No Dark Valley (9 page)

Still, Grandmother cast one more anxious glance behind her. An angel placed on Grandmother's head a crown of glittering rubies, while a man on a motorcycle nearby held a gospel tract above his head, waving it around like a little banner. A group of people next to him also smiled and waved at her, their mouths all darkly stained with purple. They were all holding large baskets piled high with blackberries. A woman enveloped in frothy mounds of bubbles and carrying an Avon catalog ran up and hugged her.

The shiny gate slowly began to close, and Celia stepped out of the poison ivy. Someone behind her, whom she couldn't see, tugged her sleeve and said, “No, come this way.” She felt herself being pulled backward. She heard the blare of a car horn, and the voice said, “Don't follow her—she never smiles.” She yielded to the pull yet strained to see Grandmother. The gate was swinging shut inch by inch. She saw her cousin Doreen appear at the gate holding a silver toy gun, which she pointed at the person tugging on Celia. “Gotcha!” she said. There was a popping sound like a cork coming loose. “Now break loose and run!” Doreen yelled to Celia.

She saw Aunt Beulah, wearing pink slippers, come up behind Doreen and gesture to the glowing angel. She heard her aunt plead, “Don't call the roll yet!” And she saw her lean earnestly toward Celia, motioning her forward. “Hurry, Celie! Get in quick! Watch out for that icy patch!”

Behind Aunt Beulah the faces of Celia's mother and father materialized, but instead of having the bodies of people, they were two little robins sitting together in a brown nest. With one of her wings her mother held up a watch, the same one that had been Celia's graduation present from her grandmother, and shook it. “Time's running out, Celie!” she called softly. Red-haired Ralphie peered out from behind the gate and started counting: “One, two, three, four . . .”

But the arm kept pulling her backward, and the voice, which sounded young and old at the same time, kept repeating, “No, Celia, no fun there. Come this way. Come with me. Come on now.” In the background she heard someone playing “No Night There” on the clarinet. She felt the ground shake, as if a train were thundering by, and then the cries of many babies filled the air.

“No! Wait! I want to go that way!” she called out at last, wrenching free and pointing ahead . . . toward a dark highway somewhere between Dunmore, Georgia, and Filbert, South Carolina.

Celia rubbed her eyes again, then opened them and looked out the window. She had to learn to tame her imagination one of these days. She had to find a way to stop dreaming so heavily, with such jumbled-up scenes, everything mixed together like Aunt Beulah's dinner table. She could trace every detail of the dream to some event or thought of the day, which settled her down somewhat, yet when she thought of the gate slowly swinging shut, she felt as if someone had his hands around her neck.

The funeral is over
, Celia reminded herself.
Grandmother is gone for good, along with all her finger-pointing. Guilt is only a trick churches use
. She kept repeating these words to herself, trying to fall into slow, steady breathing.

Al reached over and took her hand. “It's really a pity, you know?” he said. “All those relatives of yours—they live their whole lives going to church and then they die. Then what? What do they have to show for living?” He laughed and shook his head. “Boy, those were some
crazy
people back there. They'd make a great comedy act.” And although Celia agreed with him, had always said the same things herself, Al's words grated on her. Somehow her Bible-toting nutcase relatives didn't seem nearly as funny now as they did when she described them to him from a distance of eighteen years and a couple of hundred miles.

Al sighed and continued. “But really, it is sad, isn't it? Their little houses get sold to pay their debts and buy a coffin, and what's left? Nothing. And you inherit the grand sum of a book wrapped up in a brown paper sack.”

Celia was quiet for several moments. It came to her in that instant with perfect conviction that Al's voice was not one she wanted to hear every day for the rest of her life. Not even every other day or once a week. She could well imagine today being the pivotal point in their relationship. In months to come she might remember it and say to someone, “It was going fine until the day he drove me to my grandmother's funeral.” And it was nothing she could begin to explain. She agreed with everything he said, yet hearing him say it made her want to open the door and fling herself onto the shoulder of the freeway, anything to keep from having to be confined with him for another minute.

