Velva Jean Learns to Drive (9 page)

No one on the radio played mandolin—they all played guitar or banjo like my brothers. “I don’t want your old mandolin,” I told Daddy. “I want a new instrument like everyone else or I’d rather have nothing.” So he said fine, have nothing, and when it came to all of us playing music together, I was expected to sing or just bang on something like a drum.

Daddy handed me that mandolin now, and then he went through the house and picked up things that had belonged to Mama, books and a brush and her silver-plated mirror and some handkerchiefs, and he stuffed them into the sack and tied it tight. Granny had saved Mama’s wedding ring for him, and he put it on his pinky finger, right beside his own.

That night, when he was sitting on the front porch, staring off toward the mountains, his hands folded in his lap, I sat down next to him and said, “Tell me where you’ve been.”

He didn’t say anything, just sat there, so I said it again.

Granny passed by the door and said, “Come inside, Velva Jean. Let your daddy sit in peace.”

I said, “No, I will not. I want to know where he’s been.”

Daddy sighed. He said, “I’ve had an adventure,” but his voice was flat. He said, “I was in Weaverville. I walked from there to Virginia, across the top of the mountains, with a man who’s building a road. He’s building it right across the mountains, right across the tops of them. That road is going to reach from Virginia all the way down here, right down through these mountains we live in. It’s going to be the greatest scenic road in the world. A road of unlimited horizons.”

I listened until I couldn’t listen anymore. I stood up and said, “A road across the mountains? From Virginia to here? Does it take you to Africa or England too?”

Daddy stared at me.

Granny walked onto the porch. She said, “Velva Jean.”

I said, “Did you bring me something from the mountaintops? From the horizon?”

Daddy said, “I brought money. I worked hard to get it, to bring it back.” His voice caught, and he cleared his throat. He said, “There’s something for you in my bag.”

I said, “I don’t want it.”

And then I pushed past Granny and walked straight upstairs to my room and shut the door.

When we got up the next day, Daddy was gone and so was the sack of Mama’s things. But Daddy had left an envelope, fat with money, and he had left me something as well—an emerald, big and uncut. Johnny Clay whistled. He said, “You can’t get that kind of rock down here. Only place you can find emeralds is up there at Linville or Little Switzerland, up in the Black Mountains. What was Daddy doing up there?”

I didn’t say anything. I was turning the rock around and around in my hand so that it caught the light and made the green come alive.

Sweet Fern said, “A gem that size is probably worth some money.”

Ruby Poole said, “You ought to have Uncle Turk cut and polish it for you. He could turn it into a pretty ring or necklace.” Uncle Turk was Mama’s brother who lived down on the river banks like an Indian, cutting and polishing gems and camping along the river, living off the game he caught.

I looked at the rock as I turned it around, and I liked the feel of it—rough and raw, so sharp it could cut my hand. I thought I just might keep it that way.

I took the emerald upstairs and slid my hatbox out from under my bed. The hatbox was left over from Sweet Fern’s wedding hat and was where I kept all my treasures, little things I’d collected and that Mama and others had given me—a painted thimble, a silver whistle, my Little Orphan Annie secret decoder ring, some pretty stones, my fairy crosses, and clover jewelry me and Mama made. I had papered the insides with pictures of Buddy Rogers, the handsomest man I had ever seen, and Carole Lombard, swearing that I would one day be that glamorous. When I told Mama, she said of course I would, that I could do anything I put my mind to and not to forget it.

I opened the hatbox and set the emerald inside it, and then I closed it back up again. Then I went downstairs for breakfast. No one ate or talked, and when I walked outside afterward to give the leftovers to Hunter Firth, I saw Beachard’s stone—the one he had brought from the woods after Mama’s funeral. It sat, large and blank, still completely bare and empty—which was somehow worse than any message he could have written. Up on the hill, at the head of Mama’s grave, sat the enormous cross our daddy had carved. It was so heavy that it had started to lean a little, tilting forward over the earth as if it was bowing to Mama.

That night I lay in bed thinking about my daddy’s note—the one he’d left for Mama—until my face grew hot and my chest felt dull and heavy, like someone was sitting on it. When I finally fell asleep, I dreamed about my daddy and the little slip of paper he had left behind for Mama. He would hold it over my head, just out of reach, and wave it back and forth, laughing.

“Where you reckon that note is now?” I asked Johnny Clay, but he said it didn’t matter, that Mama was gone now and finding the note couldn’t bring her back. But I wanted to find it. I had to know what it said.

The next night, when everyone was sleeping, I got out of bed and went into Mama’s room thinking I would go through her things till I found it. But when I walked in and shut the door behind me, I forgot why I was there because everything was just the way Mama had left it. Granny had made up the bed with fresh sheets and a coverlet, just the way Mama always did. It looked like Mama might walk in at any moment to fold back the covers and get into bed, like she’d just gotten up for a minute and would be right back. There was still a hollow in the pillow where her head had been.

