Heading Out to Wonderful by Robert Goolrick Read Free Book Online Page A

know what everybody in town knows.” She paused, as if she were trying to recall some tale, a myth she had heard as a child. “There’s a place about fifteen miles from here called Arnold’s Valley. It’s hard to get to, but it’s very wild and beautiful, lovely. It’s untouched by time, like Eden. I’ve only been there once, a long time ago. The same fifteen or sixteen families have lived there for generations, since before this town even started, and they don’t like strangers, and they don’t much like modern life.
    “Nobody goes there, except occasionally people from the state, who go and try to get them to send their children to school, and, for a couple of years, men from the army who tried to get the boys to sign up for the draft. The boys hid in the woods, until finally they were left alone. But, still, their children don’t go to school, and their boys never went to war. If anything goes wrong, they decide it themselves. When they marry, if they church marry at all out there, or if they die, they take care of everything themselves. Nothing leaves the valley.
    “Once in a while, you’ll see them in town, buying shoes, or sugar, things they can’t grow themselves. But not often.
    “Harrison Glass was a bachelor until he was forty-eight years old. He took care of his mother, I have to say that, a difficult woman who had spells and seizures and was not only sick but a hypochondriac. Thin and romantic, like she’d been planted in weak soil. And three weeks after she died and he watched her go into the ground, he drove out to Arnold’s Valley for the first time. Everybody thought he was going to buy some land there. He didn’t talk to anybody, and nobody talked to him, just watched that big car of his wander the dirt roads. But it wasn’t land he was after.
    “He went out twelve times, they say. On the third visit, he saw a girl walking in a yard, and then he went more often, and looked for her, in the yard, in the fields, sitting on the porch.
    “On the last visit, he stopped his car and got out in front of her house. He walked into the yard, knocked on the door, and spoke to her father. Then he bought her for cash, along with the farm neither one of them ever went back to I don’t believe, bought her for one or two thousand dollars, although it could have been more, could have been less. She was seventeen.”
    “He bought her like a head of cattle,” Will added.
    “That was three years ago. He brought her to town, and he married her. We went to the wedding, such as it was, Will and I. Except to say ‘I do,’ she never spoke one word during the whole day. Then he took her to the one place she wanted to go, Hollywood, so she could get on a bus and take a tour of the stars’ homes—five days out, a week there, and five days back.
    “And, since that time, she’s hasn’t spoken much more. He bought her her own car, and she drives into Lexington every other day to go to the movies. She’s crazy about the movies.
    “Her name is Sylvan. Isn’t that a lovely name? It might be her real name, some old mountain name, or she might have heard it on the radio or made it up out of some movie. Sylvan Glass.
    “She goes to the movies and sees some getup, or she cuts out a picture from a movie magazine, and then she gets a woman in town to make a five-and-dime version of what they wear in Hollywood. That’s how she learned to speak in that fancy way, first by listening to soap operas on the radio from the time she could walk, and then by watching movie stars, once Boaty got her that car.
    “And, yes, that is her real hair color. Everybody in Arnold’s Valley is blonde, pretty much. She’ll never go back there.”
    “Alma drove out there once, it’s that big house on the way to the slaughterhouse, and asked her to come into town and have an iced tea and a visit.” Will looked at his wife.
    “She said she’d be happy to,” Alma said, smiling. “Sweet as she could be. But she never came. I never