Gloryland (11 page)

I
t took me nearly two years to walk from South Carolina to Nebraska. Course I had no idea that a place called Nebraska was at the end of the road.

Most of what happened I don’t want to talk about, and the rest I’m working real hard on forgetting, but some things you can’t forget, like how fear and joy became more than just words. They became a place, all the places besides our cabin. They were all fear. They were all joy. I trusted nobody, cause they were all strangers. I didn’t even trust the sun cause the sun lights you up for all to see. But there was joy in moving, seeing a world I’d never seen before.

The moon’s a good thing because it lets you see where you’re going in the dark. I remember how the moon got broken up by branches and leaves overhead, but when I came out of the shadows, it almost hurt my eyes, the brightness whole and cool around me instead of torn apart by branches and wind.

I was cold plenty, but every step took me closer to the end of the road. I made fires at night where there were no eyes, and the fires kept me warm and spoke to me bout old things, but I’ve lost the memory of what they said. I was away from people in my head and in my heart because of fear, fear of being alone, of not having my family close by, but in the night when I was closed up in my blanket beside a tree or whatever the road had put before me, I could feel Mama’s hand on my head, and the wind on my forehead would be her breath, and the sighing in the branches would be her singing to me, no, I was never alone, so why be afraid?

Sometimes the road was like a river moving back on itself, then
going forward, spinning me round. I wasn’t always sure which way was west till afternoon, when the sun fell from the sky, wasn’t always sure which way was north till the North Star shone above me. Other times, everything would be spinning round in my mind, the names of places and the places without names. Grandma Sara’d taught me you don’t need a map if you can read the sky.

The road I followed wasn’t plain to see but was plain to me. I felt I was being led, and most always seemed to know to turn here or turn there. Who took my hand in the dark and showed me the way? Something inside me I couldn’t name. I wasn’t following directions, I was being guided out of the South, west and north. It was as if the ground itself was showing me the way. Sometimes the forest closed in so I had to go round, but only because I wasn’t supposed to go in there.

When you’re afraid, everything is clear, too clear, and the fear seems like something living, the shadow of everything you’re seeing and feeling. I felt like a deer, like whatever gets hunted. When I was moving on the road, my heart was always beating hard, my breath came fast, and I’d be sweating even if it wasn’t hot. I got tired before I had a right to be tired, I stopped and looked hard before stepping out of the shade of trees, looking for something or someone that hadn’t come yet, listening for sounds that hadn’t been made yet. I was afraid of everything and nothing, especially the nothing that’s a hole inside when you got no one near who cares if you live or die.

But when you’re afraid, your eyes are open wide and you hear more, and you taste the wind for what might be around. Fear wakes you up to what’s around you. It can clear your mind so you see that squirrel in the elm overhead or hear a quail bolting out of the bushes, and I always kept Daddy’s Lefever ready to fire. Because I was afraid, it was harder to surprise me and easier to get food.

I remembered Grandma Sara saying, “Elijah, plants got homes just like you. Some live by a creek, some live in a meadow or a forest, but some like the edges of things, the space that ain’t meadow or forest. You gotta learn to see the line between where one kind of
tree grows and another don’t. What I’m sayin, boy, is when you find where a plant lives, then you’ll find that plant. You do that, and you’ll never be hungry.”

What Grandma Sara said kept me alive. When I got past the places where there were orchards full of apples, peaches, pears, or plums, and I had to look elsewhere, well, I didn’t have to look all that hard to find wild carrots growing right at my feet or spot the wild sweet potatoes, with their heart-shaped leaves and big white flowers, by the edge of an abandoned field.

Because there were so many oaks, I got plenty of acorns in the fall. Other times I could find sour cranberries, wild currants, sweet blackberries or raspberries, mulberries, persimmons, or black walnuts. Another mile down the road would bring me sunflowers or wild lettuce or turnips. I found mushrooms too, under logs or on wet earth after it rained. Food was everywhere. Most of it I could just eat raw, but some I had to prepare, like the acorns.

If I caught cold, I made sassafras tea out of the roots and leaves, or chewed the bark of a holly root. I used flint and steel to start fires at night, and if I needed a fire during the day, I used a pair of eyeglasses I’d found in the woods near our cabin to focus the sun. But fire is a good way to get noticed, so I had to be careful. If I had a fever I’d look for thoroughwort or dogwood. If my stomach bothered me I’d find blackberry root and it would help me.

I made soap from myrtle berries and bathed as often as I could, because the water made me strong and washed a little of my scent away, which made it easier for me to hunt and actually catch something. The thunder of Daddy’s gun brought down squirrels, birds, and other small game. But I was careful not to use it too close to people. Eating plants and catching fish was a quieter way of getting food.

