Not Without My Father: One Woman's 444-Mile Walk of the Natchez Trace (7 page)

And to a man called Hot Shot, doors existed to be opened.

“Dad! What are you doing? I’m naked in here!” I scrabbled for the shower curtain as Dad lumbered into the bathroom.

“Gotta go pee.” He was already at the toilet, showering everything in range.

“Just please don’t do anything else while I’m in here.” I yanked the curtain closed and dunked my head underwater to obliterate the scene, to transport myself to another place. Somewhere peaceful. Quiet. Private.

To my five hours alone, walking the Trace.

I started my day at milepost 60. The air still nipped my fingers and chilled my face, but the sun won the battle with broken clouds.

My phone quieted to a few texts a day, leaving me with my hyperactive mind. My Natchez Trace walk was a unique way to launch a book, but it also kept me from what other writers with new books do: Check sales; despair; check sales; more despair; check sales; try to guilt everyone into buying book; check sales; hate everyone for not buying book; check sales; drink oneself into stupor; check sales; have drunken social media rant that ends with spouse seizing all electronic devices.

I didn’t want to be that person, but I never realized giving myself five hours to walk through Nowhere would dredge up other things. How I still didn’t know my father. Why I argued with my mother. I compartmentalized familial dysfunction with an effective streak of avoidance. When my mind wasn’t occupied with texting and tweeting, why were my parents all I thought about?

On his western expedition, did Meriwether Lewis dwell on the unfathomable?

Less than a mile into my day, I gimped into a pull-off.
Lower Choctaw Boundary
. A sign mapped the old border of the Choctaw nation, with a star indicating where I stood. On the map of the Natchez Trace, the points of the star touched my starting point. An insurmountable line stretched northeast.

“This is why I shouldn’t look at maps,” I mumbled as I dragged my body onward through fifteen miles of cypress swamp. The road was a land bridge with no shoulder. Whenever a car sped toward me, I crawled down the embankment and waited until it passed. I remembered how often Dad’s job as a forester required him to shoot snakes in swamps, and I tried to stay on the pavement, bounding between cars like Frogger in the old Atari video game.

Dad’s flush whooshed me into the present. “I—”

“Dad! Get out!”

“I got your ice, Andra. Sorry if it’s all melted. I got over there, and—”

“Got to talking. I know, Dad. It’s okay.”

I always told Dad it was okay even though he wasn’t sorry.

Dad’s rambling exits were at the heart of my childhood angst. I was asleep in the back seat by the time he finished talking to everyone in a place. Cowering in the car was better than being the last person to leave, because, to me, that meant everyone got so tired of listening to Dad talk, they cleared out to get away from him. I never could understand why Dad didn’t notice glazed eyes or furtive looks or hidden signals for rescue. He just kept talking.

His unbroken stream of conversation continued as I eased myself into bed and propped an ice pack against one bulbous foot. “Got to get you to sign some books, Andra.”

When he was in college, Dad worked for Southwestern of Nashville, selling Bibles door-to-door every summer. I teased him with the image of himself, young again, reliving his time in the trenches. We kept a stash of books in the trunk, and Dad used his Bible-selling tactics to hock a story about the ghost of Meriwether Lewis to every unsuspecting person he met.

Dad’s buyers always wanted signed copies. As Dad charted out his next sales day, he made sure he had the necessary tools to close the deal. Maybe that was how he got through three summers in college, selling books. His purpose was sales, and he was determined to do it right.

Even if that meant making me sign books when I was annihilated.

“I’ll do it tomorrow, Dad.” I buried my head under a pillow, but Dad’s finger tapped the other side.

“I can’t sell them if they ain’t signed.”

I flung the pillow across the room. “I said tomorrow.”

“People don’t want to buy books if they ain’t signed by the writer.”

“Dad—”

“I really need you to sign them books.” He stood at the foot of the bed, arms crossed above his stomach. Unmoving.

The ice pack crashed to the floor, and my eyes teared when my feet hit heart pine. “Dad, is it possible for you to be quiet for five minutes? Just five minutes?”

“But them books won’t sign themselves, Andra.”

I stomped toward the car. Torture bolted up my legs. Before I reached the door, Alice was through it. “I’ll get the books, Andra. Lie back down.”

Dad planted himself between me and the bed. “Got to sign them books. I can’t sell them otherwise.”

