Velva Jean Learns to Drive (5 page)

I lay there for a minute more, smelling the earth and the mustiness of the leaves. I opened my eyes and forced myself to stare up at the blackness. There were only tiny specks of sunlight showing through here and there. As flimsy as they were, the leaves began to weigh on me, as if pushing me down, down into the ground. I wondered if this was what it felt like to be buried alive.

I pretended that I wasn’t buried in leaves but was standing to my waist in Three Gum River, getting saved in the name of Jesus, while my mama walked toward me, singing. I listened now for the first line—
Oh they tell me of a land far beyond the skies
—until I heard her voice in my head. I closed my eyes and folded my hands over my chest and prayed.
Dear Jesus: please help Mama feel better.

Then, when I felt my breath going and didn’t think I could stand it another minute, I jumped up and out of the leaves toward the sun. “Praise Jesus!” I shouted. “I am born again!”

On the third day Mama stayed in bed, I woke up and went into her room to check on her. There was an old woman standing over her, up near the headboard. Daddy Hoyt sat in a chair against the wall with his hands on his knees, and Granny stood with her arms crossed, frowning.

The old woman was waving her hands back and forth over Mama, who lay there sleeping. The woman looked to me like a sort of elf, small and delicate, but sturdy, with an ancient little face. She wore her white hair pulled back in a bun at the nape of her neck and a pair of black-rimmed glasses perched on the end of her nose. Her hands were working over Mama as if searching for something.

“What’s she doing to Mama?” I said.

“Why don’t we go outside?” Granny said, and she shooed me toward the door.

“I don’t want to go outside.” I ran away from her to the other side of the room. “I want to stay.” Suddenly, I was mad at Granny and mad at Daddy Hoyt and mad at this woman I didn’t know. “I want to stay right here with Mama.” I was practically yelling. I didn’t trust this old woman, didn’t want her putting her hands on my mama.

For as long as I could remember, Granny had talked about the bandits and the panthers and the haints that roamed the woods, about the giant who lived in Devil’s Courthouse with the devil himself, or the cannibal spirits that lived in the bottoms of creeks and rivers and shot children with their invisible arrows and afterward carried the bodies down under the water and ate them. She’d told us of the Nunnehi—fair-skinned, moon-eyed people who were invisible except when they wanted to be seen. In the thick of the night, you could hear them drumming and see the lights of their fires or lanterns through the trees, and sometimes they guided wanderers who had lost their way, and sometimes they played tricks on them and led them deeper off course. She’d told us about the runaway murderer—half-man, half-giant—that lived at the very top of Devil’s Courthouse, not leaving his house except at night when he crept down the mountain to climb on rooftops and scratch on windows, looking to rob from widow women and steal babies from their cribs. He was known only as the Wood Carver because he carved things out of wood with his killing knife all day long and he still had blood on his hands. Granny said it would always be there, try as he might to wash it off, because once you’d shed the blood of another, you could never wash your hands clean again.

She had also told us about Aunt Junie, the witch who lived alone in the woods, up on Devil’s Courthouse, raising sheep and bees, and conjuring spirits. Me and Johnny Clay used to dare each other to go up there and spy on the witch. Everybody said she could look at you and say a spell, and if you were bleeding, the bleeding would stop, and if you had a headache, it would go away. They said she could turn people into sheep or dogs and that the bees she kept worked magic.

People said this Aunt Junie looked about a hundred years old, maybe older, and I knew that she probably was at least as old as that because witches lived longer than regular people. And now Daddy Hoyt had let that witch woman into my mama’s room.

“Velva Jean can stay,” Daddy Hoyt said to Granny.

Granny just shook her head at him and stomped out. I knew she didn’t trust her baby to this witch woman either, and I didn’t blame her. What if the witch turned Mama into a sheep or an old brown dog like Hunter Firth?

Daddy Hoyt waved at me to come over, and then he pulled me onto his lap. I sat rigid and waiting, ready to jump up and knock that witch down if she started saying spells. We watched as she fluttered her hands in the air above Mama. She closed her eyes, and then she began moving her lips with no sound coming out. I jumped then, but Daddy Hoyt drew me back and wrapped his arms around me tighter.

“How do we know she won’t hurt Mama and make her worse?” I said. I was thinking I could knock her down if I had to, and then I would yell for Johnny Clay. While I waited for him, I would say an old Cherokee spell that helped you kill a witch.

“Because she won’t, Velva Jean. She saves people like I do, only she can do it without plants and herbs. She can do it all on her own because God gave her a special gift.”

Aunt Junie bent over Mama, her hands hovering above her, her eyes closed. Her mouth was moving but there was still no sound.