I took Mama’s nightgown off the bedpost and held it up to me. It smelled like Mama, only the sickness smell was gone. It was just Mama now—a mix of lavender and honeysuckle and the lye soap with spices in it that Granny sometimes made. I sat on the very edge of the bed so that I wouldn’t disturb anything.

I spread Mama’s nightgown across my lap so it was covering my knees and my legs and hanging down to my feet like I was wearing it. I put my hand in the hollow of the pillow. I sat like that, watching the moonlight come in through the window, and thought how Mama was just here, and how just over a week ago I’d held her hand and talked to her and promised her I would live out there. And now, just like that, she was gone.

Toward morning, I hung her nightgown on the bedpost and went back to my own room, forgetting all about my daddy and his note. I climbed into bed and curled up in a ball and cried myself to sleep, and when I woke up I couldn’t remember dreaming at all.

The first thing I saw when I rolled over was Johnny Clay sitting up in his bed. I said, “What are you doing?”

He said, “Hush, Velva Jean.”

I could hear Sweet Fern and Danny talking downstairs. Johnny Clay had opened our door just a sliver and closed the window, even though we might suffocate from the heat, just so he could hear better.

“We can bring them home with us,” Danny said.

“No,” said Sweet Fern. “After all they’ve lost, those children will pitch a fit if we make them leave their home. Besides, there’s no room in the apartment.”

They were talking about Beachard and Johnny Clay and me. Linc was eighteen and already married to Ruby Poole and living on his own, but Beach was fourteen, Johnny Clay was twelve, and I was ten. I sat up in my bed.

Danny had promised Sweet Fern a beautiful house of her own, which he was going to build with the help of his brothers and his daddy. Sweet Fern had picked the house plan herself from a catalog and she was mighty proud of it. She got it out all the time to look at and show people.

“It don’t mean we have to give up the house,” Danny said now.

“I know.” We could hear her sigh even from downstairs. “I guess the thought of that house makes it easier to move back here for a while.” I imagined her looking up at the newspapers on the walls—the ones Mama had put up to cover over the cracks, the ones my brothers and I had learned to read from by studying the articles, advertisements, and cartoon strips—and at the old-fashioned kitchen, which was cramped and not at all fancy, not like the one Sweet Fern would have one day.

“We could ask Granny and Daddy Hoyt,” Danny said.

“No.”

“Or Zona.”

“No,” Sweet Fern said again. “Granny and Daddy Hoyt are too old to take on these children, and Zona’s not strong enough. Besides, Daddy asked me. He said I was the one to look after them. I’m to be their mother.”

I started to cough. I coughed so hard that my eyes began to water and I couldn’t get my breath. Johnny Clay jumped on me and put his pillow over my face to get me quiet, but I felt my whole world spinning away from me. Sweet Fern and I didn’t get on at all. She was barely even nice to me, and that was only because Mama used to be around to make her act civil. I couldn’t deny that Sweet Fern was born to be a mother, but I knew without a doubt that I didn’t want her to be mine.

For ten years, Sweet Fern had been the only girl—Mama and Daddy doted on her; Daddy Hoyt named her himself because she was his first grandbaby—and then I came along and she hated me right from the crib, no matter what Mama said about her loving me from the start. When Mama wasn’t around, Sweet Fern used to stand over me and just stare. Sometimes she would look mad and sometimes she would look sad, and one time she leaned down over me and said, “I wish you had never come.” Granny said there wasn’t any way I could know something like that, being just a baby at the time, and she said not to make up stories. But I remembered it.

And now she was going to be my mother.

“I’ll never leave you, Velva Jean,” Johnny Clay whispered. “Don’t you ever worry about that.”

“Promise?” For some reason, I felt more scared now than I’d ever felt in my life—more scared than I’d ever felt over Junior Loveday or the devil or the Wood Carver or even Mama dying.

“Promise.” We grabbed hands and shook, and then I lay back in bed and tried to conjure Mama’s face and her voice and her smell before the sickness. It was hard to think of her lying alone outside in the deep, dark earth, while we were inside where it was cozy. I lay there and pieced her back together as best I could—her bright smile; the way her eyes lit up when she sang; her long, curling hair, the color of winter leaves; the way her face was shaped like a heart, just like mine. I waited till she was fixed in my mind and then I shut my eyes. Just like that, her face was gone, but I could still feel the cold of the river water on my flesh and I could still hear her sweet, pure voice filling the holler down by Three Gum River, alive with the spirit of God.

Granny said Mama had answered the call of death’s angel. I wasn’t exactly sure what that meant, but I thought it sounded wonderful and grand and brave. It sounded just like my mama.

~ 1934 ~

—“Orphans”