Velva Jean Learns to Drive (52 page)

That night at supper Harley was in a good mood. Afterward, as I sat up in bed, watching him pulling off his shirt, pulling on his pajamas, I thought of the record lying in my hatbox in the chifforobe nearby. All I had to do was stand up and walk over to it and bring out my hatbox and say, “Look, Harley. Here it is. I made a record. Can you believe it? An actual record. Let’s go downstairs and listen to it.” But I couldn’t imagine Harley thinking that was a thing to be happy about.

So I let him climb into bed next to me and turn out the lantern light and kiss me good night. I didn’t say anything. And I lay next to him as he put his head on the pillow and started drifting off into sleep, his body twitching slightly, his breathing growing deeper. And still I didn’t say a word.

The next morning, after Harley was out of the house, I picked up my record and hiked to the top of the mountain. The Wood Carver was sitting on his stoop, staring out toward the horizon, concentrating. He didn’t have a phonograph or a Victrola, but I wanted to show my record to him. He had always believed in me, even when no one else had the time to. He had seen the little singing girl before anyone else, except Mama.

I sat down next to him and said, “They’re working up on this mountain, over by Tsul ’Kalu’s cave.”

He said, “Are they?” But the way he said it told me he already knew.

I said, “Everyone up here has had to leave but you. You’re lucky the road just missed you.” He had always been on top of this mountain and I hoped he always would be, no matter what kind of tunnel they blasted or what kind of road they built.

The Wood Carver didn’t say anything to this. Instead he pointed to my record and said, “What do you have there?”

I said, “You won’t believe it. I made a record. Two songs, one on each side.” I unwrapped the paper and held up the disc. The sunlight grabbed it and held it and made it seem shinier than it was.

The birds were singing. The butterflies were floating from flower to flower. The air was warm and cool at the same time, a combination of sweet and grassy smells, and if you breathed in deep it made your head spin. It was the most peaceful place I’d known since my mama died. And in the middle of it sat the Wood Carver, looking a part of it, like some ancient woodsman, working his knife in a piece of wood.

He laid his knife down and took the record from me and turned it back and forth. He studied it close, every groove. After a long time, he nodded. “That is some record,” he said. “Since I can’t hear what’s on there, why don’t you treat me to the songs?” He picked up his knife again. He continued carving.

I sang “Old Red Ghost” first and then I sang “Yellow Truck Coming, Yellow Truck Going.”

Afterward he didn’t look up, just kept on carving. I watched the way his hands held the knife, the way his fingers felt the grain and knew how to cut and where to cut. He said, “Did you write those songs?”

“Yes.”

“Velva Jean, you must never stop singing.”

I thought about Harley telling me not to sing, and then, before I could stop myself, the words came out. I said, “I’m not sure I married a good man. I sometimes think he’s changed from the man I married, that he’s gotten off course since then and become someone else, that he’s lost himself along the way, and because of that he’s lost me and us. You’d think that when he found Jesus it would have helped, but somehow it only made things worse—made him worse. But then I sometimes wonder if he just wasn’t very good to begin with—or if he wasn’t as good as I thought he was and hoped he was, the way I colored him to be in my mind.”

The Wood Carver sat there and listened, as he always did, his hands working the wood.

“When I first married him, there were all these different Harleys, and it was exciting, even if I didn’t like every single version of him. But now there seems to be just one version—the one that stands still. The one that’s tired and busy and rooted to the Little White Church and Devil’s Kitchen and doesn’t ever have time for me or us or to remember the old Harley anymore. I’d rather be married to the bad Barrow gang Harley than this one. I’d rather have him tipping over privies and stealing moonshine and getting into fights.

“Each night I wait for him to come home and I think, ‘This will be the night that he’ll be like the Harley I remember. The one I thought I was marrying.’ But then he comes in the door and he’s this other Harley, the one who’s serious and tired and who doesn’t have time for me, who can’t be bothered because his mind is on other things, who wants me to behave myself and not trouble him and just make things easier for him at the end of a long day. And then I wish he hadn’t come home at all because it’s better when he’s away. Because at least when he’s away I can think of him as he was, and at least when he’s away I can breathe.”

I pulled my knees up to my chest and wrapped my arms around them. I hugged myself tight. “It’s like this time I accidentally killed a lightning bug. I didn’t know it was a lightning bug. I thought it was a beetle. I picked it up in a piece of paper and I squeezed it and then its light went off. It was already dying, but it couldn’t help flashing its light. I had no choice because I’d already hurt it—I had to kill it all the way, and before I did, it flashed its light again.” I started to cry—big, rolling, silent tears that plopped onto my legs.

