No Dark Valley (39 page)

She was staring down at her name on the card when the man and woman sang the first words of their duet. They were singing without accompaniment, which made the surprise all the greater, since there was no introduction to prepare her. When she saw Denise Davidson glance over at her quickly, she wondered if she had involuntarily done something to give away her shock—maybe jerked suddenly or uttered a sharp yip of pain. She tried to make her face absolutely blank as she focused her eyes on the wall behind the singers, trying hard to block out what they were singing.

It was a rock wall, flanking the baptistry, and it called to mind another source of guilt Celia had struggled with as a girl. The rocks were irregularly shaped, all sizes and different shades of gray and brown, and when her mind used to wander from Brother Thacker's sermons, she would sit in the congregation and try to find pictures on the wall. One grouping of rocks on the left side looked like a stout hiker with a large pack on his back, and on the right there was a little man kicking a box. Right above the baptistry a three-legged dog was standing on its head. She found them all now with no trouble. The rock wall was another thing that hadn't changed a bit.

She remembered how she used to pray for forgiveness every time she let herself start playing the little find-the-picture game in church. She knew it was sinful to let your mind wander when Brother Thacker was preaching, but that rock wall was in such a bad place, right behind his head, and often she would catch herself falling into the temptation before she was even aware of it. She would look back down at her notebook, where she kept sermon notes, and see that she had broken off right in the middle of a sentence:
Our biggest concern in life should be
 . . . it might read, or
God only asks that we
 . . . She often went home from church feeling totally unworthy, wondering what the ends of those sentences had been and fearing what God was going to have to do next to teach her a lesson.

The man singing the song now was a tenor and the woman an alto, so he sang the melody while she harmonized. The song wasn't in the Tabernacle hymnal, but it was one Celia used to hear regularly at Bethany Hills. And at home, too. She had even played it once as an offertory on her clarinet at her grandmother's request. She wasn't sure, but she thought she remembered that some jazz musician had written it, either the words or the music, maybe both—some big-band guy. The two people singing it now weren't jazzing it up, though. They were singing it straight. No scooped notes, no breathiness, no embellishments of any kind: “Precious Lord, take my hand, lead me on, help me stand.”

It went on to beg for guidance through the storms of life, when a person's strength was at its end, when he was about to fall. “Precious Lord, take my hand,” it kept repeating. The man and woman started out in unison on the last verse, and Celia shifted her eyes from the rock wall to look right at them. Something about the woman's face, a hollow sagging look around the eyes even though she was obviously trying to smile with her mouth, sent a chill up Celia's backbone. She reminded Celia of pictures she had seen of victims of the Holocaust marching in long lines, women whose children had been yanked from their arms, whose eyes said, “We know our days are numbered, and we wish the number would hurry up and expire.”

The last verse of the song wasn't one Celia remembered. “Though the night be long,” the two people sang, “in my heart there's a song.” Long nights—Celia had known plenty of those, but she sure hadn't heard any songs during them. Whoever wrote those words must have lived in a fantasy world. As they came to the last “Take my hand, precious Lord, lead me home,” Celia wondered all of a sudden why Grandmother had omitted this song from her funeral plans. It was one she used to sing and hum around the house all the time, probably more than any other. It could very well have been her favorite song. And it would have fit right in with the theme of heaven at her funeral.

Maybe she had chosen her funeral songs strictly from the
Tabernacle Hymns
, though. Celia could imagine her sitting up in bed one night, thumbing through the pages, making a list of all the possibilities to be sung over her dead body. She might have stayed up late that night to wash down the shelves of her dish cupboard, then stir up a bowl of Jell-O, then mend a tablecloth, then run a measly two inches of water in the tub for her bath, after which she might have climbed into bed and picked out hymns for her own funeral. To a woman like Grandmother, who saw birth and death as just two more days in a person's life, it would have seemed like the most natural thing in the world to do: clean house, cook, bathe, plan your funeral.

For some reason a vision of Grandmother's large hands rose again before Celia. Perhaps it was the suggestion in the song of Jesus taking her grandmother's hand and leading her home, or maybe it was because Celia had spent the last few days touching her things, the things her grandmother herself had handled, and laying them out on tables for the yard sale. Though there wasn't an elegant item among them, almost everything had sold. Aunt Beulah had boxed up the few remaining items and taken them to the Salvation Army.

A neighbor a half mile down on Old Campground Road had bought all five of the old quilts. A wiry little woman with three barefoot children trailing along behind her, she had the looks of someone who planned to put the quilts to good everyday use come winter. Aunt Clara, who had stopped by to nose around the tables, had asked Celia if she was
sure
she wanted to part with those quilts, and Aunt Beulah had sprung to her defense, telling Aunt Clara that Celia had already selected the two best ones for keepsakes.

Celia thought now of the one she had out on display at home. After having it dry cleaned, she had draped it over her mother's old cedar chest in her living room. It was the one with the
Dean's Pork Sausage
square right in the middle among all the printed, striped, and polka-dot ones. She had arranged the quilt so that that square was on top. At the other end of the cedar chest, she had placed a few other things she had brought home from Grandmother's: a chipped enamel dipper, an old candle snuffer, an ancient checkerboard, a cookie jar shaped like a big red apple.

In the midst of all her good paintings and sculptures, all her tasteful furnishings, she knew that some people might think this little exhibit was totally out of character. Celia didn't care, though. She didn't like the overplanned effect so many interior designers went in for these days. Mix it up—that was the way she liked things.

All of a sudden something funny hit her. She remembered the dinner table at Aunt Beulah's house the day of Grandmother's funeral, how everything was all crowded together with no attempt made to categorize the dishes. She also remembered how contemptuous she had felt when she saw how disorganized it all was. And now here she was five months later declaring “mix it up” to be her preferred decorating style. It made her wonder what other glaring inconsistencies she had overlooked in her personal life.

