Velva Jean Learns to Drive (27 page)

Then I saw a shadow come moving up the hill from the direction of Alluvial. As I watched, it grew larger and larger, and out of it there suddenly came the dark figure of a man. Before I could scream or run back to the house, I recognized the broad shoulders and the gold-brown hair in the moonlight.

“What’re you doing, Velva Jean?” Johnny Clay called.

“Waiting for you.”

“Something wrong?”

“Just a noise in the woods. Probably an animal. Hunter Firth took off after it.” I rubbed my arms where the chill bumps were and told myself it was fine now that Johnny Clay was here and whatever it was had gone away.

“That old dog. He’ll go after anything.”

We sat down on the steps and watched the woods.

“Why are you waiting up?” Johnny Clay said. He wiped at a dirt spot on his pants.

“Just wanted to see how your night was.”

He shrugged. “It was okay.”

“Was Alice Nix there?”

“Yeah.”

“She’s sweet on you.”

“She’s sweet on everyone.”

We sat there. Johnny Clay yawned. I tried to think of a way to tell him what I had to tell him. “Harley Bright asked me to marry him,” I said at last.

He stared at me like I had a possum on my head. “You’re only fifteen.”

“We’ll wait till I’m sixteen.”

“You said yes?”

“Of course.”

“Daddy Hoyt said yes?”

“He asked me if I was sure and I said I was, so he gave us his blessing.”

He shook his head. “He just did it because he can’t say no to you.”

I didn’t say anything. But he could probably tell I was getting mad because I squared up my shoulders and narrowed my eyes. Daddy always said I looked like Mama when I was mad—that my eyes and lips disappeared just like hers did.

“Look, Velva Jean, you know how I feel about the Reverend Harley Bright.” He said “the Reverend Harley Bright” like he was saying
collards
or
pig innards
or
head lice
, or something else disgusting.

“You’d feel that way about anyone I wanted to marry. Because you’re jealous. You want me all to yourself.”

“Maybe so. And maybe there’s no one good enough for my sister. Maybe if Charles ‘Buddy’ Rogers came up here himself in that airplane of his from
Wings
, he wouldn’t even be good enough. Or Fred Astaire in his dancing shoes. But it ain’t just that. It’s him, Velva Jean. I don’t trust him.”

“You said yourself he preaches a good sermon.”

“I think he tells people what he thinks they want to hear.” I could feel my lips disappearing. “What about the Opry?”

I hadn’t even thought about the Opry, but I wasn’t about to tell him that. “I’m still going.”

“How? You really think he’ll let you once you become his wife?”

I shot him my fiercest look, the one I secretly practiced on Sweet Fern when her back was turned. “No one’s got to ‘let’ me do anything, Johnny Clay. I’m still going when I turn eighteen. Now Harley’ll just go with me.” I thought about what the Wood Carver had said: “There are no straight lines anywhere, and that goes for pathways too.”

Johnny Clay laughed. “The Reverend Harley Bright, moonshiner’s boy and railroad fireman, in Nashville.”

“I’m serious, Johnny Clay.”

“Okay, Velva Jean. But I don’t see it.”

I didn’t say anything, just sucked in my lips, narrowed my eyes, and pulled my shoulders back so far that it felt like my shoulder blades were touching.

Johnny Clay sighed. He said, “Does he really make you happy?”

I looked at him then. “Yes.”

“And there’s nothing I can say?”

“No.”

He blinked, looked down at his hands, looked back up at me, up at the stars, and then back at his hands. “Well. I guess what’s done is done and I got to live with that.”

Hunter Firth came running out of the woods then, his tongue hanging out. He ran right up the steps and jumped into Johnny Clay’s lap. We watched that old brown dog as Johnny Clay rubbed him behind the ears. It was easier to watch him than it was to talk to each other right then, so we just looked at him till he closed his eyes and went to sleep.

“It’s funny,” Johnny Clay said finally.

“What?”

In the moonlight, Johnny Clay looked like both Mama and Daddy. He had Mama’s high cheekbones, which was the Cherokee in her, and he had Daddy’s strong jaw and straight nose. “When Mama died I promised never to leave you, but now you’re getting ready to leave me.”

“No I ain’t, Johnny Clay.” I took his hand and laid my head on his shoulder. “I’m always going to be right here.”

“Promise?” he said. His voice sounded sad and distant.

“Promise.”

SEVENTEEN

I leaned in close to the bathroom mirror and studied my face. I didn’t look any different. “Now I am a woman,” I said out loud. But I didn’t feel any different either. I wondered if it took a while to sink in. I paused as I was buttoning my dress and pinched at the skin on my chest. Thank God I had grown bosoms after all—not big ones like Sweet Fern’s, thank goodness, but not flat ones like Rachel Gordon’s either. Now that I was married, I hoped Harley wouldn’t expect me to start rouging them like Lucinda Sink. I pinched over and over until my skin was a faint pink and then turned this way and that to see how it looked. I didn’t think it did a thing for me.

On November 5, I turned sixteen. On the sixth we were married, and on the seventh we were on our honeymoon, a word I thought every bit as pretty as
ambrosia
or
glory
or
heaven
.
Honeymoon
. I liked to say it to myself over and over again.

The Balsam Mountain Springs Hotel was a three-story Victorian inn. It had been built in 1905 and opened in 1908 as a tourist attraction at the highest railroad depot this side of the Rockies. It sat on twenty-three acres, at 3,500 feet, looking out over the hills and hollers—proud, sprawling, beautiful, so large and lovely and grand that it didn’t look real. It was like something from a fairy story.

