No Dark Valley (23 page)

Celia nodded again. She was trying really hard to follow all this.

“But then I had another idea, a much better one . . . if you think you'd have time to do it.” Elizabeth was talking a little faster now. “And if you don't, I promise I'll understand, but it shouldn't take long, really. I don't want you to feel—”

Elizabeth stopped and took another deep breath. “Okay, I'll get to the point. I was wondering if they'd let you bring something from the gallery, some painting you particularly like maybe and would feel comfortable talking about, and then after my part of the meeting, you could show the work and speak for a few minutes about it, point out some things about the technique and style and maybe even tell something about the artist. They might have some questions, too, and you could answer those.” She stopped talking abruptly, her eyes full of hope.

So that was it. A speaking engagement. Celia had never heard of a poetry club around here. She wondered if it was held over in Greenville. The small outlying towns of Filbert, Derby, and Berea didn't exactly strike her as centers of literary pursuits.

“Hey, you two, y'all better quit talking and come get some food before it's gone!” Cindy Petrarch called to Celia and Elizabeth from the food table.

“Yeah, Betsy's filling up her second plate,” Darla Smith said. Neither Cindy nor Darla had played that morning but had come to watch. Looking at them both, dressed nicely in slacks, pretty sweaters, and jewelry, with their hair neatly combed, Celia suddenly remembered how sweaty and disheveled she felt and how she needed to get home to shower and clean up before she went to work.

“Let me think about it,” she said to Elizabeth. “I can probably come up with something. The meeting's next month, did you say?”

“No, not till May,” Elizabeth said. “So you've got plenty of time. It's always the third Monday night of the month. You wouldn't have to speak long . . . and we always have refreshments afterward.” As if that would be the clinching point, thought Celia.

Elizabeth laughed. “Not that you strike me as the kind of person who would be swayed by the enticement of refreshments.”

Celia laughed, too. She couldn't help it. She had to admit something to herself. Church attendance notwithstanding, she liked Elizabeth Landis. She liked her a lot. In a lot of ways the two of them seemed to think alike. “Well, I was beginning to wonder if I looked like a will-work-for-food kind of person,” she said.

They locked eyes for the briefest of moments, then turned and headed toward the food table together.

12

With Every Morning Sacrifice

It was about two weeks later, on a Saturday afternoon, that Celia unlocked the front door of her grandmother's house in Dunmore, Georgia, and stepped into the living room. The house had a sweetish medicinal smell, like a mixture of rotting fruit and Vicks VapoRub, with a touch of something else slightly rancid, like old bacon grease.

She knew that the phone lines between her aunts' houses had been buzzing with spiteful, gossipy complaints about how long it was taking her to get around to coming to Dunmore to see about her grandmother's property. Even Aunt Beulah had finally called her sometime in mid-March to find out when she was coming, speaking gently but insistently. “We're afraid somebody's going to break in and do mischief to Sadie's things” was how she put it.

Celia had been tempted to snap back with “Hey, I didn't ask to be named sole inheritor.” But she couldn't bring herself to be rude to Aunt Beulah. As for anyone breaking into her grandmother's house, well, that was laughable in Celia's opinion. If you were intent on robbery, you sure wouldn't target a pitiful little tin box of a house beside a railroad track, not if you had any sense.

She had known she couldn't put off the job indefinitely, however, and besides, the property was paid for, so there was at least a small chance of selling it and making a little money, though Celia still couldn't imagine who would want to buy it. But at last she had made arrangements with Ollie to be away from the gallery both Saturday and Monday so she could drive to Georgia and check things out. “So Cecilia's gonna go gloat over all her loot, huh?” he had said, and Celia had rolled her eyes and said, “Yeah, right, all my loot.”

So here she was surveying her domain. Walking through the house took all of two minutes, and when she returned to the living room, she felt so tired and weighed down from all the dark, dank memories lurking in every corner that she locked the door again, got into her car, and drove to Dunmore's only motel, a family-owned enterprise at the edge of town called the Sunny Side Up. She checked in, then bought a small pizza at Little Bud's Pizza Parlor across the road and took it back to her motel room. While she sat on the bed and ate her pizza, she used the remote control to switch among the four stations that came in clearly on the television.