The preacher was well into his sermon before Celia started actually listening. He was preaching from the book of Joshua, about the sin of Achan. Nothing much had changed here, either. Brother Thacker had also been partial to the subject of God's punishment of sin. This new preacher was getting to the part where Achan finally admitted his guilt of hiding the Babylonian garment in his tent, along with the silver and gold. No doubt he would soon come to the stoning, the sure and severe penalty that always followed a digression from the law.

Celia tuned out and let her mind retreat again, trying to imagine how long it would take for a person to die of stoning. Maybe, as a grotesque form of mercy, they tried to aim for the head first to knock the person unconscious right away so that he couldn't feel himself being battered to death. Probably not, though. They didn't give much thought back in Bible days to the criminal's comfort during his punishment. Stoning, beheading, crucifixion—it was all brutal.

Next to her she heard Denise say right out loud, “That's right,” and Celia snapped back to listening. The next thing she heard the preacher say made her wonder if he had suddenly lost his place in his notes. “God loved Achan,” he said. “He loved his sons and daughters, too.” Celia glanced around to see if anybody else gave any sign of thinking that God had a mighty unusual way of showing his love. No one else was reacting, though, except for a nod of agreement here and there.

“God could have wiped out all the children of Israel that day for the sin of Achan,” the preacher continued.
Except that he would have thwarted his own plan of sending a messiah through the line of David
, Celia thought. But she didn't have much time to feel superior, for no sooner had she formed the thought than the preacher added in his Georgia drawl, “But Jesus had to be born of Mary, of the house and lineage of David, so God mercifully preserved the race, though once again Israel had grievously disregarded his commandments.”

He went on to catalog all the times God could have destroyed Israel down through the ages for their sins against him. The flood, the tower of Babel, the golden calf, the grumbling in the wilderness, the intermarrying with the Canaanites, on and on through the long list of individual shortcomings and deceptions of the people all the way from Adam and Eve straight through to Peter's denial of Christ in the New Testament and, of course, the ultimate failure of the race as a whole: the refusal to accept Jesus as the Messiah.

“‘It is of the Lord's mercies that we are not consumed,'” the preacher said, “‘because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness.'” It was God's hand, he went on to say, that held sinners “from being dropped into the pit of hell right this very minute.” He even waxed eloquent for a minute or two, alluding to Jonathan Edwards' famous sermon, painting a graphic picture of God holding the world over the raging flames of hell like someone dangling a spider over a campfire.

Celia couldn't help being reminded of Macon Mahoney's painting
Fade, Fade, Each Earthly Joy
. She saw the hand at the top of the canvas, clasping the slender thread with two fingers, swinging the ball of the Earth back and forth like a toy on a string, and she wondered if Macon had been thinking of Jonathan Edwards' sermon when he painted the picture.

“‘There are the black clouds of God's wrath now hanging directly over your heads, full of the dreadful storm, and big with thunder,'” the preacher was saying, “‘and were it not for the restraining hand of God, it would immediately burst forth upon you.'” Celia was pretty sure he was quoting directly from Jonathan Edwards now, and when he added, “‘The sovereign pleasure of God, for the present, stays his rough wind,'” she was positive. But when he said, “Every one of us in this room should get down on their knees and thank God for his patience with us,” she knew he was back to his own words again.

It was an interesting effect, she decided, to hear the powerful drama of an eighteenth-century New England preacher's sermon coming out of the mouth of a man whose every syllable gave him away as a native southerner, who, when he shifted back into his own words, had a little trouble with pronoun case and antecedent agreement.

He was wrapping up his sermon when he said something that took Celia back. Furthermore, she had a feeling that it would keep coming back to her in the days that followed. “But for every instance of God's judgment in Scripture,” he said, “I'll show you two of his great mercy.” And right before the Communion service, he wound things up with “God's love is the theme that runs from Genesis through Revelation. He delights in blessing anyone who gives their life to him. And now we move into a celebration of his greatest blessing—the gift of his Son, who gave himself for us on the cross.”

This was evidently the cue for the deacons to rise from their pews and come forward to pass the plates of Communion bread and the cups of grape juice. Mrs. Abbott at the organ began playing “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross,” and people bowed their heads as if weighed down with shame. Celia passed the plates without taking anything. She didn't even want to be here, so there was no way she was going to compound her hypocrisy by actually participating in the service. She had sung along with the hymns, but that was somehow different.

The two baptisms after that were uneventful, although the second one, a fortyish man, did raise his hands when he was lifted up out of the water and say, “Thank you, Lord Jesus,” right out loud.

When a young couple came forward with a baby wearing a long white dress, Celia closed her eyes.
Just hang on through this and you'll be done
, she told herself.
Think about something else
. She tried shifting her thoughts to all sorts of other things outside the four walls of Bethany Hills Bible Tabernacle, but all she could hear was the preacher's voice saying, “For every instance of God's judgment, I'll show you two of his mercy.” She found herself arguing with him now. Every guilt-ridden day of her life, she felt God's judgment, but the double measure of mercy—well, she sure hadn't experienced that.

When the baby started crying, a lone thin wail, as she had known it surely would, she thought of a question for the preacher: “So where's that mercy you were talking about a while ago?”

The thought came to her that the eye-for-an-eye justice of the Old Testament could actually be seen as a form of mercy, if you didn't believe in the idea of eternal life, that is. With swift tit-for-tat retribution your punishment would be over and done. You kill someone and you die. You wouldn't have to live with the effects of your sin every day of your life. You wouldn't have to suffer through the dreadful storms of long sleepless nights and the thunder of infant voices.

20

Till the Last Beam Fadeth