No Dark Valley (11 page)

Al was finished with his serving before Celia was half done with hers. He dropped his spoon into his bowl, swiped at his mouth with his paper napkin, and emitted a satisfied sigh. At that exact moment the doorbell rang again.

Though Al didn't curse nearly as much as a lot of men did, he did so now. “That better not be the same idiot as a while ago,” he said. Celia didn't reply, but she wondered what difference it made, or how he would find out if it was, or what he would do about it. He pushed back his chair and stalked to the door as if ready to throw the person off the porch bodily.

He jerked the door open and was almost run over as a large woman lumbered across the threshold. “Well, good! Somebody's home after all! I just
knew
in my heart somebody was in here, what with the lights on and the cars in the drive and all. It could be your doorbell doesn't work right. Sometimes ours won't if you don't punch the little button right square in the middle. Willard, he's my son-in-law, he says he's going to buy us a new one and wire it up hisself so we can have one we can count on. Folks don't know they got to push it just right, so there's no telling how many visits we've missed on account of them wires not meetin' up. I keep meaning to write us up a little tag and tape it by the doorbell, one that says Push Hard, but it keeps slipping my mind. But anyway, that's one reason I like to follow up with a knock or two when I go to somebody's door and maybe holler out a word of greeting on top of it all. I figure surely they'll hear at least one of 'em in case they got a faulty mechanism like ours, though I guess
you
must not of when I came around a little bit ago. Maybe you had your TV up too loud.” She nodded toward Al's big screen. “They can sure make a racket.” Then laughing, she said, “We don't have one at our house. We make enough racket by ourselves!”

During this stunning explosion of words, the old woman stood on the brown mat at the door and wiped her feet the whole time, slowly yet thoroughly. She wore black rubber boots, a voluminous gray wool cape, and a dark green scarf cinched about her head. She had to be at least six feet tall, with the heft of a tree trunk. In one hand she carried a plastic grocery bag that bulged with the rounded shapes of whatever was inside.

Celia had a bite of Berry Berry Buckle poised on her spoon but could make no progress toward eating it, so great was her astonishment at the arrival of the visitor. Had she put this woman into a story in her creative writing class, her college professor would have cried, “Hold on! Tone her down!” Compared to a character like her, Celia's Georgia relatives were only pale shadows. And Al likewise was rendered both motionless and speechless. If someone had broken into the house with an assault rifle and begun spraying them with bullets, they couldn't have been more incapacitated.

“ . . . over there kitty-cornered in that house with the front door that's painted red,” the woman was saying now, pointing across the street. “That was the one thing I begged Willard for when we moved here a little over a year ago. ‘Willard,' I said, ‘I got just one request in all this revampin' you're doing, and that is a red door.' I always did want a house with a red front door, and I never in my whole life had one till now. It's such a handy way to tell folks where you live, to be able to say, ‘Ours is the house with the red door!'” She paused and looked down at the bottom of her boots before stepping off the mat.

Al was staring at her as if she were a UFO and little Martians were coming out of her mouth.

“Here, mind if I set down just a minute?” the woman said, making for the sofa. “I been out too long, and my old joints is telling me it's high time to get back home and quit gallivantin' around the neighborhood in the nippy night air. But I was so hoping you'd be here when I stopped by for one last try—and you
are
!” She sat down heavily on the sofa, then looked over at Al and repeated, “You must not of heard me when I came by earlier.”

Al closed the door slowly but remained standing near it. The woman set the plastic bag on the sofa beside her and turned to look at Celia, stretching her face into a spectacularly homely grin. “You must be this nice man's little lady friend,” she said. “What's your name, honey?”

Al answered for her. “Celia Coleman.”

The woman turned back to Al. “And what's—”

“Al,” he said. “Al Halston.”

