No Dark Valley (2 page)

Celia thought she heard someone in the living room make a shushing sound, but Aunt Clara either didn't hear it or ignored it. Aunt Clara had been hard of hearing years ago, so Celia could only imagine she was even more so now. Knowing Aunt Clara, it wouldn't have made any difference if she had heard it or not. If she had something to say, nothing could stop her. Celia could still hear her eighteen years ago, could still see her eyes flaming with indignation, her nose wrinkled up as if she smelled something spoiled: “Mark my words, you're going to send your poor grandmother to an early grave, young lady, if you go up there to that godless state university!” Celia had laughed right out loud. In her mind, her grandmother, sixty-nine at the time, was already ancient.

“See here, there's plenty!” Aunt Beulah raised her voice a little, perhaps to try to drown out Aunt Clara. “Y'all get you a plate and help yourself, and I'll go get the tea. I must've set it down out in the living room somewhere. Now take your fill—we got more'n enough for now and later, too. And we're not in any great big rush. We got us a whole hour before we got to be down to the mortuary.”

From the other room Aunt Clara could still be heard. “ . . . and
threw
away all her training, ever' last bit of it. Bowed Sadie down with grief to talk about it. Just
had
to go up North to some heathen college where they teach evolution and use drugs and let the boys and girls live in the same dormitories and fill up their minds with trash and . . .”

The dining room table bore a random assortment of food, all in Corning Ware dishes, Pyrex, tin plates, and plastic containers of every kind. Al caught her eye and winked. He looked as if life had suddenly gotten a lot more interesting. This was one of the things that most irritated Celia about Al—his enormous preoccupation with food. At times he could be so intelligent, so witty and sensitive to her moods, knowing exactly how much to say and when to quit prying, understanding her unspoken jokes, but then he'd turn around and act like some kind of
animal
when he got hungry.

Evidently no thought had been taken to arranging the food in any semblance of categories. It looked as if it had been set down in whatever order it had been delivered, then shoved over to make room for more. At one end sat a big platter of ham, surrounded by a basket of hush puppies, a dish of apple dumplings, and a plate of salmon croquettes. Corn-bread muffins, fruit cocktail, fried chicken, pinto beans, creamed corn, biscuits, custard pie, Jell-O salad—on and on it went.

Typical, thought Celia. It would never occur to these people, her Georgia relatives, to put all the meats together in one place, then the vegetables, salads, and desserts. Just throw them all together in a big hodgepodge and dig in. That was their way, always had been.

That was exactly how they approached life in general—mixed everything together in one big pot, stirred their religion in with whatever they did. Celia remembered how mortified she used to be when her grandmother was in Kmart or Piggly Wiggly, looking for cornstarch or floor wax one minute, then accosting a total stranger in the aisle the next, telling him bluntly that Jesus died to save sinful men or inviting him gruffly to a revival meeting at church. Celia would always walk away and hide out in another aisle.

Looking at the table, Celia couldn't help thinking how much Grandmother would have enjoyed this occasion, with all the people and all the food. She had loved family gatherings, would always arrive early and leave late, would sample some of every dish on the table, then go home grumbling about how she wished people wouldn't bring so much food. In her medicine chest Grandmother had a bottle, among all the others, on which she had printed “When you eat too much,” and she would always shake a pill out of it after such a get-together and gulp it down. That was just like Christians, in Celia's opinion—always looking for easy answers to problems.

And Grandmother had always loved a funeral, too, had dragged Celia to dozens of them all over the county during the years they'd lived together on the other side of this pathetic little excuse of a town. It was too bad a person couldn't attend his own funeral, Celia thought. Maybe they should have rehearsals for them the way they did for weddings. That way the person could come and see how the service was going to go, then give suggestions for improvements, and after that go ahead and die.

Celia followed Al around the table, taking small helpings of a few dishes. Al's plate was heaped before he had made it halfway around, and he looked longingly at the other side of the table. There were two empty folding chairs in the dining room, angled into a corner beside the gas heater. The wallpaper—a design of large red roses twining in and out of a lattice—looked scorched above the heater and was curling apart at the seams. Celia was glad the living room was full. She would have hated to eat in there with all the aunts glaring at her, their small minds racing to think of all the wicked things she must have done since she left her grandmother's house eighteen years ago.

