Not Without My Father: One Woman's 444-Mile Walk of the Natchez Trace
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Images of Dad shimmered a few feet from me. Too preoccupied to talk to me when he got home from work. Too harried to sit through a family meal. Too tired to stay awake and watch television with me.
Or maybe he just never knew what to say. Awkwardness was often labeled something else by the human need to classify.
“Life gives us these intervals, these incredible gifts,” I whispered into the sparkling air. “Why am I always too busy, too stressed, too overwhelmed to see them? Just like Dad always was when I was growing up?” I turned my head to gaze into a daffodil’s eyeball. “This walk is supposed to be about these experiences. Right here. The magic and the mystery and the beauty that color the lines of our one brief and shining life.”
When I adjusted my backpack and left that field, I stood at a junction. I looked south at a path of hardship and pain, and I raised my hand in a faint wave. “I’m leaving you now. This is the dividing line. You can’t follow me. I’ve been given these joyous moments, and I’m going to focus on them.”
I turned my face northward and took a few steps. Still agonizing, every one of them. But when a cardinal flew over my shoulder, its wings fluttered a message. “Your walk—and your life—will be different. I know it.”
I heard my Mamaw’s voice.
WALKING ON BROKEN GLASS
Annie Lennox
“You okay, Andra?” Dad waddled through the parking lot of Cole Creek Swamp. Milepost 176.
“I wouldn’t get too close to me, Dad.” I sat cross-legged on a wooden platform built between swirling-skirted cypress trees. Swamp water lapped against the dock, and peanut butter stuck my cheeks together. “Had a little accident a few miles back. Ran out of toilet paper.”
“I got some if you—”
“No-no. I’m only four miles from the end. I’ll just get to French Camp and shower.”
“They got some good Mississippi mud pie at that place.” He took a few steps toward me. “Want me to go get you a piece?”
“Sure. That’d be great.” I leaned against rippled bark and wondered what lurked beneath black water. Was it a key ingredient in Mississippi mud? The sound of the car faded, and I was left with fish chasing the sun.
When did Dad and I switch places?
He was the child, weaving stories through carefree days, while I was the parent, reaching for panicked dreams, a middle-aged gasp to force life’s math to tally.
And I was always dyslexic with math.
When I was in elementary school, Dad spent hours on the phone every night, a victim of the whims of weather. Juggling the wood supply for his plant informed almost every evening of my childhood. I combed Barbie’s hair and pretended not to hear him beg and bargain, curse and plead.
“You’re going to turn around, Roy, and your daughter will be grown, and you won’t have even talked to her.” My mom whispered unwelcome advice in their bed when she thought I was asleep. She repeated it in my presence as she stood over his recliner with ice cream. She shouted it for the neighbors while she packed me into the car for another piano recital he failed to attend.
When he finally initiated a conversation of depth, it wasn’t to say he was sorry. “I didn’t tell my parents I loved them enough, Andra, and now I can’t. If I could have just one minute with them today, I’d tell them I loved them one more time.” He paused and rubbed his eyes. My bed rocked with his departing shot. “I don’t think you love me.”
At thirteen, I didn’t comprehend Dad’s meaning. I only heard surface words and phrases, sentiments akin to swamp water. In my hormone-rattled mind, he was just lecturing me.
I dragged one foot along the white line. Milepost 178. My hand slid from metal. I turned my thoughts to daffodils.
Joy. I discovered it one hour ago.
When I looked to my right, Dad was there.
“Dad……”
I slid toward him.
And I saw a car plow through me.
What did it feel like when the soul was knocked from the body? I went numb and threw my arms around my head. Through my elbows, I glimpsed two halves of a Mercedes. While I hovered between life and death, the pieces joined together and formed one unit that fled up the highway. It vaulted around a curve and disappeared.
Was this what Meriwether Lewis experienced when he died? Explosive light and seeping cold and paralysis? Could he really see the landscape around him after he was gone, as I wrote in my book?
Was my death some cosmic repayment for writing about him in the first place?
