Authors: William Least Heat-Moon
William Least Heat-Moon’s
Roads to Quoz
is “an epic journey… by turns delightful, whimsical, informative, and illuminating” (
Washington Post
). Following is an excerpt from it.
The Goat Woman of Smackover Creek
N
OT EVERYONE A TRAVELER MEETS
along the road is actually there. Unless we compress and distort it, existence just isn’t that simple. Day in and day out, whether we perceive them or not, we continually pass through human shadows, ghostly presences that depend not at all on the supernatural but rather upon our openness to move in the deeps of time. Our predecessors often leave behind a quoz or two as a posthumous gift to direct us as we seek means to make of them what we will, perhaps using them to expand our own limited days or to remind ourselves of distant threads and successions, sometimes only pentimenti binding us even when we don’t see the linkings.
In that manner, a traveler sometimes can know a person dead and gone better than one he just met at the next table: that lady who talked about too little rain, too much rain, rain just right for a good onion crop, the best onion for gumbo, her mother’s onion-pie recipe, the time she got mad at her husband and baked him a possum stuffed with green onion and kudzu, that same lady who otherwise kept herself hidden.
The Goat Woman of Smackover Creek, I never met. She died sixteen years before Q and I crossed the stream twelve miles south of Camden and about the same to its junction with the Ouachita. Dunbar knew the creek, or perhaps one nearby, as Chemin Couvert, a “tree-covered way.” The French description, corrupted by Americans, is probably the source of the name Smackover, although locals will offer several other interpretations ranging from the possible to the implausible.
The quoz that led me to the Goat Woman sits in the Arkansas Museum of Natural Resources, a colorless name, as if atonement for its proximity to a place called Smackover, or perhaps an overcorrection for its earlier name—the Arkansas Oil and Brine Museum—which could have led you to conclude it displayed historic machinery for pickling cucumbers. (Bromine, or brine, is extracted from underground saline water there.)
The quoz itself was a 1926 Model T truck that probably began as a factory “kit”—an engine mounted to a frame with wheels that became a rolling platform for crude and clumsy, though solidly built, living quarters within corrugated-metal sides and mullioned windows, everything but the glass creosoted black. The thing had more the look of a cage than a wheeled home. At its rear was a minuscule “porch” once serving as what must have been the tiniest performance stage in America. The museum staff called the rig a “circus wagon” and a “circus carriage,” both terms misleading; more recent and accurate was “medicine-show truck.” It was, the staff believed, “probably the rarest artifact that will ever be collected by the museum.”
Between the large headlamps and the tiny taillights sat the six-by-twenty-foot box of wood and metal serving as home to the Goat Woman for more than half a century, virtually all of those years after the truck left the road. A man told me, “She got drove into the county but she never got drove back out again.” He was speaking of the vehicle, but he might as well have been referring to its longtime resident.
How the medicine-show truck came to be hauled out of the mud along Smackover Creek after years of abandonment and vandalism is the story of Rhene Salome Miller Meyer. Her middle name seems peculiar unless you consider that her mother studied opera, and Rhene (pronounced RAY-nah) was born in 1905, the year Richard Strauss’s opera
Salome
was first performed. Still, I wonder, did Mother Miller choose to ignore the pathology of Salome’s urge for the head of John the Baptist, or did she have in mind the other Salome, the one in the New Testament?
If you’ll allow a few sentences of Rhene’s biography, I’ll get us to the part of her story I think carries well beyond the limits of one woman’s life. Much of what I know came from Don Lambert who wrote a weekly column for the
Smackover Journal
and later was elected mayor, a man whose modesty led him to disprize his role in preserving the carnival wagon. A generation younger than Rhene, he met her as a boy when he went to burn trash on the back lot of his mother’s department store on Broadway, where Lambert could talk with Rhene through a fence. Some years afterward, when she moved up to the creek, he delivered Lions Club Christmas boxes to her. He once wrote that “her story will forever be locked in an impenetrable and arcane maze.” I would add, however, no matter the possible answers to her puzzle of a life, the very questions it raises reveal a way into the Goat Woman’s maze. While everything that exists is a potential quoz for somebody, one must embrace the mystery for it to open itself.
