Dad poked his head through the open car window. “We’ll go find you a snack and check out that Iuka place. What kinda name for a town is that? Iuka, Mississippi?” His laughter reverberated through silence when they left me. I pondered a soaked stretch of roadway near milepost 315.
Skeletal pain sizzled through my legs and feet. My muscles were frayed rubber bands before the weak bits snapped. Determined to find the day’s gift, I turned my ravaged body northward. “Alabama, be kind to me.”
Less than forty miles of the Natchez Trace cut through the northwestern corner of Alabama, riddled with watersheds that dumped into the Tennessee River and crisscrossed rich farmland. I wiped more rain from my eyes and left the first milepost. “It’s just rain. Only my face will suffer.”
Along the ridge line, wet seeped into my waterproof jacket and pants. It cascaded down my legs and into my shoes. Sleety rain beat a steady rhythm on the road, and it carried voices in every plop and smack.
“My leather shoes fell apart by the time I walked this far, and I had to make it to Tennessee on bare feet.”
“I’d give anything for that fancy stuff you’re wearing. Skins leak, you know.”
“Do you people ever think about how good you have it? All your complaining about the state of your feet. You don’t know pain, girlie.”
Boatmen. Delirious and showy. Broken and extreme. I turned my face downwind and shouted, “I’m still here. Doing what you did. I’m a girl, and I’m proud! Walking by myself, which beats your packs of skittish men. Leave me the hell alone! You hear me?”
Clouds parted, and the wintry mix fled. My knees groaned into a valley, but I stepped lighter, convinced my will could change the weather.
In a treeless expanse of fields, a horn broke my reverie.
“Andra!” Dad waved me to his window. “Got you a snack.”
I rolled my eyes at salted peanuts. “I’ve got nuts in my backpack, Dad. More nuts in my protein bars. You just got these because you wanted them.”
“You know your daddy.” Mom talked over Dad’s protests.
“I got ’em for you.”
“You did not, Dad.”
“I did! But if you really don’t want ’em………….” He tore into the bag and dumped them into his mouth.
I pulled windblown hair from mine. “Wind’s picking up. But looks like it’s done raining. I hope that means I’ve made it through the worst of it.”
“Iuka. That was the worst of it.” Mom fiddled with her rings and scowled. “I can’t wait to go home.”
“Really, Mom? You’re not enjoying this together time?”
She diverted her attention beyond her window, while Dad exclaimed, “Iuka! What a name. Wonder where they got that, huh? I-oo-ka.”
“Oh, dear God. We’ll be hearing that for days.” I peeled off my waterproof jacket and threw it in the back seat. Even on cooler days, it boiled me in my own juices, a zipped-and-velcroed sauna. I flung my arms over my head and let the wind fan wet patches. “Looks like nothing but fields ahead.”
“That’s another reason we found you, Andra.” Mom’s hands still wrenched in her lap, a nervous habit I inherited from her. “A maintenance crew stopped us. There’s a pack of wild dogs about a mile ahead—four or so, they don’t know—feeding on a deer carcass. When they tried to get the remains, one dog attacked them.”
“I’m sure they’ll be gone by the time I get there.” I hoisted my backpack in place and stretched my calves while Dad spilled nuts everywhere.
Mom sighed, her frustration barometer. “Roy, you just had three scoops of ice cream. Stop eating those nuts. You’re making a mess.” She flicked her blue-grey eyes back to me. “Still, I think you should let us drive you through this part, Andra.”
I repositioned my voodoo doll on my right shoulder, hoping to beat the impatient edge from my voice. “I can’t cheat, Mom. I have to walk.”
Mom shot from the driver’s seat and bolted around the car. “Who made up these ridiculous rules?”
“I’m just trying to honor history—”
“That doesn’t mean you should risk your life, Andra. Do you know how much I worry about you? Every mile of this…..this—”
“Stupid? Is that what you want to say?”
She slid a turquoise ring up and down her finger while Dad filled his face with more nuts. Nervous ticks defined every family moment. Rawness made us elemental.
