The Road to Grace (The Walk)

by Evans, Richard Paul

  He nodded. “Yes, I thought you might.”

  “I would like to shower first if that’s okay.”

  “Yes, of course.” He looked sad. “Is there anything you will need before you go?”

  “No. You’ve done more than enough.”

  “I can drive you back to the freeway.”

  Even though I had normally refused rides I could not refuse him. “Thank you. I would like that.” I took my plate over to the sink and turned on the water to wash it.

  “No, no. Just leave it. Please. I will do dishes later. You go shower.”

  “Are you sure?”

  He waved his hands, as if brushing me away. “Yes. Go.”

  At his dismissal I went to my room, retrieved clothes and a razor, then went into the bathroom. I shaved first then turned on the water and stepped into the tub. There were small slivers of soap in a plastic dish. Leszek was a man who had little and wasted less. I didn’t shower very long as I was conscious of using his hot water. I washed my hair twice, still amazed at how long it was. I could almost pull it back in a ponytail.

  As I got out of the shower I could hear Leszek playing the piano again. I toweled off, dressed, then went to my room and finished putting my things back into my pack. I made the bed, then carried my pack out to the front room where Leszek was waiting for me. He looked very sad.

  “You are ready to leave,” he said.

  “I’m afraid so,” I replied.

  “Okay, okay. We go.”

  We walked out the front door to his car. I threw my pack into the car’s backseat, then climbed in as Leszek started the car. As we drove out of his neighborhood, Leszek pointed out the Corn Palace again, its façade adorned with murals made of corncobs. As we crossed under the freeway, I pointed to a small turnoff near the freeway on-ramp.

  “How about right over there?” I said.

  Leszek pulled his car off the side of the road and shut off the engine.

  I felt surprisingly emotional.

  “Well, my good friend,” Leszek said. “This is goodbye.” He reached out his thick hand. I grasped it.

  “Saying thank you seems so inadequate. I am so grateful for all you’ve done for me.”

  “It was my pleasure,” he said. “Is your father still alive?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then he must be proud of such a son. I hope we meet again.”

  “Me too,” I said. “I didn’t get your phone number.”

  “Then I will give it to you.”

  I took out my journal and a pen. He told me his number and I scribbled it down. “I’ll call you when I reach Key West.”

  “Yes. You call me. I will celebrate for you with toast.”

  “Toast?” I said. “Is that a Jewish custom?”

  “Yes. I will drink toast.”

  I laughed. Then I shook his hand again and climbed out of the car. “Take care, my friend,” I said. “Be safe.”

  “What so bad thing could happen to me in Mitchell, South Dakota?” he replied.

  I laughed again. He waved, then started his car, signaled, and slowly pulled back out onto the road. I watched as his car disappeared in the merging traffic. All gold does not glitter, I thought.

  C H A P T E R

  Sixteen

  I have discovered the ladies of the

  Red Hat Society. Or, more accurately,

  they have discovered me.

  Alan Christoffersen’s diary

  Over the next three days I walked from Mitchell to Sioux Falls. My travel was without incident and full of corn. There was corn everywhere. At one point I passed what looked like a petroleum refinery, which vexed me, as it seemed totally out of place amid the acres of cornfields. As I examined the plant it occurred to me that they were making ethanol from corn.

  On the first day out of Mitchell, I saw a sign for the Laura Ingalls Wilder home. When McKale was little, she was a huge fan of the Little House books, so I got off the freeway to see the house. Then, shortly past the turnoff, I saw a sign that said her home was more than fifty miles off my course. I turned around and walked back to 90.

  I kept on walking. Again, there was a lot of roadkill. On one stretch I counted six “sleeping” raccoons in the course of just one mile.

  On the third day from Mitchell, after twenty-four days on Interstate 90, I exited south on 29 toward Sioux Falls. I could see the city in the distance, and even though I was tired, I decided that a good hotel with room service and a hot bath would be worth the extra effort. At nearly twenty-six miles I stopped at a Sheraton.

  I decided to take a rest day. For breakfast I ordered eggs Benedict from room service, ate, then put on my swimsuit. I borrowed the terrycloth robe that hung in my closet, then went downstairs to the hot tub.

  The hotel lobby was crowded with hundreds of mature ladies wearing red hats and purple dresses, some of them accessorized with feather boas or red or purple fuzzy socks.

  I crossed the lobby to the pool area. The hot tub was located on the far side of the pool. Two women were already in the tub, chatting loudly over the sound of bubbling water. They were wearing red hats as well. They stopped talking and looked at me as I folded my robe over the arm of a pool chair and stepped into the water. I closed my eyes and sank into the tub up to my neck.

  When I opened my eyes the women were still looking at me.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “How are you?” the one nearest me said.

  “I’m fine. And you?”

  “Having the time of our lives,” said the other woman, who was a little taller and had unnaturally red hair.

  “Why are you wearing red hats?” I asked.

  “We belong to the Red Hat Society.”

  “I’m not familiar with that.”

  “We’re just a bunch of dames out for a good time,” the first lady said. “You haven’t heard of us?”