I braced myself for waves of pain. Broken limbs. Exposed bone and viscera.
But my feet were glued to white paint. I was still upright. Unscathed. Dad’s car idled a few feet from me. When I looked at him, he smiled.
“I got your pie.”
I rattled my head between my hands.
How did that happen?
The car never braked, but I was convinced it hit me. Angry molecules spun inside me, emotions I thought I scraped off and left in a daffodil field.
I leapt across the road and assaulted Dad. “You can’t just stop in the middle of a highway to talk to me, Dad!”
“But I got your pie. Don’t you want it?”
“Did you even see that car? It almost hit me.” I rubbed my face with shaking hands. “I don’t know how it didn’t hit me. I’m sure it hit me. I know it did.” Pebbled tar and yellow paint wobbled beneath me. Dead. I should be dead.
“What do you want me to do with this pie?”
I pounded the car with my fists. “You can take that pie and—”
Dad shrunk in his seat. Confusion lit up the lines on his face. How did he miss the almost-death of his daughter, her mangled body parts strewn over a federal parkway?
Or was I the problem? Maybe hallucinations were a logical part of a migrained-stomach-bugged-dehydrated-muscle-pained-shit-perfumed day.
Meanwhile, Dad’s world was all about pie. Pie made him happy. Bringing me pie was a nurturing act, right? For the first time on the hellacious trip, Dad volunteered to do something for me. So what if it was a thing I didn’t want, calories that wouldn’t make my feet stop bleeding.
Inside my head, a voice screamed, “He’s trying to connect, to take care of you, you stupid idiot.” A cardinal flew over the car’s hood, a daffodil in its beak.
“Dad.” I touched his shoulder. “Don’t stop in the road and talk to me anymore, okay? It isn’t safe. Somebody might rear end you, and I’d feel terrible if you got hurt.”
“Well, back there you looked like you could use some pie.”
“Bethel Mission is just ahead. Pull in there and wait for me, and I’ll come and eat that pie.”
“All right.” He started to roll up his window.
“And don’t eat it before I get there.”
Laughter filtered through glass. “Don’t worry, Andra. I already had mine.”
I was full of Mississippi mud by the time I reached milepost 180. Two miles from the end, I sat within the faded lines of Bethel Mission and savored every gooey bite. Richness landed in my stomach like rocks, but I scraped the container clean.
And I wondered how I could walk fifteen miles a day and not lose a pound.
Dad picked me up and drove into the village of French Camp. One of the oldest settlements on the Trace, it was still an outpost in Mississippi wilderness. People came to gaze at the stars, to meditate with the Bible. We bounced down a dirt road to our cabin. A full kitchen and a bathroom I didn’t have to share. Dad followed me inside.
“Not more stairs.” He regarded a sketchy staircase along one wall. “You sure those things’ll hold me? Maybe I’ll sleep down here.”
I lugged a box of food laden with enough sugar-free snacks to feed the tiny village of French Camp for a week. The table groaned when I slid stuff on top, but I was too tired to care if it buckled. “Just be comfortable, Dad. I’m going upstairs to bed.”
It was our last night alone before my mother arrived.
I surveyed my sloped room under the eave
s and limped toward the bed, but I misjudged the angle of the ceiling and banged my head. A rough knot met my fingers along my hairline. What the hell was I thinking? In two weeks, we sold thirty books. I had a grand total of one event booked. A lone newspaper interview. In the history of marketing, it was the worst campaign ever launched.
“But the bed is comfortable,” I mumbled as sank into the mattress. I covered my ears with a pillow to mask the blaring media speculation from the television downstairs, yet another sensational update on the missing Malaysian airliner. “God, I hope they find those people.”
I couldn’t remember closing my eyes.
Did I dream Dad’s pronouncement? “I think when Linda comes, I’m gonna go home. Yep. That’s what I’m gonna do.”
I sat up on the bed and cringed. The window was a black square, a dusting of stars in one corner.
