Velva Jean Learns to Drive (4 page)

“Velva Jean?”

I was born again. I’d been saved at last. I wasn’t ever going to hell now. I tried to feel the water on my skin and hear the singing and tell myself I was brand new in this world. But all I could think of was Mama’s face when she read that note and the way she’d held on to her daddy.

The next day, Mama took to her bed and stayed there. I tried to imagine what was in that note that would make her so sick that she couldn’t get up. She just lay there, her face feverish, her eyes closed or turned toward the wall.

“I knew from the start that your daddy was going to be a project,” she liked to tell us. “We was at a candy pulling, and there he was, playing his mandolin and dancing the back step, long legged and nice looking. The prettiest thing I ever seen.” She said she fell in love with him right off, and he fell right back in love with her.

Daddy was what Granny called “charming,” something I knew to be bad by the way her voice turned flat when she said it. He could barely read or write, but he carried hundreds of old songs around in his head, and he could buck dance and play every musical instrument he picked up, especially the harmonica. He could make it sound exactly like a steam engine, right down to the whistle and the wheels on the track.

Mama said she knew that Daddy drank too much, fought too much, that he was a wanderer who didn’t like to live in one place for long, a blacksmith like his daddy and a part-time gold and gem miner, with talent but no real ambition, and that he had only a passing belief in God. Mama loved Jesus and she knew the Bible front to back. But she loved Daddy too. She couldn’t help it. She said she had enough faith for both of them.

Back when it was just the two of them, before any of us children came along, they would pick up and go when Daddy got work. He may not have worked hard, but he was a good blacksmith and people would ask for him. He and Mama went all the way to Murphy, and then to Tennessee—Copperhill, Ducktown, and up to Johnson City. They went to Waynesville, North Carolina, and then to Asheville, which Mama hated because she didn’t like so many people. She missed her mountains. She said the Black Mountains weren’t the same—that they left her cold. They went to Bryson City, then to Cherokee. Then they came back to Sleepy Gap. When Sweet Fern was born and then Linc soon after, Mama told Daddy she was done moving. She didn’t plan to raise her children like gypsies. So Daddy came and went just like he always had, and Mama stayed put. She called him Old Mule because he was stubborn. He called her BeeBee, but we never found out why.

I supposed Daddy was off now chasing another gold vein or hunting gems or maybe doing some blacksmithing work for someone. Just to be sure, I went outside and looked over on the back porch and there was a stack of wood, just as high as the house. We could always tell how long he’d be gone by the height of the woodpile he left behind.

“How come she won’t get up?” I asked Johnny Clay. We were supposed to play on the porch and be quiet about it because Daddy Hoyt was looking after Mama, and Granny said Mama needed rest and that we weren’t to get on her nerves. Johnny Clay had some marbles he’d won off Lester Gordon, so we were shooting them back and forth. “What do you think was in that note? Daddy’s left before. Daddy always leaves.”

Johnny Clay pointed at the wood stack. “It ain’t never been that high before.”

“Is she gonna get up and fix lunch?” I didn’t tell him that I was worried about her. Never in my life did I remember Mama staying in bed past sunrise. It made me feel nervous to think of her in there with her face turned toward the wall.

“I don’t know, Velva Jean,” Johnny Clay said. He flicked a large green marble into a smaller blue one and they rolled off the side of the porch.

Daddy Hoyt didn’t leave Mama’s side all morning. Later that afternoon, he took Johnny Clay and me out to find the mayapple plants that grew on the floor of the forest like green umbrellas. They smelled so sweet that they made my stomach turn, and I held my nose as we picked the leaves. Daddy Hoyt said they had something in them that might help Mama get better.

“What’s wrong with her?” I asked him. Mama had been sick before, with a chest cold or headache, but she never took to her bed. She always just worked right through it.

“Your mama’s ailing,” Daddy Hoyt said. “And I’m doing my best to fix her.” But that’s all he would tell us.

“You’ll fix her,” I said. “You fix everyone.” Daddy Hoyt could heal anything because the Cherokee had taught him how. When he was eighteen years old, he had left Sleepy Gap and walked all the way over to the reservation on the other side of our valley and our mountains, two ridgelines away. He went to live with the Indians and learn from their medicine man, and while he was there he met Minnie Louise Kinsley, or Granny, whose daddy was a Scottish missionary and trader living on the reservation and whose mama was a full-blooded Indian. Daddy Hoyt stayed with the Cherokee for ten years and learned how to heal people from the land and the trees and the plants, while Granny became a midwife. When he felt he had learned enough to go back home and help his own people, he took Granny with him. By that time, the Indians called him
didanawisgi
, which means medicine man.

I pinched my nose and stuffed the mayapple leaves into my apron pockets. “There ain’t no one you can’t heal,” I said again. “Right, Johnny Clay?”

“Right,” he said, his head bent toward the ground.

