Velva Jean Learns to Drive Read Online Free

asked Granny, who’d come over from next door to sit with us. All of us—Mama’s parents, Granny and Daddy Hoyt; my brother Linc and his wife, Ruby Poole; Mama’s sister Zona and her twins; Great Aunt Bird; Mama and Daddy; Beachard and Johnny Clay and me—lived within a few feet of each other up in Sleepy Gap, which sat high up in a holler on the side of Fair Mountain. Mama and Daddy’s house was a narrow weatherboarded two story, painted yellow, with a tin roof and a porch on the front and off the back. There were two rooms downstairs—a kitchen and a main room with a stone fireplace—and three small bedrooms upstairs.
    With the rest of the family we shared a big red barn, a chicken house, a smokehouse, a springhouse, a root cellar, and a hog scalder, and we’d lived there all my life and all Mama’s life and all Daddy Hoyt’s life too. That mountain had been in our family for generations. It was named for us, even though the family name was Justice. My great-great-great-granddaddy had named it Fair Mountain when he first arrived in 1792 because he liked the sound of it, liked that it was another word for just , and liked that it had more than one meaning.
    Granny, who was one-half Cherokee, said the Indians believed Fair Mountain was sacred. Only our mountain made its own music; only our trees told stories. The music was like the humming of a thousand bees, only it never happened in bee season and was always loudest before a thunderstorm. The air shook so you could feel it through the bottoms of your feet. The stories were left there by the Cherokee, those sent west on the Trail of Tears. They carved out holes in the trees and left messages for each other inside of them, and they bent and shaped the trees along the trail so they could find their way back someday. They called these “day stars” because you could see by them.
    “Where’s Mama going this late at night?” I asked again.
    “Down to use the telephone at Deal’s,” Granny said. Deal’s General Store and Post Office was the only place within miles that had a telephone. It sat just off the railroad tracks, down by the river, in a small oval-shaped valley called Alluvial. Surrounding the valley were mountains forged together in a high dark circle, with names like Blood and Bone and Witch and Devil’s Courthouse. With our mountain, they stood in a tight ring around Three Gum River and the stubborn lines of the railroad and looked out over high, lush green hollers tucked here and there—Sleepy Gap and Snake Hook Den and Bearpen Creek and Juney Whank Cove and Bone Valley and Panther Hole and Devil’s Kitchen, a place so horrible they named it after the devil himself.
    “Who does she want to talk to?” I said.
    “She’s just asking around after your daddy.”
    “To see where he went to?”
    “Yes.”
    We lived in the wildest part of the North Carolina mountains, up in the Smokies—the oldest mountains on earth—where winter and summer the clouds and the mist settle down over the hills and hollers and cover up the valleys. The peaks are the steepest here, the most rocky and wild. The colors are the deep brown-black of the stone and the soil, the burnt red of clay, and the darkest green of the balsam firs that cover the mountaintops. Daddy Hoyt called it the land of the wild things—the last place where the wild things could roam untouched. We lived near the Indian nation, near the Cherokee. Waterfalls. Thick forests. Rich soil. A river in the valley, which is why Daddy Hoyt’s people had settled here in the first place, all those years and years ago, when they came from Ireland.
    I thought the whole world was right there inside the Alluvial Valley. There weren’t any roads that came into our part of the country—just the old cattle path that got you started toward Hamlet’s Mill, the nearest town, ten miles away, and a few old Indian trails and footpaths. The other roads we made ourselves, by walking or driving on them. If you wanted to