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

milled corn and sharpened plows. Even shoed a horse sometimes.”
    “We could fix up a horse or a man or a baby,” Watts said.
    “Thurmond, tell him we had a doctor on the ridge in them days.”
    “We had a doctor on the ridge in them days. As good as any doctor alivin’. He’d cut a crooked toenail or deliver a woman. Dead these last years.”
    “I got some bad ham meat one day,” Miss Ginny said, “and took to vomitin’. All day, all night. Hangin’ on the drop edge of yonder. I said to Thurmond, ‘Thurmond, unless you want shut of me, call the doctor.’”
    “I studied on it,” Watts said.
    “You never did. You got him right now. He come over and put three drops of iodeen in half a glass of well water. I drank it down and the vomitin’ stopped with the last swallow. Would you think iodeen could do that?”
    “He put Miss Ginny on one teaspoon of spirits of ammonia in well water for her nerves. Ain’t nothin’ works better for her to this day.”
    “Calms me like the hand of the Lord.”
    Hilda, the Wattses’ daughter, came out of the backroom. “I remember him,” she said. “I was just a baby. Y’all were talkin’ to him, and he lifted me up on the counter and gave me a stick of Juicy Fruit and a piece of cheese.”
    “Knew the old medicines,” Watts said. “Only drugstore he needed was a good kitchen cabinet. None of them antee-beeotics that hit you worsen your ailment. Forgotten lore now, the old medicines, because they ain’t profit in iodeen.”
    Miss Ginny started back to the side room where she and her sister Marilyn were taking apart a duck-down mattress to make bolsters. She stopped at the window for another look at Ghost Dancing. “How do you sleep in that thing? Ain’t you all cramped and cold?”
    “How does the clam sleep in his shell?” Watts said in my defense.
    “Thurmond, get the boy a piece of buttermilk pie afore he goes on.”
    “Hilda, get him some buttermilk pie.” He looked at me. “You like good music?” I said I did. He cranked up an old Edison phonograph, the kind with the big morning-glory blossom for a speaker, and put on a wax cylinder. “This will be ‘My Mother’s Prayer,’” he said.
    While I ate buttermilk pie, Watts served as disc jockey of Nameless, Tennessee. “Here’s ‘Mountain Rose.’” It was one of those moments that you know at the time will stay with you to the grave: the sweet pie, the gaunt man playing the old music, the coals in the stove glowing orange, the scent of kerosene and hot bread. “Here’s ‘Evening Rhapsody.’” The music was so heavily romantic we both laughed. I thought: It is for this I have come.
    Feathered over and giggling, Miss Ginny stepped from the side room. She knew she was a sight. “Thurmond, give him some lunch. Still looks hungry.”

    4. The Wattses: Marilyn, Thurmond, Virginia, and Hilda in Nameless, Tennessee
    Hilda pulled food off the woodstove in the backroom: home-butchered and canned whole-hog sausage, home-canned June apples, turnip greens, cole slaw, potatoes, stuffing, hot cornbread. All delicious.
    Watts and Hilda sat and talked while I ate. “Wish you would join me.”
    “We’ve ate,” Watts said. “Cain’t beat a woodstove for flavorful cookin’.”
    He told me he was raised in a one-hundred-fifty-year-old cabin still standing in one of the hollows. “How many’s left,” he said, “that grew up in a log cabin? I ain’t the last surely, but I must be climbin’ on the list.”
    Hilda cleared the table. “You Watts ladies know how to cook.”
    “She’s in nursin’ school at Tennessee Tech. I went over for one of them football games last year there at Coevul.” To say
Cookeville,
you let the word collapse in upon itself so that it comes out “Coevul.”
    “Do you like football?” I asked.
    “Don’t know. I was so high up in that stadium, I never opened my eyes.”
    Watts went to the back and returned with a fat spiral notebook that he set on the table. His expression