Mountain Walks

My papaw’s hand steadily gripped the walking stick: a whittled wooden branch the perfect shape and length to suit his height, decorated below the handle with swirling carvings, stained dark, a rubber stopper on the end and a cushion of duct tape, which could fix anything according to Papaw, where it met his hands.  The rocks below my feet crunched as I tried to stay in step with him, his strides so much longer than my own. The path was familiar. The tire treads from our many rides in the old black jeep still stretched fresh upon the dirt and gravel trails of my memory, but I knew this time the trail would feel different. I looked over to my papaw but my hands felt empty.
“Don’t I get a walking stick too, Pap?” I asked him, feeling jealous.
“Huh?” He looked at me and teased, “You need a stick to get up the mountain?”
“Well, you’ve got one,” I replied. He walked over to where the stream ran beside the trees and cracked a branch off for me. It was a little crooked and it wasn’t as pretty as his, but it seemed like it would do all right, so I didn’t complain.
Shadows of leaves danced on the ground and I danced with them, picking up rocks, inspecting and claiming them as my own. My papaw would laugh from time to time at my discoveries and we would chat as we raced slowly upward, a marathon-- the sticks in first place and Papaw and me falling in at second and third.  He wore his usual blue and red plaid shirt with rolled up sleeves tucked into his blue jeans held firmly with a black belt under his protruding belly, and black work shoes. I was in jean shorts, a tank top and flip flops. We were quite a pair; he told me that we needed to do this to stay in shape, laughing. I knew that he was being silly and trying to tease me about being skinny, but I had noticed that he had started losing weight. His belly had gotten smaller, and his face was skinnier, which pronounced his wrinkles. He had stopped smoking, but every now and then he would spit out that brown juice from “baccar” as he called it. Every now and then he would stop and point out deer tracks on the ground and I hoped with all of my might that we might see one.
“Where are we going to turn around, Papaw?” I knew that some of the trails on the mountain went all the way around and came out the other side, but I was hoping that we weren’t going to walk that far.
“At the well,” he replied. I had always wondered why it was called the well. It didn’t look like a normal well, the kind with a bucket and a dark hole that you could whisper down into and have it echo all the way back up. That well was made of brightly painted orange pipes that stuck up from the ground like in the Mario games. It just didn’t make sense to me.
“Let’s take a break here,” Papaw said, so we stopped. We were about halfway there. The ground was flat along this part of the trail and there were no trees to block out the sun so the warmth of the sunlight hugged our bodies like a fresh blanket. The air was thick with so much humidity that you could drink it through a straw. Papaw and I used our walking sticks like crutches to hold us steady. Through the surrounding woods, a grassy meadow peeked out but disappeared downward into a slope off the path. The mountains melted into one another against the streams that connected them. Water trickled down below where we stood. Papaw pointed to the far side of the mountain. “Do you see that over there?”
“What?? What, is it a deer??” I asked excitedly.
Again, he laughed. “No. My aunt had a house, right over there, a long time ago.” He leaned on his crutch and squinted his eyes, making the wrinkles on his face become valleys and mountains, like a physical map. He pulled out a white hankie and wiped the sweat collecting on his forehead below his perfectly parted black hair.
“Over there?” I asked, bewildered.
“Yes, over there,” he replied. “If you look really close you can still see the chimney from the house.”
“That pile of rocks?” I gasped, my voice rising with every new detail.
“Yes.” He laughed, and his whole body moved. I thought his laugh was like Santa Clause’s, jolly, and it just made me want to smile when I heard it.
“But… what happened to the rest of it?”
“It just got old because no one took care of it and it rotted away,” he stated matter-of-factly.
“That sounds sad,” I replied, still wondering why someone would build a house so far out of the way. I imagined myself as his aunt as a young girl living there in a long dress like Laura Ingalls wore with a bonnet to protect my face from the sun. I imagined them hunting all of their food and traveling down the mountain to town on horseback. I could see the mountain without wells made of pipes and four wheelers chasing one another sending flying dust all over the plants. The sounds were all natural, chickens scratching the ground, woodpeckers drilling holes into the trees for food, and water gushing down the mountain. 
“Maybe one day I’ll take you over there,” he said.
“But, how are we supposed to get all the way over there?”
“I know the way.” He smiled, and I knew that he would find somehow to get us over there one day.
We turned and continued up the mountain. Our stamina was slowly decreasing; the sticks began to carry much more of our weight. The sticks thudded against the rocks and dirt and our feet made a sliding shifting noise as we shuffled one after the other up through the dirt, the gasps of our laborious breathing echoed the wind rustling through the trees. The sun had crawled over the shade of the trees and was riding on our backs up the mountain. The mountain climbed through our bodies, changing us as we climbed up to our stopping point.
At last the orange pipes were in sight. We stopped for a break and sat down on some cut logs alongside the trail. I looked ahead. Past the well, the path split into what I called the smooth road and the bumpy road. I would always beg Papaw to take the bumpy road because it was more fun to sit in the back of the jeep and say words really slowly because it caused the sound of your voice to go “Ah-ah-ah-ah-ahhhh-ah-ah-ah.” I would often sing one of my favorite songs to see how different it sounded while my papaw drove onward. However, the best part about the bumpy road was the end. When you stepped out of the jeep to stretch your legs, there waiting for you were what seemed to be millions upon millions of blackberries. Papaw and I would sit and pick the blackberries until both our hands and our faces would turn purple with their sweet, sticky juice. I looked up the bumpy road and could taste the blackberries in my mouth, the way my tongue would run over the small round humps that held their juice, and the way they would squirt inside my mouth when I bit into them.
“Papaw, couldn’t we go up the bumpy road and get some blackberries?” I asked.
“If we tried to walk up that road, Myrealdy, we probably wouldn’t be able to make it back,” he chuckled. “Besides, Mamaw probably will have supper cooked by the time we get back up the holler.” We both sighed.
“Some blackberries do sound good right about now, though,” I looked back again to the bumpy road.
“They sure do,” he agreed, taking out his hankie again to wipe the sweat from his forehead. He took off his plaid shirt, to carry on the way back. Beneath his undershirt a wide scar cut into his chest, from open-heart surgery. He leaned forward, using both the log and the walking stick to pick himself up. “Let’s head home.”
The sunlight continued westward upon its normal path in the sky as we turned back through the arching trees to lead us back to air conditioning and home cooked meals. We stepped lighter as we dreamed of all the food that waited for us at home. It wasn’t long before I gave in to the downward slope and broke into a run, my heart beating wildly against my chest. Papaw kept his steady walking pace: falling further behind me with each of my strides, supportive, warning me to be careful. We were an unlikely duo; but we needed to stay in shape. The mountain had called to us that morning, and we had conquered it step by step through the sunlight and shade. However, one thought echoed in my brain with each of my rushed footsteps: home, home, home.