A little later she called Aunt Beulah from the motel and asked if she thought she could come over to her grandmother's house tomorrow and help her go through some things. The thought of being cooped up in that little house by herself gave her the creeps. At least it was warm and springlike outside, so she could open up the doors and windows to let in some fresh air.

Aunt Beulah agreed to come over the next day, but not till after church, of course. She hesitated before asking Celia timidly if she'd like to come to church with her, to the Believers of Christ Church on the other side of Dunmore. “Or maybe you were planning to go to Bethany Hills, since that's right down the street,” she said. Celia let her know quickly that she hadn't planned any such thing and would just meet her at Grandmother's house the next afternoon whenever Aunt Beulah could get there.

“Oh, but we want you to eat dinner with us,” Aunt Beulah said. “I couldn't stand it if I thought you had driven all the way here from South Carolina and then didn't eat at least one meal with us. Can't you come over first and let me feed you some pot roast? We usually eat sometime around one. I always put our dinner in the oven on Sunday morning, so it doesn't take too long to get it on the table once church lets out.” She paused, then added, “It would just be your uncle Taylor and me and you.” She was smart, Aunt Beulah was, no doubt realizing that Celia wouldn't want to take a chance on having to eat at the same table with any of the other aunts.

Celia put her off, though, claiming the need to use every minute on Sunday to go through stuff before she had to leave Monday afternoon and promising Aunt Beulah she'd come over for a meal when she came back to Dunmore this summer to tie up all the loose ends.

“But what will you eat?” Aunt Beulah asked. Regular meals had always been a major concern among Grandmother and her sisters. Celia put her off again, assuring her she'd be fine, that she'd probably grab something at Popinjay's Burgers on her way over to her grandmother's house.

Finally she got off the phone with Aunt Beulah and resumed flipping channels on the television. Sometime after midnight she sat through a mindless sci-fi movie called
Alligator
, in which a man-eating alligator lived in a sewer and terrorized Chicago. On another weekend night it might have been funny, something to laugh about later with Ollie or Connie at the gallery or maybe Elizabeth Landis or Bonnie Maggio after a tennis match, but tonight she simply sat on the bed and thought about what a sad thing it was that people spent time and money making such movies and, even sadder, that other people actually watched them from beginning to end.

Every time a commercial came on, though, she quickly changed to another channel. Commercials made her jittery now, ever since that one she had seen for the first time a month or so ago. She'd had no idea they made commercials like that. It had come out of nowhere, starting deceptively with a little soft piano music and two hands scooping out two holes in some dirt. Then each hand dropped a seed into one of the holes and smoothed the dirt over it.

A second later the hand on the left had dug back into the earth and removed the seed, leaving an empty hole, but on the right a little sprout had appeared, then green leaves. And still the innocent tinkly piano music had continued, and Celia hadn't caught on, although she should have seen what was coming and rebuked herself afterward for being so slow. The rest of it happened so fast she couldn't even reach for the remote to turn it off.

On the side of the screen where the little plant was growing came a swift succession of superimposed images—first, a closeup of a baby laughing, then one crying, then one a little older reaching up to slap at the keys of a piano, then one chewing contentedly on a cob of corn, then a toddler taking his first unsteady steps, then a preschooler smashing his face against a windowpane, then an older child running through a sprinkler, and finally a little girl stooping to bury her face inside the golden cup of a daffodil. And as the piano music faded away, the words
Choose Life
, along with an 800 number, came across the screen, and a voice said soothingly, “Facing an unexpected pregnancy? Call for help.” By the time it was over, Celia knew what it must feel like to fall from a great height and land on a hard, immovable surface. The commercial probably hadn't lasted more than a minute, but it had been a long paralyzing minute.

