Not Without My Father: One Woman's 444-Mile Walk of the Natchez Trace (5 page)

I could tell her a few things about Army life.

Germany. 1953. The Black Forest. My feet froze inside fur-lined boots when I went on patrol. I smoked cigarettes to warm my insides, but I never let anyone snap my picture with one lit. They was always behind my ears, no matter what. Regardless of how cold I was, I had an image to preserve.

For posterity.

If I ever had posterity.

Right then, my posterity was wandering up the Natchez Trace, a place I’d barely heard of, all for the love of some book I hadn’t read. I cleared my throat. “Ma’am. You a reader? Maybe I can interest you in this here book.”

Alice pinched my arm. “Roy. Not now.”

I set my feet to follow the owner-lady. Because I couldn’t do stairs. Nope. They was too much for me at my age.

WALK

Foo Fighters

Winter storm Titan bowled across Mississippi in the early morning hours of my third day. I left Miss Ethel’s for good and slogged through fifteen miles in sleet, frozen biscuits my only comfort. The cold ransacked my tendons and shredded my joints. I set out from milepost 30 barely able to walk. When I staggered up to milepost 45, tortured tears froze on my cheeks. I trained for two months and believed I was prepared. In three fifteen mile days, the Trace showed me who was master.

But Mardi Gras was the next day. How could it not be a party?

While Alice and Dad checked into our next place, I walked my daily fifteen. Without my guiding influence, Dad looked at Alice and proclaimed, “I can’t do stairs. No more stairs. You tell ’em.”

“But you just have to tell Dad he doesn’t have a choice,” I sputtered when she picked me up at milepost 45.

“I tried, Andra.”

“He didn’t have any problem doing the stairs at Miss Ethel’s. He went up-and-down a hundred times to talk to her. He’s just being lazy.”

“Well, maybe he thought these stairs were steeper. Or something.” Alice slowed to make a turn.

“This is the Natchez Trace. There’s nothing out here. I got us into the only decent bed and breakfast for miles. I read the reviews online and couldn’t wait to stay there.”

“Well, the bed and breakfast owners were really helpful. They found us something else.”

I looked at the main house, the real accommodation, the one I reserved. A pristine Victorian, its lamplit windows beckoned me. I imagined a world of comfort befitting a Natchez Trace hiker: soft sheets, a soaking tub, and consistent heat. I shelved my dreams of collapsing inside it. “Great. I try to put us in classy B and B’s. What did Dad find? A redneck hell hole?”

“It isn’t that bad. Plus, the B and B owners said we could spend as much time as we want over at the B and B.”

I bit my tongue and stared at Dad’s castle. A squat yellow building, the porch spangled with plastic furniture and astroturf.

“It’s usually a rental, but everybody’s gone out of their way to make Roy happy. They put a board under the sofa cushions to make it easier for him to stand up. The innkeepers at the B and B even offered to make a special dinner for Mardi Gras. I know it isn’t great, but everyone’s really trying.”

“Well, I’m gonna have to tell him he can’t pull this again.”

“Just don’t say anything. I’ll go get you some dinner.”

“Is there anyplace to eat here?” I opened the door and prepared to hurl myself on the ground and crawl up the driveway.

“McDonalds. Or Sonic.”

My stomach cartwheeled like it might spew forth an alien.

“Neither.”

“You have to eat, Andra.”

“But that stuff’s not even food.”

“Don’t be such a snob.” She touched my hand. “I’ll go to Sonic. Their milkshakes are decent. It’ll lubricate your joints.”

The door swam through tears. I was too tired to suck a milkshake through a straw. Gritting my teeth, I fell to the driveway and sat there, stunned from exhaustion and pain. “Do you think anybody’s reading my book to make up for how stupid this stunt is?”

Alice reached through the door and squeezed my fingers. “Whether people read your book or not, you’re doing something amazing, Andra. Really. Stop worrying about that and just experience the Trace.”

“But I never thought I’d have to walk ten miles in sleet. In Mississippi. In March. I worried about heat, and now I’m afraid you’re going to find me inside a frozen pillar of ice.”

“There’s something in that, too. I know you can find it.”

I massaged my shattered calves and almost retched. “You’ve got more faith in me than I do.”

“Sometimes, all anyone needs is somebody to believe in them. Now, let me go and get our tasty fast food feast.”

Cable news blasted through the door. Acres of shag carpeting led in every direction.

