Father Y was the one I told about the flies and sundry, not sure if those were sins, really, but not wanting to chance it. He had no idea what to say but only scanned his frontal lobe throughout our encounter, looking for Jesus up there, I guess, or else for the vascular discrepancy that had first made him want to go fish. In time he came to and said that God loved me, which by then I needed to hear, and he gave me some prayers to say, which I suspect I did, and some penance to do, which was about as likely as my asking an eye-rolling priest if he honestly thought every being we encountered wanted to kill us, granted, but also to die, so plain was that notion to anyone who had persisted even a short time out there.
(You sad and forsworn country priests: cheerio!)
Ants liked to off themselves in the sugar bowl, which made sweetening one’s Cheerios a challenge. The trick was to extract a spoonful of hardened sugar that did not include an ant dead from diabetic shock. I grew so adept at this procedure that there was some talk of my becoming a famous surgeon. Obviously that did not happen.
(You failed little country excavators: cheerio!)
Ticks hitched rides to hell on all five of us, especially newly enthusiastic country boys who ran around willy-nilly advertising themselves for rent (so that when a pig went missing its farmer might appear in the churchyard of a Sunday, just after Mass, and make inquiries, and offer a few dollars apiece, as my brother and I were said to be swift, and despite being Catholic still technically Christian, and unwilling to let a pig go any more than we would a human (and it was known by then that we had once apprehended a runaway delinquent in a field, hoping to make a name for ourselves in the bounty-hunting trade, and thus be availed of the millions we imagined were allocated to the retrieval of harder sorts who broke out from the State Farm every month or so, and fetched all those helicopters overhead, and left the shelter of the trees to approach small children, which dream went unfulfilled, as did my wish to become a repo man later on, when I worked as a teller for the local farmer’s bank and thought I would be better put to collecting debts than to dwelling on assets, but we did catch that one little insult: asked where he thought he was going, the JD said, “Home,” by which he meant Richmond, and my brother explained that Richmond lay many miles to the east, through those endless woods, whereas the JD was oriented north, through those endless woods, and with any luck would reach Washington within a year’s time, to be picked up by the FBI, if he were still alive, and beat on considerably, and sent back here, or else he could come along with us right now, at which point the JD started crying, and on the long walk back to the road I explained that before he set off the next time he might know how many phones were installed in his facility, and where said phones were located, and then just prior to his escape might unscrew the mouthpiece to each, and remove the resonator within, and screw the mouthpiece back on, so that no one his keepers then called would be able to hear anything about a drug problem running through the woods with directional difficulties and dyed-red hippie hair), though I do remember on one such occasion cornering an adolescent pig under the porch of a farmhouse and behaving less than professionally with him: we recounted the “Three Little Pigs,” which seemed to agitate rather than console him, and when he smelled bacon frying brightly in the house above, and heard our stomachs grumble in sympathy below, my brother pointed up at the smell, and then at him, and he bolted and butted the smaller of us full-on in the sternum, which sent me flying ass-backward and greatly extended the chase (through crackly woods and still-dampened grasses: how I miss them now!) until at last we realized that he was playing a game with us too, and actually wanted to be caught, and we formed a stratagem around this idea and brought him in easily, though when we handed him over, wriggling and squealing with self-delight (can I not still feel those precious ribs beneath his skin?), my brother took the farmer aside and explained that this pig should under no circumstance be eaten, as we had God’s hard evidence that it could spell), till word went round that these boys might get the job done, sure, but were not so quick as was claimed, and were unorthodox at best in their approach, and perhaps even liberal, and should probably be confined to tasks that required less sense, or none at all, such as fetching more wood, or putting up more hay, or digging further postholes, or helping out your obviously insane old farmer (“what would you do if somebody pulled your nuts off? I reckon I’d shoot him. And then I’d shoot him again!”), whose niece, or cousin, or granddaughter, a cheerleader we had admired at the high school, once approached us in the parking lot and said that there was a truckful of wood in need of unloading, and the pay was fifty dollars because it was the bank president, and would we do it? and we said yes we will Yes (apiece?), and then discovered that the wood had been hauled in days ago on an unwashed fish truck, with the refrigeration turned off, which we managed nonetheless to clear, by means of rags strapped across our mouths and our noses, after which we ate crinkle-cut potatoes fried in butter by the bank president’s looker of a wife and barely made it home before the worst of the vomiting began.
(You retchers into tacked-on toilets: cheerio!)
Ticks are famous, of course, for their propensity to swell up with borrowed blood and bust, leaving behind them, as vigorish, this or that ugly disease, but the majority I encountered in Goochland sought out a very different suicide upon me. In want of more dramatic assignments I had developed a sideline in the repair of barbed-wire fences, contemplative work I figured would at least impede the pigs and the rapists while I made a more intensive study of, and a healthier fellowship with, my surrounds. It was an easier job for two, but my brother had found steady employment to the east, with a twinkling farmer who encouraged him to drive the tractor along Route 6, even when there was no real cause to do so, in order that the tanned and shirtless young man might force to a crawl, and a familiar rage, motorists who otherwise took such political pride in the fact that they lived in a place where one had now and then to wait behind a tractor.
(You freeway cars and combines: cheerio!)
Wire and poles, then. Wood and metal. Solitude. The themes are familiar and the work relatively straightforward: one needed no more than a spool of barbed wire, and a wire stretcher, and some clippers, and a bag of bent nails, and a hammer, to remake all of America, which is known for its whitewashed fences, thanks to Twain and Rockwell (though these seem to have painted their pickets somewhat differently), but is more widely, and more accurately, defined by the wire. Still, I intend no abstract on American boundaries here: that has already been tried in our literature. Nor will I indulge my own vanity by making too much of the fact that my first attempt at “creative” writing occurred well within, and of necessity beyond, those exceedingly hurtful constraints.
(Really this was a trifle. Once I had repaired or replaced the strands along the road, cutting away the kudzu to do so, and hammering fresh or rusted wire into grayed posts that sometimes needed a hand up and help back into the ground, I reached a sharp corner and was forced down east into thick country pine, where the heat let up less than the humidity adhered, and my breathing shallowed of its own accord, and I began to see peripheral flashes of a red I at first thought presaged a stroke (did I in fact die in those woods? am I lying there even today?) but soon understood (I cannot overstate how real this was for me, at that particular time, in that particular place) to be glimpses of the Devil’s own flesh as he stalked me from tree to tree.