No Dark Valley

by Jamie Langston Turner

  Celia heard one of her teammates say, “Way to go, Celia.” Sissy stepped up to where the serve had landed and scowled down at the court, as if looking for a ball mark, then moved over to the ad court. She danced lightly on the tips of her toes as Celia prepared to serve, as if to say, “Okay, try that again. I’m ready now.”

  But a few seconds later they were shaking hands at the net, Celia having won the final point when Sissy’s service return hit the tape and dropped back onto her own side of the court. As they walked to the benches, Celia saw that the crows appeared to be settled in the trees on the other side of the parking lot, where it sounded like a heated family conference was going on. Celia nodded toward them and said to Sissy, “Interesting sound effects today, huh?”

  Sissy sighed. “Yeah, they should do something about that. You shouldn’t have to put up with stuff like that during playoffs. I’m going to complain to Melanie.” Melanie, one of the league coordinators, was the one monitoring today’s match. Celia glanced quickly at Sissy to see if she was teasing, but evidently she wasn’t. Grim-faced, she was shoving her things back into her tennis bag.

  Celia tried to imagine exactly what Sissy would say to Melanie: “The crows distracted me” maybe. And while they were at it, Celia could chime in with her own complaints. “Yeah, and Sissy bounced the ball too many times, and a Porsche was playing loud music.”

  Sissy zipped up her bag and left the court, shoving past Celia’s teammates at the gate. Celia wondered if Sissy would go home and tell everybody she could have won today if it hadn’t been for those crows that made so much noise at a critical point in the match. Celia wondered if anyone would point out to her that her opponent must have heard the same crows.

  An hour later the whole team was sitting inside Wendy’s eating lunch. Ollie was going to open the gallery today, so Celia didn’t have to be there till two. The Holiday Winners were in good spirits. They had taken today’s match against the Greenville team, winning three of the five courts. Elizabeth Landis had lost her singles match in a disappointing three-set match, and Ellen Myers and Carol Sawyer had also lost in two close sets.

  But with Celia’s win and the other two doubles, they had taken their second playoff match. Now they would have a day off to rest before their last one on Thursday, and if they could win that one, they were going to Charleston. It would be a tough match on Thursday. They were playing a team from their own division, one they had played during the regular season—the Gateway Greens team, the one Donna Cobb played on.

  There were about five different conversations going on at the long row of tables they had moved together. Elizabeth, who was sitting next to Celia at one end, was still trying to replay her match to figure out how she had let it slip away from her. Celia had seen most of the last set but couldn’t give her much help. From what she could tell, Elizabeth had been playing smart, not making many unforced errors, and keeping her opponent on the run. But the other woman, who looked to be in her twenties, was a gazelle. She could get to anything and could usually place it well.

  “I hate to lose,” Elizabeth said to Celia now.

  “Probably because you haven’t had much practice doing it,” Celia said, smiling. This was only Elizabeth’s second loss of the ten matches they had played this season, and the other one had been in early March after she had been in bed for a week with the flu.

  Tammy Elias must have been listening in because she leaned over the table and said to Celia, “Well, look who’s talking. And how many matches have you lost this season?”

  “Oh, I’ve been lucky,” Celia said with a wave of her hand.

  “I wish I had that kind of luck,” Tammy said.

  “Yeah, how about sharing?” Elizabeth said, laughing. One thing Celia had discovered about Elizabeth was that she often changed subjects abruptly, which she did now. “You’re still planning on coming to our poetry club, aren’t you?”

  “Oh no, I had completely forgotten,” Celia said, clapping her hand over her mouth. She was teasing, of course. This was only about the ninth or tenth time Elizabeth had mentioned it since she had first asked her in March.

  Elizabeth made a face. “Okay, okay. What I really meant was, has Ollie decided yet about letting you bring something from the gallery?” Celia had told her a couple of weeks ago that Ollie didn’t think their insurance would permit a piece to be taken out of the gallery for something like that. If anything happened to it, he wasn’t sure they would cover it.

