No Dark Valley (25 page)

The preacher, wearing his glasses now, sat down on a small footstool and examined one of the quilts. “Look at all these stitches,” he said, shaking his head. “Think of the time this took.”

“She made the squares out of old clothes,” Aunt Beulah continued. “I used to give her some of ours. In fact, I'm almost sure this red plaid came from a pair of Jerry's pajamas.” Which Celia figured must be why they looked so faded. Most likely the clothes were already ragged with wear by the time Grandmother turned them into quilt squares. Aunt Beulah lifted the quilt to her nose. Celia could imagine thousands of mildew spores pouring into her aunt's lungs. There was no telling how long those quilts had been on the back porch, unprotected from the humid Georgia air. Whatever she decided to keep would have to be dry-cleaned.

“I think this is the best one,” Aunt Beulah said. “You ought to put it in the kitchen with your other things, Celie. Here, I'll help you fold it back up.” And together they folded it.

“Maybe I'll take a couple of them,” Celia said as she headed to the kitchen with the folded quilt. She had her eye on another one that had a white cotton square right in the middle of all the other multicolored ones, stamped with blue letters:
Dean's Pork Sausage
. That one had personality.

The tabletop in the kitchen was almost full, but she moved some things over and placed the quilt next to Grandmother's old brown copy of
Tabernacle Hymns Number Three
, which she had run across quite early in her sorting, back in Grandmother's bedroom on a little table. Everything inside her had told her to throw it in the trash bag or put it in the pile of things to donate to the Salvation Army, but instead she had taken it to the kitchen table. It was, in fact, one of the first things she had set aside to keep.

As she stood at the kitchen table now, staring at the hymnal, she heard the preacher back in the living room, his voice still full of wonder. “Just think of it,” he said. “Think of how much sleep she must have sacrificed every morning to make all these.”

With every morning sacrifice
. Celia touched her finger to the raised design of a small torch on the cover of the hymnal. She knew she could open the book right this minute and find the hymn the phrase came from. Again the thought came to her that she ought to get as far away from this book as she could. She ought to take it out in the woods, throw it into the pond, and let it sink to the bottom.
Take it home and you'll be doomed for the rest of your life
, she told herself.
You'll hear her voice every time you turn around
.

But a few hours later, when she had finally gotten rid of the preacher and his wife, said good-bye to Aunt Beulah, and locked up her grandmother's house, the hymnbook was inside one of the three cardboard boxes she had loaded into the trunk of her car. She started her car, then backed out of the driveway to head out of town, and though she should have peeled off as fast as she could go, for some reason she couldn't begin to explain, she paused once more to look at the house. She imagined her grandmother's hand pulling aside the cheap organdy curtains at the front window, her lips pinched together as she watched Celia drive off.

13

Ten Thousand Charms

By the time she had pulled into the Stewarts' driveway back in Derby and unlocked her door, Celia felt as if she were returning from an assault on Mount Everest. It was odd how physically tiring it could be simply to sort through things in closets and drawers. The lack of sleep no doubt accounted for some of her exhaustion, as well as the emotional strain of being back in Dunmore and handling her grandmother's things.

And guilt—that could wear a person down, too. The whole weekend she had felt bound up and suffocated with guilt in spite of her vigorous attempts to reason it away.
You're free from it all
, she had kept telling herself.
She's not here anymore to point her finger and spout off a long list of no-no's. Sure, you've messed up, everybody has, but it's over and done. Get on with life!
Nothing worked, though. In Grandmother's house she felt something large and dismal looming over her at every turn, glaring at her, rustling around reproachfully behind her back. Her little pep talks were useless.

It took several trips to get everything from the trunk of her car into her apartment. As she set each of the three boxes on the floor of her living room, she wondered again if it wasn't a huge mistake to bring all this stuff home. There was no way to explain why she had kept some of it—the old radio, for instance. Every part of her had screamed out to trash it, yet she had watched her own hand reach down and unplug it, then lift it from Grandmother's nightstand and carry it to the kitchen table. Later, even as a voice inside her was yelling,
You'll regret this!
she had placed it inside one of the cardboard boxes.

