Velva Jean Learns to Drive (15 page)

“Your granddaddy’s a wise man.” He twirled the piece of wood round as he carved, little curled up shavings falling down on the ground by his feet.

“So if you never had a lesson, how’d you learn?” I said. I tried shifting my weight from one foot to the other to stop the ache.

“I just tried it one day and I discovered that I knew how to do it, like it was in me all the time.”

“Mama always said that singing was like praying twice,” I said without meaning to. I was thinking about how singing was like that for me, how ever since I could remember I’d been singing and making up songs in my head and planning my outfit for the Grand Ole Opry—a gold skirt and jacket with red trim and rhinestones, and a matching cowboy hat. I knew where Nashville was on Beachard’s map of the world, and that it was almost three hundred miles from Sleepy Gap. I had already saved up a dollar and seventy-five cents to help get me there one day, money I’d earned by working for Mrs. Dennis and her husband.

The Wood Carver had stopped carving. He was rubbing at the piece of wood. I pointed to a tree that stood directly in front of the porch. Its trunk was dark and straight; its arms spread wide toward the sky. It was the only one like itself in the middle of all those firs and ashes. “What kind of tree is that?”

“It’s a Jesus tree,” he said and looked up for the first time. “More commonly known as a dogwood.”

“It don’t look like a dogwood.” There were dogwoods up and down the mountain, but I’d never seen one like this. Its trunk was nearly black and it grew up tall and full like it couldn’t wait to get to heaven. When the breeze blew, the leaves trembled so that it looked like the tree was dancing.

“I planted it myself to carve from,” the Wood Carver said, “but its brace roots are too strong. If a tree has enough support, I don’t cut it because it needs to become a tree, which is what it was meant to do. But a tree with one root—even one large root—will never be supported, so I make something else out of it, like a cane or a toy.” He paused, his knife still working. “You’ve got good brace roots. Your mama, your brothers, your sister, your grandparents. Even your daddy.”

Suddenly, I was sorry I’d come. He was nice and easy to talk to, but he was a murderer after all. I should have just sat still when he called to me or slipped back down the hill without saying anything.

I stood up. “My mama’s gone,” I said and kicked at the dirt with my bare foot. And my daddy killed her, I added in my head. I had never said it out loud, not even to Johnny Clay.

“She’s not gone in here.” He tapped himself on the head with the piece of wood. “Or here.” He pointed at his heart.

I wondered if this was true. Mama felt gone. Completely gone. Mama felt nowhere to be found. I thought about Beachard asking where God was and wondering if he was anywhere and if Mama was anywhere, too. Suddenly, the loneliness came over me, so sharp and fast that I almost lost my balance.

“Yep,” the Wood Carver said. “Good solid brace roots.” He continued to carve and I stood watching him until I knew Sweet Fern would be worrying and it was time to go home.

Before I left, I could see that the piece of wood he was working had become a little girl with long, curled hair and hands folded as if she was praying. It’s beautiful, I thought, but I didn’t say it.

He closed the girl’s eyes and opened her mouth so that it looked like she was singing. He blew off the loose shavings and smoothed it with his fingers, and then handed the figure to me.

“I can’t take it,” I said, thinking Sweet Fern would tan my hide for taking something from a runaway murderer. But I wanted it very much, more than anything.

He touched his knife to the brim of his hat in a kind of salute. It was then that I saw his eyes were a dark midnight blue, the color of a starless sky. “Yes you can,” he said. “She was waiting, you see. She was in there all the time.”

When I got home, Johnny Clay was leaning against the front porch railing, his hands jammed into the pockets of his trousers. When he saw me, he stood up straight and waved me on. I thought I would tell him about the Wood Carver and how I’d talked to him and watched him use his killing knife. I imagined Johnny Clay would be proud and also jealous that I’d spent the day with a murderer. I might even take him up there with me one day so that he could visit the murderer, too. I ran up the steps, my right hand wrapped around the wooden girl that I was carrying in my pocket.

“Where the hell have you been?” Johnny Clay looked mad as a hornet. He talked so low I could barely hear him. “I been looking everywhere for you.”

“Why?” I said.

“Keep your voice down,” he said.

“No I will not. Why don’t you speak up? A person can barely hear you.”

“Hush, Velva Jean!” He looked toward the house and then back at me.

“What’re you so mad about?”

“You’ll see.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

I was getting good and angry now. I couldn’t believe he was being so hateful. Just for that, I decided I wouldn’t tell him about the Wood Carver.

“Velva Jean?” Sweet Fern opened the front door and stepped out, shutting it behind her. Her face was pink and rigid, which was how it looked when she was upset. I waited for her to yell at me, too. “Velva Jean,” she said again. Her hands worked at her hair, as if searching for loose pieces. Her hair was neatly wound into a braid and pinned off her neck, just as it always was. I thought about how she was never messy and how she always smelled just like a daisy, even when it was hot as Jupiter out, and how her hair never came down like other people’s. “Daddy’s here.”

