No Dark Valley

by Jamie Langston Turner

  As they walked over to where the rest of the team was sitting, Bonnie told her that Elizabeth had indeed won the first set of her match and was tied at five-all in the second. Nan and Judy had lost the first set 5–7 but were up one game in the second, and Jenny and Carol had lost the first set and were trailing in the second. They weren’t sure about Cindy and Jane’s match, because they weren’t using the scorekeeping numbers on their court and nobody could hear them call out a score before a game. “We’ve got a chance, though,” Bonnie said. “Nobody’s giving up. We might win this thing yet.”

  Bonnie made Celia sit in her canvas chair while she sat on the grass beside her. It was hard enough to follow the score of one match, much less three or four, so Celia decided to focus on Elizabeth’s court, which was right next to the one Nan and Judy were playing on. Focusing on anything was a little difficult at the moment, though, since Anastasia Elsey, seated on the other side of her, was talking nonstop, delivering a running commentary on every shot, on every player on the courts, and on every person who walked by. She changed subjects so often that it was impossible to keep up with her, and when she said, “Good grief, she sure thinks she’s hot stuff, doesn’t she?” Celia had no idea who it was she was talking about.

  Horror vacui—the Latin term for “the horror of empty space”—was what came to her mind all at once, something she had read about in an art magazine a long time ago. It was originally a concept in art tracing its roots to India, she thought, or maybe to the Middle East, where an artist’s skill seemed to be determined by how much he could cram into a single painting, as if the tiniest blank space meant that his imagination had run dry. The concept also carried over to many other areas. In interior decorating, for example—the compulsion to fill up all the available space. Celia had often suspected, in fact, that she herself was approaching that point in the way she kept packing more art onto the walls of her apartment.

  And, of course, in social settings, there were always those people, such as Anastasia, who seemed to have a horror of the empty space of silence. Celia decided it would be an interesting contest to have Anastasia Elsey and Eldeen Rafferty in the same room together.

  As Celia watched a particularly long point during which Elizabeth’s opponent ran her from one side of the court to the other, then up and back several times, something caught her eye outside the fence where they were playing. A little girl stood watching the match, her face pressed up against the fence, her fingers clutching the chain links. She was as skinny as one of the fence posts and had long blond braids. After Elizabeth won the point by drilling a shot down the line, the little girl called out, “That’s okay, Mom! You can do it! Come on!”

  Celia looked more closely at Elizabeth’s opponent—a tall gangling woman who didn’t exactly look like a spring chicken but, like Elizabeth, was evidently the kind of player who sank her teeth in and wouldn’t let go of a point. Celia had learned not to underestimate singles players like her, who looked like they were past their prime but somehow had a battery that never wore down. What they lacked in power and technique, they often more than made up for in consistency and sheer determination.

  “You must feel awful about losing your match,” Anastasia said beside her. “That girl you played sure strutted off the court, didn’t she? Did you see that tattoo on her arm? I never could get close enough to see what the picture was. Did you?”

  Too tired to talk, Celia merely shook her head and kept her eyes on Elizabeth’s match. She always avoided looking at children close up, but she sometimes studied them from afar, and for some reason right now she kept coming back to the little girl by the fence. It took only seconds for her to realize why. At this distance, some forty feet away, the child looked exactly like Celia herself at that age, skinny with long braided pigtails.

  Her parents, being frugal as they were, hadn’t filled up dozens of photo albums the way some parents of only children did, but they had taken a moderate number of pictures, and Celia’s mother had neatly labeled them all with occasion and date and filed them in order in a shoebox. Owning a shoe store as he did, Celia’s father had ready access to shoeboxes, which they used for everything at home. Her mother’s recipe box, covered with yellow wrapping paper, had once held a pair of child-size bedroom slippers. It had sat on the kitchen counter next to the canisters the whole time Celia was growing up.

  “But don’t worry,” Anastasia said. “I have a gut feeling that Elizabeth’s going to pull this one out for us.”

  “Good shot, Mom!” the little girl shouted now and clapped her hands. Her mother had just scored on a drop shot.

  “I wish that kid would be quiet,” Anastasia said. “Somebody ought to make her get away from the fence.”

  Though Celia was pulling for Elizabeth, something in her wanted the mother of this little girl, whose voice rang out so clearly and so hopefully, who twirled around in a joyful little circle as she clapped her hands, to do well, also. She felt a wrenching deep inside when she thought of what it must be like for that woman to hear her own daughter cheering her on after every point. She let herself wonder for a moment what it would have been like in her own match against Kristin if she had heard a voice like this urging her on from the sidelines. That would have to add an extra charge to anybody’s battery.

  And then again the cloud descended. She would never ever hear a child’s voice saying to her, “Good shot, Mom!” She had been too stupid, selfish, and shortsighted one day almost fifteen years ago to ever earn the right to hear something like that. She shut her eyes tight and lowered her head, which suddenly felt too heavy to hold up.

