Velva Jean Learns to Drive (33 page)

“Ma’am,” I said. “We need to get you out of here. You need to come with us and then we’ll do what we can for your husband.” I didn’t know what else to say to her. Then I said, “He wouldn’t want you sitting here like this when there are people here to help you.”

She started crying harder. I put my arms around her and I worked my hands up under hers so that she had no choice but to loosen her grip on her husband.
Lord, forgive me.

The Wood Carver leaned all his weight into the upper berth and flipped it like it was no heavier than a pancake. I pulled the woman out and we tumbled together, and then the Wood Carver picked her up and carried her out of the train.

I ran for help. Because I couldn’t find a doctor or a nurse, I ran to one of the lawmen, the one who had cursed the lack of lights, and told him we’d found a woman alive in one of the first four cars.

He came quickly after me, talking into his radio, to where the Wood Carver waited in shadow, holding the woman in his arms. I thought how brave the Wood Carver looked, so tall and strong and larger-than-life. He stood with his head bowed down over the woman, his hat covering his face. The woman was crying now, her head against his chest. Her eyes were closed.

The lawman said, “You’re a hero.”

The Wood Carver said, “No more than anyone else.”

The lawman was looking at him, trying to see his face. The Wood Carver set the woman on the ground, soft as a feather. She opened her eyes and said, “My husband.”

“Her husband is still inside,” I said.

The lawman said something into his radio about needing a doctor. Then there was static and he shook it. “Goddamn radio,” he said. “Never works. Have to go find one myself.”

The Wood Carver watched him go. And then he walked toward the train. I looked toward Harley. Daddy Hoyt was still with him, but I didn’t see the doctor. I wanted to be there, but I didn’t want to leave the woman alone. I sat down next to her. “My husband is in there,” she said.

A few minutes later, the Wood Carver returned. He was carrying a body. He laid the body down on the ground near the woman. He crossed the man’s arms over his chest. He closed the man’s eyes. The woman started crying again. “Thank you,” she said.

“Go back to your husband, Velva Jean,” he said.

When I got back to Harley, I looked over toward where the woman sat, on the small rise of a hill, her husband laid out beside her. Somebody was tending to her. The lawman was there, too. But the Wood Carver was nowhere to be seen. ~

Danny Deal handed the truck keys to Johnny Clay. Danny had lost his hat somewhere in the confusion, the blue hat that Sweet Fern had given him two Christmases ago. He had wrapped his coat around a boy whose shirt was blown right off him in the blast. Danny told him to keep it. Now Danny had his sleeves rolled up over his elbows. Like Linc, his face was red and wet. He didn’t seem to feel the cold. “You take Velva Jean and Harley home in the truck. I can ride home with Daddy and the rest.”

Danny and Johnny Clay carried Harley to the yellow truck and laid him down in the back. I took off my coat and rolled it up and made a pillow for his head. His eyes fluttered open for a minute and he looked up at me. “Velva Jean?”

“I’m here,” I said.

“Straight Willy’s dead.”

“Yes.”

“They’re all dead but me.” He closed his eyes again. He’d been going in and out of consciousness since they found him. His breathing was short and raggedy. I brushed the hair away from his face, careful not to touch his burns, careful not to bump his bad leg, which the doctor had set with a piece of wood and some strips of cloth. “You give him a poultice of comfrey leaves or paper soaked in vinegar to help take down that swelling,” Daddy Hoyt had told me. “And as soon as you get home, you send Johnny Clay for Aunt Junie. You hear me? As soon as you get home, Velva Jean.”

“I’ll take good care of your truck,” Johnny Clay said to Danny now. My brother took my hand and helped me down.

“You’d better,” Danny said, but he was smiling.

TWENTY-ONE

Aunt Junie sat on the edge of the bed beside Harley. Her little hands worked and her glasses slid down her nose and she talked the fire right out of him. “God sent three angels coming from the east and west. One brought fire, another salt. Go out fire; go in salt. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.” She chanted it three times softly, moving her hands above and across Harley’s chest, pushing her hands away from him, and then blowing on the burn.

Afterward she stood up and pointed at Johnny Clay. “You,” she said. “Repeat it three times and do just what I did.”

“I’ll do it,” I said.

“Has to be him for it to work,” Aunt Junie said. “I can’t teach a person of the same sex. It has to be a man.”

Johnny Clay looked at Harley lying there, and then he looked at me. He frowned and for a minute I didn’t think he would do it, but then he rolled up his sleeves and leaned over the bed. “God sent three angels coming from the east and west,” he said. He moved his hands above Harley’s chest, as if pushing the burn away toward the door. “One brought fire, another salt . . .”

