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

in the ancient millrace of Randolph Mills at Franklinville curled in slow menace like a fat water moccasin waiting for something to come to it. The mill ran on electricity now, and the race was a dead end—what went in didn’t come out. Inside, spoked flywheels tall as men spun, rumbling the wavy wooden floors and plankways, but no one was around. It seemed a ghost mill turned by Deep River. I knocked on the crooked pine doors; I tapped on a clouded window and pressed close to see in. On the other side, an old misshapen face looked back and made me jump.
    “Looking for Noel Jones!” I shouted.
    The face vanished and reappeared at a doorway. It said, “Gone home. First street over,” and disappeared again. I took the street, asked at a house, and found Jones at the end of the block.
    “I know the place you’re alookin’ for,” he said, “but I’m not up to goin’ back in there just now. Got a molar agivin’ me a deal of misery.”
    “I understand, but maybe you could describe the way.”
    He took off his cap and ran his hand over his head. “It’s possible to walk in. Not so far you cain’t. But directions gonna be hard. Sorry I cain’t take you.” He put his cap back on. “Tell you what. Get in my truck and I’ll show you where to start. It’ll keep my mind off this molar. One thing though, you got some work in front of you, son. And not aknowin’ the way, well, that’s a worry of its own.”
    In the warm afternoon, we followed a dirt road until it turned into a grassy trail so narrow the brush screeched against the windows. At a small clearing, he stopped. “This is my old family property,” he said. “Just down the hill you can see Sandy Crick. The old mill of yours musta been right along there. Let me show you somethin’ else.”
    We walked over to a cabin with only the back wall of logs still standing. Hanging to it was a warped kitchen cabinet lined with layers of newspaper. “July of ’thirty-six on this paper,” Jones said. “Used to stick it up to keep wind out of the cracks. Pitiful. But look at the price of shoes.”
    He pulled a broken coffee cup from the cabinet, scowled, and put it back. “When I was a boy, an old fieldhand lived in this house. He was adyin’ of pneumonia one night my daddy took me by, and I watched through the window. Man was out of his mind with fever, and he thrashed in bed. He thought he was aplowin’ with his mule, John. ‘Come on over, John! Pick it up there, John!’ Whole night he and that mule plowed, we heard. Dead by mornin’. My daddy said he worked himself to death that night. Said if he coulda put the plow down, he mighta rested enough to live. Those days, it was hard livin’ and no easier dyin’. Took thirteen months a year to grow ’bacca.”
    We went on through a hump of woods into another clearing where stood several small tobacco sheds with roofs falling in and an old smokehouse.

    5. Noel Jones near Franklinville, North Carolina
    “These the old curin’ barns where they dried the ’bacca. Haven’t been used in years, but you can still smell the ’bacca inside.” We walked over to one. “Look here. That hearth cover’s a Model T hood the blacksmith’s touched up with his hammer. Nobody ever heard of junk then. Junk’s a modrun invention.” We went in the low doorway. Poles that women once strung tobacco on were still in place under the roof.
    Jones explained the curing: to “fix the color,” leaves hung from cross poles for three days and nights as heat from the fire cured the burley. Skill in getting a good color could mean the difference between loss and profit. In his boyhood he had stayed up all night with the men tending the hearths. “They told stories the night long. Mostly true stories and mostly how troubles come in a thousand shapes.”
    We walked down the wooded hillside to Sandy Creek Reservoir. “Here musta been your granddaddy’s mill. Before the dam, you could walk the length of the crick and hardly see the