Velva Jean Learns to Drive (63 page)

Afterward, when we were getting ready for bed, I felt sick to my stomach. I didn’t know if I could go through with leaving. I looked at Harley, standing in the moonlight. He was still in a good mood from the meal and the day. He kept saying we were turning over a new leaf, making a fresh start. A lot of people thought he was a hero. To folks who had been down to see and be healed by Damascus King, he was better than that—he was a savior. Harley had cast out the demons and, at the same time, rescued everyone on the mountain. It didn’t matter that the outlanders were back at work on the Scenic. They had been warned and the one that had attacked Janette Lowe had been caught.

He was my husband. His wedding ring flashed in the light. He took off his shirt. He was wearing the bottoms to his pajamas but not the top because it was so hot outside and inside that you couldn’t get away from it. He lay down on the bed and he bent one elbow underneath his head on the pillow. He flexed his muscles a little.

I said, “Remember when you first found the Little White Church, back when it was just getting started? Remember when you talked to them about making choices and keeping the faith, about the Lone Ranger and fighting a good fight?”

He closed his eyes. “ ‘For I am now ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is at hand. I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.’ ” He opened his eyes again. “Why?”

I said, “I just wanted to see if you remembered.”

I got into bed and lay down next to him for the very last time. He lay there, smiling up at the ceiling, every now and then flexing his arm muscles. I turned on my side, facing him. I said, “I want you to know that I have truly loved you.”

He turned his head to look at me. He grinned his big white grin. He rolled on his side to face me. He said, “I love you, too, Velva Jean. We got us a fresh start.” He pulled me close, wrapping his arms around me. He started singing:
Come take a trip in my airship, come take a sail among the stars
. . .

I could feel his warmth. I could hear his heartbeat. It beat strong and fast. I breathed him in. I was wide awake for a long time after he went to sleep.

 

Early the next morning, I got up and fixed the breakfast, pitted Levi’s prunes, stirred his oatmeal in a bowl, and waved good-bye to Harley as he walked off toward the church. As soon as he disappeared into the trees, I tore off my apron and dropped it onto Daddy Hoyt’s rocking chair and flew down the porch steps, over to the truck.

According to
How to Drive
, there were five things to make sure of before you took your car on a journey:

1. There is gasoline in the tank.

2. The radiator is filled with water.

3. There is enough oil in the crankcase.

4. The tires are inflated to the pressure prescribed by the tire manufacturer.

5. The lights are working—if you are to make a night trip.

I knew that there was enough gasoline because I had already filled up the tank. I lifted the hood. I checked the level of the water. It was low, so I added more. I checked the oil, and it was fine. I walked around the truck and studied each tire. Also fine. And then I checked the lights. Fine.

Afterward I crossed the yard, back to the house. I picked up my apron and went upstairs and dressed. I pulled the only clothes I wanted from the chifforobe—Mama’s flowered dress and my old dresses that were my very own (not the ones Harley had picked out for me) and the suit with the bolero jacket that Harley had bought for me because that one I liked. Then I put on my black shoes with the bows across the top and I packed away my clothes—all my underthings as well—into Mama’s old brown suitcase. And, at the last minute, I put the apron in too, because it had belonged to Mama. As I did, something fell out of the pocket and onto the floor. I picked it up and unfolded it—a ten-dollar bill. My eyes started stinging and then they went blurry, and for just a moment, I thought I would have to sit down on the bed and cry.

Instead I took the hatbox and mandolin out of the back of the closet and I put Mama’s little keepsake box inside my hatbox along with my record and the ten dollars. Then I set my wedding ring on the dresser.

Harley would be at the Little White Church now, surrounded by Brother Jim and Sister Gladdy and the rest of them. He would be working on his next sermon, trying to decide who to save next or avenge next or condemn next.

I pulled out the family record book and opened it and read over the last few entries—there was Mama’s death, Daddy’s leaving, the first time I was crowned Gold Queen, the first time I sang by myself at the Alluvial Fair, the time Johnny Clay and me ran away from home, the panther, my marriage to Harley Bright, the Balsam Mountain Springs Hotel, the Terrible Creek train wreck, the death of Danny Deal, learning to write my music, my first recorded songs, learning to drive, Janette Lowe, Johnny Clay leaving, Butch leaving, the Wood Carver going away. I thought: There is my life. All summed up in those few lines. There it is, captured right there.

