No Dark Valley (41 page)

She had returned another day and tried again, then found herself wandering over to the other coats and jackets, finally settling on a tan wool pea coat that would be more practical. For days after, she had been so mad at herself that she finally went back and bought a leather jacket just to prove—well, she wasn't sure what she was proving, really, maybe just that she could do whatever she wanted to. But the fact was that for the next several winters she wore the tan pea coat ten times as much as the leather jacket.

Celia gave herself a little shake and looked at her watch. She couldn't be wasting time like this standing out here in the barn reliving the past. She picked up the box of walnut shells and headed around to the back of the barn toward the old creek bed. It had dried up many years ago and was now full of weeds, dead branches, and pinecones. She would dump the shells in there and throw the box away.

Surely, she thought later, she would have remembered the cat incident at some point, even if she hadn't gone down by the creek bed behind the barn. Something like that would
have
to come back to you sometime. You couldn't repress such a memory permanently. How odd, though, to consider the seemingly random chain of events that led up to the moment of remembering—discovering the paper-wasp nests in the first place, using the free time before the closing at the lawyer's office to return to the barn for another check, finding the box of walnut shells, deciding to dispose of them, walking purposefully to the creek bed, and then, on the way back to the house, the sudden violent erupting of the memory from years gone by. For weeks after, it made her nervous, wondering how many other closed compartments were to burst open on her unawares.

As soon as it happened, she knew this was another of those moments that would come back to her at all hours, especially in the nighttime. Even as she sat in the lawyer's office two hours later, she had trouble following the proceedings. She kept replaying what had just happened, saw herself tromping through the tall grass behind the barn, then reaching the creek bed and turning the box over, watching the shells fall out and disappear beneath the thick growth of weeds, then mindlessly heading back toward the barn, carrying the box by one of the top flaps.

And then . . . seeing it. There, about two feet from the back side of the barn, was a small crude-looking cross of sorts, tilted a little to one side. She had never actually seen it here in this place before, but she remembered with absolute clarity the day her grandmother had nailed it together out on the front porch. Celia had watched her from the living room window as she went into the old store and emerged a minute later with two short pieces of one-by-two. She watched her lay one piece on top of the other to form a cross, then lift her hammer there on the front porch and furiously drive two nails through the center, after which she stomped back toward the barn, holding the cross in one hand and the bucket in the other. In the bucket was a dead cat.

It was a nasty, spiteful gray cat, with an unpredictable streak running through him. He would lunge at the silliest things without warning, like a leaf skittering across the driveway, or a shadow moving across a windowpane, or a dish towel flapping on the clothesline. On the other hand, he was very predictable about other things. Every single time the train whizzed by, for example, Smoky could be found hiding behind the big tin washtub on the back porch.

Celia hated him from the moment she laid eyes on him, and the feeling was evidently mutual. The cat always watched her resentfully, as if she were trespassing on his turf, and at times she thought he had a greedy hungry look in his eye, as he might if she were a very large rodent he'd like to rip into.

He was a stray that had shown up on her grandmother's back doorstep only weeks after Celia herself had moved in. He was half-starved and flea-bitten, and though her grandmother usually didn't have a sympathetic bone in her body, for some reason she started feeding this mangy creature. She even used some of her grocery money to buy flea shampoo and dipped the cat within an inch of his life, over and over, suffering scratches all over her arms and face in the process. One day she gave him a name: Smoky, because his fur was smoky gray. She let the cat stay on the back porch and cut a little hole in the bottom of the screen door so he could get in and out. But he wasn't an indoor cat. As much as she loved him, Grandmother never would have stood for an animal in the house.

And amazingly, the cat seemed to love the old woman, too. He would purr softly and rub himself against her when she took a bowl of milk and a plate of scraps out to the back porch. Whenever Grandmother swept the back steps, Smoky would meow so pitifully at her that she'd always put down her broom, sit down on the steps, and take him into her lap for a brief minute.