The old woman nodded approvingly. “Celia and Al—them's nice names.” She pointed back over her shoulder. “I'm Eldeen Rafferty. I live over there on the other side of the street. I been watching you come and go for weeks on end, out the window of our house—that one I was telling you about with the red door—but I couldn't never seem to get it timed right so's I could come pay you a visit when the both of you was here. I help baby-sit my little granddaughter, you see. But I do love to visit when I get a minute here and there.”

She picked up the plastic bag beside her. “Well, anyway, here's the cause for me bustin' in on you young folks tonight. I brought you these. My daughter Jewel baked us up a double batch of muffins tonight to go with our supper, and I told her, ‘Jewel,' I said, ‘I'm aimin' to put some of these in a bag and carry 'em to our neighbor over there in that little white house.' I was so happy when I saw your car here,” she said to Celia, “'cause I been wantin' to meet you, too, and see if you was as pretty up close as you was from the window.” She clenched her teeth into another frightful smile. “And you
are
!” she said. “Here, you can take these.” She extended the bag toward Al, and he stepped over from the door.

“Thanks,” he said. He opened the bag and looked inside.

“I apologize for not comin' over sooner,” she continued, “but like I said, I baby-sit my little grandbaby during the day—Rosemary Jean's her name—and she's been teething bad, and then she had her a doozy of a ear infection for a spell and has been all fretful and out of sorts from it. So I been sticking close to home 'cause I sure didn't want to get her out during that awful cold snap we had.”

One quick breath and she plowed ahead. “We moved here to this neighborhood a little over a year ago, and I been working on learning everybody's name up and down our street. I'm just about done, too, except I never can get that man down there in number 58—you know that house with the fence and the sign that says Beware of Dog—to come to the door.” She lowered her voice and leaned forward. “He's got him a bad leg, from what I can tell—it might even be one of them wooden legs—and I think he needs him a hearing aid to boot.”

She leaned forward a little more. “And I don't think he's got him a dog at all 'cause I sure never seen one or even heard one. I think the sign's there to discourage burglars and hooligans.” She leaned back. “'Course, maybe he
did
have a dog and something happened to it.
We
had us a dog named Hormel that got hisself hit by a car.”

Dispenser of Too Much Information
—that's what Celia called people like this old woman, though she couldn't remember meeting anyone who fit the label to quite the extent of this woman, who was still talking. “ . . . and I sure miss that little pooch, though I don't miss all his mischief. Why, he could scoot under the fence and take off faster 'n a jackrabbit, he could! Just had these short little stubs of legs, but, oh, he was a
quick
little feller. One of them wiener dogs, you know.”

She looked back and forth between Celia and Al, smiling. “So now I got two more names to add to my list. Celia and Al.” She paused and looked down at her black rubber boots. “Most people don't realize how much they count on their
feet
, you know. I'm sure thankful for mine. Woodmont Street's my mission field, you see.” She waved an arm back and forth and around her head as if to encompass the whole neighborhood. “Some missionaries get to go to Africa and Japan and Brazil and what have you, but no, God called
me
to go up and down Woodmont Street.” She bared her teeth in another smile. “And all ground's holy ground, I say. I'm marching through Immanuel's ground—right here in Derby!”

So she was religious—Celia could have guessed as much. She knew beyond a doubt that if she were to ask this woman to sing “Marching to Zion,” she would know every word by heart. An odd sensation overwhelmed her at that instant. She looked intently at the old woman and was struck, first of all, by how much she reminded her of her grandmother in a way that had nothing at all to do with looks or the simple fact that neither of them had a television. She could imagine the two of them striking up a friendship, reciting Bible verses by the hour, listening to sermons on the radio, and singing duets from the hymnal, though an octave apart—Grandmother taking the soprano line while this woman sang the bass.

But they were an octave apart in more than a literal sense. The difference between them reached far beyond vocal pitch. It was the resonant tone of what Eldeen Rafferty said, the whole eager attitude behind it, the fullness of spirit, the peculiar light of her countenance. How different this neighborly delivery of muffins than Grandmother's presentation of blackberries in Dunmore, Georgia, so many years ago. How funny, thought Celia, to meet someone so much like Grandmother, who was dead and buried in Georgia, yet someone at the same time so very, very different from her, so charged up with words, so happy, and so very much
alive
.

