Velva Jean Learns to Drive (8 page)

“Live out there,” she said finally. “That’s where you belong, Velva Jean.”

I had no idea what she meant, so I just looked at her.

“Promise me,” she said, and her eyes were watery.

“I promise.” I was scared not to. I wanted to promise her whatever I could.

“My daddy heals people with plants,” she said. “You do it with your singing voice. It’s a power, just like healing.”

And then she squeezed my hand once more and pursed her lips so I could kiss her. “I wish I’d never been born again,” I whispered into her ear. “I want everything to go back the same way it was.”

We prayed together then, one more time, and I wondered how Mama could speak to Jesus when he was letting her die and leave us all alone. “Look after my babies for me,” she said. “Amen.”

I kissed her again and watched her drift off into sleep. She looked peaceful, like the pictures of Mary, the mother of Jesus, that were painted on our church fans. I thought about the promise I’d made to her, how she made me look out the window and told me to live out there. Did Mama want me to live outside on the porch or under the stars?

I thought about her prayer to Jesus. Just one week ago, I thought he had smiled down on me and chosen me to be saved, to be lifted and to begin again. But now I wondered where he even was to let something like this happen to Mama and to me and whether I really wanted to live my life for him after all.

And then I thought of my daddy, somewhere out in the world, not knowing that Mama was lying here like this and that he had done it to her. If only he had been here and not gone off again, I thought. If only he hadn’t written that note.

FIVE

Mama had been in the ground for a week when Daddy got home. We heard his footsteps on the porch sometime after supper. Johnny Clay and me were shooting marbles, Beachard was reading, and Sweet Fern was cleaning up from the meal. Even though Sweet Fern and Danny Deal were living in their apartment above Deal’s General Store, they had come to stay with us till Daddy got back.

He walked in and grinned that big grin of his and we all just stared at him like he was a ghost. He was dusty and tan and there were sweat stains under his armpits. He smelled like apple brandy. Johnny Clay left the room and Beachard looked back at his book and kept reading, or pretended to. Sweet Fern slammed a dish down on the counter so hard that it broke, and Daddy looked confused but happy and said, “I’m home.”

When Sweet Fern told him about Mama, Daddy ran out of the house and up the hill to the cemetery, and Sweet Fern followed him, and then he sat right down on the dirt, right on top of Mama, and just cried and cried. I stood on the edge of the cemetery and watched him. I’d never seen Daddy cry before and it made me nervous. It sounded like a dog or a panther, this wild, lonely sound, like he was turning inside out.

“Go back to the house, Velva Jean,” Sweet Fern snapped. She was standing over Daddy with her arms crossed, the breeze blowing her hair. She was crying too, but not making any noise. As I turned back down the hill I saw her lean in and put her arms around him.

Thank you, Jesus, for sending Daddy home
, I thought. I went home and sat on the settee, the one my mama had inherited from her grand-mamma, and waited for him to come back in and make everything right again.
Thank you.
~

Daddy always said he knew in his bones when it was time to set off again. He told us he didn’t know why he couldn’t sit still like other men and be happy right where he was. Sometimes he tried. A path still led from our house up to an old mine he had dug himself. The mouth of the mine was dark. An animal had built a nest there. All around the opening, the ground shone like a rainbow—black and blue and reddish pink and yellow, depending on how the sun hit it. This was from the gems that weren’t good enough, the ones he’d tossed aside and that were now a part of the dirt—garnet and sapphire and beryl and black tourmaline and gold. Just past the mine was the little cabin where Daddy sorted the gems and where he did his blacksmithing. It was overgrown now and falling in on itself. One corner of the roof touched the ground and the floor had rotted away. One wall was completely gone.

Daddy had tried to be a gem miner in that little cabin. He had tried to set up a blacksmith shop. But then he would feel the urge start to well up in him, and he said he just had to follow it. Sometimes he was called to work and sometimes he just went because the urge was too great. He traveled up and down North Carolina, across the line to Georgia, and all over Tennessee.

Mostly he did blacksmithing. But sometimes he picked up work digging wells, laying railroad ties, farming, mining for gold and gems, to earn money to bring back home. While he was away, Mama and my brothers took up whatever work they could find. Linc farmed, Beachard did chores for the neighbors or did blacksmithing or took work on the railroad, Johnny Clay went panning for gold, and Mama took in washing and sewing. She never asked where Daddy wandered to.

Whenever he came home, I searched his pockets for the gold dust that always seemed to be there, and even though Mama never did, I always asked where he had been. He started telling me: “I’ve just come from London, England, where I talked with the king,” or “I’ve just got back from Constantinople, where I met with the prince.”

Afterward I would pull out the map of the world that Daddy Hoyt had given Beachard on his tenth birthday and look up the places Daddy had been. I put my finger on North Carolina, right toward the very bottom left corner of the state where I knew we lived, and then followed the route to England or France or Egypt or wherever it was with my other hand. I tried to picture my daddy in those far-off countries, doing important work that kings and whole governments needed him for.