Beneath it all, I started to write: “August 22, 1941: Velva Jean . . .” And then I stopped myself because I wasn’t sure what to put next. “Leaves home”? “Sets out for the Promised Land”? “Goes in search of her destiny?” I didn’t know what was going to happen next, so I decided to just leave it for now. I would fill it in later, once I found out for myself.

I packed the book into my suitcase. Then I picked up the suitcase and my hatbox and my mandolin and I walked down the stairs. Levi was sitting at the table, eating his oatmeal. He looked at me over his spoon and I looked at him. He looked down at my suitcase and my hatbox. Then he looked back at his paper and kept eating. I started to walk away and then I turned back around. I went up behind the old man and leaned right down and kissed him on his head.

I walked outside and threw the suitcase into the bed of the truck and climbed into the cab, setting the hatbox and the mandolin down on the seat next to me. I sat there for all of a minute, staring up at the house, at the window of Li’l Dean and Levi’s old bedroom on the second floor where Harley and I had slept.

Then I turned the key in the ignition and started the yellow truck. When it sputtered and shook, I prayed that Harley wouldn’t somehow hear it all the way over at the Little White Church. I glanced back up at the house. The curtains in the bedroom window blew a little in the breeze, but otherwise they didn’t move. There was no one there to bother them. I put my foot on the gas pedal and headed down the hill.

I passed the field where I had taught myself to drive and where I sometimes drove with Butch, singing my songs. And then I came down into Alluvial one last time and I passed Sweet Fern’s house and then Deal’s and the old school and the Baptist church and the Alluvial Hotel, where Lucinda Sink sat rocking on her front porch. As I drove by, I waved and she waved back. I passed the road up to Sleepy Gap and Daddy Hoyt and Granny and my family and my home. My heart lurched and I felt the lump in my throat grow back.

I gathered up speed through the valley and didn’t stop to wave to anyone else who happened to be out this early and who called to me, wondering where Velva Jean Hart Bright was off to so early on a Friday, hair flying out the window, lips painted Magnet Red, and singing loud enough for everyone to hear.

Then I left the valley on the bumpy old cattle road, which wasn’t even a road—just a narrow line between two high mountains—and headed outside my world to the one beyond. On the way to Hamlet’s Mill, I met up with the access road that cut up toward Silvermine Bald. I wound around the mountain, up to the top. I prayed the truck would go all the way and get me there.

I reached the Scenic, up where the road twined across the mountain like a gray-black ribbon. I waved to the workers—the outlanders who were a part of this place now, like it or not. There were guards standing over them, walking nearby, making sure that no one bothered them.

There was one long section of the road just finished where it was paved and smooth. I turned up onto it and drove as far as I could. The truck floated. It soared. It practically flew. Then, too soon, the road went bumpy and rough and gravelly, and then it was dirt and barely a road at all, but I kept driving anyway because it felt so good to be up there, on top of the mountains, with the great wide world spread out on all sides. From up there, I could see everything—not just North Carolina and Tennessee and South Carolina and Georgia, but Johnny Clay and Nashville and Butch and the Wood Carver and Daddy and even Mama, just over a cloud, so close I could almost reach her.

I thought: Look at me, Harley Bright. I’m singing
and
driving. The map was spread out on the seat beside me. The tank was filled with gas. I thought: I am running
to
something, just like the Wood Carver said. I am running to something just as fast as I can.

I wiped the tears off my cheeks as I went round the bend that would take me toward the highway, the one that came up and across Wagon Road Gap and intersected the Scenic. Down there on Fair Mountain—my mountain that had been in my family for generations—sat my mama’s old house. Down there on the hill above it stood the cross Daddy had carved out of his pain and grief, keeping watch over Mama’s grave.

I was still crying as I drove over the mountains above Hamlet’s Mill, where Johnny Clay and Danny Deal and I had driven up and down in this same yellow truck, waving like the queen of England.

I was ten years old when I was saved for the first time. I was fifteen when I was saved for the second. But I was eighteen before I was found. All it took was eight years, a panther cat, a tent preacher, a blues singer, a murderer, an old yellow truck, and a road that could take you anywhere.

I pressed my foot on the gas pedal and sped along the mountaintops, heading up the road to “off somewhere,” out into the great big world. Only this time it had a name—Nashville. I thought it sounded beautiful, like music. I didn’t know anyone in Nashville. I didn’t have a place to stay and I didn’t have a job—not yet. But I had plenty of gas and a map and $121.11, most of which I’d earned myself.

The truck started climbing higher and higher. The world was spread out before me. As I reached Wagon Road Gap, my voice grew stronger. By the time I got to the highway, I was singing louder than I had ever sung before.