No Dark Valley

by Jamie Langston Turner

  “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.

  The preacher was on a roll and, no doubt trying to be poetic, rattled off a whole string of these little Christian banalities. “Once you fall in love with the Savior,” he said, “the things of this life seem pretty trivial,” and “Once you cast your lot with the Almighty, you forget about all the little trinkets that clutter up your life.” And nobody around her seemed to catch on that he was repeating himself over and over. They all acted like every statement was something brand-new. There were amens all over the place, and Denise scribbled away furiously on her piece of paper. “Once you experience the mercies of God,” said the preacher, “it sort of spoils the pleasures this old world offers.”

  The mercies of God—it wasn’t a concept old Brother Thacker used to talk much about, his sermons always leaning as they did toward the judgments of God. Then later, out in the parking lot before she escaped, Celia heard it again from Denise. She had paused a long time after Celia’s complaint about the illogical connection between blood and cleansing, then had evidently decided to ignore it for the time being. “God wants you to be his child, Celia,” she said at length. “He reaches out to you in love and mercy. Nobody is beyond his saving power. Nobody.”

  “Not even the chiefest of sinners, huh?” Celia said. It was a phrase she remembered from years ago. She wasn’t trying to be sarcastic, though, and Denise seemed to know it.

  “That’s right,” she said kindly. “Not even the chiefest of sinners.” She smiled, and her eyes scrunched up into little blue stars. “And that could describe most of us, you know.”

  Celia opened her door at that point and got inside her car. But she rolled down the window after she started the engine and looked up at Denise for a long moment. “Thank you for your interest in me,” she told her, “but I need to leave now.” And as she backed out, she waved to Denise and said, “See you later,” as if they were parting for just a few hours instead of forever.

  23

  Pilgrim Through This Barren Land

  Five weeks later on the first of August, after Celia and the Holiday Winners had come back from the USTA Southeaster
n Regional Tournament in Louisville, Kentucky, Celia was returning her suitcase to her storage area in the basement when she noticed how asymmetrical and messy it all looked. She stepped back and studied the stacks. If she took the time to move all the plastic sacks and paper bags to the same side, it would help some.

  So she set her suitcase down and picked up two brown grocery sacks with the tops folded over. This wouldn’t take long, since most of them didn’t weigh much. She had forgotten what all was in them, and now certainly wasn’t the time to do an inventory. She had to finish tidying her apartment and then get supper going for her company tonight. Just move them, she told herself, and don’t start digging through them.

  Now that this last tennis trip was over, it was time to settle down again and give her full attention to the art gallery. After all, it was already August, and summer would soon be over. Ollie and Tara had been good to fill in for her at the Trio, but everybody was ready for things to get back to normal.

  A new show had gone up the week before, while Celia was in Louisville, and Connie had been in charge of the reception table. The artist, Yvette Song, did mostly delicate pen-and-ink drawings of Oriental subjects, and Celia had suggested they go the predictable route with the refreshments and table decorations, serving tea, rice cakes, goldfish crackers, and homemade fortune cookies. They rigged up a pretty little trickling fountain as a centerpiece, along with a rock garden and a couple of bonsai.

  Before she left for her tennis trip, Celia had found some miniature paper lanterns to string above the table and had typed out over a hundred little sayings about art for Connie to insert into the fortune cookies she was making, things like “Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art,” and “The excellency of every art is its intensity.” She wasn’t even sure she agreed with them all, but if somebody famous said it, like Leonardo da Vinci or John Keats, she knew the art crowd would love them.

  It was the first time in ten years that Celia had not been there on the opening night of a show, and she hoped it was the last. She had been sitting with her teammates in a steakhouse in Louisville that Thursday night of the opening, and she was sure the others must have noticed how fidgety she had been the whole time, although they couldn’t have known it was because her mind was back at the Trio, wondering how things were going—if there was a good turnout, if Craig had remembered to meet Yvette at the airport that afternoon, if Ollie had gotten all the pieces hung in plenty of time, if Connie had run into any snags with the fortune cookies, what kind of speaker Yvette had turned out to be, and so forth.

  Her teammates probably thought she was just nervous because of the match against the Arkansas team the next morning. They all knew they had to really be on top of things to pull off a win at this level, where the competition was cutthroat. It was rumored that one of the Arkansas singles players hadn’t lost a single set since the beginning of the season back in February.

  As it had turned out, the Holiday Winners did perform well enough to beat the Arkansas team the next day but not the Tennessee team after that. And something inside Celia was secretly glad. She had had enough traveling for a while, and she had no desire to pack up again in a few months and fly to Tucson for the nationals. Maybe another year, but not this one.

  A few seconds later, as Celia lifted a sack that was considerably heavier than the others, she momentarily forgot her resolve not to look inside. When she opened it, she saw that it contained nothing but steno pads. A fusty smell came wafting up from inside the sack. Oh yes, Grandmother’s makeshift diaries. There must be more than two dozen of them, the exact kind of steno pads Celia herself had used as a sophomore in high school when they still offered courses like typing and shorthand, both of which her grandmother had insisted she take that year. “A girl can always use secretary skills,” she had told both Celia and the school counselor when they had gone to Dunmore High that first day to get Celia enrolled.