She thought Aunt Clara was through in the other room, but evidently she had just stopped a few moments to chew. “Sad how some folks'll wait till a funeral to come back and pay their respects,” Celia heard her say. “Poor Sadie. What she wouldn't of
give
for that girl to come see her before she died. You'd sure think a body would have enough common decency to come visit their own grandmother when she was on her deathbed!”

But I didn't know she was on her deathbed!
Celia felt like shouting. She kept quiet, though. She wasn't going to let these people get to her, not anymore. She didn't owe anybody any explanations for anything. She had nothing to apologize to them for. She had been done with that way of life for a long time.

Suddenly someone was standing in front of her. “Hey there, Celie.” Celia looked up to find her second cousin Doreen grinning at her, holding a plate in one hand. She must have put on a good thirty pounds since Celia had last seen her, but it wasn't hard to recognize her with her round freckled face and curly red hair. Doreen wiped her other hand along the side of her dress, then cocked her index finger and thumb at Celia and made a shooting noise as if firing a gun. “Gotcha!” she said. “Remember how we used to all the time do that in the hall at school?” She laughed, showing broad yellow teeth. She had some fish sticks on her plate, Celia noticed, all cut up into small squares and slathered with ketchup.

“Hi, Doreen,” Celia said. “How are you doing?”

“Ornery as always and up to no good,” Doreen said. “How 'bout yourself?”

“I'm okay,” said Celia. “Managing to keep busy.”

Doreen laughed again. “Hey, remember that summer at Bible Memory Camp when I hid from you in that big old patch of poison ivy? And then jumped out and scared the livin' daylights out of you while you was walking by?”

Celia smiled and nodded. Doreen had always loved practical jokes, though they often backfired on her. The two of them had been good friends during the first two years she had lived with her grandmother but had drifted apart after that. Doreen could have been a lot of fun if she hadn't had such a religious streak.

“And then a little bit later I started itchin' and scratchin' like crazy,” Doreen said. “I 'bout scratched myself raw before it was over. I remember that!”

Celia nodded again. She remembered a counselor threatening to tie Doreen's hands behind her back if she didn't quit scratching.

Doreen reached behind her and dragged a little red-haired boy out to stand in front of her. He looked down at the floor and twisted from side to side, three fingers jammed in his mouth. “This here's Ralph Junior,” Doreen said. “Named after his daddy. You remember Ralph, don't you? He graduated same year you did. Played football.”

Celia felt her stomach knot up as she glanced at the boy. Probably no more than four or five. She nodded at Doreen. She remembered Ralph all right. Big dumb Ralph Hubert, who reinforced every stereotype in the world about football players. She thought she remembered her grandmother writing her that he had gone into the army a year or so after graduating from high school, but she was already away at college by then and couldn't have cared less about any of the hicks she had gone to high school with. She looked back at Doreen's little boy and felt something like the cold point of a knife against soft skin.

“So you finally decided to get hitched yourself, huh?” Doreen said, nodding to Al. “Never too late. Better not wait around for ten years to have you a kid like I did, though. 'Course that wasn't the plan. I expected I'd just drop 'em out one after the other the way Billie Ruth did, but no sir, not me. Me and Ralph had to traipse all over to a hundred doctors 'fore we found out what was wrong, and then—”

“And how is Billie Ruth?” Celia asked.

“Oh, same as ever. Had her another baby couple of months ago—number eight. Imagine that, my sister's got eight, and I had to work like the dickens just to get me one. Mama told her she ought to get her tubes tied, but . . .”

Al spoke up, his mouth full. “And how old is Ralph Junior?” he asked. The boy scowled up at him briefly, then turned and buried his face in his mother's skirt.

