Velva Jean Learns to Drive (24 page)

He closed his eyes then and I slumped against the back of the bench. He had been talking right to me.

The preacher held up his hands, one palm open, the other embracing the Bible. He spoke loud and fast. “Jesus said, ‘Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature. He that shall believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned.’ ” The word “damned” nearly rattled the rafters of the brush arbor and rang through the air like a small explosion.

We were all on our feet with the force of his words. I could see why he was called the Hurricane Preacher. I felt like he was reaching out from his pulpit and wrapping that voice of his—afire with damnation and the promise of salvation—around my neck like a glittering scarf. It was like he’d been speaking just to me—only to me—and for a moment, he had been.

He took up his guitar and started to sing “The Glory Song,” only he changed the words of the verses, making up his own words to suit the day and the crowd and the sermon. He left the chorus the same. He closed his eyes and he banged the guitar and his voice was strong and rough.

Afterward he announced the altar call and those that wanted saving went forward to receive it. I got up and walked to the front with most everyone else. Johnny Clay got up and walked behind me.

The line was moving slow across the stage. The Reverend Harley Bright was shaking people’s hands and touching their foreheads and saying prayers over every person. Each one went off crying and raising their hands, praising the preacher and Jesus. Johnny Clay poked me. He said, “You can be blind if you’d rather. I don’t care.”

I said, “I don’t think he’s healing people like that. I’m just going to shake his hand.”

Johnny Clay didn’t say anything for a minute. I didn’t turn around or look at him. I could hear what he was thinking. I could hear him being mad. Then he said, real low, “Where’s the fun in that?”

I stood there waiting my turn, waiting for the Reverend Harley Bright to lay his hands on me and make me whole again. When he finally touched me—his hand on my forehead—it was quick but electric. He pressed something into my hand. A handkerchief. It was folded into a square. It smelled like lilacs. On it was written: “Special Miracle.”

Johnny Clay and I sat back down and watched as the rest of the people made their way across the stage. Johnny Clay slumped down low in his seat. He was sulking, but I didn’t care because I knew then that I was in love. It would be forever, and it would be true, and it would be the most glorious, powerful thing on earth.

I had already been saved once, back in 1933. But now, on the banks of that very same river where I thought I had found salvation, I had just been saved for a second time.

Johnny Clay and I sneaked away every night that week to go to the revival, and Sweet Fern didn’t find out. On the very last night, after the service, the short man walked up to us where we sat and said, “The Reverend Bright would like to see you.” He looked right at me when he said it. Something about him was familiar. I thought of the day we followed the bad Barrow gang, of the moonshiner’s boy and his skinny friend and his fat friend and his short friend, the one that was small as a child.

“What does he want?” Johnny Clay said.

“He likes to meet the members of his congregation,” the man said. “Especially two such faithful attendants as you.”

I looked at Johnny Clay and his eyebrows shot up. “He’s already met her. You were there. You both met her that day I beat the tar out of him in Alluvial.”

The short man didn’t say anything to this, just started coughing. When he was done, he stood frowning up at us, waiting.

Johnny Clay turned to me. I gave him my sweetest look. He said, “Fine.”

The Reverend Bright was sitting in a chair behind the altar, waving a fan back and forth, back and forth at his temple. His eyes were closed. I thought how smooth and white his skin was now that it was free of all that dirt, and how I wished I could reach out and touch it.

“Harley,” said the short man.

The Reverend Bright opened his eyes and smiled. It was a smile that spread across his whole face. He stood and I tilted my head up to look at him. He was still taller than Johnny Clay by a half inch, something I knew would only make Johnny Clay madder. Harley Bright held out his hand to my brother, who almost didn’t take it, and then he turned to me and did the funniest thing—he bowed.

“Prettiest face on Fair Mountain,” he said right to me. I just looked at his own face, the way one side dimpled when he smiled, and the way he cocked his head to the side and kind of lifted one eyebrow in a way that made him seem real and human and more like the moonshiner’s boy and less like the Hurricane Preacher.

Johnny Clay cleared his throat. He scratched the back of his neck where it was sunburned. “You preach a good sermon,” he said loudly.

“You enjoyed yourselves, then?” the moonshiner’s boy was staring right at me, just like he’d stared at me during his sermon on the first day of the revival.

“Oh yes,” I heard myself say. “Yes.”

“I like to make a difference where I can,” he said. He looked at me like he was waiting for something.

“You did. It was . . .” I knew what I wanted to say but I wasn’t sure whether I should say it, especially in front of Johnny Clay, who would never let me hear the end of it. I lifted my right foot and scratched the back of my left calf, where the panther scar was. It still itched sometimes. The reverend just looked at me, his mouth crooked up in a grin. He looked at me like he knew me and like he understood and like whatever I was going to say was fine with him. So finally I said, “It was like you were talking right to me.”

