No Dark Valley (45 page)

You would never dare say such a thing, though. She could well imagine this soft-spoken, low-key woman flying into a rage at such a suggestion, slapping her right across the cheek. How could a woman who had gotten
rid
of a child she had considered an inconvenience ever in a million years understand the sorrow of a woman who wanted children and couldn't have them? No, Denise Davidson would never be able to sympathize with somebody like Celia. If she knew what Celia had done, she wouldn't be standing here asking her if she was washed in Jesus' blood. She wouldn't want anybody like Celia having a chance to go to heaven, as if there were a chance of that anyway.

“Well, anyway, all this talk about being washed in blood doesn't make sense to me,” Celia said. The thought had come to her that maybe she could find her way out of this by walking straight into it head on. Maybe she could distract Denise with an argument Ansell used to have fun with. “I mean, all these songs that talk about being
clean
after being dunked in a fountain of blood,” she said, “well, think about it. Does that make sense to you? Would you feel
clean
if you had a bucket of blood poured over your head?” A look came into Denise's eyes that was hard to describe—some combination of puzzlement and horror, with a touch of wonder.

All of a sudden Celia heard a tapping on glass and realized how stuffy the inside of her car was getting. Bruce, the man who lived next door, was standing outside her window knocking with the knuckle of an index finger while holding up the other hand, from which was streaming . . . blood.

How eerie. She had just been thinking about all those hymns about blood and Denise Davidson's words about the Crucifixion, and now here was her next-door neighbor showing her his bleeding hand. She felt her stomach lurch, and she looked away quickly. What would he do, she wondered, if she got sick to her stomach right here in front of him? The thought of him trying to touch her with that bloody hand to help her impelled her to open the door at once and get out. She made sure she kept her eyes away from his hand, though.

“I'm glad I saw you pull in,” Bruce said. “What great timing. You got a Band-Aid? I've torn the house apart trying to find where Kimberly keeps them.”

Men and their ineptitude—their total dependence on their wives for the simplest things! He ought to be humiliated to admit that he didn't know where his wife kept the Band-Aids, but, in fact, he looked quite amused by it. “I was ripping out some old chair rail in the dining room,” he said by way of explanation, “and I completely forgot it had nails in it when I picked it up to carry it out. Dumb, huh?”

It
had
to be a nail wound, of course, and right in the palm, just to make it match up all the more. Celia turned and headed for her front door, fingering through her keys to find the right one. “Were they rusty?” she asked, then scolded herself. She didn't want to prolong this any more than she had to. Get him a Band-Aid and send him on his way—that was her goal right now.

“Yeah, I thought about that,” Bruce said, “but I washed it out with soap and peroxide. Plus, I had a tetanus shot a year ago when my foot ended up inside a dog's mouth. An old stray my sister dragged home.” He laughed. “Lousy little mutt. I was just playing with him, but he couldn't take a joke. They put him down after that out of respect for my pain. Ever had an animal attack your bare foot? It hurts, let me tell you.”

Celia unlocked the front door and stepped inside. Bruce followed her. Another weird coincidence—they had both suffered foot injuries from other people's pets. But she wasn't about to tell him the story of Smoky, the devil cat. She just wanted to get rid of this man so she could get on about her business. “Stay here,” she said, then worried that she sounded a little too curt and distrustful, she added, “I'll get it and be right back.”

As she headed to the bathroom, it came to her that Bruce must have changed jobs recently. She distinctly remembered Kimberly saying he traveled a lot, but it seemed to Celia that he had been home most of the summer so far. And at all hours of the day, too. Maybe he had started some kind of business he ran out of their house. She wondered if he was going to keep coming to her door with strange needs. Why couldn't he go to another neighbor for help?

Frankly, he made her feel uncomfortable. He seemed a little too friendly for a married man. She thought back to the day when he had tried to intercept her between her car and apartment to engage her in a conversation about the Norman Rockwell exhibit coming to Atlanta. She had cut him off, hoping to send a clear message, and he hadn't bothered her again until the toilet plunger incident.

