Velva Jean Learns to Drive (45 page)

The hem of my skirt, where it was still wet from the creek, smacked against my leg and stuck to it. I focused on that feeling—smack, stick, smack, stick—and in my mind I put myself back in that creek, dancing with Janette, so that Harley couldn’t bring me down.

The day after Janette Lowe was saved, I sat on the porch in Daddy Hoyt’s rocking chair and thought about the joy in her face as she danced. That joy made me want to sing everywhere, all the time. But suddenly I was fed up with the songs I knew. I had probably sung every song there was to sing on the radio and every hymn and murder ballad at least five times. My own songs seemed silly. I wished I could write a song like the one Butch Dawkins played down at Deal’s—a real song with real feeling, one that would stir people up. Except for the thoughts that I sang to myself now and then, it had been a long time since I’d tried to write anything. I thought: It’s time to change that.

I stood up and went inside the house, right over to Harley’s office. I looked at the neat stacks of paper, the notebooks where he sometimes wrote his sermons because he was too insecure to just let the Lord lead him, the sharpened pencils that he kept in an old milk bottle. Quiet as I could, as if someone might hear me or see me—even though there was no one home but me—I reached out and picked up a pencil and then I opened one of Harley’s notebooks and turned it to the back where the blank pages were. I tore out a page, neat as possible, and then put the notebook back.

I had never written down any of my songs before. Outside, I sat back down in the rocking chair and looked at the paper and wondered how to begin.

The next day, after Harley left to go down to the church, I sat out in that rocking chair and I kept on writing. Suddenly I realized how much I had in me—all these words I’d saved up. I started on a song about a boy named Old Mule who loved a girl called BeeBee, about how she sang while he buck danced on a mountain that was named for her and how they lived happily together until the day he broke her heart and left her there to die. When I finished it, I cried for half an hour. Then I took out a new sheet of paper and wrote another song.

The words came fast and easy, but the music was harder. I got out my mandolin and fiddled around with the strings and tried to put the melody that was in my head down onto the paper. I could read and write basic notes—Mama had taught me—but when I wrote them down, they stopped working together. On the page, they split apart and went their separate ways and when I tried to play back the tunes, they sounded different from the way they sounded in my head.

At the end of the week, on Friday afternoon, I sat there in that rocker and looked at the stack of papers in my lap. All I had was words and a few notes. I was trying to remember the melodies and keep them in my head where they sounded good, where they worked. Something in me had been stirring around for the past few days, ever since I’d started writing songs. It felt great big, much bigger than me, and it made me feel small but worthy at the same time. I felt just like Janette Lowe, dancing in the Spirit.

That night I lay in bed, wide awake, curled on my side, waiting for Harley. Just before midnight, he slipped into the bedroom. I heard him undressing and I felt the bed sink as he sat down on it, and then he slid his body between the sheets and I could feel the cool of his pajamas and the heat of his bare chest as he moved behind me and wrapped his arm around me and breathed in my ear.

There was a song that I’d been singing all day. It was a song I’d written about him, about when we’d first met. I thought I might try to sing it for him. As I lay there next to him, I felt the hard, cold knot start to melt a little—the one that had been building in my chest ever since he wrecked the Scenic. I let my body shift into his, but I kept my back to him. I went over the tune and the words, trying to get it right in my head.

He tightened his hold on me. The tune started going away from me a little. I tried to get it back.

“I’m sorry I’m away so much, Velva Jean. It’s just that there’s so much to do. I’m tired, honey. Sometimes I just want to get back on that settee, listen to the radio. But I’m needed there.” His voice was getting blurry, drifting away.

I said, “You’re needed here.”

Harley yawned.

I opened my eyes and stared out into darkness, nothingness, out toward the wall with Harley’s little boy picture and the pictures of his three dead brothers and his mean, dead mama. Every day I meant to take those pictures down and put them away somewhere so I didn’t have to look at them. Every day something happened that made me forget to do it. I ought to put my Opry picture up on that wall where I can look at it all the time, I thought.

I said, “I wrote a song today. About us when we first met.”
I’m writing lots of songs. I’m teaching myself to drive.
I had the tune in my head. It was waiting. When he didn’t say anything, I said, “Harley?”

His breathing had shifted and he was asleep, his arm around me—weighing me down, pushing me down like it weighed one hundred pounds—his breath heavy on my neck. I lay there the rest of the night, warm and uncomfortable, and too disturbed to sleep.

THIRTY

Two weeks after Janette Lowe was saved, I walked to Alluvial to do the shopping with what was left of the money I had saved from my apron fund. The first thing I noticed was that the boys from the Scenic were back. I saw them hanging around on the porch at Deal’s and rocking in the chairs at Lucinda Sink’s.