And I wondered where I got my obstinance.

In a couple of days, Dad went from unable to stand on his own to a whirlwind of activity. Watching him exhausted me.

I snatched a few from Alice’s hands and carved my name into a page. “Dad. I could’ve done this in the morning. On the way to walk.”

“You’d forget.”

“I would not forget!!! How could I possibly forget when you won’t cease your nagging until I sign freaking books???” I almost threw one at him, but instead, I piled them next to my night table. If I turned around, I would see the smile tugging the edges of Dad’s lips, his satisfaction at getting to me. Push-pull. See-saw. It was the fulcrum of our relationship.

I took a deep breath and crawled back into bed. “Don’t you forget them in the morning, Old Man.”

“I won’t.” Dad tottered to the window and rooted around a grocery bag. “Where’s my sugar-free cookies? I need to eat one before I go to bed.”

I eyed Dad’s distended gut. “You don’t need another cookie, Dad.”

“Your blood sugar was 171 this morning, Roy.” Alice plopped onto the mattress. I bet she counted the seconds until she could drive away from our insanity. And all I wanted to do was kneel at her feet and plead, “Please don’t leave me. Don’t leave me alone with him. We’ll kill each other.”

“Them cookies are sugar-free. That means I can eat ’em.” Dad rummaged through another plastic bag. Protein bars and cashews rained onto the floor.

I lurched toward the shambles. “Oh. My. God. Dad. Will you please go to bed?” By the time I crisscrossed my sore legs and started picking up spilled food, Dad was onto another bag. “Dad—”

“Roy!” Alice rattled a package. Dad leapt toward her. He tore into the wrapping and stuffed two cookies into his mouth. “Think I’ll go to bed now,” he crunched through the words. Once his door was closed, I prostrated myself at Alice’s feet.

“Please don’t leave me. I’m going to kill him. Please stay and save me from killing him.”

“He’s killing himself. With food.”

I finished with the mess and strained to stand, my hands digging into the side of a wingback chair. “When did he become the child here? Because I’m a sorry parent.”

Alice turned out the light. “Enjoy this time, Andra. Even this. You’re gonna miss it when he’s gone.”

I whispered into darkness. “I’ll never, ever miss this.”

Would I?

WALK LIKE A MAN

The Four Seasons

“I’m gonna stick close to you today, Andra.” Dad surveyed thick commuter traffic as it motored past milepost 90 outside Jackson, Mississippi. “They’s a lot of cars here, so if you don’t mind, I wanna keep you where I can see you.”

I shrugged into my backpack and sighed. “I’ll be fine, Dad…..but if it’ll make you feel better……..”

He turned and eased himself into the driver’s seat, his knuckles white as he gripped the door to compensate for legs that couldn’t hold his weight. When the car tilted and he was settled, I handed him my phone. “Take my picture.”

Dad studied the device like it might zap him with a thousand volt electrical current. “Don’t know how to work these new-fangled phones.”

Smartphones were another language to a man Dad’s age. He retired before the advent of the desktop computer. I remembered visiting his office. Every surface was littered with paper. Maps. Charts. Lists. Remnants of trees he bought and sold.

I forced the contraption into his unwilling hands. “Just push this button. The gray one. Right here.”

On the Trace, I started each day with my back to the car, my first milepost in the foreground. Unbeknownst to me, Alice took my picture as I staggered away every morning. She asked me to maintain that tradition, and after everything she did during my first 90 miles, I wanted to honor her.

I had no idea how to walk away from a milepost and snap a backside selfie. Not without a mirror and the ego of a Kardashian.

I stumbled a few steps and turned back to the car. “Did you get it?”

“Don’t know.” Dad dangled my iPhone between two fingers, and I ran to the window to keep it from smashing on pavement. It was my only camera, and I still had 354 miles to go.

“Really, Dad. You don’t need to follow me around all day.” I glanced at the shot: His thumbprint, with me and most of the milepost blurred in the background. I sighed and stuffed the phone in my pocket. “I’ll be okay.”

“Well, that lady yesterday said you was in danger. The one that stopped. Remember her? Worked for the state or something. On her way to Vicksburg. There’s some mean people around here. That’s what she said.” He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “Tell you what. I’ll pull into them rest areas and sell books to the people that stop. When I see you coming, I’ll go on to the next one.”

