It looked like a piece of junk and it had been sitting there in the lot behind my Grandmother’s home as far back as a mind can remember. I have faint memories of my Grandmother bathing me in her kitchen sink, and a little rubber ducky-like toy she used to entertain me, but this old Volvo had been rusting in the field long before those days. By the time that I was outflanking the Yankee troops on the farm with my gun-shaped piece of Eastern Juniper, that car had become more like an enemy fort and less like an inert object. At the same time, if harboring Yankee scum wasn’t enough, the old car hosted a set of windows that were disproportionately newer than the rest of the car. Unfortunately for the car, I had arrived at an age when destroying things would be an expression of my ability to destroy things. It’s kind of like when puppies get to the age when they are discovering new uses for their teeth on a daily basis.
The car used to be considered white. The bumpers were almost certainly chrome. The rubber on the flattened tires was cracked and the foam in the seats was pushing through here and there. Along with the various forms of rubbish that had made a home on the floorboards there were weeds that had pushed through the steering column, and a litter of black pellets that hinted to a colony of rats – no evidence that it was a vehicle of value. Back when my sister and I used to enjoy each other’s company, before I sharpened knives, made guns out of sticks, and developed my own style of cong-fu, we would use the car to practice our steering, an activity that initiated future road-way debates on each other’s driving skills. If driving skill was measured by our system, then roads would have to be made pretty crooked. It’s a lesson we learn pretty quick – that shaking the wheel back and forth isn’t what makes the car go, a right of passage for all children is to realize that the movement of a car’s steering wheel is directly related to the preservation of life.
I think back and try to reason with little Zebulon. I try to tell him to stop while he can still claim it was an accident, a stupid misfire that should have careened into a Yankee patrol. But the cinder-block merely bounced off the windshield to the ground, initiating a curiosity over the effort that destruction required, the curiosity that has left so many good cats dead.
Safety glass was invented in 1903 by Edouard Benedictus. He discovered it by mistake when he put some cellulose nitrate in a flask and accidentally dropped it the next morning. The cellulose nitrate left a thin layer of plastic on the inside of the flask that caused the glass to hang together after it was dropped on the floor. Nowadays it is meant to protect drivers and people who like to break glass from the blades of razor sharp glass that would have otherwise flown into our bodies upon impact. Instead it was designed to be extra resilient to impact, yet fragile enough so that, when penetrated, it crumbles into a million little squares. I guess that the windshield of a car was something mysterious to a young man who spent most of his time absorbed into a wonderland of imagination. It seemed so important and impermeable, that clear force-field that shields the passenger from the outside world, yet mom and dad used the image of our little bodies flying head first through it so we would keep our seat belts fastened. Luck would have it that safety glass was designed to break. Just think how unsuccessful it would have been had all those beltless passengers exploded against the inside of their car windshields? I mean, chances are you’re pretty much a corps if you go flying through the glass, but at least there are not pieces of you lying in your family’s laps. Thank Mr. Benedictus.
In school they always taught us that we could be anything we wanted to be and do anything we wanted to do. It is an all-American mind set, that one’s destiny and success is controlled by his willpower. If you first do not succeed, try, try, try again. And I did – again and again and again. It is funny how that same virtue which led to the destruction of the car’s windshield is at the same time, the champion of old fashioned, American values. Perhaps my father didn’t understand this. Perhaps he didn’t understand the kind of effort and meticulous concentration I used to break the glass, the same meticulous patience that had earned me the most praiseworthy accomplishments. It was at this time that I noticed an anger in my father that I had never seen. Sure, I had seen him kicked by a few cows and had seen him hit his finger several times with a hammer, but this was different because it was directed at me, the same anger that caused him to kick back, to throw his hammer. I realize that if my father was ever going to hit me, then it would be now, and I even somehow understood and accepted that I deserved it. His red face and violent restraint, everything indicating I had crossed a line that was beyond my comprehension, so far beyond it that explanations could be justifiably replaced with a good beating.
It was a classic scene in which father and son stood straining to face one another, neither ready to look into the other’s eyes and see something human, see the disappointment, see something of which both would be ashamed. That is how we humans are able to justify violence. We look away, take a step back, and strike, shoot, stab, destroy the connection. Somehow my intuition knew this, and it would have been right had it been anyone else’s father standing there in front of me.
My father collected himself enough to reach into his pocket, pull out his pocket knife, unfold it, and hand it to me. My sweaty, shaking palm reached for the handle as I received this tool with which I was to cut a switch, to choose the knotty twig that would be used to strike my body. My father stool waiting in front of the dairy barn, beside the apple tree, while I carried the knife in my tear soaked hands over to a hedge.
Privet hedge is an invasive species to Tennessee’s Central Basin, a kind of vegetative form of cancer that made itself at home first as a property line, then as bows and arrows for neighborhood kids, and finally as a substitute for native trees. It is a gangly growing plant proliferating in bushes of straight, resilient twigs that grow at about a quarter inch in diameter. They all looked painful to me, but some of them were heavier and raspier than others. I stood there searching, thinking, trying to lengthen the time between my choices and their consequences, wondering what kind of switch would find favor with my father’s intentions. Would he be angry if I chose a wimpy, soft one? I was ashamed but didn’t want my father to think that I couldn’t take a good thrashing. But those heavy, knotty ones looked fierce, like they could draw blood. Eventually, there it was, a switch that could arouse neither suspicions of cowardice nor pride. I would have liked to cut it quicker, but my father’s pocket knife was duller than a spoon, and I began to think that I would have fared much better had my dad just beat me with the knife. It took some courage to accept my punishment, but I did return to face my father and place the weapon in his coarse fingers.
He stood with his head bowed to the ground, a father doing what he could to make sure that his son would not be a hooligan, and he slowly rotated the piece of privet between his thumb and forefinger, searching for truth, searching for the right words that could prevent the seemingly inevitable violence. It took a while for us to gather the courage to look at each other, but when we did a silent line of communication opened, and all at once he understood, he saw that I understood. There was no need for words, no need for swinging a stick, merely a simply question that reaffirmed his assumption that I realized my wrongdoing.
Volvos are some of the most respected cars in the automobile industry, above everything else renown for the durability and protection they offer in the time of an accident. But what made this car so special was that it didn’t belong to us. It had been in safe keeping for a friend, just sitting there in the field all my life, slowly awaiting this day. That is what really made my father upset. He had to call his friend and tell him that his son had just obliterated the windows in his old Volvo. That must have been pretty difficult for him to do. I can imagine he felt more shame than me, with all the pride and effort he put into making sure that I would turn out to be a good guy. Would they think that he was a neglectful father? Would they wonder how any kid would even be given the capacity to do such a thing? Would they ever understand that his son was just ridiculously imaginative and thorough, committed to finishing every job that he started. Even when it is breaking out the windows of an old Volvo, my intuitive desire for symmetry and perfection was shining through my work, determined not to leave anything undone. Unfortunately, another man’s trash is always another man’s treasure, and if there are any real lessons to be learned here then we will first have to accept that even Volvos can’t last forever. Eventually we have to let go of whatever it is in our life that we are trying to preserve, whether it’s an old car, our youth, or a sense of place.
I will never forget that day because my father never hit me. It was an expression that no matter how valuable the car was, there was no size of privet hedge big enough to bring back the windows in the car, no car valuable enough to warrant a father’s violence towards his children. Where most fathers would have struck their sons for destroying the car, my father refrained and showed me that there was nothing material I could destroy that would be more valuable than our mutual respect for each other.