  Their insurers had gotten picky lately. A few weeks ago they had told the gallery they couldn’t display any paintings in the front window, as they had done for years—or rather, if they continued doing so, the company wouldn’t cover any damage to those pieces. There had been a lot of talk about a gallery in Columbia that had recently been the target of vandalism in the form of drive-by shootings through the plate-glass window. Several expensive pieces had been ruined.

  Celia shook her head. “He still hasn’t found out for sure. But he said he’d let me have something of his own from his studio at home if they say no. Ollie’s got some great stuff, especially his older work. I’m thinking of one in particular that would be the perfect thing. Lots of possibilities for writing material.”

  Elizabeth held up a hand. “Hey, you don’t have to convince me about Ollie’s work. I know it’s good. Remember, I’m the proud owner of Little Tweed Creek. I look at it every day on my wall and can’t believe it’s really mine.” For a moment she looked as if she had fallen into a trance. Some of Frank Bledsoe’s bad fiction came to Celia’s mind. He had always liked to describe characters as having “a certain faraway look” or “slipping into a moment of serene reverie.”

  Elizabeth carefully examined a French fry, then slowly brought it to her mouth, bit it in half, and chewed contemplatively. “Well, anyway,” she said brightly, the moment of serene reverie apparently ended, “I know whatever you bring will be great. I’ll quit bugging you about it.”

  Just then there was a loud burst of laughter from the other end of the table. Several other people at nearby tables looked over curiously. “Hey, y’all gotta listen to this,” Betsy Harris called out. “Listen to what Gloria’s mother-in-law did this time. Go on, tell ’em, Gloria.”

  * * *

  It was a good seven hours later, after she had gotten home from work that evening, that Celia opened her hall closet and got up on a chair to reach to the back of the top shelf and pull out her clarinet case. She took it into the kitchen and wiped it off with a damp paper towel, then slowly opened it. She wouldn’t have been surprised if dozens of moths had fluttered out, or maybe a bat, or if some kind of wood-boring insect had had a feast over the years, but from all appearances the clarinet was perfectly fine.

  The packet of reeds had to be useless, though. She took one out and stuck it in her mouth, sucking on it while she slowly put her clarinet together. Then she inserted the reed into the mouthpiece and tried playing a C scale. To her great surprise, she got a strong, completely identifiable clarinet sound. She played another scale or two, then stopped. What she really needed was some music to play. She used to have an old leather satchel with several books and pieces of sheet music in it, but she couldn’t remember where it was, or even if it still was. Maybe she had discarded it somewhere along the line, though she couldn’t imagine doing so.

  She checked the closet again, but it wasn’t there, and she surely didn’t feel like going through all her trunks and boxes stored in the Stewarts’ basement. Suddenly she remembered something and almost immediately wished she hadn’t. Grandmother’s hymnal—it was in one of the three boxes she had brought back from Georgia. In fact, she knew exactly which box it was in. If she was desperate for music and wasn’t picky about what kind, it could be easily had.

  She walked over to the door leading from her hall into the laundry area and flipped the lock. Generally, the only time she used this door was when she did her laundry on Thursday mornings in Patsy Stewart’s washing machine. Her storage area was just o
utside the door, against the other side of her bedroom wall, and she had set the three boxes of Grandmother’s things right in front. She opened the smallest of the three. There was the brown hymnal, Tabernacle Hymns Number Three, right on top, as she had known it would be.

  She took it out, then closed the box and returned to her kitchen. She sat down at the table again, and as she reached forward to open the book, she heard something drop hard on the Stewarts’ kitchen floor upstairs, accompanied by the shattering of glass. The thought crossed her mind that maybe it was a warning that she shouldn’t tamper with the hymnal. Go put it back in the box, something told her. Then move the box over to the Stewarts’ side of the basement and mix it in with their things so you can never find it. An image popped into her mind of rows and rows of identical boxes stacked up in a huge warehouse, like the ones at the very end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. It was one of the few movies she owned. You knew at the end of that movie that the box containing the lost ark would never again see the light of day.

