Velva Jean Learns to Fly Read Online Free PDF Page A

“Tickets now required: twenty-five cents.” This was because the show was so popular that everyone wanted to see it. Even as I stood there, folks were walking up, pushing past each other and me, going inside, dressed in pretty clothes, clean clothes—the men wearing hats and starched shirts, the women wearing hats and dresses, nicely pressed. I noticed a smart-looking girl hurrying through the crowd. She wore red, red lipstick, and she was hatless. Her brown hair was cut in a bob that hugged her chin, and she carried a purse the color of tomatoes. She was a giant girl, fat as Harley’s mama, but pretty. She looked like she must be from Atlanta or New York. She walked by me and dropped a fifty-cent piece in my hand.
    I stared at it and then started laughing. That girl thought I was some sort of less fortunate, a down-and-out in need of help. Granny had told me the cities were full of them. I held that coin tight in my fist and then opened the door and followed everyone inside. I walked up to the box office and bought one ticket. My hair was a mess, my dress was dirty, my shoes were making squish-squish sounds as I walked, like they might come off my feet and stick right to the floor. But my lips were painted bright as rubies.
     
    I sat straight up during the show, rigid as a post, and listened to every word, every note. Down on the stage, all the musical acts I’d grown up hearing on Saturday nights on the radio—Pee Wee King’s Golden West Cowboys, Bill Monroe, the Possum Hunters, Minnie Pearl, the Missouri Mountaineers—stood around the WSM radio microphone playing their most famous songs.
    The auditorium was beautiful, with a grand, high ceiling that looked like an enormous gold-and-white checkerboard and a chandelier that hung down in the center. I sat up in the left balcony, but what I really wanted to do was to climb down into the audience and jump onto the stage and sing my heart out.
    And the stage—that was something else. It was a ten-foot circle of dark wood that looked like magic to me. Even from the balcony, you could feel the history of it, like everyone who’d stood there had left a piece of themselves behind.
    When Judge George D. Hay, dressed in a black suit and black hat, cigar hanging out of one corner of his mouth, said into the microphone, “Now put your hands together for Roy Acuff and the Smoky Mountain Boys,” I felt a thrill going through me from my feet to the top of my head. Judge Hay was the program director of the Opry. On the air he was called the Solemn Old Judge, and he chose everyone who sang on the show.
    I wondered if just seeing Roy Acuff, even from way up here in the balcony, would send me into a swoon like some woman from a movie or an old-timey novel like the ones Ruby Poole read when Linc wasn’t around. I leaned forward and rested my arms on the railing. I wondered if Roy Acuff might see me in the audience, seated up here above the stage, just like Harley Bright had noticed me in the congregation of that first revival, the one he preached on the banks of Three Gum River, when I knew that one day I would marry him, when I thought I’d just been saved for the second time. Just in case, I sat up straight and tried my best to look regal in spite of my matted hair and dirty face. I was hoping Roy Acuff would see past the dirt and see the Velva Jean who could be clean and shiny and pretty in spite of freckles and too-wavy hair.
    Roy Acuff was as tall as Harley. He sang “The Wabash Cannonball,” “The Precious Jewel,” and then “The Great Speckled Bird,” which was my favorite. He was skinny and handsome, with thick and wavy black hair and a sweet face that looked like he’d just scrubbed it with soap and water. It was the kind of face that seemed to be smiling even if he wasn’t. I wanted to kiss him, and just the thought of wanting to do such a thing made me clap my hand over my mouth and laugh like someone who had lost all sense.
    This was one of the nicest moments