Velva Jean Learns to Drive (28 page)

In the evenings, an orchestra played in the grand ballroom on the first floor. I tied back my hair and put on my nicest dress—one that Harley had bought me for the trip: swirling navy skirt, red plaid Celanese taffeta blouse, short-sleeved navy bolero jacket. It had cost $2.98 and was as cute as anything Ruby Poole owned. Then Harley and I went downstairs to join the other guests. Mostly we just held on to each other and rocked back and forth to the music—“Pennies from Heaven,” “Stardust,” and “Moonlight Serenade.”

The third night we were there, we stood out on the balcony and listened to the music coming up from downstairs—soft and sweet in the early November air—and I watched for the woman to appear out of her house. I wondered if she could see the dancers and hear the music and if so what she thought of them. I wondered if she hated looking up here at such a beautiful, grand place, if it reminded her of how poor she was and of all she didn’t have, or if the sight of it made her glad. I thought that if I lived across from the Balsam Mountain Springs Hotel I would both hate it and love it, that it would make me both angry and happy at once.

“Isn’t the music beautiful?” I said. I was full from the lime-pepper steak, but I still felt like dancing. “Let’s go down there right now,” I said. I thought that while I was here in this world I might as well enjoy it. I would be back in the other soon enough.

“Mr. Bright?” A man from the inn came running down the porch. He waved something in his hand. “Harley Bright?”

“That’s me,” said Harley.

“Telegram for you.”

The man handed him a square of paper. It said: “Son—Come home. Your mama’s dead. Levi Bright.”

I looked at the lights on the porch, at the warm lights of the inn. I looked at the stars in the sky—at the North Star, which never moved and always stayed the same—and at the black outline of the mountain across the holler. Inside we could hear music and laughter. It sounded like a celebration. ~

On Friday, November 11, I woke up in Mama’s old house and went to the window. The sky was dark with clouds and the ground was wet. There were red-brown puddles all across the yard, and whenever the wind blew, water showered down from the trees. The air had turned bitter cold overnight. Harley would be over at his house, arranging for the casket and writing the eulogy and comforting his daddy while Mr. Cabe, the undertaker, got Li’l Dean ready for the funeral.

She had died of a heart attack. Li’l Dean Eufasia Milner Bright dropped dead on the steps of her own front porch, her arms weighed down with buckets of muscadine grapes she’d been picking. Harley said she made what she called her “muskydine wine” for medicinal purposes, but I wondered. Levi found her in a pool of muscadine juice, and wiped the grapes off his wife’s face before even checking her pulse, because he knew she would far rather be dead than untidy. As soon as he heard the news, Harley was sure his mama had done it on purpose so that we would have to cut our honeymoon short.

Instead of putting on my navy and red dress with the bolero jacket and eating a lime-pepper steak, I pulled on my old work clothes and spent the day helping Sweet Fern and Danny pack up their things so they could move back to the apartment over Deal’s.

“We can wait till after the funeral,” Sweet Fern said. “We don’t have to go yet, Velva Jean.”

“No,” I told her. I knew how excited she was about going home after all these years. I knew the sooner she got there, the sooner Danny could begin building her house and the sooner she could get on with her life. “There’s no reason you need to stay.”

Danny drove his yellow truck up to the house and Johnny Clay and Linc and me helped load their things into the back of it. When it was time for them to go, Danny picked up Corrina and then Justice and put them in the cab of the truck, and Dan Presley climbed in after. Danny said, “Sweet Fern, get on in this truck.”

She said, “Absolutely not. The baby and me are walking.”

Sweet Fern was holding baby Hoyt as she hugged Linc and then Johnny Clay. When she got to me, there were tears in her eyes. She didn’t say anything, just pulled me in tight with her free arm, and then pulled away just as quick. Then she turned and followed the truck as it started off. We stood and waved as they headed down the hill.

Johnny Clay said, “I guess that just leaves me.”

“And Beachard,” said Linc, although we knew this didn’t count for much. Beach was still gone. And even when he was there, we always knew it wouldn’t be for very long. He was gone more than he was home, just like Daddy always had been.

The three of us, Linc and Johnny Clay and me, walked back into the house. It looked empty, like the life had suddenly gone out of it. The newspapers were yellowed and curling on the walls; the cushions on the settee were faded and worn; the curtains Sweet Fern had made when she and Danny moved back in were frayed at the ends.

My honeymoon things sat, still packed and waiting, in the middle of the front room. I hadn’t known what to pack so I had taken everything—all of my dresses and undergarments, which were inside the little brown suitcase Daddy had once bought for Mama but that she never used because he was the one to go places, not her. And all the treasures from my hatbox, including the little singing girl the Wood Carver had given me, the emerald from Daddy, my Magnet Red lipstick—which I’d never returned—and my Nashville money, which wasn’t much but which I’d started to save up again whenever and however I could over the years.

“It looks different,” Linc said. “Smaller somehow.”

“Think of all the people that used to live in here,” said Johnny Clay. “Us, Mama, Daddy, Sweet Fern, Beachard.”

“It felt bigger then,” I said. “I don’t know how, with all those people, but it did.”

That night, I took down the family record book and, below my wedding date and “Velva Jean leaves for her honeymoon,” I wrote: “Sweet Fern moves back to Alluvial.”

The next morning, the rain had gone away, taking the clouds with it, and leaving only bright blue skies behind. I woke up to the sun in my old room where I slept with Harley because I couldn’t bring myself to sleep in Mama’s. We had somehow fit ourselves into the two narrow beds, pushed together to make one, Harley’s feet hanging off the ends. I slipped out, careful not to wake him. Johnny Clay had gone off somewhere early, gold pan in hand. He had been avoiding Harley ever since we came back.

