Upon This Rock

Upon This Rock

A short story

by Brandon Britton

Periodically I sweep the dust, leaves and sticks off the flat, smooth, though misshapen, rocks at the base of our little portable faux wrought iron fence. I sweep and I time travel. I transcend my current geographic location and am carried by the winds and my memories to a place hundreds of miles and decades away. I touch down in a place with a funny little name: Chicken Creek.

Every story has a starting place, a natural beginning, and for this story, our story, Chicken Creek is where it begins. It was here that Richard and Dale began their lives together, in much the same way places with names like Trade Branch and Gunter Ridge marked the beginning point for their parents. Although they had married years earlier, and three of their children were born when they lived at a different location, Chicken Creek was where their lives, our lives, began. After a decade, one of their sons would lead his girlfriend up a hill overlooking Chicken Creek and ask her to become his wife. Almost thirty years later that same son, and his now wife, would begin the second act of their lives on this same farm, in that same little white house. Nearly a century earlier their ancestors had lived here, not on the flat forty acres at the bottom of the hill, but high atop that hill, in a simple wooden house that their great, great, great, great, great grandson at sixteen would hang out in to party with his friends, prompting his grandfather, who was unaware his oldest grandchild was the source of the commotion, to threaten to call the police to break up the party. As the circle of life continued, upon this same hill, this grandson would go on his first date with the girl who would become his wife, a girl he just met the day before while swimming together where Chicken Creek flowed into Richland Creek. Another ten years would pass and that same grandson would eventually bring his wife and children to the cool shady spot beside the creek to live, raising his boys on the farm where both he and his father played as children.

Long, long before any of this there was Richard and Dale and Chicken Creek. This was the place he had chosen to raise his boys. It had everything they would need for a memorable childhood: a huge field for football and baseball, a basketball goal, hills and woods, a natural spring, cows and hogs, and that creek. The creek that they would fish in, swim in, skips rocks and kill snakes in. He bought the little white house that was built in the 1800’s and moved in his family. It was small, but it was all they needed, and most importantly it had a loving mother to watch over it all and to keep it all together. She was a gentle Christian woman who never went to work outside the home, but was constantly at work within it. Dale, or Memaw as her grandchildren would later call her, kept food on the table, clothes on their backs and Dr. Seuss books in their hands. She loved to read, and was a talented writer herself, which she tried to instill in her boys, and ultimately did in her grandson. This was the place that would serve as their foundation for the next fifty plus years, though sadly, he would seldom spend his time there.

“Fatty”, or better yet, Granddaddy Richard, as he would eventually be called, had what was known as a thousand yard stare. He always looked like he was seeing things the rest of us didn't see, whether they were things in the past, the future or the present and just in a different geographic location, who knows. I first witnessed this stare on Saturday mornings as he sat at the little circular kitchen table reading the paper, listening to the morning news and drinking coffee as the smoke from his cigarettes swirled in the air above his head. Meanwhile Memaw would be in the front of the house, drifting between the three rooms with the blue shag carpet and the noisy air conditioner in the summer or the four burner electric heater in the winter. I observed all of this from in front of the television in the den. There was no cable television on Chicken Creek, so my Saturday morning cartoons came via a twenty foot high antenna atop a pole in the backyard. The floor would be littered with matchbox cars, Legos and geometrically shaped wooden building blocks that became the ingredients for my Saturday mornings adventures. Memaw would cook or clean, I would play, but he would sit there silently and stare at nothing in particular. 

