Random Walk: A Novel for a New Age

Eleven

When Phil Donahue said he would be right back after this message, Mame Odegaard flicked off the set with the remote control device and carried her coffee cup into the kitchen. This was not the simple process it had once been. Mame was sixty-seven. Five years ago, which would have been some three years after her husband’s death, she had begun to be bothered by arthritis. The condition had progressed, and it was now quite severe.

She could walk, but not without the aid of an aluminum walker. She could tend for herself, but everything took longer than it used to, and was more trouble, and often involved pain. Even doing nothing involved pain — pain in her fingers, pain in her toes and ankles, pain in her knees, pain in her hips. She took Tylenol every four hours and it was easier on her stomach than aspirin, but no matter what the doctors said she would swear it wasn’t as effective as the aspirin, it didn’t get past as much of the pain. But then perhaps aspirin wouldn’t be as effective now as she remembered it, because her condition had worsened since she switched to Tylenol.

Her son wanted her to move in with him and his wife, but he worked for the government and they lived in Maryland, just outside of Washington. They had a very nice house but it was their house, not her house, and this was his second wife, he and Ruth had been divorced for some years now, and she had been real close to Ruth and just couldn’t warm up to the second wife, Stephanie. They got along all right, but a visit was a far cry from living under the same roof, and she didn’t want it.

And she didn’t want to live in a city, either. Nor did she like the idea of a retirement village in Arizona, which he kept proposing to her. There would be people around, he told her, people her own age, and she’d have activities, and the harsh winters of western Oregon would be a thing of the past. And, most important, things would be easier for her. She wouldn’t have to do so much for herself, and the heat would help her arthritis, and life would be, well, easier. Easier and better.

And it probably would, she had to agree, but it wasn’t what she wanted. She’d lived at this house beside the road for forty years, moving into it just three years after she and Karl were married. She’d birthed both her children in that house, and she’d buried her daughter from it, and her husband, too.

She could walk out her back door and be steps from the Malheur River. She could see Cottonwood Mountain from her back door, or she could stand on her front step and look at Sourdough Mountain. She had been looking at her mountains for forty years and she wasn’t in any big hurry to give them up.

She rinsed her cup in the sink and walked to her front door now, and out onto the step. She looked first at the mountain, as if to confirm that it was still where she’d seen it last, and then at her mailbox at the foot of the drive. The flag was down, which was supposed to indicate that the mailman had come. When she collected her mail she put the flag up, even if she didn’t have any letters to be picked up. Then he would put the flag down when there was mail for her, and that way she would not have to walk the hundred yards to the road for nothing. It was a long walk, and she didn’t like to make it for no reason at all.

She walked down to the road, positioning the aluminum frame, taking a step, gathering herself, moving the frame, taking a step, covering the hundred yards one small step at a time.

The box was empty. Actually this was not that surprising. Sometimes she forgot to put the flag up. For years she had only done so when she was leaving a letter, and old habits were hard to change. It was early, too, it wasn’t eleven, Donahue was still on. She almost always watched the whole of the Donahue show, and even then the mail usually didn’t arrive for another hour, so why had she even looked to see if the flag was up or down, let alone walked all the way out here?

Now she didn’t know for sure that she’d left the flag down, and she didn’t know for sure that the postman hadn’t come, since there were days when he came extra early, just as there were days when he came quite late. So either he hadn’t come or he hadn’t had any letters for her, there was no way to tell, and it didn’t much matter, since either way she’d made the trip for nothing.

Of course it didn’t hurt her to walk. Well, that wasn’t the right way to put it. It pained her some, but it was supposed to do her good in the long run. The arthritis was worse if she didn’t exercise than if she did, which was another argument against moving to some retirement home where people would do things for her that she now had to do for herself.

Now that she was here, she might as well wait for the mail. Save making the trip again later on.

A car passed. The driver honked and she waved. She leaned her weight on the aluminum frame and enjoyed the warmth of the sun on her arms. Crazy to stand out here — it might be hours before the mail came, and since when did she center her whole day around the mail delivery? All she ever got in the mail were bills and seed catalogues and invitations to subscribe to magazines or contribute to politicians or buy a set of porcelain commemorative thimbles from the Franklin Mint. Her son never wrote. If he had something to say he picked up the telephone.

What was she doing out here? Why had she walked out here in the first place, why had she turned off Donahue ahead of time?

Something made her stand there patiently. And then she saw the first of them coming down the road from the west. She may have sensed them before they came into view, but then they came into sight around the bend, a whole troop of hikers strung out along the road.

