The boy eyes the window in the old brick tower, sees a glint of wholeness amidst surrounding shards. He has no knowledge of physics or geology or religion, but he knows the wonder of the day, the sunshine and the cool air pouring through the pines. The wonder of the perfectly sized rock in the ditch. The wonder of the last unbroken pane, all the way at the top.
The rock has realness, both smooth and jagged in his palm. It exists. It is quite obvious to the boy that every single instant of time stretching back to the moment of Creation has culminated in this rock. The tools of God—quantum forces, gravity, geologic processes spanning the ages—have conspired to create its perfect form, and place it here in the gravel road behind the cotton mill. All of history has occurred so that this rock might meet the last unbroken window and achieve its destiny.
Once, millions of panes illuminated thousands of factory floors with sunlight, powering the economy of the American South, but for decades the windows have wasted their light on uncaring ghosts shuttered behind padlocked doors. They have long since achieved a higher purpose. It has become the highest, best fate of windows in abandoned cotton mills to be broken by boys with rocks.
The boy draws back his arm and throws, the weight of the rock increasing with the centrifugal arc of his arm. He doesn’t consider Newton’s Laws, the magic of perfect mathematics that rules rocks and boys and planets. He simply squints, aims, and throws, with all his passion. And a boy’s passion is the strongest forces in the universe. It is the force that has, and always will, guide the flow of history.
The rock glints in the air, perfect in its weightlessness. The boy wonders; if he were an ant on the stone, would he feel the sensation of a rollercoaster? If the spinning rock were a planet, would the oceans slosh off, would the inhabitants scream with glee or horror?
The boy feels this moment with the staggering clarity of childhood and none of the obscuring veils of age. An adult would see consequences, worry, expense, destruction, vandalism. The boy, however, still possesses the ability to experience the wonder of every single moment. Far more than an adult, he instinctively realizes the importance of his action. He is an agent of entropy, the engine of time that drags every object in the universe from order to disorder; an exploding sun, a dying grandmother, a scrambled egg. The last unbroken window in the old cotton mill is an affront to entropy, an act of cosmic defiance. If the natural laws of the universe are an expression of God’s form, entropy is an expression of His will. The boy, of course, is His laughter and joy.
Inside the tower at the base of the long-empty wooden fire tanks lay more proof of entropy in action: an ever-growing collection of rocks cast by other boys.
The first rock was thrown on a quiet Sunday evening in June, 1970, six years before the mill closure but long after it had begun its decline. It was thrown by Campbell Posey, a boy whose throwing arm had much later made him high school quarterback. That first rock had sailed magnificently through the bottom right-hand pane and come to rest against one of the metal hoops that held the staves of the tank. Today, like Campbell Posey who died of lung cancer in 1994, it lay forgotten and buried, Posey by six feet of red clay at the Baptist cemetery, the rock by six inches of guano from the pigeons that his broken window had allowed to enter. It was a landmark moment, vanquishing the sanctity of the high tower window, transforming it from an unnoticed piece of perfection to an alluring target. Perfection is always a target for boys with rocks.
The rock continues the perfect arc through the morning air, its path predetermined by ballistic mathematics, its point of impact fixed the moment it had left the boy’s hand. The rock’s destiny is secure, the final page of a story long written.
But what of the boy? Is the life of the boy also a book, each page pre-written at the flash of the big bang by the finger of God? Is each day a turn of the page, each moment a sentence written at the beginning of time? Or is each moment built upon the moments that come before, influenced by the infinite swirls and eddies of probability?
The boy doesn’t care. He watches the rock strike, and smiles and leaps and shouts. The sunshine is bright and the day is new and there are plenty more rocks in the ditch.
