Vanity and Vexation of Spirit (or This Family Kills Fascists)

by Israel Allen

When I was a boy, we lived a long way from my relatives, and I traveled hundreds of miles every Christmas in the backs of station wagons and pick-up trucks with camper tops and pallets of blankets and sleeping bags, listening to Walkmen, fighting with my brothers, and looking out the windows at all the works which are done under the sun. From our Tennessee home, westward we rolled to my grandmothers’ houses, like a nursery rhyme on four wheels. I learned to love a road trip like other kids learned to love Santa Claus, and there was always a chance of Waffle House syrup on my socks on Christmas morning.

My father had four brothers and seven sisters whose names I could never remember, much less their kids, some of whom were older than Dad and scattered further and farther even than we were. Mom’s three sisters were manageable, and I knew all their collective children’s names. Some of them were even our age. We called Mom’s mother Mammaw, and at her house (or cabin or trailer), we celebrated with our cousins by playing games—sometimes card games, sometimes board games, and sometimes BB gun war. The copper fell like rain, but we always managed to miss each other’s eyes, praise God.

Grammaw Allen was old when I was born—sixty-four, I think, so nearly seventy in my earliest memories of her, which is unfathomably ancient to a toddler. She made better biscuits than your grandmother, of this I am sure, and she had the softest hands I have ever touched. I was twenty-four when she died, and I drove to Louisiana to touch them in her casket. They were like rubber or some Madame Tussauds wax imitation of my grandmother, and I knew then the difference between a body and a soul.

Like Elvis, she had left the building.

Her eldest daughter, my aunt Mavis, was two years older than Mammaw. I’m now middle-aged and genuinely in fear that I will die childless like Mavis before me, so I have thought far too much about the oddities of generational gaps. Nevertheless, I still marvel when I think, “My aunt was older than my grandmother.” Mavis died of lung cancer even though she wasn’t a smoker. It started on her heart sac, probably a product of all the bitterness she harbored there because her father was an abusive alcoholic, and it was easier to be angry and self-righteous and miserable than to forgive someone who didn’t deserve it one bit. She gave me a great many things over the years: souvenirs from her travels around the world and experiences on road trips with her to places my parents could never afford to show me, but more valuable than any of these was her example of how not to live, an object lesson in the beauty of a deep and abiding apathy toward the things you cannot change. She was a concave Serenity Prayer just begging for someone to pour himself into it. I have tried, with moderate success. The man who ruined her life, my grandfather, died long before I was born, when my father was only five and probably still believed in Santa Claus.

Mammaw was a saint. Her only real flaw was that she married an alcoholic savage who beat her and their four daughters. No one is perfect. When I was twenty-six, I carried his casket from a tiny church in the honest-to-God boondocks of rural Mississippi, so far out the locals get lost, across a parking lot, across a rough, hilly lawn, through a graveyard so old some of the headstones had worn plum away—but still with plenty of room for more graves because hardly anybody has ever lived out there—and put him in a hole dug by men he would have called words I won’t say. I had help, of course: five relatives—my younger brother and some cousins, if memory serves. It was July and ungodly hot and humid and miserable, and we all pretty much hated the wretched old devil, and we knew we were going to have to do it all again just a few days later.

In an unrelated event, my cousin Daniel had committed suicide the same night that my grandfather died. My aunt Evelyn lost her father and her only son in a matter of minutes. The former was no great loss, really, but the latter was more than any mother should be asked to bear. We carried Daniel the same way we carried Granddaddy and put him in a hole dug by the same men. In the casket, you couldn’t feel any difference. That was a long time ago. More recently, we put the building Mammaw had left in a graveyard so close and similar that I couldn’t tell the difference. It’s a few miles, I suppose, but it felt like we were leaving her just a stone’s throw from her useless ex-husband.

Some things you just can’t get away from.

Before all of that, when they were all still alive—Mavis and Daniel and David and Mammaw and Granddaddy and Grandmaw Allen, along with other aunts and uncles and cousins whose names I still can’t remember—we went tramping through the trees and timber behind my aunt Ellen’s house sometime between breakfast and the opening of presents. She and her family and Mammaw lived in Alabama then, about four hours from the backwater Mississippi county where much of that side of the family is now buried, but the two states don’t differ enough for anyone to really notice without reading the road signs.

CAUTION: It may be hazardous to point this out to the locals.

I think Daniel was there, but I could be wrong. I think the group was Jeff and my older brother, the outlaw—the eldest of our generation on that side—with me and Daniel and Aron, my aunt Janice’s son. Michael, my younger brother, may have been with us, but I’m sure Cher, Daniel’s older sister, was not. I think Ellen’s sons, David, who would some years later be murdered, God rest his soul, and Mark, were still too young to be tromping about with the teenagers. In any case, we had been hiking around, probably shooting each other with BB guns and God only knows what all other mean-spirited sinfulness when we came upon an old Volkswagen Beetle.

It didn’t belong there.

It didn’t belong to anyone in the family, and we were on my aunt and uncle’s land. There was no road, no reason for it to be there. Lo these many years later, I couldn’t swear it was still a working vehicle. It had a fair bit of rust, I think, but it seemed okay. At the time, I thought it was someone’s car, driven there and left with every intention of returning and driving it home.

We were bored.

We were teenagers.

We were boys.

There were several of us, and one of us was Jeff. My brother is not exactly Billy the Kid, but he has a certain flare for iniquity. He had an idea, and we all thought it was a great one. We all wished we had thought of it ourselves. From an adolescent, not-considering-the-consequences-of-your-actions and completely-oblivious-to-anyone-else’s-concerns perspective, it was probably as brilliant an idea as anyone, anywhere, has ever had.

You see, that Beetle was parked on a trail.

That trail ran along a bluff.

That bluff dropped sheer for about seventy-five feet.

Jeff said we should flip the Beetle, just roll it off the cliff. A Beetle is fairly light, as cars go, and I imagine its weight was less than the heft of the collective pall we have since borne. We lined up on one side, each got a good hold, and in a unison of effort never achieved before or since by any group of my blood relations on either side for any purpose under heaven, we lifted that hunk of German engineering from the earth and tipped it to its death on the rocks below. Strength through joy, indeed. It may have been the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. It did not toil or spin but dropped like a science teacher’s object lesson, thirty-two feet per second per—crash!

Seventy-five feet goes by fast in a falling Volkswagen.

For a few seconds, we looked in awe at the work our hands had wrought. Then we laughed and congratulated ourselves and went back to hiking and shooting and insulting one another. It was so meaningless, so inconsequential, I don’t believe we ever spoke of it again.

As an adult, I wonder to whom that car belonged and if that person ever came back. I wonder if it was someone’s only means of transportation or even someone’s home. I wonder if it was the car some other kid rode in on trips to see family hundreds of miles away, people about whom that child would tell stories even today, disjointed and tangential, to his own kids while the iPhone plays Woody Guthrie and the stars go by in that endless skyway, viewed through lined defrosted glass on the way to grandma’s house or maybe just out for a waffle.

BIO: Israel Allen did media and constituent relations for the governor of Tennessee before earning an MFA in Creative Writing. He has since taught English and Theatre at colleges and high schools. He is the author of several novels, including the thrillers Ian Baker’s .45 and Bibles and Ball Bats (writing as Chris Allen). His plays Ask Me Anything and Stitches earned awards from the South Carolina Theatre Association. His dinner theatre murder mystery The Emerald Heist has been produced by more than one hundred theatres across thirty-five U.S. states, four Canadian provinces, New Zealand, Australia and Ethiopia.