  “Sorry, no. I’m not from Sioux Falls.”

  “Oh, this isn’t just a Sioux Falls thing,” the tall lady said indignantly. “The Red Hatters are global. We have more than forty thousand chapters worldwide. We’ve been featured in Time magazine and on television shows. We’ve even been on The Simpsons.”

  “The Simpsons?” I said. “I’m sorry, I guess I’ve been in a cave for a while. Actually, I’ve been on a walk.”

  “That must be some walk,” the second woman said.

  “I’m walking across America.”

  “Oh my,” the first lady said, “that is a walk.”

  “Really,” the second said. “Which side of the country did you start on?”

  “I started in Seattle.”

  “How long ago did you start?”

  “It’s been nearly eight months. But I got held up five months in Spokane. I got stabbed just outside of the city.”

  “Stabbed?” the second woman said.

  I rose up out of the water to show my scars from the attack.

  The first woman put her hand over her mouth. “Oh my. How horrible.”

  The second woman glanced at my ring finger. “So how did you convince your wife to let you go? Or did she come with you?”

  “You lost her,” the first said. “How did you lose her?”

  I looked at her quizzically. “How did you know that?”

  “Yes,” the second woman said, turning back. “How did you know that?”

  “He’s wearing a ladies’ wedding ring around his neck,” she said. She turned to me. “If you were divorced, you wouldn’t be wearing it. If you were still together, she’d be wearing it, and if it belonged to another woman, your wife wouldn’t let you wear it.”

  “Aren’t you the Sherlock?” the second woman said. “Is she right?”

  I nodded. “She passed away last October. Two days after her funeral, I began my walk.”

  Both women just looked at me. Then the second woman said, “That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “Tell me about the Red Hat club,” I said.

  “… Society,” the se
cond woman corrected.

  The first woman began, “It started when Sue Ellen, our queen mother—”

  “You have a queen?” I asked.

  “That’s what Sue Ellen calls herself,” she replied. “The society started when she bought a friend of hers a red hat for her fifty-fifth birthday. There’s a poem about a red hat. I won’t recite the whole thing, but it goes like this.” She straightened herself up a little.

  When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple,

  with a red hat that doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me.

  And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves

  and satin candles, and say we’ve no money for butter.

  “And I’ll learn to spit,” said the second woman.

  The first woman nodded. “That’s in there too. It means we’ve spent our lives playing by the rules and being fuddyduddies, now we’re going to kick off our shoes and have a good time.”

  “And we have fun,” the second woman said.

  “My wife would have been a Red Hat woman,” I said.

  The first lady shook her head. “She’s not old enough.”

  “She would be a Pink Hat lady,” the second said. “Those are our younger members.”

  “She would do that,” I said.

  I lowered myself in the water one more time, then rose back up. “I think I’m boiled enough.” I stood. “Nice meeting you.”

  “So nice meeting you,” the first said.

  “Good luck on your walk,” the second said.

  “Thanks.”

  I climbed out of the tub. I dried myself with a hotel towel, then put my robe back on and walked to the elevator. The lobby was not quite as crowded, but still boasted an impressive number of red hats.

  As I walked toward the elevator I could see two of the red-hatted women inside. One of them, a very tall brunette with a red fedora, said, “Hold the door, Doris. Here comes some man candy.”

  I smiled as I stepped in. “Red Hat Society.”

  Fedora lady smiled. “Red Hot Society. And where were you last night at our Red Ball when I was looking for a dance partner.”

  “I was resting my legs,” I said. “I’ve been doing a lot of walking.”

  “You look like it,” she said. “How about losing the robe and giving us a little peek?”

  “Janet!” Doris said.

  “Oh, don’t be such a prude,” Janet replied. “He’s probably a male model. He’s used to this.”

  “I’m not a model.”

  “You could be,” Doris said.

  “Ought to be,” Janet corrected.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  Just then the bell rang for my floor.

  “Oh, come on,” Janet said. “Just a little peeksy.”

  I stepped out of the elevator. “Have a good day, ladies.”

  As the elevator door shut I heard Janet say, “Get his room number, Doris. That man is hot.”

  The next morning I went downstairs and ate at the hotel’s restaurant. There were still red hats all around, but the women seemed subdued, as if a wild night had done them in.

  I left the hotel by eight o’clock, getting back on 29 south. The road led through an industrial area and my walk was slowed considerably. I spent a lot of time maneuvering the on- and off-ramps, searching for roads that paralleled the freeway. It was difficult walking, but sometimes there’s no easy route.

  I had walked for eight miles, to a town with the fantastic name of Tea, before the construction ended and the traffic started to thin out. The landscape turned again to plains, which I was glad to see again. That night I slept under an overpass. It had been a tedious day of walking and I was exhausted. I don’t know why some days are harder than others, but I had thought of McKale all day and my chest ached with loneliness. I was glad to finally sleep.

  C H A P T E R

  Seventeen

  One cannot judge someone by the

  city they’re from, any more than

  one can judge a book by which

  bookstore sold it. Yet, still we do.

