No Dark Valley (5 page)

The day her parents had gone to get the clothes dryer, however, she had come home from school and been so eager to get to her geometry homework, which was her favorite class after a whole week of tenth grade, that she changed her schedule around and skipped praying. Her geometry teacher, Miss Augustine, was beautiful and used her hands gracefully as she explained things. She had a long elegant neck like Audrey Hepburn's, and she had worn the same pearl necklace around it every day so far, a necklace that Celia was sure Miss Augustine's boyfriend had given her. Celia sat right in front of her desk and studied her worshipfully.

So that day after school, thinking about how pleased Miss Augustine would be when she saw her neat, perfect homework paper, Celia took out her books and sat down at the desk in her room without taking time to read her daily chapter in Psalms and pray. She even postponed her clarinet practice that day, which usually came right after prayer time and right before taking her tennis racket outside to practice her backhand against the side of the garage. She intended to do it all later.

Her parents had brought her home from school that day and dropped her off, telling her they would be home in an hour, after they picked out a new clothes dryer. She remembered how happy her mother was. This was her first clothes dryer after being married for nineteen years and hanging clothes outdoors on a clothesline long past the time when women did that routinely.

The first thought that came to Celia's mind when she learned of the accident was “I skipped my prayers and look what happened.” And she lived for the next two years with the assurance that her omission that day had caused her parents' death. She became fanatical about praying then, was dressed and waiting to accompany her grandmother to church every time the doors were open. She filled up notebooks with verses she copied from the Bible and concentrated hard on every word that Grandmother read during their devotions together at breakfast and supper.

When she finally woke up her senior year of high school and, with the help of three new friends, discovered how ridiculous a notion it was—that by doing her geometry homework before praying she was responsible for her parents' accident—she turned her back on everything else associated with her religion. Religion survived, Ansell had told her, only by making people feel guilty. It feeds off the gullible, Renee had said. It takes everything in life that's fun and puts it on the no-no list, Glenn had added. It didn't take Celia long at all to see the truth in what they said, and every day afterward she saw evidence all around of how manipulative a force religion was, how totally devoid it was at its very core of love and joy, those two Christian virtues they were always singing about at church.

Grandmother saw that year as a war and fought vigorously to keep Celia from being captured by the enemy. There were more battles than Celia could number. Every day Grandmother rose with fierce determination, ready to take up arms, and every day Celia, fortified by her new knowledge, her new way of thinking, and her new friends, resisted. Grandmother, however, never retreated, nor did she devise new tactics whereby she might circle around and surprise the foe. She wasn't very creative. She was a head-on fighter, very predictable. You could count on her to keep the front line steady, not giving an inch.

And the thing Celia couldn't get away from now, looking down at her grandmother in death, was the incredible expenditure of energy it must have taken. It tired her to think of it, and she was only thirty-six. Her grandmother had been almost seventy at the time. How could a woman that old keep it up day after weary day? How could she continue to open her Bible every morning and evening and start to read aloud, knowing full well what would follow?

Celia hadn't been all that creative herself, really. Sometimes she would begin shouting to cover the sound of her grandmother's voice, or she might put her hands over her ears and sing. Sometimes she would simply get up and storm out of the kitchen, slam her bedroom door, and turn her radio up full blast. She might even leave the house on foot and stay gone a couple of hours.

If she could find her grandmother's car keys, which she usually couldn't, she would take the car and speed off in the dark. Twice out of pure spite, not at all because she enjoyed it, Celia came home drunk. The first time, she stumbled and threw up all over the front porch. She didn't even remember how she got into bed that night. The next day when she left for school, two hours late, there was no sign on the front porch that anything had happened the night before.

As a believer in a literal heaven and hell, Grandmother must have gotten a glimpse of what hell was like during that year. And all the years after that, as she waited for Celia to come back, if not in body at least in spirit.
But I never did
, Celia thought now.
I got out for good
. The thought didn't give her the satisfied surge it had before, whenever she had let herself think about her escape from the stranglehold of religion. For some reason, all she could think of now was the withering and fading of an old woman's hope and peace, of her own part in a lasting disappointment.

