Not Without My Father: One Woman's 444-Mile Walk of the Natchez Trace (14 page)

Because I did. Until my old body gave out. On that bus, I never thought I’d have the same problem seventy-some years later. When we’re young, we can’t imagine being old. But then, sometime in our forties or fifties, when our bodies break down, we get scared. When am I gonna keel over from a heart attack? Golly molly, if I have a stroke, I hope it’s massive enough to kill me. Is this bump cancer?

It’s only when we start to fag out that we realize the things we took for granted are the ones we don’t want to live without. A full set of teeth. Hair that grows where it’s supposed to. The bulge that wakes a fella up in the middle of the night. A body that can make it to a toilet before the crap starts coming.

Guess folks can start calling me Tootie again.

WALKIN’ AFTER MIDNIGHT

Patsy Cline

“I don’t understand why my ankle hurts.” Mom dragged her leg like a wounded animal. At milepost 257, the Trace transformed into a commuter highway. We dodged morning traffic and illegal eighteen wheelers on the outskirts of Tupelo, birthplace of Elvis Presley.

For three days, Mom started and ended my walks with me. Four or five miles at the beginning. Two or three at the end. We eased into conversations, two grown-ups building a symphony. When notes clashed, we erased them and tried again. And again. With miles of nowhere to go, we uncovered lifetimes to discuss.

I was surprised when I found myself relishing hours one-on-one with my mother. After a decade of shouted battles and seething skirmishes, I embraced the possibility of peace.

Another eighteen wheeler cut short our conversation. The sky whirled as we tumbled down an embankment. I popped to my feet and scrabbled up the hill. “You’re not supposed to be on the Trace!” I shouted and waved my fists. Backdraft flattened us.
No Commercial Vehicles
. I pointed to a sign and helped Mom stand. “Are you all right?”

She finger-combed brown hair and repositioned her hat. “If you are, I am, too.” But her pinched face wove another story. She favored one leg and winced whenever she put weight on the other.

Hands on hips, I blocked her progress. “Okay, Mom. Describe the pain in your ankle.”

She stood on one leg and wiggled her foot. Back and forth. Side to side. Whenever her Achilles tendon stretched along the back of her leg, she grimaced but turned it into a smile. “It sort of burns in my heel. I thought it was fine this morning, but it started again after I took a few steps.”

First, Dad needed diapers. Then, Mom couldn’t walk. I was the worst person ever for guilting them into an adventure with me.

Like Meriwether Lewis preparing for his Western expedition, I studied possible ailments I was likely to encounter during my thirty-four day slog. I googled repetitive motion injuries. What caused them. Who was most at risk.

Continuous movement. Unforgiving surfaces. Age. Mom was a repetitive motion trifecta.

“Tendonitis. That’s what you have, Mom.”

“What’s that?” She lunged forward, her injured heel stretched flat behind her.

“Don’t do that! Stretching those tendons will only inflame them more.”

“But I thought I was supposed to stretch a sore muscle.”

“Tendonitis isn’t a sore muscle, Mom. All this walking has put too much stress on your tendons, and—”

“But I walk seven miles a day at the gym!”

I scrubbed my hands over my sweaty face. Why did my mother always have to be obstinate to the point of madness? I prepared to unsheathe my response. Stubbornness was the very quality that had me standing next to a traffic-clogged highway in northern Mississippi. Why I couldn’t discard my dream of living from the written word. Orneriness was the signature of my DNA.

I couldn’t point fingers at her.

I breathed in alluvial dust and asked millions of Trace spirits for patience.

“Mom.” My even voice startled me, but I pressed on. “The motion of a treadmill isn’t like walking on a paved road. The machine distributes the stress on your joints and makes the workout less taxing. Not less effective. Just easier on your body. Does that make sense?”

She gimped along the grass, her back to me. “Oh, I’m sure I can just walk this off. Let’s keep going.”

I bit my lip and counted to ten. On nine, I saw the nose of the Mercury. It jutted into the road five hundred yards ahead. “There’s Dad. I think you should stop when we get to the car.”

“But—”

“No buts. If it’s tendonitis, walking will only make it worse. You need elevation, ice and rest.”

