my turned stomach and itchy crack how these demons got in than that they palpably had, and would be back again shortly if encouraged, and had mapped out well their miserable townships within me, and had determined to start new lives there rather than remain any longer in the dirt below my clenched fundament, or in the weeds beyond my loud mouth, and were harbingers all of more terrible intrusions to come.
A box thrown between us
From the raids foreshadowed by the worms in my ass I must in all fairness exclude the rats, as they preceded the worms and, despite multiple measures to the contrary, survived them. These traders in filth, these brokers of disease, who in the popular imagination are denizens only of town and hence enough reason to leave it, were so well represented in Goochland’s clearings that I sometimes thought us squatters on their property rather than them on ours. These, and not the heat, and not the constant threat of unsquashed and vengeful spiders, and not the hum and stab of kamikaze wasps, and not the muffled repeat of my father’s stolen staple gun against pink fibers let loose to swirl among the fecal motes we normally inhaled, led me to abandon all hope of a retreat any nearer the sky than I already had. For a while I convinced myself that those peripheral flashes of gray in the attic were indicative of squirrels who had mistaken our house for a wide and hollow tree, and so looked to situate their nuts within its reaches, but the illusion would not hold: whilst arranging boards and boxes in my aerie one night I chanced to corner one of these animals, and noticed that it had an oily string in place of the usual bushy tail, and that its face was thinner than what I had come to expect, and that the dots with which it greeted the world betrayed not squirrelishness at all but rather a keen and unbreakable rage, which in a sudden spurt saw the entirety of its body launched against me.
I blocked the rat’s assault by means of a box thrown between us, but my evenings in the attic were over, and I rarely went up there afterward except to fetch some stored and hard-to-find item, whereupon I announced my arrival with claps and loud whistles, so as to frighten off, if only for a measure or two, what sharpened teeth lay in wait for me there. Each subsequent trip up that yanked-down and unfolded ladder reminded me that where I had failed two uncles of mine, younger brothers of my father, had in their teens made for themselves a fine and rat-free haunt in the eaves of their parents’ Illinois farmhouse, and had music up there, and entertained at least one eventual wife that I can recall (with fondness: she could really dance: Hello, Aunt ____!), and a brother or half-brother of hers, and a girl with him too (whose relation to me is less clear), and had carved out a space where these and more could congregate, and laugh together, and play their records, and smoke their dope, and tease one another, and eventually (if not all at once: who can say?) couple without fear or foreknowledge of the day when they would be led, as a matter of simple need, to take work (after generations wholly aware that their kind could not possibly survive as farmers, even sober and celibate ones) as soldiers and printing-plant workers and long-distance truckers and attendants at the nearby nursing homes.