Before that, she had always been able to see the dangerous commercials coming. There would be some giveaway image at the very beginning, a baby sitting inside a tire, for example, or a little kid eating breakfast cereal maybe, something that would warn her:
Turn it off!
Pretty soon she responded almost instinctively, before the picture even showed up on the screen. She had even grown a little smug about the way she was able to protect herself by sensing what was coming. And then along came that stupid Choose Life commercial to catch her off guard.

And movie theaters—she had grown wary of those, too, ever since Ward had taken her to
The Cider House Rules
, that awful movie about the orphanage that was also an abortion clinic. She had been ambushed by that one, had felt like she was being slowly asphyxiated as she sat trapped in the middle of a row at the theater.

She didn't get much sleep that night, nor had she expected to, not within the city limits of Dunmore, Georgia. She got up early Sunday morning and headed to her grandmother's house after eating a package of small cake doughnuts from the vending machine in the motel lobby. She knew better than to try to get anything to eat at Haynie's Dinette because Haynie Peeler had always prided herself on not opening her doors on Sunday. She knew something like that would never have changed over the years here in Dunmore.

By eight o'clock Celia was at her grandmother's house sorting through things, and she kept at it by herself for a good six hours. Her aunt showed up around two, and they worked hard for another four hours. Celia was glad that at least the refrigerator had already been emptied and cleaned. The aunts had done that when Grandmother had gone into the hospital two weeks before she died.

At six o'clock Aunt Beulah apologized profusely for having to leave but explained to Celia that it was her week to staff the library table at church before and after the evening service and then work in the nursery during the service, and she just hated to ask someone to substitute for her because it would mean that person wouldn't get to hear the sermon. “They do try to pipe in the preaching to the nursery,” she said, “but you only get to hear bits and pieces of it in all the hubbub.” She chuckled and added, “Some of those babies can really set up a ruckus. Why, the last time I was on nursery duty, this one baby—”

But Celia cut her off quickly, thanking her for her help and telling her she understood completely. She went to the front door ahead of her aunt and held the screen door open for her, repeating her thanks and saying whatever nonsense came to mind just to fill up space until Aunt Beulah was out of the house and safely on her way. Celia left a couple of hours later, since the electricity was turned off and daylight was fading.

On Monday morning when she unlocked the house, she felt the smallest whisper of hope as she realized she'd be leaving Dunmore this afternoon. Only a few more hours, thank goodness, and this trip would be history. Around ten o'clock she folded over the flaps of the last box of old books and magazines and glanced at her watch.

The Holiday Winners would have already started their weekly match back in Derby by now. She wondered how it was going. Nan Meachum was having to play singles today since Celia wasn't there, but Celia knew she would do fine. Besides having a strong all-around game, Nan was so cranky she often unnerved her opponents, closing out matches before anybody else had even started a second set. It struck Celia that exactly two weeks ago right now, she had been playing the first set of her exhausting tennis match against Donna Cobb. She shook her head.
That
had been an entertaining little lark compared to what she had been doing here at her grandmother's house for the past couple of days.

She walked to the window facing the railroad track, lifted the cheap vinyl window shade, and gazed out toward the woods beyond. It wasn't much of a woods, really. The whole scene looked bleak and beaten down. The pine trees were scraggly and stunted along the track, and a small misshapen dogwood tree, looking like some kind of mutant species, leaned sideways at a crazy angle and bore only a smattering of pink blossoms along a couple of scrawny branches. Along the banks of dry red dirt grew a snarl of blackberry bushes. No doubt they would produce their usual abundance of fruit later in the summer, but right now they looked totally unmotivated.

Celia thought about the small deep pond farther back in the woods. She could imagine its waters having stagnated over the years, now emitting a greenish vapor that floated through the woods like a phantom. A little boy had drowned in that pond years before Celia had come to live here, and her grandmother had warned her about it constantly. Once during her senior year of high school, out of spite, Celia had run off into the woods one night, knowing Grandmother would follow her with a flashlight, which she had.