Maybe she should leave everything packed up. She could store the boxes in the Stewarts' basement and never have to look inside them. She could take them over right now and put them in the storage area with her other things. She wondered if it would be possible to forget all about them, or if she would wake up through the night and hear faint scrabbling sounds coming from the other side of her basement door. Or maybe eerie strains of old hymns or the soft whir of beaters or the strident tones of a radio preacher's voice. She knew very well what her imagination was capable of.

She suddenly remembered something Ansell used to say to her in his low, lazy voice: “All those years of moral rectitude have warped your psyche, Celia. In the parade of life, you could carry the banner for the Society of Religion-Induced Stress Syndrome.” He had loved to taunt her about what he called her “plethora of hang-ups.” More than once, though, Celia had suspected it was her religious background that so intrigued him, that without it she wouldn't have been nearly so welcome in his small select circle of friends, that he fancied in their unlikely friendship something of a conquest.

Ansell had always imagined himself a great intellectual, had talked about studying philosophy in college and writing essays and poetry that, once decoded by the critics, would turn the world on its head. Only he wouldn't care, of course. The world could do whatever it wanted. He didn't need its praise, would actually shun it if he got it. He was above all that.

And as for criticism, well, he was like the peak of an ancient pyramid, he used to say, and when it stormed, whether a measly few drops of faultfinding or a gully washer of condemnation, it just ran right down to the base and soaked into the sand. Nothing could touch him up at the top. He would live somewhere in solitude after college, he said, away from the abysmally ignorant masses, and spend his days thinking, reading, and writing. How he planned to finance his hermitic existence was never a topic of discussion, though maybe he should have thought about that part, since his family wasn't wealthy. His father taught math at their local high school, and his mother worked at the Dunmore post office.

Celia checked the car once more, then locked her front door and went into the kitchen to make some popcorn. That would be her supper tonight—a bag of popcorn and a Coke. Her grandmother and Aunt Beulah would be horrified.

She had stopped for a late lunch at a Burger King drive-through sometime around three, about an hour outside of Dunmore, but was so out of it that she had forgotten to tell them to hold the onions and ketchup. As soon as she had realized her mistake, she had stopped along the road and pulled off the onions, then tried to wipe off all the ketchup with a napkin, but it was no good. She could still taste the onion, had even bit down on a little piece she had missed, and the bun was soggy with the ketchup that had already soaked in.

She had eaten a few bites, then thrown the rest away. As she drove on, she wished she had never stopped. She kept seeing the white paper napkins smeared with ketchup, which metamorphosed into splotches of blood on a white sheet, another image that often showed up in her bad dreams. Even after she stopped at a gas station to wash her hands, she couldn't get the bloodstains out of her mind.

That was another thing Ansell had teased her about—her squeamishness over blood, which in his opinion was also somehow tangled up with her fundamentalist background and all those songs and sermons about blood. And in his habit of reducing everything to the same level of seriousness, he always went on to say that this religious perversion was also undoubtedly the source of her dislike of ketchup and tomato products in general.

Which in turn always led to another of his favorite subjects—what he called her finicky eating habits. “Just give her a chicken wing and some corn bread,” he'd drawl to a waiter whenever they drove over to Cartersville or Rome to eat. He would often order lunch for her when they ate at Haynie's Dinette, adopting a bored tone to underscore his point about the lack of variety in her diet: “One grilled cheese sandwich, fries, and a large Coke.” He was always telling her that she was missing out on all the good stuff in the way of food. “Shrimp, onion rings, mushrooms, pasta, tacos . . .” He had memorized a whole list, and if he was in cheerful spirits, he'd really lay it on thick, throwing up his hands in mock dismay. “Why, you don't even like Chinese—no chop suey, no chow mein, no moo goo gai pan!”

But again, Celia had sensed that this was something else he found interesting about her, that if she were to suddenly begin eating anything and everything, part of her novelty would wear off. Glenn and Renee, the other two in what Ansell called their “core four,” always took their cues from Ansell, joining in on the teasing or falling silent, depending on his moods. Once Glenn had misread him and poked fun at Celia about something—maybe something she was wearing, she couldn't remember now—and Ansell had almost wrenched his arm out of its socket. She could still see Glenn, kneading his arm and trying to act casual. “Hey, it was a
joke
,” he had said, to which Ansell had replied, “So get a new one. That one wasn't funny.”

