Velva Jean Learns to Drive (30 page)

This made me mad. That road coming through my mountains. My brother so full of himself. And a room so dark you couldn’t tell what you were eating. I looked right at Harley and said, “Please excuse how dark it is in here. It’s just the worst kind of dark.”

The next day, I awoke to a horrible banging and hammering. When I came downstairs, Harley was standing in the dining room, which was flooded with light. Squares of all sizes were cut into the wall and he was fitting panes of glass into the squares. He said, “I don’t want you to have any more darkness, Velva Jean. You’ve had enough already. I don’t want you to have anything but light.”

When he was finished, none of the windows matched in size, but the light just poured right in. The dining room was the brightest room in the house. We didn’t even have to use the oil lamps at supper.

Harley preached all through December, working the freight as fireman, and we rode with him—Clydie, Marlon, Floyd, Floyd’s wife Lally, and me. We rode from nearby town to town and holler to holler. Long Swamp Creek, Nacoochee, Bethel, Retreat, Cruso, Center Pigeon, Spring Hill, Owl’s Roost, and Hesterville. I thought about what the Indian fortune teller had said about traveling. I figured my fortune was finally starting to come true.

No matter where we went, people were hurting from the Depression. I noticed it now that I was out of the Alluvial Valley and away from home—there was a look these strangers had, these people I didn’t know, a look about their faces that seemed haunted, like they had, just barely, lived through something horrible.

It was Clydie’s job to drum up the crowds. He went up and down the streets or worked his way in and out of the hills and hollers, starting at the general store or train depot and moving outward from there. He had the charisma and color of a circus barker and knew how to fill seats. He would promise people anything he thought they wanted to see or hear.

The week before Christmas, Harley found an actual circus tent to buy for the Glory Pioneers. It was torn at the corners, with holes in the roof. He and Clydie haggled with the circus owner until they got it for cheap, and then Lally and I patched up the holes with old feed bags. Even with the patches, it was a beautiful tent—brightly colored in orange and red and blue. Harley said that once we put it up people would be able to see it for a good mile. And it was true. People saw that tent and couldn’t stay away.

Harley was just like my daddy—he couldn’t sit still in one place. As soon as we got home, he wanted to leave. We weren’t back a day, and he was pacing the floor, walking the porch, staring out across the mountains, holding that cigarette, off somewhere in his head. Much as I hated to admit it, I yearned to be gone, too. Devil’s Kitchen was quiet—too quiet. I found myself standing on the porch with Harley, gazing out over the trees and the valley and way out above the mountains and wondering where and when we were going next. I guessed it was my daddy in me that made me want to roam.

The last week in December, the snow settled over the mountain like a great white blanket. It bent the trees and buried the mounds of Cemetery Fields and froze the water that slid down the face of Falling Rock. It covered the bald at the very top of Fair Mountain, and it turned the dark peak of Devil’s Courthouse white, up where the Wood Carver lived all alone. It worked its way into the crevices of the rock face and, we imagined, probably chilled Old Scratch himself, deep in his cave.

With the snow came a great, overwhelming quiet. The world seemed dead and still. Up on the mountains, work on the Scenic stopped. We stayed in our houses and watched the world from the inside and the snow kept coming, and when it was finally done falling, it covered us and smothered us and the weight of it left us barely breathing.

It was in the midst of this that revenuer Burn McKinney’s house burned to the ground—fierce red in the midst of all that blinding white. No one would say who did it, but everyone knew Swill Tenor was involved. Afterward Swill said, “Just you wait, he won’t stay here now.” But Burn McKinney stayed. And there were those—Hink Lowe and the Gordons, who were bored and angry at the snow and trying to stir up trouble—who claimed they had seen a giant, long-haired man in the woods, crawling away from the fire on all fours. There was always someone itching to blame the Wood Carver for anything bad that happened on the mountain.

Harley and I were pent up at home, unable to go anywhere. We stood on the porch and stared out at the mountains, covered in snow, and went places in our heads. He snapped at me and I snapped back, and Levi stalked off into the woods in the bone-chilling cold so that he didn’t have to listen to it. Something I learned about my husband was that he didn’t like to feel pent up. The minute he felt boxed in by anything, he got restless and edgy, like an animal in a cage.

At the end of the week, just before New Year’s, I was out in the chicken house, hands freezing, breath blowing out like smoke. I heard the crunch of footsteps in the snow and went out to see who it was. Floyd Hatch and Clydie Williams came walking up over the hill.