“Good,” Aunt Junie said when he had repeated it three times. “Get the daddy in here.”

“The daddy’s crazy,” Johnny Clay said.

“I don’t care if the daddy’s a wild rabbit. Get him in here,” she said.

Johnny Clay disappeared and returned a minute later with Levi. The old man was wild-eyed and sad. His cheeks were damp and he smelled of whiskey.

“You,” Aunt Junie said. “Repeat this and do what I do.”

Levi stared down at her in alarm. I patted him on his back and rubbed in little circles between his shoulder blades where they knocked together like chicken wings.

Aunt Junie began waving her hands over Harley. “God sent three angels coming from the east and west,” she said.

“God sent three angels coming from the east and west,” Levi croaked. His old fingers waved back and forth, the knuckles swollen like the knots of a tree.

Junie said each line and Levi repeated it, and at the end of the last one he added, “Amen.”

“I need a third,” she said. “I need another man.”

“There ain’t no other men,” Johnny Clay said. “All the men are over at Bone Mountain, helping with the accident.”

“I need three for this to work, not counting me,” she said.

“You’ll have to use Velva Jean,” said Johnny Clay.

She stared at me over her glasses, her blue eyes searching.

“She’s the luckiest person I know. Our mama said she was born under a lucky star. Granny says she’s charmed. She’s got a voice that could soothe a wild bear and make grown men cry. If Velva Jean can’t heal someone, I don’t know who can.”

Junie’s hands were working—one hand kneading the knuckles of the other. Worry hands, Granny called them.

“It’s either that or Elderly Jones, the Negro. He’s all the way down in Alluvial, and there ain’t no way he’s coming up here to do witchcraft.”

Junie sighed. “Repeat after me,” she said in my direction.

“I don’t have to repeat it,” I said. “I know it by heart.” I held my hands over Harley’s chest. I lowered my voice so that it was barely a whisper. “God sent three angels coming from the east and west. One brought fire, another salt. Go out fire; go in salt. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.” I said it three times in all while I waved my hands and blew on the burn.

“Now what?” I said.

“Now,” she said, “we wait.”

One hour later, Harley’s breathing was easy and clear. The blisters were gone and his skin was white and smooth and new, like a baby, like the marble of a statue. Aunt Junie laid her hand over his heart and cocked her head, as if listening. “Yes,” she said. “Good.” She fixed her eyes on me. “It shouldn’t have worked but it did. You are charmed like your brother says. That can be good and bad. I hope for you it’s always good.”

Then she shuffled out of the bedroom, down the stairs, and outside into the night.

At four o’clock that morning, there was a knock on the door. “I’ll get it,” I told Johnny Clay. Harley was asleep upstairs, and Johnny Clay and I were sitting up talking. I’d made us coffee, which we mixed with sugar and milk, just the way Mama used to make it for us on our birthdays or Christmas. We were eating jam cake and divinity, left over from two days ago, and trying to pretend like everything was okay, like so many people hadn’t died over at Terrible Creek, like I hadn’t seen a woman become a widow. The truth of it was, I was sad for everyone, but I was grateful for myself.
Thank you, Jesus
, I was saying over and over in my head. It was all I could think of. I was too full and tired to think of anything else.
Thank you for taking care of Harley.

Daddy Hoyt stood on the front porch, hat in hands. Beyond him was Linc in some car I didn’t recognize and a strange man behind the wheel. The man had brown hair on his head and a long beard that was silver in the moonlight.

Daddy Hoyt had always seemed so tall to me, like the tallest man I’d ever known. But every now and then I saw him as he really was instead of how he’d always been, the way he looked to me in my mind. It was like sometimes—every once in a while—he moved into focus and I saw that the years had stooped and bent him some, and I noticed the way he touched his hand to his back where I knew he felt the rheumatism.

He said, “How’s our patient?”

“He’s sleeping,” I said. “Aunt Junie talked the fire right out of him.”

“Good,” he said. He turned his face just slightly so it caught the moonlight. The lines on his face were little hollows around his mouth and eyes. “Velva Jean. Johnny Clay. You need to come with me.”

Danny Deal was lying upstairs over his daddy’s store, covered in an old gray blanket. He had crawled underneath the mail car, trying to reach a man trapped there, when the car shifted, crushing both of them. Danny had died instantly, as far as they could tell. He was cold when Daddy Hoyt found him. My granddaddy had wrapped him up and brought him home.