Not Without My Father: One Woman's 444-Mile Walk of the Natchez Trace (17 page)

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 scary, 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.”

I flung my uneaten sandwich across the back seat. “Dammit!” Mom plugged her ears with spangled fingers, but I didn’t care if I offended her. Cardboard sawed my flesh as I opened a fresh box of books and scribbled my name. “Here. I’m signing them. Ten of them. You’d better sell every last one of these today.”

“I already sold—”

“I don’t care what you already sold, Dad. You’ve got two miles left. If I have to sign these in the shape I’m in, you have to sell them.”

“But—”

“What’s the matter? I bet you can’t get rid of half these books in an hour.”

“Watch me.” Dad flicked the visor and grinned. Verbal sparring was his lifeline to me.

But when I opened the door and faced hurricane-like gusts, I saw my resolve fly away. I still had one significant landmark to cross. The John Coffee Memorial Bridge. The longest bridge on the Natchez Trace, its two lanes straddled the Tennessee River.

“Mom, I’ve got a bridge coming up. If we drive down to the landing, I’ll scope it out first. You know, before I walk it. I’m not sure I should be on foot in this wind.”

“I don’t think you should,” Dad muttered.

I squeezed his shoulder and fought to mask a laugh. “I don’t care what you think, Dad.”

“Heh-heh. I know.”

Mom wound the car through the site and parked on a bluff. The Tennessee River churned like a pot boiling over.

Colbert Ferry got its name from the man-and-boat that moved people, animals and things back and forth across the river. In the aftermath of the Battle of New Orleans, the ferryman earned infamy by charging Andrew Jackson $50,000 to haul troops and materiel from one bank to the other. I eyed the rock-strewn gorge where the Old Trace met the water’s edge. If Meriwether Lewis traveled that far south, he crossed the river there. Maybe he stood where I did, awaiting the ferry.

I imagined his day. Illness forced him from the Mississippi River at Memphis. He recuperated at Fort Pickering for two weeks before embarking upon an overland journey with Chickasaw Indian agent James Neely and two servants. Neely was headed as far as Nashville. He offered to escort the ailing Lewis and help him find another travel companion.

They drank their way through the backcountry and lost a valuable horse. According to Neely, Lewis ordered him to find it, while he pressed onward to Grinder’s Stand.

Windblown voices smacked my face. “Have you been listening, girl? We couldn’t walk on water. We were all ferried across.”

I looked around the empty parking lot. Mom and Dad waved from the Mercury, engine running.

A car would be my ferry.

When I settled in the back seat, the wind still roared in my head. “Drive me across the bridge, Mom.”

Dad fastened his seat belt. “That’s the first sensible thing you’ve said on this entire trip, Andra.”

“You just figure out how to sell ten books in two miles, Old Man.” I leaned into the leather headrest and closed my eyes.

Two miles to go. Another 114 miles to the end.

Would I ever cross the finish line?

FOLLOW YOU, FOLLOW ME

Genesis

Collinwood, Tennessee. Population 991.

“Here’s the room, Hon.” I limped through a commercial glass door and followed another Linda into an oblong room. Two beds shared the same space. Fluorescent lighting dotted ceiling tile. “The bathroom is so small, because we planned it as an office initially. But with all the bicyclists on the Trace and whatnot, we converted it into places to stay.”

When I closed the door, I couldn’t turn around in the bathroom. I inspected the minuscule shower and wondered whether Dad would fit.