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

disappointed.
    “But I followed him and I told him what Daddy Hoyt said, about how he’s known as making the best corn liquor for miles. That warmed him up enough to let me see it.”
    “What did it look like? Was it big? Was it loud?” I’d never seen a still before, and I was sorry now I hadn’t gone with Johnny Clay. I thought about the boy with the dark hair and the raccoon eyes and wondered if he drank whiskey or helped his daddy make it.
    “It was the biggest thing I ever seen, hid in a cave behind a waterfall. You got to go through the Devil’s Tramping Ground to get to it.” The Devil’s Tramping Ground was a bare circle of earth where no plants grew. Old Scratch was supposed to go there in the dead of night and walk round and round, thinking up his evil plans. “He’s got a rock furnace in there that he built himself. He said the waterfall hides the sound of the still, which is loud, real loud. He said he’s up there every day because you got to go up every day to stir the whiskey. He had barrels to catch it in and cases of half-gallon glass jars. You should have seen it, Velva Jean. The steam raised up out of it. I almost got drunk just standing there.”
    I could tell he was proud of this. “Let me smell your breath.”
    Johnny Clay put his hand up to his face and then blew into it. He shook his head. “You’re too young.”
    “What else did he say?”
    “Just that some revenuers have been up on the mountain sniffing around.” I knew from Johnny Clay that revenuers were even worse than convicts because revenuers worked for the government and carried guns and came onto the mountain and got rid of the stills and took people to jail and sometimes killed them. “He said Burn McKinney’s been closing up stills left and right, every which way, ever since they found that branch walker in the creek.”
    Burn McKinney was famous in the Alluvial Valley. He was filling the Hamlet’s Mill Jail and Butcher Gap Prison full of shiners, and chopping up their stills, selling the copper for junk, and burning the wood so that there was nothing left but a pile of ashes.
    “He also said his wife thinks he’s going to hell for making whiskey, but that it don’t seem to stop her from living off the money he makes or trading down at Deal’s with a jug now and then. He said she tells him all the time that his soul is doomed to hell, but he don’t seem to care. He said if he is going to hell, he might as well do all he can to earn it.”
    This was the most shocking thing I had ever heard. After all the work I put into praying to be saved, I couldn’t imagine a man who knew he was going to hell but didn’t even care.
    “The son’s just as bad. He’s been to jail once already and he ain’t much older than me.” Johnny Clay seemed both jealous and impressed. He kicked the dirt up as he walked. “Shit.”
    All the way home, past Alluvial and Deal’s General Store, I thought about that moonshiner who didn’t care that he was doomed to hell and his son the convict.
    As we reached Sleepy Gap, the sun dropped behind the trees, turning the sky pink and orange and red. We walked the last half mile staring up at it.
    We got near to the house and could see it up in the distance with the lights through the windows. Granny was sitting on the front porch, and when she saw us coming she stood and waved.
    I brushed the gold dust from my skin. I said, “You think Mama’s going to die?”
    Johnny Clay didn’t say a word, just took my hand with his free one and kept walking.

FOUR
    On July 28, six days after Mama took to her bed, Daddy Hoyt and Granny sat me and Linc and Beachard and Johnny Clay down. Sweet Fern stayed upstairs with Mama, with the door closed. Johnny Clay told me he had a bad feeling when he saw Sweet Fern come up from Alluvial without Danny or her baby.
    Daddy Hoyt did the talking while Granny sat, stiff as a post, and stared angrily at the floor. Every now and then she blinked her eyes real hard as if