Anabasis

by Robert Earle

            The garage housed a two-door maroon BMW, paint cans, a ladder, screens, rakes, a push lawn mower, an old oak desk, an old oak chair, and a wastebasket. A white-haired man wearing leather boots that rose well above his ankles hobbled in. He sat in the chair and removed the boots. He looked at the yellow legal pad and the pencils he had placed on the desktop. For the first two days, nothing came to him. He doubted anything ever would, but on the third day that changed. He wrote about his boyhood in Pennsylvania on a farm his father did not farm because he was a banker. He wrote about trips to New York because his father wanted him to see Columbia football games. He wrote about his father’s plan that he would study economics and finance at Columbia and help build the family’s bank into a regional bank. He wrote about disliking Columbia because he disliked New York’s fumy air, karate chop shadows, death march traffic, and obliteration of land that once had been real land with real trees and real streams and real wildlife. He wrote about enjoying his fifth year at Columbia in the Teacher’s College.

            “What kind of career is teaching?” his father asked.

            “I’m not interested in a career. I’ll get jobs at schools overseas and walk around on my vacations.”

            “On your foot?”

            He wrote about walking until he couldn’t walk and ending up in this garage.

#

            Each day he crumpled what he had written and put it into the wastebasket. He put the fieldstone farmhouse in the wastebasket, his father in the wastebasket, his stepmother and stepbrother in the wastebasket, and Low Library in the wastebasket. He wrote about his choice of a major, nominally geology but in his case better described as geography, and discarded it, and about his choice of math as a minor and discarded it. The more he discarded, the more he discovered he needed to discard. It was like digging a hole in soggy ground. The hole didn’t want to be a hole. The hole kept filling up with water. The sides of the hole kept collapsing. The deeper he dug, the more necessary it was to dig deeper. He kept digging and tossing the soggy earth over his shoulder. Not all of what he tossed reached the lips of the hole. A good bit fell where it came from like the memory of stretching out on the parlor carpet when he was a little boy and putting his hand on his mother’s foot. She let him graze it with his fingertips. She died when he was three.

#

            He wrote that after his father and stepmother died, he sold his share of the bank and the farm to his stepbrother and tapered off teaching. He wrote that as he followed a river, a ridge, or a coastline, he marked fertility yielding to desiccation, he marked villages yielding to urbanization. Along the way he camped, he lodged in hostels, in the back of trucks, and in the homes of people who invited him to stay a while. Some of those people set their lives aside and accompanied him. Some tried to ease his journey by offering him a beat-up motorcycle or an old Land Rover. He declined. When he was in boarding school, he translated Xenophon’s Anabasis, where he encountered the parasang, as in how many parasangs Xenophon covered on a given day when he was leading his troops out of Persia. He remembered parasangs but only as a word. He had no idea how far you had to go to cover a parasang and escape Artaxerxes killing you, but he escaped, too. He walked into a refugee operation in Greece, then South Sudan. He found that refugee camps bore a resemblance to an entire country in which you could walk all day and never reach the border distributing food and clothing, setting up clinics, doing a census. In South Sudan, he couldn’t keep on without some good orthotic boots. He was in bad shape. London was a long way away, but he got there and spent a few moments looking at the window display of Jeremy Plowman & Son, est. 1937. Tall riding boots. Boots for shooting. Brown boots with black leather scrollwork on the toes. Boots with laces, boots with buckles.

            Jeremy Plowman, the son, stood behind the counter in a polish-stained canvas apron with many pockets, a green and brown houndstooth vest, and underneath the vest a blue shirt and a blue and red regimental tie. Just him in his shop. No helper.

            Plowman cupped the heel of his left foot and slipped off the sock. He palpated the bones and tendons and scars and calluses and toes. He guided the ankle through a series of movements. He pushed his thumb hard into the heel. He took the whole foot in his hand and twisted it, leveling the sole.

            “So, you were born with a club foot and had it bound but that didn’t work, and it came to surgery.”