  And Grandmother had been so interested in those two courses for some reason! Celia had heard her on the telephone with various aunts that whole year, proudly announcing that Celia was “earning high marks in her secretary classes.” From time to time Celia would find her poring over her Gregg typing and shorthand manuals.

  One of the few times Celia could remember her grandmother laughing, as a matter of fact, was when Celia found her reading aloud the practice exercises for the letters x, y, and z in Celia’s typing manual. “Rex and Alex mixed the extra beeswax exactly,” Grandmother had said. “Yes, young Sally played with a cymbal and a yellow yo-yo.” Standing in the doorway behind her, Celia saw her grandmother’s shoulders shaking. “Zesty zebras zigzagged crazily in the Zanesville Zoo,” Grandmother concluded, and then she leaned back and actually laughed right out loud. Celia was so surprised that she had tiptoed back to her bedroom without a word.

  Several years later when she was away at college, her grandmother had written that the high school had a brand-new computer laboratory, according to the newspaper, and was selling all their typewriters for twenty-five dollars each. “Seems like a pure waste to me to get rid of perfectly good equipment,” she had written. Instead of typing and shorthand, she reported, they were offering Computer Skills. It was funny how Celia could tell just from Grandmother’s handwriting, darker and more angular in that paragraph, that she thought the whole thing was a pack of foolishness, one more sign that the world was going to pot.

  Of course, it wouldn’t have mattered if someone had pointed out that Dunmore High actually lagged way behind the times, that other schools all over the nation had switched from typewriters to computers a couple of years earlier. In Grandmother’s opinion they should have held out and refused to give in. So what if everybody else changed? If everybody else jumped off a cliff, did that make it right? What was wrong with the old ways? They should have stuck with their typewriters and steno pads.

  But evidently Grandmother had taken advantage of the new ways when she ran across a bargain on steno pads around that same time. Celia set the sack down and counted them now. Thirty-one of them, all identical, all filled up from front to back with Grandmother’s handwriting. About half of them had a red sticker on the back marked Clearance, with the price of twenty-five cents stamped below. So Grandmother might have frowned upon Dunmore High’s surrendering so easily in the war of technology, but she sure had been quick enough to pick up a few spoils from that particular battle.

  Celia had flipped through several of them while clearing out the house back in Dunmore, and why she hadn’t tossed them in a trash bag right then she couldn’t say. Another thing she couldn’t say was why she had never before realized her grandmother had such a compulsion to write things down, even the most insignificant of details. She guessed she should have known from the number of letters her grandmother wrote and the kinds of letters, too—always crammed with the trivia and tedium of everyday life on Old Campground Road.

  And Grandmother’s Bible—that should have been another clue. Every page was heavily underlined, and the margins were crowded with handwritten notes of all kinds—cross-references, sermon outlines, definitions of words, even little corny pithy sayings like “An excuse is a lie with a thin skin of reason around it,” or “Never doubt in the dark what God told you in the light.” So why should Celia have been surprised to find steno pad after steno pad filled to the brim and overflowing with words, words, and more words?

  As far as women went, Grandmother hadn’t been that much of a talker, not to the extent of someone like Aunt Clara or Boo Newman or Anastasia Elsey. And certainly not like that old woman named Eldeen that Celia still thought about from time to time. Once not long ago, in fact, she had rounded the corner in the Winn-Dixie and had seen in front of her a very large woman hunched over a shopping cart, shuffling through a handful of coupons. Celia had stopped dead still at the end of the aisle, wondering whether to go speak to her or run the other direction. She had decided to skip that aisle but had seen the old woman again later by the dairy case and found that it
wasn’t Eldeen after all.

  She had been a little surprised to feel a twinge of disappointment. It was funny how a person you hardly even knew, didn’t really want to know, could stick with you like that. Sometimes during the night when she was trying to get to sleep, Celia would think about Eldeen and try to imagine what it would be like to live next door to her. She would hear her deep sticky voice at odd times during the day: “I can tell you how to get yourself a ticket if you want me to,” or “Yes, sir, I’m marching through Immanuel’s ground right here in Derby!”

  Her grandmother might not have done much talking in person, but she had evidently done her share of it on paper, far more than Celia had known at the time. The diaries were just one more of the many, many things she hadn’t noticed as a girl. She tried now to picture Grandmother sitting in the living room bent over a steno pad, filling the lines with words. Surely she could remember something like that. But it was no good—the picture wouldn’t focus. Maybe Grandmother had done her diary writing in her bedroom with the door closed.

  Thinking back over it, Celia was fairly certain now that her grandmother had approved of her majoring in journalism in college, though she never actually said so. Maybe some of her approval had to do with the fact that it involved writing, something Grandmother thought was important. She had always wanted Celia to be a teacher, but spending her days in a classroom wasn’t Celia’s idea of a fulfilling life. Nor was the life of a secretary, another acceptable career in Grandmother’s opinion. Celia knew that answering the phone and typing letters would get boring in a hurry.