I’d grown up in the country, run from it for most of my life, and now wanted to live nowhere else. Between ages nineteen and fifty-three, I traveled relentlessly, living and working in New York City, Boston, Paris, Florida, Iowa, Georgia, Tennessee, Arizona, New Mexico, Montana, Kentucky, California, and Mississippi. In my free time I visited other places. I’d slept in every state except North Dakota and Delaware and still hoped to get there.
What began as a desire to see the other side of the nearest hill at home had shifted to travel as a habitual way of life. If things didn’t work out, I moved on. I knew how to arrive in a new town, get a job, find a cheap room, and furnish it with junk from the street. I liked living without history, nothing held against me. My brother once asked what I was running from. I told him I wasn’t, I was running toward, only I didn’t know toward what. He nodded and said, “You’ll always be afraid of him, you know.”
I didn’t believe my brother, didn’t want to, couldn’t bear to face the idea. It took courage to live my way—hitchhiking across the country, refusing to take a full-time job. I wasn’t afraid of anything except snakes, and I’d killed one and skinned it and hung the brittle hide on a nail where I could see it every day in order to overcome my phobia. But my brother was right all along. I didn’t know it until my fear ended with Dad’s death.
I became concerned that examining the minutiae of his work was turning me into him. I wrote ten hours a day. At night I read. I avoided leaving the house. I got mad at small things, yelled at inanimate objects. If this were true—the steady evolution to becoming Dad—then my sons will suffer the same fate and become me, an absurd notion that destroys the logic of my premise. Therefore, I am not my father. I’m a middle-aged man contemplating my own mortality through the lens of a parent’s death.
I went outside and watched two sparrows fight in my dusty gravel driveway. On a distant fence post, a hawk watched them. The air thickened suddenly and a quick shower pocked the dirt. The birds flew away and the hawk moved on. The rain stopped. I headed for the woods behind my house. I walked a quarter mile to a barbed wire fence that had been mended several times.
Going through a barbed wire fence is a simple skill. Like swimming or riding a bicycle, once learned it’s never forgotten. I crouched, pressed the low wire down with one hand, stepped over it, and carefully eased my body through the gap. Twice I felt the barbs scrape my shirt, but I was moving slowly enough to stop, bend my knee a quarter inch lower, and pass through safely.
I walked the length of a fallow cotton field to the edge of Berry Branch, a very old creek with a ten-foot bank running nearly straight down. Water moved slowly along the sandy bottom. Kudzu had killed several smaller trees. A large maple lay in the creek, its roots eroded from below. I headed west to a series of smaller gullies where I’d found feather and bone before.
A shape that didn’t fit in caught my peripheral attention. I stopped moving, fearful of a snake, and saw a turtle as wide as my hand. It had been climbing a bank before I arrived. Now it had halted, blending in like a stone, its head protruding from the gray shell, back legs extended on the slight incline. As a boy I’d caught dozens of turtles, carried them home, and kept them in a cardboard box with grass and water until realizing they were the most boring pet of all. I painted the back of their shells with fingernail polish, then set them free, hoping to find one again.
I wondered if this particular turtle had seen a human before. I squatted a few feet away and asked where he’d been and where he was going. I warned him about water moccasins and coyotes. I told him about my father. After twenty minutes my knee was cramped and the turtle hadn’t answered. He stayed immobile during our entire conversation. I told him goodbye and headed home, momentarily cheered.
I walked across the field and passed through the fence without a scratch. Crawling along my arm was a Lone Star tick, with the distinctive yellow spot on its back. I cut it in half with my thumbnail. At home I removed my muddy boots and drank some water. Briefly I wondered what my neighbors would think if they’d come upon me while conversing with a turtle. They’d probably have watched silently, then slipped away. Everyone on the road would know, but nobody would mind. In Mississippi personal eccentricity didn’t matter any more than it did in Kentucky. I’d found a home, the same as Dad had in the hills.
Chapter Twenty-three