Velva Jean Learns to Drive Read Online Free Page B

and Mama stayed put. She called him Old Mule because he was stubborn. He called her BeeBee, but we never found out why.
    I supposed Daddy was off now chasing another gold vein or hunting gems or maybe doing some blacksmithing work for someone. Just to be sure, I went outside and looked over on the back porch and there was a stack of wood, just as high as the house. We could always tell how long he’d be gone by the height of the woodpile he left behind.
    “How come she won’t get up?” I asked Johnny Clay. We were supposed to play on the porch and be quiet about it because Daddy Hoyt was looking after Mama, and Granny said Mama needed rest and that we weren’t to get on her nerves. Johnny Clay had some marbles he’d won off Lester Gordon, so we were shooting them back and forth. “What do you think was in that note? Daddy’s left before. Daddy always leaves.”
    Johnny Clay pointed at the wood stack. “It ain’t never been that high before.”
    “Is she gonna get up and fix lunch?” I didn’t tell him that I was worried about her. Never in my life did I remember Mama staying in bed past sunrise. It made me feel nervous to think of her in there with her face turned toward the wall.
    “I don’t know, Velva Jean,” Johnny Clay said. He flicked a large green marble into a smaller blue one and they rolled off the side of the porch.

    Daddy Hoyt didn’t leave Mama’s side all morning. Later that afternoon, he took Johnny Clay and me out to find the mayapple plants that grew on the floor of the forest like green umbrellas. They smelled so sweet that they made my stomach turn, and I held my nose as we picked the leaves. Daddy Hoyt said they had something in them that might help Mama get better.
    “What’s wrong with her?” I asked him. Mama had been sick before, with a chest cold or headache, but she never took to her bed. She always just worked right through it.
    “Your mama’s ailing,” Daddy Hoyt said. “And I’m doing my best to fix her.” But that’s all he would tell us.
    “You’ll fix her,” I said. “You fix everyone.” Daddy Hoyt could heal anything because the Cherokee had taught him how. When he was eighteen years old, he had left Sleepy Gap and walked all the way over to the reservation on the other side of our valley and our mountains, two ridgelines away. He went to live with the Indians and learn from their medicine man, and while he was there he met Minnie Louise Kinsley, or Granny, whose daddy was a Scottish missionary and trader living on the reservation and whose mama was a full-blooded Indian. Daddy Hoyt stayed with the Cherokee for ten years and learned how to heal people from the land and the trees and the plants, while Granny became a midwife. When he felt he had learned enough to go back home and help his own people, he took Granny with him. By that time, the Indians called him didanawisgi , which means medicine man.
    I pinched my nose and stuffed the mayapple leaves into my apron pockets. “There ain’t no one you can’t heal,” I said again. “Right, Johnny Clay?”
    “Right,” he said, his head bent toward the ground.
    Daddy Hoyt didn’t say anything to this, just stooped over and pulled up an entire plant, roots and all, with one hand. He pulled this leaf off and another and another, and left the ones he didn’t want. Each time he pulled up a plant, he dropped a bead into the hole left behind in the earth and covered up the hole with dirt. He carried red and white beads in his pocket just for this purpose. It was something the Cherokee had taught him. They said it was like a thank-you—a way of giving back—for what the earth was providing.
    Back home, Daddy Hoyt ground the mayapple leaves into a powder and added small doses of it—barely enough to taste—to Mama’s food and drink. He gave Mama snakeroot tea to bring down her fever and ginger root boiled and rolled in sugar to help with her stomach trouble. He made her a poultice of ground up poke root and laid