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

by Watkins, Andra

  Dad’s gaze dug a trench in the floor. Suitcase. Door. I plugged my ears against Mom’s raging breath and covered my eyes to miss Dad’s exit. If I didn’t see him walk out, it wouldn’t be true. Rapid heartbeats fired in my ears, counting out seconds. Ten. Twenty. My voice sliced through layers of tension.

  “Where will you go, Daddy?”

  “Don’t know. I just……..don’t know.”

  “Can I call you?” Emotion ripped my core, the rending of my first heartbreak. “Maybe come see you sometime?”

  He ran his hands through salt-and-pepper hair and studied the popcorn ceiling. “Dear God. How’d I wind up here?”

  Shards of my heart ticked sixty seconds before he stepped over his suitcase. He slumped down the hallway, toward my parents’ bedroom. “Leave me be awhile, Linda,” he whispered, right before he closed the door.

  “Leave me be awhile.” If I stuck to my walk, even when every part of me didn’t want to, would I understand why Dad stayed to become an old man who was waiting to die?

  Cold numbed memory. Or maybe focusing on the cold trumped thinking about the past. My lungs cracked with every inhale. I hobbled past mileposts 50 through 55 in a blur of frozen torment. With every step, my pinky toes ground into the sides of my shoes. Swollen more than twice their normal size, they refused to bend. Bone shoved into the ball of my foot with every step. Speed distributed the pain, but I couldn’t maintain speed-walking pace for more than a few minutes before I had to stop, thaw my lungs and catch my breath. Rest, even for a few seconds, meant reconditioning my feet again.

  When I hobbled around the curve, I gasped. Rocky Springs. Yellow lettering beckoned me into trees. I explored a path through a ghost town, an abandoned church the only reminder of the life that once bustled there. Trees clung to the sides of the trail, teeth protruding from gums. Their branches rained sleety dandruff.

  I listened for notes tinkling through the wind. Garbled words I couldn’t understand. Grunts of animals long-dead.

  I forgot cold and pain in the joy of communing with the beauty of the Trace.

  When I got out my phone and punched Alice’s number, her voice warmed my ear. “Bring Dad to Rocky Springs. It’s a couple more miles. He’ll love the trees.” I hung up and hurried to put some distance between us. Five more miles. To a shower. To a Mardi Gras feast. To warmth.

  Did Dad ever find warmth after he almost left us that day? I strapped velcro tighter around my wrists to block the chill. When he emerged from the bedroom, he didn’t have his suitcase. He walked through the house without looking at me. Mom stopped him at the door.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Nowhere, Linda. I’m going nowhere.”

  And he slipped outside. Mom held me while we listened to his truck’s grinding start. Sound reversed down the driveway.

  “Will he come back, Mom?”

  Her sigh jangled against the side of my head. “He has to, Andra. He just has to.”

  “But that doesn’t mean he will.”

  She peeled my arms from her waist and swayed toward their bedroom. Before she closed the door, she mumbled, “No. It doesn’t.”

  ROAM IF YOU WANT TO

  The B-52s

  I seen a lot of things in my life.

  When I was a younger man, I wanted to be somebody. I guess that’s what everybody wants, ain’t it?

  But I watched my father farm the hard Tennessee land. I saw the toll it took on him. How it sent him out catting around every night of the week. First one bar and then another. Left my poor mother at home to wonder I-don’t-know-what-all.

  One of my first memories was of Dad acting ugly.

  I couldn’t have been more than two or three. A little scrap of a boy, I was. And Dad, he took me with him on his drinking jaunts. Let me entertain his friends on the bar while he got drunker and drunker.

  ‘Course I enjoyed the attention. What kid don’t like that kinda stuff?

  What I didn’t like was going home, Dad all fired up in his cups. Sometimes, I had to sit right next to him to make sure he kept that old truck in the road, and I could barely see over the dashboard.

  One time, it was nigh on four in the morning when we got home. Dad couldn’t even walk up the front steps, and all forty pounds of me couldn’t drag him.

  “Leave him be. Maybe he’ll drown in his own puke and spare the rest of us.”

  My mother’s voice rang out from the dark porch.

