Free Velva Jean Learns to Drive by Jennifer Niven Page B

it will, Velva Jean. But it’s a funny thing about a road. It’s not just an incoming road you know. It’s an outgoing road too.” ~

    By May the sky had cleared and the sun was out. I was sitting on top of the mountain, up on the highest point. I liked walking to the top of the mountain, to the bald spot, where I sat by myself and sang. I did this year-round, in the daytime when the panthers and haints were asleep, because it was up here that I could really hear myself. I was working on the words to a mean song. It was a song about a murder because lately I was in a murder sort of mind. I knew I had turned wicked since Mama died, that I was backsliding, but I didn’t care. All the songs I wrote now had murders in them.
    I was staring off into the distance, toward the layers and layers of mountains, thinking that if I was a giant like Tsul ’Kalu I could step on them, from one to another, on their very tops, and walk across the earth. The air was clean and I breathed it in. For a moment, I almost felt like writing a pretty song. But then I saw, off toward Reinhart Knob, a line of automobiles and trucks. There were maybe twenty of them in all. They were stopped, men standing around. Some of the men were staring out into the valleys, hands on hips. Some of them stood with their eyes shielded from the sun, looking out toward me and my mountain.
    I got to my feet and looked right back at them. I stared at them so hard I hurt my eyes, trying to look as fierce as I could. Maybe they would think I was a witch woman or a haint or a spirit from the mountain or an Indian princess. I thought I might scare them off and let them know we were a force to be reckoned with, not poor and primitive mountain folk who wanted them here. At the same time, I was trying to see their faces, trying to see if any one of them was my daddy. ~

    On Memorial Day, we dressed up in our best clothes and climbed the hill to the cemetery. I carried merry-bells and Indian pink and the little white daisies that Mama loved, but not as much as she loved asters, which weren’t yet blooming. Sweet Fern and Aunt Zona had stayed up all night, making bright paper flowers. We sang hymns and, one by one, we remembered the dead. When it was time to talk about Mama, I didn’t have anything to say. Granny said, “Go on, honey.” But I just stood there, holding the flowers so tight that they turned my hand green.

    By the time he was thirteen, Johnny Clay had been the youngest gold-panning champion in North Carolina for four years running. He was nine when he first entered a competition at Blood Mountain Mining Company—where our daddy and his daddy and his daddy before him had worked when they weren’t doing blacksmithing—and beat men more than twice his age, ones who had come to Blood Mountain from far and wide to work the mines. They lived up in shacks on the mountain, and Johnny Clay always pointed them out and said, “You won’t catch me living in a shack, mining someone else’s gold. By the time I’m as old as them, I’ll have my own mine and my own mountain.”
    He knew that the best place to test for gold was at a sharp curve in a stream. I sat on the bank of Sleepy Creek and watched him and didn’t say a word because this would have distracted him and made him mad. He didn’t like anyone to talk while he was panning.
    I didn’t mind because I liked the woods in the daytime. They were peaceful and quiet and I could think there, out of sight of our house and Mama’s grave. I liked to lie there and stare up at the sky and think about how I lived in the center of the world because there was the sun right above me. These were the moments I would listen to the creek and to the mourning doves and I would breathe in the sweet, clean smell of the pines and think that I always wanted to stay in Sleepy Gap and never leave in all my life.
    Johnny Clay was bent over the water, shirtsleeves rolled up, arms wet and red from the cold, shaking the pan away from