“Whatever. Do whatever makes you happy, Dad. I’m gonna get started.”

Frozen joints eased into the rhythm of walking. Puss stuck my toes together. At milepost 91, I stopped to snap a photo underneath a spring sky. Cornflower blue hovered above grassy farmland, cut by a line of highway. When I closed my eyes, I smelled the sweet aura of fresh-cut hay.

In the field to my right, a cat slinked through spikes of grass. I shielded my eyes with one hand and studied its proportions. “Huh. That’s an awfully big house cat.”

It eased behind a clump of brush. Like a submarine scope, its head scanned the horizon. When it caught me in its cross hairs, it stopped.

I realized what it was when we locked eyes, when I knew I was prey to a Mississippi bobcat.

I couldn’t remember what to do when confronted by a predator. Break eye contact? Wave my arms to make myself bigger? Shout? I sneaked a look at my phone. Plenty of signal. I waffled between calling Dad and catching up with him.

After a minute-long staring match with the bobcat, I broke contact and sussed out the terrain. “If I just keep to the road and walk at my normal pace—don’t run, Andra—I can make those trees. They’re just a few hundred feet from here.”

But once I peeled shaking hands from milepost 91, I flailed in a morass of flawed logic. Open spaces on the Trace were like swimming an ocean. The harder I pushed, the farther the horizon drifted. I kicked my step to a jog. Once, I looked back.

And remembered the story about Meriwether Lewis being chased into the Missouri River by a grizzly. His rifle was empty when the bear came after him, and he was alone. He dove into the water and awaited the bear’s inevitable attack. Something else caught the grizzly bear’s eye, and it fled along the bank, leaving Lewis uneaten.

Did Lewis feel like I did? I longed to run, to climb a tree, to beam myself somewhere else, but my tattered feet were cemented in place. Terror paralyzed me.

The bobcat started a slow creep toward me. Relaxed. Like it tracked easy prey. I jerked my gaze to the road ahead. A football field. Maybe two to go. Without looking back, I sprinted through the highway’s heart. I prayed for a car, any car, and braced myself for claws tearing into flesh, for fangs at my throat, for—

A squeal knifed the air.

I forgot the pain in my feet, the stiffness in my heels, the agony in my hips. Never a runner, I didn’t stop until milepost 92. Dad’s car materialized where I waited, doubled over and heaving. He inched off the highway and rocked himself from the driver’s seat. “Sold two books back there. I’m a good salesman, ain’t I?”

I swallowed bile, a grenade through my insides. I lurched forward, hands on knees.

“Ain’t I, huh? A good salesman?”

Cough-cough-cough. “Yes, Dad!”

“Well, okay. Traffic’s pretty bad up ahead. I’m gonna pull up there to that curve and wait. Gotta make sure you’re okay.”

While Dad gyrated through the driver’s door, I lurched along the shoulder. Why was Dad always so oblivious? To him, Life was the next stranger, laughing at his stories. Another piece of junk. Why couldn’t he see how much I needed him to shine his fading light on me?

For the next mile, I banished Dad and focused on my surroundings. Cars and trucks barreled around Jackson, forcing me to uneven grass. I couldn’t walk on the road.

“At least, that bobcat won’t follow me into this.” I talked above the growl of a truck. It hugged the white line two feet from me, its speed around fifty. Vibrations rattled my ribcage and reverberated between my teeth.

At milepost 93, I whipped out my phone and snapped another picture. “Fireball Whiskey. A big bottle this time.”

I made a game of photographing things along the side of the road. Five hours of monotony captured in pictures. At the end of each day, I scrolled through them and remembered. The ethereal quality of light. Brushes of bird wings. The primordial stench of swamp water.

But by Jackson, my photographs developed a troubling theme. Beer bottles, crushed beer cans, empty mini bottles and Costco-sized liquor containers accounted for a third of the garbage I encountered. In one mile, I found fifteen remnants of booze.

Which meant one in every three drivers could be driving under the influence, inches from me.

I kicked the plastic bottle and diverted my thoughts to the need for a pit stop. Traffic was too heavy for me to pee near the road, a proficiency I honed during my week-long walk from Natchez. I could drop trow and have my pants up, usually without seeing a car. From my virgin pee-on-the-ground foray at Elizabeth Female Academy, I progressed to a streetwalking whore who could do it anywhere.