Free Velva Jean Learns to Drive by Jennifer Niven Page A

loving me from the start. When Mama wasn’t around, Sweet Fern used to stand over me and just stare. Sometimes she would look mad and sometimes she would look sad, and one time she leaned down over me and said, “I wish you had never come.” Granny said there wasn’t any way I could know something like that, being just a baby at the time, and she said not to make up stories. But I remembered it.
    And now she was going to be my mother.
    “I’ll never leave you, Velva Jean,” Johnny Clay whispered. “Don’t you ever worry about that.”
    “Promise?” For some reason, I felt more scared now than I’d ever felt in my life—more scared than I’d ever felt over Junior Loveday or the devil or the Wood Carver or even Mama dying.
    “Promise.” We grabbed hands and shook, and then I lay back in bed and tried to conjure Mama’s face and her voice and her smell before the sickness. It was hard to think of her lying alone outside in the deep, dark earth, while we were inside where it was cozy. I lay there and pieced her back together as best I could—her bright smile; the way her eyes lit up when she sang; her long, curling hair, the color of winter leaves; the way her face was shaped like a heart, just like mine. I waited till she was fixed in my mind and then I shut my eyes. Just like that, her face was gone, but I could still feel the cold of the river water on my flesh and I could still hear her sweet, pure voice filling the holler down by Three Gum River, alive with the spirit of God.
    Granny said Mama had answered the call of death’s angel. I wasn’t exactly sure what that meant, but I thought it sounded wonderful and grand and brave. It sounded just like my mama.

~ 1934 ~
    No sweet and tender mother
Cheering their dark home,
No strong and loving father
Watching over them below.
     
—“Orphans”

SIX
    It was the hardest winter anyone could remember. January filled the Alluvial Valley with snow until it was covered. The weather turned so cold and mean that we had to stay inside. There was sleet that cut your skin and fog so thick you couldn’t see two inches in front of you. We were closed off from the rest of the world and even from parts of our world—from Alluvial and from our own neighbors. We read and sang and slept and tried not to get on each other’s nerves. We crowded around the radio at Daddy Hoyt’s and listened to the news reports. That’s when we heard about the inspection party the government had sent out across the mountaintops to make a survey for the road they planned to build there. It was going to be a road from Virginia to North Carolina or Tennessee. The inspection party got as far as Grandfather Mountain but was forced to turn back because of the weather.
    So it was true. There was going to be a road on the mountaintops, just like Daddy had said.
    When the weather cleared and we were able to get down the mountain, we walked to Deal’s. Everyone was buzzing about the news. Linc bought a copy of the Asheville Citizen , a few days old. It talked about this scenic road that would open the mountains to tourists while saving the poor, downtrodden people who lived there: “These primitive mountain folk, these rural mountain poor deserve help. This scenic road will be the biggest thing that has ever happened or that can be expected to happen for them. It is essential if their economic needs are to be met. It is their only salvation.”
    Everybody had something to say about this and none of it was good. No one liked being called “poor” or “primitive.” No one liked the idea that we were a people in need of saving. No one liked the idea of outlanders coming here and trying to change things. And most of all, nobody wanted that road coming in. Johnny Clay said if those road builders wanted to come to our mountains and cut a road through, they could just try. He’d like to see them do it.
    I said, “I don’t want a road coming in here.”
    Daddy Hoyt said, “We don’t know that