You rarely saw hikers on the road, and never so many of them. She felt excitement at the sight of them, and wondered why. They had come out of nowhere, from the west. They would disappear into nowhere, in the east. Why should their brief presence mean anything to her? If she wanted to be stirred by something, let her be stirred by Sourdough Mountain. It wouldn’t walk off and leave her, it had been there when she was born and it would still be there when she died.

But when the first of them reached her she said, “Well now, just look at you, and aren’t there a wonderful number of you? My house is open and the kitchen’s down the hall on the left. My well’s deep and the water runs cold and clear. And there’s a bathroom off the kitchen if any of you would care to use it.” She said all this in one breath. Now she took another breath and said, “My name’s Mame Odegaard. You’ll excuse me if I just stay here. I’d show you to the house but you might perish of thirst before I got all the way there.” She beamed at them. “It’s nice to see you. I hope you’re not in too much of a hurry, because I’m glad of the company. I don’t get much of it here, being sort of out of the way for most people.”

They stayed with her for almost an hour. They filled their canteens, they used the bathroom, they harvested a few handfuls of berries from the patch she told them about down by the river bank. While they were there the mail did finally come, and of course there was nothing in it worth looking at, just some bills and circulars and a letter wanting to know why she wasn’t renewing her subscription to Country Crafts Magazine. If they really wanted to know, she thought, she could send them a picture of her hands.

When they couldn’t think of another excuse to stay, and she had run out of things to offer them, they each took her hand and thanked her and wished her good-bye. She felt no sadness at the prospect of parting, but she did feel wistful. The craziest thing she’d ever heard of, a slew of fools walking across the country, but if she were younger she’d be going with them and she knew it. Younger? It wasn’t her age that was holding her back, sixty-seven wasn’t old, not nowadays. It was the damnable arthritis. How could you walk across the country when you couldn’t walk to the mailbox?

But something made her say, “Now do you know what I wish? I wish I could walk just a little ways down the road with you. So that no matter how far you went on without me, I’d still be going with you in spirit.”

“Then that’s what you’ll do, Mame.”

“Oh, I’d slow you down. I can’t do that.”

“You’ll walk with me,” one of them said. His name was Les, she remembered, and he was the biggest of the lot, with a fancy western shirt and an imposing bamboo walking stick. “It don’t matter how slow we go, ma’am. The rest of these folks can go on ahead and I’ll catch up with ’em later. I’ve been holding down my pace to stay with them all morning, and if they get out in front a mile or two it’ll give me a chance to stretch my legs.”

Two of the younger men suggested they could interlock their arms to make a chair and carry her that way. Sara, the blind woman with the beautiful gray eyes, said no, that Mame should walk with Les. But how would she get back when she had gone as far as she wanted to go?

“I’ll walk her back,” he said, “or I’ll carry her back if she’s had enough walking. You people aren’t gonna get that far out in front of me. You’ll stop for lunch, or to look at a mountain, or to dig in the dirt for arrowheads. Mame and I could walk for an hour and I’d still catch up with you by the time you’re ready to make camp for the night.”

“But do you want to do that?” she demanded. “Don’t you want to stay with your friends?”

“Oh, these folks aren’t my friends,” he told her. “They just want me for my money.”

And so they walked together. Her pace was shamefully slow but he didn’t seem to mind in the least. He walked with a rolling gait, so that he seemed to be moving all the time even though he was keeping pace with her. At first it pained her to see the rest of them drawing away from her, but before long they vanished around a bend in the road, and once they were out of sight she was less aware of the widening gap between them. Now she and Les were no longer at the rear and falling ever farther behind; instead, they were off on their own, and keeping up with each other just perfectly.

He spoke some about his business career, and about his marriages. “One was worse than the next,” he said, “and after the last time I swear I never thought I’d do it again, and if I hadn’t been drinking Jack Daniel’s on top of French champagne I wouldn’t have, and surely wouldn’t have picked Georgia to marry. But do you want to know something? I think it might last awhile.”

She talked about her marriage, and her husband’s death. She told how he’d ignored warning signals and broken doctor appointments. “They might have saved him if he went to them on time,” she said, “but he was scared of what they’d find, and so he went and died for fear he might be dying. Damn the man anyway, making me a widow with his damnable cowardice.”

Les said something, but she didn’t even hear him. She was too shocked by her own words and the tone of her own voice. Why, she’d never said anything like that before. She’d never even thought anything like that before.

Or spoke of anyone, least of all Karl, in that tone of voice.

She talked about her daughter, her second-born child, born with a defective valve in her heart, sickly all her life, always a near-invalid, and dead, God rest her, at seventeen.