  Anastasia leaned over to her. “Hey, I know exactly what you must be thinking right now,” she said in Celia’s ear.

  Celia didn’t even lift her head as she answered, her eyes still closed, “Oh no, I don’t think you do.”

  19

  On the Page White and Fair

  Celia had always known that someday she would find herself in this place again, especially since she had all but promised to come a couple of months ago. But now that she was here, it didn’t seem quite real. She felt as though she were in some kind of time warp. She glanced to either side, halfway expecting to see her grandmother seated beside her, but the only people on the pew with her were ones she had never seen before.

  A sixtyish couple sat across the aisle from her, the man with only a few sprigs of pale hair sprouting around his ears and the woman crowned with a hairdo that reminded Celia of the huge paper wasp nest she had found in Grandmother’s barn the day before. The couple smiled at her as she sat down, and the man said, “Glad you could come out to worship with us this morning.”

  The first thing Celia noticed as she sat down—in fact, the thing she was most curious about, the thing that probably, even more than her tacit acceptance of the invitation back in April, had made her come this morning—was that the hymnbook in the rack in front of her bore on its cover the title Tabernacle Hymns and below it, in smaller letters, Number Four. This edition had a green cover but was about the same size as the old brown one of her grandmother’s and had the same torch emblem embossed beneath the title.

  So Bethany Hills had simply reordered the same hymnal when the old ones wore out. She could have expected as much. She remembered thinking, when she used to visit Grandmother’s church as a little girl, that the hymnal was made especially for this church, since they both had Tabernacle in their names, but her mother had explained that it was just something called a coincidence. She took the green hymnal out of the rack now and examined it. If all of them were as worn as this one, the deacons here at Bethany Hills needed to approve funds to order the Number Five edition sometime soon.

  Celia flipped through the pages. All the same old hymns were there. As much as she wanted to feel scornful about this tangible evidence that a whole group of people had remained entrenched in mindless tradition, for some strange reason she felt the smallest prickle of satisfaction that they hadn’t changed hymnals.

  Up
on the platform sat the preacher, not old Brother Thacker from eighteen years ago, but the other one who had come to Grandmother’s house when Celia was there back in April, the one whose wife, Denise, had said to Celia right before she walked out the door that day, “Well, we’ll be looking for you at one of our services when you come back in June, all right?” And like a spineless ninny, Celia had nodded dumbly, realizing as she did so that people like these would interpret that as a commitment. She should have said what she felt: “No, I won’t be coming to church. I escaped from that cage a long time ago and don’t intend to get caught up again.”

  And, of course, Denise had just had to drive by Grandmother’s house yesterday as Celia and Aunt Beulah were having the yard sale. Naturally she had stopped her car and greeted them, even bought three of Grandmother’s aprons and a flour sifter before leaving. And, as Celia had known she would, she had repeated the invitation to come to church the next day, giving the exact times of the services in a tone that implied her certainty that Celia would be at one of them.

  And so, here she was. This was exactly the kind of thing that Ansell and the others used to laugh at her for in high school—her heightened sense of obligation. “One of life’s finest thrills is letting people down,” Ansell would often say. But she had never found that to be the case. Even after she had started letting people down and had gotten quite proficient at it, she had never considered it a thrill. There was always that little beesting of guilt she never could reason away completely.

  The organist was the same one from years ago—Mrs. Abbott, who swayed and dipped and sang along with the congregation as she played. Her hair had gone gray, and she looked a little rounder, but her face still had that same alert scorekeeper’s gleam as she scanned the faces of the congregation, checking out who was here this morning, all the while playing “Blessed Be the Name.” Mrs. Abbott hardly ever used printed music, rarely looked down at the keyboard, and could play anything in any key you wanted. She used to accompany Celia for all her clarinet solos.

  The pianist was someone she didn’t recognize—a young woman with exceedingly straight posture who sat on the bench, hands in her lap, staring intently at the open hymnal in front of her, as if reviewing for a hard test she was worried about. At eleven o’clock a door opened behind the platform, and the choir started filing in. Celia recognized one of the men at once as Rodney Ruskin, who used to be the church treasurer and give the financial reports at the monthly business meetings. It was amazing how little he had changed in almost twenty years. It wasn’t really fair the way men seemed to age more slowly than women. She recognized a couple of the women in the choir, also—Mrs. Vanzetti, who used to teach the junior high Sunday school class, and Mrs. Gerard, who used to sing solos that were always just slightly too high for her range.

  It turned out that Celia was to be treated to the full menu of church business this morning, for in addition to the table laid out with the silver Communion trays, the preacher announced that today’s service would conclude with the baptism of “two new converts” and a “baby dedication.” Too bad they couldn’t add a missionary slide show and a church discipline session to make it complete, Celia thought. Well, she would slip out before these add-ons at the end of the service. She wasn’t about to sit through a baby dedication.

  As the preacher moved from the announcements to greeting the visitors, a plain little rabbit-faced woman walked down the aisle looking for a place to sit. She was wearing a tan shirtwaist dress with a straw belt, not a good choice for someone whose complexion was already totally lacking color. Except for her eyes—those Pacific blue, western-sky eyes that looked completely out of place in such a nondescript face.