Without even meaning to, Celia reached down and touched one of her grandmother's hands. It was cool and hard. She drew back quickly. She remembered that first day she had arrived at her grandmother's house with Aunt Beulah and Uncle Taylor. Grandmother had led her to the back bedroom, the one that had been added on with the bathroom, finally. Celia didn't remember it, of course, but the whole time her mother had lived in the house growing up, there had been only a path to a little rickety outhouse behind the garage.

Grandmother had walked into the bedroom, which was small and would barely be big enough to accommodate Celia's bed once it was set up, and had laid one of her hands on top of the old pine bureau that had been Celia's mother's as a girl. “You can put your things in here,” she had said. Then she had opened the tiny closet and pointed. “Here's where you can hang things.” She had turned and left the room then, saying, “You go ahead and get settled. I'm going to get our supper finished up.”

Uncle Taylor and Aunt Beulah had carried the bed in and set it up, and then they had stayed for an early supper of pork chops and turnip greens. The pork chops were fried tough, not like her mother's tender slow-baked ones. “We'll go to the school tomorrow,” Grandmother had said after Uncle Taylor and Aunt Beulah left. “You can go run you a bath if you want one. Try not to use much hot water. The tank doesn't hold much.”

“Hey, Celia, you okay?” Al leaned close and studied her face. “She's gone now, Celia. You don't have to worry. She's not going to rise up and start preaching at you again.” He squeezed her hand. “Never again, babe. You're free as a bird.”

Celia suddenly laughed.

“What's the matter?” he said. “What's so funny?”

“Nothing,” Celia said, shaking her head. “Nothing at all.” The truth was, a picture had sprung into her mind. For some strange reason she had just remembered the time Grandmother had backed her Mercury Comet over a motorcycle in the parking lot of the Crystal Burger out on the old highway near their house in Dunmore.

She had gone inside to find the owner, who turned out to be a big hulking guy with a ponytail and a nose ring. Grandmother had told him about his motorcycle and walked with him outside to see the damage. Celia, sixteen at the time, had been there, hanging back in fear of what might happen. The guy had sworn colorfully and at great length, had looked like he wanted to punch Grandmother's lights out. A policeman had to come and write up a report, and right before they left, Grandmother had reached into her purse and pulled out a gospel tract. She stepped right up to the man whose motorcycle was so banged up it would have to be carried away, who was still so mad he could hardly see straight, and handed that tract to him. “Here, read this,” she said in her blunt way. “If you're so bent on riding motorcycles, you better be sure you're going to heaven.”

3

Where the Still Waters Flow

Aunt Beulah was suddenly standing beside her again. “If you've had enough time, Celia honey, we can go on out to the other room now before people start getting here for the funeral. I think they're about ready to close up the casket.”
If I've had enough time?
Celia thought. She had had more than enough time. She took a deep breath and stepped back from the casket.

Aunt Beulah took her arm and led her out into the hallway. “We're supposed to meet back here in this other room,” she said, “and then we'll all walk in together and sit in the family seats.”

Celia wondered if Mr. Shelby had any idea how many seats he needed to reserve for the family. With all the aunts and uncles and assorted cousins, they'd probably take up at least a dozen pews. The thought came to her again how much her grandmother would have enjoyed all this. An idea popped into her head: What if it were true that people in heaven could look down and, with some sort of magical long-distance vision, see things on earth? What if Grandmother had been allowed to pull up a chair right at the brink of heaven so she could have a good view of the funeral?

She didn't realize she was smiling until Al gave her a long look. “Hey, what's going on?” he said. “You look like you know a secret.”

“Maybe I do,” she said, but she stopped smiling. Inside the family waiting room she chose a straight-back chair by the window. They were the first three in the room. She knew it would be full before long. She could hear their voices already, strident and contentious, with no sense of discretion.