“There’s no time for all that. I’ve got to get your supper. And take care of Roy. And—”

My mother. When I was growing up, I basked in Mom’s waiting on me. Of her buying me something new, never realizing she went without. Of her arranging her existence around taking me where I wanted. I thought she did those things because she loved me.

In part, I was wrong.

Mom needed to be needed.

For much of my adult life, she was happiest when I wasn’t happy, but she wasn’t a sadist who liked to watch me suffer. My agonies gave her something to do. A place to be. A role to play.

I needed her when I struggled.

Until I didn’t. My not-needing her was the fuse that detonated our relationship. We spent a decade piling shards of hurt into fortresses, and we camped behind walls, hurling nuclear invective. I didn’t understand Mom’s need to be needed.

Neither did she. For years, she swore she wasn’t needy and hung up when I insisted she was.

But, a few months before my walk, something shifted. I called her one day and caught her reading my novel. When she finished, she told me it was good. Really good.

I couldn’t remember the last time Mom offered me unsolicited praise.

When I asked Mom to join us for three weeks on the Trace, she resisted. How could she go to the gym? Who would pay the bills? Would their empty house be a target for thieves?

As Dad and I planned, Mom worried. The more she heard about my walk, the more convinced she was that Dad and I would kill each other. When she decided to come, I uncovered my hope candle and let it shine. She knew exactly what I needed.

And I understood her. I put my arm around her thin shoulders. “Mom, you can still take care of me. You know what would really make me happy right now?”

“What?” Firelight flared behind her eyes.

“A real latte. I haven’t had one in almost two weeks. Will you go into Tupelo? See if they have a Starbucks?”

She staggered to the car at milepost 259. “All right. If you’re sure you’ll be okay alone.”

“Mom, I’ve done most of this alone.” I stuck my head through an open window. “Dad! Make sure Mom gets some ice for her ankle, okay?”

“Huh? What for?”

“Just make sure.”

“Why you quitting so soon, Linda?” Mom opened the driver’s door and shooed Dad from her seat, the wheelhouse of control.

They motored toward Tupelo and left me beside a pasture dotted with cows. Ragged edges of barbed wire ringed the perimeter, next to a brown sign.
Chickasaw Village Site. 1 mile
. “People wandered in and out of that place for decades. For centuries. Maybe even for millennia.” In forgotten times, did children struggle against parents for control of their lives? Did they live long enough to witness the body’s sickening decline?

Thirty minutes later, I sat on a fence and sipped my latte. Long-dead ghosts hovered in an expanse of field, a vacant reminder of the town that once thrived there. I listened for stories embedded in the breeze. In my whispered thoughts, I asked them one question.

Were any of them like my parents and me?

A MILLION MILES AWAY

David Byrne

Less than a mile into a new day, a guy waved me to his white truck. Surveyors sprayed the road with orange hieroglyphics. Dots and circles. Dashes and arrows. The bearded man made a note on a clipboard. “I’m the federal inspector on this job. Road’s closed up ahead. These boys here tell me you’re walking the Trace.”

“Yep.”

“How far you come?”

“All the way from Natchez.”

He clocked the milepost across the highway. “Two-seventy. Damn. You’ve walked all that way?”

“Yes.”

“By yourself?”

“Pretty much.”

“On the parkway?”

I pushed red hair under my hat and nodded. “There’s nowhere else to walk.”

He scratched his salt-and-pepper beard and whistled. “Nobody does that.” Avoiding my eyes, he concentrated on his paperwork. I could almost hear cogs turning in his brain. Let me go ahead? Or tell me I couldn’t?

After a few beats, he turned to me. “Technically, the road’s closed. I should make you get off the highway. You know, follow the official detour.” He pounded the steering wheel a final time. “But I get what you’re doing. I mean, I don’t really, but I do, if that makes sense?”

“It doesn’t make much sense to me, either.” Relief whooshed through my lips. I’d been holding my breath.

His eyes crinkled at the corners when he laughed. “All right. They’re resurfacing a bridge. Should be almost done. I’ll radio up ahead and tell them to let you through. Only got one side blocked, so they can hold traffic, and you can walk across. Okay?”

“Thank you!” I shouted as he drove away. How many bureaucratic rules and regulations had he broken to keep my walk intact?

