Velva Jean Learns to Drive (10 page)

SIX

It was the hardest winter anyone could remember. January filled the Alluvial Valley with snow until it was covered. The weather turned so cold and mean that we had to stay inside. There was sleet that cut your skin and fog so thick you couldn’t see two inches in front of you. We were closed off from the rest of the world and even from parts of our world—from Alluvial and from our own neighbors. We read and sang and slept and tried not to get on each other’s nerves. We crowded around the radio at Daddy Hoyt’s and listened to the news reports. That’s when we heard about the inspection party the government had sent out across the mountaintops to make a survey for the road they planned to build there. It was going to be a road from Virginia to North Carolina or Tennessee. The inspection party got as far as Grandfather Mountain but was forced to turn back because of the weather.

So it was true. There was going to be a road on the mountaintops, just like Daddy had said.

When the weather cleared and we were able to get down the mountain, we walked to Deal’s. Everyone was buzzing about the news. Linc bought a copy of the
Asheville Citizen
, a few days old. It talked about this scenic road that would open the mountains to tourists while saving the poor, downtrodden people who lived there: “These primitive mountain folk, these rural mountain poor deserve help. This scenic road will be the biggest thing that has ever happened or that can be expected to happen for them. It is essential if their economic needs are to be met. It is their only salvation.”

Everybody had something to say about this and none of it was good. No one liked being called “poor” or “primitive.” No one liked the idea that we were a people in need of saving. No one liked the idea of outlanders coming here and trying to change things. And most of all, nobody wanted that road coming in. Johnny Clay said if those road builders wanted to come to our mountains and cut a road through, they could just try. He’d like to see them do it.

I said, “I don’t want a road coming in here.”

Daddy Hoyt said, “We don’t know that it will, Velva Jean. But it’s a funny thing about a road. It’s not just an incoming road you know. It’s an outgoing road too.” ~

By May the sky had cleared and the sun was out. I was sitting on top of the mountain, up on the highest point. I liked walking to the top of the mountain, to the bald spot, where I sat by myself and sang. I did this year-round, in the daytime when the panthers and haints were asleep, because it was up here that I could really hear myself. I was working on the words to a mean song. It was a song about a murder because lately I was in a murder sort of mind. I knew I had turned wicked since Mama died, that I was backsliding, but I didn’t care. All the songs I wrote now had murders in them.

I was staring off into the distance, toward the layers and layers of mountains, thinking that if I was a giant like Tsul ’Kalu I could step on them, from one to another, on their very tops, and walk across the earth. The air was clean and I breathed it in. For a moment, I almost felt like writing a pretty song. But then I saw, off toward Reinhart Knob, a line of automobiles and trucks. There were maybe twenty of them in all. They were stopped, men standing around. Some of the men were staring out into the valleys, hands on hips. Some of them stood with their eyes shielded from the sun, looking out toward me and my mountain.

I got to my feet and looked right back at them. I stared at them so hard I hurt my eyes, trying to look as fierce as I could. Maybe they would think I was a witch woman or a haint or a spirit from the mountain or an Indian princess. I thought I might scare them off and let them know we were a force to be reckoned with, not poor and primitive mountain folk who wanted them here. At the same time, I was trying to see their faces, trying to see if any one of them was my daddy. ~

On Memorial Day, we dressed up in our best clothes and climbed the hill to the cemetery. I carried merry-bells and Indian pink and the little white daisies that Mama loved, but not as much as she loved asters, which weren’t yet blooming. Sweet Fern and Aunt Zona had stayed up all night, making bright paper flowers. We sang hymns and, one by one, we remembered the dead. When it was time to talk about Mama, I didn’t have anything to say. Granny said, “Go on, honey.” But I just stood there, holding the flowers so tight that they turned my hand green.

By the time he was thirteen, Johnny Clay had been the youngest gold-panning champion in North Carolina for four years running. He was nine when he first entered a competition at Blood Mountain Mining Company—where our daddy and his daddy and his daddy before him had worked when they weren’t doing blacksmithing—and beat men more than twice his age, ones who had come to Blood Mountain from far and wide to work the mines. They lived up in shacks on the mountain, and Johnny Clay always pointed them out and said, “You won’t catch me living in a shack, mining someone else’s gold. By the time I’m as old as them, I’ll have my own mine and my own mountain.”

He knew that the best place to test for gold was at a sharp curve in a stream. I sat on the bank of Sleepy Creek and watched him and didn’t say a word because this would have distracted him and made him mad. He didn’t like anyone to talk while he was panning.

I didn’t mind because I liked the woods in the daytime. They were peaceful and quiet and I could think there, out of sight of our house and Mama’s grave. I liked to lie there and stare up at the sky and think about how I lived in the center of the world because there was the sun right above me. These were the moments I would listen to the creek and to the mourning doves and I would breathe in the sweet, clean smell of the pines and think that I always wanted to stay in Sleepy Gap and never leave in all my life.

