Butterfly Weed Read Free

if untrue story. Without planning it or knowing it in advance, I would also be collecting material for one of my major books, We Always Lie to Strangers, on the distinction between exaggerations meant to deceive and to entertain.
    So I went. I ought to have told Marie what I was planning to do, but I didn’t. I just up and went. I left her a letter, apologizing for sneaking off before daybreak, and making it clear that my intentions were no different from that sort that had allowed her to say to her friends on several occasions, “Oh, Vance has just hit the road again, to see what he can see.” You recall that old folk tune, “The bear went over the mountain, to see what he could see”? In fact, I had spent most of the decade of the twenties, perhaps secretly driven by the coming of the Jazz Age, living hand-to-mouth in my rambles all over the Ozarks. This time I had a little money, and I was leaving Marie more than she needed for groceries and such. The year before I had been invited to put in a stint as a screenwriter in Hollywood—just like Fitzgerald and Faulkner and all the rest—and they had paid me a couple hundred dollars a week for nearly three months before they discovered that I couldn’t write movies. That was the best money, the most money, I had ever earned.
    Except for a sizable wad of cash, I was traveling light. I had everything I needed in a canvas knapsack, including plenty of scraps of thin newsprint, on which I would jot down my recordings of stories and jokes and old sayings and odd words and their meanings, and superstitions and whatever else I needed to collect and record. I had one change of clothes in the knapsack, and the clothes on my back, which I had carefully selected to make me look as much like a hillman as possible: a well-worn chambray shirt, frayed and faded denim pants, scuffed brogues on my feet, and on my head a crushed, floppy, sweat-stained black felt fedora. I had debated with myself whether to wear a felt hat or a straw, and had decided the latter might make me look like a farmer, which I wasn’t.
    Even in such old clothes, I cut quite a figure in those days, if I say so myself. You wouldn’t guess it to look at me now, but I was a handsome man in my forties. I had a neat, nearly a dapper, mustache, not as full as I wear now nor as gray but dark, and in contrast to this shiny smooth dome, which looks like I’m a-clearing ground for a new face, I had a full head of dark hair, just beginning to thin. During my ephemeral stay in Hollywood, I had more than once been mistaken for a movie star.
    Much of my traveling was by shank’s mare—on foot, but I got plenty of rides too—by wagon, by occasional auto, sometimes by truck or other conveyance, and thus I gravitated toward the remotest part of the Ozarks, that selfsame Newton County which has been the private purlieu of your fictions. As soon as I crossed the county line, I began to lose track of time, which I suppose was my intention anyhow. I spent the nights in a variety of accommodations: in the crudest, dirtiest log cabin, sleeping with a whole family of twelve in one room; in the “guest room” of a rather prosperous valley farmer whose wife came perilously close to sharing my bed; in an abandoned house that must surely have been inhabited by ghosts, who kept me awake most of the night; in a barn, on the straw, not once but twice; in the shelter of a moonshine distillery, whose owner and I both passed out sampling the product and slept on the hard ground; and in a house of sorts in the mouth of a cave, three of its four sides the natural rock of the cave.
    Everywhere I went I was warmly received and invited to stay, and sometimes almost forcibly prevented from leaving. My business, to anyone who inquired, was simply that I was wandering the countryside, a vagabond in search of adventure and occasional work—and I had occasional work, being put to good service helping out around the farm or the house. Often I earned