She could imagine Aunt Elsie pointing her out to someone on their procession into the chapel: “Up there, that's Celia. Look at her worldly haircut and that little bit of a dress, and not even wearing a coat!” And then Aunt Clara would add her commentary: “Still as stubborn and contrary as she was before! Not one ounce of concern for the things of the Lord! Made poor Sadie's life one endless tribulation!” Even Doreen might chime in: “She used to be real sweet till she got mixed up with the wrong crowd in high school.”

There was a little table by the window where she sat, and Celia looked hard at the artificial flower arrangement sitting on it. It was in a white wicker basket, an unseasonable mixture of fake irises, roses, and daffodils in colors much too bright for a January day. As could be expected, the petals and leaves were coated with a fine film of dust. The basket was too large for the arrangement in it, and it sat a little lopsided on the table.

Looking at the basket, Celia was taken back to a summer afternoon when she was sixteen, before she had gotten mixed up with the so-called wrong crowd, when she and Grandmother had gone blackberry picking along the railroad track that ran beside their house. They had spent hours filling their baskets and pails with berries. Grandmother could pick them twice as fast as Celia, deftly avoiding the thorns, and when her basket was full she came alongside Celia and helped her fill hers.

They didn't talk much, just picked. And broiled like hot dogs on a grill. Celia remembered how unbearable it was, how long the day had seemed. She wondered now why they hadn't risen early and done their picking in the morning when it was cooler. She hadn't complained, though, not even about the long sleeves Grandmother had insisted she wear. That was before she had wised up and found out about freedom. Those were still the days of conforming, of accompanying Grandmother to church and praying four times a day and doing as she was told.

They had finished with the baskets and set them side by side, then taken up two buckets they'd also brought along. The bushes were loaded with ripe berries, and even after both buckets were full, her grandmother put her hands on her hips and looked off down the tracks. “We could empty these and fill 'em all over again,” she said, shaking her head. For a minute Celia was afraid she was going to insist they do just that, but she didn't. She took off her straw hat and bent over to wipe her forehead with the hem of her dress. “Let's go,” she said, putting the hat back on. “Time to get us some supper.”

After they ate that night, Grandmother took out some plastic grocery store bags and divided up all those berries, every last one. Then they walked up and down Old Campground Road delivering them to all the neighbors. Grandmother kept one bag for herself. One bag out of probably twelve or fourteen. The next day she made one blackberry pie and two jars of preserves. Not much to show for all that hot work under the July sun. Their fingers were stained for days afterward, and Celia had scratches all over her hands and wrists from the brambles.

Not that her grandmother made a proud show out of her generosity. Not at all. It had often seemed to Celia that Grandmother hardly knew how to go about being neighborly. It almost seemed as if she were embarrassed by her attempts. As Celia remembered it, she was terse, bordering on rude, in her presentation of the berries throughout the neighborhood that night. They certainly hadn't lingered over the task.

Her grandmother would thrust the bag at whoever came to the door and say, “Here, we got lots more'n we know what to do with. You take some.” Then she'd wheel around and stalk back to Celia, who was waiting at the edge of the road. Since Grandmother's house was set off all by itself, they had walked quite a little distance in either direction, stopping at houses where lights were on. The whole process took more than an hour, and when they got home, her grandmother washed her hands for a long time in the kitchen sink, seemingly glad to be done with the whole business.

Celia sighed now and turned from the basket of flowers to look out the window. She saw a couple of cars pulling into the parking lot of the funeral home and felt herself wishing she could make time zoom ahead. If only she could suddenly be on the other side of the funeral, headed back home to normality. If only she could stay mad at Grandmother, if she could call up pictures of the hateful ways Grandmother had tried to control her life during that awful last year of high school, if she wouldn't keep seeing instead all these other images of earlier times when they lived together peaceably.