“What?” And then I looked down and saw the sack lying by the door. It was large and brown and just like the one my daddy always carried when he was traveling. I shot Johnny Clay a look to kill. “You couldn’t tell me?” And then I shoved past Sweet Fern and opened the door. There was Danny and Aunt Zona and Granny and Daddy Hoyt, all looking grim and serious, and there by the fireplace was my daddy. It had been one year since he’d left us with Sweet Fern.

His face brightened when he saw me. He walked over to me and I thought he seemed shorter than I remembered—and older. “What do you think? I’m back. I got myself a job on the Scenic. Did you hear? They’re building that road and your daddy’s going to help them. From Virginia through North Carolina, even though Tennessee wanted it bad, they did. But Carolina got it. The government just announced it, made it official. ‘Will need labor,’ they said. That’s me. I’m going to work on it, do whatever I can do. I came back to tell you. They’re moving mountains up there, Velva Jean. You can’t believe what they’re going to do.”

Daddy always did talk fast. He talked like he buck danced—hard and quick and excited and joysome. It had been a long time since we’d had that kind of energy around here. He didn’t say anything then, just held out a hand as if he was going to pat my head, and then he pulled it back. “Is that my little girl?” he said, and he tried to smile, but it seemed strange on him, like the rest of his face didn’t want to. “Is that my baby?”

I could feel Johnny Clay and Sweet Fern behind me, feel the look Johnny Clay was giving Daddy, the dislike that he didn’t even bother to hide. I thought I should be nice to Daddy because he was my father and deep down he was still sad, but he’d left us and he’d killed Mama, and I realized that after all this time I had nothing to say.

“Is that my baby girl?” I could tell he wanted me to say something, to reach out, to somehow make it better.

Where have you been? I wanted to say. Why did you leave us with Sweet Fern? What did you write in that note? What did you say to Mama to make her so sick like that? Why did you leave her and go away?

“No,” I said instead. “It’s not.” And then I went into my bedroom and shut the door and moved a chair in front of it so that he couldn’t get in. I waited, but he didn’t try. My heart was racing and my face was hot. I was not his baby girl. I wasn’t a baby at all. I was a grown-up person who had been to jail and drunk hard corn liquor and visited with murderers.

How dare he come back? I thought. How dare he come back here?

I sat up on the bed by the headboard, with my knees squeezed up tight against my chest, and listened to the rise and fall of voices. There was Johnny Clay yelling and slamming out of the house, Sweet Fern sounding cold and upset, and Daddy Hoyt, like always, trying to calm and soothe. And there was another voice, the voice of a stranger. The voice of my daddy.

I lay in bed that night, turning the wooden girl round and round in my hands. When my eyes got used to the dark, I held the little figure up in front of my face and studied every angle. I thought about what the Wood Carver had said about brace roots and how I had good ones.

“Your mama, your brothers, your sister, your grandparents. Even your daddy,” he had said.

I thought about what kind of world it was where you could ask God to save your Mama, but he wouldn’t listen and would just let her die. And what kind of world it was where a daddy was so heartless that he could leave his own children, but a murderer was nice and kind. I thought about Johnny Clay and how sometimes he went away from me, too, just like Mama, just like Daddy. I thought about brace roots and weak roots and what made some trees grow one way and some another. I prayed that this new road might take Daddy away forever so that he didn’t have the chance to come back and hurt us anymore.

I tucked the wooden girl under my pillow and kept one hand on it as I rolled onto my side. I felt the anger begin to wash away and my body start to go limp and my brain grow fuzzy. Just as I drifted off into sleep, I heard the Wood Carver’s words again: “You’re Hoyt’s girl, aren’t you?” “Zona or Turk or Corrine?” “Your mama, your brothers, your sister, your grandparents. Even your daddy.”

Even your daddy.

How did he know my mama’s name? How did he know Daddy Hoyt and Aunt Zona and Uncle Turk? Not from anything I’d ever told him, because I had never, not once, talked to him about my family.

Daddy left the next morning before I was awake. I looked outside and his traveling sack was gone. There was a fresh bouquet of witch hazel on Mama’s grave, but otherwise there was nothing to show that he’d even been here at all.

I opened the family record book and wrote, “November 30, 1934: Daddy left.” The book was just as full of bad things as good ones.

~ 1935 ~

—“Sing On, Sweet Voice”

NINE

In the middle of April the damp lifted, and Danny Deal and his daddy announced that they were taking the train all the way to Asheville to buy a truck. They were buying it practically new from a man Mr. Deal had known for ten years, a man named Lenny Philpot, who owned two drugstores and a movie theater. They were going to stay the night at Mr. Philpot’s house and then start back in the truck early the next morning. Johnny Clay and me thought we should be allowed to go, too, because he was fourteen and I was twelve, but Danny said we had to stay at home.