Velva Jean Learns to Drive by Jennifer Niven Read Free Book Online

sister, Mr. Deal sometimes gave us a free sample. Sometimes he even gave us a bottle each of orange Nehi or Cheerwine, and then we hung around outside to watch the train come in as long as Sweet Fern wasn’t around. She and Danny lived above the general store in an apartment she had decorated herself, and the one bad thing about Deal’s was that you were always running into Sweet Fern.
    We crossed through Alluvial, over the railroad tracks, over the river on the old wooden bridge that had been there as long as anyone could remember. Normally, we liked to bounce up and down on it, to try to make each other fall off. Today we didn’t because it wasn’t that kind of day. We started up Devil’s Courthouse, making our way along the unfamiliar hillside. Soon we were swallowed up by thick, green woods.
    Johnny Clay was following an old Indian trail that wound around the mountain like faded red ribbon. He was good at tracking. He could find his way anywhere. I collected fairy crosses from a creek bed and put them in my pocket. These were stones shaped like crosses that protected you from witchcraft and sickness. I thought I would take one back to Mama.
    Usually, we would have played Spies on a Mission, our favorite game ever since Johnny Clay had thought it up last summer. I was Constance Kurridge—detective, spy, pilot, and sometime movie star. And Johnny Clay was Red Terror—fierce code breaker and member of the Russian secret police. He’d made up Red Terror all by himself and had given him super strength; the ability to speak ten languages; and, best of all, a limp. We had a series of hand signals we’d worked out over the winter—things to mean “stop,” “wait,” “hide,” “retreat,” “run.” But today we weren’t spies on a mission. We were just Johnny Clay and Velva Jean Hart, gone to fetch moonshine for our mama who was too sick to get out of bed.
    We climbed up and down hills till I wasn’t sure where we were or if we’d ever find our way there or back. We crossed the river—now a creek—fifteen times.
    I didn’t know what would happen once we got home. I didn’t know what would happen tomorrow. But for now, Mama was here and the sun was out and Johnny Clay and I were together and the giant hadn’t shown himself and the devil was staying away. I wanted this trip to last forever, because right now Mama was still with us and everything was in its place.

    The moonshiner lived in a two-story house in a clearing halfway up the mountain. You had to cross a little stream on a wooden plank to get to it. The house was white with bright blue trim, the color of a robin’s egg. It had a great, slanting roof that made me want to slide down it, and a wide porch that wrapped around the front and one side. Beyond the house there was a big black barn, a chicken house, a springhouse, a cornfield, and a small open meadow. Johnny Clay whistled. I figured there must be good money in moonshine because these people had to be rich, almost as rich as the Deals.
    “You looking for me?” a man shouted at us. The moonshiner had a fountain of white hair and a hollowed-out face and a fat wife who sat on the porch fanning herself and watching the woods. Daddy Hoyt said the old man was crazy, due to the metal plate in his head, which was put there by World War I army medics after the top of his skull was shot off by a German soldier. Daddy Hoyt said the moonshiner claimed to communicate with Jesus through that metal plate, but that he was kind and fair and would give us a good price for the whiskey, if he charged us at all.
    I was too scared to go any further than the woods that surrounded the house, so Johnny Clay left me at the tree line and marched forward to where the fat woman and the old man sat. A boy not much older than Johnny Clay was feeding the hens that clustered at the side of the house. He was tall and dark haired and covered in coal dust, and there were two white rings rubbed around his eyes. He didn’t