36 pages • 1 hour read
Mary HoodHow Far She Went
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 1984A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaStory 1: “Lonesome Road Blues” Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Story 1 Summary
The collection’s opening story takes place over the course of a single hot, dry summer day in rural Georgia. The third-person omniscient narrative opens with the unnamed female protagonist’s arrival at an annual blues festival. A widow whose husband’s lingering death has “leached her to the bone” (14), she is attending the festival alone.
Sunburned but still carrying the air of her dead husband’s sickroom, she returns specifically to see a musician from the previous year—a man named Edmun Lovingood. Having already purchased every one of his albums the year before, she knows every song and anticipates every emotional response the music evokes. She remains fixated on Lovingood alone for the entire performance. The performance, however, is not the main reason for her return. She has come for more than the music and prepared each minute detail for her true intent before leaving home: “the razor, the soap, the towels [...] laid out for him [...] the cut-up hen [...] in buttermilk. The beans [...] already snapped. The corn [...] to be shucked and pared” (15).
After the first performance, she follows Lovingood to the parking lot and waits for his fans to leave to plead her offer: “A shower [...] clean sheets cool and sweet and line-dried in the sun [...] Someone laying silver on a clean cloth [...] shining plates,” ending softly with the words, “I want you to have a friend!” (10-11). His next performance is at 6:30pm. He accepts her offer. Relieved and joyful, she drives home with Lovingood, who takes swigs from the bottle of whiskey she already purchased and had waiting in the car for him.
After passing out for several hours, Lovingood awakes, showers, dons the clothes and boots she has cleaned for him, and finishes off a home-cooked meal. They remain strangers, yet they are strangely happy from the sensation of home and family that they share in this brief hour.
After his final performance, she finds him at the phones, calling a number from a scrap of paper handed to him by an adoring fan—planning his interlude for the evening. She runs off quickly and drives home laughing at the thought that he doesn’t even know her name—first sorry, then not, for her day of blues.
Story 1 Analysis
With the opening title, “Lonesome Road Blues,” a recurring theme for this collection is introduced in the ambiguous reference to loneliness. At first glance, the title associates itself with the solitary life of the blues traveler, moving from town to town and performance to performance. Here, it becomes the metaphor for life itself as experienced by the characters in this story. It is not life on the road that brings loneliness. Loneliness is the road they each travel, whether married or single—and it brings its own comfort, in the melancholy way that a blues song brings solace in its sadness.
The female protagonist has no name. She is a widow, but one whose pallor comes more from the lingering illness before her husband’s death than from the death itself. That fact that her loneliness is already settled into place in his sickroom, while he is still alive, offers a foreshadowing of the loneliness neither she nor Lovingood—nor any of the characters in this collection—can truly escape. They seek solace in each other’s company—not from the companionship itself, but from the sensations of someone else’s presence. It is the sensation of home-cooking and knowing someone will emerge from the bedroom—even if only once and for that hour—that renders her so “amazed and pleased [...] she [has] to look quick, then look away” (16). For Lovingood, it is the sensation that, “‘In a hundred miles, what’s the difference?’” that brings “a light in his eyes” behind “the old masking sadness” (17), because the very impermanence of sanctuary guarantees the yearning.
When he chooses another girl, the protagonist regrets all the planning and preparations she has put into lost hopes. She is not sorry for how things turn out, as it is in the sensation of being lonesome that she can hold onto the imaginary lost joy, like a character in a blues song.
