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Show RTVER This story is especially poignant if you've ever been to Arkansas and wondered what could persuade anyone to live in such a flat, hot, swampy, mosquito-infested, godforsaken place, but it is hardly fair to illiterates. A man doesn't have to know how to read just to have a little common sense. There are some beautiful mountains in the state, they raise fantastic watermelons, and the weather is great at least two weeks out of every year. Experience suggests you can discount about ten percent of all the bad things you hear about Arkansas as being at least partially untrue. Helena is built on the last hills on the western side of the river: below the town, all the way south to the Gulf of Mexico, the land is black, rich, wet, and flat. From the tallest hills west of town you can look out over vast tracts of farmlands that reach to the horizon with the immensity of an ocean. Helena claimed twenty thousand people though it hardly seemed that large. It was a sleepy place, an agricultural center, caught in the time lag that has ensnared the rural South. The natives of Arkansas and Mississippi originally scared me "like to death," but after meeting a few of them I came to see that they believed religiously in minding their own business. They definitely were not going to go to all the time-consuming trouble of shooting a stranger unless that stranger had done something singular enough to warrant shooting. Rosie and I had reached Helena after a beautiful autumn morning that was clear with the special color and intensity of October. The leaves were in high color and a gentle wind was filled with clouds of butterflies. Spiders floated on the breeze aboard enormous webs that rode the wind like parachutes. God knows where they got the ability to fly their silky gliders, but we'd see arachnids -197- |