One of six children, Rhene was born on a farm in Pennsylvania Dutch Country where her father staged occasional medicine shows to peddle a nostrum called the Miraculous Seven Sisters Hair Tonic that would “make your hair grow to touch the floor!” (Just who might want hair dragging the floor, I haven’t learned.) Onstage, Father Miller would trot out three-year-old Rhene and point to her long and thick tresses as proof of the efficacy of the tonic. From the time she could strut a few steps, she grew accustomed to public exhibition and came to see the world as her stage. When Rhene was not displaying her locks, her chore, one she enjoyed as much, was milking the family goats. That pair of tasks set the fundamentals of her entire life.
In her midteens she went to Philadelphia to study art; then it was off to New York City for music at the Juilliard School and possibly a performance in Carnegie Hall, all of which led to training with a diva. But those impressive educations earned Rhene nothing more than a job with the Barnum & Bailey Circus as a “one-girl band,” performing on seven instruments simultaneously (accordion, harmonica, drums, cymbals, traps, tambourine, castanets), or six if she pulled away from the rigged-up harmonica and sang. She also could play the piano, violin, harp, and bass drum.
During the ’20s, Rhene traveled to Europe with another circus until it failed, forcing her return to New York to model shampoos and cosmetics. Don Lambert said, “Mrs. Meyer’s hair was her glory.” Indeed, in the two photos I’ve seen of her, her wiry mane didn’t grow so much as explode into a dark nimbus above a face of high, rounded cheeks and seductively narrow eyes. Those photographs and her stage name and her European travel lead me to hypothesize that Rhene’s art study exposed her to the famous Aubrey Beardsley illustrations for Oscar Wilde’s
Salome
as well as to Gustav Klimt’s well-known paintings of the two headhuntresses Salome and Judith, each portrait based on the same model whose hair and coloring Rhene could have seen in herself.
About 1927 or the year following, she joined a small, nearly insolvent carnival traveling to one-night stands in remote Midwestern and Southern villages, places that would turn out for anything if it promised even the slightest diversion from the quietude of local life: a tent revival would do as well as a medicine show (both having about the same results). For a troupe struggling on the fringe of the Depression, a one-girl band was both economical and a good come-on. In 1929 the faltering carny arrived in Camden, never to leave again except in pieces, broken up by economics. When the show folded its tents for the last time, Rhene may have been on the edge of destitution.
She was twenty-four years old, educated, broadly talented, attractive, the world before her, yet for reasons unknown, she decided to marry Charley Meyer, a quarter century older; he was presumably the business manager and a man with little education or talent, facially unblessed, and eccentric. The merest speculation suggests a marriage of convenience in such a May-December union, but that one lasted till Charley died a wizened octogenarian thirty-two years later. Perhaps because the old man may have physically and mentally battered her, Rhene did not remarry, nor apparently did she have any subsequent attachments.
As newlyweds, they drove the medicine-show truck from Camden down to Smackover where Charley found a rent-free “slap-up remnant” of the oil-boomtown days and opened a used-tire business providing a limited income. Abruptly, her life went from the most public of social intercourse to an inexplicable insulation, a segregation through a concealment.
At the back of the tire shop was the show wagon, and around it Charley built a board fence that Don Lambert said “presented a stockade appearance,” much of it covered by an arbor to create a compound. Within it Rhene virtually disappeared for the next two decades, her society a tribe of goats she cherished and scarcely seemed to distinguish from people. The situation was made for a modern Chaucerian tale: a jealous aging husband fearing cuckoldry cloisters his bewitching bride while he buys and sells junked tires and vulcanizes flats. It’s the classic motif of the maiden in the tower, Rhene’s tower a wooden palisade:
Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair
(grown to touch the floor by the Miraculous Seven Sisters Hair Tonic).
