Not Without My Father: One Woman's 444-Mile Walk of the Natchez Trace (6 page)

At milepost 48, my feet were senseless nubs, and my hands froze inside my gloves. I eased my bottom onto the side of an overpass. With frozen muscles, it took precious seconds to sit. “I’ve got twelve more miles. On feet I can’t feel. With hands that don’t work.” I blinked to keep my tears in check, lest they freeze my eyelids shut. I wedged a cold biscuit from my backpack and chewed a bite, friction that might work its way to my core.

“If dreams are rivers, I guess I’m just gonna roll.”

Twenty minutes later, I huddled in the back seat of the Mercury. My whole body shuddered against the leather seat, and my fingers ached as warmth flowed from a thermos of hot tea. I spilled some when I tried to take a sip, scalding liquid I rubbed into my thigh. “What’s the temperature? No. Wait. Don’t tell me.”

“It’s twenty-six degrees,” Dad crowed from the passenger seat. Every time I asked him if he was all right, he pretended not to hear me.

Alice glanced in the rear view mirror. “You’ve only been walking an hour, Andra. Maybe you should quit early today. We could try to find a king cake and celebrate Mardi Gras. You could even dress up for dinner tonight.”

I shook my head and fanned steam into my face. “I’m at milepost 49. I’ve got to keep going. I told people I could do this, and I will.”

“It’s projected to get colder, and it’s still sleeting.” Alice looked at Dad for backup, but he gazed out the window.

I studied the winter glow outside. Blue tinge clung to everything, the frigid hue of icecaps. My fingers mapped the same eerie shade. Bruises crept into folds of skin and rendered my hands useless. I fumbled with my gloves and tugged them back on, a shield to hide the havoc the weather played on my body.

Dad tried to swivel in the front seat. “Heard the wind chill’s not supposed to get out of the teens. I think you should call it a day, Andra.”

“Is that because you aren’t okay, Dad?”

“Me? Naw. I’m good. I’m just worried about you is all. And I think you should quit.”

Before Alice could open her mouth and continue the two-on-one takedown, I guided my still-frozen fingers to the door latch. “Remember this morning? When we were on our way out here, Alice?”

“Yeah. It’s colder now than it was then.”

Why couldn’t they understand? People who reached for impossible things didn’t expect an easy walk in ideal weather. I slipped through my door and tapped on Alice’s window. When she cracked it, I pounced. “The cold doesn’t matter. We saw a blue heron in one of the bayous this morning. Remember?”

She pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose and nodded. “But—”

“And you said—you said—seeing a blue heron at the beginning of my day was a sign of good luck. Who knows what seeing a blue heron at the beginning of Mardi Gras means, but I don’t have time to look it up. I’ve just got to believe it’s even more luck, one of this walk’s joyous moments, because I’ve got eleven miles left to find joy in this day. If that bird can stand it out here, so can I.”

I limped away from the car before I changed my mind. I didn’t turn and wave when they drove in the other direction, lest I lose my resolve and summon them. Dad’s receding taillights brought back another time he almost left me.

I was sixteen.

Dad flung a suitcase into the den. Its hard sides burst open, and wadded clothes rained to the floor. He tottered on his recliner, like if he rocked enough, it might catapult him through the door.

“I’m leaving you, Linda.”

Mom stood by the kitchen sink, swabbing an invisible stain with a towel. “Oh, Roy. You are not.”

I gripped the sofa, my head ping-ponging between them. Mom’s towel squeaked through silence. Finally, Dad crumpled into his chair. “I can’t do this anymore, Linda.”

“What? What can’t you do?” Mom’s hands rubbed her anger into cabinet doors.

“This……..this family stuff.”

Tears welled in my teenage eyes. “Don’t you love us, Dad?”

“I don’t know, Andra. I don’t know if I ever have.”

“Roy!” Mom slapped her dishtowel against the edge of the counter and stomped over to him, hands on hips. “Don’t you dare say that!”

He pushed past her and kneeled on the floor next to his things. One by one, he stuffed them in the suitcase and closed the brass clasps. “You gotta understand, Andra. All I do is work, work, work a job I can’t stand to provide for this family. To provide for you. And I hate it. Every day of my life, I hate it.”

