Velva Jean Learns to Drive Read Online Free Page A

leave Alluvial, you walked or left on one of the three trains that came in every day on the spur line from Hamlet’s Mill. Daddy Hoyt said you could barely find us on a map, that we were hidden, that no one would ever know we were up here, out of sight beneath the smoke and the trees.
    Now I sat up listening for Mama and Daddy Hoyt because I knew full well all the bad things that could happen at night, that there were things to be afraid of in the dark, not the least of which were bears and panthers and haints. I wanted to make sure my mama and granddaddy got home safe. When Daddy was gone, I worried in a way I didn’t when he was home. He had a way of filling up a house so there was no room for anything bad or scary to get in.
    I was in bed by the time Mama came back. When I heard Mama and Daddy Hoyt walk up on the porch, I got up, quiet as I could, and went to the window. It was already wide open and I kind of leaned my ear out so I could hear.
    “He’ll turn up, Corrine,” I heard Daddy Hoyt say. “He always does.”
    Mama hugged her daddy then and clung on to him for a long time. When she pulled away, I got back in my bed and yanked the covers up over my head even though the room was hot as a Dutch oven.
    “Did they find him?” Johnny Clay asked from the other bed, yawning in the middle of his question.
    I didn’t answer. I just pulled the covers up tighter and tucked my whole self under them, snug as a bug.
    “Velva Jean?”
    I was born again. I’d been saved at last. I wasn’t ever going to hell now. I tried to feel the water on my skin and hear the singing and tell myself I was brand new in this world. But all I could think of was Mama’s face when she read that note and the way she’d held on to her daddy.

    The next day, Mama took to her bed and stayed there. I tried to imagine what was in that note that would make her so sick that she couldn’t get up. She just lay there, her face feverish, her eyes closed or turned toward the wall.
    “I knew from the start that your daddy was going to be a project,” she liked to tell us. “We was at a candy pulling, and there he was, playing his mandolin and dancing the back step, long legged and nice looking. The prettiest thing I ever seen.” She said she fell in love with him right off, and he fell right back in love with her.
    Daddy was what Granny called “charming,” something I knew to be bad by the way her voice turned flat when she said it. He could barely read or write, but he carried hundreds of old songs around in his head, and he could buck dance and play every musical instrument he picked up, especially the harmonica. He could make it sound exactly like a steam engine, right down to the whistle and the wheels on the track.
    Mama said she knew that Daddy drank too much, fought too much, that he was a wanderer who didn’t like to live in one place for long, a blacksmith like his daddy and a part-time gold and gem miner, with talent but no real ambition, and that he had only a passing belief in God. Mama loved Jesus and she knew the Bible front to back. But she loved Daddy too. She couldn’t help it. She said she had enough faith for both of them.
    Back when it was just the two of them, before any of us children came along, they would pick up and go when Daddy got work. He may not have worked hard, but he was a good blacksmith and people would ask for him. He and Mama went all the way to Murphy, and then to Tennessee—Copperhill, Ducktown, and up to Johnson City. They went to Waynesville, North Carolina, and then to Asheville, which Mama hated because she didn’t like so many people. She missed her mountains. She said the Black Mountains weren’t the same—that they left her cold. They went to Bryson City, then to Cherokee. Then they came back to Sleepy Gap. When Sweet Fern was born and then Linc soon after, Mama told Daddy she was done moving. She didn’t plan to raise her children like gypsies. So Daddy came and went just like he always had,