“My God,” Susan tells her walking friends. “You could have pushed me right over with a breath of fresh air. I was stunned because, well shit, in high school my friends were my whole world. But I found out later that my mother was right, and when they all left and never helped me, my mother was always there. So there was that one best friend. But she was wrong about the same thing too. She was wrong because of you, because of all of you.”
Susan's tears fall into the grass, and Alice, who is sitting next to her, follows each one with her eyes. To her the tears look like melting dew. She moves behind Susan and holds her in her lap like a baby, a small baby girl.
“This is a time, one time, when I need a friend more than anything in the whole world because of this stupid mess I've gotten myself into. My mother should see me now.” Susan lifts her eyes up toward heaven, where she imagines her mother might be watching her. “Good God, what a mess! I must have about six of someone else's friends, but I'm not about to give up any single one of you.”
Janice laughs, and Alice tilts her head back and also looks heavenward, thinking to herself that if Annie Marie had lived, she might be kind and open like Susan and that would be wonderful. J.J., Sandy and Chris laugh too, thinking about all the women they know, all the women in the world who would be green with envy to be with them, walking, talking and exploring.
The quiet of the fields surrounds them. The light in the trees and the short, soft grass wave like tiny fingers as cars again begin moving past the women. All the people inside the cars have their heads pointed sideways, wondering what in the world the women could be doing out on the grass.
Alice lifts her head like a little turtle who has spotted something in the distance. “So what about all the sex everyone but me has been getting for the past forty years?”
Associated Press, April 29, 2002
—National Release, Feature Follow
Wilkins County, Wisconsin
WALKERS MOBILIZE NATION'S HEARTS
Reporters following a group of seven women walkers here are betting the farm that they will capture the attention and imagination of women throughout the country.
With the war in Afghanistan cooling its heels, the economy in a total mess, and people still afraid to travel because of the threat of terrorism, “this phenomenon closer to home offers everyone some positive drama,” said Jim Slaveny, a
Chicago Sun-Times
reporter who has been hiking behind the women. “This is a glimpse into the world of women, and what could be better.”
“There isn't a woman alive who hasn't dreamed of doing this,” said Peggy Burns, a feature writer from
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel,
who admits she is tempted to step out of her pumps and into her hiking boots to join the women. “These women are on the road to becoming national heroes.”
Burns might be on the right road herself. Letters and phone calls have been pouring into Sheriff Barnes Holden's office in support of the women, and it is no surprise to him that the letter writers are mostly women. Holden said he has received offers of money and cars and food, and one group in California has volunteered to help protect the walkers from curious onlookers.
“We haven't ever seen anything like this before but I can tell you my wonderful wife is standing by the door with her own tennis shoes on,” he said. “Some days, I'd love to chuck it all and join them myself.”
In an era where meeting schedules and excess on every level have men and women running to stay in place, Holden and others who know the women say it's not hard to understand someone wanting to get away from it all.
“Even if they have seen some kind of a vision or something, really, good for them,” said Holden. “It's a free country, let's all remember that.”
The reporters tailing the walkers have vowed to stick with them, even though Holden has assigned a deputy to keep everyone from getting too close.
“I could be covering the Elmwood City Council meeting tonight,” said Slaveny. “This is the best assignment I've ever had.”
—30—
The Women Walker Effect: Margaret
It took Margaret eighteen minutes to shuffle her bony body to the edge of her hospital bed so she could turn up the small radio that was sitting on the stand beside her. Each time she managed to grab a handful of her worn and faded sheets and drag her brittle bones a centimeter or two, she could feel the insides of her legs burn like fire because of the bedsores. When she finally reached the silver volume knob, she said, “Thank you, sweet Jesus.” Her soft words echoed off the empty walls, down to the dusty floor, and across the room that Margaret had come to refer to as her cell.
She turned the radio on, then began to cry.
Breathing, moving, just being alive for another day was a great struggle for Margaret. The simple act of successfully turning on a radio overwhelmed her with joy.
In a life that now consisted of one indignity after another, Margaret found little reason to prolong her last months. Urine-filled bedpans, the stench of death, sores in her sides that gnawed at her brittle hipbones, roommates who cried for help in the night. Not one visitor in three years. In her eighty-seven years, life had given her many things and taken away just as many. In her wildest, craziest dreams she never, ever thought she would end up alone in a nursing home with absolutely nothing to look forward to but the voices on the radio.
Margaret had been living at the Wayside Home near Brenton, Ohio, for seven hundred fifty-nine days and nights. How she came to be in such a place was something she had been trying to remember for almost all of those days. She wanted to piece together her life one last time before she let herself go, before she shed her brittle bones and faltering body parts for something, anything, better.
But Margaret was having a hard time remembering. She wanted to line up all the days of her life and file through them, searching for the people and places she once loved. However, when she tried to focus on something or someone, everything grew foggy, and she could not get a clear vision of who she once had been.
Of course Margaret knew that the drugs given to her to constantly keep her asleep contributed to her forgetfulness, her inability to connect the past to the present. Knowing that gave her the courage to spit the pills into her own urine and crush them with her long fingers until they dissolved and were thrown down the toilet by the sullen, unkind attendants who brusquely tended to her.