            “That was my childhood. The last surgery has served me well until a year ago.”

            “Wearing boots like the things you’re wearing? What have you been thinking, sir?”

            “I suppose I thought that at some point it would stop getting worse.”

            “Why would you come to me and not a surgeon?”

            “I’m afraid if anyone fooled with the rigging in there, the whole foot would crumble.”

            “And you think I can make you a boot that will take care of the wobbling and grinding and pain?”

            “I hope so. Can you?”

            Plowman held up a hoary blue leather orthotic between his index finger and thumb and turned it around to inspect it as if it were a dead mouse. “Where did this come from?”

            “Lahore.”

            “Pakistan?”

            “Yes. And now I envision that the entire insole would be an orthotic,” he said, “and there would be orthotic adjustments up the shaft that would hold me in place the way you’ve done with your hand.”

            “It hurt you when I did that, though.”

            “If it’s exactly the right kind of leather padding, it would flex and not hurt like metal or plastic. I don’t want metal or plastic. I don’t want a brace up around my calf. I want leather that will shim my foot level and keep the sole on the ground.”

            “A boot like that would take time breaking in, and it wouldn’t be only one orthotic you’d have—it would be a few of them, each bringing you a bit closer to level. Let’s see the other foot. Yes. Bad. You’ve been walking on the inside of your left foot and outside of the right one.”

            The boots would take five weeks, and he couldn’t make his way around the hard streets of London, so he took a train to Oxford and secured a room that normally was let to visiting professors but was vacant and leased to him for a month. The stairs were a problem. Once he mounted them, he was all right. He had a bathroom, a desk, a bureau, an easy chair, a daybed, and a view of a quadrangle whose grass was as short and spongy as moss. He thought that one day he might like to try it out barefoot.

#

            He made it down the stairs in search of something nearby to eat and saw a poster. There was a lecture in the next entryway about reparations to the global south for the ravages of climate change. When he tugged open the lecture hall door, a woman resting against it tumbled on top of him.

            She accompanied him around the corner to a cafe and told him she was on a sabbatical year from Williams in Massachusetts, writing a book about hijacked nations—Catalunya hijacked by Spain, Scotland hijacked by England, Quebec hijacked by Canada. He told her he had never taken sabbatical years when he was teaching, he just moved on from one international school to another, spending his vacations walking.

            “But you can hardly walk.”

            “I’m getting new boots to fix that.”

            “Fix what, exactly?”

            He told her about his club foot. It pointed downwards and sideways at birth, so there were casts, there were splints and stirrups. Bones were broken and reset with screws. By the time he was seven, he could walk pretty well. He walked to school and back from school. He walked through the woods to the pond, where he liked to fish, then back through the woods and across the pasture to the house. But gradually the foot began to return to its state at birth. He needed surgery and had his last operation when he was thirteen.

            “Since then it’s been reasonably solid,” he said. “Over the last little while it’s been bothering me.”

            “A great deal?”          

            “Well, increasingly.”

            In his room, she said her father had been a neurologist and pulled off his socks so she could stick a pin in his feet. Pins, feathers, even the breath, could be used to touch the skin and assess the nerves. He resisted, but there they were—the left foot curled like a leaf that had only half-unfolded, the right foot thicker, wider, normal but ugly. He could scarcely feel the pin, just its pressure. She grasped his leg above the ankle and slipped her hand up his trousers over his calf. She poked it with the pin. He stopped her. Told her to put the pin down.

            “You need a shower, not sex,” she said. “You smell like sheep shit.”

            She did not stay with him that night but came back the next afternoon. She was pretty, smart, and direct. He liked her teeth. They were smallish, well-aligned, and quite white, shaping a smile that seldom faded as she asked about places he had walked through—Ingushetia, Moldova, Kosovo—and the similarities between the north and south of Italy, buckled in place by Rome, and the north and south of Mexico, buckled in place by Mexico City. She treated him like what anthropologists called an informant, journalists called a source, cops called a stool pigeon, a bird that couldn’t fly. Finally she told him to stop talking and hit him as an owl would hit a rabbit or a squirrel, her feathers and talons everywhere.

