“It took a moment for the message to sink in. I began to cry. I said, ‘I don’t deserve to be loved.’
“She said, ‘Love is not earned. It is a gift from our Father.’
“I said, ‘I’m so sorry I didn’t go with the family. I should have been with you,’ but she said that it wasn’t my time. Then I started to apologize for what I’d said to her the morning they left, but before I could finish, she said, ‘Paige, you are loved.’
“I just broke down and wept. When I could speak, I said, ‘What do I do?’ and she told me to fill my life with love. I said I didn’t know how, but she just smiled and said, ‘Of course you do. You love me, don’t you?’
“When I told her yes, she said, ‘Begin there. Begin by treating my mother as if she were me.’
“I asked her if I was dreaming, and she smiled and said, ‘Tell Grandma that Babbo says he’s still waiting for her answer. And tell her to be patient with the little rose. It’s been a tough winter.’ Then she said, ‘Remember to love my girl,’ and she was gone.
“I got up early the next morning. I felt like a new person. I cleaned my room, then I went into the kitchen and made breakfast. Grandma came into the kitchen to see what was going on. She was so surprised. But there was still a lot of tension between us, so she didn’t say anything. She went to get her tea and I said, ‘Sit down, Grandma. I’ll get it.’
“I got her tea and poured it for her. Then I sat down at the table with her. We looked at each other for a moment, then I said, ‘I’m very sorry about what I said last night. I didn’t mean it.’
“She said, ‘Maybe you did.’
“I began to cry. I said, ‘No, I think I just hate myself.’
“She stared at me a little longer, then said, ‘You came to this last night?’
“I said ‘Yes.’ We just sat there for a while, then I said, ‘I saw Mom last night.’
“She gave me this concerned look. I’m sure she just thought it had something to do with the drugs. I said, ‘I don’t know what it means, but she said to tell you that Babbo says he’s still waiting for an answer.’
“I thought she was going to faint. She turned white as a sheet, then she began to cry. When she could speak, she said, ‘Did she say anything else?’
“I said, ‘She said to be patient with the little rose. It’s been a tough winter.’ ”
“Little rose?” I asked.
“I found out later that before I was born, Grandma would pat my mother’s belly and call me her little rose.”
“And Babbo?”
“Ten years after my grandfather died, my grandmother fell in love again. He was from Italy and his children called him ‘Babbo.’ It’s an Italian term of endearment, like ‘Daddy.’ She started calling him Babbo too.
“He asked her to marry him. She said she loved him, but she had been single for so long that she wanted to take the weekend to think it over. He joked that he’d come by on Sunday night to collect his ‘yes.’
“She made up her mind that she was going to marry him, but he never came by. She called his house the next morning and his son answered. Sunday night he had passed away from a stroke.”
Paige paused. I looked down for a moment, then took a deep breath. “What happened next?”
“I changed. I stopped drinking and partying. I got help for my eating disorder and I went with my grandmother back to school to meet with my counselors. I was able to get my grades back up enough to graduate.
“After that, I started working with hospice. Every now and then I’m able to share some of my own experience to help a patient. I have a good life.”
“You’re headed back to see your grandmother now?” I asked.
“Yes. She’s in the final stages of cancer. I guess it’s her turn.” She looked up, smiling through her tears. “I don’t know what she’s going to do with both Grandpa and Babbo up there!”
We both laughed.
Later, after we had turned out the lights to go to sleep, Paige asked, “Do you ever feel your wife near you?”
I thought about it. “Sometimes,” I said. “Sometimes.”
CHAPTER
Twenty-one
The storm has passed. As usual, the world looks deceivingly safe.
Alan Christoffersen’s diary
The storm died in the night. When I woke early the next morning, Paige was already up and getting ready for the day. She came out of the bathroom holding a blow dryer.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Did I wake you?”
“No. I’m an early riser. You look nice.”
“Thank you.”