As the popcorn popped, Celia filled a glass with ice, then opened a can of Coke and slowly poured it in. How had she gotten off on Ansell? she wondered. Thinking about him was certainly not the thing to lift her out of her weekend depression. She had been so cautious over the last couple of days in Dunmore, making sure she never drove past his parents' house, and now here she was, letting him mill around inside her head and talk to her, smiling his slow, cynical smile.

Ansell had been the whole reason she had gone to Blackrock College in Delaware. He had an uncle—actually only a half-brother of his mother's—who was on the music faculty there, one of the few adults for whom Ansell seemed to have some measure of admiration, though he had met him only once when he was twelve. From what Ansell had told Celia, this uncle was something of an eccentric, a pianist and composer who had never married and who lived in a house he had designed himself, surrounded by a wrought-iron fence and guarded by two Dobermans. Celia had the idea that Ansell was hoping to insinuate himself somehow into the uncle's good graces, to be invited inside the wrought-iron fence, to win his confidence, perhaps at some point even to live there while he finished up his college courses.

The microwave beeped, and she removed the bag of popcorn, then carefully opened it and watched the steam rise.
Oh, the dreams of youth
, she thought.
They drift up just like that and vanish
. She emptied the popcorn into a bowl and sat down at the kitchen table.

Ansell's uncle had turned out to be an alcoholic, an old tenured professor just putting in his time whenever he could drag himself to campus. Celia would never forget the look on a girl's face, a music student, when she and Ansell went to the music building in search of the uncle's studio a week or so after arriving on campus. They had found the studio, but a girl was in it, sitting on the piano bench practicing a bassoon. “I'm looking for my uncle,” Ansell said. “Is he here?”

The girl looked down, apparently from embarrassment, and then reached down to her case as if searching for something. “You mean Professor Gambrell? He's your uncle?” She wasn't looking at them. “Well, uh, no, he hasn't been in today, I don't think—or yesterday, either. He lets us use his studio to practice, but he . . . well, I don't think he's in very often.” She straightened, then shrugged. That's when she finally looked right at them, and Celia recognized it at once as a look of pity. Ansell, on the other hand, didn't choose to interpret it that way. He slammed the door shut and pronounced the girl an idiot.

He finally made contact with his uncle a few weeks later, catching him in his studio during what must have been one of his rare appearances. He was with a student, presumably teaching a piano lesson, but was actually slumped in an armchair with his eyes closed while the student played something bombastic, and badly, according to Ansell. They eventually noticed him standing in the doorway, but the uncle couldn't seem to process the information Ansell tried to give him. “I am no one's uncle,” he kept saying. “I have no brothers or sisters,” and then, incoherently, “I will refer you to my attorney, young man.” Ansell tried to act indifferent about it all when he told Celia, but she could sense the flimsiness of the facade. She could hear the anger behind his words, as if he felt betrayed.

Evidently Ansell wasn't cut out for college life, for he lasted only two months. Perhaps inspired by his uncle's example, he began drinking himself into a blind stupor every night and missed most of his classes during the day. He turned on Celia and called her unspeakable names when she tried to talk to him. Something in their relationship suddenly disintegrated, like an airplane exploding in midair, the pieces flying everywhere.

Then one day he simply disappeared from campus. Most of his things were still in his dorm room, but his roommate said he hadn't talked to him in days. Celia remembered the feeling of liberty and happy independence after Ansell left campus, though she wouldn't have admitted it to anybody for the world. She hadn't realized how much he had controlled her life until he was gone, how she was always looking to him to tell her what to do, how she would never make plans on her own until she checked with him. In an upside-down sort of way, she supposed that Ansell had simply replaced her grandmother. She talked to his mother on the telephone a few times and tried to sound sorrowful and comforting, though deep inside she felt ashamed for her insincerity.