When I opened my eyes the next morning, the first thing I saw was the framed picture Johnny Clay had given me for my last birthday. It was the first thing I saw every morning, propped up on the chest of drawers next to the bottle of perfume from Ruby Poole: Paris, by Coty (“a perfume that knows how to be tender and sparkling, witty and feminine, all in the same fragrant moment . . .”). It was a framed photograph of the Grand Ole Opry stage, empty except for a microphone.

“That’s where you’ll be one day, Velva Jean,” Johnny Clay had said. “See there? That’s where you’ll stand.”

It was the best present I’d ever got, and I loved to stare and stare at it until I could see myself on the stage, dressed up in my rhinestone outfit and holding my Hawaiian steel guitar.

For as long as I could remember, being on that stage had been my biggest dream, and after a while, my only one. But now I had two dreams. I was still going to be Velva Jean Hart, star of the Grand Ole Opry, but I was also going to be something else. I didn’t know if I would ever see the Reverend Harley Bright again. But I’d made up my mind that if I ever did, I was going to be his wife.

FIFTEEN

Work on the Scenic had made its way south from Deep Gap all the way down to Bull Gap, right around Weaverville, just north of Asheville. Johnny Clay climbed up to Old Widow’s Peak nearly every day with a set of binoculars that Daddy had brought him years ago, and then he came back down and gave us a report over supper. The binoculars barely worked anymore and you couldn’t see far with them, but he swore he could see the construction men at work—boys as young as him and men as old as Daddy—cutting down trees and blasting through the mountain and making way for the road to come.

When I looked through the binoculars myself, I couldn’t see a thing, but Johnny Clay said I was doing it wrong and didn’t know how to use them. What I didn’t tell him was that I wasn’t trying to see Bull Gap. I was trying to look at Devil’s Courthouse. I thought maybe those binoculars would pick up the moonshiner’s house in Devil’s Kitchen, and maybe I could see the Reverend Harley Bright. Now that the revival was over, I wondered if I would ever see him again.

Whether you could see it or not, the way that road was making its way down toward us had everyone on edge. The flags were back on Devil’s Courthouse. I thought about going up there again and taking them down and burying them, but I knew somehow it wouldn’t matter. They would only keep planting more.

Hink Lowe said the Scenic was a rich man’s road. Root Caldwell said it was a sign of the devil. Old Buck Frey said he didn’t care if there was a depression and they were giving people jobs, it just wasn’t worth it—they were taking away more than they were giving. Even Uncle Turk said it would be the end of us. He said the government was trying to run that road right through the Indian nation to the gates of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The Cherokee were fighting it and he was joining them. On June 25, he packed up his gems and his polishing tools and all his earthly belongings and moved to the reservation.

On June 27, we got a postcard from Beach: “Am working on the Scenic near Altapass. Earning thirty cents per hour, six days a week. Digging stumps out of steep slopes, laying drainage tile in the mud, lifting five-hundred-pound rocks with hand cranes, planting trees and shrubs and flowers. Have been spreading my message up here where all can see. No sign of Daddy. Love, Beach.”

One week after the revival, on Saturday, June 29, there was a rumble like far-off thunder, even though the sun was out and it didn’t look like rain. The rumble grew louder and louder, like it was coming fast toward us, and I rushed out of the house, followed by Sweet Fern, Granny, and Johnny Clay. We stood there watching the cloud of dust that rolled toward us. Behind it came an automobile, a dark blue one.

Other than Danny Deal’s truck and Dr. Keller’s truck, we’d never seen an automobile this high up the mountain before. I couldn’t imagine who it could belong to. The car came to a stop in front of the porch, and as the dust settled, the Reverend Harley Bright opened the door and swung his long legs out, the other half of him still leaning into the mirror.

“My goodness,” Sweet Fern said. “Who on earth?” Her voice trailed off. I suddenly felt my face grow hot. My palms tingled, just like they had when I’d first seen the Reverend Bright, and I could feel my heart start to race. I’d never imagined he would come to call or that I would ever even see him again.

“It’s the moonshiner’s boy,” Johnny Clay said. “From the revival.”

“Revival?” said Sweet Fern. “Moonshiner’s boy?”

“He’s turned preacher,” said Johnny Clay.

Sweet Fern fixed a look on Johnny Clay, on me, on Johnny Clay again, her eyebrows shooting up toward her hair. “What in the great blue yonder would a revival preacher want with you?”

“Oh, I don’t think he wants me,” Johnny Clay said.

Sweet Fern looked straight at me and only at me. Before she could say anything, Granny gave a low whistle. “All the way up here. And in an automobile.”

Sweet Fern stared back at the car and at the man inside it and suddenly I could see exactly what she was thinking. Moonshiner’s boy or no moonshiner’s boy, revival preacher or no revival preacher, Harley Bright looked like a gentleman. Danny Deal’s yellow pickup truck wasn’t anywhere as nice as this blue automobile.