“And all those years until then,” she said, “she stayed alive but she wasn’t alive. She couldn’t really live, do you know what I mean, Les? She couldn’t run. She couldn’t climb a full flight of stairs. She caught cold all the time, she got weary in the summer’s heat. And I wanted to shout, ‘Go ahead! If you’re not going to live then go ahead and die!’ But of course she didn’t die. And then she did die, and I buried her.”

Was that true? Had she ever wanted Mary Frances to die? No, it couldn’t be true, it was just the excitement of the day, making all manner of unseemly things come popping out of her mouth.

And Les said, “Mame, you don’t have to push yourself. Just walk at a nice easy pace.”

“I’ll take that as a joke, Les.”

“No, I’m serious,” he said. “You’re walking much faster than you did when we first set out.”

“Well, if I am I didn’t realize it,” she said. “I’m certainly not straining. I thought I was going the same snail’s pace as always. Plant the walker, take a step, shift your weight, move the walker. You’re right. I am going faster.”

“I told you.”

“I guess my joints are warming up a little,” she said. “All this activity, and out in the sun and all.”

“Karl was just trying to protect me,” she said. “He thought I couldn’t manage without him. He should have known better than that, but he didn’t. He needed the idea that I needed him. He had to think I wasn’t enough without him, because he thought he wasn’t enough unless he was needed by somebody.” She sighed. “He was a sweet man. He didn’t dare believe he had cancer. He tried to fight it by closing his eyes to it, and then it was too late.”

And, a little later, “Why did Alan have to move to Washington? What was so wonderful about him that he deserved a better life than his mother and father had? What made him too good for his home, too good for his family? Why, he even came to discover he was too good for his wife, and so he had to leave Ruth and marry the new one, Stephanie.”

And, after that, “I couldn’t bear knowing I would lose Mary Frances someday. I loved her so much I couldn’t stand the idea. And so I wanted her to hurry up and die and get it over with, but I was afraid to want that, so I cut off the feeling, and by doing that I held back some of the love, because I was afraid to love her as much as I did.”

And, finally, “Les, do you want to know what the real story is about me? I just always wanted to hold onto everything. I couldn’t bear to let go of a thing. I was always afraid people would leave me and I’d be the less for it. Why, these past years, staying on in that house. Les, I was trying to hold onto those mountains.”

“They’re fine mountains, Mame.”

“Well, they’re fine without me, and I’ll be fine without them. I swear I’m all of a sudden seeing things faster than I can fit words to the tune of them. Les, do you need that stick?”

“Pardon?”

“That bamboo cane, that stick of yours. Do you need it to walk?”

“Oh, hell, no,” he said. “I thought I might when I bought it, but I mostly picked it up because it struck me as a handsome piece of workmanship. There’s not a great deal you’d admire to purchase in Bend. Why?”

“Could you take this metal frame away from me, and just let me try your stick for a little while?”

“You think you’ll be all right with it?”

“I think I’ll be fine with it. I know I’ll be fine with it.”

It was just the most remarkable thing.

She never seemed to be hurrying, because as the arthritis withdrew she went on putting the same amount of effort into her walking, and it kept producing greater results. Her body straightened, her stride lengthened, her step quickened, and she simply could not believe what was happening to her.

Except that she could believe it, she had to be able to believe it, or else how in the world could it happen? Because there were moments when she fastened on that thought — I can’t believe this — and then she would feel something seize up inside of her, something curled within her bones, and she would begin to give back a little of what she had gained. Somehow she knew that she couldn’t have this unless she was prepared to believe it, and so she willed that belief into her bones and breathed deeply to fuel herself and kept those feet moving.

“Mame, if we go much further, it’s going to be a long walk back.”

“Les, do you really think I’m going back?”

“I don’t guess you are, not to stay. But isn’t there anything you need to get from the house?”

“Like some cash money and something to wear? There is, but there’s nothing I want enough to go back for it. Les, I don’t even want to look back. I might turn into a pillar of salt. I remember Mary Frances heard that story in Sunday school and thought it was a pillow of salt.”

“You’ll wish you had any kind of a pillow tonight, Mame. We just bed down on bare ground.”

“Walk twenty miles and a body could probably sleep standing up. Les, you can throw that thing away, that walker. Or just leave it by the side of the road. Some old crippled lady might come along and have a use for it.”

There was a long curving uphill stretch to the road, and at the top of the rise you could see a long ways. “There they are,” she said, pointing. “They must have stopped to take in the view.”

“Slowpokes,” he said.

“We’ll catch ’em.”

When someone at the rear of the procession turned and caught sight of the two of them, word passed the length of the column and all of them came back to wait for the pair to catch up. When Mame reached them, walking like a girl, there was a long moment of awed silence. Then, tentatively, someone began to clap. And then everyone was applauding, and it rolled and echoed in the hills like thunder.