  Overhead she heard Milton’s voice raised in alarm as heavy footsteps pounded through the hall. Then she heard Patsy’s voice, followed by a moment of total silence, then laughter, then more talking. Whatever it was, it hadn’t been much of a catastrophe.

  Celia once again reached forward to open the hymnal. She remembered the sudden atmospheric upheaval earlier in Raiders of the Lost Ark when the Ark of the Covenant was finally uncovered and displayed in full view. As it was about to be touched, all hell broke loose—or rather, heaven. Swords of lightning, huge splintery cracks of thunder, howling winds, graveyard shrieks and wails. “The wrath of God”—that’s what Indiana Jones had called it. He had told Marian not to look at it, and that’s how they had survived while all the Nazis melted in the great heat.

  No such pyrotechnics occurred now when Celia touched the hymnal, however, and she gave a little laugh as she opened it. It was just an old, old hymnbook, nothing more. But she was cautious, turning to the back instead of flipping it open to the middle. She found herself looking down at the very last hymn in the book. Number 352, “All Hail the Power.” Okay, here were staff lines and notes, key signatures, meter, the whole works. This is what she wanted—any kind of music to play on her clarinet.

  She played the hymn four times, twice through each of the two tunes printed on the page. Though she tried hard to look at only the notes, the words jumped out at her. And even if they hadn’t been printed right in front of her, she knew she would have heard them anyway. “All Hail the Power” had been a heavyweight Sunday morning song at Bethany Hills, not a Sunday night or Wednesday night song like “Glory to His Name” or “Sound the Battle Cry.”

  “O that with yonder sacred throng we at his feet may fall,” she heard during her fourth time through the melody, and for some silly reason she suddenly saw a very clear picture take shape in her mind, a picture of an enormous crowd of people looking toward a bright light. And she knew for a certainty that her grandmother was in that crowd—her parents, also. She stopped playing and immediately looked over at her kitchen counter, staring hard at her canisters with their bright yellow lids.

  She tried picking up the tune again without looking back at the music and finished it with only one minor slip. That’s what she should have done anyway—tried playing by ear. She had always been pretty good at that.

  Across the page from “All Hail the Power” was a page titled Responsive Readings. Celia remembered the procedure well. The preacher or song leader or sometimes a deacon would read the first verse, and the whole congregation would join in whenever the text shifted to boldface type. This would usually come after the second hymn, right before the offertory. One thing Bethany Hills knew how to do was stick to a routine. She remembered one deacon in particular, Brother Dooley, who was a poor reader and always butchered his half of the responsive readings, doing things like mixing up immorality and immortality, and once when reading John 3 had had Nicodemus address Jesus as Rabbit instead of Rabbi. Another time he had pronounced naked as one syllable, rhyming it with baked. “Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return,” he had read.

  Celia had tried to make a joke of it once, and only once, a few months after coming to live with her grandmother, when they were having their Bible reading after supper one night. She was still timidly trying to figure Grandmother out, to see if there were any sunlit corners in her dark personality. It was Celia’s turn to read, and she had purposely mispronounced naked as Brother Dooley had the Sunday before, even stressing it a little: “ . . . but all things are naked and opened unto the eyes of him with whom we have to do.” Her grandmother had immediately lifted her eyes from her Bible and fixed them on Celia’s face reprovingly. “Don’t make fun of the less fortunate” was all she had said, or needed to.

  Celia saw now that the first responsive reading was titled “The Holy Scriptures,” and before she could close the book, she caught sight of the second verse, the one in bold print for the congregation to read: “But continue thou in the things which thou hast learned and hast been assured of, knowing of whom thou hast learned them.” Her eyes leapt ahead to the next verse, “And that from a child thou hast known the holy scriptures,” but she closed the book firmly and pushed it away from her, as if it were emitting noxious fumes. It was a passage she had heard often, though. She knew it went on to talk about being “wise unto salvation.”

