Velva Jean Learns to Drive (43 page)

The next morning, two dollars appeared in my apron pocket and we were good for another week. That evening I pinned my hair back and put on my church dress, one that Harley had picked out for me. I stared at myself in the mirror, trying to recognize the girl I saw in there. The navy of the dress washed me out, chasing all my colors away. My skin looked pale underneath my freckles. My hair looked dull pulled back like that, like the life had gone out of it.

Harley and I walked to the Little White Church. In the moonlight, he shone beside me in his Barathea white suit. I barely recognized him either. He moved in the darkness as jaunty, as fluid as a panther cat, standing out as the only bright thing against the black of the earth and the trees and the sky. The moon sent down its light and caught him in it, and his suit reflected light back to the moon like Harley and the moon seemed to have an understanding. I felt jealous and admiring at the same time, clomping next to him in my black pumps and my dowdy blue dress, the pins poking into my head. I felt like a girl playing dress-up, pretending to be someone she wasn’t, walking beside her glorious husband who was carrying on a secret conversation with the stars.

TWENTY-EIGHT

Aunt Junie left the Alluvial Valley for good on March 8. The day before she moved, Harley and I walked up the mountain together, to where she lived with her sheep and the bees she kept in a little log cabin covered with trumpet vines and wisteria. Roses, tiger lilies, dahlias, and larkspurs grew wild.

We stayed an hour. The cabin was plain inside—just a stove and a bed and a table and chairs and vases of wildflowers in the windows. Bees buzzed in and out. Two sheep slept curled up in one corner. Junie served us tea with honey and fresh honeycomb, which tasted sweet and warm.

“Where will you go?” Harley said. He was glaring into his teacup, his face dark as a storm cloud.

“To Flower Knob, high up where my sheep can graze and where I can be left alone,” she said.

He said, “How are you getting there?”

“I’m walking it with my sheep and my bees and everything I own on my back.” It was a far way to Flower Knob. When Harley offered to help her, she waved her hands and shook her head once and said, “No. Thank you. I don’t want what I can’t carry myself.” Then she looked around at her house and said, “I’ve never spent a night outside of this house. I was born here. I was married here. My husband died in that bed. We slept in this house all my married life. I’ve never known another place.”

Harley said, “You can’t leave.”

She said, “I’m afraid that’s not a choice I have.”

Harley got up, set the teacup down with a bang, and walked outside.

I said, “But can’t you cast a spell or turn the government men into goats?”

She stared at me and then her eyes grew wide and she threw her head back and laughed. She said, “Oh, child, I wish I could.”

I pretended like she hadn’t just laughed at me. I said, “What will happen to your house?”

She said, “Maybe they’ll keep it, turn it into some sort of history site. The home of the devil’s witch.” She smiled and the lines of her face shifted and changed so she suddenly looked much younger than one hundred. I thought, she’s magic. ~

Three days later, on a Monday, Harley announced that he was going down to Alluvial and that he wouldn’t be back until nightfall. He gave me a kiss and then he walked out of the house like he was already somewhere else. He had been angry and distracted for days. I stood in the doorway and watched him as he climbed into the DeSoto, legs folding under the dash, and drove off.

I couldn’t imagine what business he had down there. Since Damascus King’s revival, he had been spending each day at the church and each night locked in the mudroom, hard at work on his sermons, most of which preached against the evils of the Scenic. He walked through the house bleary-eyed and pale, looking like a ghost.

Arizona Rayford and his brother Terry came that morning like they did three days a week. When I walked outside to give Arizona the week’s pay, he pointed at the yellow truck and said, “Someone ought to drive that truck. It’s just a shame to see that truck sit there.”

I looked at the truck. It was covered in leaves from the fall, which no one had bothered to brush off. Weeds had grown up around the tires. Pine needles poked out of the windshield. There was a splatter of bird droppings on the front window. The yellow of the paint was dusted a faint brown from the Carolina soil. That poor truck looked a sight.

I said, “You’re right, Arizona. At the very least, someone ought to clean it.”

“You want us to wash it today?”

“No,” I said. “You all got enough to do. I’ll take care of it if I find the time.” I tried to sound casual, like I might get around to it, like the idea wasn’t burning a hole in my brain. Just looking at that truck made me feel guilty. How could I have abandoned it? How could I have forgotten it? Wasn’t that just as good as forgetting Danny? If it was the last thing I did, I was going to march into the house right now and tear up some old rags and get some soap and water in a bucket and come right back out and wash off that truck.