“Harley around?” Floyd said.

“He’s in his office.” I followed them to the house, praying they had somewhere for us to go that would get us out of Devil’s Kitchen, away from the snow and the sameness.

The four of us sat down in the front room, Harley and me on the settee, and Floyd and Clydie across from us in the matching chairs.

Floyd said he wondered if we should bring our message up to the CCC camp, where the Scenic workers were living. The Civilian Conservation Corps had set up a camp on Silvermine Bald as part of their work-relief program, the one President Roosevelt had started for the young men of families that didn’t have jobs. The CCC camp was one of thousands around the country, each one made up of around two hundred men paid to do outdoor construction.

“The men up there could use some inspiration,” Floyd said. “They’re far from home. They’re missing their families, especially right about now, what with the holidays. Tempers are running high because they are all types of men from so many places. Boys up from the South, down from the North. Whites, Jews, Italians, Germans, Indians—”

“Nigras,” Clydie said. “But they got them living at another camp.”

Floyd said, “The work they’re doing is the worst type of work I ever seen. Breaking through the mountainside with sledge hammers and drills—shit I wouldn’t do for a gold nickel.” Floyd had this skinny face with great big eyes. He was so serious now, he looked like a haint.

Harley listened to him talk. He didn’t say anything about the Scenic, about how much he was against it, although I knew him well enough to know he wanted to. He just sat there, tipped back in his chair, smoking a cigarette, and afterward he said, “I don’t believe in this road; you know I don’t. I think it’s a piece-of-shit idea. Those ass-holes coming in here to give us their charity like we can’t take care of ourselves. I’d like to blow their heads off.” He took a long drag on his cigarette before crushing it out in the old jar lid he used as an ashtray. “But if it’ll get us the hell out of here, then let’s go.”

The CCC camp was on the north face of Silvermine Bald, protected by high, dark trees. No railroad ran up that way, and there weren’t any roads except for the one they were building. This time Floyd, Clydie, Marlon, Harley, and I traveled on horseback.

The camp was managed like an army base, with barracks that housed not only the men but the camp store, lobby, commissary, office, kitchen, supply room, and dining rooms. Men got up at 6:00 a.m. and went to work by 7:45. They worked until 4:00 p.m., with a break for lunch. Peace officers tried to keep order in the camp by threatening workers with dishonorable discharge, but lately tensions were running high and mean between the men. One of the leaders was a boy from Texas, a fellow named Blackeye. He had a redheaded half brother, Slim, who was almost as bad as he was.

Harley preached in the lobby, which was a barracks with a large heating stove in the middle of the room and benches along the wall. The men marched into the room in lines, just like soldiers, and took their seats. They even wore uniforms like soldiers. While Harley preached, the men sat on those benches and watched him, some of them smoking and chewing tobacco. Sometimes Harley prepared sermons and other times he just made things up as he went along. I knew he had prepared a sermon for today, but when he started talking I could tell he’d laid it aside.

He said, “As I was traveling here, I looked at the smoke coming down over the mountains. Those mountains were smoking. They looked like they were on fire. It looked like the fire might be coming up from the earth itself, or from down below the earth. Up we went, up the mountain, and the further up we came, the more it seemed like we might be going to see the Lord himself. But all that smoke called to mind a warmer place. Maybe we were going to see Old Scratch instead.”

Blackeye and his brother Slim and the rest of their gang stood along one wall and chewed tobacco and glared at Harley. They glared at him even when he talked about how he was an ex-convict and how if it wasn’t for the Lord he might never have been a free man, free to make his own choices out in the world, to work with his hands, to hold down a job, to do honest work like they were doing here on the Scenic. Then he told the story of the prodigal son, who wasted his life with riotous living and when he had lost everything returned home to seek his father’s forgiveness.

Then Harley sang a song he’d made up to the tune of “Give Me That Old Time Religion.” It said the same kinds of things his sermon had, all about doing honest work and seeking God’s forgiveness and trying to get along with one another in a CCC camp.

When the others came forward afterward to shake Harley’s hand and thank him for being there, Blackeye and his boys still stood against the wall. I thought, Lord, just let us get out of here without any trouble. And then the men walked out in a line, one by one, and Blackeye and the others fell in and I watched them go.

As I did, I noticed a man walking one line over. I could only see him from the back. He had brown hair, dusted with gray, and long legs that looked like they wanted to dance instead of walk. There was something about the way he moved that made my heart clutch up in my chest.