No Dark Valley (24 page)

Celia had simply circled back to the house and was soaking in the bathtub by the time her grandmother came back. She remembered feeling so proud of herself as she heard footsteps come down the hallway toward the bathroom, then stop outside the door. “Celie, you in there?” her grandmother had called sharply, rattling the doorknob, which was of course locked.

Celia remembered scolding herself at the time for laughing out loud, for as soon as her grandmother had started back down the hall, she realized she should have kept absolutely quiet.
That
would have been the perfect answer to the question. Ansell was always telling her that silence was the best way to show contempt—not answering back, not even laughing. Ansell had always told her she was too quick to offer an apology or explanation. “You don't owe anybody anything,” he was always saying. “Never let people figure you out. Always keep 'em guessing.”

Before she left for home this afternoon, Celia thought now, maybe she would walk into the woods and see if the pond was still there. But she immediately dismissed the idea. There would be no pleasure in seeing it again. The thought of worrying her grandmother sick didn't hold any of its former appeal, and all Celia could picture now as she remembered the pond in the woods was the beam of a flashlight bobbing up and down along its edges in the black of night.

The storage building that used to be her grandparents' little neighborhood grocery store was off to the right, next to the narrow dirt road that led out to the abandoned Boy Scout camp. The store had always been a sad sight, in Celia's opinion, and it was even more so now, with its peeling paint, sagging screen door, and grimy windowpanes. Sitting a little lopsided on cement blocks, it appeared that the ground had shifted, or maybe the building itself had. Maybe the cement blocks had gradually sunk deeper into the earth over on the side of the store where her grandfather used to keep the heavy cooler of soft drinks and the freezer of ice cream and Popsicles. Anyway, the perspective seemed slightly off, as if a child had drawn it without the aid of a ruler.

My inheritance
, Celia thought.
All mine
. But all the humor had gone out of it now that she was actually here. She shifted over a little and looked out the other direction, toward the back of the house where the garage stood. Her grandmother had always called it “the barn” because it was big enough for a car, a truck, a dilapidated tractor, all her grandfather's old tools, and a couple of animal stalls, where her grandmother had at one time kept a few goats. It had two broad doors that hung crookedly and were secured by a padlock, if
secured
could be used of such a flimsy arrangement.

It surely wouldn't take much effort to break down one of those doors, both of which appeared ready to fall off the hinges. Celia wondered briefly where the key to the padlock was. Maybe it was one of the extra ones she had gotten from the lawyer—on the cheap key ring with the little glow-in-the-dark plastic disk on it stamped with the words
Jesus saves
.

She wasn't at all eager to find the key, though. The thought of opening the barn and having to look at and dispose of whatever ancient, rusted, mildewed junk was out there gave her a sick, oppressive feeling. She had had her fill yesterday and this morning of going through somebody else's useless, worn-out things. And to think, she had just gotten started. She would have her work cut out for her when she came back later this summer to finalize everything.

Celia moved away from the window and walked to the kitchen. She stood in the doorway and looked at the things she had laid out on the old porcelain table the day before, things she had set aside to think about keeping. If someone had asked her months ago what she would want from her grandmother's house, she would have instantly replied, “Not one single thing.”

But the tabletop was quite full. It had surprised her to realize how unobservant she must have been when she lived here every day—or rather, how her memory had shut down once she left. All the things on the table were things she remembered her grandmother using regularly, but it was only in seeing them again after all these years that her memory was stirred. She doubted that she would ever have thought of them again if she hadn't come here and started going through Grandmother's cupboards and drawers.

She walked over to the table now and picked up the set of hand-held beaters, with the little crank wheel on the side and the label
Mister Mixer
imprinted on its metal handle. She could picture her grandmother standing right here at this very table holding the top handle of the Mister Mixer tightly with her left hand and turning the little crank with her right hand so that the beaters whirred around in whatever batter she happened to be mixing up, most often corn bread or sweet muffins. Sometimes she used the beaters to whip up evaporated milk, which she would mix in with Jell-O and call dessert. That was about as fancy as dessert had ever gotten at Grandmother's house.

