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

had changed. “Miss Ginny’s
Deathbook
.”
    The thing startled me. Was it something I was supposed to sign? He opened it but said nothing. There were scads of names written in a tidy hand over pages incised to crinkliness by a ballpoint. Chronologically, the names had piled up: wives, grandparents, a stillborn infant, relatives, friends close and distant. Names, names. After each, the date of
the
unknown finally known and transcribed. The last entry bore yesterday’s date.
    “She’s wrote out twenty years’ worth. Ever day she listens to the hospital report on the radio and puts the names in. Folks come by to check a date. Or they just turn through the books. Read them like a scrapbook.”
    Hilda said, “Like Saint Peter at the gates inscribin’ the names.”
    Watts took my arm. “Come along.” He led me to the fruit cellar under the store. As we went down, he said, “Always take a newborn baby upstairs afore you take him downstairs, otherwise you’ll incline him downwards.”
    The cellar was dry and full of cobwebs and jar after jar of home-canned food, the bottles organized as a shopkeeper would: sausage, pumpkin, sweet pickles, tomatoes, corn relish, blackberries, peppers, squash, jellies. He held a hand out toward the dusty bottles. “Our tomorrows.”
    Upstairs again, he said, “Hope to sell the store to the right folk. I see now, though, it’ll be somebody offen the ridge. I’ve studied on it, and maybe it’s the end of our place.” He stirred the coals. “This store could give a comfortable livin’, but not likely get you rich. But just gettin’ by is dice rollin’ to people nowadays. I never did see my day guaranteed.”
    When it was time to go, Watts said, “If you find anyone along your way wants a good store—on the road to Cordell Hull Lake—tell them about us.”
    I said I would. Miss Ginny and Hilda and Marilyn came out to say goodbye. It was cold and drizzling again. “Weather to give a man the weary dismals,” Watts grumbled. “Where you headed from here?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Cain’t get lost then.”
    Miss Ginny looked again at my rig. It had worried her from the first as it had my mother. “I hope you don’t get yourself kilt in that durn thing gallivantin’ around the country.”
    “Come back when the hills dry off,” Watts said. “We’ll go lookin’ for some of them round rocks all sparkly inside.”
    I thought a moment. “Geodes?”
    “Them’s the ones. The county’s properly full of them.”

17
    C OOKEVILLE : Easter morning and cold as the bottom of Dante’s Hell. Winter had returned from somewhere, whistling thin, bluish snowflakes along the ground, bowing the jonquils. I couldn’t warm up. The night had been full of dreams moving through my sleep like schools of ocean fish that dart this way, turn suddenly another way, never resting. I hung in the old depths, the currents bending and enfolding me as the sea does fronds of eelgrass.
    Route 62 went across the Cumberland Plateau strip-mining country and up into the mountains again. In the absence of billboards were small, ineptly lettered signs: USED FURNITURE, HOT SANDWITCHES, TURKEY SHOOT SATERDAY (NO DRINKING ALOUD). It was like reading over someone’s shoulder.
    Wartburg, on the edge of the dark Cumberlands, dripped in a cold mist blowing down off the knobs. Cafes closed, I had no choice but to go back into the wet mountain gloom. Under massive walls of black shale hanging above the road like threats, the highway turned ugly past Frozen Head State Park; at each trash dumpster pullout, soggy sofas or chairs lay encircled by dismal, acrid smoke from smoldering junk. Golden Styrofoam from Big Mac containers blew about as if Zeus had just raped Danae. Shoot the Hamburglar on sight.
    The mountains opened, and Oak Ridge, a town the federal government hid away in the southern Appalachians during the Second World War for the purpose of carving a future out of pitchblende, lay below. Here, scientists