“Do you think Daddy is in Africa by now?” I had asked Sweet Fern one day when Sweet Fern was seventeen and I was seven. I’d been lying on the ground, trying to see pictures in the clouds. I was supposed to be helping Sweet Fern with the wash but I’d gotten sleepy because me and Johnny Clay had stayed up all night catching lightning bugs in a jar and watching them till their lights went out.

“What on earth are you talking about, Velva Jean? Daddy’s not in Africa.”

“Oh yes he is. He told me so.”

“Daddy is over in Copperhill or Waynesville.”

This made me mad, and I thought Sweet Fern was mean for saying so. “He is not. He told me he’s in Africa. He’s going to bring me back a real live nose tusk like the natives wear.”

“Well, he isn’t. He’s right over there on the other side of the mountain or in Hazel Bald or somewhere else around here that he can get to by walking.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Velva Jean,” Sweet Fern had bent over and looked me straight in the eye. “Sometime you got to learn that what folks says and what’s the truth ain’t always the same.”

That was when I learned that Daddy didn’t go anywhere far or interesting or important when he left us. He barely even went past our own mountain. And all those things he brought me back from his trips—from Africa or China or Ireland—were just things he’d picked up over the hill or down in Georgia or across the line in Tennessee, things that suddenly had no meaning once I knew where they were really from.

Daddy was still crying when he walked in the door. He sat down next to me and took my hand and gathered me close, and for a few minutes we cried together. Then he wiped his eyes and stood up and ran his palms down the fronts of his pants to dry them. I watched him as he walked to the front door, just as calm and quiet as you please, and went out into the night. He took off faster and faster, his long, buck-dancing legs pulling him down that hill. Sweet Fern followed after him, yelling, “Where do you think you’re going?” But he didn’t answer. We all knew he was going to get his hands on the meanest third-run sugar liquor he could find, the kind that made you drunk fastest and hardest.

Hours later—along about three o’clock—Sheriff D. D. Story came up to the house from Hamlet’s Mill. He said, “We found Lincoln Sr. down in town, liquored up and causing trouble outside Baskin’s Bar. He got into an automobile with a woman he didn’t know and scared the wits out of her.”

Johnny Clay said, “You can keep him.”

Sweet Fern said, “Johnny Clay.”

He said, “I mean it. Let him stay overnight and sleep it off. It might do him some good. One of us might come for him tomorrow. Or we might not.”

Beach said, “I think Johnny Clay’s right. Leave him in there.” Beach was already on his way back to bed.

The rest of us looked at Johnny Clay. He said, “We’ll most likely see you tomorrow, Sheriff.”

The next day, sometime after lunch, Johnny Clay rode down to town with Linc in Linc’s old farm truck. It took them nearly two hours to get there and back over the old bumpy cattle road, but finally they came home with Daddy. When he got out of the truck, he didn’t say a word, just went into the woods and then came back later and got Linc and Beachard. They disappeared into the trees, and when they came out again, they were dragging the biggest boulder I’d ever seen, even bigger than the one Beachard had left in front of the porch on the day of Mama’s funeral. They pushed and pulled that boulder out of the trees, across the yard, and up the hill to the cemetery. Then Daddy walked back down, his face wet and red, and went into the house and came out with his tools. He went back up the hill and sat there for the rest of the day and the rest of the night, and when I got up the next morning, he was still there, carving that stone with his chisel and hammer.

Two days later, it was clear what he was carving—a cross. An enormous, raggedy, rugged old cross, just like the hymn.

With Linc’s help, Daddy moved the cross to the head of Mama’s grave, where they worked for nearly an hour to dig a hole deep enough for it in the dark soil. In the end, Daddy sank down on his knees and dug with his hands. When he had dug as deep as he could, he and Linc lifted the cross into the hole and packed the loose earth around the stone so that it finally sat there like a sad, mournful soldier.

Daddy stood there a long time, fingers bleeding, head bowed, tears streaming down his cheeks, and then he walked back down the hill—as slow as an old man—and went inside the house and got out his traveling sack, the one he used to carry all his things in, and dumped the contents onto the floor.

He saw me staring at the mandolin, the one he gave me years ago and that I gave right back to him. When I was eight, Daddy had ordered instruments from a mail-order catalog—just up and purchased an entire band from money earned on what he called a healthy vein of gold. Our whole family—for six generations back—was musical except for Sweet Fern, who couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket, but even she went down with us to Deal’s to pick up the instruments when they came in. Everyone from Sleepy Gap turned out to see, and for the first and only time in my life I was proud of something my daddy had done. But when I asked him where my instrument was, he said I was too young to have a new one, and that instead I could have his mandolin. He’d got himself a new guitar to replace it.