I know from what followed that our father had conspired with his fear, and in this case with the institution of basketball, to toughen us against what he saw as a formidable opponent, and I will not challenge that call. In the first place it is nice to have been thought of, and in the second the environment would prove itself a threat to his children soon enough: it would extract their blood by stinger and thorn, and would unsettle their innards with parasites, and would puff them up with plant and bug venom, and would cause them to claw at their limbs and to vomit, and would roast their little skulls until they saw dots and more complicated ghosts in the fields, and would leave them in no state to question their father’s wisdom that the proper attitude toward nature was to prepare for her inevitable assault and be watchful. Why he could not have reacquainted himself with this simple truth before his line was marooned out in the hinterland again is beyond me, but he is surely due credit for an eventual grip on the fact that we were in no way wanted as caretakers of the American muck and may even have been intended as hapless sacrifices to it.
What was to be gained by this sacrifice, aside from the enrichment of those with the effrontery to hype and sell a worthless land that did not anyway belong to them, I cannot say. Perhaps a compact was struck in the olden days to ensure that the bears and the alligators and the snakes and the floodwater would avoid the better settlements, and that lightning and tornadoes would not target them from above, and that earthquakes and sinkholes would not come at them from below, and that ants and termites would not amble in and carry off all that was edible in the meantime, so long as undesirables were sent out into the desolate places to be drained of their wits, and then of the will to proceed, and finally of life itself. I do not know. Every child, I imagine, would like to believe that it has been thrown away for a higher purpose, as opposed to just thrown away.
Trash pit
I had seen from the car window where the rural man’s husk went when there was no more work to be had from it: to a sad little churchyard cemetery if he was lucky, or to a smaller and still sadder cemetery in the tall grass behind a farmhouse if he was not, there to explore eternity alongside a wife he could no longer touch, and a mother he could no longer do for, and a father he could no longer hope to impress, and in-laws he could no longer hope to avoid, and siblings he could no longer laugh with, and an uncle or two the drink had taken, and the odd aunt no man would marry, and of course all those infants who might have lived longer had they only been born in town. A bleak country churchyard waited patiently for us all back in southern Illinois, ripe with the remains of my cousins and ancestors, but I worried that my father might turn that invitation down and send his children out to scare up something more expedient in the Virginia weeds. I planned to argue, if he had such a thought, that we should dig our graves in the hole where the shed had been, as the work there was already half done.
Neither graveyard nor basketball court would occupy that space, though, nor would this depression manage to transform itself, despite any machinations of mine, into a swimming pool. It would morph instead into something poor and strange: an emblem of my father’s imbalance during those regrettable years, a testament to the family’s continued tradition of inelegance and despair, hard evidence of our failure to live any more decently in the country than we had back in town, a catalogue of all we had consumed there in order to survive. It would prove a fester on my childhood unequaled by any other, and an embarrassment not even the stripes on my legs could outshine. It would become, from the moment we first asked what to do with that refuse we could not burn off illegally in the rusty old oil drum just beyond the aborted basketball court, and our underwear-clad father looked up from his umpteenth cigarette and answered with a finger thrust in the direction of the by-now overly familiar crater that abutted the twin ruts we had consented to call a driveway, that darkest of all country landmarks: it would become, though I would not have imagined such a thing possible, even in that county, an enormous open-air trash pit.
We threw a world down there, or so it seemed to me: every store-bought can scraped clean of its predictable treasure, every glass or dish dropped in numbness or hurled out of anger, every tin tray ruined in the attempt to warm a meal of Banquet fried chicken or off-brand fish sticks, every jar not commandeered to hold the inedible pickles my mother made to show us what a hoot it was to be self-sufficient, every supermarket bottle or foil-lined box of wine she then emptied to demonstrate otherwise, every window fan that had perished in the effort to push a few lungfuls of air through the house, every stretch of mesh pulled away from the back porch or the chicken coop by the wind or the gravity, every load of coals and ash our miserly stove had vomited up into its pail, every tool my father could not salvage with oaths and blows and electrical tape, every car battery he could intimidate no more work out of, every oil can sucked dry by a parched and damned engine, every air filter choked to death by the dust from the roads and the driveway, every cinder block too broken to support its share of a car’s dead weight, every armful of plaster hauled away from my father’s attempt to “remodel” the house’s two front rooms (and so silence at least one of his wife’s complaints), every sheet of tin roofing the shed or the front porch or the outhouse had donated to our embarrassment, every nail or hinge that had managed to loose itself from the pile of boards in the yard, every chunk of cement that had broken free from the mushroom cap over the well and somehow not plummeted down into it, those faucets that had formerly filled the bathroom sink and tub, the sink itself, the tub itself, an old commode, three cheap town bicycles the Virginia dew had corroded and the Virginia hills had anyway rendered useless, a plastic radio or two, a television set, and I seem to recall at least some part of a refrigerator, though a lingering disgust may mislead me there.
I will not pretend that a trash pit in the yard held no attraction for a young boy who now had cause and opportunity, after all, to discover what happened when a glass jug met a toilet bowl at considerable velocity, or to see how deeply a car battery could be made to penetrate a television screen, and who now had something to shoot at with his BB gun besides birds and siblings, just as the latter now had something to shoot at besides him. We took to the hole with air rifles and hammers and even the axe whenever my father was gone, glad to be free of the need to convince him every ten minutes or so of our attention to whatever senseless labor he had assigned us that day, and we aimed every trip to turn the garbage down there into an undifferentiated gravel by means of our violence and our joy.
I trust that our violence would have been adequate to the task, but we were shorted on the joy. We soon enough saw that a country trash pit contained fewer friends than had the underground pipes back in town, and that the promise of a slow death by septicemia was no replacement for the glamour of a quick one by sewer gas. We saw as well that the passerby’s eye sought out signs of humanity in the countryside, rather than the advertised delights of a flora and fauna that in truth only annoyed and oppressed him. Each honk heard from the road below, even when there was no derision in it, reminded us that our debasement in this place was far more public than it ever had been in town. We had supposed ourselves hidden in the wilderness, but we, like those cruel walls we felt thicken each summer and then thin when winter came on, like the cars and the weeds and the wreckage that surrounded our tin-hatted treachery, like the pit in which we cavorted with our waste, were undeniably a spectacle, gawked at like any other. Ridiculed by the ignorant, pitied by the less so, we occasionally met with a certain mortified and honkless recognition.