But here he was again. She wondered where Kimberly was right now. Maybe she had gotten tired of Bruce and his bumbling ways and had taken baby Madison and gone home to her mother's. That would be easy to understand.

When Celia came back, Bruce was stooped down over by the cedar chest. He had his hurt palm against his mouth, as if he was sucking on his wound, and with the other hand he was touching her grandmother's patchwork quilt. She imagined little droplets of blood on the patches—something a man wouldn't even be aware of. She wanted to call out, “Don't touch that!” but couldn't think of a nicer way to say it. “Here,” she said, “I brought you a couple of extras.” She handed him three Band-Aids.

“Hey, good deal,” he said. “Thanks. Now I can go hurt myself in two other places.” He tucked two of the Band-Aids into his shirt pocket, then started to unwrap the other one. “Rats,” he said, holding his hand out toward her. “There it goes again.” A bright new bubble of blood was swelling up. He clamped it back against his mouth.

Celia swallowed hard and looked down. She had never once touched her tongue to blood. If the sight of it sickened her, she could only imagine what the taste of it would do.

“Would you mind?” Bruce said, his words muffled as he handed her the Band-Aid. And though every part of her resisted the thought of touching a bleeding person, even if it was just the palm of a hand, she took the Band-Aid and peeled off the backing. Bruce removed his hand from his mouth and flattened his palm against his jeans to dry it off, then held it out. The tiniest little veins of red were already appearing as Celia quickly applied the white pad to the wound and then pressed the sticky ends down firmly. She wanted to shoo him out the door and say, “There now, go on out and play.” She also wanted very badly to go wash her hands.

“Good job, nurse,” Bruce said, examining his palm carefully. “How about we put on another one to be extra sure—you know, cross them like an X.” As if she couldn't figure that out. He fished another Band-Aid out of his pocket and held it out to her. Not seeing any other choice, she took it, ripped off the wrapping, and, not quite as gently this time, put it over the other one.

With his other hand Bruce patted all around the circumference of his palm, making sure the Band-Aids were secure. “Guess I'm going to have to keep it stretched out like this for a while, huh?” he said cheerfully, holding his hand out flat. “'Cause if I cup it, the Band-Aids buckle up, see?”

Oh, he was a quick one, he was. Kimberly ought to keep this man leashed and muzzled, Celia thought. Standing as close as she was to him, Celia could see the burn scars on the back of his hand. At least, she assumed they were burn scars. It could be seen as a scary-looking hand, actually—with the skin all tight and shriveled. It wasn't a uniform color, either, but a mottled pinkish red. She wondered all of a sudden how the skin would feel if she touched it.

And then she had a horrible thought of Kimberly walking up to the door and looking in on the two of them, seeing them face to face, watching Celia reach out to touch Bruce's scars. She stepped back quickly and bent to gather up the little bits of wrapping from the Band-Aids. She dropped them into the trash can, then walked to the door, hoping Bruce would take the hint and leave. He did follow her out, all right, but unfortunately, his plan was to repay her great kindness in giving him a Band-Aid by helping her carry all her things from her car.

“Where've you been?” he asked as he hoisted her suitcase from the trunk.

“Georgia.”

“Yeah? What part?”

“Dunmore.” What a damp, heavy sound it had, like a soggy lump of uncooked dough. For some reason Celia suddenly remembered one of the ridiculous lines of their high school pep song: “Hear us cheer, and hear us roar. We're the best 'cause we've
Done More
!” They were supposed to yell those last words so no one would miss the clever pun.

“ . . . earlier today, and she was telling me about growing up in some little spot in the road in Georgia,” Bruce was saying, “but it wasn't Dunmore. It was . . . oh, I remember now. Burma. That's it. Burma, Georgia. I thought it was funny because there used to be this two-laner we'd take to get to my aunt's house in Alabama, and it had these Burma Shave signs along the side of the road.”

Funny he should mention Burma, Georgia. That's where Elizabeth Landis had grown up. Celia and she had discovered that when they rode to Charleston in the same car for state playoffs. Burma was only about forty miles from Dunmore, so the two high schools had played each other in sports, but, of course, Elizabeth had been done with high school during the three years Celia lived with her grandmother.