Perhaps this stare was just the collateral damage of fighting addiction. If you are constantly waging war in your mind with the siren song of the bottle, it makes it nearly impossible to concern yourself too much with the cooling of the coffee or the burning down of the cigarette in your hands. Maybe it was just the side effects of being a traveling salesman. Those who live on the road are never really anywhere. A life in transit means you are always coming from or going to somewhere so you never truly, fully, get to be "there." I came to understand that stare, and my appreciation for and admiration of him only increased when I made my own lonely journey down the road he traveled, first addiction, then as a traveling salesman. Our addictions weren't identical, mine was whiskey, his was vodka, and we didn't sell the same things, for him it was farm equipment parts, for me missions, but it was the same isolated path that we followed, just in different eras. We were never close in the traditional sense, though I never once questioned how much he loved us. He demonstrated his love through his constant generosity and his keen business sense which he freely shared with others. Strangely, I was never closer to him than when I was alone, 1,500 miles from home, sitting alone at a diner, striking up conversations with strangers because I was dreading having to walk into my hotel room and spend the next eight hours alone. Sometimes when I was driving down the highway, bored with the radio, but still with hundreds of miles to go, I would prop my left wrist at the twelve o’clock position and lean over onto the armrest on the right the way he always did. This simple maneuver somehow made me feel like I wasn’t alone. It made me feel like he was there with me.

Looking at these rocks I see him and he’s here with me. These rocks are tableaus and looking down upon them I see the scenes of our family history recreated, both triumphant and devastating. Sometimes they are mirrors, other times they are portals to a time long gone or to glimpse the future. These rocks are tombstones, stumbling blocks and foundations. They are me. They are we. They are those of us who have yet to arrive. Many times the storms of life have frightened and injured me, yet these rocks have sustained me, all because a wise woman, my Memaw, a few generations ago determined to build her house, not on the sand, but on the Rock, and upon these rocks, to this day, I flee for safety and stability in times of threat or indecision.

These rocks made the migration to Florida, via Georgia, by way of a twenty-seven foot Penske moving truck. After agonizing over the decision to dig up my roots and leave Chicken Creek behind, I had a moment, an epiphany perhaps. I will never leave this place behind, no matter where I go, not because I choose to stay, but because I choose for it to stay with me. Moments before pulling away from Chicken Creek with everything we owned loaded in that truck, I realized something was missing. Jumping from the cab of the truck I waded into the middle of the creek, the part where the water breaks across the shoals, and felt around for eight rocks. Sliding them under the bench seat I climbed behind the wheel and began the drive south. For awhile I kept them a secret from everyone in my family, until Memorial Day 2011, just before my parents and mother in law got in their cars to return back to Chicken Creek. Gathering all of us in the flower garden of our back yard I produced the stones. Eight flat, smooth creek rocks, molded and shaped, smoothed and washed in the creek that carved its way through our family farm. There was one each representing my sons, one representing my wife and I, one for my parents, one for my wife’s mother and three to symbolize our faith (the Father, Son and Holy Spirit). In the same fashion that Joshua erected a monument in the Jordan River to remind the Israelites where they came from, where they were going, and Who brought them there, we established our own portable shrine to our history and our legacy, crafted from the foundation of Chicken Creek itself. It is a  constant visible reminder of who we are, where we are going and where we came from. Three years later when our location drifted even farther south to Florida, the stones journeyed with us, and are now, by the same hand that pulled them from the waters and planted them in the sand, being swept of the natural debris that accumulates on top of them from day to day. 

Standing up I snap back to the present, no longer in the cool, lush stream bed of Chicken Creek, but now under the Spanish moss covered Live Oaks and palm trees in the tropical heat of a Florida Spring. I take my seat between the bougainvillea and hibiscus flowers, refreshed, comforted, and put pen to paper. We too are flat, smooth and misshapen, yet planted and arranged together. We too are covered in dirt, leaves and sticks, soiled and scarred by time and circumstance, but we are still here together. For generations these rocks have been smoothed, shaped and cleansed by the cool waters of Chicken Creek flowing over them, and so have we, not by flowing over us but because it flows through our veins. When separated from it we crave it the way a beached fish does the ocean. We are who we are because of Chicken Creek and it serves as an umbilical connection to our origins, binding us together no matter where the winds take us. Even though the Tennessee dirt under my feet has been replaced with Florida sand, I will always stand upon this rock.