Velva Jean Learns to Drive (7 page)

“Baby boy!” his mama said. She leaned forward and smacked her hands together and the sound was like a crack. “Baby boy!”

He shoved the pistol into his belt and turned toward the house. “Yes’m.” He hitched his fingers in his belt loops and shambled over to her, looking like he wasn’t in any hurry to get there.

“You fetch your poor old mama somethin’ to drink and then wash up for supper.”

The boy’s eyes flickered over to where I was standing, pressed up behind the trunk of a tree. He stared in my direction for a moment, as if he could see me. Then he turned his eyes back to the woman. “Yes’m.” He wiped his hands on his pants and walked into the house, dragging his feet. I thought he moved more like a young-old man than a boy and that he was probably the wickedest, most miserable boy I had ever seen.

“And change out of them filthy clothes,” the woman called. Her gaze slid over to the right of her and lingered. She seemed to be looking directly at me, even though I was hidden behind the tree. I shivered. The fat woman spooked me. She seemed to see right through that tree, past my face, and straight into my brain. This might be the devil himself, disguised as a woman—a devil woman—or Spearfinger the witch, who could take any form, so, just in case, I made myself think nice, clean thoughts about Jesus.

When I saw Johnny Clay come back with the old man, I thanked God. The fat woman was still staring in my direction. Johnny Clay shook the old man’s hand and came to get me, not caring if the woman saw us or not. He was holding a jar painted white so that it looked like buttermilk.

“Daddy Hoyt wasn’t lying,” said Johnny Clay as we headed back home. He stopped and shook the jar. “Look at this. Look in the top, just here under the lid, right above the paint. See how the whiskey climbs up the glass a little? This is the purest corn I ever seen.”

I wondered when my brother got to be such an expert on corn liquor.

“He said he sells it as far away as New York City.”

“No wonder he’s so rich,” I said.

Johnny Clay started walking so fast that I had to do a kind of run-hop to catch up.

“Did you see the still?” I said.

“At first he made me wait in the woods and close my eyes,” Johnny Clay said. “I think he had to make sure I wasn’t a branch walker.” Branch walkers are snoopers who get ten dollars for each still they report. Just such a one had moved over to Sleepy Gap from Wrongful Mountain back in March, and one after another he got six or seven stills shut down. Two months later, Elderly Jones, the old Negro who lived in Alluvial, was fishing down at Three Gum River and found the snooper floating face down near the shoreline, shot through the head.

“Oh.” I was disappointed.

“But I followed him and I told him what Daddy Hoyt said, about how he’s known as making the best corn liquor for miles. That warmed him up enough to let me see it.”

“What did it look like? Was it big? Was it loud?” I’d never seen a still before, and I was sorry now I hadn’t gone with Johnny Clay. I thought about the boy with the dark hair and the raccoon eyes and wondered if he drank whiskey or helped his daddy make it.

“It was the biggest thing I ever seen, hid in a cave behind a waterfall. You got to go through the Devil’s Tramping Ground to get to it.” The Devil’s Tramping Ground was a bare circle of earth where no plants grew. Old Scratch was supposed to go there in the dead of night and walk round and round, thinking up his evil plans. “He’s got a rock furnace in there that he built himself. He said the waterfall hides the sound of the still, which is loud, real loud. He said he’s up there every day because you got to go up every day to stir the whiskey. He had barrels to catch it in and cases of half-gallon glass jars. You should have seen it, Velva Jean. The steam raised up out of it. I almost got drunk just standing there.”

I could tell he was proud of this. “Let me smell your breath.”

Johnny Clay put his hand up to his face and then blew into it. He shook his head. “You’re too young.”

“What else did he say?”

“Just that some revenuers have been up on the mountain sniffing around.” I knew from Johnny Clay that revenuers were even worse than convicts because revenuers worked for the government and carried guns and came onto the mountain and got rid of the stills and took people to jail and sometimes killed them. “He said Burn McKinney’s been closing up stills left and right, every which way, ever since they found that branch walker in the creek.”