“I don’t think I’ve ever felt so horrible in my life as when I killed that lightning bug. I watched its light go out. I put out its light.” I looked at the Wood Carver. He had stopped carving. He had laid down his knife and was sitting with his wrists hanging off his knees. I said, “I’m afraid I’m like the lightning bug and Harley is like me. I’m afraid he’s starting to put out my light.”

I didn’t wipe my eyes, but let the tears roll. The Wood Carver didn’t say anything. When I had cried myself dry, we sat for a few minutes, not speaking. Then the Wood Carver tilted his hat back on his forehead and pointed the knife at the dogwood tree.

“Do you see our old friend there?”

I looked at the lean black trunk, the heaven-reaching limbs. “Yes.”

“Remember when the tornado came through in 1935, taking down half the trees up on this mountain?”

“Yes.” That was the year of the Alluvial Fair, the one where I’d sung by myself for the first time.

“I had to chop down the trees that were broken in half and replant where I could. But this tree,” he pointed at the dogwood, “remained standing. Why do you think that was?”

Because it’s a magic tree, I thought. “Because it has good brace roots?”

“No,” he smiled. “Because instead of standing rigid against the wind, trying to fight against it, this tree bent with it.”

I looked at the tree, looked at him.

“The strongest trees are the ones that bend with the storms, Velva Jean. Those are the trees that remain after the storm is gone. At the same time,” he said, “the tree knows not to give itself up. It stands its ground. It bends, but it doesn’t break. And it’s still there.”

It’s still there.

I suddenly felt like hugging the Wood Carver and laughing and crying at the same time. Who are you? I thought. What is your real name? Where did you come from? I know even less about you than I do about Butch Dawkins, but you know everything about me. You always have. Instead I said, “I should get going.”

“Yes, you should, Velva Jean. You have many things to do.” The way he said it made me look at him funny. His eyes were dark and hard to read. He had the darkest eyes. There was barely any light in them at all.

This time he walked with me through the laurel thicket and down a ways, for about a half mile. Then he stopped, gazing beyond the ridge as if there was a boundary only he could see. “I have to be getting home. Good luck, Velva Jean. I would say that your light is never in danger of going out.”

I watched his back, strong and broad, as he hiked up the trail toward his cabin. I watched him walk away, with a slight limp, till the woods swallowed him and I could no longer see him, and then I made my way down the hill toward home. ~

I walked home singing. I sang funny little songs that I had made up and songs Mama had taught me when I was a girl. I was happy in the sunshine, feeling like it had somehow reached inside me and was filling me up, feeding me like it fed the plants and the trees and the flowers.

The nearer I got to Devil’s Kitchen, the slower I started walking. My chest started to close up. It got tighter and tighter. I didn’t want to go home to that house where I felt locked in by four walls and a ceiling and the woods that surrounded it, where I lived like a treed raccoon, all alone and shut off from everyone except for someone who told me no and told me not to sing and not to drive. I didn’t want to go back where someone would try to squeeze my light out and press it down till it didn’t exist anymore and kill it till it was gone.

That was one reason I loved that yellow truck. Because it could take you anywhere, away from those four walls and the woods and that tree. And it was bright and lovely and no one could take that brightness away, unless they painted over it, and even if they painted over it, it would still be bright underneath. No one could stop it from being bright, like Harley was trying to stop me.

But there was nothing to do but go home. “It’s a great big world,” Johnny Clay had said. I couldn’t very well live in the woods and I couldn’t go back to Mama’s. I couldn’t live in a tree or in a cave, and I couldn’t live at the top of the mountain in a house I’d made with my own two hands like the Wood Carver. So I would have to go back.

When I finally got there, dragging my feet all the way, the DeSoto wasn’t in the yard. When I walked into the house, I called Harley’s name and waited. I called it again and went to the mudroom and upstairs, just to be sure, but he was nowhere and neither was his daddy. Then I went into the front room and turned on the record player, the one Harley had bought me when we first got married, and put on my record. I turned the volume up as loud as it would go, and then I danced out onto the porch and into the yard.

I just danced and danced and sang along at the top of my lungs, like mountain trash, like some kind of wild and wanton woman, like one of those harlots down in Atlanta. I danced until my feet hurt, and even after they started hurting, I kept right on dancing. You are not going to put my light out, Harley Bright, I thought. I am not going to let you.