Velva Jean Learns to Drive (51 page)

The next day, Harley sat me down on the settee in the front room. He sat down beside me and took my hand. He seemed calmer, like maybe he had forgiven me. He said, “Velva Jean, you’re a leader in the community. You’re my wife. We got to set an example for people to live from. I got a responsibility.”

I said, “I know that.”

He said, “We got to have some new rules around here.”

I thought: Oh no. Not more of them. How many more rules can there be?

I said, “I don’t know how I can do more. I’m already leading the circle meeting and calling on the sick and going to the funerals and sitting in the front row at church. I’m leading the prayer groups and giving suppers and making quilts for the needy. And when I’m not doing that, I’m trying to keep this house and the farm in working order for you and me and your daddy.”

Then he looked me deep in the eyes with his green eyes, the color of Three Gum River, the color of emeralds—like the one my daddy had brought me years ago—the color of the greenest green on earth. For a minute, I saw only his eyes and his warm skin and the little lines in his face, the scar above his eyebrow that he’d got in the railroad accident, the dimples on either side of his mouth, the full lips, the waving dark hair. I wanted to lean in and kiss him, to remind him of us as we used to be, of him as he was when I met him. I wanted him to smile and breathe and let go of all the tightness inside of him that was making both of us cross and unhappy.

He said, “I don’t want you driving off this property. I don’t want you driving at all.”

I said, “What?”

He said, “I don’t want to hear about you driving anywhere or see you driving anywhere. I don’t know why you even feel you have to, Velva Jean. I don’t know any women that drive up here. I think you should just give me the keys.”

“I’m not giving you the keys, Harley Bright.”

He frowned at this and moved his mouth around a little, like he was chewing something. I could tell he was trying to think just how much to fight with me on this one. He said, “Well, then, you have to give me your word that you won’t drive anymore.”

I didn’t tell him that now that I knew how to drive there was no going back. I couldn’t very well teach myself how
not
to drive. I said, “I can’t promise that.”

He said, “You’re going to need to.” He winked at me and flashed me a smile. He was charming Harley now. But his voice was firm. Then he said, “You’re going to need to promise me something else. You know I think you got a pretty voice. Prettiest voice in the world.”

I waited. He was saying nice things the way someone did before they told you something bad about yourself.

He said, “But, Velva Jean, sometimes it sounds sinful when you sing.”

For a minute, I sat there wondering if I’d heard him right. Then I said, “What?”

He let go of my hand and sat back a little. “It sounds sinful when you sing. Sexy. I mean I like it, I do.” He winked at me again. “I love your voice, but you’re a preacher’s wife. Not just a preacher’s wife, you’re
my
wife. I think it’s best that you don’t sing.” He leaned forward and patted my knee.

I could tell he was waiting for me to say something, but my throat was starting to close up. My chest felt tight and empty at the same time, like my heart was both too big and too small for it. I didn’t know what to do with my hands. They felt miles away from me, way down at the ends of my arms, heavy and useless. They lay crumpled in my lap, palms up, as if holding some great weight.

“You mean when we’re out somewhere or with people?” My throat felt tighter and tighter, like someone was squeezing it. I was thinking about my songs, all the ones I’d written. I was thinking about my trip to Waynesville. I was thinking about the Opry and the framed picture in my truck and the money I’d been saving off and on ever since I was little that was tucked away safe in my hatbox. There was ninety dollars and fifty-six cents, counting the money I’d earned making a record for Darlon C. Reynolds.

“I mean, I don’t want you to sing at all.” He was already up and moving toward the kitchen, stretching, yawning, searching for something to drink in the icebox.

I watched after him and thought: I should have run you over when I had the chance.

THIRTY-THREE

Three days after he had left to get married, Johnny Clay was back. I heard he was home from Lally Hatch, who heard it from someone in town. She said the wedding never happened, that Lucinda changed her mind at the last minute, and that they had come back up to Alluvial in the middle of the night and he had dropped her off at the hotel with her powder blue cases and hadn’t been back since.

I waited for him to find me and tell me himself. But days passed and he didn’t come. “He’s stubborn,” Sweet Fern said, “and embarrassed. He’ll come eventually.”

I couldn’t stand it. I didn’t like the thought of Johnny Clay off somewhere and hurting. But I wasn’t about to go to him myself. I hadn’t forgiven him yet for going off and leaving me and not even trying to say good-bye. I thought he owed it to me to apologize.

Instead of feeling relieved, I was feeling just like I felt before a storm. I was cold right down to my feet—even though the thermometer on the side of the barn read eighty-eight degrees—and I had a feeling of dread way deep down in my stomach. Something was getting ready to happen.