I shifted sore feet to the floor and forced them to carry my weight. I walked like C3PO, the droid from Star Wars. Five daily hours of walking transformed me into a robot.
As I felt my way toward the door, Dad’s words drifted up the stairs.
“Yep. Think I’m gonna leave Linda to deal with this.”
I pushed myself through the door and crashed downstairs. “What did you say?” I planted my body in front of the television and shouted over the reverberation. Dad shrunk in his cushioned chair and wouldn’t look at me. Instead, he picked at the plaid fabric and mumbled. I stepped over his feet and sprayed sleep breath in his face. “Would you really leave me?”
I made my peace with the trek that afternoon, survived a brush with a speeding car, even thwarted an argument. Why did he always push me harder? Remind me not to be a failure? And reiterate that no matter how much broken glass I crunched with bloody feet, it would never, ever be enough to please him?
“Don’t leave me now, Dad. Doing this with you, right now, at this moment in our lives—it should’ve been my dream all along. I don’t care about this book anymore. I just want to spend time with you. With Mom, when she gets here. Don’t take this experience away from me. From us. Please.”
“But I almost got you killed today, Andra.” His hefty fingers prodded the remote. “I don’t think I’m helping you any.”
I touched the back of his splotched hand. “You got me a sandwich earlier, right? ‘Best one on the Trace,’ somebody said. And don’t forget the pie. And all the books you’re selling. How many is it now?”
“Most ever in one day, just today. Think I sold close to ten.” He sat taller.
“There. See? I need you, Dad. And, more than that, I want to do this with you. Even when it’s hard.”
“But you’re so much tougher than me, Andra.” He shifted and tried to look around me. “I don’t know how you do this, day after day after day.”
“How do we do life day after day after day, Dad?”
“One step at a time, I reckon.”
“That’s right. And that’s how we’ll finish this trip: one glorious step at a time……….or, we’ll kill each other.”
Dad laughed with me. “Yeah. Probably kill each other. I guess we’ll see.”
“So you’ll stay?”
“Let Linda get here. I’ll decide in the morning. I got to get some sleep.” He clicked the remote and shuffled to the stairs. At the bannister, he stopped. “Think they’ll find those people? On that plane?”
“I hope so, Dad.”
“Yeah. Me too.”
WALK ON BY
Dionne Warwick
I wanted to go home because I was afraid.
There.
I said it.
I was afraid of what Linda’s coming would do to my time with Andra. How I’d be outside their shorthand. Ringmaster for their arguments.
For almost ten years, I told Linda, “Andra’s an adult, and you need to let her live her life. It’s her knitting, the choices she makes.”
But Linda, that woman is the stubbornest human being I ever laid eyes on. I don’t even recall when it started, but she kept at Andra. Questioning her. Telling her what to do, and her a grown woman with a life of her own. Being betwixt them two was like standing in the worst part of a hurricane.
Something shifted, though. About the time Linda read Andra’s book.
I found her in Andra’s old bedroom. Crying and clutching that story.
“Is it that bad?” I asked her. ’Cause I ain’t read the thing. I don’t need to read a book to sell it.
She never answered me, but she got up off that bed, and she started calling her sisters, and before I knew it they all read Andra’s book. They spent hours on the phone talking about I-don’t-know-what-all, while I turned down my hearing aids and concentrated on the ballgame.
And she and Andra wasn’t arguing so much anymore. Lots of stuff gets past me, but I saw a change. They wasn’t so strained and mad all the time.
And that’s why I was afraid, on the eve of my wife’s coming to Mississippi. I had time with Andra, all by myself. I didn’t want to share it, to go back to farting around for the right words to say. I just wanted it to be me, and Andra, and selling them books.
For a little while longer.
Was that too much to ask?
I CAN TELL THAT WE ARE GONNA BE FRIENDS
The White Stripes
My second rest day dawned with Dad banging on my bedroom door at 8am. “We got to go see that Doc Jones. South of Tupelo.”
I settled into Michael. He made the long trek to bring my mother from South Carolina to Mississippi. I tried to ignore Dad and let Michael rub my shoulder. “Maybe if we don’t answer, he’ll go away,” Michael whispered.