Celia couldn't count the times she had seen them on the back steps, her grandmother gently stroking Smoky's gray fur and talking to him, never in a babyish crooning voice the way a lot of pet owners did, but always very sensibly in her ordinary voice, usually reciting her day's agenda for him. “I got to finish up the sweeping,” she might say, “and then trim the bushes in the front yard. And I got to put in a load of wash, then hang it out, then call up Molly and ask her when she's aimin' to bring over those cucumbers so we can put up some pickles.”

Celia had never had much contact with cats, or dogs, either. Neither one of her parents liked animals, especially not in the house, and they had always made it clear that a pet would cost money they should be using on other more important things. As a child, Celia had had only one pet briefly, a blue parakeet named Chipper, but he was a messy, loud bird who hated his cage and bolted for freedom whenever Celia opened the little door. He would fly to the top of her mother's nicest draperies and dirty them with droppings. One day he flew right out the front door as her father came in from work, and though she was sad for a day or two, she soon realized that life at home was a lot less complicated without Chipper. She had never asked for another pet after that.

Maybe Smoky sensed in her an aversion to animals. Or maybe he liked only old women, not teenaged girls. Whatever it was, he clearly avoided her. The few times she took his food out to the back porch, he made no move to welcome her but stared at her with his evil green eyes from his favorite spot under the old wringer washing machine. She tried a few times in the beginning to stoop down and pet him, but he hissed at her and retreated behind some paint cans. “Well, I don't like you either, dumb cat,” she finally said, but not loud enough for Grandmother to hear, and after that she quit trying to make friends with him.

Whenever Grandmother was working in the yard, Smoky would station himself near her, curled up under a bush somewhere or up against the house. On summer evenings after supper Grandmother would often sit on the front porch in the swing, snapping beans or mending something or cutting pictures out of magazines to glue onto the homemade cards she sent to missionaries. Smoky would always be lying right next to her, usually asleep. She didn't generally talk to him in the evenings on the porch swing, only on the back steps, but as she worked, she would frequently look down at him with something very close to a smile on her lips.

To Celia's way of thinking, there was nothing in the least bit endearing or winsome about Smoky. He was snooty and temperamental. When he caught birds or chipmunks in the backyard, he proudly paraded around with them in his mouth, their little heads hanging out one side and their tails out the other. If he happened to see Celia, he would stop in his tracks and glare at her distrustfully.
As if I want that disgusting thing
, she would think. If he saw Grandmother, however, he would walk straight to her and lovingly lay his prize at her feet.

Part of Celia's dislike of Smoky, she suspected now, was that deep down she was jealous of him, for he had appropriated Grandmother's affection in a way she didn't seem to be able to do. He and Grandmother seemed to have such an easy, natural relationship, each one giving and receiving gentleness as a matter of course. Theirs was a staunch silent friendship, and she felt at times like an intruder. During her senior year of high school, she had often used Smoky to excuse her wild behavior and her disrespect to her grandmother. Though she wouldn't have stooped to say such things aloud, she had often thought,
If you acted like you cared for me half as much as you do that cat, maybe things would be different
.

In the lawyer's office Celia realized that she was now being asked to sign papers. She saw Ashley Franco studying her from across the table and wondered if she had done anything to give away the fact that she hadn't heard a word that had been said in the last few minutes. For all she knew, they could have lowered the cost of the house and gypped her out of ten thousand dollars. She ought to check the papers carefully before signing.

But even as the lawyer's assistant slid the papers over to her, the printed words began swimming before her eyes, and once again the image of the wooden cross in the ground behind the barn rose before her. The human mind was a curious thing. How could she have possibly blotted from her memory such a horrible day? The answer suggested itself at once. Maybe it was because she had had so many other horrible days since that one.

She could still see the hoe her grandmother was using to break up the ground on either side of the front steps that March day, jabbing furiously at the hard ground in preparation for planting dahlias. Less than six feet away from her, Celia herself was sitting in the porch swing, something she rarely did during those last few months at Grandmother's house. The two of them weren't talking right then, but there were hot bitter words still hanging in the air.

