No Dark Valley (6 page)

Al sat on the sofa by the window. Without looking directly at him, Celia could tell he was leaning forward, staring at her. “Celia, do you . . .” he started to say, then fell silent. Celia turned her head away from him. Again, she wished she had considered the effort it would take to have him along on this trip. The thought of riding all the way home with him after the funeral exhausted her.

Aunt Beulah had disappeared again, but Celia could hear her voice out in the hallway: “We're all meeting in here. Go on in. Celia's already in there waiting.” Out of the corner of her eye, she saw several people enter the room, but she didn't look to see who they were. She heard one of them say, “I bet you the ground is hard as cement. Sure is a cold day for burying her.” Someone else added, “Yep, I reckon it'll be a sparse turnout.”

But when they all filed into the chapel fifteen minutes later, Celia saw that the place was packed. She couldn't help wondering who all these people were.

Grandmother's life had been so narrow. She had been born in a little town thirty miles away and had moved here to Dunmore after she married. Atlanta was about the farthest she had ever traveled. At one time Celia had thought it was pleasantly quaint to have a history like Grandmother's, confined to a tiny pinpoint on the map, but then she had changed her mind and seen it as a horrible way to live your life. “Don't you ever want to
go
places and
do
things?” she had asked her grandmother once, during the time she was starting to shake off her old way of thinking.

“I got plenty to do right here at home,” Grandmother had replied evenly, and without so much as looking at Celia she had continued ripping an old sheet into rags.

Celia followed Aunt Beulah into the second row of the funeral chapel and sat down between her and Al. The organ was playing softly “'Tis So Sweet to Trust in Jesus.” Celia wondered if her grandmother had chosen even the prelude hymns. Probably so. Someone directly behind her blew his nose, a sudden loud honking sound, and Celia flinched. Al put a hand on her arm, but she pulled away.

She had always hated sudden loud noises. One of the hardest things to get used to when she had visited her grandmother as a little girl, and then later when she had lived with her, was the sudden blast of the train whistle as it rushed by the house. Actually, it wasn't anything like a whistle. It was more like a horn or
many
horns—a great sustained blast of a thousand tubas. She had finally learned to watch the clock and brace herself for it, but sometimes she would forget and be caught by surprise. Often she could feel the train coming before she actually heard it, but even then she was never fully prepared for the whistle.

She had never thought to ask her grandmother during all those years whatever possessed her to buy a house less than thirty yards from a railroad track that was still in use. She remembered how the windows would rattle as the train rumbled by, how the floor would vibrate. No doubt her grandparents had gotten a low price for such a piece of real estate. They had probably thought they were getting a real bargain. Celia could imagine the former owners making sure they didn't schedule appointments with potential buyers during one of the two times each day when the train came tearing by. She could picture them turning somersaults after her grandparents signed the papers, thanking their lucky stars for unloading the house, and then moving far away to a tranquil hillside out in the country.

Two men in dark suits walked into the chapel from a side door and sat in chairs on the small platform. Celia sensed a stirring in the rows behind her and saw that the casket was being borne in by eight men walking slowly down the center aisle. She wondered if any of her relatives knew that the custom at most funerals now was to place the casket on a rolling stand and let the pallbearers walk beside it instead of actually carrying it. Of course, maybe Walsh's Funeral Services didn't have such a rolling conveyance available. It didn't look like the kind of establishment that spent a lot of extra money on up-to-date amenities.

As the pallbearers made their way down the aisle, everyone turned sideways to watch the procession. Celia wondered if anyone else was thinking about how much like a wedding this part was. The men were surefooted and kept the casket level. Mr. Shelby must have met with them and given them instructions beforehand. Maybe they had actually practiced it.

Celia picked out Doreen's husband at once. Ralph Hubert still had the build of a football player, carrying his part of the burden easily. He actually looked a lot better than Celia would have predicted. No potbelly or scruffy beard. If she didn't know who he was, she'd almost be tempted to call him handsome. She knew if he opened his mouth, though, every syllable he uttered would give him away as a very blue-collar small-town former high school football player who had graduated only because of the mercy of several teachers.