#

            They took a train to London. She met with an economist who specialized in Scottish affairs. He went by taxi to get his boots. They were like two hands clasped together over his ankle and Achilles and a third hand under his forefoot. After ten steps, he had to stop. Plowman said if the pain did not end within a month, he should come back. But if he was able to walk without pain, he should slip in the next of the orthotics he had made—there were three—and gradually push his foot closer to level.

            Back in Oxford, she insisted he put on the new boots and show her what they did. They sat on a bench in the courtyard while he collected himself. He got up and took a few steps, turned, and lurched back.

            “Do you really think those boots will be the answer?”

            “They’re not broken in. It could take a month.”

            She would go out to buy them breakfast and bring it back to his room. Then she would walk down the stairs in front of him to make sure he wouldn’t fall and drink a second cup of coffee as he walked around the courtyard. She returned in the afternoon, and he repeated the courtyard walk, and then they made their way to the nearby café for something to eat. On the way back his room, she would buy a bag of ice so he could cool his foot in a wastebasket. Afterward she rubbed his foot to warm it up and they made love and lay in bed talking.

            One night she asked, “Why don’t you come to Massachusetts with me?”

            He had been thinking about walking up the Thames while doubting he would ever be that kind of walker again.

            “What would I do there?” he asked.

            “Maybe teach,” she said.

            “I haven’t taught in more than a decade.”

            “You said you loved teaching.”

            “Sometimes I think everything I’ve ever said about my life is an exaggeration.”

            She studied him. “What do you mean?”

            “I allow people to draw the wrong conclusions about me.”

             “I’ve never known a man who didn’t,” she said. “That’s the way mating works.”

            He tried to tamp this idea down. “I don’t know a soul in Massachusetts.”

            “Besides me, you could start with a friend of mine, Steve. He’s a psychiatrist,” she said. “I think you’d like each other.”

            “Was this fellow Steve your psychiatrist?”

            “The second time I saw him I told him it wouldn’t work because I wanted to go to bed with him.”

            “What did he say?”

            “He said if I still felt that way in a month, he’d like that. It didn’t work out, but we’re good.”

            “I still don’t know what I would do in Massachusetts,” he said.

She had another idea. “Why not write all the interesting things you’ve been telling me?”

            “I’ve never written anything.”

            “You could pick up a pencil and start.”

#

            He left the side door to the garage open to air the place out and sat behind the desk. He wrote that his stepbrother Roger was celebrated at sports, and his father annoyed his stepmother by trumpeting Roger’s success. “Roger is quite the athlete,” she would agree, “but Wayman doesn’t need sports to show his grit.” She was the one who saw him through procedures, rehabs, and surgeries, cooked what he liked, sat in his room with him when he was not supposed to move and read to him. She kept saying more could be done. More. Until he did not want her to come into his room, did not want to see her eyes glisten when he pushed her away, but after his last operation, he could walk like anyone else. He wanted to be called Walker. His father said he was being an idiot. Wayman was a family name. His stepmother said his father was the idiot.

#

            He pressed the pencil so hard with his index finger that the impression stayed there long after he was done.

#

            He wrote that he took a job teaching in a DoD school in Rota and met a woman who did a lot of walking with him in Spain. When they married and were walking around Iceland on their honeymoon, she realized that he would never stop. After Iceland it would be somewhere else, and while he was thinking about somewhere else, he would not be thinking about her or about children. They divorced by mail.

#

            He wrote that his stepmother started wearing his father’s light blue golf cardigan. He remembered his father telling her that her tits would ruin it. He did not write that. Instead, he began writing about a troubled student with a freckled face and red hair who came to him because her father was going to be transferred from Germany to a base in the U.S. He saw panic in her light blue eyes. He thought about his stepmother again. His father wanted the sweater back. His stepmother said no. It was hers now. The girl asked him if he could find some family that would take her in so she could stay in Germany. He said he was not the person to look to for that kind of help. It was October. Yellow rape fields blazed beyond the classroom windows. He offered to walk her home. She said no, she would walk home by herself. Twenty years later he thought that she wanted a sweater the color of her eyes, and he had not given her one.

