How Breaking Chains Lead Me to the Grave
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Inside his white, 1970 TransAm, a man yodeled over the stereo. The acoustic guitar thumped like the lonely, widowed heart that beat inside the whiskey-stained Fire Bird, the pedal steel guitar wailed and howled, and each fiddle lamented for the good LORD to take him home. My grandfather, Lenny, sang his aching heart’s delight and self-wallow into Hank Williams’s honky tonk tunes, which painted the hopeless highway of trees blue, inside of which we drove deeper. It stretched for over fifty miles in all directions—one lane leading West, the other East. For a stoic type, the man could yodel.
My grandfather was a large man and had been his whole life. All the muscle he once used to overpower any sorry man who double-crossed or disrespected him, had now deteriorated and deflated into rippling, gelatinous chicken-thigh whackers. On his evergreen, anxious regard, he wore glasses, which nestled in his withering, thin white hair, which he still wore in the same hairdo since the 40s and 50s — slicked back with a rogue cowlick that arched over his forehead like the fishing pole he would cast into the Floridian swamps growing up.
The Legacy of My Father’s Father
Lenny was a remnant of a dying generation. Back in his day, the sheriff only had jurisdiction over one county — and the counties weren’t more than twenty miles in parameter each. Once, he and his boys left a man cut with a buck knife and dumped in a ditch after an exchange of poorly chosen words. A witness at the bar phoned the sheriff’s deputies. Not long after, they tailed after him to the county line. That’s where Lenny led them. A couple of deputies waited at the finish line and lay a spike strip before he could break free, but he whipped his car around theirs and up over the grass and slammed back down on the highway, crossing out of Gardnerville. He halted his car and stepped out into the road, flashing them his salutations until the next time.
“Grandpa,” I said as my head rested in my hand, leaning out of the car window, the warm wind brushing through my long, blonde hair, “Do you have any other cassette tapes?”
“Well,” he uttered with stammered hesitance, “there’s another one somewhere in the back.”
I contorted my body over my seat and checked all over the floorboard. Nothing. Then I stuck my hand in the passenger seat back pockets and to my delight, I felt the clunkiness of that relic musical device. Got ya!
I pulled the unearthed treasure up to my face, and my spirit crashed back into my chest when I read the album title: Honky Tonkin’, Hank Williams. “Grandpa, do you only listen to Hank Williams?”
“I never liked that new music,” he scowled. “You can’t hear what the hell the singer’s even sayin’ over all that noise”
“Yeah, I guess everything after Nirvana became less about the lyrics.”
“What? The who now? I mean the rocking stones or somethin’. That stuff ain’t music.”
“The Rolling Stones?” I asked. I sighed at every fiddle anacrusis that wrung its notes under my collar, ready to drag me into another line dance. Each time, I inhaled a metallic, mildewy scent on my tongue. Something about the water here smelt of copper, rust, or iron. It stained the bathtubs (and my hair) orange.
But my dulled spirit illuminated as I realized we were close to our first destination. Action! We pulled up to the curb of a house with overgrown shrubs and weeds draping over the brick wall next to a set of stairs leading to the halfway home to pick up the last of our party: My father, Lenny Jr.
The Legacy of My Father
Like his father, Lenny Jr. often evaded the local law. In a Dukes of Hazard-like fury, my father led the deputies on a high-speed pursuit to cross that county line. Three cop cars swiped at his tail as he pulled them over train tracks in his stick shift Camero. Pulling them by the nose, he ricocheted right off the road and into a field where a barn house was erected among the tall grass. He took cover behind the barn house, pulled the emergency breaks, and flipped his car in a one-eighty. When the deputies followed him behind the barn house, he broke through the herd head-on. In the end, the sheriff blocked him off with several deputy cars and a row of them bracing for my father, pistols drawn and aimed for his inbound head. Lenny Jr. was rebellious but not stupid. After he was handcuffed, the sheriff walked up to him and said, “In all my years, I’ve never seen a man drive like you just did. Where in the hell did you learn to drive like that?”
My grandpa sat there with a worried, confused regard. I don’t think the state knew he still used his expired driver’s license. But when you live out in the sticks, who’s going to say something?
My father waited for this moment many seasons since he sprang out of the house as soon as we arrived. I jumped out of the car, gave him a brief hug, and quickly squeezed myself into the back of the two-door. We were back on the road again.
We hadn’t eaten yet today, so we stopped in town at the local Hardee’s for some honey biscuit breakfast sandwiches and sweet tea. They exchanged both of their regrets and other miseries. Having my cup’s worth of the blues, I asked if the train that ran straight through the town was operational, but somehow that segwayed into a discourse about the Confederacy.