On the afternoon of June 23, I stood on the porch and looked up at the sky, as if I would be able to see the storm clouds coming. It was blue and clear. The sun was shining. You couldn’t tell, to look at it, the trouble that lay ahead. ~

On the last Friday in June, I was in the yard, cleaning out the milk buckets, washing them, scalding them, and hanging them in the sun to dry. I was trying not to look at the yellow truck because every time I did I felt guilty for not driving it. So far I hadn’t so much as started the engine, but I missed the feel of the wheel in my hands, of the pedals under foot, of the rumble of the motor, and the way I still felt it run through me even after I had turned it off.

Jessup Deal whistled as he came up the hill. He could whistle louder than anyone. It was the kind of whistle that hurt your ears. He was grinning when I turned around. He had the mail bag he sometimes carried slung over one shoulder. “There’s a package here for you, Velva Jean.”

“For me?” I hung up the last of the buckets and then I dried my hands. I tried to imagine who would send me a package.

He held up a wide square wrapped in brown paper. The label said: “Velva Jean Hart Bright c/o Deal’s General Store, Alluvial, Fair Mountain, North Carolina.”

“Are you expecting something?” he said.

“Oh,” I said, “I don’t know.” I didn’t want to tell him that I was waiting for something every day—that Johnny Clay and I had gone to Waynesville and a man had recorded my voice and paid me money and I had been waiting ever since for him to send me the record of it. “It’s probably some handkerchiefs I ordered.”

I waited till Jessup was gone, watching as he walked away, back through the trees, and then I went inside the house and shut the door and sat down on the settee. I tore open the brown-paper wrapping and there it was—my very own record. Black, round, with writing in the middle. On one side, “Yellow Truck Coming, Yellow Truck Going” by Velva Jean Hart, on the other, “Old Red Ghost” by Velva Jean Hart. They had left Harley’s name completely off it.

There was a note inside from Darlon C. Reynolds. It said:

Dear Mrs. Bright,

I ran my fingers over the grooves—lightly so as not to hurt anything. I couldn’t wait to hear it. My voice. It was on here, captured on this flat, round disc. I had sung into a microphone and this was where it ended up. I thought it was a miracle. I put the record on the player and cranked it up and there came my voice, wheezing out, crackling and spinning, sounding higher than normal, and not at all like I thought it did in real life.

I listened to it twice through. Even if I did sound funny, I thought it was just about the best thing I ever heard. The only thing that would have made it better was if Mama was there to listen to it with me.

After I played it the second time, I picked up the record and put it back in its wrapping and closed up the phonograph cabinet. And then I sat right down on the floor and cried.

I walked over to Sleepy Gap to show Johnny Clay. The house was empty when I got there. I ran all through it, calling his name, but got no answer. Hunter Firth came barking from the woods, and then I heard a shout from Linc’s house. I ran in that direction and found Linc and Ruby Poole working the field while Russell crawled in the shade.

We, all of us but Johnny Clay, gathered in Daddy Hoyt’s parlor, around the old Victrola, to listen to the record. When I asked where he was, Daddy Hoyt said, “Your brother needs time. He’s been off by himself ever since he got back. He’ll come around to you soon.”

I tried to be satisfied with this, to focus on the record and listen to it with the part of my family that was there. I kept saying, “That’s not how I sound. I don’t sound like that.” But everybody kept shushing me. Granny was sitting with her hands folded in front of her mouth, her feet tapping, her head shaking back and forth. Her eyes were wet and she was barely breathing. Daddy Hoyt was sitting tall and proud.

They made me tell the story, from start to finish, about how we’d gone to Waynesville, about the theater, about sneaking in through the balcony, about Darlon C. Reynolds, and about singing on the stage into the microphone. I even told about how Mr. Reynolds wanted me to stay for a few days to keep making records, but how I’d told him I had to get home in time for supper. I missed Johnny Clay even more after I told the story. He would have told it better.

Daddy Hoyt said, “Your Mama would be proud of you, Velva Jean. No matter what happens, this record will always exist.”

I liked the sound of that. On the walk home, I kept it close to me, pressed against my chest. I had wrapped it up carefully so that it didn’t get too hot in the sun. This is something no one can take away from me, I thought. I hadn’t decided whether or not to tell Harley. I knew he wouldn’t be happy about it—especially about Velva Jean Hart having a singing career all on her own without his name, and cutting records behind his back. But I wanted to think that a part of him, somewhere deep inside, could be happy for me because it was what I loved to do and he knew it was what I loved to do, no matter how much he didn’t want me to sing.

No one can take this away, I told myself as I climbed up the hill toward Devil’s Kitchen, as the house came into view. I was already thinking of ways to slip the record into the house past Harley, of places to hide it, and of how I would keep it in my hatbox with all my other secrets.