Since her grandmother had had no countertop to amount to anything, the porcelain table served an all-purpose function in the tiny kitchen. Positioned as it was, directly in the center, it took up most of the space, leaving about two feet on all four sides. Depending on which side of the table you were sitting at, you could easily reach over to the stove, refrigerator, sink, or dish cupboard. Grandmother's kitchen made Celia's apartment kitchen back home seem spacious.

She put the Mister Mixer down and picked up one of the plates. She ran a finger around the scalloped edge, then set it back down with the others. She couldn't believe it yesterday when she had seen that the robin's-nest plates were still in the cupboard, all five of them, along with four other plain white plates she had never seen. She didn't care anything about those, but she had set the robin's-nest ones on the table to take home with her. She certainly didn't need any more plates, but somehow she couldn't stand to think of selling them at the yard sale Aunt Beulah was going to help her with when she came back in June, nor of donating them to the Salvation Army if nobody bought them at the yard sale.

Celia sat down wearily at the table and closed her eyes. She hadn't slept well last night, again. She had dreamed a whole string of short troubling dreams, not about babies this time, but about old women. Or rather about one old woman—an old woman chasing chickens through the yard, chopping weeds with a hoe, hanging threadbare clothes on a line, driving an old Mercury Comet, bending over a big black Bible. She had kept waking up all night wishing dawn would come.

Sitting here at Grandmother's kitchen table, Celia could almost imagine that it was twenty years ago and if she opened her eyes, she might see her grandmother, with her blue bibbed apron tied around her waist, which for some strange reason had always appeared to be higher up than a normal person's waist, somewhere around the middle of her ribcage. Under the apron, she'd be wearing a shapeless old dress the color of catfish or gravel.

Biscuits, that's what she'd be pulling out of the oven. She'd scoot them off the baking sheet with a spatula, dumping them into a basket lined with a clean dish towel, then set them on the table along with the old glass syrup dispenser. First you opened up your biscuit and put a pat of butter in the middle and closed it back up. After the butter melted, you laid it open and drizzled the syrup over both halves, then ate it with a fork for breakfast.

But first you prayed, or you sat and tried not to listen as Grandmother prayed, on and on and on. In the background the Christian radio station would be blaring out some gospel song or some rabid preacher's hellfire sermon. But over the top of that, droning on and on, would be Grandmother's voice, flat and businesslike, going through a whole litany of entreaties for divine assistance—everything from weather concerns to Aunt Clara's migraine headaches to the missionary family in Cameroon whose house had burned down.

A sudden knock at the front door startled Celia. It must be Aunt Beulah. She had said she'd drop by today before Celia left. “Come on in!” Celia called, then remembered she hadn't left the front door unlocked this morning. She walked quickly to the living room, and as she swung the door open, she said, “Sorry, I meant to—”

She stopped and stared at the two people standing on the other side of the screen door, neither of which was Aunt Beulah. The man, tall but slight of frame, spoke first. “Good morning. We thought we saw somebody here over the weekend.” He was wearing a navy polyester knit sport shirt, the pocket of which was stuffed messily with note paper, two pens, and a pair of glasses. He had a receding hairline, and the hair he did have was as wispy as duck down. Celia had the vague feeling that she knew him.

The woman, almost as short as Celia herself, could have been the man's twin sister except for the extreme difference in height. Here it was again, another married couple who looked alike. At least Celia assumed they were married. The woman's hair, a washed-out brown going to gray, was thin and nondescript, and both of them looked as if a good stout wind could carry them off. She wore a plain white blouse and a denim skirt and carried a small straw purse that gaped open at the top and exposed everything inside, which, like the contents of her husband's pocket, seemed to be stuffed in haphazardly.

The woman did have one arresting feature of her own, though—a pair of amazingly blue eyes, a darker blue than your average blue eyes, with a slight tinge of something close to violet, the color Celia imagined the South Pacific to be, although she had never seen it. Or maybe the summer sky right before twilight in Wyoming, though she'd never seen that, either. “We just wanted to stop by and say hi,” she said to Celia. “We knew Sadie real well.” She was talking louder than a woman her size normally talked and certainly louder than she needed to. It was a Sunday school teacher's voice.