I tightened the stays on my backpack and stepped away from her. “Believe me, I know how stupid this walk is. I have to get out here and do it every day, remember?” I stopped. To swat aggravation from my voice, I bit my lip and stretched my calves again. When I found calm, I continued. “I’m not doing anything people haven’t done before me. I’ll be fine.”
“You always say that, but how do you know? I’ve gone along with this business for more than a week. I’ve watched cars almost hit you, and I’ve seen you crippled by pain. How can you possibly know those dogs won’t go after you?”
“Because,” I turned my face northward. “I have them to protect me.”
“Who?”
I ignored her and walked away. She didn’t like my voodoo doll mascot and questioned the voices I heard along the Trace. Dead pioneers. Ancient Native Americans. Soldiers and Spaniards and animals. Spirit walking, a friend called it. A notion that didn’t jibe with Mom’s devout faith, a faith I shared with her, though I made allowances for other mysteries, varied beliefs.
Because, at its heart, wasn’t all faith the same explanation for things we couldn’t see?
The closer I crept to the Meriwether Lewis site, the louder the voices grew. On sunny days, I heard them in my footsteps. They chattered in raindrops and rode the coattails of a gale.
One morning, they conjured a deer. It bounded up a hill and walked next to me. I saw its ears flick, heard its puffs of breath. Its hooves echoed on the highway, and it regarded me with one curious eye.
In the stillness, I heard voices. “We used to have these moments all the time. How do you people live without ’em?”
How did I?
Still, Mom was right to worry. When I walked onto an overpass, I didn’t leave anything to chance. I carried one weapon. On my shoulder, next to my voodoo doll.
I never fired my police-issue mace, because I was afraid I’d aim the wrong way and spray myself in the face. Or the wind would carry the noxious mixture back at me. Panic always made me grasp the wrong things.
“I guess I’d better practice. Just in case.” I yanked the canister from my shoulder and flipped its plastic top. When I pushed the red button, a stream of what looked like semen shot ten inches from its nozzle. I looked at its snout in disbelief. “That’s all I get? One pathetic squirt of protection? Somebody could have me in their trunk, halfway to who-knows-where, before this thing would help me.” I almost hurled it into space. “Police-issue mace. I don’t know why it doesn’t come with a big, fat sign that reads ‘Abduct Me’.”
When I stopped shaking, I palmed the mace in my right hand, my thumb close to the red trigger. I followed the road until it bisected another field. “Surely this is the wild dog place.” I scanned the muddy expanses on both sides. Though I wanted to run, I held steady. A rustle of trees was a possible attacker; a snort the hunger of insatiable hounds. “I wish I’d never read Edgar Allan Poe,” I whispered as I marched into the open. The road was an elevated land bridge through broken fences. Plowed earth and scrub.
I telescoped my head from west to east, breath quickening with my heartbeat. Didn’t hunters claim animals gave off more pheromones when they were spooked? And, once I allowed myself to think the word ‘spooked,’ I couldn’t take it back.
I was a target.
For anything.
I galloped into a run, chanting, “I’m going to be fine. I’m going to be fine. I’m going to be fine. Step quick. Eyes on the horizon. Change sides of the road every twenty steps. Keep moving. Don’t stop. I’m going to be fine. I am.”
When I reached
the trees, I slid underneath them and didn’t look behind me. I loosened my grip on my mace and expected to find my palm print in plastic. Panting, I sat next to a milepost and slid my head between my knees.
Mom steered the car beyond me. When I stopped shaking, I snapped my milepost photo and walked to her open window.
Mom waited. Hands in her lap. Silent and still. “Those dogs were gone by the time we got there.”
“Uh-huh. Looked that way.” I fought to keep my voice even, furious she didn’t come back to tell me.
“You remember my chiropractor?” My mother. The master of unexpected conversational tacks.
And how could I forget him? Mom saw him every week in my teens. For two years, she battled sciatica, while I wondered if she prolonged her visits because she liked the way he hugged her. That’s what she called his adjustments: Hugging her. She always noted how handsome he was.
