To the rider of back roads, nothing shows the tone, the voice of a small town more quickly than the breakfast grill or the five-thirty tavern. Much of what the people do and believe and share is evident then. The City Cafe in Gainesboro had three calendars that I could see from the walk. Inside were no interstate refugees with full bladders and empty tanks, no wild-eyed children just released from the glassy cell of a stationwagon backseat, no longhaul truckers talking in CB numbers. There were only townspeople wearing overalls, or catalog-order suits with five-and-dime ties, or uniforms. That is, here were farmers and mill hands, bank clerks, the dry goods merchant, a policeman, and chiropractor’s receptionist. Because it was Saturday, there were also mothers and children.
I ordered my standard on-the-road breakfast: two eggs up, hashbrowns, tomato juice. The waitress, whose pale, almost translucent skin shifted hue in the gray light like a thin slice of mother of pearl, brought the food. Next to the eggs was a biscuit with a little yellow Smiley button stuck in it. She said, “You from the North?”
“I guess I am.” A Missourian gets used to Southerners thinking him a Yankee, a Northerner considering him a cracker, a Westerner sneering at his effete Easternness, and the Easterner taking him for a cowhand.
“So whata you doin’ in the mountains?”
“Talking to people. Taking some pictures. Looking mostly.”
“Lookin’ for what?”
“A three-calendar cafe that serves Smiley buttons on the biscuits.”
“You needed a smile. Tell me really.”
“I don’t know. Actually, I’m looking for some jam to put on this biscuit now that you’ve brought one.”
She came back with grape jelly. In a land of quince jelly, apple butter, apricot jam, blueberry preserves, pear conserves, and lemon marmalade, you always get grape jelly.
“Whata you lookin’ for?”
Like anyone else, I’m embarrassed to eat in front of a watcher, particularly if I’m getting interviewed. “Why don’t you have a cup of coffee?”
“Cain’t right now. You gonna tell me?”
“I don’t know how to describe it to you. Call it harmony.”
She waited for something more. “Is that it?” Someone called her to the kitchen. I had managed almost to finish by the time she came back. She sat on the edge of the booth. “I started out in life not likin’ anything, but then it grew on me. Maybe that’ll happen to you.” She watched me spread the jelly. “Saw your van.” She watched me eat the biscuit. “You sleep in there?” I told her I did. “I’d love to do that, but I’d be scared spitless.”
“I don’t mind being scared spitless. Sometimes.”
“I’d love to take off cross country. I like to look at different license plates. But I’d take a dog. You carry a dog?”
“No dogs, no cats, no budgie birds. It’s a one-man campaign to show Americans a person can travel alone without a pet.”
“Cain’t travel without a dog!”
“I like to do things the hard way.”
“Shoot! I’d take me a dog to talk to. And for protection.”
“It isn’t traveling to cross the country and talk to your pug instead of people along the way. Besides, being alone on the road makes you ready to meet someone when you stop. You get sociable traveling alone.”
She looked out toward the van again. “Time I get the nerve to take a trip, gas’ll cost five dollars a gallon.”
“Could be. My rig might go the way of the steamboat.” I remembered why I’d come to Gainesboro. “You know the way to Nameless?”
“Nameless? I’ve heard of Nameless. Better ask the amlance driver in the corner booth.” She pinned the Smiley on my jacket. “Maybe I’ll see you on the road somewhere. His name’s Bob, by the way.”
“The ambulance driver?”
“The Smiley. I always name my Smileys—otherwise they all look alike. I’d talk to him before you go.”
“The Smiley?”
“The amlance driver.”
And so I went looking for Nameless, Tennessee, with a Smiley button named Bob.
15
“I DON’T know if I got directions for where you’re goin’,” the ambulance driver said. “I think there’s a Nameless down the Shepardsville Road.”
“When I get to Shepardsville, will I have gone too far?”
“Ain’t no Shepardsville.”
“How will I know when I’m there?”
“Cain’t say for certain.”
“What’s Nameless look like?”
“Don’t recollect.”
“Is the road paved?”
“It’s possible.”
Those were the directions. I was looking for an unnumbered road named after a nonexistent town that would take me to a place called Nameless that nobody was sure existed.
