About 1952, the couple fired up the old sideshow truck and sputtered four miles north into the woods where the wagon would “endure yearly baptisms from Smackover Creek” for the next half century. Charley, ill, his wick burning short, became more approachable and less intent on his wife’s quarantine. Perhaps he, well into his eighties, was seeing the end, or maybe his jealousy just plain wore out with his body. A few volunteers, Don Lambert among them, built onto the Model T a small side room made from the old fence planks. It was little more than a hovel. Apparently, Charley lived in it while Rhene continued to reside in the show wagon. Lambert wrote that the couple, once away from Poplar Street, “seemed happy with their circumstances. They entertained whenever anyone cared to visit by showing silent movies followed by Rhene’s musical presentations.” She and her herd, visible to travelers on Route 7, became an inadvertent wayside attraction, and the medicine-show truck, a landmark; even yet in Camden, citizens speak of how they would put on the brakes to gape at the one they still call the “Goat Woman.”
Not long after the move to the boggy, frog-riddled creek bank, Charley died, and Rhene’s story shifted unpredictably once more. Now into her fifties, she forsook hermitry and stepped out of her unexplained shackles and commenced reclaiming the life she’d been educated for. She began performing on a local television morning show that aired her singing, accompanied by her own hand and sometimes by one of her goats which would, said Lambert, “join in songs with distinctive bleats at all the appropriate intervals.” The village seemed to accept the lady who could so single-handedly divert them through one means or another, even if she remained the Goat Woman and they appeared to countenance her amusements much as a street-side audience does an organ-grinder’s monkey: “Why, look at that little thing bang those cymbals!”
Although no longer sequestered, Rhene continued to live apart, and I don’t believe she entirely slipped the village tether; rather, she found ways to express herself within its constriction, not letting it choke off her song. She continued lifting her seven instruments until her final few years when true dementia dropped a slow curtain down over her bright performances, and she went into a nursing home, and there she died at eighty-three.
Also by William Least Heat-Moon
PrairyErth
River-Horse
Columbus in the Americas
Roads to Quoz
Praise for William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways
“Some men, when they lose their jobs and wives, take to drink and go to the dogs. When William Least Heat-Moon lost his, he took to the road and went to Subtle, Neon, and Mouthcard, Ky.; to Dull, Weakly, and Only, Tenn.; to Dime Box, Tex., Scratch Ankle, Ala., and Gnawbone, Ind. He wrote a book about his travels in order to find out where he was trying to arrive at and called it Blue Highways, because on old maps the back roads were colored in blue. The book is wonderful.”
—Anatole Broyard, New York Times
“Plenty of plain good old entertainment. Heat-Moon has a penchant for humor; a zanier cast of characters has rarely been paraded before modern-day readers.”
—David G. Wilck, Christian Science Monitor
“A masterpiece… a magnificent and unique tour.”
—Robert Penn Warren
“We have a whole literature of ‘on the road’ books. Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley is one of the best, and William Least Heat-Moon is even better.”
—Norbert Blei, Chicago Sun-Times
“William Least Heat-Moon writes with true heat and pungency about an America that scarcely anybody knows about, an America that we have been led to believe no longer exists….An overwhelming book.”
—Jim Harrison
“Wondrous… brilliant… a stunningly good book…. Reading Blue Highways made me go back and look at Jack Kerouac’s On the Road to see if Mr. Heat-Moon does as well. He does far better.”
—Noel Perrin, New York Times Book Review
“It’s a beauty, a true delight on every page.”
—Walker Percy
“The real life of the book… lies in the amazing variety of American originals the lonely and curious author meets along the way….Heat-Moon has the judgment to step aside and let them tell their own often remarkable stories in their own words. The results are unexpected and sometimes very funny.”
—Gene Lyons, Newsweek
“If you would like to know who and what America is at the center, read this book. This is what we, as a people, are about.”
—N. Scott Momaday
“William Least Heat-Moon has gone on quest, on the thin blue highways of America that drift like smoke….He has come back and turned the quest around, and made a gift to us…. Heat-Moon walks through this book about our land and our people with a patient, eloquent, beautiful pace, his eyes taking in everything and its meaning. Then he puts our words and our vistas into language that lives on the page.”
—Michael Parfit, Los Angeles Times Book Review
Contents
Welcome
Dedication
Blue Highways
ONE: EASTWARD
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
TWO: EAST BY SOUTHEAST
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
THREE: SOUTH BY SOUTHEAST
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
FOUR: SOUTH BY SOUTHWEST
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
FIVE: WEST BY SOUTHWEST
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
SIX: WEST BY NORTHWEST
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
SEVEN: NORTH BY NORTHWEST
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
EIGHT: NORTH BY NORTHEAST
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
NINE: EAST BY NORTHEAST
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
TEN: WESTWARD
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Lines from a Navajo Wind Chant
Map
Afterword
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Preview of Roads to Quoz
Also by William Least Heat-Moon
Praise for William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways
Copyright
Copyright
Copyright © 1982, 1999 by William Least Heat-Moon
Excerpt from Roads to Quoz copyright © 2008 by William Least Heat-Moon
Author photograph by Newman Richardson
Cover design by John Fulbrook III; cover illustration by Paul Bacon
Cover copyright © 2012 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
Little, Brown and Company
Hachette Book Group
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First e-book edition: April 2012
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Portions of this book appeared in The Atlantic.
“Daniel Boone” by Stephen Vincent Benét
From: A Book of Americans by Rosemary & Stephen Vincent Benét
Copyright 1933 by Rosemary & Stephen Vincent Benét
Copyright renewed © 1961 by Rosemary Carr Benét
Reprinted by permission of Brandt & Brandt Literary Agents, Inc.
ISBN 978-0-316-21854-2
Blue Highways: A Journey Into America Page 52