No Dark Valley (7 page)

There was a sudden metallic clanking in the rear of the chapel, and Al turned around to look. “They're setting up folding chairs in back,” he whispered to Celia. “People are still standing.”

Celia marveled again at the crowd that had come out on a cold January afternoon in the middle of the week. Church friends and neighbors—those had been her grandmother's main contacts. Now that she thought about it, though, Celia supposed that there would be enough of them to account for most of the people here at the funeral. After all, it wasn't a terribly big chapel, not as large as the auditorium of Bethany Hills Bible Tabernacle, for example.

Grandmother had never been what you'd call “a people person,” though, so it was curious to Celia that so many would come to her funeral. She wasn't the kind of woman to talk on the telephone a lot or pay visits just to pass the time of day. For her, the time of day was not to be frittered away but spent profitably, which always meant some kind of work.

Her grandmother wasn't a leader at church, though she attended faithfully and served wherever she was needed. It had become one of Celia's frequent criticisms during that last year of high school, however, that her grandmother's service was so rigidly and sternly rendered, almost by rote. “You're just following a bunch of stupid rules somebody made up centuries ago!” Celia had said more than once. “They don't even have anything to do with
now
. I'd hate to live my life like you! You've never even known what it's like to have a good time!”

“Doesn't she ever smile?”—the first time Ansell had asked that question was when he had come to pick Celia up for a party at Renee's house. She had told Grandmother they were going to the library to work on some research for a debate they were having the next week in economics class. Ansell thought it was the funniest thing he'd ever heard. “And she
believed
you?” he asked. Celia said yes, though she wasn't at all sure about that. Grandmother had a way of looking through what a person said and knowing things intuitively.

It was early in Celia's friendship with Ansell and the others, and he pulled up in their gravel driveway in his red souped-up Camaro and honked the horn one long toot. Grandmother had been trimming some bushes at the other side of the house and, at the sound of the horn, came charging around to the driveway frowning and holding the long clippers in front of her with both hands as if ready to whack off somebody's head. She walked up to the car, according to Ansell's report, and said, “The only thing I can figure out, young mister, is that your hand must've slipped and landed on the horn by accident.”

Celia flew out of the house about then and headed for the car. Ansell was looking at Grandmother with his mouth hanging open, as if she had posed a riddle he couldn't figure out. He had caught her meaning, of course, which was “Surely you wouldn't drive up to my house and sit in your car and
honk
for my granddaughter to come out instead of going up to the door like a gentleman.” But Grandmother would have no way of knowing that one of Ansell's favorite ways to show his disdain for adults was to stare straight at them and act as if he was too slow to understand what they meant.

When Celia got into the car that day, Grandmother raised her voice and said, “Be home in time to . . .” but Ansell was already backing out by then, spraying gravel everywhere. He mimicked her grandmother all evening, giving his performance over and over for everybody at Renee's party. It kept getting more and more outrageous as the evening wore on, and everyone laughed and begged him to do it again whenever somebody new arrived.

He had Grandmother's gruff manner down pretty well, but the vocabulary was all wrong: “Hey there, young stud, my granddaughter is not some piece of trash you can pull in here and honk for! You need to get your sorry self out of that car and walk up to the door and behave like a gentleman, which I can see is a completely foreign idea to a slimeball like you!” Celia hadn't heard Grandmother's actual words, but she knew she would never have said
stud
or
slimeball
.

By the last time Ansell reenacted the scene that night, he was using even worse words, words that shocked Celia, though she tried not to let it show. She laughed along with everybody else. Part of the hilarity was that they were all out of their minds by the end of the night, except for Celia. She wouldn't have anything to do with drugs, and it took her a good while to get up the nerve even to take her first sip of beer. Even months later, after she had loosened up a little, she was always very cautious, rarely letting herself get as far gone as the others.

To be honest, it scared her. You don't grow up hearing about the evils of alcohol and then suddenly overnight start drinking. She had hated the sensation of drunkenness the couple of times it happened, especially the aftermath, and frankly, she also hated the taste of beer. Deep down, drinking seemed like such a low-class, pointless thing to do for fun, though she never told her new friends this. Anyway, she decided she could put up with the drinking, considering the fact that they were rescuing her from her old way of life.

When she came home that first night, Grandmother was up waiting for her, sitting in her old green recliner with her Bible open in her lap. Lifting her nose to sniff the air, she gave Celia a long level look, then read aloud part of a verse from James: “‘Know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God?'”

Celia walked right past her without speaking, went back to the bathroom, and stared at herself in the mirror over the sink.
It's time to quit feeling guilty
, she told herself,
and start having fun
. When she turned to start her bath water, she was surprised to see a tall bottle of Avon bubble bath on the side of the tub. She knew it was for her. Grandmother had ordered it a couple of weeks earlier when a woman had come by the house with a catalog. She had called Celia from her bedroom that evening and asked her to choose the fragrance she wanted.

Celia knew it had pained her to spend money like that on something so unnecessary, but here it was. The Avon lady must have delivered it today. She unscrewed the lid and smelled it. “Spring Rain” was printed on the label. She wanted to pour a capful into the water and watch it turn into a mass of bubbles, but she wouldn't let herself. Instead, she put the lid back on tightly, then set the bottle on the floor and pushed it behind the trash can.

4

And the Morning Breaks Eternal

Finally it was all over, but not until after the mourners had sung three verses of “When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder” beside the grave. Surely the preacher could have condensed Grandmother's funeral instructions, Celia was thinking, out of consideration for the comfort of those attending. Why did they have to sing
three
stanzas? Wouldn't one be enough to give the effect? Grandmother would never know the difference anyway.