“There is a verse in the Bible that only healers know,” Daddy Hoyt said in my ear, “and that they never reveal to others for fear that their powers will be lost forever. That’s why she doesn’t say the words out loud.”

I sat very still and watched her. I knew that normally Daddy Hoyt didn’t hold much stock in faith healers, but he trusted this woman, and I trusted him.

“There,” Aunt Junie said several minutes later, nodding at Mama. “I done what I could for now, Hoyt.” She sat back, staring at Mama’s face. “I don’t know. I just don’t know.” Her voice faded off.

“Can she heal everyone?” I asked Daddy Hoyt, very low so that Aunt Junie wouldn’t hear.

He sighed and his arms tightened around me. “Not always, Velva Jean. Not all the time.”

That night Johnny Clay and Beachard and me were sent over to Linc’s house to eat supper with him and Ruby Poole. Usually, this was cause for celebration because Ruby Poole—who was born and raised in Asheville and looked just like a doll, with her lips painted red and her dark hair curled so that it bounced on her shoulders—would let me try on her perfume and her lipstick and let me read her movie magazines, but I knew this time they were just getting us out of the way so that the witch lady could sit with Mama.

“You want more slaw, Velva Jean?” Ruby Poole got up and carried the bowl over to me herself instead of just passing it down.

“No thank you,” I said. I couldn’t eat a bite. I just sat there thinking about Aunt Junie and the way she had shook her head and said, “I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

By the next morning, the witch woman was gone, but not long after she left we heard a rattling and a quaking, and there came a truck right up our hill, and out of that truck stepped Dr. Keller with his black bag, all the way from Hamlet’s Mill. Daddy Hoyt met him on the porch, and they went upstairs and into Mama’s room together and shut the door.

I knew it was a big deal for Dr. Keller to come—that it was a far, hard way to come from town—and that the only time folks called him was when someone was hovering at death’s door. Once a year, Dr. Keller sent his nurse up to Alluvial to give us our shots at school, and the night before she was supposed to arrive Johnny Clay and I would lie in bed and pray to Jesus that she would die so that we didn’t have to get stuck with a needle. But Dr. Keller only came in the case of emergency.

I stood with my ear against the door, trying to hear what Dr. Keller and Daddy Hoyt were saying. I heard Daddy Hoyt say, “I should have known.” And Dr. Keller said, “You couldn’t know if she didn’t want you to.” And then he said the word “hospital.” I listened as hard as I could until Granny found me and made me go outside.

No one would tell me what Dr. Keller did for Mama or what was wrong with her. He stayed for hours, and afterward he came out of Mama’s room with his black bag. I watched him climb back into his pickup truck and bump and rattle down the hill, and after I knew he was gone, I went in and sat with Mama.

We held hands and didn’t talk. I didn’t read to her or sing, and for the first time I thought: What will happen to me if Mama dies?

Mama didn’t say anything, just squeezed my hand and kept her eyes closed and her face turned toward the wall.

I left her then to go try to eat dinner, and afterward, while Johnny Clay and Beachard helped Linc with the farm chores, I crawled under the front porch and sat there. I’d been doing this every afternoon for the past four days. Sometimes Hunter Firth, Johnny Clay’s old brown dog, joined me and we would sit, curled up tight as we could, and not make a sound. In my head, I thought about Mama in Three Gum River, walking toward me, and how I’d wanted to run to her and go to her and sing with her like the others did but how I hadn’t. I felt sick now that I hadn’t.

I remembered what Mama once said about how we shouldn’t bargain with Jesus. She said this was something everyone did, promising him things if only he would help them, when what you should really do was ask him to help you help yourself. And then I heard Daddy’s voice, which always sounded scratchy, like he had a sore throat, and laughing, like he’d just been told a joke: “You got to be willing to give up things to get things.”

From the house above, I heard Daddy Hoyt’s footsteps, heavy and lumbering. I knew he was leaving Mama’s room to get a cool rag with fresh water. He would soak it through and then wring it out just a little, and then he would go back in and place it on her head. He would sit with her then, and Granny would chant some of her Cherokee spells, and Mama would lie there with her eyes closed and her face fading into the pillow.

I liked to go with Daddy Hoyt to gather his plants and herbs and help him to mix up his medicines, and I liked to talk to his patients and hold their hands and tell them it was going to be all right because Daddy Hoyt was there and he always made everything better. But this was different because this was my very own mama, and because I didn’t know if even Daddy Hoyt could make this okay.

“Hunter Firth,” I whispered, “you listen to me.” Hunter Firth didn’t look up. One paw lay across his nose and he stared straight ahead. “Everything changes when you’re born again. But not in the way that you think.”