Rhene’s withdrawal into a Model T truck enclosed by a goat pen was so sudden and complete, villagers began to question whether her reclusion was that of a captive. Twice, the marshal came by Charley’s little compound to ask questions and look inside, once asking to see a marriage certificate. No, the marshal told the people, the Goat Woman was not being constrained; as best he could determine, her isolation was of her own volition. Although no one used these terms, the childless woman appeared to be an anchoress whose sanctum was a cramped goat yard and her deities cloven-hoofed beasts.
Columnist Lambert, speaking of Smackover in the 1940s, wrote:
Most people would see her on those rare evenings late when she would walk down a darkened and deserted Broadway street in a brisk barefooted pace, her long hair in a wildly disorganized muss, with only a light-weight cotton dress covering her modesty. There was talk she was a deaf mute while others contended that she was crazed. We boys believed [the couple] to be German spies, with little consideration given to the fact that there was really nothing in Smackover to spy on. One fact was evident. She was different and to me resembled what I perceived to be a wild beauty right out of a Stone Age cave.
In a hamlet, anonymity doesn’t exist because proximity won’t allow it; there’s no place to hide, no vanishing into a madding crowd available to the city dweller. A village resident is inescapably, ineradicably present in one way or another, and, since nothing is more conspicuous than attempted disappearance, imperceptibility is impossible; the best an eccentric can hope for is merely solitude.
Withdrawal affords an easy path to nonconformity, but to venture it in a village will only provide fodder to cramped lives where mockery is the usual first step to reducing an independent mind in order to pigeonhole it. Human enigma must be, if not explained, then at least accounted for, and those who set themselves apart through solitariness will be thought aloof, one of the world’s oldest insults, and the common communal response will be a diagnosis of dementia. Society works to change self-imposed seclusion into banishment.
Contributing to Rhene’s discrediting were her talents and good looks: she could do what other women couldn’t, and simply by appearing, she showed men what they couldn’t have. Such capacities must be brought within limits of ordinary tolerance, and the village accomplished that by reduction, by changing Salome into the “Goat Woman,” the milker of bearded ruminants, the captured maiden of a (what else?) lecherous old goat. And she? The goat of jest and suspicions. It all fit together on so many levels. To a woman who loved goats and who prided herself on the milk they produced, the lone grace must have been the deprecating appellation carried no insult or hurt.
For villagers, the mocking cognomen helped answer her threat to their ordinariness and allowed the emotionally hobbled to fetter an exotic stray. Her perceived challenge to the complacency of their constringed lives of ingrained patterns was blunted, and their restricted existence could continue undisturbed as long as she provided entertainment. She was still onstage, even if the boards were no longer those of a theater or carny wagon but ones intended to hide her behind a palisade. Whether the hamlet knew it or not, Salome was invisibly dancing down Broadway. Don Lambert said, “Hair down to her waist, she was really something to see.” If she did not hold any severed heads of the baptized, she held their minds.
That’s my notion of how Rhene went from a life on the public stages of two continents to a durance behind a high plank wall where the audience was a few devil-eyed goats, the males now and then coming into odoriferous rut. But I wonder, was she ever aware of any passersby pausing outside the stockade to listen to her soft soprano accompanied by her violin, perhaps sending forth strains from
Salome
or
Pelléas et Mélisande?
In the songs from behind the wall, did anyone hear Salome singing:
Why does my king look at me
all the time with his mole eyes
under those twitching eyelids?
Or did someone hear from her Mélisande’s desire:
My long hair is descending
to the threshold of the tower,
my hair is waiting for you,
all down the tower,
all the long day,
all the long day.
Did anyone hear Rhene’s songs as cryptograms of confinement with a jealous old eccentric?
If the Goat Woman’s story ended there, it would be a sorrowful one indeed, but her life, still free of segues and legatos, again leaped over passages into unexpected movements.
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.”