  It was Denise Davidson, the preacher’s wife. Unfortunately, she spotted Celia right away and stopped at the end of her pew to greet her, then craned her neck to see past her, checking if there was room to squeeze in one more, which there was. Everybody shifted down some, and with a sinking heart Celia moved over to let her sit on the end, realizing that her chance of a quick and early exit had just died a sudden death.

  “I see that the late Mrs. Davidson has arrived,” the preacher said, and everybody laughed and looked back at his wife, who waved her hand and smiled. The ushers came forward to distribute visitors’ cards, and Denise Davidson waved her hand again to secure one for Celia. If it had been left up to Celia, she would never have identified herself as a visitor. She would have looked the other way until the usher passed her pew. But now, with the preacher’s wife sitting right at her elbow, she felt obligated to fill it out.

  A task, however, which though simple enough proved to be a challenge because of all the activity that followed—standing up for a hymn, sitting back down, finding the responsive reading in the hymnal, standing up again, shaking hands during a segment called “greeting the brethren,” sitting back down, watching two teenaged girls carry their violins to the platform during a deacon’s long pre-offering prayer, listening to them play a vigorous rendition of “Since Jesus Came Into My Heart” while the offering plates were passed and thinking that, in spite of a pitch problem here and there, they were really much better than she had expected, then singing another hymn, and then watching as the song leader turned around to direct the choir special.

  No one had known Celia was going to be there this morning, so it couldn’t have been planned. And even if someone had known she would be in the service today, no one could have possibly remembered that the choir had sung this exact song, the very same arrangement, almost twenty-two years ago on the Sunday morning she had been baptized by Brother Thacker in this church. It had been only a couple of months after she had come to live with her grandmother.

  She had talked with her parents earlier that summer about being baptized, and they had been very happy. She had told them that she wanted to talk to the pastor of their church in Lawrenceville about it sometime that fall after she turned fifteen. The trip to buy the clothes dryer had changed all that, though, and in addition to her guilt over skipping her prayer and Bible reading the afternoon they died, Celia had worried that her delay in getting baptized had had something to do with their accident. If she hadn’t put it off so long after she had walked the aisle for salvation at the age of eight, then maybe God wouldn’t have had to punish her that way.

  After coming to Dunmore, she had wasted no time speaking to her grandmother about her desire to be baptized, for what other horrible penalties might she have to suffer if she didn’t get that requirement taken care of? She remembered wishing Brother Thacker would hurry up and get her under the water that Sunday morning as she had stood with him in the baptistry. He had talked far too long about the meaning of baptism, had quoted Scripture, had asked Celia to give a word of testimony about her salvation, had spoken sadly about the loss of her parents and how glad they would have been to witness this happy occasion, and then finally, finally had placed the white handkerchief over her mouth and nose and lowered her into the water.

  She hadn’t held back the way some of the younger children did, the way the little Childers boy had, who had gripped the edge of the baptistry a couple of weeks earlier and wouldn’t let go, had even started crying and had to be pried loose by his father, who came up finally to assist Brother Thacker. But not Celia. No, she had let herself go, giving herself to the water, pushing into it and almost causing Brother Thacker to lose his hold of her, interrupting his rhythm a little as he had recited his blessing: “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Buried in the likeness of his death and raised in the likeness of his resurrection.”

  She had been baptized at the very beginning of the service. That’s the way Brother Thacker always did it, not at the end the way this new preacher did. So by the time the choir sang their special number right before the sermon that morning, she was already dried off and dressed, sitting back in the congregation, her hair pulled back into a slick ponytail. And when the choir had sung “Is My Name Written There?” her heart had leapt with the
answer: “Yes! Yes, it is! My name is written there on the page white and fair.” It was all signed, sealed, and delivered now. All the boxes in the checklist filled in. No loose ends. Nothing that an angry God might see as unfinished business.

  * * *

  The choir didn’t sound much different today than it had all those years ago, not much better certainly, but not much worse, either. There seemed to be a few more men in the back row than there used to be, and the basses sang out boldly on their repeated phrase at the end of the chorus: “Yes, my name’s written there!” What a bizarre coincidence that this would be the song they were singing on the only day she would be sitting in a service. She wondered how many times they had sung it in the past twenty-two years, what kind of rotation schedule the Bethany Hills Bible Tabernacle Choir had, if they even had a schedule. One thing was clear to her by now: The changes that had taken place in this church over the past twenty-plus years could be listed in full on a Post-it note. The very smallest size they made.

  By the time a man and woman came forward to sing a duet before the sermon, Celia had filled in only her name on the visitor’s card. How did they expect people to fill these out when there were so many things going on in such swift succession? And what were they going to do with this information after she filled it out? Were they going to use her address to start sending her all kinds of letters and pamphlets, trying to shoehorn their narrow brand of religion back into her life?