Johnny Clay was bent over the water, shirtsleeves rolled up, arms wet and red from the cold, shaking the pan away from him and toward him. Buried in the grains of sand there were tiny flecks of gold, glittering now and again in the light.

Johnny Clay worked the water like he was part of it. He was smooth when he panned, not wild or urgent like some of the other gold pan ners. He could do it faster than anyone if he had to, but he didn’t believe in fighting the water. If you fought the water, you ended up losing the gold and being left with nothing but a dirty panful of sand. This was the most peaceful he ever was—when he was panning. Unless he messed up and lost some gold. Then he got mad at himself and brooded and fell into a silence so deep and distant that you couldn’t go near him for hours afterward.

I was half-asleep in sunlight when I heard a step behind me. I sat up and turned and looked just over my shoulder to see the moonshiner’s boy standing there. He said, “What are you doing?”

I said, “None of your business. Go away.”

He said, “There ain’t no more gold up here.”

I said, “That shows how much you know. He’s a champion.”

Johnny Clay said, “Shut up, both of you.” He kept working.

The moonshiner’s boy sat down beside me. He was smoking a cigarette. He held it out to me like an offering. I shook my head. Smoking was dirty.

“I seen you before,” the moonshiner’s boy said.

“No,” I said. “I don’t think so.” I didn’t want him to think he had any reason to know me.

He shook his head. “I have. You and your brother come over to my house once to get some whiskey for your mama.”

“You got me mixed up with someone else,” I said.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “How is your mama?”

“She died.”

“That’s too bad. You loved her?”

“Of course!” I thought to myself, what kind of question is that?

“Don’t get offended, sister. I can think of worse things happening than losing my mama.”

“I think that’s an awful thing to say.”

The moonshiner’s boy just shrugged.

Johnny Clay tilted the pan toward him and the sun caught the gold that was there. He counted the nuggets and then wrapped them up in a handkerchief and stuffed the handkerchief in his pocket. He looked at the moonshiner’s boy. “What do you want?”

The moonshiner’s boy said, “I just wanted to see what you all were doing.”

There were voices moving toward us in the woods. Three boys appeared. One of them was skinny, one of them was fat, and one of them was short like a child. They looked as wild and dirty as the moonshiner’s boy. They all three had knives hitched into their belts. The skinny one carried a bottle that he was drinking from. The little one was smoking. Each of them looked right at me.

Johnny Clay bristled just like a dog. He went rigid all over like he was expecting trouble.

The short one said, “Who’s the girl?”

The moonshiner’s boy stood up. He said, “Come on.” He went off with them and didn’t look back. We heard them whooping and hollering in the woods even after they disappeared from sight.

I said, “Let’s follow them and see where they go.”

Johnny Clay said, “They ain’t nothing but trouble.”

I said, “Don’t tell me you’re scared.”

He stood up. He picked up his gold pan. He said, “Since when in your life have you ever known me to be scared?”

I didn’t say anything to this because he hadn’t been scared a day. We started after the moonshiner’s boy, careful not to make a sound. My heart was beating so loud that I was sure everyone on the mountain could hear it. I was trying to prove that I was strong and brave, which I wasn’t, and that I wasn’t afraid of everything, which I was.

In the months since Mama died, Johnny Clay and I had taken to doing every bad or wicked thing we could think up to do and had got ourselves an impressive reputation as terrible children who couldn’t be controlled, something folks were always complaining about to Sweet Fern or to each other. “Those children are running wild,” we heard them say to her. “Sweet Fern needs to keep better hold of them,” we heard them say to one another.

We smoked rabbit tobacco and stole snuff from Hink Lowe, and Johnny Clay taught me to spit long-distance. We talked back to Sweet Fern and stayed out past supper so that she had to call and call for us to come. We lay down in the high grass outside the True house, waiting for Miss Martha or Miss Rowena to set fresh-baked pies out to cool on the windowsill, and then we took the pies and ran off to the woods to eat them. We trapped snakes—water snakes and garter snakes—and wrapped them around our waists and necks just like they did at the church where Reverend Nix preached on Bone Mountain. We went down to Alluvial and hung around outside the hotel to spy on the whore-lady. I colored my cheeks and lips with red clay and paraded up and down Sleepy Gap until Sweet Fern caught me and gave me five lashes with an old switch of Daddy’s.

Being bad was nothing new to Johnny Clay and me, which was why we decided to follow the moonshiner’s boy and his friends down the hill toward Alluvial. They drank and smoked and sang dirty songs and chewed tobacco and just as Johnny Clay said, “There ain’t nothing to see here, Velva Jean,” the moonshiner’s boy pulled out his pistol. He held it up over his head and put one hand on his hip and said, “I’m Clyde Barrow. I’m a wanted robber. Come out with your hands up.” Johnny Clay and me ducked into the woods, down behind some mountain laurel. The moonshiner’s boy pointed the gun at the trees just east of us and pulled the trigger. My heart jumped up into my throat just like it did when I was homesick and couldn’t swallow, but the gun didn’t make a sound.