It was misting by now, and combined with the bitter cold, it was a miserable day to be standing around outdoors. Celia was glad she had put her long wool coat in the car before leaving home that morning. She had seen Aunt Elsie squinting at her as she and Al had walked toward the gray tent at the cemetery. Celia knew exactly what she must be thinking:
About time that girl put on something warm
.

Celia wondered why funerals had to drag out so long, especially this last tacked-on part at the graveside, and especially on such a cold day. She was sure she wouldn't be able to remember all the parts later on as she thought back over the day, but then she hoped she wouldn't be doing much thinking back over this day. Forget the earlier idea of making today into the beginning of a novel. The only thing she wanted now was to get it all over with and blot it from her memory.

Today would make a lousy novel anyway. Besides the funeral gimmick that opened so many bad novels, there were also way too many orphans in fiction. Orphans who had suffered through bleak childhoods, then carried their pitiful shipwrecked emotions into an adulthood doomed from the start. In many books, however, these orphans would eventually rise above their troubled past with great heartrending courage and accomplish admirable things, all of which turned out to be terribly contrived on the printed page.

Recently one of her longtime clients, a man named Frank Bledsoe, had brought her the opening chapters of a new novel he planned to publish himself, since his previous attempts to find a publishing house interested in his stories had proved fruitless. Celia had been telling Frank for years that his manuscripts lacked the important ingredient of believability, to which he always replied indignantly, “But it's all based on something that
really happened
. These are people I
really know
.” Frank had never learned what she had learned years ago in college, that real life didn't always convert into good fiction. He also took himself way too seriously.

She had read only a few pages of Frank's newest manuscript before she recognized it for what it was: the dreaded autobiographical novel. Actually, she was a little surprised it had taken him this long to get around to writing it. On the first page it was established that the main character—a boy named Dean, which happened to be Frank's middle name—was an orphan, as was Frank. Celia had never told him that she, too, was an orphan. She had never told him much of anything else about herself, either, mainly because Frank always did most of the talking, and the topic he was most fond of discussing was himself.

He had never once blamed her for his many rejection letters but kept coming back, bringing yet another stack of pages for her to read, critique, and edit, sure that this one would be a bestseller. He paid her well, but with this most recent manuscript she was beginning to think no amount of money was worth having to slog through stuff like this. She thought of the manuscript now, on her desk at home, waiting for her attention. It was in one of those thick brown expandable folders, titled importantly “From Ashes to Fame.”

Celia pulled the collar of her wool coat up tighter around her neck. Most of the people at the graveside service were standing, since Walsh's Funeral Services had set up only a dozen or so folding chairs, in which Grandmother's sisters and some of the other older relatives were sitting. The tent was too small for everyone to stand under, so a lot of people were huddled under umbrellas around the perimeter.

Celia leaned closer to Al. She couldn't remember being this cold in a long time. She wouldn't be surprised to hear later that they had set some kind of temperature record here in Georgia today.

After the last chorus of “When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder” came a benediction offered by Grandmother's pastor, who seemed to be trying to depict the concept of eternality by the length of his prayer. During the prayer Celia's mind whirled with snatches of the things she had seen and heard today. Like Frank Bledsoe's novels, it all lacked the quality of believability, yet, as Frank was so fond of saying, it had all “really happened.”

Sometime before this closing prayer, Uncle Buford had limped forward to recite the passage of Scripture about man's days being as the grass of the field, and at some other point the song leader had sung another solo, a hymn called “No Night There,” which Celia remembered as another of Grandmother's favorites. Naturally, it was talking about heaven, calling it the “land of fadeless day” and the “city foursquare” and tritely listing the “gates of pearl” and the “crystal river” among its many mythical charms.

Somewhere in there Uncle Buford had also read the verse “For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” For an old man hard of hearing and half blind standing outside in the freezing cold, his voice sounded wondrously strong. He stood unsupported at the head of the grave, throwing himself into his role of Scripture reader with great fervor, giving no evidence of wishing he were at home on such a dismal day taking an afternoon nap after all his second helpings at Aunt Beulah's house earlier.

But at long last it was over. The preacher finally wound up his prayer, and after the amen, the pallbearers came forward once more and lowered the casket into the ground. At this, Celia suddenly turned and left. It was as if a tight wire inside her had snapped. Didn't these people have any sense of when enough was enough? She supposed they were going to stand around now and watch the clods of dirt fall against the casket, or maybe even help out by taking turns with the shovel. They wouldn't know that this part was also out-of-date.

She had been standing behind all her aunts and uncles, off to the side a little for a quick getaway. Al caught up to her now and took her arm. He held his umbrella over her, and they walked toward his car in silence for a few moments. Then Al chuckled. “So, when the roll is called up yonder, I wonder where
we'll
be, huh?” Celia didn't answer. The trouble with all these old church songs was the way they clung like barnacles to your memory. Without wanting to, in fact trying hard
not
to, she heard the words of this one now: “When the trumpet of the Lord shall sound, and time shall be no more, and the morning breaks, eternal, bright and fair . . .”

She heard Aunt Beulah's voice floating above the others in the chorus, confidently asserting that when the roll was called up yonder, indeed
she
would be there. “I'll b'there” is how Aunt Beulah sang it. At the thought of her aunt, she stopped and turned around. They were all starting to move away slowly now, out from under the gray tent, back toward their cars. She didn't care about the rest of them, but she hated to leave without saying good-bye to Aunt Beulah.

“You ready to get in?” Al said, pressing her arm. “Here's the car right here. You don't need to hang around for any reason, do you? I mean, hey, there's not going to be a big
reading of the will
or anything, is there?” Celia could tell he was eager to get back on the road. He was probably already thinking about where they'd stop for supper. He had to be cold, too, not having brought an overcoat along as she had. At least he had on a turtleneck under his sport coat.