I stood on the porch in my bare feet and stared up toward the trees and toward Mama’s grave. I used to think about Mama all the time and wish for her. I thought of her saying that she would be there for all the big things that happened to me. But I wasn’t sure I believed it. Mama still felt gone. Was she there with me when I walked down the aisle of Sleepy Gap Church holding on to Daddy Hoyt’s arm? Was she there when Reverend Nix shouted out to everyone that Harley and me were husband and wife? If she was there, was she happy? Did she like my Harley Bright?

I heard a humming sound—a sound like bees—and knew the mountain was making music. As I stepped off the porch into the clear white light of day, I covered my eyes to block the sun. It was so bright that I couldn’t see, and I stood there for a moment, blinded.

EIGHTEEN

One week later, on November 20, we moved to Devil’s Kitchen. The day before we left, I went up to Old Widow’s Peak by myself, where no one could see me, and cried like a baby. I didn’t want to leave my home, this place I loved more than any other place on earth, and I didn’t want to give up my dream of the house with blue shutters and dormer windows. But we had to go and I knew we had to go. We couldn’t leave Harley’s daddy on his own, much as Harley wanted to. Besides, Mama’s house belonged to Johnny Clay now, and to Daddy, if he ever came back. And the house with the blue shutters didn’t even exist, except in my own mind. I guessed now it never would. Meanwhile, over in Devil’s Kitchen, there was a sad old man who had just lost his wife and who needed looking after. Moving was the right thing to do. Harley and I would just have to be men about it, as Johnny Clay liked to say.

The next morning, I went from house to house and told everyone good-bye, and then Harley and me loaded up our belongings and drove three miles in his automobile to Devil’s Kitchen. I stared out the window of the dark blue DeSoto all the way and did not cry once.

When we got there, Levi was sitting on the front porch steps, talking to himself or to Jesus, it was hard to know. Harley saw his daddy and swore under his breath. “Daddy, we’re home,” he shouted out the car window.

Home. I couldn’t believe it. This was going to be my home from now on. I took in the house and the barn, the chicken house, springhouse, cornfield, and meadow. Levi’s house was big, bigger than Sweet Fern’s that Danny was going to build for her. Wisteria and roses grew all the way around the front of the porch. The vines twined around the railings and posts. Even in winter, it was pretty. But it wasn’t home. I climbed out of the car and shut the door.

Levi stood up and waited on the edge of the porch, hands on hips, his bony elbows pointed heavenward. “I can live on my own,” he hollered. “I don’t need babysitters.”

“We’re here to stay, Daddy,” Harley said, lifting two suitcases out of the backseat—one packed with his clothes, the other, my Mama’s, filled with all my earthly belongings. “You’d best get that straight.” He set the suitcases on the ground and untied the rocking chair that was strapped to the top of the car. It was the one piece of furniture I wanted from Mama’s house. Daddy Hoyt had made it himself out of the leftover wood from his fiddles.

Levi walked down the steps, hands still planted on his hips. “Goddammit, boy, I don’t need you here.”

My legs felt shaky from the ride. I focused on smiling, but the old man terrified me. He’d never said more than two words to me, and he always seemed to be barking at Harley or cursing or muttering to himself. I was scared he was going to think of me as a whiskey thief, scared he might shoot me or turn me over to the sheriff. For the first time that day I felt a tickling in my nose and behind my eyes that meant I hadn’t cried myself completely dry.

“Behave yourself, Daddy.” Harley looked over his shoulder at me, nodding for me to join him. “Come on up here, Velva Jean.”

Levi peered past his son and looked me up and down. “What she ever sees in you, I don’t know.”

Harley set the suitcases on the ground. I reached the porch and stood next to him, clutching my hatbox and mandolin. I had almost left the mandolin at home, but I thought better of it at the last minute. Even an unwanted instrument was better than no instrument at all.

“How do,” I said to my father-in-law, wondering what to call him.

Levi grunted and stumped off into the house, where we could hear him slamming things around. The muscles in Harley’s jaw twitched and then he smiled. “Allow me.” He swooped down and picked me up and carried me up the porch steps, over the muscadine stains that were still there in the wood, and toward the front door.

I wrapped one arm around his neck while the other held on to my hatbox and mandolin. “What are you doing?”

“I’m carrying my bride over the threshold,” he said, kicking the door all the way open. “Welcome home, Mrs. Bright.”

The next day, I woke up in a strange bed in a strange room in a strange house. The walls and ceilings were made of hand-planed yellow poplar, aged to a deep gold. For a moment, I couldn’t remember where I was. Then I saw the family photographs on the walls—Harley as a boy; Li’l Dean and Levi on their wedding day; a set of baby pictures. Harley was already up and I could hear him moving around downstairs.

Li’l Dean’s daddy and his brothers had built the house. I thought about the woman who used to sleep in this same bed in this same room, Harley’s mama. I tried to picture her lying here on this cherry four-poster, atop this mountainous feather bed, underneath this quilt and woven coverlet. I tried to picture her with Levi, talking about all the things they would do and all the places they would go, the way Harley and me did before falling asleep. I tried to picture Levi lying on top of Li’l Dean the way Harley liked to lie on top of me. And I tried to picture the young Harley living across the hall from them in the great big room—the one where Li’l Dean and all her brothers and sisters had slept when they were kids, the one that was Levi’s room now.