Mom blocked Dad’s path to the door. When he tried to push past her, they struggled. She kicked the suitcase and pounded his shoulders, each lash drawing a fresh sob from my mother. “Stop saying those things! Right now! You’re not the only one who’s giving more than they’re getting!”

My parents blurred together in a tangle of arms and legs. When Dad pushed Mom away, she tripped and landed in a heap. She watched him with red-rimmed, animal eyes.

Dad’s gaze dug a trench in the floor. Suitcase. Door. I plugged my ears against Mom’s raging breath and covered my eyes to miss Dad’s exit. If I didn’t see him walk out, it wouldn’t be true. Rapid heartbeats fired in my ears, counting out seconds. Ten. Twenty. My voice sliced through layers of tension.

“Where will you go, Daddy?”

“Don’t know. I just……..don’t know.”

“Can I call you?” Emotion ripped my core, the rending of my first heartbreak. “Maybe come see you sometime?”

He ran his hands through salt-and-pepper hair and studied the popcorn ceiling. “Dear God. How’d I wind up here?”

Shards of my heart ticked sixty seconds before he stepped over his suitcase. He slumped down the hallway, toward my parents’ bedroom. “Leave me be awhile, Linda,” he whispered, right before he closed the door.

“Leave me be awhile.” If I stuck to my walk, even when every part of me didn’t want to, would I understand why Dad stayed to become an old man who was waiting to die?

Cold numbed memory. Or maybe focusing on the cold trumped thinking about the past. My lungs cracked with every inhale. I hobbled past mileposts 50 through 55 in a blur of frozen torment. With every step, my pinky toes ground into the sides of my shoes. Swollen more than twice their normal size, they refused to bend. Bone shoved into the ball of my foot with every step. Speed distributed the pain, but I couldn’t maintain speed-walking pace for more than a few minutes before I had to stop, thaw my lungs and catch my breath. Rest, even for a few seconds, meant reconditioning my feet again.

When I hobbled around the curve, I gasped.
Rocky Springs
. Yellow lettering beckoned me into trees. I explored a path through a ghost town, an abandoned church the only reminder of the life that once bustled there. Trees clung to the sides of the trail, teeth protruding from gums. Their branches rained sleety dandruff.

I listened for notes tinkling through the wind. Garbled words I couldn’t understand. Grunts of animals long-dead.

I forgot cold and pain in the joy of communing with the beauty of the Trace.

When I got out my phone and punched Alice’s number, her voice warmed my ear. “Bring Dad to Rocky Springs. It’s a couple more miles. He’ll love the trees.” I hung up and hurried to put some distance between us. Five more miles. To a shower. To a Mardi Gras feast. To warmth.

Did Dad ever find warmth after he almost left us that day? I strapped velcro tighter around my wrists to block the chill. When he emerged from the bedroom, he didn’t have his suitcase. He walked through the house without looking at me. Mom stopped him at the door.

“Where are you going?”

“Nowhere, Linda. I’m going nowhere.”

And he slipped outside. Mom held me while we listened to his truck’s grinding start. Sound reversed down the driveway.

“Will he come back, Mom?”

Her sigh jangled against the side of my head. “He has to, Andra. He just has to.”

“But that doesn’t mean he will.”

She peeled my arms from her waist and swayed toward their bedroom. Before she closed the door, she mumbled, “No. It doesn’t.”

ROAM IF YOU WANT TO

The B-52s

I seen a lot of things in my life.

When I was a younger man, I wanted to be somebody. I guess that’s what everybody wants, ain’t it?

But I watched my father farm the hard Tennessee land. I saw the toll it took on him. How it sent him out catting around every night of the week. First one bar and then another. Left my poor mother at home to wonder I-don’t-know-what-all.

One of my first memories was of Dad acting ugly.

I couldn’t have been more than two or three. A little scrap of a boy, I was. And Dad, he took me with him on his drinking jaunts. Let me entertain his friends on the bar while he got drunker and drunker.

‘Course I enjoyed the attention. What kid don’t like that kinda stuff?

What I didn’t like was going home, Dad all fired up in his cups. Sometimes, I had to sit right next to him to make sure he kept that old truck in the road, and I could barely see over the dashboard.

One time, it was nigh on four in the morning when we got home. Dad couldn’t even walk up the front steps, and all forty pounds of me couldn’t drag him.

“Leave him be. Maybe he’ll drown in his own puke and spare the rest of us.”

