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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