Read Blue Highways: A Journey Into America Page 52


  About 1952, the couple fired up the old sideshow truck and sputtered four miles north into the woods where the wagon would “endure yearly baptisms from Smackover Creek” for the next half century. Charley, ill, his wick burning short, became more approachable and less intent on his wife’s quarantine. Perhaps he, well into his eighties, was seeing the end, or maybe his jealousy just plain wore out with his body. A few volunteers, Don Lambert among them, built onto the Model T a small side room made from the old fence planks. It was little more than a hovel. Apparently, Charley lived in it while Rhene continued to reside in the show wagon. Lambert wrote that the couple, once away from Poplar Street, “seemed happy with their circumstances. They entertained whenever anyone cared to visit by showing silent movies followed by Rhene’s musical presentations.” She and her herd, visible to travelers on Route 7, became an inadvertent wayside attraction, and the medicine-show truck, a landmark; even yet in Camden, citizens speak of how they would put on the brakes to gape at the one they still call the “Goat Woman.”

  Not long after the move to the boggy, frog-riddled creek bank, Charley died, and Rhene’s story shifted unpredictably once more. Now into her fifties, she forsook hermitry and stepped out of her unexplained shackles and commenced reclaiming the life she’d been educated for. She began performing on a local television morning show that aired her singing, accompanied by her own hand and sometimes by one of her goats which would, said Lambert, “join in songs with distinctive bleats at all the appropriate intervals.” The village seemed to accept the lady who could so single-handedly divert them through one means or another, even if she remained the Goat Woman and they appeared to countenance her amusements much as a street-side audience does an organ-grinder’s monkey: “Why, look at that little thing bang those cymbals!”

  Although no longer sequestered, Rhene continued to live apart, and I don’t believe she entirely slipped the village tether; rather, she found ways to express herself within its constriction, not letting it choke off her song. She continued lifting her seven instruments until her final few years when true dementia dropped a slow curtain down over her bright performances, and she went into a nursing home, and there she died at eighty-three.

  Also by William Least Heat-Moon

  PrairyErth

  River-Horse

  Columbus in the Americas

  Roads to Quoz

  Praise for William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways

  “Some men, when they lose their jobs and wives, take to drink and go to the dogs. When William Least Heat-Moon lost his, he took to the road and went to Subtle, Neon, and Mouthcard, Ky.; to Dull, Weakly, and Only, Tenn.; to Dime Box, Tex., Scratch Ankle, Ala., and Gnawbone, Ind. He wrote a book about his travels in order to find out where he was trying to arrive at and called it Blue Highways, because on old maps the back roads were colored in blue. The book is wonderful.”

  —Anatole Broyard, New York Times

  “Plenty of plain good old entertainment. Heat-Moon has a penchant for humor; a zanier cast of characters has rarely been paraded before modern-day readers.”

  —David G. Wilck, Christian Science Monitor

  “A masterpiece… a magnificent and unique tour.”

  —Robert Penn Warren

  “We have a whole literature of ‘on the road’ books. Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley is one of the best, and William Least Heat-Moon is even better.”

  —Norbert Blei, Chicago Sun-Times

  “William Least Heat-Moon writes with true heat and pungency about an America that scarcely anybody knows about, an America that we have been led to believe no longer exists….An overwhelming book.”

  —Jim Harrison

  “Wondrous… brilliant… a stunningly good book…. Reading Blue Highways made me go back and look at Jack Kerouac’s On the Road to see if Mr. Heat-Moon does as well. He does far better.”

  —Noel Perrin, New York Times Book Review

  “It’s a beauty, a true delight on every page.”

  —Walker Percy

  “The real life of the book… lies in the amazing variety of American originals the lonely and curious author meets along the way….Heat-Moon has the judgment to step aside and let them tell their own often remarkable stories in their own words. The results are unexpected and sometimes very funny.”

  —Gene Lyons, Newsweek

  “If you would like to know who and what America is at the center, read this book. This is what we, as a people, are about.”

  —N. Scott Momaday

  “William Least Heat-Moon has gone on quest, on the thin blue highways of America that drift like smoke….He has come back and turned the quest around, and made a gift to us…. Heat-Moon walks through this book about our land and our people with a patient, eloquent, beautiful pace, his eyes taking in everything and its meaning. Then he puts our words and our vistas into language that lives on the page.”

  —Michael Parfit, Los Angeles Times Book Review

  Contents

  Welcome

  Dedication

  Blue Highways

  ONE: EASTWARD

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  TWO: EAST BY SOUTHEAST

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  THREE: SOUTH BY SOUTHEAST

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  FOUR: SOUTH BY SOUTHWEST

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  FIVE: WEST BY SOUTHWEST

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  SIX: WEST BY NORTHWEST

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  SEVEN: NORTH BY NORTHWEST

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15


  Chapter 16

  EIGHT: NORTH BY NORTHEAST

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  NINE: EAST BY NORTHEAST

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  TEN: WESTWARD

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Lines from a Navajo Wind Chant

  Map

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Preview of Roads to Quoz

  Also by William Least Heat-Moon

  Praise for William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways

  Copyright

  Copyright

  Copyright © 1982, 1999 by William Least Heat-Moon

  Excerpt from Roads to Quoz copyright © 2008 by William Least Heat-Moon

  Author photograph by Newman Richardson

  Cover design by John Fulbrook III; cover illustration by Paul Bacon

  Cover copyright © 2012 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  www.hachettebookgroup.com

  www.twitter.com/littlebrown

  First e-book edition: April 2012

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  The Hachette Speakers Bureau provides a wide range of authors for speaking events. To find out more, go to www.hachettespeakersbureau.com or call (866) 376-6591.

  Portions of this book appeared in The Atlantic.

  “Daniel Boone” by Stephen Vincent Benét

  From: A Book of Americans by Rosemary & Stephen Vincent Benét

  Copyright 1933 by Rosemary & Stephen Vincent Benét

  Copyright renewed © 1961 by Rosemary Carr Benét

  Reprinted by permission of Brandt & Brandt Literary Agents, Inc.

  ISBN 978-0-316-21854-2

 


 

  William Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways: A Journey Into America

 


 

 
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