  She twisted her clarinet apart and put it back into the case. What a stupid idea it had been to use Grandmother’s hymnal for clarinet practice. She should have listened to the voice that had warned her not to. Now she had all those pesky words spinning around in her head: “The things which thou hast learned” and “from a child thou hast known” and “O that with yonder sacred throng.” Something else to keep her awake tonight.

  As she snapped the case shut, she noticed the nametag hanging from the handle. Turning it over, she saw her name printed neatly on the little card inserted behind the plastic shield: CECILIA ANNETTE COLEMAN. The ink had faded over the years, but she recognized it at once as her mother’s printing.

  And suddenly a whole day from the past came back to her. It would have been twenty-two years ago, almost twenty-three now, on the second day of August, the day she had turned fourteen. That had been the day her mother had printed her name on a little white card and inserted it into the luggage tag, taken off an old suitcase, then affixed it to her clarinet case, which, being secondhand, didn’t have one of its own.

  “Some nugget about your mom”—wasn’t that what Mike had said on the phone recently? “One of those meaningful moments from childhood.” If she ever did write anything about her mother, this might be the nugget, the meaningful moment—her fourteenth birthday. It had been a mild, pleasant, fairly low-key birthday up until the big surprise that evening.

  Celia always knew that part of the reason her father was so concerned about finances was that, unlike many of her friends at school, hers was a one-income family. Though her mother had taught first grade before Celia was born, she had quit her job and stayed home after discovering, jubilantly, that she was finally pregnant after nine long years of waiting and hoping. Or trying, as Celia had heard people describe it today. Thereafter, when filling out forms with a blank for occupation, her mother had proudly written in “homemaker, wife, and mother.” And her father approved wholeheartedly. He wanted her mother to stay home. He liked being the sole breadwinner, even if it did worry him sick at times.

  Her mother was a skilled seamstress, though, and gradually, as Celia got older, she took on sewing projects to make a little extra money. After several years, her father cleared out the spare bedroom and made it into a sewing room with a big worktable in the middle and a three-sided mirror mounted in the corner. Her mother used an old Singer sewing machine that had hardly any attachments, but nobody seemed to care about her equipment when she could turn out such perfect draperies and neatly tailored dresses.

  Every month her parents made a ritual of sitting a
t the kitchen table and paying all the bills together, during which time Celia would sit quietly in the living room right around the corner, pretending to read or do homework, listening for signs of trouble. She remembered the feeling of relief when it was over, when the last stamp was licked and stuck on the last envelope, when her mother would sigh and say something like “Okay, that leaves fifteen dollars to put in the fund.”

  “The fund” was for a new sewing machine her mother had her eye on, one “with all the bells and whistles,” as she called it. The fund had been a fourth presence in their home for as long as Celia could remember. It was raided regularly, however, to pay for emergencies, such as a brake job or a dental bill, and once her mother had taken fifty dollars out of it to send Celia to a summer camp sponsored by the Baptist church they attended in Lawrenceville, Georgia. And when Celia started clarinet lessons in sixth grade, her mother paid for them out of her sewing money, which meant less left over for the fund.

  Keenly aware of the extra expense, Celia threw herself into her lessons and practiced fiercely. If she was going to strain the budget, she was going to make sure her parents saw results. And they did. Her teacher, Mrs. Campbell, had nothing but praise for her efforts in spite of the castoff instrument Celia was using, which had been the one her father had played in high school.

  He had told her that if she did well on the clarinet, he would take her out and show her how to use the tennis racket in his closet, which he had also used in high school. The summer before eighth grade he had kept his promise, and she had picked up on tennis as quickly and as well as she had on clarinet.

  Several times, as Celia continued to improve, Mrs. Campbell had suggested to her mother that they look for a better clarinet, and her mother had always acted embarrassed and said, “I’ll tell my husband, and we’ll think about it.” Which made Celia wonder if she should back off and stop improving so her teacher would quit talking about her parents spending more money. By then, however, she loved playing so much she couldn’t make herself ease up.