“Dad! Turn that down!” I coughed to combat fresh Roy smell.

Dad patted the sofa. “Gotta sleep right here, but that’s okay. I cain’t do stairs.”

“You’ve got to do stairs, Dad.” I crabbed my hands up a paneled corner and pulled myself to stand. “Why can’t you ever be happy with my choices?”

Dad turned up the television in response.

“Okay. Fine. I’m going back to the B and B—my choice—to eat my dinner.”

I limped toward twinkling stained glass and barricaded myself in the sitting room. Would the owners find tear-stained sofa cushions and think I left a ring of sweat?

Alice was right about the chocolate milkshake, though. I inhaled it like food nirvana.

But when I went to bed, I couldn’t sleep. I thrashed around the mattress, leg cramps and technicolor dreams a shaken-and-stirred cocktail of vicious insomnia.

Suffocating sounds caused me to lurch upright. I battled a sneeze and strained my ears. Dad’s usual cacophony of sleep apnea machine and self-scratching didn’t emanate from the next room. He grunted. And he strained. Was he having a stroke? Or a seizure?

I clung to the wall and pulled my body into the adjacent room. Dad gripped the edge of the sofa, his face a Joker-like grimace in weak light.

“You okay, Dad?” I didn’t whisper. Without his hearing aids, he’d never hear me. “What’s the matter?”

“Gotta go to the latrine.” He rocked against the sofa. “And I cain’t……..get………up.”

He seesawed his top-heavy body into stick legs, but his arms weren’t strong enough to push the rest of him to stand. I fought back images of Dad chopping wood, of him playing basketball, of him working outside for ten hours in summer heat.

I went to him, a foreign creature ravaged by Time, and I braced my arms under his. Familiar musk drifted up my nose, the scent of the man who made me. “Here, Dad. Lean on me. I’ve got you.”

He teetered to his feet in a push-and-pull that wrenched my leg muscles. When all two hundred sixty pounds of Dad was upright, he stumbled. Momentum pushed me across the room. I careened into the far wall and cried renewed tears as stiff muscles flew in unnatural directions.

“I hate being old.” Dad stuttered, stifled a sob. Jokes and feigned optimism hid in the shadows, covered by a black drape.

“I’d rather have you however you are than the alternative, Dad.” I crawled across the floor and reached out to him, but he slapped my hand.

His voice cut through darkness, fired with resentment. “I don’t want to have a stroke. Be helpless. I wish I could go ahead and die. Just die. I’d rather die than be like this.”

Some tears are cathartic. Others are cruel. I sucked in air.

At its cruelest, Life makes a little girl watch her daddy cry.

Fifteen miles a day helped me comprehend aging. Already, I saw how the body gave out, slowed down, refused to cooperate with the mind’s intentions.

Were my lowest agonies what Dad’s life was like all the time? I crouched in the corner, stunned awake by realization. Eighteen months before, Dad survived a ruptured appendix, but his near-death experience didn’t shock me from my obsession with my own floundering career. On the phone, I lectured him about physical therapy. Diet. The hours he spent in his recliner. When he was slow to stand, it was easier to attribute his lethargy to ‘Watkins Laziness,’ an aversion to all forms of exercise that bordered on the pathological. Obliviousness became a shield against the reality of Dad’s decline.

I helped him untangle himself from the hose of his sleep machine. “Dad. You’re okay. You’re with me, and I wouldn’t have anyone else right now. Nobody finds heavenly fried chicken like you do.”

Dad swiped his brown eyes. “I wanted to be here, Andra. I’m just not sure I can do it.”

“You can, Dad. I know you can. You’re the strongest person I know. Come on. The bathroom’s just there.” I tugged his arm. “Everything’s going to be all right.”

“But what if you hadn’t heard me, Andra?” He closed the door in my face, and I stood there, wondering whether he would emerge. Alive. Whole. Ready to tackle another day.

When I settled him into his sleeping quarters and crawled back into bed, his question morphed into a crushing list of possibilities.

A reality no child ever wants to face.

WHEN THE SAINTS GO MARCHING IN

Louis Armstrong

Mardi Gras dawned on March 4, and I awoke to a panicked message from my husband Michael, more #areyoucrazy than #yougogirl.

Dear: The forecast is calling for ice patches on the roads today in southern Mississippi. I really think you should consider a rest day. I love you.

