Velva Jean Learns to Drive Read Online Free PDF

in.
    “Let’s make the stack higher,” Johnny Clay said, and grabbed a long stick that was split off at the top like a fork. He began using it as a rake.
    “And then we can take turns burying ourselves in them,” I said.
    “And being born again,” added Johnny Clay.
    Playing like we were being born again made me feel new and light, like I didn’t have anything to be worried about. It took me back to being baptized, back to that happy moment before everything changed. When I played being born again, I could pretend that it was all happening all over again, only the right way, the way it should have happened the first time, without Daddy going away and Mama getting sick right afterward.
    When the pile was high enough, Johnny Clay let me go first. I crawled into the leaves and lay flat on the ground, closing my eyes, while he covered me up till I was invisible. “Ready,” he said at last when he got the pile just like he wanted it. His voice sounded muffled and far away.
    I lay there for a minute more, smelling the earth and the mustiness of the leaves. I opened my eyes and forced myself to stare up at the blackness. There were only tiny specks of sunlight showing through here and there. As flimsy as they were, the leaves began to weigh on me, as if pushing me down, down into the ground. I wondered if this was what it felt like to be buried alive.
    I pretended that I wasn’t buried in leaves but was standing to my waist in Three Gum River, getting saved in the name of Jesus, while my mama walked toward me, singing. I listened now for the first line— Oh they tell me of a land far beyond the skies —until I heard her voice in my head. I closed my eyes and folded my hands over my chest and prayed. Dear Jesus: please help Mama feel better.
    Then, when I felt my breath going and didn’t think I could stand it another minute, I jumped up and out of the leaves toward the sun. “Praise Jesus!” I shouted. “I am born again!”

    On the third day Mama stayed in bed, I woke up and went into her room to check on her. There was an old woman standing over her, up near the headboard. Daddy Hoyt sat in a chair against the wall with his hands on his knees, and Granny stood with her arms crossed, frowning.
    The old woman was waving her hands back and forth over Mama, who lay there sleeping. The woman looked to me like a sort of elf, small and delicate, but sturdy, with an ancient little face. She wore her white hair pulled back in a bun at the nape of her neck and a pair of black-rimmed glasses perched on the end of her nose. Her hands were working over Mama as if searching for something.
    “What’s she doing to Mama?” I said.
    “Why don’t we go outside?” Granny said, and she shooed me toward the door.
    “I don’t want to go outside.” I ran away from her to the other side of the room. “I want to stay.” Suddenly, I was mad at Granny and mad at Daddy Hoyt and mad at this woman I didn’t know. “I want to stay right here with Mama.” I was practically yelling. I didn’t trust this old woman, didn’t want her putting her hands on my mama.
    For as long as I could remember, Granny had talked about the bandits and the panthers and the haints that roamed the woods, about the giant who lived in Devil’s Courthouse with the devil himself, or the cannibal spirits that lived in the bottoms of creeks and rivers and shot children with their invisible arrows and afterward carried the bodies down under the water and ate them. She’d told us of the Nunnehi—fair-skinned, moon-eyed people who were invisible except when they wanted to be seen. In the thick of the night, you could hear them drumming and see the lights of their fires or lanterns through the trees, and sometimes they guided wanderers who had lost their way, and sometimes they played tricks on them and led them deeper off course. She’d told us about the runaway murderer—half-man, half-giant—that lived at the very top of Devil’s Courthouse, not leaving