The subject had been the high school prom. Celia had demanded money for a dress, to which her grandmother had replied that a Christian girl didn't have any business going to an event where the devil was going to be having his way all night long, to which Celia had replied that maybe a Christian girl didn't, but
she
was going to, and if Grandmother didn't fork over the money out of the hoard that was rightfully Celia's anyway, she'd find some other way to get the dress. Over and over she kept repeating to herself Ansell's advice: “Stick up for yourself, Celia. Don't let the old witch run your life.”

Celia rarely looked directly at her grandmother during these blowups because she knew she'd lose her nerve if she did. Right now she sat on the swing with one leg tucked up under her and looked instead at her grandmother's hoe. It was a big hoe, much too big for the job at hand in Celia's opinion, but Grandmother wielded it with the ease of someone who had many years of experience with farm implements. She wasn't a tall woman, but she was strong. With her large hands she gripped the handle of the hoe firmly and chopped at the dirt like a madwoman. Any worms hiding in that flower bed would be mincemeat before she was done.

Smoky was on the porch, too, lying beside the front door, his wicked tail swishing ever so slightly as he watched Grandmother hack away with the hoe. Celia was waiting for Grandmother to speak, waiting for some kind of commitment about the money for the dress. As the seconds ticked by, she grew worried, for she had learned by now that total silence wasn't a good sign. If Grandmother continued to grumble and mutter objections, it meant she was beginning to concede defeat. If she said nothing, then her mind was already made up.

Though it was late March and still cool, Celia was barefoot, another thing her grandmother frowned upon, along with almost everything else she did, and as she continued to watch the rise and fall of the hoe, she must have started wiggling the foot that wasn't tucked under her, the one hanging down from the swing. Maybe it was twitching in rhythm with the hoe. She wasn't aware of doing it, or she surely would have stopped, for she knew Smoky's neurotic behavior well enough by now. It wasn't until later, after Smoky pounced, that she realized what she must have been doing.

All she remembered was a sudden projectile of snarling gray fur and the shocking pain of claws and teeth sinking into her bare foot. She screamed, she remembered that, too. But the cat latched on, going for a kill, and wouldn't let go. When she tried to shake him off, she felt a ripping of flesh and the warmth of blood. It was almost as if Smoky had waited long enough and now was finally taking his revenge on her for the past two and a half years.

Somehow she had managed to get off the swing and began hopping around the porch, blood dripping from her foot, but still Smoky hung on. Snarls, shouts, screams, it was hard to tell where they were all coming from—the porch was pure bedlam. For a brief moment Celia pictured a terrifying scene of the cat launching himself from her foot to her face, scratching out her eyes, ripping her scalp open. She heard her screams escalate and felt herself going weak, as she imagined a person must feel right before fainting, and then all at once she heard a mighty whack against the floor of the porch and saw Grandmother's hoe come down inches from her foot.

Smoky immediately went limp and released his hold. Both Grandmother and Celia stood motionless for several long seconds, staring down at the cat, whose hindquarters were almost severed from the rest of his body. Later Celia would generate a fresh wave of anger at her grandmother for coming so close to chopping her foot off with the stupid hoe, but for now she was stunned by the amount of blood pooling under Smoky, mingling with her own blood, and she suddenly saw the floor of the porch start to spin and felt herself falling down into a gaping black hole. When she came to, she was lying on the porch close to the door and Grandmother was bent over her foot, sponging it gently with warm soapy water in a tin bucket.

“This'll hurt,” she told Celia bluntly, then applied something that felt like liquid fire and started wrapping the foot with a long strip of gauze. Over this she put a length of stretchy bandage, clamping the end with a little silver clip. Celia didn't dare turn her head to the left to see if all the blood was still there, or the mutilated cat. She didn't say a word, just kept her eyes fastened on Grandmother's face, unyielding and intent as she bent over her work.