My mother’s voice rang out from the dark porch.

“But Momma.” I groped my way to her, sitting in her favorite rocking chair, and put my head in her broad lap. “I don’t want Dad to go nowhere. How will a boy like me learn to be a man without no daddy?”

She took my chin in her hands. I could see some of that snuff she liked dribbling down the crease next to her mouth. Same lines I noticed when I looked in the mirror. And she told me her truth.

“You learn to be a man, Son, by doing the opposite of everything that sorry drunk does. You grow up and be somebody, you hear me? Do good. Go to college. Get the hell out of this place. You marry a good woman, and you love her. Don’t run around on her like your daddy does me.”

“What’s Dad doing when he’s running around on you?”

She ruffled my cow-licked hair. “You’ll figure it out. Soon enough. And if God gives you children, you be an example. Act right. Show them how to be good people, even when you don’t feel like it. Don’t you ever leave them stranded, without no daddy. You grow up to be the man your father ain’t and make your momma proud of you.”

I thought about that conversation with my mother, the day I almost left my family. Life didn’t turn me into the somebody I dreamed of being, but even though my mother’d been gone since before Andra was born, I knew she’d be disappointed if I acted like my daddy. She was someplace.

And she would know.

WALK RIGHT BACK

The Everly Brothers

“I’m never, ever getting out,” I muttered as I sank abused limbs and appendages into a jacuzzi tub. Salt water stung my lacerated feet. “Does all this pain mean infection?” I shouted over the jets. “I mean, what if one of my toes falls off?”

“Your toes aren’t going to fall off, Andra.” Alice banged around the bedroom. Packing. She was leaving the next day.

I would be alone. With Roy.

By milepost 75, I walked to Raymond, Mississippi, a suburb south of Jackson. Five days done. Twenty-nine to go. Repetitive motion consumed me. Most athletic shoes aren’t made to absorb the shock of a foot striking tarmac five hours every day for a month. Even with gel inserts stacked three deep, over one million steps, taken the same way, will cause the walker unrelenting agony.

The surface of the roadbed made hot spots flare within minutes. The only compensation for road crowning was weaving all over and hoping for minimal consequences. When the wind blew in my face, I couldn’t hear cars behind me, especially if they failed to lay on the horn.

Every night, I alternated soaking my feet with icing them. While that combination alleviated swelling, nothing kept blisters at bay. They formed between cracks in my toes and down the sides of my feet. Puss bubbled along the edges of my toenails. I couldn’t wait to lie in bed and let cold numb the torment.

“Where’s Dad? He should’ve been back with ice by now.”

Alice zipped her suitcase. “You know Roy. I’m sure he’s up at the main house, spinning more stories.”

We were at a new place, one with a real bed for Dad, sturdy new furniture and a jacuzzi. Every move gave Dad a new audience for his stories. I put my feet on the jets and imagined Dad up at the main house. In his pajamas, his impressive belly protruding through a wedge of unbuttoned shirt.

I didn’t have to guess where he would start. On the Natchez Trace, he told the same story. Every time.

Dad was the only son of an alcoholic dairy farmer from East Tennessee. The fourth child of five. The longed-for boy after a string of girls. From the time Dad could walk, he accompanied my grandfather and his friends on their daily rounds. This speakeasy. That still. The other honky-tonk. All of them soused with booze, tobacco and women.

While my grandfather got drunk, my future father entertained everyone, his pudgy legs a whirl of interpretive dance along the sticky bar top. For tips of pennies, nickels and quarters, Dad smoked cigars at the age of two, and he filled his piggy bank with the change he earned from saying words like
damn
,
bitch
, and
fuck
. He was known around the county as Hot Shot, the toddler who smoked boxes of cigars, whose vocabulary streamed from a sewer.

I sloshed water and tried to envision my father as a child. A sleeveless sailor suit, his coy finger next to his lip. Honorable Mention splayed across his certificate for the National Children’s Photography Contest. I conjured the only other photo I possessed from that era. A pudgy kid in front of a bird bath, one-piece romper torn and bare knees filthy. His dirt-encrusted hand cradled a crude slingshot. Eyes burned through the yellowed frame, unsure whether to smile or hurl a rock at the viewfinder.

Whenever I remembered that look, I knew why they called him Hot Shot.