Once my grandpa wrapped up his lecture on how plantation owners used to educate their slaves, we hit the road again.
Let’s Rock and Roll
“Dad, have you been making him listen to Hank Williams this whole time?” my dad asked as he clung some dip under his gums. The Trans Am ventilated a foreign scent to me—piney, minty.
“Shoot, we only listened to it twice.”
My father turned around in his seat and said, “I have something to introduce you to. You’re too young to know this guy, but he is one of the greatest guitarists in history.”
My grandpa sniggered. “Aw, chicken shit.”
He ejected the cassette that the vintage stereo must’ve melted by now. He entered a CD and the mood of the car ride took a dramatic shift. I leaned with my head pressed against the back window. The land was so moist. The fields were a drenched, dark green. The gutters can’t have seen their bellies in decades. Suddenly, I heard the twang of a brittle electric guitar lick— slurs, hammer-ons, and pull-offs. My ears perked as they recognized that distorted guitar tone and the raspy voice began to cry, “Layla!”
Before I could bask in what was familiar to me and the world I came from, my dad proceeded to lecture me on his version of what made Eric Clapton famous and why the music was so great. I tried to tell him that I loved this artist. I learned to play that opening lick. However, he glossed over my extended hand and continued to “teach” me about his generation’s music. Again, my spirit fell right back into my chest, leaving a crater in my lungs this time.
“Are we almost there yet?” I asked.
Respect Your Elders
“Now slow your horses, son, your family ain’t goin’ nowhere,” my dad said, in a reassuring tone as if showing any level of expressiveness were a sign of losing composure. Things took their time in the South. The big city corrupted my pacing mind. And I needed to chill. Message received.
“Now was it this turn, now?” my grandpa asked.
“Yeah, I think so. It’s past this tree.”
“The what, now? Oh, thissun?”
Just focus on the music. At least the self-pitiful fiddling stopped. Now you have these distorted power chords to drown out the noise.
“Daddy, it’s down that path right down there.”
You know, I’ve heard this song so many times. Geez, Clapton. Is four minutes seriously necessary for a piano outro? I think we got the point. Why didn’t I charge my iPod Nano last night? My shirt won’t quit sticking to my roasting skin. I feel like a bird in an oven.
“Alright, alright. Don’t yell at me now.”
“I ain’t yellin’.”
I didn’t even want to go on this stupid trip. I would rather shoot guns in the backyard again than endure this trip. Though, last time, the power of that .45 rattled every bone in my body like a trepid xylophone. But hey, at least I felt alive. Not like this stale drive in this stupid old car that doesn’t even have AC.
“Ya did. Ya raised your voice at me.”
“How can you not know where you’re going? You said you’ve driven here for decades!” I yelled.
They both stopped snickering at each other and fell silent. The eye of the storm passed over them for a moment, looking at each other with blank stares. Then my grandpa pointed his finger at my father and said in a matter-of-fact tone, “You better teach that boy not to raise his voice at his elders.”
Without a second spared, he said, “Son, don’t you talk to your granddaddy like that. He’s getting older. You show him some respect.”
“You, too, while you’re at it, boy,” Grandpa remarked.
“Yes, daddy.”
My dad and I both sank back into our seats.
“Oh, look! We made it,” Grandpa said.
Redemption at the Grave
Off to the right of the road, we approached a clearing in the forest. We drove under an arched sign, which read: Gardnersville Cemetery.
All three of us filed out of the car at a leisurely pace. My father looked toward me and said that this is where all of the James’ have been buried for centuries. My granddaddy’s daddy and his daddy before that and so on.
I stared into the tombstones and read all their names. They were dated back previous the Civil War — some of them were Confederate graves from the Civil War. I, a southwestern Yankee, shared lineage with these men buried beneath my feet in this ungainly, graveyard, which has been lost to the wilderness of Floridian forestry. They bore my name. I would never have known they existed if their graves weren’t kept here in this forgotten place and if my father and his father hadn’t kept their memories alive. Granddaddy told me that he already arranged his hole in the ground next to his wife's, Rose, among the rest of the James’. And my divorced dad echoed the sentiment, pointing next to his mama and daddy’s grave.
At once, the weight of two hands grabbed a hold of my consciousness. The power of tradition revealed itself to me. What else could produce this sensation of singularity between the present and the past? Nothing. I stared into the past before me. Our existence was tied to the land. My granddaddy, his son, and I were all ripples expanding from the past into the unknown expanse of time. Deep down, though, I knew that it would end with me. I would break the chain. Though I wasn’t raised on this land, I tithed a tear toward the legacy of which I was the conclusion.
“Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things have passed away. Behold, new things have come.
2 Corinthians 5:17
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