She removed her hand from his, almost shook it off actually, and reached into the backseat for the package Aunt Beulah had given her. She raised the back of her seat and began untying the string.

“Hey, are you all right?” Al said. “You're not mad about anything, are you?” She thought she could detect a tone of wounded annoyance, could almost hear him thinking,
Hey, I took off work today to drive you here. I deserve to be treated better than this
.

“Don't worry about it,” Celia said tersely. She had the string off now and was unwrapping the Piggly Wiggly sack from around the Bible. She wondered when her grandmother had done this. It was wrapped up very securely and neatly, not at all as if someone had done it in a hurry, and certainly not as if a dying person had done it. But she couldn't imagine her grandmother wrapping up her Bible well in advance of her death, either, not having it at her fingertips to leaf through, to write in, to trace the words she already knew so well by heart.

Celia sighed and looked out the window at the dying light of the January sky. Here was just another small mystery to add to all the other things she would never understand about her grandmother.

5

Marching Through Immanuel's Ground

Another reason her life would make a bad novel, Celia had decided, was that the characters would seem so stereotyped. Nobody would believe that one person could have so many rigidly religious relatives, all stuck in the rut of such predictable, countrified ways of viewing life, all trekking to church several times a week, all so unaware that the twentieth century had come and gone. You could get by with one or two characters like that in a book, for quirky splashes of color, but not dozens and dozens of them. The whole thing would turn into a farce.

She could remember her second year at college when she had taken a course in creative writing. She had tried to write a short story about an intelligent boy with relatives like her own, a boy who started feeling cramped in the small-town box he was born in and finally made the decision to run away from home to get away from a hyper-religious grandfather. The focal scene of the story had taken place at a family reunion, and she had been very proud of the way she had captured the comical hubbub of the occasion. She had, of course, drawn freely from her memory.

It hadn't worked, though. The story, like the whole course, was a disappointment. Part of the story's failure was probably due to trying to write from a boy's perspective, but another part, a big one, was that everybody who read the story said the characters seemed fake. They had passed their stories around in class that semester for what the teacher called “peer feedback,” and this comment kept showing up on her evaluation forms. Everybody thought the characters were funny in an overdone sort of way but not at all believable. One person had written, “Is this supposed to be a satire?”

The professor of the class, who had grown up in Canada, told her in their private conference that the characters were all too “broadly drawn,” that she needed “a majority of rational benchmark characters” instead of “so many abnormals” in order to tie the story more securely to the school of realism, which seemed to be the tradition of fiction in which she was attempting to write. He had stressed the word
attempting
. She remembered that clearly. He had offered a bit of praise at the end, though in a rather condescending tone. “You obviously have a great imagination,” he had said, “and an eye for humorous detail.” He might as well have patted her on the head and said, “Aren't you adorable?” At least she had had the sense to keep her mouth shut and not shoot back with “But they're all people I
really know
!” No one would have believed her anyway.

And the tone—that was another problem the teacher pointed out. He said he felt there was too much anger fueling the story, as if “you're writing about something you're too close to.” Something she needed to have more time to sort through, he said, so that she could reveal some kind of cohesive pattern to the whole situation.

The creative writing class had been good for one thing, though. It had shown her how much effort an artist has to put into something to make it appear effortless. She had never tried to write fiction again after that semester, though she often thought she probably could now. Not that she had ever really been able to sort through her life yet, certainly not that she had found any cohesive pattern. She could spot a good story when she saw one, though. She could also spot a bad one, which is what she most often saw in the editing she did on the side. Poor Frank Bledsoe—she thought of the reams of awful stuff he kept churning out and bringing to her.

Most of her classmates in college considered her a novelty, a cute little immigrant from Dixie. A boy in one of her journalism classes, Danny Ingles, had always begged her to talk. “Say
anything
,” he would plead. “Go ahead, just talk and keep on talking. Recite the Declaration of Independence or a nursery rhyme or read from the textbook . . . anything at all, I don't care. Just let me close my eyes and listen.” Sometimes she'd comply, and he'd close his eyes and lift his face as if basking in the sun, then afterward sigh and say something like “Oh, Celia, love, you're the real thing.”