Daddy Hoyt didn’t say anything to this, just stooped over and pulled up an entire plant, roots and all, with one hand. He pulled this leaf off and another and another, and left the ones he didn’t want. Each time he pulled up a plant, he dropped a bead into the hole left behind in the earth and covered up the hole with dirt. He carried red and white beads in his pocket just for this purpose. It was something the Cherokee had taught him. They said it was like a thank-you—a way of giving back—for what the earth was providing.

Back home, Daddy Hoyt ground the mayapple leaves into a powder and added small doses of it—barely enough to taste—to Mama’s food and drink. He gave Mama snakeroot tea to bring down her fever and ginger root boiled and rolled in sugar to help with her stomach trouble. He made her a poultice of ground up poke root and laid it across her chest to ease the pain, and when that didn’t work he made one out of comfrey root and cornmeal.

While Johnny Clay and Beachard worked with Linc out in the yard and the chicken house and the barn, I sat outside Mama’s door and waited to go in. Linc was tall and handsome and looked like a darker, quieter version of our daddy. He and Beachard had gotten a touch of Cherokee, both of them brown-eyed and lean, but Beachard’s hair was copper instead of black, exactly the color of North Carolina dirt. At twelve Johnny Clay was nearly as tall as Linc, but he was bright gold from his skin to his hair. None of them had freckles like me.

Finally, Daddy Hoyt came out and said I could go in for just a few minutes and hold Mama’s hand or read to her. Inside the room, Mama lay still with her face turned toward the wall. I wanted to ask her what was in that note Daddy wrote that made her take to her bed, but I was worried that asking about it might make her worse. So instead I opened the
Grier’s Almanac
, which I’d taken down off its nail by the fireplace, and read her the weather forecasts. And then I read her a story from
Farm and Home
.

Mama didn’t move or say anything, so I went over to her chest of drawers and got the family record book, which she kept displayed on top, right beside her brush and comb and the silver-plated hand mirror Daddy had bought her years ago. The record book had a red leather cover and listed every important date and event to ever happen to us. It went as far back as Ireland, to the family of Nicholas Justice who first escaped France from the Huguenots. It was a complete history of our family on Mama’s side.

I read some of my favorite entries to Mama: “1766: Nicholas Justice and his wife move to the United States. 1781: Ebenezer, fourth son of Nicholas—Revolutionary War soldier, hero of Kings Mountain—is run through with a sword at the battle of Cowpens and nearly dies. 1792: Ebenezer Justice arrives in the Alluvial Valley of North Carolina and names Fair Mountain.”

I couldn’t get over the fact that if Ebenezer Justice had died way back then, none of us would be here—not me or Johnny Clay or Mama or Daddy Hoyt. I loved to read the family record book. It told about modern things too, like when Mama was born and when she and Daddy were married and when all of us children came along.

I was just reading about Linc and Ruby Poole’s wedding day, when Mama rolled over a little and looked at me. Her eyes were kind of half-open and she said, so soft I could barely hear her, “That’s enough, sweet girl. Why don’t you sing me a song?”

I said, “Mama, what’s wrong with you? Why don’t you get up? Do you have a headache?”

She said, “Sing me something you wrote. Have you written any new ones I don’t know, Velva Jean?”

I said, “I wrote one about a giant that lives in a cave.” This was based on Tsul ’Kalu, the giant that lived at the top of Devil’s Courthouse. His mother was a flashing comet and his daddy was the thunder. He could drink streams dry with a single gulp and could walk from one mountain to the next. His voice could make the heavens rumble and his face was so ugly that men ran from him in terror.

She said, “Sing that one.” And she closed her eyes.

I sang:

I sang the whole song, and when I was done I felt a hand on my shoulder. Daddy Hoyt was standing there and he said, “Let’s let her sleep for a little while, honey.”

After supper Johnny Clay and me ran off to play along the tree line, where Granny and Sweet Fern and Ruby Poole could see us. We gathered the leaves that always seemed to cover the ground, even in summer, Johnny Clay kicking them into a pile, while I collected them in my dress and threw them in.

“Let’s make the stack higher,” Johnny Clay said, and grabbed a long stick that was split off at the top like a fork. He began using it as a rake.

“And then we can take turns burying ourselves in them,” I said.

“And being born again,” added Johnny Clay.

Playing like we were being born again made me feel new and light, like I didn’t have anything to be worried about. It took me back to being baptized, back to that happy moment before everything changed. When I played being born again, I could pretend that it was all happening all over again, only the right way, the way it should have happened the first time, without Daddy going away and Mama getting sick right afterward.

When the pile was high enough, Johnny Clay let me go first. I crawled into the leaves and lay flat on the ground, closing my eyes, while he covered me up till I was invisible. “Ready,” he said at last when he got the pile just like he wanted it. His voice sounded muffled and far away.