Her Journey Westward
Lamar Herein
She had never been in Texas before, and that night as she'd slept in a Texarkana Holiday Inn it had sleeted and snowed. No one had told her the winters in Texas were severe. She knew the state was large, and she'd given them a full day to drive from Texarkana to El Paso, where Raymond and Esther Ghesterson would not be waiting for them because she had not specified a date, only the chance that after 32 years it might happen. "Don't be surprised if you see us sometime this winter," she'd written at the bottom of this year's Christmas card, but no one had mentioned the terrible weather. The expressway was icy. Her husband, Wally Bartow, had been in his day perhaps the steadiest driver in Alabama and Tennessee—half his professional life had been spent on the road—but his day was almost over. Hard to say, but it was. As was hers. In some ways, an obligation to say, for she believed too much silliness and too much suffering resulted from a daily self-deception about youth and age, and she refused to get caught in the national game. Her mind was clear. She would die when her body broke. Her body would break when she exceeded her body's capacity. "Relax," she told her husband who was gripping the wheel and setting his jaw against the day to come, "drive more slowly. We've got a ways to go."
