Not Without My Father: One Woman's 444-Mile Walk of the Natchez Trace Read online

  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 pani
cked 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.

  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.”
r />   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.