“I don’t know which is more beautiful, your inside or your outside.”
“Are you hitting on me, Alan?”
“No,” I said.
“Darn,” she said, turning away. “I was hoping you were.”
We ate breakfast together in the hotel’s dining room. She wrote down her cell phone number and made me promise to contact her when I reached Memphis.
“I’ll take you for barbecue at Vergo’s Rendezvous,” she said.
We said goodbye, hugged, and then, for our own reasons, both headed south.
It was hard to believe that it had only been a week since I had resumed my walk.
In the sunlight, Jackson looked nothing like it had the night before. I turned left at the city hall building and soon found my way back to 61 South. I reached Cape Girardeau by noon, a decent-sized city with a population of more than 38,000. I ate lunch at the Huddle House, where I ordered breakfast—the Mansion Platter, a rib-eye steak, three fried eggs, hash browns, and biscuits with sausage gravy.
I left the town on Kingshighway, ending up on I-55 to Scott City, where I took exit 89 (a dangerous roundabout for pedestrians) leading back to 61 South. I took the highway for two more miles until I reached the tiny town of Kelso. There were nice homes, but no hotels, so I ended up camping in a grove of trees near an elementary school.
I woke the next day before the sun came up. I ate an orange and a protein bar, then folded up my tent and started walking. It was a beautiful morning and the sun painted the pristine landscape in golden hues. In addition, I had no headache and my muscles weren’t sore. It was the nicest walking I’d done since I’d resumed my journey.
The first town I reached was Benton. I stopped to eat breakfast at Mario’s Italian Eatery, a prefab building painted dark green with an Italian flag draped over the entrance. It had dozens of hand-painted signs mounted to its exterior, advertising daily specials. I had a breakfast calzone stuffed with mozzarella cheese, eggs and ham, then got back on my way.
The next town was Morley, which was a vestige of small-town Americana, the kind of place where people decorated their yards with old tractors and American flags.
The walking continued to be good. The roads were smooth, with wide, flat shoulders. The air smelled sweet and was alive with the cacophonous song of insects. One peculiar thing I noticed was that along one long stretch all the power poles were bent toward the road at a fifteen-degree angle.
By late afternoon I reached Sikeston, which I quickly deduced was a religious community as I passed nine churches on the way into town. I ate dinner at Jay’s Krispy Fried Chicken, then, following my waitress’s advice, walked to the other side of town and booked a room at the Days Inn.
CHAPTER
Twenty-two
Our culture’s quest to hide death behind a facade of denial has made fools and pretended immortals of us all. Perhaps it would be more helpful and liberating to begin each day by repeating the words of Crazy Horse, “Today is a good day to die.”
Alan Christoffersen’s diary
The next day began pleasantly enough, with ideal weather and open cotton fields, the air fragrant with the smell of cotton.
I stopped and picked a boll, just to see what picking cotton was like. Fiddling with it as I walked, it took me nearly fifteen minutes to liberate the seeds from the plant, which did more to explain to me the historical impact of the cott
on gin than a whole middle school semester studying the Civil War.
Around noon I suddenly got a strange, sick feeling that something was wrong. I stopped and looked around. I was alone, miles from the nearest town. I took off my hat and wiped the sweat from my forehead. Had I forgotten something? Was it a premonition? I hadn’t felt anything like that since . . . It came to me. It was one year ago from that very hour that McKale had broken her back. I put my hat back on and kept on walking.
After eighteen miles I reached the town of New Madrid (pronounced MAD-rid), which seemed more southern to me than northern.
Of all the Civil War states, Missouri was, perhaps, the most complicated. Politically bipolar. Officially, the state was pro-Union, but many, if not most, of its residents were Confederate or sympathetic to the South’s cause.
A mile into town I turned off onto Dawson Road, where I ate dinner at the local eatery, Taster’s Restaurant, then, at my waitress’s recommendation, walked to the Hunter-Dawson State Historic Site.
