Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon Read Free Book Online

said, “If you get back this way, stop in and see me. Always got beans and taters and a little piece of meat.”
    Down along the ridge, I wondered why it’s always those who live on little who are the ones to ask you to dinner.

16
    N AMELESS , Tennessee, was a town of maybe ninety people if you pushed it, a dozen houses along the road, a couple of barns, same number of churches, a general merchandise store selling Fire Chief gasoline, and a community center with a lighted volleyball court. Behind the center was an open-roof, rusting metal privy with PAINT ME on the door; in the hollow of a nearby oak lay a full pint of Jack Daniel’s Black Label. From the houses, the odor of coal smoke.
    Next to a red tobacco barn stood the general merchandise with a poster of Senator Albert Gore, Jr., smiling from the window. I knocked. The door opened partway. A tall, thin man said, “Closed up. For good,” and started to shut the door.
    “Don’t want to buy anything. Just a question for Mr. Thurmond Watts.”
    The man peered through the slight opening. He looked me over. “What question would that be?”
    “If this is Nameless, Tennessee, could he tell me how it got that name?”
    The man turned back into the store and called out, “Miss Ginny! Somebody here wants to know how Nameless come to be Nameless.”
    Miss Ginny edged to the door and looked me and my truck over. Clearly, she didn’t approve. She said, “You know as well as I do, Thurmond. Don’t keep him on the stoop in the damp to tell him.” Miss Ginny, I found out, was Mrs. Virginia Watts, Thurmond’s wife.
    I stepped in and they both began telling the story, adding a detail here, the other correcting a fact there, both smiling at the foolishness of it all. It seems the hilltop settlement went for years without a name. Then one day the Post Office Department told the people if they wanted mail up on the mountain they would have to give the place a name you could properly address a letter to. The community met; there were only a handful, but they commenced debating. Some wanted patriotic names, some names from nature, one man recommended in all seriousness his own name. They couldn’t agree, and they ran out of names to argue about. Finally, a fellow tired of the talk; he didn’t like the mail he received anyway. “Forget the durn Post Office,” he said. “This here’s a nameless place if I ever seen one, so leave it be.” And that’s just what they did.
    Watts pointed out the window. “We used to have signs on the road, but the Halloween boys keep tearin’ them down.”
    “You think Nameless is a funny name,” Miss Ginny said. “I see it plain in your eyes. Well, you take yourself up north a piece to Difficult or Defeated or Shake Rag. Now them are silly names.”
    The old store, lighted only by three fifty-watt bulbs, smelled of coal oil and baking bread. In the middle of the rectangular room, where the oak floor sagged a little, stood an iron stove. To the right was a wooden table with an unfinished game of checkers and a stool made from an apple-tree stump. On shelves around the walls sat earthen jugs with corncob stoppers, a few canned goods, and some of the two thousand old clocks and clockworks Thurmond Watts owned. Only one was ticking; the others he just looked at. I asked how long he’d been in the store.
    “Thirty-five years, but we closed the first day of the year. We’re hopin’ to sell it to a churchly couple. Upright people. No athians.”
    “Did you build this store?”
    “I built this one, but it’s the third general store on the ground. I fear it’ll be the last. I take no pleasure in that. Once you could come in here for a gallon of paint, a pickle, a pair of shoes, and a can of corn.”
    “Or horehound candy,” Miss Ginny said. “Or corsets and salves. We had cough syrups and all that for the body. In season, we’d buy and sell blackberries and walnuts and chestnuts, before the blight got them. And outside, Thurmond