  “But Momma.” I groped my way to her, sitting in her favorite rocking chair, and put my head in her broad lap. “I don’t want Dad to go nowhere. How will a boy like me learn to be a man without no daddy?”

  She took my chin in her hands. I could see some of that snuff she liked dribbling down the crease next to her mouth. Same lines I noticed when I looked in the mirror. And she told me her truth.

  “You learn to be a man, Son, by doing the opposite of everything that sorry drunk does. You grow up and be somebody, you hear me? Do good. Go to college. Get the hell out of this place. You marry a good woman, and you love her. Don’t run around on her like your daddy does me.”

  “What’s Dad doing when he’s running around on you?”

  She ruffled my cow-licked hair. “You’ll figure it out. Soon enough. And if God gives you children, you be an example. Act right. Show them how to be good people, even when you don’t feel like it. Don’t you ever leave them stranded, without no daddy. You grow up to be the man your father ain’t and make your momma proud of you.”

  I thought about that conversation with my mother, the day I almost left my family. Life didn’t turn me into the somebody I dreamed of being, but even though my mother’d been gone since before Andra was born, I knew she’d be disappointed if I acted like my daddy. She was someplace.

  And she would know.

  WALK RIGHT BACK

  The Everly Brothers

  “I’m never, ever getting out,” I muttered as I sank abused limbs and appendages into a jacuzzi tub. Salt water stung my lacerated feet. “Does all this pain mean infection?” I shouted over the jets. “I mean, what if one of my toes falls off?”

  “Your toes aren’t going to fall off, Andra.” Alice banged around the bedroom. Packing. She was leaving the next day.

  I would be alone. With Roy.

  By milepost 75, I walked to Raymond, Mississippi, a suburb south of Jackson. Five days done. Twenty-nine to go. Repetitive motion consumed me. Most athletic shoes aren’t made to absorb the shock of a foot striking tarmac five hours every day for a month. Even with gel inserts stacked three deep, over one million steps, taken the same way, will cause the walker unrelenting agony.

  The surface of the roadbed made hot spots flare within minutes. The only compensation for road crowning was weaving all over and hoping for minimal consequences. When the wind blew in my face, I couldn’t hear cars behind me, especially if they failed to lay on the horn.

  Every night, I alternated soaking my feet with icing them. While that combination alleviated swelling, nothing kept blisters at bay. They formed between cracks in my toes and down the sides of my feet. Puss bubbled along the edges of my toenails. I couldn’t wait to lie in bed and let cold numb the torment.

  “Where’s Dad? He should’ve been back with ice by now.”

  Alice zipped her suitcase. “You know Roy. I’m sure he’s up at the main house, spinning more stories.”

  We were at a new place, one with a real bed for Dad, sturdy new furniture and a jacuzzi. Every move gave Dad a new audience for his stories. I put my feet on the jets and imagined Dad up at the main house. In his pajamas, his impressive belly protruding through a wedge of unbuttoned shirt.

  I didn’t have to guess where he would start. On the Natchez Trace, he told the same story. Every time.

  Dad was the only son of an alcoholic dairy farmer from East Tennessee. The fourth child of five. The longed-for boy after a string of girls. From the time Dad could walk, he accompanied my grandfather and his friends on their daily rounds. This spea
keasy. That still. The other honky-tonk. All of them soused with booze, tobacco and women.

  While my grandfather got drunk, my future father entertained everyone, his pudgy legs a whirl of interpretive dance along the sticky bar top. For tips of pennies, nickels and quarters, Dad smoked cigars at the age of two, and he filled his piggy bank with the change he earned from saying words like damn, bitch, and fuck. He was known around the county as Hot Shot, the toddler who smoked boxes of cigars, whose vocabulary streamed from a sewer.

  I sloshed water and tried to envision my father as a child. A sleeveless sailor suit, his coy finger next to his lip. Honorable Mention splayed across his certificate for the National Children’s Photography Contest. I conjured the only other photo I possessed from that era. A pudgy kid in front of a bird bath, one-piece romper torn and bare knees filthy. His dirt-encrusted hand cradled a crude slingshot. Eyes burned through the yellowed frame, unsure whether to smile or hurl a rock at the viewfinder.