As they passed her row, Celia stared intently at the casket.
And this is how it all ends, Grandmother
, she thought.
You're put in a box, then carried in, then carried back out, then dumped in a hole. The end
. Of course Grandmother wouldn't agree. If she heard Celia sum it up that way, she'd turn at once in her Bible to the book of John and start reading aloud those verses about mansions, and then she'd flip back to Revelation and read about the twelve gates and the crystal river and the light that shines eternally and all the rest of it. If there was one thing Grandmother had had plenty of, it was faith.

Celia felt a thick suffocating sadness. How pathetic, she told herself, to live eighty-seven years in the same area and never see the world, to rise day after day and do the same things, to have such a long list of rules to live by, to miss out on so much. But even before she finished the thought, her grandmother's face, which she had seen less than a half hour ago in the open casket, rose before her—the set of her lips, the strong brow, the parchment skin—and she knew beyond a doubt that Grandmother would take issue with her on this point, also. “Don't go feeling sorry for me,” she would say. “I did exactly what I was supposed to do. It suited me just fine.”

At least I got away from here and didn't end up like her
, Celia thought.
At least I've seen what the world outside the state of Georgia looks like. At least I know something about real life and art and culture
. Still, a disturbing thought nibbled at the edge of her mind. As far as
happiness
went, she knew that was probably one area in which she hadn't really surpassed her grandmother. Money, yes. Education, yes. Experience, at least of a certain kind, without a doubt. Even a moderate measure of success. But happiness? Not by a country mile, as her relatives were fond of saying.

Not that Grandmother had
seemed
all that happy on the outside. “Doesn't she ever smile?” Celia's friend Ansell had often said when he came to pick her up in his car. Or, “There she is, the old woman with the contagious laugh.” But something spoke very clearly to Celia right this very minute as she watched the men gently place her grandmother's casket on a stand in front of the pulpit:
She was contented with her lot in life
. She couldn't have liked much of what had come her way, but she accepted it and went on living.

Grandmother had lived in the same little white frame house next to the railroad track for sixty-some years, had raised three children of her own in it, had planted a garden every spring and kept chickens in the backyard. Celia had seen her snatch up many a chicken with her bare hands and wring its neck for supper that night. Then she'd chop off its head with a little hatchet she kept in the shed. She'd fling the head out into the tall weeds behind the garage for the stray cats to fight over.

For all those years she had washed clothes and hung them on the line outside, sewed and mended and ironed, mowed the grass, scrubbed the floors, cooked meals. Not fancy meals and usually not even very good ones. She fixed the same things over and over, as Celia remembered it, and she didn't hold much to the principle of seasoning, believing that Americans used far too much salt. She also thought Americans ate their meat too rare, so she went to the other extreme. Though Celia had never taken the trouble to actually keep a tally, she knew that at least two out of every three meats her grandmother put on the table were seriously overcooked, usually downright burned.

A funny thing about human adaptability, though, was that you could get used to almost anything. Celia recalled the way her grandmother would fix fried potatoes—dice them up, then fry them in hot oil until they were dark brown. Very dark brown. Later, living in her first apartment, sharing her bed with a grad student named Benjie, Celia had made fried potatoes one night to go with the hamburgers Benjie had grilled on her hibachi. When she put them on the table, Benjie had laughed and said, “Whoa, what have we got here—potato pellets?” He took only a couple of bites, and Celia ate all the rest. He couldn't believe she actually
liked
them fixed that way, that she had been watching them carefully the whole time they cooked, deliberately waiting until they were almost black to transfer them from the skillet onto a paper towel.

One of the men stood behind the pulpit now and introduced himself as the pastor of “our dear sister, Mrs. Burnes.” As far as looks went, he fit the bill for a backwater southern preacher. Tall and thin, with an apologetic stoop to his posture, everything about him bland and nondescript. He told about visiting Mrs. Burnes daily during her last week when “she knew she was soon to depart to Glory.” And he read from what he claimed was her favorite passage of Scripture: Joshua 1:5–9.