6

Where Bright Angel Feet Have Trod

The following afternoon Celia was working in the back room of the Trio Gallery. It had been another slow day, but she didn't mind that at all. In fact, she preferred it. If it weren't for the fact that the traffic in and out of the gallery had a pretty direct correlation to the amount of revenue generated, she wouldn't care if anybody ever came in.

But she especially didn't want to talk to people today, not after last night. After the old woman, Earlene or whatever her name was, had finally left Al's house, Celia had unburdened herself of her news, that she felt it was time for the two of them to go their separate ways. Al hadn't taken it very well, had been quite loud and accusatory. She had finally opened the front door and walked out while he was still talking. He hadn't followed her but had stood at the door and watched her take his bags of stuff out of her car and set them on the front lawn.

She had then backed out of his driveway, glancing behind her at the house with the red door. She wasn't sure, but she thought she saw a curtain move, as if a hand had pulled it aside for a peek. She didn't doubt for a minute that the old woman knew everybody's comings and goings along the whole street. Still, it was strange that she hadn't grated on Celia's nerves the way she should have, given her little missionary speech. No doubt she thought the Ten Commandments should be posted on every street corner. But underneath her religion—or maybe on top of it, Celia couldn't be sure—she had seemed like such a
nice
old lady. Odd as a three-dollar bill, but somebody you could love without even having to try.

Last night's breakup had affected Celia more than usual. It had come to her in a flash of certainty early this morning while she was splashing her face with water that she was getting too old for this sort of thing. Someone thirty-six years old should either go ahead and find somebody decent to marry, she told herself, or else give up and quit looking. Just resign herself to being single.

Anyway, marriage was far too risky. The thought of a commitment that huge made her go cold and hot at the same time. How could you ever
know
the person was right, that he would wear well with time, that you wouldn't get bored out of your mind before a month was over? The whole idea of what they called a “happy marriage” seemed like something out of a book of fairy tales. Well, no, actually fairy tales hardly ever dealt with marriage unless it was an unhappy one with wicked stepmothers and such. Fairy tales usually stopped with the falling-in-love part, glossing over all the years that followed with a “happily ever after” summary. The writers of those stories sure knew how to get out while they were ahead. These were the thoughts circling through her mind as she worked in the back room of the gallery.

When she had interviewed for this job ten years earlier, Celia had made it clear to the owners, two men and a woman who were all artists themselves, that she didn't have the gift of salesmanship. If that was what they wanted from her, they'd be better off hiring someone else. Her concept of a good art gallery director, she had said, was someone who allowed the visitors plenty of time and space to browse, someone who realized that good art spoke for itself, that it didn't need a cheerleader, but rather someone who would be waiting in the folds for quiet consultations if asked.

She had said it all with a perfectly straight face, though afterward she wondered how she had managed it, seeing that up until the actual job interview she had never given a passing thought to her concept of a good art gallery director. She had, in fact, interviewed for the job on a whim after hearing through the grapevine that the gallery was looking for a director.

Today she was packing up a set of prints to return to a dealer in Charleston. Ollie, one of the gallery owners, was going to drive the van down and deliver them in a couple of days. The show had been a successful one, and, thankfully, they were returning fewer than half of the prints they had exhibited. All the others had sold for prices anywhere from six hundred to three thousand dollars. The most expensive one, a large black and white of homes along the Charleston Battery, priced at five thousand, hadn't sold but had been greatly admired by everyone. She held it up now and studied it.

The dealer had told her that this particular artist had finished the woodcut from which this print was made only two weeks before he had died suddenly at the age of fifty. It was an incredible piece of work, so fine and detailed you could hardly believe the plate was carved from wood. She had seen steel plate prints that weren't nearly as delicate as this one.