Burn McKinney was famous in the Alluvial Valley. He was filling the Hamlet’s Mill Jail and Butcher Gap Prison full of shiners, and chopping up their stills, selling the copper for junk, and burning the wood so that there was nothing left but a pile of ashes.

“He also said his wife thinks he’s going to hell for making whiskey, but that it don’t seem to stop her from living off the money he makes or trading down at Deal’s with a jug now and then. He said she tells him all the time that his soul is doomed to hell, but he don’t seem to care. He said if he
is
going to hell, he might as well do all he can to earn it.”

This was the most shocking thing I had ever heard. After all the work I put into praying to be saved, I couldn’t imagine a man who knew he was going to hell but didn’t even care.

“The son’s just as bad. He’s been to jail once already and he ain’t much older than me.” Johnny Clay seemed both jealous and impressed. He kicked the dirt up as he walked. “Shit.”

All the way home, past Alluvial and Deal’s General Store, I thought about that moonshiner who didn’t care that he was doomed to hell and his son the convict.

As we reached Sleepy Gap, the sun dropped behind the trees, turning the sky pink and orange and red. We walked the last half mile staring up at it.

We got near to the house and could see it up in the distance with the lights through the windows. Granny was sitting on the front porch, and when she saw us coming she stood and waved.

I brushed the gold dust from my skin. I said, “You think Mama’s going to die?”

Johnny Clay didn’t say a word, just took my hand with his free one and kept walking.

FOUR

On July 28, six days after Mama took to her bed, Daddy Hoyt and Granny sat me and Linc and Beachard and Johnny Clay down. Sweet Fern stayed upstairs with Mama, with the door closed. Johnny Clay told me he had a bad feeling when he saw Sweet Fern come up from Alluvial without Danny or her baby.

Daddy Hoyt did the talking while Granny sat, stiff as a post, and stared angrily at the floor. Every now and then she blinked her eyes real hard as if there was something in them.

“I’ve done all I could for your mama,” Daddy Hoyt said. “Me and Granny both have done everything we know to do.”

“What about the whiskey potion?” I said.

Daddy Hoyt shook his head.

“What about Aunt Junie? Dr. Keller?”

“She’s too far gone,” Daddy Hoyt said.

My brothers and I just looked at him.

“You children need to say your good-byes.”

I didn’t understand what he was saying. Daddy Hoyt was the best healer on the mountain and he had been working on Mama all week. We had prayed, all of us, to God. How could that not have saved Mama? Hadn’t God heard us? If he heard us, why wasn’t he listening? Why wasn’t he doing something?

Linc stood up. He was the oldest boy, and although he was quiet, he was stubborn and liked to take charge. “We’ll take her to another doctor. We should have took her long ago. We’ll take her to Hamlet’s Mill or to Waynesville. We’ll take her to a hospital.”

Johnny Clay looked like he was fixing to punch something. Beachard sat with his eyes closed, and I knew that he was somewhere far away because even when Beach wasn’t out wandering, he was wandering in his own mind. Beach was just like our daddy that way. He liked to ramble off and go exploring all alone, and although he didn’t talk much, he wrote messages to God and about God on rocks, trees, and walls: “Look for the Lord.” “Search out God.” “Where Is Jesus?” Mama said it was his very own way of communicating.

“Dr. Keller said the sickness is too widespread.” Daddy Hoyt sighed. His face looked sunken, as if it might fall in at any minute. “It’s taken her over.”

We all just sat there and Granny blinked fast and hard, and I stood up in the middle of them and shouted, “How am I supposed to tell Mama good-bye? What am I supposed to say to her? How can you tell someone good-bye like that?” And then I ran outside and crawled under the porch.