It didn’t matter that I was always in new country, cause I knew where different kinds of plants lived, knew if they liked running water, thickets or dry open groves or fir woods, wet meadows or farm fields. Everything’s got to live somewhere, and it lives there for a reason. You just got to know why.

On a day after days of walking, I was watching the sun lowering west behind the Smokies, and I walked right off the ridgeline path I was on. I dropped down with the sun, my feet sliding in muddy soil and through sweet grass, the smell of it in my head, my hands grasping at the trunks and roots of great trees as I slid by. I could feel the wet ground soak my pants, my legs, feel the plants tearing at my hands as they tried to hold on. I wondered if I’d ever find someplace flat again. But then some ground in a hollow that wanted my acquaintance rose up suddenly out of the woods and stung my rear, while dust settled in a cold breeze about me.

I looked up to find a hole in the forest. I got up, found there was nothing broken, brushed the dirt off me, and walked deeper into that hollow of light and high branches. It was so pretty it made me forget how my hands still stung and my knees ached.

I’d fallen into a place where the ground was covered with tall grass that made the wind sing. I remember the mound there, making the ground look pregnant or swollen from a wound, and the quiet coldness made by a sky losing light. I rested there, lying in the grass by that high mound, and had a dream, or maybe I was awake and listening to a music that was trees and wind and grass.

 

 

I remember the grass speaking softly like it was shy over who might be listening. All I could make out was one word over and over again: “Kituwah,” and again, “Kituwah.” I didn’t know what it meant, then or now, but I know what it felt like. It was peace, like the first day, like when you’re held for the first time by your mother. You’re naked, but it don’t matter. You’re helpless, but it don’t matter. You’re loved and that love holds you up, keeps you safe.

I remember this because it was the only time on the road that eventually led to Fort Robinson that I wasn’t afraid. I couldn’t be afraid because I felt in the presence of something that was older than fear. Fear hadn’t been born yet, but beauty was already old, older than Grandma Sara. It was everywhere and in everything, but stronger in that place the grass called Kituwah.

Everything that happened and didn’t happen on the road from Spartanburg moved like water round the memory of Kituwah. The
night sounds of Bryson City, North Carolina, when I was lying outside it against a tree. The coldness of a waterfall on my face near Spencer, Tennessee. The tall pole with a white flag that made me cry, near a town called Hopkinsville. What’s so sad bout a flag the color of a cloud? Don’t know. Empty fields of harvested corn, and an orchard picked clean of all its fruit.

I remember the summer heat and mosquitoes, one becoming the other till the heat was a drone that stung, and the insects were a fire burning my face and neck and arms. And then the winter rain seeping in past every button and fold till I was miserable, and then too numb to care. Only the names of where I walked stayed dry and warm in my head: Port Royal, Princeton, Green’s Ferry, Springfield, Fayetteville, Tahlequah, and Fort Gibson. Places filled with people but dead to me.

It was the mountains, forests, and rivers that were alive.

When I was dirty I bathed in a stream. When I was lonely I bathed in a stream. When I was afraid I bathed in a stream. The water was always familiar at dawn. Always the same coldness, the same sweetness at the edge of the grass, the delicious singing in the ground that woke up your mouth, your skin. Big Creek was always with me no matter how far I walked, the waters near our cabin flowing everywhere I went, and when I cried at night it was from the joy of knowing that home was as close as any mountain stream or drop of rain.

 

Ross’s Landing. The Tennessee River. The Mississippi. The Arkansas. It was night and a river, don’t matter the name, it was big and cold and I had to get across. I couldn’t swim that far, so I had to take the ferry from that man. He was tall and to me he looked big with a wickedness stolen from an oak that was used to hang
niggers
, that kind of tree, and he wanted money to cross the river, money I didn’t have, so I pleaded with him long after the sun had gone down to take me across. But he wanted what I didn’t have, and it made no sense cause he lived on the other side, so to get home he had to cross the water. So I argued with that white man to bend a bit and take
me with him, but oaks don’t bend, they only break if the wind is stronger.

I said to him, “I’ll just be a shadow by your side, that’s all, a shadow, so it don’t matter that I got no money! You just goin home, you got to go, and I need to go with you!”

He just looked at me and laughed, if whiskey could laugh and not stink, and showed his yellow teeth like they could bite right through the fear in me, the fear of not getting across to the other side. All I could think of was, I gotta get past this man, I gotta get over there, else I can’t keep moving, and only a dead man doesn’t move. So I pleaded and pleaded.