Clumps of wild garlic lined the county highway that I hoped was the Shepardsville Road. It scrimmaged with the mountain as it tried to stay on top of the ridges; the hillsides were so steep and thick with oak, I felt as if I were following a trail through the misty treetops. Chickens, doing more work with their necks than legs, ran across the road, and, with a battering of wings, half leapt and half flew into the lower branches of oaks. A vicious pair of mixed-breed German shepherds raced along trying to eat the tires. After miles, I decided I’d missed the town—assuming there truly was a Nameless, Tennessee. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d qualified for the Ponce de Leon Believe Anything Award.
I stopped beside a big man loading tools in a pickup. “I may be lost.”
“Where’d you lose the right road?”
“I don’t know. Somewhere around nineteen sixty-five.”
“Highway fifty-six, you mean?”
“I came down fifty-six. I think I should’ve turned at the last junction.”
“Only thing down that road’s stumps and huckleberries, and the berries ain’t there in March. Where you tryin’ to get to?”
“Nameless. If there is such a place.”
“You might not know Thurmond Watts, but he’s got him a store down the road. That’s Nameless at his store. Still there all right, but I might not vouch you that tomorrow.” He came up to the van. “In my Army days, I wrote Nameless, Tennessee, for my place of birth on all the papers, even though I lived on this end of the ridge. All these ridges and hollers got names of their own. That’s Steam Mill Holler over yonder. Named after the steam engine in the gristmill. Miller had him just one arm but done a good business.”
“What business you in?”
“I’ve always farmed, but I work in Cookeville now in a heatin’ element factory. Bad back made me go to town to work.” He pointed to a wooden building not much bigger than his truck. By the slanting porch, a faded Double Cola sign said J M WHEELER STORE. “That used to be my business. That’s me—Madison Wheeler. Feller came by one day. From Detroit. He wanted to buy the sign because he carried my name too. But I didn’t sell. Want to keep my name up.” He gave a cigarette a good slow smoking. “Had a decent business for five years, but too much of it was in credit. Then them supermarkets down in Cookeville opened, and I was buyin’ higher than they was sellin’. With these hard roads now, everybody gets out of the hollers to shop or work. Don’t stay up in here anymore. This tar road under my shoes done my business in, and it’s likely to do Nameless in.”
“Do you wish it was still the old way?”
3. Madison Wheeler outside Nameless, Tennessee
“I got no debts now. I got two boys raised, and they never been in trouble. I got a brick house and some corn and tobacco and a few Hampshire hogs and Herefords. A good bull. Bull’s pumpin’ better blood than I do. Real generous man in town let me put my cow in with his stud. I couldna paid the fee on that specimen otherwise.” He took another long, meditative pull on his filtertip. “If you’re satisfied, that’s all they are to it. I’ll tell you, people from all over the nation—Florida, Mississippi—are comin’ in here to retire because it’s good country. But our young ones don�
�t stay on. Not much way to make a livin’ in here anymore. Take me. I been beatin’ on these stumps all my life, tryin’ to farm these hills. They don’t give much up to you. Fightin’ rocks and briars all the time. One of the first things I recollect is swingin’ a briar blade—filed out of an old saw it was. Now they come in with them crawlers and push out a pasture in a day. Still, it’s a grudgin’ land—like the gourd. Got to hard cuss gourd seed, they say, to get it up out of the ground.”
The whole time, my rig sat in the middle of the right lane while we stood talking next to it and wiped at the mist. No one else came or went. Wheeler said, “Factory work’s easier on the back, and I don’t mind it, understand, but a man becomes what he does. Got to watch that. That’s why I keep at farmin’, although the crops haven’t ever throve. It’s the doin’ that’s important.” He looked up suddenly. “My apologies. I didn’t ask what you do that gets you into these hollers.”
I told him. I’d been gone only six days, but my account of the trip already had taken on some polish.
He nodded. “Satisfaction is doin’ what’s important to yourself. A man ought to honor other people, but he’s got to honor what he believes in too.”
As I started the engine, Wheeler 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
NAMELESS, 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 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 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.”
Blue Highways: A Journey Into America Page 4