I looked at Alice. Her glasses slid down her nose with every blow into thin kleenex. “Where’s Dad?”

“At the big house.”

I glanced into the main room. His rumpled coverlet. A vacant sofa. After his nighttime bathroom scare, Dad was awake, showered, shaved and out the door before breakfast. No dregs of the man from the middle of the night.

“What’s the temperature outside?”

“Twenty-two.” Her voice rattled inside a drum. “On the way up to twenty-seven. I won’t tell you the wind chill.”

I grabbed my phone off the night table. Reader texts littered my screen.

Watching the weather and thinking of you today!

Cold? What cold? You’ve so got this, Andra.

I buried my phone in the sheets and winched onto my side. Bloody gouges littered my feet. If I poked anywhere, skin broke like gauze. Blood and puss oozed onto the bedspread. Barely 8 o’clock, and already my body groaned like I walked my daily fifteen.

I stared at the ceiling too early on a polar morning, and I wondered who was crazier. Dad, because he agreed to take a long car trip when he couldn’t climb stairs, get up from a low chair or be apart from a toilet for ten minutes? Or me, for knowing I’d force myself to walk through a blizzard on a forgotten highway if it meant I might reclaim my life from the ashes of failure?

I couldn’t rest on my fourth day. After three fifteen mile slogs, I comprehended how stupid my walk was. Twenty miles or more in one day was a chasm I couldn’t imagine. Whatever the weather, I had to walk. An icy highway was a minor chord in a concerto of pain.

My legs refused to bend when my feet hit the floor, but I forced them to totter to my suitcase. I chewed four Advil and pulled out a navy sweatshirt with “Nashville” sewn across the front. Incentive and impossibility were woven through every thread. “I guess I’d better use extra layers.”

Alice hovered in the doorway. “I really think maybe you should listen to Michael. You know, take a rest day.” She pointed to my macerated pinky toes, victims of the crowning in the road. Crowning: The tilt in the pavement that allows water to run off. See also: The slope in tarmac that gnaws at feet and renders them chewed-up, tortured stumps. “Your feet are pretty bad. Maybe they’d be happier if you gave them a break.”

I flinched as I forced a wool sock over carnage. It stuck to blister band-aids and duct tape ringed in puss. “I can’t rest today, Alice.”

“Why not?” She honked her nose into a tissue. “Nobody would blame you for taking a day off in weather like this.”

“I can’t take an unscheduled rest day during the first week of this walk. Meriwether Lewis wouldn’t do that. It would be like……..quitting………almost.”

She sat on the bed and turned me to face her. “You can make it up later. You’re not making sense, Andra.”

It didn’t make sense, no matter how I construed it. At milepost 45, I crawled from the back seat and balled my gloved fingers to keep them warm. Taillights receded behind a scrim of sleet. It stuck to my lashes when I looked at the furious sky and whispered, “What about this is logical?”

I didn’t have a single book event scheduled for the entire walk. My grand plan to garner media coverage was a bust. I was spending time with Dad, but I wasn’t sure he could make it to the end. When I pulled out my iPhone to check the temperature, it was dead from cold.

I tightened my hood and leaned into sub-zero wind chill. Sleet crackled on the highway. Was it wrong for people to go for dreams in mid-life, to force my father into a journey he couldn’t handle? I swung my arms and forced my legs to keep time, but activity only fueled memory. Of people who said no. Of folks who told me I’d probably be dead before anyone read anything I wrote. Of naysayers who preached the gospel of being happy with the life I had, because it was unseemly for a forty-four-year-old woman to try to be somebody. Of Dad’s voice challenging me to succeed.

Did my walk shine a light on dreams unfulfilled, on paths not taken? I hoped to inspire others to take risks at any age. Yet, as I shivered across a bridge, I didn’t know how to fuel anyone’s dreams when I was already defeated.

“Stop feeling sorry for yourself, Andra. Lots of people are with you. Focus on them.”

Music twittered in the background. Staggered beats built into a song. A convoy of motorcycles streamed over a hill to Tina Turner.
Rollin’ on the River
. I ran my hand along a battered sign.
Little Bayou Pierre
, cracked white letters on a brown background. Nine o’clock on Mardi Gras, and all was well.

I waved beads of green and purple and gold, and I timed my footsteps to fading music. My shoes left footprints in an ice sheet along the roadway. If those motorcyclists could find something to celebrate during the winter that wouldn’t die, so would I.