No Dark Valley (33 page)

By now most of the other women had stopped their various conversations and were listening to Eldeen. “They carry little torches, you see, and they wiggle theirself down these long dark burrows, where the python's a-layin' all snugged up asleep in his den, and they
snatch
'em real quick right behind their head”—to illustrate, she reached a man-sized hand behind her own head and grabbed her neck—“and then they drag 'em out and slit open their throats and . . .”

This time the other woman must have exerted a little more pressure on Eldeen's arm, for Eldeen lost her rhythm and looked over at her. The younger woman whispered something, at which Eldeen burst out with a great honk of laughter, followed by another series of deep, sheeplike baas, then clamped her hand over her mouth briefly. “Oh yes, I know it. I know it!” she said. “I'll stop now, I promise. We didn't come here to listen to me talk about snake huntin'. We got us a meeting to get started! You go right ahead, Elizabeth honey, and I'll be quiet as a little church mouse.” She laughed again and added,” A
mouse
—now that reminds me. The article said that's one thing them pythons like to eat!”

Elizabeth smiled and looked down, smoothing her skirt, a pale apricot knit. Celia always liked the colors Elizabeth put together. From the first time she had come into the gallery years ago, Celia could tell she had a flair for color, and not your traditional combinations, either. That day she had been wearing cranberry-colored slacks and a bulky sweater the blue of a robin's egg. Tonight with her apricot skirt, she had on a sleek tunic-style top the color of a clay pot, with the sleeves pushed up. Her only jewelry was a large silver pin shaped like a conch shell.

“Well, all right,” she said, nodding toward the attractive woman seated to her right. “I guess we'll go ahead and get started now, Margaret. I thought maybe we could go around first, starting with you, and give our names for Celia.” The other woman, whom Celia took to be the leader of the group, nodded and gave her name. “Margaret Tuttle,” she said, smiling at Celia.

When it got around to Eldeen's turn, she said, “Eldeen Rafferty, and just one more little thing about them pythons . . . they don't spit out poison like some snakes, but they got these long teeth in the back that curves backwards and can tear up flesh like saw blades!” She grinned, a grisly-looking grimace of a smile, then said, “There, I'm done. Oh, and I guess I was out of the room when this little lady got introduced.” She nodded toward Celia.

Celia had already identified Eldeen by now, of course, as the nighttime visitor, the bringer of muffins, the persistent Woodmont Street welcoming-committee-of-one who had come to Al Halston's house the night she broke up with him back in February. The woman who claimed to be marching through Immanuel's land, whose finger was on the pulse of the whole neighborhood, who kept watch at her front window on the comings and goings of everyone along the street.

Yet Celia also remembered the curious feeling she had had as Eldeen left Al's house that night—the simultaneous rush of relief at getting rid of her, mixed with the inexplicable desire to follow her out and give her a hug. She remembered wondering what it would have been like to have a grandmother like her instead of the solemn, poker-faced one she had been saddled with. Even though the woman had made no secret of her religion, she seemed to have a broad imagination and a generous spirit. You could tolerate a little religion in a grandmother like that.

Though Eldeen had crossed Celia's mind a number of times since February, never had she suspected they would someday be thrown together again. Now as Elizabeth repeated Celia's name and an abridged version of her introduction for Eldeen's benefit, the older woman cocked her head and stared at her intently. But evidently she didn't make the connection with Al, for afterward she broke into another alarming smile and stated her pleasure in making Celia's acquaintance. Then, surprisingly, she fell silent and allowed the meeting to continue.

The painting Celia had chosen to bring to the meeting was one of what Ollie referred to as his “experientials,” which fell between his earlier objective landscapes and the moody mythological abstracts he had dabbled in before his most recent exploration of architectural themes, or “playing around with the line,” as he liked to describe his current style. Personally, Celia thought Ollie's earlier work was superior to his later stuff, but she knew artists had to be free to roam, so she never spoke up and agreed when his wife, Connie, openly expressed her opinion about the direction he was going, which she did quite often without mincing words.