The words were familiar to Celia. She could have recited them from memory. When the pastor came to the words “observe to do according to all the law” and “turn not from it to the right hand or to the left,” Celia felt the old bitterness rise up within her. There was that same old rigid code of behavior being held up as the only way to live. Follow the rules! Stay inside the lines! Walk the straight and narrow!

When he came to the final words, the pastor slowed down and let each one hang in the air a little longer: “‘For the Lord thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest.'” He closed the Bible and leaned forward. “And that promise is as true for our departed friend today as it was for Joshua. Mrs. Burnes has gone to a new place, but the Lord God is still with her. In fact, he's with her now in an even better way, for she's resting in his bosom as a lamb with its shepherd.” Celia suspected that this was intended as a transition so they could all stand and sing something like “Savior, Like a Shepherd Lead Us.”

She continued to study the pastor as he returned to his seat. He wasn't the same pastor as the one she remembered from eighteen years ago. Pastor Thacker had been the name of that one, but he had probably retired or died by now. He'd been an old man even back then, but he'd had a strong voice, with which he had loudly denounced “the rampant worldliness creeping into our homes and churches.” That was one thing Pastor Thacker had loved to harp on—how much like the world Christians were becoming. “‘Come out from among them, and be ye separate'!” he would shout at some point during almost every sermon he preached. She remembered the looks of silent reproach he gave her that last year the few times she went to church. She remembered the day he visited their house, no doubt at Grandmother's request, and tried to talk her out of going to a liberal state college.

Celia's prediction proved wrong. The congregation wasn't asked to sing “Savior, Like a Shepherd Lead Us” after all. But she hadn't been all that far off. The other man came to the pulpit now and began singing all by himself a song Celia remembered from the old book of
Tabernacle Hymns
: “The Lord Is My Shepherd.” At least she had been right about the shepherd part. Next to her she saw Aunt Beulah wipe her eyes with an embroidered handkerchief.

Celia knew all the words to this hymn, also. “The Lord is my shepherd, no want shall I know.” When the man got to the part that said “He leadeth my soul where the still waters flow,” the pastor leaned forward in his chair and nodded earnestly.

She studied the pastor again. He was sitting with his hands on his knees, both feet flat on the floor, looking steadily at the man who was singing. He was probably in his late forties, Celia guessed, and not at all handsome, with thin hair he was clearly in the process of losing. He looked exactly like the kind of man who would be Grandmother's pastor. Not one glimmer of prosperity about him. He had probably “felt the call” early in life and devoted himself to studying the Bible as a youngster, never experiencing anything remotely close to an adventure.

But
adventure
wasn't a word people like Grandmother understood. The
sameness
of her life was remarkable to Celia. And totally unthinkable—she couldn't imagine such dullness. Not only had her grandmother lived in the same house for all those years, but she had also attended the same little clapboard church only three blocks from her house as long as she had lived there, and most of that time she had walked to services, even in winter.

She had owned only one car in her whole life—a tan Mercury Comet that her husband, Celia's grandfather, had bought used in 1970 only two years before he died. Actually, he had bought it wrecked at an auction and had gotten it home and fixed it up like new out in the barn. Before that they had gone everywhere in an old Chevy pickup. Grandmother was over fifty when she learned to drive the Comet, and she drove it mainly to the grocery store. Come to think of it, that was probably the great adventure of her life—learning to drive a car. The children were gone by then. There had been two boys, uncles Celia never really knew, and one girl, Celia's mother.

Everyone talked about how strange and sad it was that her grandmother had outlived not only her husband, whom Celia barely remembered, but also all three of her children. One son had died at the age of twenty-three in Vietnam, the same year Celia was born, and the other had died of cancer when Celia was in junior high. He had been only forty-seven. And in between the two boys, of course, Celia's mother had gone out with her husband one day to buy a clothes dryer.