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

sun, trees grew so heavy. Animals too. Bobcats, foxes, weasels, deer, wood ducks. Good soil along the crick bottom. That’s why Indians took to it. Had all they needed—water, meat, berries, protection.”
    “It’s a big reservoir for such a little town.”
    “Got dry a few summers back—a real drouth—and the old town reservoir below where the dam is now almost run dry. Some people got scared. But I heard said too—couldn’t tell you the truth of it—that there’s some awantin’ new industry in here. Mills don’t produce like they did. Randolph Mills used to spin raw cotton into cloth. All we do today is finish cloth. Bleach, nap, and print patterns on cotton flannel mostly. We’re printers now.”
    He sat on a rock and stared out over the flat, silent water to a bulldozed hill. “I’m not atakin’ sides, I’m just atellin’ you, but there’s people who say there was plenty of water in that old reservoir. They say, ‘Who needs a bigger reservoir?’”
    “New industry means more people to buy clothes and open savings accounts.”
    “I mind my own business.” He looked toward the dam. “Already a crack in the spillway. Cain’t seem to get it fixed. I wouldn’t say how long this crick’ll stay drowned.” He got up. “Good fishin’ along Sandy. Wasn’t lunkers in it, but it was cool in here and the water moved. Now you cain’t put as much as a fishin’ line from the bank in that lake legally. No swimmin’, no nothin’. It’s a watchin’ lake because that’s about all you can do with it.”
    We walked back up the slope into the woods. Halfway, Jones stopped and edged his shoe into a small depression. “Dried up now, but this used to be a spring where women came to boil their wash clothes in iron pots. One time a woman was here, they say, abeatin’ a rug clean with a stick. Had her daughter along. The little girl disappeared, but the woman just figured she was aplayin’ hide and seek. The mother was athumpin’ her rug when it commenced aturnin’ red. She got vexed with the child for hidin’ raspberries in the rug. She opened it to wash away the stain and her little girl rolled out. Child was hid in the rug. Woman run off through the woods acryin’, ‘I bludgeoned my baby! I beat my baby dead!’ Next night she come out here to a big oak and hung herself with a bedsheet. That sheet, they say, blowed in the trees until it rotted away. Terrified many a man acomin’ through at night.”
    On the road back, Jones pointed out the trail to start with. “Grave’s yonder, dead ahead, but the hills and water is in the way. Woods gets terrible heavy over that first rise, and if you follow the reservoir around, you’ll be in water or mud most the way. The grave sits out on a little tip of land about seven feet above the water line.”
    “I’ll try through the woods. Get that molar fixed.”
    “Gonna have to see a tooth dentist. Stop by tomorrow if you make it. Best you wait ’til mornin’, or you’ll be wipin’ shadows all the way.”

3
    B UT I didn’t wait until morning. The smell in the pines was sweet, the spring peepers sang, and the trail over the first hill was easy. Whippoorwills ceaselessly cut sharp calls against the early dark, and a screech owl shivered the night. Then the trail disappeared in wiry brush. I began imagining flared nostrils and eyed, coiled things. Trying to step over whatever lay waiting, I took longer strides. Suddenly the woods went silent as if something had muffled it. I kept thinking about turning back, but the sense that the grave was just over the next hill drew me in deeper. Springs trickled to the lake and turned bosky coves to mud and filled the air with a rank, pungent odor. I had to walk around the water, then around the mud—three hundred yards to cross a twenty-foot inlet. Something heavy and running from me mashed off through the brush.
    When I was a boy, my mother would try to show the reality of danger by making up newspaper headlines that