  Whenever I remembered that look, I knew why they called him Hot Shot.

  And to a man called Hot Shot, doors existed to be opened.

  “Dad! What are you doing? I’m naked in here!” I scrabbled for the shower curtain as Dad lumbered into the bathroom.

  “Gotta go pee.” He was already at the toilet, showering everything in range.

  “Just please don’t do anything else while I’m in here.” I yanked the curtain closed and dunked my head underwater to obliterate the scene, to transport myself to another place. Somewhere peaceful. Quiet. Private.

  To my five hours alone, walking the Trace.

  I started my day at milepost 60. The air still nipped my fingers and chilled my face, but the sun won the battle with broken clouds.

  My phone quieted to a few texts a day, leaving me with my hyperactive mind. My Natchez Trace walk was a unique way to launch a book, but it also kept me from what other writers with new books do: Check sales; despair; check sales; more despair; check sales; try to guilt everyone into buying book; check sales; hate everyone for not buying book; check sales; drink oneself into stupor; check sales; have drunken social media rant that ends with spouse seizing all electronic devices.

  I didn’t want to be that person, but I never realized giving myself five hours to walk through Nowhere would dredge up other things. How I still didn’t know my father. Why I argued with my mother. I compartmentalized familial dysfunction with an effective streak of avoidance. When my mind wasn’t occupied with texting and tweeting, why were my parents all I thought about?

  On his western expedition, did Meriwether Lewis dwell on the unfathomable?

  Less than a mile into my day, I gimped into a pull-off. Lower Choctaw Boundary. A sign mapped the old border of the Choctaw nation, with a star indicating where I stood. On the map of the Natchez Trace, the points of the star touched my starting point. An insurmountable line stretched northeast.

  “This is why I shouldn’t look at maps,” I mumbled as I dragged my body onward through fifteen miles of cypress swamp. The road was a land bridge with no shoulder. Whenever a car sped toward me, I crawled down the embankment and waited until it passed. I remembered how often Dad’s job as a forester required him to shoot snakes in swamps, and I tried to stay on the pavement, bounding between cars like Frogger in the old Atari video game.

  Dad’s flush whooshed me into the present. “I—”

  “Dad! Get out!”

  “I got your ice, Andra. Sorry if it’s all melted. I got over there, and—”

  “Got to talking. I know, Dad. It’s okay.”

  I always told Dad it was okay even though he wasn’t sorry.

  Dad’s rambling exits were at the heart of my childhood angst. I was asleep in the back seat by the time he finished talking to everyone in a place. Cowering in the car was better than being the last person to leave, because, to me, that meant everyone got so tired of listening to Dad talk, they cleared out to get away from him. I never could understand why Dad didn’t notice glazed eyes or furtive looks or hidden signals for rescue. He just kept talking.

  His unbroken stream of conversation continued as I eased myself into bed and propped an ice pack against one bulbous foot. “Got to get you to sign some books, Andra.”

  When he was in college, Dad worked for Southwestern of Nashville, selling Bibles door-to-door every summer. I teased him with the image of himself, young again, reliving his time in the trenches. We kept a stash of books in the trunk, and Dad used his Bible-selling tactics to hock a story about the ghost of Meriwether Lewis to every unsuspecting person he met.

  Dad’s buyers always wanted signed copies. As Dad charted out his next sales day, he made sure he had the necessary tools to close the deal. Maybe that was how he got through three summers in college, selling books. His purpose was sales, and he was determined to do it right.

  Even if that meant making me sign books when I was annihilated.

  “I’ll do it tomorrow, Dad.” I buried my head under a pillow, but Dad’s finger tapped the other side.

  “I can’t sell them if they ain’t signed.”

  I flung the pillow across the room. “I said tomorrow.”

  “People don’t want to buy books if they ain’t signed by the writer.”

  “Dad—”

  “I really need you to sign them books.” He stood at the foot of the bed, arms crossed above his stomach. Unmoving.

  The ice pack crashed to the floor, and my eyes teared when my feet hit heart pine. “Dad, is it possible for you to be quiet for five minutes? Just five minutes?”