The Hunter-Dawson house is a monument to the lifestyle enjoyed by wealthy southern families in the late 1800s. The fifteen-room mansion was built by William and Amanda Hunter, owners of a successful mercantile business that capitalized on New Madrid’s location on the Mississippi River. William died of yellow fever before the home was completed, but Amanda and her seven children moved into the house in 1860, and the home remained in the family for more than a century until it was purchased by the city of New Madrid and restored to the 1860–80 period. Today it contains the Hunters’ original furniture as well as family portraits and a large portion of the family’s library.
I walked to the site’s visitor center, a long trailer planted directly across the street from the mansion. The guide, a young female park worker wearing a baseball cap, informed me that it was nearly closing time but that she’d give me an abbreviated tour of the mansion free of charge.
The Hunter family had owned thirty-six slaves. During the Civil War, New Madrid leaned heavily toward the Confederate cause, and one of the Hunter sons joined the Confederate Army. During the Siege of New Madrid by Union forces, the mansion was occupied by General Pope and one of the Hunter boys joined the Union Army to keep the family home from being burned.
In one of the upstairs rooms there was a display of mourning dresses, bonnets and armbands. I was told that at the loss of a family member, women wore the black dresses for two years, while men wore black armbands for three to six months. My guide explained that mourning was much more formalized back then and that even Queen Victoria had mourned the loss of her husband, Prince Albert, for forty years. It made me wonder why modern culture has so painstakingly removed the rituals of death. Today, society pressures the bereaved to sweep their grief under the carpet of normality—the sooner the better.
When the tour concluded, I tipped my guide, then walked back to the street while she locked her office, then drove away. After she was gone, I returned to the home and pitched my tent on the soft grass beneath the maple, oak, and walnut trees behind the house.
CHAPTER
Twenty-three
You can tell as much about a culture from their diet as from their literature. Sometimes, perhaps, more.
Alan Christoffersen’s diary
My headache and exhaustion returned the next day, and I didn’t walk far, barely sixteen miles, stopping at a hotel called Pattie’s Inn. The first thing I noticed was the large NO PETS ALLOWED warning on the hotel’s marquee. Then, just in case you missed it, there was another NO PETS sign on the hotel’s front door. I walked into the hotel’s lobby and there was yet another NO PETS sign on the wall behind the check-in counter, with, oddly, a dog lying on the floor beneath it.
The next morning I felt better again. As I walked back to the highway, I came upon a young man standing near the freeway on-ramp with a large handwritten poster-board sign around his neck. As I got closer, I read the board.
I CHEATED ON MY WIFE.
THIS IS MY PUNISHMENT.
I stopped a couple yards from him, read his sign, then looked up at him. He was red-faced with embarrassment and just stood there, avoiding eye contact. After a moment I said, “She made you do that?”
Glancing furtively at me, he said, “Yeah.”
“For how long?”
“Today. And all day tomorrow.”
I shook my head, then continued walking.
Highway 61 South turned into a bigger, busier road with a speed limit of seventy miles per hour. Fortunately it had a wide shoulder. I kept thinking back on the guy with the sign around his neck and chuckling.
I crossed into Pemiscot County and left the highway for a frontage road lined with cotton fields. Four hours into my walk I stopped at Chubby’s BBQ for lunch.
South of the Mason-Dixon line, barbecue restaurants are as plentiful as deviled eggs at a church picnic. In the same vein that the state of Washington prides itself on the creative naming of coffee shops, the South holds the titling of barbecue joints in high regard. I dedicated a page in my journal to writing down some of their names.