“Get back to humanity,” Connie was fond of saying. “These things you're doing now aren't what people want hanging on their walls at home. They're sure not what
I
want hanging on
our
walls. That last thing looked like a blueprint you'd roll up and put a rubber band around.” Not that the recent pieces didn't have the mark of an acknowledged master of color, line, and form. They were good art, no doubt about it, but not terribly appealing to the average collector who came into the Trio Gallery with the dual ambition of investing and decorating. “People have to feel art tugging at them,” Connie would say. “The stuff you're doing now is for the connoisseur, not for the nice person who's looking for something to hang above his mantel or go over a new sofa.”

Ollie would argue good-naturedly, accusing Connie of lapses in her logic. “You and your false dichotomies,” he might say, laughing. “As if a connoisseur can't also be a nice person.”

“Well, anyway, you need to get back to humanity,” she would always repeat at some point in their debate. “Something people feel drawn to, not all this gothic, sterile stuff.”

Connie often seemed to fling words around indiscriminately, yet somehow they always managed to communicate quite precisely. Like
gothic
and
sterile
, two words that had seemed to fall off her tongue at random. Ollie's style during his mythological phase had indeed been somewhat gothic, full of dark brooding stylized figures arranged in highly allegorical contexts, while the spare lines of his more recent architectural pieces did give each piece the cold, sterile feel of an office or waiting room. “You've gone from way too much to way too little,” Connie also liked to say. “Keep on and pretty soon you'll be down to blank canvases with a little dot in the middle.”

But Celia herself would never say such things to Ollie's face. Instead, she used words like
mystical
and
evocative
or
uncluttered
and
innovative
. And then there was
interesting
. That was always a highly useful word, too.

The painting she had chosen for tonight, though, was one of Connie's favorites. She was out of town for a few days, visiting her mother in Irmo, or Ollie might have had trouble getting her permission to take it off the wall. “This way she'll never know,” he said when Celia had stopped by to get it.

He had offered her anything in his studio, but none of those pieces seemed suited to tonight's purposes. To be polite, she had nevertheless looked at them all. She knew she'd see many of them again when Ollie did his next show of new works at the gallery. When she had hesitated, then asked if he'd let her take the painting in the entryway by the front door, the one titled
Beyond
, he had agreed at once, as long as it was back on the wall by the time Connie came home.

After a few words from Margaret Tuttle by way of introducing the goal of this evening's format, which was the composition of original poems by the women themselves, Elizabeth spoke briefly about three well-known paintings and read the three poems inspired by them. She had distributed handouts containing small prints of each painting, along with the text of each poem. In addition, she had larger color prints of the three paintings, which showed more detail than the handouts.

Elizabeth had evidently changed her mind about which paintings and poems to use, for they were different from the ones she had mentioned to Celia earlier. There were a few comments and questions after Elizabeth's part. Concerning Cathy Song's poem about Kitagawa Utamaro's
Girl Powdering Her Neck
, Eldeen observed, “How'd she know them was maple leaves on that lady's kimono? Looks to me more like little birds a-flittin' through the air.” Another woman asked what a “meerschaum” was in Delmore Schwartz's poem about the painting by Seurat, and someone else noted how the verb tense shifted in the third poem by Molly Peacock.

Then Elizabeth turned the floor over to Celia to “share with us a fine work by a contemporary artist living right here in our own corner of the world.” Celia enjoyed the sensation of unveiling Ollie's painting, of lifting off the blue blanket and hearing the admiring murmurs of the women. It was a large painting, around thirty-six by fifty-two inches. She loved standing right next to it and basking in its beauty and power. And when she started talking, she had no trouble finding words for
Beyond
. There was so much to be said, in fact, that it was hard to find a place to stop. She defined terms such as
impasto, Mars pigments, ochre
, and
copal
as she went along. The women listened closely, as if preparing for a test over the material. Most of them were taking notes.

The painting, richly suggestive of a thousand things, combined golds, oranges, grays, and browns with so many subtle gradations you'd think you were looking at something in real life, except for the fact that you couldn't identify an actual scene or object. It could be any number of things if you were bent on trying to find a picture of something in it—the sky above a canyon, the intimate parts of a giant flower, the Florida Keys at dusk, a woman lying in a pool of sunlight, an oil spill, the interior of a topaz mine—which made it the perfect piece for the poetry club to write about.