The tears stung my face but I didn’t wipe them away. I just sat there and rocked back and forth, back and forth, and thought how much I hated being born again. This is what you get for giving yourself over to Jesus, I told myself. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before I was saved.

Later that night, after everyone had gone on home or gone to bed, I crawled out from under the porch and went inside. I’d heard Granny and Daddy Hoyt arguing earlier. “Let her be,” he’d said to her. Granny had wanted to pull me out and make me go in there and talk to Mama like my brothers were doing. “She’ll do it when she’s ready,” he said.

“What if Corrine don’t hang on that long?” I could tell by Granny’s voice that she’d been crying.

“Corrine ain’t going anywhere until that child comes to see her.”

So they let me be, and I sat out under there through supper. I sat there and listened to Sweet Fern as she came out of the house crying and walked across the porch, and I watched her as she ran down the hill. I sat there listening to Linc go home to Ruby Poole and Johnny Clay run off to the woods, Hunter Firth howling after him. I sat there while Granny crouched down above me and peered at me through the slats in the porch floor and called out to me and told me she loved me and to come on over to her house if I needed her. I sat there until the night was quiet and still and I didn’t think anyone was around to see me come out.

I pushed open the door to Mama’s room and saw Daddy Hoyt in the corner, wide awake and watching. When he saw me, he just stood up and walked past me. He laid a hand on my head and then went out, closing the door behind him.

Mama was sleeping. I sat down beside her and watched her face in the light of the oil lamp. I pulled a fairy cross from my pocket and rubbed it, just like I’d been rubbing it ever since I picked it from the creek. I had already placed another one under her pillow. I tried to breathe soft and quiet so that she wouldn’t hear me, and I didn’t touch her because I was afraid I’d wake her up. I almost prayed that she wouldn’t wake up because I didn’t know what to say to her.

While I sat there, I tried to remember the words to the song I’d started the day before.

I went over it and over it in my head, but that was all I could remember. The song wasn’t finished yet, but there had been more yesterday. What if I didn’t finish it in time? What if Mama never got to hear it?

After ten minutes or so, Mama opened her eyes and saw me. Her eyes, wide and blue, were hazy at first and then sharpened as they looked at me so that I knew she was really seeing me. She held up her hand so I could take it. I wanted to cry and throw myself on her and tell her to get better, that she had to get better, and have her wrap her arms around me and tell me it was all going to be okay, just like it used to be. But instead I sat there and held her hand and bit the inside of my lip so that I wouldn’t cry.

“How’s my girl?” Mama’s voice was just a whisper. I had to lean in close to hear her. She still smelled like Mama but there was another smell, the smell of sickness. She smiled at me, a small, gentle smile, the corners of her mouth barely lifting. “I will always be here, Velva Jean. Big things will happen for you, and I’ll be there to see them.”

I couldn’t help it. I cried, even though I fought the tears as they came out and cursed myself blue for letting them show. I didn’t want anything big to happen to me, not if Mama wasn’t here. “Don’t go. You can’t go,” I said, and it sounded like a baby thing to say. “I love you.”

“I love you, too,” she said. She squeezed my hand just a little. “Go to the window now.” She let go of my hand. “Go and look out there and then come back and sit by me.”

I walked over to it and stood there. The window was half-open and I rested my chin on the sill, my forehead against the pane, and looked out, wondering what I was supposed to see. I looked back at Mama, who just watched me. I opened the window more and stuck my whole head out and gazed at the dark sky, the stars, the moon just disappearing through the trees, the long slope of the hill, black in the night, as it rambled down toward the bottom of the mountain. The blackness of the horizon where I knew other mountains grew. In the daytime, they would be there, layered in the distance, one after another, separated by narrow valleys and hollers like ours, with clear, cold springs and wide, rushing streams, and wildflowers. The crickets were humming and the lightning bugs were blinking here and there. I took a long, deep breath of the heavy honeysuckle air and closed my eyes. Then I sat back down by Mama and took her hand again.