“Yeah. I remember him.”
“Well, he died last month. Mauled. By a pack of wild dogs.” She prodded me with a perfect fingernail. “I worry about you, Andra. Always going on these hikes alone. Or with Michael. I’m afraid something like that’ll happen to you.”
As she drove up the highway, I squirted mace into her jet stream.
Did she make up that story about the dogs and the deer carcass to scare me into quitting?
It wouldn’t be the first time.
CROSS ROAD BLUES
Robert Johnson
Andra was always into that theater stuff. I think she got the acting bug from me.
And her storytelling.
And her looks, most of ’em.
I remember her getting the lead in ‘South Pacific’ in college. I didn’t want her to stay home for school. That was Linda’s idea. I thought she needed to go away from home, build her own independence. Like I did. But when I got Andra into the University of Georgia, my alma mater, Linda had a fit.
“Andra Watkins is not going to that……that den of iniquity.” Linda’s nostrils flared when she was mad, but I was pretty riled up, too.
“I went to that den of iniquity, and I turned out all right.”
But nothing I said changed that woman’s mind. Andra enrolled in the local college and kept doing plays. I was there, the day she came home and found Linda on the pot.
“Mom!” She breezed by my recliner and headed down the hallway.“My theater professor wants me to audition for the musical theater program at Florida State.” I sat forward in my chair and listened.“He knows people there, and he thinks I’m good enough to win a place and transfer.”
I could just see Linda there on her throne, that application straining in her hands. I expected her to use it to wipe her butt. Her voice wafted down the hall, and I turned down the TV to catch it.“You’re not majoring in musical theater, Andra.”
“Why not? I’ve always loved it, and—”
“You’re just not.” A spigot ran. Probably Linda washing germs from that paper off her hands. She was so mad I could hear her over the flush of the toilet. “You need to major in something that you can do part-time when you have children—”
“I don’t want to have children.”
I chuckled. My daughter. Always digging in for a fight.
“Oh, you think that now, but you’re young. You’ll change your mind.”
Their voices came toward me, and I sat back in my recliner. Didn’t want ’em to know I was listening. When Linda made up her mind about something, it was just easier to take her side.
I never dreamed I’d spend my whole life stuck between two women. My mother and my wife. My wife and my daughter.
Andra trailed Linda into the den, still fighting. “I’ve always dreamed of performing, Mom. You know that.”
“Dreaming only gets us in trouble.”
I cranked up CNN, but I couldn’t stop thinking about dreams. When I was Andra’s age, I had ’em, too. Get outta Tennessee. Travel in the Army. Go to college and make my mother proud. I avoided women ’til I was thirty. Then I done gone and lost my mind. Married Linda. Started a family.
It wasn’t that life didn’t play out like my dreams. I just wanted more than going to work. Coming home. Breaking my back to provide for people who depended on me. I was always afraid of disappointing ’em, letting ’em down.
Being like my dad was.
People go into parenthood saying, “I won’t do. I won’t do. I won’t do.” But, at some point, they look back and realize they’ve become the very people they said they wouldn’t be. Oh, I didn’t drink. Didn’t run around on Linda. Nothing like that.
But I never knew how to talk to my children, like my father never knew what to say to me. I dreamed of being different, of having one of them close father-daughter relationships. After trying all through Andra’s teens, I knew I missed my window.
I’d never live that dream.
ONE STEP UP
Bruce Springsteen
Alabama wind. It blasted from the northwest and swirled the length of my body. Cars zipped past me, and I wondered if I looked like the Tasmanian devil from old Bugs Bunny cartoons, a funnel cloud with arms and legs. I dodged a path of wild dogs to stagger through endless fields, borders defined by scattered trees, a starker landscape than Mississippi.
My legs followed the will of unseen forces. Every step landed somewhere other than I intended.