She and Danny had even dated some, mostly for meals late at night at his favorite Italian and Chinese restaurants, had in fact even gone further than dating for a short while. He had gotten an apartment in town their junior year and asked her offhandedly one night after polishing off a double pepperoni pizza what she'd think about the idea of moving in with him and sharing expenses. “Not a whole lot” was her reply. Celia knew she'd get sick of living with the smell of garlic. If a food didn't reek of garlic, Danny wasn't much interested in it.

Everyone at college had been fascinated that she was from Georgia, had teased her about living on a plantation like Tara. They had no idea what a curious state Georgia was, made up of every possible socioeconomic stratum of society, from old-money aristocrats to poor white trash. But that probably wasn't so curious after all. Every state was most likely that way. She knew firsthand of at least one other, having lived in South Carolina for twelve years now.

She remembered clearly the first time she had seen a copy of the magazine called
Georgia: The Easy Life
, which featured full-color spreads of mansions all around the state and told all about the cultured people who lived in them. These people collected Jackson Pollock and de Kooning paintings. They attended the theater and hired chamber groups for their private dinners, where they served dishes such as Scalloped Artichoke Hearts, Stevens Tavern Turtle Gumbo, and Herb Roasted Lamb with Grape Sauce.

It was like looking at a travel brochure for a foreign country. For sure Celia had never rubbed shoulders with the likes of these people during her years in Dunmore, where the locals preferred Clint Eastwood movies and Hank Williams songs. Their idea of good art was sticking a calendar picture or an old greeting card inside a frame from Kmart.

But while her relatives and their homes and menus certainly never appeared in
Georgia: The Easy Life
, neither were they at the other extreme—the kind of down-and-outers you saw shuffling down to the welfare office with five or six ragged, runny-nosed children trailing along behind them, redneck mountain illiterates who lived in gullies and hollows, dipped snuff, and had old couches and rusted washing machines sitting on their front porches, people straight out of the movie
Deliverance
, with a mean streak as wide as the Chattahoochee.

Instead, her relatives were part of another group Celia called the Rabid Blue-Collar Fundamentalist Fringe. She pictured all the other people of Georgia as a multicolored tablecloth, and this group as a very tacky tasseled border all around the edges.

It was incredible to her, looking back on it, how much
alike
all her Georgia relatives were, every single man, woman, and child among them, and how truly funny they were if you could just step back and observe them from afar instead of having to live in the middle of them. She doubted there was a more homogeneous family in the entire country than the Georgia clan on her mother's side. For certain a more churchgoing gang you'd never find anywhere. Though her grandmother had attended Bethany Hills Bible Tabernacle, the rest of them went to churches on the other side of Dunmore, near the old GE plant, where many of them had worked all their lives.

Oh, the churches in Dunmore, Georgia! Everything else existed in moderation: one elementary school, one junior high, and one high school, two decent-sized grocery stores, one Laundromat, one drugstore, one theater, one beauty shop, and five restaurants—Haynie's Dinette, Shady Lane Bar-B-Q, Popinjay's Burgers, Dairy Queen, and Little Bud's Pizza Parlor. But when it came to churches, they had sprouted up all over town like toadstools after a hard rain. Everything from Roman Catholic to holy rollers.

On a Thursday night, two weeks after returning from her grandmother's funeral in Dunmore, Celia found herself sitting at Al's dining room table in Derby, South Carolina. He didn't know it yet, but in the trunk of her red Mustang, which was parked in his driveway that very minute, were all the possessions he'd left at her apartment over the past months—the clothes, the toiletries, his portable CD player, several books, coffee mugs. She had put them all into a couple of large garbage bags before she left home, with plans to return them to him tonight after she told him she didn't want to continue their relationship.