I hiked next to black Mississippi earth, wet and aching to be plowed. The ground vibrated with the thrum of unseen machinery. I wished Mom was with me, but I ordered her to stay at Bridges Hall and ice her ankle. When men needed to be charmed, she could always out-flirt me.

Dad materialized and steered the Mercury half on tarmac and half off. “You can’t go that way, Andra. They done said.”

“You pull into the road up there and watch me.”

“I already been up there, and they told me you can’t walk it.”

I hooked my fingers into my backpack straps and stood taller. “Well, maybe I’m more convincing than you, Old Man.”

Challenge combusted behind his eyes. He revved the engine, and his hands vibrated on the wheel, like he could absorb mechanical power. “I bet you I’ll sell ’em all books before you get there, and I’ll be waiting to drive you around. They done told me where to go.” He peeled away and blew the horn before I raised his bet.

Some relationships worked best with good-natured sparring. Even as a child, I questioned my father. Demanded to know why he was right and I was wrong. Dad’s brown eyes sparkled to life when I argued with him, and his deep-throated chuckle always ended our rows.

I didn’t understand the flaw in Dad’s lessons on interacting with men until I was in my thirties. While Dad taught me to push boundaries, to express my opinions, to stand up for myself, he never explained the male ego. Nothing I said to Dad was below the belt. It took almost two decades of adult mistakes to learn some men didn’t respect strong women.

In fact, a few men feared them.

At milepost 271, Dad pulled into the side road and winched himself from the car, my green-swaddled novel in each hand. Before I took a step, he flagged down a car as it slowed to a stop sign and launched into his sales pitch.

I wished I could be that confident. Dad knew my book was good, and he hadn’t even read it. Why couldn’t I believe in myself the way he believed in me?

By the time I reached the intersection, Dad sold books to two customers, stalled in their effort to turn north and follow the Trace. He beckoned me to the eastern side of the highway and dragged me to their window. “These people here’s from Louisiana, but they got a house up this way. I sold them some books, and you need to sign ’em.”

Road dust was sandpaper on swollen fingers when I held a pen, but I smiled and made small talk. Where they were from. How often they drove a highway older than Time. What they thought of Meriwether Lewis.

When they left, Dad grabbed my shoulders and maneuvered me toward the car. “You got to sign more of these books, Andra. I can’t sell ’em without them being signed.”

My fingers throbbed from one bout with a pen. No matter how much I trained, I was never prepared for the toll of gravity. Five hours of swinging my arms caused blood to pool in my fingers. By the end of a fifteen mile day, they wouldn’t bend. Clumsy numbness invaded my hands for hours after I finished, making the simplest tasks a challenge. I blotted my face with my sleeve and sighed. “I’ll sign a few more tonight, Dad.”

He flung the back door open. “No. Now. While I drive you around this construction.”

“But I don’t have to drive around the construction. They already told me I could walk through it.”

He studied the cloud of tar dust, the choreography of equipment. “You ain’t walking through that. I won’t let you. One of them things could run over you.”

I picked up a pen and scribbled my name. “I am walking through that, and I won’t get hurt.” I handed him a stack of signed books. But as I prepared my diatribe about how many years I’d taken care of myself, I chomped my lips. Dad would worry about me for as long as he breathed. Probably after he was dead. Worry was the essence of loving something he had a hand in creating.

And, if Life taught me anything about worry, the best antidote was diversion. Distraction. Dragging the mind to another place.

I squeezed his arm. “You’ve got enough signed books to get you through today. Since you’re not selling too many.”

“What? I’ll show you not selling too many!” He was behind the wheel and gone before I took a step toward the construction zone, danger from heavy equipment forgotten.

Younger than he’d been in days.

I scrubbed grime off my face and hoped my eyes weren’t too swollen. Men in neon vests buzzed next to machines, a lone flagger at their front. I sized him up like a sniper plotting the destruction of a target.

“Hi.” I fluttered lashes caked with road grease and hoped it resembled mascara. Maybe the red blotches on my fair cheeks mimicked blush.

Who was I kidding?

I shoved my self-doubt aside and smiled. “The inspector said you’d let me walk through.”

The man took in my dirty green jacket. My sandals swaddled with duct tape. Streaks of dingy hair glued to facial filth. He leaned on his Slow sign. “You the girl who’s walking the Trace?”