After Celia's talk, the idea was for the women to come up to the easel a few at a time and examine the painting at close range, ask questions, and then go back to their seats and start writing their poems. They wouldn't be able to finish them that night, most likely, but they were to jot down ideas, certain phrases that came to mind, decide on a unifying theme, maybe get a few lines put together. Elizabeth, Margaret, and Celia were all available for consultation during this half hour of initial rough drafting, and then at the next monthly meeting they were to bring back their finished poems, revised and polished, to share with one another.

When Eldeen came up to view the painting, Celia noticed that she had evidently already decided on a theme for her poem, for in her spiral notebook she had printed on the top line in large, childish letters,
WHEN WE GET TO HEAVEN
. She stooped and craned her neck forward so her nose was about ten or twelve inches from the bottom of the painting, and she scanned her eyes back and forth across the canvas, turning her head from side to side, as spectators did while watching a tennis match, gradually straightening as she went higher, until she was again standing to her full height.

Being so close to her, Celia could easily imagine Eldeen being featured at a carnival, alongside the Sword Eater, the Two-Headed Man, and the Bearded Lady. They could bill her as the Huge Funny Old Woman. It might not sound all that strange, but people would sure get their money's worth if they gave her a chance.

After Eldeen's close-up perusal, she stepped back and took another good long look at the painting, then whispered to Celia loudly, so as not to disturb the others, “That there's a picture of the shinin' pathway to heaven, clear as clear can be!” She pointed to the bottom corner of the canvas. “Right now we're standin' outside, don't you see, way off here in the valley of shadows a-lookin' at it from afar.”

Then she pointed to the broad, curved band of gold running through the center. “There's the road leadin' to the celestial city. See how it keeps a-gettin' brighter as it goes along? And right there—see? See that splotch of yellow, like the sky's busted a hole in itself? Why, that's the light of eternity spillin' out the gate! And all this up here”—she waved her hand at the bleeding layers of reds, oranges, and golds at the top—“all this here's the reflected glory and majesty and splendor of the Almighty God and his precious son, Jesus, whose blood ran down the old rugged cross of Calvary to give old Eldeen Rafferty a ticket to show at the gate!” She leaned even closer to Celia then and added, still talking in a stage whisper, “And I don't know if you know it or not, honey, but he'll give
you
a ticket, too, if he already hasn't!”

Not a word of which surprised Celia one bit. Why hadn't she thought of heaven as a potential topic for the poems springing from a painting titled
Beyond
? Knowing that Elizabeth was a churchgoer, she should have known there would be others in the group. It would be the most natural thing in the world for someone wired together like Eldeen to interpret the painting this way. Celia glanced back at Eldeen, who was smiling at her hopefully, and revised the sign on Eldeen's carnival exhibit: Huge Funny Old Religious Woman.

She thought again, as she had that other time at Al's house, of how much her grandmother and Eldeen could have found to talk about—two women totally different in temperament but standing on the same unshakable bedrock. Celia let herself imagine for a moment what it would have been like if Eldeen had been one of their neighbors in Dunmore, Georgia, if she and Grandmother had visited back and forth and traded recipes with each other. Maybe she would have rubbed off on Grandmother a little, could have eased the lines around her grim mouth and made her laugh once in a while.

“See, here's how my poem starts out,” Eldeen said, showing Celia her spiral notebook. “There's a song we sing at church with almost the same words, except it says, ‘When we
all
get to heaven,' but I left out the
all
because, sad to say, we're not
all
going to get there.” She patted Celia's hand, quite hard. “But I hope
you
are, honey, I sure do. I can talk to you during refreshments and tell you how to get there if you want me to, that is, if you don't already know.” She squeezed her hand, again quite hard. “You sure are a pretty little angel of a thing. You look like you
belong
in heaven, like you're just down here amongst us on loan!” She let go of Celia's hand. “You know, I keep thinking I've met you
somewhere
before, but I just can't put my finger on it.” Celia let it pass. She didn't want to bring up Al Halston's name. Eldeen turned around and moved back to her seat on the sofa.