“Said she was just driving by and thought she'd stop,” Bruce said. “Funny how you don't expect to see people out of their regular zone, you know.” He gave a short laugh. “I didn't recognize her at first.”

Well, Celia had no earthly idea who Bruce was talking about, and since it didn't matter anyway, she said nothing.

Finally the car was empty. She had brought back a lot more than she had intended on this trip, most of it stuff she knew she'd never use, so once again she'd have to add to her stack of boxes in the Stewarts' basement. The last thing Bruce brought inside and set on the floor was a brown paper bag of twelve embroidered placemats Aunt Beulah had given her. “This is a whole set I made for a real sweet girl who was getting married at church,” she had told Celia, “but the boy got killed in a car wreck two weeks before the wedding, so I've had them in a drawer all these years, just hating to let go of them. I never could find anybody else I wanted to give them to.” Then she had thrust the paper bag at Celia, adding, “But I'm too old to be clinging to things, and I've finally found somebody I want to have them. They're all yours, Celie honey, if you'll have them.”

They weren't at all the kind of thing Celia would choose for herself—reversible blue-and-white gingham with a pink flower pattern embroidered in each corner—but she wouldn't have hurt Aunt Beulah's feelings for the world. So she admired them at great length, told Aunt Beulah how nice they would look with her blue dishes, waxed grateful that there were so many of them, and by the time she finished had actually formed a mental picture of them on her own kitchen table, which was set for company, with white cloth napkins folded in the shape of little sailboats and a bouquet of pink roses in the center. It was funny how fast you could get used to things if you just gave in a little, how you could hate the whole country style of decorating on one hand yet make room for dashes of it here and there without compromising your standards to any great extent.

As she watched Bruce jog back toward his house a minute later, Celia was once again glad the neighbors' driveway was on the other side of their house. She would hate to always be running into Bruce and Kimberly, having to smile and think of polite things to say, always feeling that they were watching her go and come. It was bad enough as it was. She remembered when Lloyd and his wife had lived next door—that was a much better arrangement. Never once had either of them come to Celia's door to ask for something. They used to visit back and forth with Patsy and Milton, but they left Celia alone. And then when the house sat vacant all that time—that was better yet.

She closed and locked her door, then turned around to face the mess of sacks and boxes on her floor. More stuff. She hated the thought of adding more baggage to her life than she already had. That was another reason she didn't want a house. All those extra rooms would only give you an excuse to collect more
things
, and it had always been her experience that things generally translated into more work—arranging, dusting, repairing, rearranging, dusting again, on and on it went. Not to mention earning the money it took to buy the things in the first place.

She lifted her eyes and looked around at the walls of her living room. That was the good thing about art. With a minimum of upkeep you had something truly beautiful and valuable that would last a lifetime. And it didn't take up a bit of floor space. It was funny, she supposed, how she could be so stingy and practical about some things, but then turn around and talk herself into buying a painting that cost a thousand dollars or more.

She looked back at the boxes and bags on the floor. Dump them all out and the whole pile wouldn't be worth anywhere close to a thousand dollars. Well, if she went ahead and stacked them with all her other stuff in the basement right now, she wouldn't have to feel depressed every time she walked through the living room. Might as well get it out of the way. She picked up two brown paper sacks and walked toward the door at the end of her hallway. Passing the kitchen, she saw the new linoleum—she had almost forgotten about it. She flipped on the light and studied it for a minute. It was nice. Simple, understated, neutral tones, new, shiny, clean—all the things she liked. If she weren't so tired, maybe she could feel more excited about it.

As she proceeded into the storage area, she remembered something the preacher had said in one of his sermons on Sunday. Not that she wanted to remember it. In fact, she had tried hard over the past few days to expunge that whole day from her memory. “Once you get a glimpse of Jesus,” he had said, “nothing down here on earth holds much attraction.” Beside her, Denise Davidson had nodded and murmured, “That's right.” Out of the corner of her eye, Celia could even see her write it down on a piece of paper in her Bible.