Last Walk

by Sara Heegaard

“He went into the woods,” says Grandmother. She stops to listen and wraps her finger around the curly phone cord. “Yes. Yes.” Light is coming in through the stained glass door in the kitchen and nesting in her white hair. “Yesterday afternoon.” She pauses again. “He went into the woods, and he never came out.” Grandmother says yesterday “yestadee,” soft and smoky. She listens to the voice on the other end and then hangs up the phone.

Today is Grandaddy’s eightieth birthday. I’m seventeen. We’re sitting in the living room, me and Mother and Daddy and Bill Hearn and Jack, Grandaddy’s dog.

“Well,” says Grandmother, “ain’t that a load of bull.”

“Mama,” says my Daddy, “don’t.”

“They said they sent somebody. They said that yesterday.” Yestadee.

“It hasn’t been long,” says Daddy. “We’ll hear back soon.”

Grandmother stares at her feet and mumbles something under her breath.

“We’ll go look again,” says Daddy, and he reaches for his keys.

* * *

We get in the truck and drive, Daddy and Bill Hearn and Jack and me. The thermometer says 105, and the heat creeps in through the sealed windows like water. It’s too hot for Grandmother, so she and Mama have to stay behind.

It’s just me and the men.

We barrel down County Road 27 and the town blurs by like a bullet. Daddy’s gunning it and red dust explodes around the car. I hold Jack in the backseat.

Around Old Saint Stephen’s Daddy makes a turn and parks in front of a fence at the mouth of a narrow dirt road.

“Open the gate, Lou,” says Daddy, and he hands me the key.

I get out and the heat hits me like a heavy hand. I swing the gate around, and open up the old logging road.

I feel like a little girl again. I shade my eyes with one hand and watch the car come through.

* * *

“See these trees?” Grandaddy used to say as we walked the old backroads when I was a kid. “These are your trees.” When I was little they were tiny fuzzy pines. Small and shivering. Now they’re grown, looming and old. I picture Grandaddy taking his walk along the rows. The smothering sun. His Auburn baseball cap shading his eyes. Planting his feet with each step, one, two, heavy in the dirt.

But here the dirt is clay, and a walk takes a permanent form.

* * *

We walk for a long time. We don’t see anything. An hour goes by. The sun feels like a spear in my stomach, sinking deep, deep, deep. But Daddy won’t stop. He keeps going on, sweat running down his spine. Red mud climbing up his socks, the saddest, wildest wound.

“Daddy!” I shout.

He stops.

“It’s too hot. We’ve gotta turn back.”

His arm swings down to his side, then back up to his face. Beads of sweat run down his cheeks like trains.

He nods. We turn around.

* * *

I remember my thirteenth birthday, when Grandaddy taught me how to drive. He woke me up at dawn. “Wake up, kid!” he whispered, shaking my shoulder. “I got something for you.”

He led me out front to the truck, his hands on his hips. Big southern man. His feather white hair. “Go ahead and get in,” he said.

“Where are we going?” I asked, bleary eyed.

I reached for the passenger door.

“Wrong side,” he said, and winked. “Nobody drives the back roads this time of year. Nobody for miles.”

* * *

Grandmother and Mama sit around the kitchen table as we walk in. No one speaks. They don’t look up.

“We didn’t find—”

“We know,” says Mama. “Mr. Hutto called.”

“Oh,” says Daddy.

“The police called too.”

“Oh my,” says Bill Hearn. We all sit down.

Nobody looks at Grandmother except for me. She’s looking at my father, pressing one finger hard to her lips.

“Go,” she says. “We’ll meet you there.”

He stands up and kisses her on the head.

I follow him out. I don’t know if I’m supposed to. I just do.

* * *

We’re silent the whole drive except for one moment when Daddy looks at me and says, “I think the best thing my daddy taught me is that a man is not a man until he learns how to dance.”

I don’t ask what he means. I don’t ask why he said it. I don’t laugh.

I don’t dare make a sound.

* * *

An old wooden farmhouse with a leftward lean and woods for miles. Five cars in the driveway. The county sheriff. Two police. No ambulance.

I look to my father. He’s looking up.

“My god,” he says, shaking his head.

* * *

Mr. Hutto says a lot happens on those old log roads in the summertime. “Lot of hunting accidents,” he tells us. “People aren’t careful. And then they can’t get help. Your daddy liked to walk the backroads whenever something happened.” Mr. Hutto tells this to my daddy, sitting beside him in the white wicker chairs on the Huttos’ front porch. He has a long black mustache and the ends of his words get muffled in it. “A few days ago I got wind of a mishap with some hunters from Thomasville. So when I heard he went missing, I had a feeling.”

I sit across from them, on the porch swing with Mrs. Hutto. We let the men talk, but Mrs. Hutto rocks us with her foot, swinging us gently, the softest creak.

“I feel like I shouldn’t even be telling this story today,” Mr. Hutto says.

“Mr. Hutto,” says Daddy, “I need to know it.”

Mr. Hutto holds the edge of his chair.

“I went out to look for him this morning, but I didn’t have to look far.”

I look at Mrs. Hutto. She’s looking at her feet.

“The police say he fell about a mile from where they found him. That’s where the tracks stop.” He pauses. “From there, it looks like he crawled.”

Back, forth. Back, forth. We don’t stop swinging. We don’t dare.

Mr. Hutto stops. Daddy stares straight ahead. We keep swinging, and for a moment I am high above the back roads above the tall pine trees, flying close to the sun.