“Four more miles to go!” I shouted but couldn’t hear myself. Words were sucked into the ether around milepost 326. I shook my fist at the sky, and Nature crept in and almost stole my hat. With both hands gripping the brim, I forgot my resolve to find joy every day. Instead, I leaned back and bawled, “A wind tunnel? What else are you going to do to me?”
Was it my imagination, or did the Wind laugh?
Across the road, a tractor wove trenches in a field, spreading clouds of red dirt that crashed across the highway, an opaque wall of filth. I jumped up and down, shouted and waved, hoping he would stop to let me pass. I even considered mooning or flashing, because in that moment, I understood how some people did anything for a break.
Back and forth, machinery carved into land. I couldn’t compete with the hum of the engine, the roar of the gale. Defeated, I stumbled through dirty air and almost fell in the path of a minivan. It careened toward me, fighting the weather, and I moved into the ditch to avoid it. When I raised my arm to wave, howling forces snapped it backward at the elbow.
The van streaked into the grass and stopped next to me.
“I’m okay!” I started talking as soon as the passenger rolled down her window, but I caught myself when she wagged a paper rectangle in my face. Black lines. White letters.
My book.
“We came out here to meet you, and we need you to sign this.”
Unthinkable requests were tricks of the wind. I leaned closer and cupped my hat brim next to my ears.
“What?”
“Our book! Your dad sold us one of your books back there at Colbert Ferry, and we want you to sign it.”
A gust blew me into the door. I sneaked my eyes downward, hoping I didn’t scratch it. The woman smiled and pressed the book flat, while the driver handed me a pen. “We’re related to William Clark,” he said.
“Through the Austins,” a man chimed from the back seat.
“So when your dad told us you’d written a book about Meriwether Lewis, it wasn’t a hard sell.”
I leaned through the opening, a respite from the growl in my ears. “Where are you from?”
“Just up the road in Tennessee. We think what you’re doing is incredible, walking the Trace and all. And writing about Meriwether Lewis.”
“Incredible. Or incredibly crazy.” I smiled at the three of them.
“Well, those historians think Lewis was crazy, but Clark’s family, we all believe he was murdered.”
My swollen fingers battled to scratch my name on the front page, but I didn’t feel pain. Whenever I needed a lift, the Trace found a way. “I hope you like what I did with his story. It’s kinda s
cary, knowing people who still care will read it and have opinions.”
“We’re looking forward to it.”
I handed them a bent business card. “I hope you’ll keep in touch. Thanks for coming out in this weather. You made my whole week.”
As I peeled myself from the van, I forgot the wind. I covered the two miles to the Tennessee River in less than thirty minutes. My feet hovered above the ground. I weaved along the entrance road to Colbert Ferry and climbed into my parents’ car for a late lunch.
Dad was talking before I touched my sandwich.
“Those people find you? Get you to sign their book?”
“Yes, Dad.” I bit into smashed peanut butter and bread.
“You need to sign more of them books, Andra. I can’t sell ’em if they ain’t signed. People want ’em signed.”
“Can I eat first, Dad?”
“Just don’t get out of the car without signing them books.”
My fingers were the size of bratwursts, and they trembled when I gripped my sandwich and forced it to my mouth. The inside of the car bounced like I floated on the open sea. I blinked, but the motion intensified. “I think I went too long today without eating.”
Mom glanced in the rearview mirror. “Did you not stop for a snack?”
“I never found a sheltered place. Couldn’t sit in the open, with all this wind.” I fanned my face with my balloon-ish hand. “I’m a little dizzy. It’ll pass.”
Dad tapped the dashboard with his Georgia ring. “You better sign those books.”
“Dad—”
“Roy—”
Mom and I blurted in stereo.
“Can I please eat and rest a few minutes without you nagging me, Dad?”
“I’m helping you. That’s what I’m doing. This is your dream, but you ain’t doing your part.”
I could almost hear his speech to thirteen-year-old me. “Don’t grow up to be a failure, Andra. You need to learn to stick to the things you start. Have some stick-to-it-ive-ness about you.”
Not Without My Father: One Woman's 444-Mile Walk of the Natchez Trace Page 13