There was an iron four-poster bed that filled most of the room and a modern bathroom just down the hall that you didn’t have to go outside for and that we shared with other guests. On our first night there, we sat in the restaurant and ordered a steak with lime-pepper sauce, one for each of us. It was the best thing I ever tasted and I ate every last bite. Afterward I purchased some picture postcards in the lobby and we went up to one of the long porches that ran the whole length of the inn on the first and second floors, and sat down in rocking chairs. Harley watched me while I wrote a card to every single member of my family—even Celia Faye and Clover, who could barely read—telling them about the bathroom, the inn, the steak, and the train ride there. When I was done with each one, I passed it to him and he signed his name at the bottom right beside mine.

Then we sat there and looked down the hill and across the railroad tracks and out across the holler at the mountains beyond, at the little houses that dotted the hillside—chickens running in the yard, smoke winding from chimneys, figures moving in and out of barns and smokehouses and homes. In front of one of them, there was a woman pulling wash off a line. I was too far away to see her face, but her hair was falling down and her back was bent. She didn’t look old, but she walked old. I wondered how many fancy people had sat here in this same chair and watched that woman and thought how poor she looked and how poor her house looked with chickens running wild in the yard and wash hanging out on the line for everyone to see.
These primitive mountain folk, these rural mountain poor . . .

“The inn sits on twenty-three acres,” Harley was saying, “and is known for its healing springs. There are seven springs, and people come from all over the country to bathe in them and feel their powers.”

I couldn’t look away from the woman. I watched as she walked up the steps to her house, laundry in her arms, and disappeared. Over the mountains, the sun was setting. The sky was turning pink and gold and orange. Down in the valley, it was getting dark. It seemed strange that the sky could still be so light and bright when the valley was already turning black. The air was chilly. Winter always came faster to the mountains than it did down below. Harley stood up and held out his hand. He said, “You’re cold. Let’s go back to our room, honey. We can find the springs tomorrow.”

Then it hit me that this was the first time I was completely alone with Harley—no Johnny Clay, no family, no Glory Pioneers, no fellow travelers. It was just us, husband and wife. We went back into our room and sat on the bed and held hands and then he leaned in and kissed me. Before I knew what I was doing, I put my arms around him and kissed him back.

The hairs up and down my arms—the little ones that were still gold from summer—were standing straight up. I felt like my entire body was on alert, like Hunter Firth when he was tracking something. Harley pulled me in tighter and we fell back on the bed so I was lying on top of him. Even as I felt myself spinning, floating, I thought, there we are like two wild animals, as if I was watching us from up above or from across the room.

No one had ever talked to me about sex—not even Granny—but I knew it was something men and women did when they got married, and something men sometimes did with Lucinda Sink before they had a wife to do it with. When Harley rolled on top of me, for just a second I wondered what on earth I was supposed to do, so I just lay there and tried to breathe with all that weight on my lungs. He certainly don’t look like he weighs this much, I kept thinking. I wondered what was so good about this that made Sweet Fern want to keep having all those children.

But then he kissed me again and he shifted his weight and suddenly he wasn’t suffocating at all, but strong and manly and I wanted to be covered by him, by my husband, by this big, dark, sturdy man. I felt a strange tingling in my toes that was working its way up my body—just like when I was saved—only it was more like a lightning bolt because it was happening everywhere all at once.

And then we were rolling and rolling and the bed seemed to have grown, and I lost my breath, and all I could think was, Harley, Harley, Harley. The moonshiner’s boy. The Hurricane Preacher. Harley Bright. And then it became a kind of rhythm, and we moved to it, and it wasn’t really beautiful, but more like two animals rooting around in the woods after something. I was surprised at myself. I am worse than Lucinda Sink, I thought.

Afterward we lay side by side in the dark and I stared at his profile and fit my fingers into his dimples, the twin ones right by the corner of his mouth. My dimples, I thought. My face. My husband. I thought I would be embarrassed to look at him, after what we had done, but I wasn’t.

“Harley?” I was too awake to sleep. “Do you think we just made a baby?” I knew enough to know that this was how you made one.

“No.”

“How do you know?”

“Because it’s too soon. We’re barely married, Velva Jean. You don’t mean you want a baby right away.”

“No.” And I didn’t. I’d never thought of babies except to pray that I myself wouldn’t have any. I saw what they did to a person. And what would I do with one once I went to Nashville?

“Because now is not the time,” he said. “We need to be married for a while first.”

“But how do you know we didn’t just make one?” I was suddenly worried. Suddenly the last thing I ever wanted was a baby.

“Because I made sure of it.” He pulled me close, my head on his chest. “Get some sleep, Velva Jean.” His voice was blurred, drifting.

“Harley?” I laid a hand on his chest. His heart was still beating fast, but I could feel it slowing. “Harley?” I said again.

 

He was already asleep. ~

There was billiards, Ping-Pong, lawn tennis, card parties, and a box social on the front lawn. During the day, we took long walks over the grounds and splashed in the springs up to our ankles. We held hands and talked about the house we would build, up behind Mama’s—a pretty house with a wraparound porch and dormer windows and blue shutters the color of asters. There would be flower boxes at each window and yellow gingham curtains blowing in the breeze and sunshine spilling in and out of every room. We talked about it so much that I could see every detail in my mind, just like the house was already put together and waiting for us.