She was right about the pills, and after ten days without them, her mind began to flow at a more even pace and life, her life, came into the clearest focus she'd experienced for nearly three years. Slowly she began to recall things—smiling faces, the tiny hands of a baby, a porch as wide as her cell, and a field, a long field that was filled with blossoming fresh corn one day and then covered with snow the next.
Margaret grabbed at the details of the men, women, and children who once again filled up her mind. Margaret knew there had been children, and she wanted to know what had happened to them. For one quick moment, she had a feeling of great sadness as she saw herself standing alone on that porch; yet there was more, much more, and she was determined now that the pills were not inside of her to retrieve those crucial memories.
On the twelfth day without them but faking her own awake-sleeping behavior that the attendants were used to, Margaret first heard about the women walkers.
Against her pillows, she listened intensely to every word of the story.
In her mind's eye, Margaret could see them. Even as she stared at the sludge-green wall of her cell, she could envisage the road they were on, even their scuffed-up shoes. Two of them were holding hands and another woman, with long hair that was as gray as winter sky, was laughing so hard and long that Margaret willed her to take a breath.
For the rest of that day, Margaret floated in her own imagination and walked with them. She felt the wind blowing and saw blackbirds chasing each other and a small robin chirping in fright as they passed by. Margaret's feet were as light as air, and she felt as if she could walk with them forever, as if they were her friends, and that if she reached out they would touch her, someone would finally touch her.
By noon Margaret felt famished. From the exertion, she told herself as she ate parts of a meal for the first time in months. The walkers rested for a while after lunch, and Margaret with them—eager to return to her own secret world. They were lying in tall grass next to a wood so that they could go to the bathroom. Then Margaret fell asleep.
While she slept, it came to her that the place where the women were resting was in the field of her old family farm in Wilkins County. This knowledge burst into her mind and covered her with a layer of peace. It made her smile in her sleep, though no one noticed.
Her matted hair fell in long strands down the sides of her face. The turned-up corners of her mouth, the soft lines in her face, the suddenly pink color that rose in her cheeks, made her look beautiful.
As her dreams continued, she saw her mother, with shoulders as broad and wide as the man's she had called Dah. There were brothers and sisters, so many that a shocked Margaret took a deep breath. The world around the farm was a buzz of activity as everyone worked feverishly nonstop. Margaret could feel her feet and hands and the bones in her youthful body long for something as simple as a few moments' rest.
Margaret would never be able to remember everything that passed through her mind during that sleep. She slept for hours, almost the entire day. She slept as the walkers rose and moved again down the highway. She slept as the nursing shift changed, and first one and then another attendant cracked open the door to see if she was still breathing.
Indeed Margaret was breathing. Breathing through all the winters, springs, summers and falls of her former life. She breathed through her wedding to a man who caught her eye at the local drugstore and then packed her away to live in a series of hotels and a sleazy boardinghouse while he tramped through town with his tarnished silverware and chipped china. When he didn't come home one night and then the next, she searched for him. He had fallen drunk under a wagonload of the same corn that her father might be growing, leaving her a widow with a baby inside of her and nothing of any tangible value but a cardboard suitcase.
She returned to Wisconsin and moved into the room off her mother's kitchen, enduring the stares of the brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles who whispered, “We told you so,” just loud enough for her to hear. Then another man came for her. He was a farmer too, the son of her father's friend. He took her away from Wisconsin once again to the long porch house in Ohio where she spent all the rest of the days of her life until she came to be in her hospital bed.
She remembered in her dreams that her new husband had loved her and the baby boy very much. She grew to love him too, with such a fierceness that she thought she might die if she were never to see him again. Their love brought them two more sons, and for years there was a perfect mixture of hard work and happiness as the family grew and the farm flourished.
When the Depression came, they did not go hungry but worked harder and helped as many friends and neighbors and wandering souls as they could. The war that followed is what broke Margaret's heart the first time. Those inconceivable, distant battles snatched the two oldest boys before either of them had reached twenty years of age. What Margaret sent off to war were two strong, handsome men who adored her and promised to be careful, to come back to her and their life on the farm. What came back was a simple pine box for each of them, medals with purple ribbons, tattered clothes that had once touched the bodies of her baby boys.
When the third boy fell from the top of the barn during haying season, Margaret wondered if she could go on living, if her broken heart would allow her to continue to feel anything. And there was always Raymond walking toward her at the end of the day, with that look in his eye that seemed to say over and over again, “I'm sorry, so sorry, my love,” as he peeled off his worn gloves.
The years stored in Margaret's memory marched by while she slept, and when she finally opened her eyes, it took her a long time to remember where she was. She smiled as she stirred awake and for the first time, Margaret found she could move a little more easily to turn on the radio. She wanted to hear the latest reports about the walkers even though she already knew where they were going, why they were walking and what would happen to each and every one of them. Margaret knew all about the trials and tears of women and how sometimes you have to simply take a stand and say, “No more. That is the end of all of this.”
Feeling grateful for all her new knowledge, Margaret also felt relieved that she could finally fit all the pieces together. She could never remember feeling quite so happy or light. Her mind was alive and crisp and anxious for what she was going to allow to happen to her next.
When the morning attendant arrived, saying gruffly, “Hello, Mrs. Helgenson,” he reached to turn off the radio. She clasped her hand on top of his, feeling for the first time in many, many days what it was like to share the warmth of a human touch. “Please,” she said in a clear strong voice, “please leave the radio on. It comforts me and it's very difficult for me to turn it back on myself.”