“Hey. Hey, Andra!”
I sat up and sighed. “Do you really think he’s gonna let us ignore him?”
The door knob rattled. “Hey! You awake? We got to go see Doc Jones today!”
For ten seconds, I held onto the rest day of my dreams: Snuggling with Michael until check-out; walking outside to find the car loaded and ready; hearing Michael say he didn’t have to leave; driving straight to Bridges Hall Manor, our next stop; soaking in the tub while everyone else unloaded the car; and eating dinner in bed before passing out on my husband’s chest.
Wood popped when Dad leaned his weight into the door, the insistent sound of reality. “We got to go, Andra. Doc Jones is expecting us. I done told him we was coming!”
Michael brushed a wisp of hair from my cheek and held me. “We’ll be out in five minutes, Roy.”
“Huh? I done told Doc—”
“He said five minutes, Dad!”
I clung to Michael to keep my pleas inside. I didn’t think I could walk fifteen miles a day and spend three weeks with my parents. I was the world’s biggest idiot, and I wanted to beg Michael to stay and referee.
Instead, I squeezed my husband and smiled. “I hope Doc Jones has someplace for me to elevate my feet.”
Michael loaded the car while I looked around our bedroom one last time, tried to memorize being with him. For the next three weeks, he would work to pay for my crazy book-launch adventure. No more visits until the end of the Trace.
Twenty-one days. Two hundred and forty-eight miles.
Without my husband, it might as well have been infinity.
When I limped downstairs, I found Mom standing in the cabin’s main room, her spring outfit accentuated with flawless hair and layers of matching jewelry. She strutted over and offered a bejeweled arm. “Do you need help getting to the car? I did extra workouts, you know. At the gym while Roy’s been gone. I’m sure I can help you if you can’t walk.”
“Mom, I have to walk. I’m just stiff at the beginning.” I ignored her outstretched arm and forced my legs to move. “I’ll ride with Michael as far as Starkville.”
“We got to get going! Doc Jones is—”
Michael helped me into his car and shut the door on Dad’s rant. When he slipped next to me, he took my hand. “Whenever he gets like this, just remember what it feels like right now. Here. Holding my hand.”
“Doc’s a-waiting. We got to go.”
As Mom drove through farmland south of Tupelo, I massaged my calves and longed for the Trace. Sunlight through leaves. The tangy scent of pine sap. Shadows on black water.
I listened to Dad delight Doc Jones with his own Trace stories, but I missed making my own. Five hours of walking was magical, if one saw enchantment in the ordinary. In spite of sore legs and frozen ankles, I was ready to spend five daily hours practicing the life I wanted to live.
In the meantime, Mom and I watched Dad laugh with his old friend, almost three hours without complaint. When I tottered to the car, Dad shook Doc’s hand, and I wondered whether they would ever visit again.
I realized I gave Dad the gift of seeing people who mattered one more time.
We bumped toward Houston, Mississippi, Dad’s voice interrupting my thoughts. “This next place. It have stairs?”
“Maybe Mom can carry you up the stairs, Dad. She offered to carry me to the car this morning.”
Mom flicked her eyes in the rearview mirror. “Do you know that since I started going to the gym, I’ve lifted over a million pounds?”
“See, Dad? She can totally carry you upstairs.”
When we pulled in front Bridges Hall Manor, we were laughing, familial music I never expected. Mom hauled things from the trunk while I circled the rambling Victorian and knocked on the front door. Before the echo died away, a woman who resembled Aunt Bee from the Andy Griffith Show greeted me. She took my hand, her sentences a whirlwind. “I’m Carol, and let me tell you, I’ve been waiting for you all day. I’ve got your room ready, because I know you’re about to fall out, aren’t you? And, oh! This must be your father. I’ve been reading all about you, Mr. Watkins, on Andra’s website. I’m Carol Koutroulis.”
Dad’s chuckle shook his belly. “You been reading about me?”