Fat Matt’s
Kiss My Ribs
Squat and Gobble
Swett’s
Bubba’s
Porkpies
Birds, Butts and Bones
The Boneyard
The Bonelicker
Barbecutie
Butts
Bubbalous Bodacious Barbeque
Dixie Pig
Bone Daddy
Prissy Polly’s
Pig Pickins Parlor
The Boars’ Butts
The Prancing Pig
Holy Smokes (A bbq joint in a converted Lutheran church)
Sticky Lips
Adam’s Rib
The Rib Cage
The Butt Rub
The Pig Out Inn
Hog Wild
Half Porked
Lord of the Swine
Big D’s Piggy Strut
The Swinery
Some of the restaurants’ slogans were noteworthy as well.
“We shall sell no swine before its time.”
“A waist is a terrible thing to mind.”
“No pig left behind.”
After a lunch of chopped brisket, collard greens and cheesy mashed potatoes, I returned to the interstate. I disliked walking such a busy road. The draft created by semis traveling at seventy-plus miles per hour would hit my pack like wind against a schooner’s sail and almost knock me over. Twice I lost my Akubra hat, chasing it across more than one lane of traffic. Still, I made decent time and after twenty-six miles I took exit 8 off 61 and walked to the Deerfield Inn. For dinner I ate a meatball sandwich and a tuna salad at the local Subway restaurant.
CHAPTER
Twenty-four
Missouri calls itself the “Show Me” state. I’m not sure if they’re claiming skepticism or voyeurism.
Alan Christoffersen’s diary
The next morning I reached the town of Steele in less than an hour. Running parallel to the road was a slow-moving train, and I saw several men clambering onto the outside of one of the cars. The scene reminded me of Israel, the hitchhiker I had met outside Marceline, Missouri, which now seemed like a decade ago. It was hard to believe that after all these months I was still in the same state. But not for much longer. Just before noon I saw a small arch spanning the road in front of me. As I approached, I could see that it had the word ARKANSAS written across it.
A hundred yards from the border, I passed a dilapidated white house with a plaque in front of it. I stopped to read it.
EDGAR HAROLD LLOYD
MEDAL OF HONOR RECIPIENT FROM WWII
It was a poor monument, but a monument just the same, and the fact that a hero came from such an unassuming locale made me glad.
Like my transcendent experience of crossing from Wyoming to South Dakota, shortly after crossing the Arkansas state line, the landscape and architecture improved and soon I was walking past country club estates with beautiful manicu
red lawns and minicolonial mansions. I stopped for lunch in the town of Blytheville, where I ate southern fried chicken.
Unfortunately, not far past the restaurant, the scenery changed from beautiful mini-mansions to pawnshops and boarded-up buildings, making me think the place was only Blytheville for some. I walked another five miles and spent the night at the Best Western Blytheville Inn. That evening I turned on my cell phone to check for messages. No one had called.
CHAPTER
Twenty-five
To challenge the rules of conventionality is to open ourselves to an entirely new universe. One cannot pioneer new worlds from old trails.
Alan Christoffersen’s diary
The next day felt like a rerun of earlier days, with seemingly endless cotton fields and, again, the mysteriously leaning power lines. The tilt of the poles was so perfectly symmetrical that I wondered if they had been purposely set in this manner or if their leaning was caused by some natural phenomenon, like the famed bell tower of Pisa. I vowed to ask someone when I got the chance, which settled my mind on the matter enough that I never actually got around to asking anyone.
I felt physically more able than I had in days and I was eager to get through this lonely stretch, so I walked nearly twenty-five miles until I reached the quaint little town of Wilson. Wilson had once been a thriving logging town, built around a huge sawmill and lumber yard which, decades before, had been closed down, cordoned off by an eight-foot chain-link fence topped with razor wire.
What distinguished Wilson from the other towns along that stretch was the architecture—which, peculiarly, was more British than southern. I stopped for dinner at the Wilson Café and my server gave me some of the history. The town was founded by Robert E. Lee Wilson, who, after cutting down the trees, used the land for agricultural purposes. Wilson pretty much owned the town, but he was a generous public benefactor, and every town resident had use of the company doctor for just $1.25 annually, about $17 in today’s money.