I sang as I washed. I sang the song I had written about the truck, for the truck.

Outside the barn, Terry Rayford stopped what he was doing and listened. Inside the chicken house, Arizona came to the door and leaned against the doorway and closed his eyes.

I was standing in the truck bed, bucket at my feet, dressed in one of my old, faded dresses, with the sleeves rolled up past my elbows. I had my hair pulled back, but here and there it kept escaping and I stopped now and then to blow it out of my way. I was washing the roof of the cab. It was all that was left to do. I had washed the tires and the windows and the hood and the sides and the bumpers and the fender and the grill and the wheel wells. I had even washed out the bed. My arms and shoulders ached and I was hot, even though it wasn’t yet spring and winter still hung in the air, and wishing for some overalls like the ones Arizona and Terry wore.

I finished the last line of the song with the last rub of the roof. I stepped back to look at my work. The sun hit the cab and made it shine. The yellow truck caught the reflection and beamed it back to the sun, like they were talking, having a discussion, trying to decide who was brighter.

“She looks real pretty,” Arizona said from the chicken house. “She’s just shining like a dime.”

I nodded. I couldn’t speak. Something in me was filling up and for just a minute I thought I might cry. The sun was so hot and bright, beating right down on this very spot, like this was the only spot on the whole of the earth that it was choosing to shine on. The truck seemed to glow. I picked up my bucket and my rags and walked to the edge of the truck bed and hopped down onto the ground, sloshing the water onto the dirt, turning the red-brown soil into little rivers everywhere.

Three hours later, the Rayfords were gone. I watched as they walked up the hill and then cut through the trees toward the house they shared with their mama and daddy and their nine brothers and sisters. I waited till they were out of sight and then I went upstairs to the bedroom and from the back of the chifforobe I pulled out my hatbox and opened it up.

There were the pictures of Carole Lombard and Buddy Rogers, now starting to yellow. There were the painted thimble, the silver whistle, my Little Orphan Annie secret decoder ring, the fairy crosses, and the clover jewelry Mama and I had made. The little singing girl given to me by the Wood Carver, her mouth still open in prayer or in song, I couldn’t be sure which. Daddy’s emerald. Johnny Clay’s sapphire. My Nashville money. I opened up the handkerchief and counted. $15.56, after what I’d had to spend for the groceries and pay the Rayford boys. I whistled. Not bad. I put the money away and told myself I just might start saving again. I took out the keys to the yellow truck.

I slid the hatbox into the back of the chifforobe, behind my clothes and my mandolin. Then I pulled Mama’s brown suitcase out from under the bed. There, mixed in with a couple of old dresses that didn’t fit me anymore, was my framed picture of the Opry.

“Okay,” I said. “All right.”

I put the key in the engine. I turned it. The engine sputtered and shook, coughing like Levi on one of his early morning jags. Then it smoothed out and steadied and it kind of hummed like Linc’s old tractor or like Mama’s old cat, Percy, when he purred. I sat there, not steering, listening to the hum, feeling the rumble, the unfamiliar power of it.

I rolled down the window and let the day in. Then I leaned across the seat—across the framed picture of the Opry, which sat propped up next to me—and took the owner’s manual from the visor. I sat there and read the book from cover to cover. When I was finished, I slid the book back in the visor and said, “That was no help at all.”

What I needed was a driver’s manual, but Johnny Clay didn’t have one of those. I studied the dash. I put my hand on the gearshift. It rattled and shook with the engine. I yanked my hand away and laughed out loud. I put my hand back and held on to it this time. I put my foot on the brake.

“Clutch, brake, gas.” I tapped each pedal. I knew which one was which from the manual. “Clutch, brake, gas.” I tapped them again. I pretended to shift while I tapped them. The heat came up from beneath the floorboards and through the firewall. I thought I would melt into the seat. I tried to get the feel of the truck. The engine growled and hummed. I did this over and over and over again.

Then I rolled up the window and turned the key until the truck went quiet. I am going to learn to drive this truck, I thought. And the thought was real, like it came from somewhere else, someplace other than me and my own mind and heart. I shivered. I climbed down from the cab of the truck and shut the door. I leaned there for a minute, feeling the heat of the sun and the heat of the truck. Someday. But not today.