Celia pushed the screen door open. “Well, sure, come on in. I'm kind of in the middle of—”

“Oh, we're not staying,” the woman said, shaking her head and backing up a little, but still talking as loud. “I know how busy you must be. We're not even coming in. We just wanted to let you know we'd be glad to help out in any way if you need us.” Then she stopped and shook her head. “Sorry, we forgot to tell you our names.”

At that, both the man and woman laughed and started speaking over top of each other, then stopped and laughed again and started all over. It was clear that they were trying to introduce themselves, and out of it all, Celia finally managed to catch the name Davidson, which she guessed to be their last name, and she soon pieced it together that the man was the preacher of Bethany Hills Bible Tabernacle and the woman was indeed his wife. Then it hit her why the man had seemed familiar. He had been the preacher in charge of Grandmother's funeral back in January.

“We just live a few houses down the road,” the woman said, waving a hand back over her shoulder. “We'd be happy to help if you need anything. I know all about cleaning out and getting ready to move, believe me. We've done plenty of it ourselves.”

Celia stepped out onto the porch and closed the screen behind her. “Well, thanks,” she said. “I think I'm fine, though. I'm almost done for now.”

The man fumbled in his pocket for a scrap of paper and a pen. “We figure you must be Sadie's granddaughter. She used to talk about you a lot.” He peered down at her and smiled, his pen now poised like a newspaper reporter ready to write something down.

Oh, I'm sure she did
, Celia was tempted to say.
And I can just imagine some of the things she said
.

“Sorry, I can't remember your name, though,” he said. “I sure should because we heard it over and over, but . . .”

His wife swatted him gently on the arm. “Why, it's Celia. Don't you remember?” She looked at Celia and made a face, as if to say,
Men—what would they do without us?

Her husband smiled and nodded. “Oh yes, of course, that's it. I remember now.” He wrote something down, then said slowly, “But since she was your mother's mother, I don't guess your last name would be Burnes, would it?”

“No, it's Coleman,” Celia said as she saw her aunt Beulah's green Pontiac pull up in the driveway. Good, she thought, now maybe these people would take a hint and leave so she could get back to work.

But that didn't happen till another full hour had passed, after Aunt Beulah had made the mistake of mentioning an old treadle sewing machine stacked up with all of Sadie's old quilts next to the washing machine, and after the preacher's wife—Denise, her name turned out to be—had expressed great interest in it, thus eliciting an invitation from Aunt Beulah to walk through the house to the back porch to see it. They had ended up removing the whole stack of quilts so that Denise could get a better look at the old sewing machine, and then they had brought them all back out into the living room and unfolded each quilt to examine it front and back.

“You'll want to keep some of these,” Aunt Beulah said to Celia, and Denise quickly added, “Oh, absolutely!” Even the preacher seemed to be interested in the quilts, patchwork all of them, which in Celia's opinion were certainly not samples of fine workmanship, though they did possess a simple homespun charm in the style of folk art. It would be fun, she decided, to have one or two at home, among all her good art, to look at every now and then, to remind herself of how ordinary country people used to live. Maybe she should even display one on a wall somehow if she could find a place for it, or maybe get one of those quilt racks. After all, there would be nothing shameful about having a few crafts mixed in with all her art, especially if they were authentic crafts instead of the fake commercial stuff.

“Sadie used to make these when her children were little,” Aunt Beulah said, running a finger over a square of pink cotton printed with little white rabbits. Well now, that made even more of a difference, Celia thought. She hadn't realized that her grandmother had made the quilts herself. She didn't remember seeing any of them while she was living here. One more thing she had failed to notice all those years ago. Surely the quilts hadn't been on the back porch right in plain sight back then. “She'd get up early, real early in the morning before anybody else was up,” Aunt Beulah said, “and work on them before she fixed breakfast.”