(I hid in a depression behind a briar patch and shook, actually shook, in that hundred-degree heat, so country had I allowed myself to become, or willed myself to be (either way), sure that any moment I would look up and see Satan standing over me, until I remembered how Jesus had not cowered before this hindrance but rather had confronted him, and found him powerless, and had said to him Get thee hence (emphasis mine), who was not anyway painted red until much, much later, whereupon I resolved to rise up and approach him as any Christian properly should.
(My knees were at first uncooperative in this effort, and there were moments when I thought to shrink again behind the briars, but eventually I reached that point in the middle distance where I judged those flashes of red to have originated. What I saw there both eased my fear and inspired a lifetime’s assurance of it:
(Tacked to numerous trees, beyond those stapled now with new or ancient wire, were red plastic ribbons, at about head’s height, as if the forest had decided to commemorate something fully half its citizens refused to. This scene extended north for an acre or two, maybe more, and I could not help but consider its beauty, and its possible meaning, and estimate its odd outline, until at last I was able to ask my employer, ridden back toward me on pompous horseback, if he knew anything about the red ribbons, and he told me that his neighbor had paid a university man to tell him which trees ought to be chopped down so that the others might survive, which science he personally put no store in, preferring to leave such matters up to God, and he asked me how the fence was coming, and I said that it would be done on time, and he asked me was I sure, and I said that I was, and he asked me again was I sure, and this time I declined to answer him. As we spoke, or did otherwise, I do not think I took my mind for a moment off those brave and beribboned trunks across the way.
(I completed my repairs around that old man’s property in a fever, kicking and cursing at his cows to get out of the way once I had made it up into the field, and when it was finished I found myself with a single carved-out weekend to spare, during which time I would be paid to haul my equipment down into those woods, claiming to be doing “touch-up work,” and could hide said equipment in the dent behind those briars where I myself had previously hidden, and could flout the wire and reassign those red ribbons to trees of my choosing, not a university man’s, not yours, and certainly not God’s, so as to spell out into the future, by means of a stranger’s prophesied saw, a sentence the length of two football fields and readable, I prayed, from the vantage of the clouds.
((I will not be so crass as to transliterate that early effort here.))
At day’s end I would climb up exhausted into the yard, and sit on the cinder-block step to the cluttered old side porch, and slop a lazy finger of kerosene into a rusted Campbell’s soup can, and remove my boots and socks, and roll up my trousers, and use a pocketknife to shave my shins and calves clean of the ticks who had assembled there so thickly that I could not always see the blade’s surface as I scraped it against the inner lip of the can. I hoped then that these beasts would at least be granted a final wish, and drown in the kerosene, before I had time to drop a lit match down onto their still-struggling number.
(You flames and far-off trepidations: cheerio!)
Wonder Bread
Was it the Word or only the Wafer that was meant to save me? For a stretch I believed it was both, and was pleased. A happiness to hear the Word; a happiness also to taste the Flesh, since I knew It at least by name, if not by sight, and had decided already, long before any Church-prescribed “retreat” to a half-defunct summer camp nearby (where some few of us had previously been day campers, to be lashed out at and spit upon by town kids whose parents lacked either the money or the intel not to board their angry issue out there, and one summer only after we had weatherproofed its failing cabins in the offseason, without having first been warned that what we slathered on the siding would raise welts and blisters where it touched our skin and then met sunlight, which it seemed almost to seek), to like It personally.
We were meant to admire the Jesus counselors because they were older, of course, but also because they took us all seriously, and thought us more “mature” than our parents ever gave us “credit for”; and because they played guitar, which our age group was known to “respond to”; and because they were not at all “uncool” about playing only “God’s music” on their “axes” (and what a joy it was when we finally convinced that one counselor to play “Whole Lotta Love” on his, even though he did it wrong, and everyone, even the other counselors, joined in!); and because they were always “on call” for late-night “rap sessions” a full quorum of them might accidentally happen to attend, and then, with patient impatience (or was it the other way around?), continually steer the conversation back toward Jesus while the annoying teen in their trap refused to stop rhapsodizing about all the different ways rabbits knew how to kill themselves.
And the goats! My God, but the goats! I knew of a nanny who would position herself into death’s grim profile whenever my friend, her ostensible keeper (or was he my keeper, and her friend?), took a dirtbike out into the fields that surrounded his toiletless home, and revved up the hillocks and jumped, only to find himself suspended, in air and in thought, looking down at a goat who clearly asked to be landed upon, her belly swollen with tumors (or else with a kid who for years refused to come out, as every vet she ever saw had concluded (and were they wrong, these experts? is the leap from kid being born so that it might seek out ways to kill itself to kid choosing not even to be born really so enormous? are our delays in this life, and prior to it, not explained by what awaits us beyond the vulva’s tight grasp?)), until he threw his bike off to the left, and himself off to the right, landing each painfully so as to spare the goat, whom he then took to tying up by the neck in an empty hog pen, where one night she intrigued, by means of her bifurcate paws, to scramble over the southerly side and hang herself.
(The outer boards showed no evidence that she had ever tried to regain her confinement.)
A dog of ours (named by our father Wee Cooper O’Fife, after the Scottish folksong about the wife-beating old barrel maker, and because our part of the county was called Fife, and because that dog was monstrously large, even as a puppy) once employed this same method while tied up “for his own good” on the side porch, except that the barrier he made it over was shorter, or the rope was longer, and so, by this grace, or that devilment, he survived. He had tossed himself in front of a Monte Carlo (which required real forethought, if you think about it, on a road less traveled by), though possibly it was a Gran Torino. The people inside it braked, and said how sorry they were, while the dog lay whimpering in a ditch, and asked was there anything they could do, he came out of nowhere, and I said, “No,” and thanked them, thanked them, and they rolled up their window and drove off at the same suicide-heedless speed as before. Only our “melodramatic” pleas that night, and our “emotionally manipulative” tears, and our “frankly shocking” decision to part with a multigenerational coin collection we had cared not one whit for since leaving the Land of Lincoln, saved that dog from a self-consciously rural bullet to the back of the head and won him a town operation he little wanted and less deserved. After which he sought to hang himself on the side porch and then took primarily to murder.