“Five his next birthday,” Doreen said proudly. “He goes to the four-year-old kindergarten school over at the Baptist church three days a week, don't you, Ralphie?” No response from Ralphie. “Here, show Cousin Celie and her friend how good you know your numbers, Ralphie.” Doreen tried to pry him away from her legs, to no avail. “Come on, Ralphie, one . . . two . . . three . . . Count for us and show what a big boy you are.” Ralphie wouldn't deliver.

“Oh well, maybe another time,” Celia said.

“Yeah, maybe so,” Doreen said. “Well, come on then, sport, let's go back out here to the kitchen and finish up your din-din.” She grinned at Celia. “He loves fish fixed like this.” She nodded toward the plate she was holding.

This came as no surprise to Celia. Breaded fish sticks that came frozen in a box would be exactly the kind of food her relatives would love. Give them a fresh fillet of flounder amandine or Chilean sea bass, and they wouldn't have a clue what it was.

Doreen waved. “Talk to you later, Celie.” She jerked her head toward the kitchen. “We're eating out here with Candy. You remember Candy—she's married now and has her a baby. She's trying to nurse him, but she's afraid she doesn't have enough milk.”

For a moment Celia didn't understand. Surely this wasn't the same Candy she remembered—Aunt Elsie's “change of life baby,” as everybody had called her. The last time Celia had seen her, Candy was still dragging a blanket around and sucking her thumb. But that was over eighteen years ago, Celia realized, which would make her twenty or more now.

“And Ralph's coming to the funeral, so you can see him, too,” Doreen was saying. “His boss is letting him off early today. He's one of the pallbearers—I didn't know if you knew that. Your grandmother picked 'em all out herself before she passed.”

Celia shook her head. “No, I didn't know.” She waved back at Doreen as she steered Ralphie toward the kitchen. As they disappeared through the swinging door, the sound of a baby's wail broke forth, then suddenly stopped. A rushing sound filled Celia's head, like a semi passing by, and she took several deep breaths.

“Wow, there goes one classy woman,” Al said, then laughed. “I can't understand how you escaped all this, Celia.”

Celia watched him for a few moments. He had already picked two chicken wings clean and was busy now with a mound of spaghetti casserole. He was having trouble getting it to stay on his fork, however, so he finally took up his spoon and, with the aid of a corn-bread muffin as a pusher, began to make headway. Celia looked away. Bringing Al with her on this trip had seemed like such a good idea a couple of days ago.

She wondered if her grandmother had planned out the whole funeral. That would be just like something she would do. She probably had it all written down in one of her notebooks somewhere, right down to the songs that would be sung. This was something southerners were fond of doing. And knowing Grandmother, there would probably be dozens of songs.

Next to her Bible, her grandmother's favorite book had been the old brown hymnal they used at church. She even had her own personal copy of it that she carried back and forth to church.
Tabernacle Hymns Number Three
it said on the cover. And she sang those songs at home all hours of the day and night the whole three years Celia had lived with her. During that last awful year Celia would often turn her radio up full blast to block out the sound of her grandmother's singing.

Looking up at the roses on the wallpaper, Celia suddenly thought of the words of one of Grandmother's favorite songs: “I come to the garden alone, while the dew is still on the roses.” She could remember her grandmother singing it over and over at home and calling out its number time and again at church on request night. In Celia's opinion it was a sappy maudlin song, one of those that sounded pretty but meant nothing.
Well, Grandmother
, Celia thought,
it looks like the dew has all evaporated now and the roses have wilted and died on the trellis, just like you
.

And even though she tried hard to keep it from coming, she could clearly hear her grandmother's abrupt answer. “No, Celie, I haven't died. I only changed addresses is all. And the dew
is
still on the roses up here, and there's not a single thorn on 'em, either.” As much as she disliked it, Celia couldn't stop a picture from forming, one of her grandmother strolling through a lush celestial garden with Jesus by her side. Or rather
stomping
through the garden. She had never known Grandmother to stroll anywhere.

Grandmother loved the second stanza of that song and would always close her eyes when she sang it at church: “He speaks, and the sound of his voice is so sweet the birds hush their singing.” In Celia's opinion, if Grandmother was the one in that garden with Jesus, that explained the birds' falling silent. It had nothing to do with
his
voice—the poor birds were terrified of hers.