#

            Laura brought home Thai takeout. She put everything in bowls and arranged place settings. He sat across from her with his foot on the seat of the chair next to him. They messed about serving themselves. Kung Pao chicken. Chardonnay. Didn’t seem to know what to say to one another.

            “Why don’t we talk as much as we did in Oxford?” she asked. “I know why I don’t. I’ve   been talking all day. But you—are you saying it all in what you write in the garage?”

            “No, I’m not saying it all.”

            “This throwing it away. I don’t understand it. Why not save a few days’ work and let me read it?”

            “I don’t read it myself.”

            She poured them each more wine, took a sip and smiled as if it didn’t matter. “You’re an odd one.”

            He shrugged. 

            “At least you’re walking better,” she said.

            “I’m still on my second orthotic.”

            “It must hurt less, though.”

            “More than pain, it’s fatigue. I find I last longer with paper and pencil.”

#

            He made it to his third orthotic and walked a fair amount in the afternoons. Williamstown’s surfaces sparkled and gleamed. Streets and buildings were dazzling. Trees were on fire in the autumn sun. People knew where they were going and what they were doing but kept it to themselves. At a bookstore café every college and high school student had a personal laptop, sometimes two. Table after table arrayed like sections of strings and woodwinds in an orchestra, but there was no music, instead earphones everywhere. He bought a packet of pencils. His boots creaked as he walked out.

#

            She saw Steve. “I’m losing him even though I’m sure there is still more in this,” she said.

            “How long is he going to stay around?” Steve asked.

            “He’s said he’s not sure how to stay.”

            “What does that mean?”

            “He’s used to walking away, I guess. He can’t do it anymore, but that’s how he’s lived.”  She saw Steve was not pleased to be talking about him. “Was it a really bad idea, putting you together?”

            “You probably shouldn’t ask your former lover what to do about your present lover,” he said.

            “I just want to know what you think. I’ve always wanted to know what you think.”

            “What can I say? We sat over there at the bar that one time.” Steve nodded toward a very nice bar with very nice stools. “I haven’t sat at a bar for years.”

            “You probably didn’t want to sit at a table and look at each other face to face.”

            “Probably not,” he said. “Is the plan he’ll keep living with you?”

            “There is no plan except that every morning he goes into the garage and sits at my father’s desk. Why have I even kept that desk? My father worked in an ultra-modern clinic but posed behind this old oak desk. Pure stagecraft. Look at my desk, he was saying: It’s old, it endures, it has seen so much, it is wisdom. He never called glasses glasses. He called them spectacles.”

            “Does he remind you of your father?”

            “No, you did, you were the doctor.”

            “You put that in the past tense. Not now?”

            “You seem looser.”

            “Is that good?”

            “Yes, I can feel you better now.” She shifted her gaze away from Steve and looked over at the bar. “I know I should stop talking about Walker, but I think I’m in love with him.”

            “Is he in love with you?”

            “He hasn’t said so.”

            “Have you?”

            “I can talk to him about all sorts of things, but it’s hard finding a way talking about that.”

#

            On weekends they took drives in the countryside. At the outset they talked about her week. Lectures. Job applicants. A student she would like to get into Harvard for graduate school. The look on his face was not encouraging as he listened; it was an old, slack, disappointed look. She worried that to him the Berkshire region was a wrinkled patch of prettiness, gemütlichkeit. One Saturday she decided to push him.

            “The chief reason we’re out here going nowhere is because I thought you’d like wandering around with me, but we’re worlds apart.”

            “That’s your conclusion?”

            “That’s my conclusion. Why won’t you let me read what you write?”