I looked for my daddy, to see if he was with them, but he wasn’t. And then I looked for Butch, and I didn’t see him either. After I did the shopping, I went to call on Mrs. Dennis and Dr. Hamp. I sat with them and had tea out of the little rose teacups that Mrs. Dennis was so proud of, the ones that had belonged to her grandmother.

I left with a stack of books from their library—
The Motor Girls on a Tour
; a collection of stories on auto journeys (including one about Alice Ramsey, the first woman to drive coast-to-coast in 1909); and Emily Post’s
By Motor to the Golden Gate
, telling about her motor trip from New York to San Francisco in 1917 and her tips for driving across country by automobile. I also left with two manuals:
How to Drive
and
Man and the Motor Car
. I figured if I was going to learn to drive, I was going to do it right.

As I came out of Dr. Hamp’s house, I saw Butch sitting on the steps of Deal’s. He was tuning his steel guitar and drinking from a bottle of root beer. When he saw me, he waved me over. He said, “What you got there?”

I said, “Just some books.”

He nodded. He kept tuning, his hands sliding up and down the guitar, working the strings.

I said, “Have you had any sings lately?” I missed hearing about them.

He squinted up at me. “We’re having one tomorrow night. You should come.”

I said, “I don’t think so.” What I wanted to say was, “I’ll be there.” I shifted under the weight of the books. They were heavy in my arms. I wanted to ask him about the music I was trying to write, but I didn’t know how. I said, “I been writing songs.”

He said, “Words?”

“Mostly. Something happens when I try to put the music down. The notes get scattered.”

He nodded. He put the broken bottle neck in his mouth and played a few chords. He took the bottle neck back out and twirled it in his fingers before sliding it into his pocket. “You want me to help you?” He had this look about him like a cat that just swallowed a bird. It was a look he wore a lot, like he was thinking things to himself—dangerous things or racy things or things that only he knew—that he wasn’t about to share with anyone else.

“Yes.” I said it without thinking.

“You got any with you?”

“No.”

“I’ll come up to the house then. But I don’t want to see Harley. Nothing against you, but I got nothing to say to him.” I thought about the Scenic, about all Harley had done.

I said, “He’s got a meeting at the church tonight. I don’t have to go with him.” My heart sped up. What would Harley say if he knew I was telling Butch Dawkins to come up there while he was gone?

 

Butch said, “I’ll see you then.”

I went home that afternoon and finished my work, and then I took the books outside to the truck and set them on the seat next to my Opry picture. I sat in the truck and, one by one, picked up the books and flipped through their pages.

Alice Ramsey taught herself to drive her husband’s car, one he had never learned to drive himself. She had already driven it six thousand miles, in the summer of 1908, before she ever drove it across the country—which she did without even using a road map. She once said, “Good driving has nothing to do with sex. It’s all above the collar.”

I read parts of Emily Post and parts of the Motor Girls book, and then for a while I studied the driving manuals. They both said the same thing—do not learn to drive without a teacher. According to the books, not only couldn’t I drive a car without a teacher, I couldn’t possibly drive a car until I understood the engine and all of its “mechanical possibilities” and “limitations.” I was supposed to know how to read the water temperature gauge, the oil pressure gauge, and something called the ammeter. There were words like “throttle valve,” “crankshaft,” “choke valve,” “flywheel,” “differential pinion,” and “combustion chamber.”

There were five steps to starting the engine. After that there were seven steps to putting the car into drive. Then the steering began.

There were five steps for stopping the car from low gear; four steps for shifting from low to second gear; five for shifting from second to high gear; three to stop from high gear; five to shift from high to second gear; seven when turning around; and six when parking on an angle.

I was so confused by the time I was done reading that I wondered how on earth I had ever even got the truck started. I thought I would just put the books away and never open them again and that maybe I would give up driving. I threw the books onto the floor. When I did,
Man and the Motor Car
fell over and opened to a page in the middle.

As I leaned down to pick it up, I read, under the heading: “Are Women Worse Drivers Than Men? According to available statistics, the answer is No. The average man is four times as likely to have an accident as the average woman, and five times as likely to have a fatal accident.”

“Maybe men are the ones without sense,” I said out loud. Then I hit the clutch, flipped the ignition switch, released the starter pedal, and pressed my foot on the gas as I downshifted and started steering myself forward toward the front yard. My heart was pounding. I got scared and stopped, jerking forward so hard that my head nearly hit the windshield. I started over again. Brake, clutch, gas, shift, steer. The truck pulled to the right and I steered to the left to make up for it, and all of a sudden I was sailing right past the house. I turned the wheel as hard as I could so that I could go around the side. My arms ached. I forgot what to do with my feet. I jerked to a stop again.