  Alan Christoffersen’s diary

  Over the next four days I covered the distance between Sioux Falls and Sioux City with little worth writing about in between. From Sioux City, my next major destination was St. Joseph, approximately 225 miles away. At my current pace I would make it in ten days.

  The freeway leaving Sioux City was too busy and too narrow to safely traverse, so I walked along the Floyd River, which was beautiful with its sandy shore.

  State lines converged on my route out of the city, and for much of the day I wasn’t sure whether I was in Iowa or Nebraska. I could have solved my quandary by consulting my map, but it didn’t really matter. I knew I was on the right road, and at the end of the day, that’s all that mattered.

  Over the next seven days I followed I-29 due south. The road, for the most part, was in Iowa though at times it crossed state lines into Nebraska, as it did in Omaha.

  This part of the country seemed old and good to me, reflected, perhaps, in the area’s claims to fame. Western Iowa gave us Donna Reed (Jimmy Stewart’s low-maintenance wife in It’s a Wonderful Life), the great orchestra leader Glenn Miller, and the performer Andy Williams of “Moon River” fame—a song I only knew because we performed it on our recorders in Miss Rossi’s class in the second grade.

  The region didn’t just contribute actors and musicians to the American cultural pot. One of the towns I passed was Onawa, the place where Eskimo Pies were invented by a Danish immigrant named Christian Kent Nelson—a schoolteacher and candy store owner. (A delightfully congruent combination, I thought.) Nelson came up with the idea for the Eskimo Pie in 1920 when a child in his store couldn’t decide between an ice cream or a chocolate bar. He ended up patenting the bar and made an agreement with Russell C. Stover, the candy magnate, to produce the frozen treats under the name Eskimo Pie. At the height of their popularity, more than one million Eskimo Pies were sold in America each day. The American dream is made of such stuff.

  As I walked, I felt as if I were discovering a side of America that was lost to the media, or at least ignored, written off as inconsequential. As I would discover over the next few weeks, these small towns are tinder boxes for some of the world’s greatest people and ideas. Residents from metropolises tend to look down on those from smaller populations—even in their big-city failures. I had an employee from Brooklyn who told me that when his driver’s education teacher informed his class that because of all the car robberies their borough had the highest car insurance premiums in the country, some of the students clapped and high-fived each other. Stupid as this mentality is, I don’t think it’s ever been different. People tend to grab onto whatever they can to make themselves feel superior—whether it’s a brand, a football team, or even a locale.

  These were not bad days of walking. I passed large, well-organized fields and lilac-strewn countryside, always pleasant to look at, at best, idyllic.

  Fifty miles past Omaha, I walked through Sidney, Iowa, the self-proclaimed “Rodeo Town, USA.” Sidney is a pert little town with a barbershop, a café, and two law offices—which seemed excessive to me until I remembered a story my father once told me about a town that had only one lawyer, who just about starved until a second lawyer moved into the town and then they both became rich.

  In the center of Sidney I stopped at a small grocery store to stock up on food and water. I was the only customer in the store, and the market’s lone employee, an attractive, thirty-something woman at the checkout counter, was reading a magazine off the rack when I approached her with my purchases. She set her magazine down and smiled at me. She had short blond hair that framed a pretty, delicate face with striking features, almond-shaped eyes, high cheekbones, and a slightly upturned nose. In contrast to her blond hair, she had brown eyes and dark eyebrows.

  “I like your hat,” she said as she rang up my items.

  “It makes my hair look shorter,” I replied.

  She smiled.
“No. It doesn’t.”

  I smiled back. “Well, at least it keeps the sun off my face while I’m walking.”

  “Where are you walking to?”

  I picked up a package of gum and a tube of lip balm from a display next to the counter and added it to my purchases. “Key West, Florida.”

  Her eyebrows raised. “Wow. You’re a long way from Florida. Actually, from here, you’re a long way from anywhere. Where did you start walking?”

  “Seattle.”

  “Seattle.” She thought about it. “Then you’re about halfway there, aren’t you?”

  “Pretty close.”

  “I bet you’re halfway,” she said. “What’s in Key West?”

  I shrugged. “Sand, I guess.”

  “Sand?”

  “I guess. That’s why I’m walking. To find out what’s there.”

  She smiled. “I like your answer.”

  “So are there any hotels or bed-and-breakfasts in town?”

  “Sorry. Not around here. The nearest one would be in Nebraska City, but you’re going the other direction, aren’t you? Probably St. Joseph. That’s about a hundred miles from here.”

  “Thank you. I’ll just find a place to camp. Is there a park around here?”

  She cocked her head a little. “A park? No. But you can stay at our place. My home is nice.”

  “You’ve got a yard I can camp in?”

  “We do, but I didn’t mean you had to camp. We have a guest room.”

  I was surprised by her offer. That would never have happened in Seattle. “I wouldn’t want to impose.”

  “It’s no trouble. Frankly, we’d love the company. It would be the most exciting thing that’s happened around here all year. Besides, I’m making spaghetti tonight with Chairman of the Board clam sauce.”

  “Chairman of the Board?”

  “It’s one of Emeril’s recipes. I’m kind of a fan. Actually I’m a big fan. I love to cook.”