            “I’ve told you—I don’t read it myself.”

            “You don’t ever go back and revise?”

            “No, it wouldn’t be there. Words are snakeskins, not the snake. The snake is gone.”

#

            He wrote that in South Sudan one family had much more food than anyone. The neighbors decided to pillage their larder. They moved like a school of fish. The family with the food resisted and got pushed away. People fled with bags of sugar and flour and cans of soup and juice. He called in what was happening. Help arrived after the food was all gone, and the pillaged tent was stripped clean. The blankets and cookware, too. The matriarch of the tent clutched a plastic jug of water between her legs. All she had left to defend.

#

            “Where did you spend the night?” he asked.

            “Steve was helping me figure things out. I drank too much and crashed at his place. Is that a problem?”

            “No, not a problem,” he said.

            “Here’s what I came up with,” she said. “It’s not a conclusion. I’m done with conclusions. It’s a wish. I wish you’d accept the fact that this long walk of yours is over.”

            “What do you think that would lead to?”

            “Maybe to me, or maybe not. Maybe some kind of new you.”

            They spent a moment considering what that might mean.

            “What was it like sleeping with him again?”

            She didn’t pretend she hadn’t. “I feel stupid and guilty about it.” 

            “No reason for that.”

            “Oh, come on, Walker. Is this going to work?”

            “I don’t know.”

            “How long until you do know?” she asked.

            “Not much longer,” he said. “I can feel it coming to an end.”

            “What’s ending? Us, or you writing instead of living?”

            “Writing.”

            “Because your foot is better, and you want to move on?”

            “I don’t want to say that.”

            “Because you don’t know, or you don’t want to hurt me?”

            “Both.”

#

            He walked into the kitchen, removed his boot and sock, and filled a large plastic tub with ice cubes. He eased his foot through the ice cubes to the bottom of the tub. As the cold took over, the cramping subsided. He leaned sideways in his chair and opened the refrigerator door and grabbed a bottle of white wine and a block of white cheddar cheese, which he unwrapped and broke into pieces with his thumb and forefinger. He took sips of wine from the bottle to swish down each bite of cheese. She came in and joined him. He said he was getting much better. What did much better mean, she asked, other than being able to hobble farther than he could when they flew back from the U.K.? He said it couldn’t mean going back to South Sudan, but he still wanted to go to Ethiopia. She said if he ever got around to it, she would go along so she could look into the Tigray conflict. She got took two wine glasses and filled them and took a cutting board off its hook on the wall and got a knife from the drawer and put the block of cheese on it and sliced it. She said a long flight to anywhere in Africa would be terrible for his foot. They would have to go business class at least so that he could elevate it. He said that would be fine, but he wasn’t ready to go back to Africa.

            She opened another bottle of wine and brought out some crackers and emptied the tub of ice and kneeled to slip his sock back on. He squeezed her head between his knees and tugged her up toward him. For God’s sake, she said. His face was smothered against her breasts. Her head rested on his shoulder.

#

            He bought a van and slept in the back. Sometimes, to give himself a break, he spent the night in a motel. Either way, he liked waking up and moving along, looking at things, letting them slide into and out of view. He bought some fishing gear and stayed in parks that had lakes. He thought about buying a farm with a lake and did so. The farm was in the North Carolina. He leased his barn and pastures to a real farmer. They stayed in touch. She sent him photos of her first child, then her second, and news of her divorce. He told her he had room for them. She said she still had room for him. That is how it went on. In the morning, he talked to the farmer and looked at the cows and horses and then made himself a second cup of coffee and went outside and looked at them some more.

BIO

Robert Earle’s short fiction has appeared in scores of literary journals, including Mississippi Review, I-70 Review, Eclectica, december, Baltimore Review, Philadelphia Stories, Seattle Star, Florida English, Southwest Texas Literary Review, The Common, The Literary Review, Quarterly West, Inkwell, Main Street Rag, Ocotillo Review, Chiron Review, and many others. He lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.