  “But them books won’t sign themselves, Andra.”

  I stomped toward the car. Torture bolted up my legs. Before I reached the door, Alice was through it. “I’ll get the books, Andra. Lie back down.”

  Dad planted himself between me and the bed. “Got to sign them books. I can’t sell them otherwise.”

  And I wondered where I got my obstinance.

  In a couple of days, Dad went from unable to stand on his own to a whirlwind of activity. Watching him exhausted me.

  I snatched a few from Alice’s hands and carved my name into a page. “Dad. I could’ve done this in the morning. On the way to walk.”

  “You’d forget.”

  “I would not forget!!! How could I possibly forget when you won’t cease your nagging until I sign freaking books???” I almost threw one at him, but instead, I piled them next to my night table. If I turned around, I would see the smile tugging the edges of Dad’s lips, his satisfaction at getting to me. Push-pull. See-saw. It was the fulcrum of our relationship.

  I took a deep breath and crawled back into bed. “Don’t you forget them in the morning, Old Man.”

  “I won’t.” Dad tottered to the window and rooted around a grocery bag. “Where’s my sugar-free cookies? I need to eat one before I go to bed.”

  I eyed Dad’s distended gut. “You don’t need another cookie, Dad.”

  “Your blood sugar was 171 this morning, Roy.” Alice plopped onto the mattress. I bet she counted the seconds until she could drive away from our insanity. And all I wanted to do was kneel at her feet and plead, “Please don’t leave me. Don’t leave me alone with him. We’ll kill each other.”

  “Them cookies are sugar-free. That means I can eat ’em.” Dad rummaged through another plastic bag. Protein bars and cashews rained onto the floor.

  I lurched toward the shambles. “Oh. My. God. Dad. Will you please go to bed?” By the time I crisscrossed my sore legs and started picking up spilled food, Dad was onto another bag. “Dad—”

  “Roy!” Alice rattled a package. Dad leapt toward her. He tore into the wrapping and stuffed two cookies into his mouth. “Think I’ll go to bed now,” he crunched through the words. Once his door was closed, I prostrated myself at Alice’s feet.

  “Please don’t leave me. I’m going to kill him. Please stay and save me from killing him.”

  “He’s killing himself. With food.”

  I finished with the mess and str
ained to stand, my hands digging into the side of a wingback chair. “When did he become the child here? Because I’m a sorry parent.”

  Alice turned out the light. “Enjoy this time, Andra. Even this. You’re gonna miss it when he’s gone.”

  I whispered into darkness. “I’ll never, ever miss this.”

  Would I?

  WALK LIKE A MAN

  The Four Seasons

  “I’m gonna stick close to you today, Andra.” Dad surveyed thick commuter traffic as it motored past milepost 90 outside Jackson, Mississippi. “They’s a lot of cars here, so if you don’t mind, I wanna keep you where I can see you.”

  I shrugged into my backpack and sighed. “I’ll be fine, Dad…..but if it’ll make you feel better……..”

  He turned and eased himself into the driver’s seat, his knuckles white as he gripped the door to compensate for legs that couldn’t hold his weight. When the car tilted and he was settled, I handed him my phone. “Take my picture.”

  Dad studied the device like it might zap him with a thousand volt electrical current. “Don’t know how to work these new-fangled phones.”

  Smartphones were another language to a man Dad’s age. He retired before the advent of the desktop computer. I remembered visiting his office. Every surface was littered with paper. Maps. Charts. Lists. Remnants of trees he bought and sold.

  I forced the contraption into his unwilling hands. “Just push this button. The gray one. Right here.”

  On the Trace, I started each day with my back to the car, my first milepost in the foreground. Unbeknownst to me, Alice took my picture as I staggered away every morning. She asked me to maintain that tradition, and after everything she did during my first 90 miles, I wanted to honor her.

  I had no idea how to walk away from a milepost and snap a backside selfie. Not without a mirror and the ego of a Kardashian.

  I stumbled a few steps and turned back to the car. “Did you get it?”

  “Don’t know.” Dad dangled my iPhone between two fingers, and I ran to the window to keep it from smashing on pavement. It was my only camera, and I still had 354 miles to go.