The Map My Father Pinned Above the Workbench

My father has wanted to drive to the top of the country since before I was old enough to hold a spanner. He talks about it the way other men talk about a woman they once let get away. There is a map above his workbench, curled at the corners now, with a thick blue line he drew years ago in a koki pen that has long since dried out. The line runs north from our place outside Pretoria, up through Botswana, up and up until it stops somewhere near a river he has only ever seen in other people's photographs. He is sixty-one. I am twenty-eight. Somewhere in the middle of those two numbers is a window, and we both know it is closing.

The truck that would not wake up

The plan always had a shape, even when it had no engine. The shape was an old Land Cruiser, a seventies model my father bought off a farmer in the Free State for less than the price of a decent couch. It was rough. The seats were split and the chassis wore a skin of red dust that had baked on over decades, but the body was honest and the ladder frame underneath was straight. My father walked around it twice, kicked a tyre the way men do when they are pretending to think, and handed over the cash.

For two years we gave it our weekends. We scraped and wire-brushed and swore gently at seized bolts. My mother brought us tea and pretended not to notice how much Handy Andy we were getting through. It was good, that time. My father is not a man who says much, but a man who hands you the right socket before you have asked for it is saying plenty.

Then we tried to start the engine properly, and the dream nearly ended on the spot. There was a knock from deep inside the block, the kind of sound that makes your stomach drop. We pulled the head off on a Saturday that I remember more clearly than most birthdays. Number three piston was scored like someone had taken a chisel to it, and there was a crack running where no crack should ever run. My father wiped his hands on a rag for a long time without speaking. A brand-new engine was a joke we could not afford to laugh at. The quotes we got would have paid for the whole trip twice over and then some.

Learning to speak the language of scrap

So we went looking for a second-hand one. I did not understand, going in, how much of a craft it is to hunt for a sound used engine. I thought you phoned a place, they read a price off a shelf, and you drove home with a motor in the boot. It is nothing like that.

My father knew better. He grew up fixing what he had because there was never money to replace it, and he taught me the rhythm of it over those weeks. You phone around first. You learn which blocks fit and which ones people will swear fit but do not. You learn to read a seller the way you read weather. We spent a lot of evenings at the kitchen table with my laptop open to pages of [Engines for sale], my father leaning over my shoulder, asking me to scroll up again because he had seen something he wanted a second look at. He does not trust a screen entirely. He wants to put his hand on a thing.

Which is how we ended up spending a good many Saturdays walking the rows of a [Scrap Yard] out past the industrial part of town, where the ground is more oil than soil and the air has that particular smell of old steel warming in the sun. I had expected it to be a sad place. It is not. It is more like a library where every book has already been read hard and then set down. Rows of them, bonnets up, waiting. My father moved through it slowly, pausing at things that had nothing to do with us, telling me stories. That shape of tail light, he drove one of those when he was courting my mother. That bakkie, his own father had the same. The place unlocked him somehow.

The one we almost did not check

We looked at three engines before the right one. The first had a cracked manifold the seller had tried to hide with a smear of black paint, and my father spotted it in about four seconds and simply walked away without a word. The second turned over sweet but had a history nobody could explain, and he does not buy a thing with a silence in its past. The third we drove ninety minutes for, in the rain, and it was seized solid.

The fourth was the one. We had almost not gone back that day because my father's knee was giving him trouble and I could see it in the way he climbed out of my car. But he wanted to look at one more, a unit a man had told us about, sitting among a shelf of other used Engines at the back of a stripping place where the fellow actually knew what he had. My father put his hand flat on the block the way he always does. He asked to hear it run on a stand. He listened with his head tilted and his eyes half shut, the way he listens when my mother is telling him something important, and then he looked at me and gave the smallest nod I have ever seen a man give.

We paid for it together. I want to be clear about that. It was not his money and it was not mine. We split it down the middle from two envelopes we had both been feeding for months, and shaking hands on it in that dusty yard felt more like a wedding than a purchase.

What the blue line is really for

The engine is in the Cruiser now. It is not pretty. There are bolts on it that are older than I am and a patch of welding that tells a story we will never fully know. But it starts on the first turn, every time, with a sound my father calls healthy and I have learned to call the same.

We have not done the trip yet. We leave in March, when the rains have eased off up north. The blue line is still curled above the workbench and the koki is still dry, but neither of us needs the pen to work anymore. What I have come to understand, somewhere between the scoring on that first piston and the handshake in the yard, is that the trip started a long time ago. It started the first weekend my father handed me a socket I had not yet asked for. The road north is just the part other people will get to see.