No Dark Valley (40 page)

At first Celia had thought of it as a total miracle that somebody wanted to buy Grandmother's house, but then she had learned that the train no longer kept its daily schedule along that stretch of track. With that drawback out of the way, she could see how somebody might want a small clean house like her grandmother's, even though it would need a new roof in the next few years and the kitchen was no bigger than a walk-in closet. Maybe a widow or a retired couple, somebody who didn't do a lot of cooking, would find it just right.

But it turned out to be a newly married couple. And one of the biggest surprises was that they were paying cash, so there was no loan approval to wait for. Evidently the girl's father, an orthodontist, was giving them the house as a wedding present. They wanted to move in soon, in July, so they'd be all settled by the time school started. They were both teachers in Dunmore, one at the high school and the other at an elementary school. They had come by twice already to take some measurements while Celia had been here this time, and it was clear that they were champing at the bit to start hanging curtains and unpacking dishes.

This couple was a great mystery to Celia, and she marveled that they hailed from right here in Dunmore. They looked like they belonged in some big city like Atlanta or Savannah. They were both good-looking in a wholesome, all-American way—shiny brown hair, clear fresh complexions, straight white teeth. Their names were Luke and Ashley Franco, and they both had one whole year of teaching under their belts.

The first time they came by the house, Celia had two more names for her list of married couples who looked like each other. Here they were, the Franco twins, with their shiny-faced star quarterback and head cheerleader kind of good looks. She added them at once to the preacher and his wife, the look-alike Davidsons, and her next-door neighbors back home, Bruce and Kimberly, whose last name she didn't even know, who, not counting his scars and her extra weight, could also be siblings.

Now that she thought about it, though, it wasn't just the couples she had met recently. Milton and Patsy Stewart looked alike, too. They were almost exactly the same height and body build, wore the same bland smiles, and from a distance appeared to have something perched on top of their heads, Patsy's hairdo looking like a helmet with earflaps and Morton's like an upside-down mixing bowl. Even Ollie and Connie favored each other, with their Scandinavian kind of good looks, both tall and big-boned with blue eyes and blond hair going gray. And Boo Newman's husband was as plump as she was, though Celia had seen him only a couple of times through the art gallery window and couldn't judge how much they looked alike in the face. She thought also of her Coleman grandparents, Papa and Mums, who had looked a lot like the farm couple in the famous
American Gothic
painting—stiff, responsible, and deadpan, though her grandfather had been a scientist not a farmer.

She thought also of her own parents. When she was growing up, she didn't think anything about it, but now she could see that they, too, had looked like they came from the same gene pool. People had called her mother “cute”—she remembered that clearly—and her father, in spite of the fact that he was a chronic worrier, had a boyish grin and a smattering of leftover freckles across his nose—Sally Field and Ron Howard kind of faces. Gidget and Opie.

Of course, she knew she could make a list of an equal number of couples who didn't even remotely resemble each other, but once she got past Aunt Beulah and Uncle Taylor and Elizabeth and Ken Landis, she lost interest. It was more fun to think about couples who looked alike and to hypothesize about why it so often happened that way. Did they gravitate toward each other in the first place because they recognized something familiar in the other person's face, or was it that true intimacy, physical and emotional, somehow worked its way out of the soul and into their features? In other words, was the resemblance a cause or a result of the relationship, or maybe a little of both?

Oh, these were the kinds of things Celia could spend hours contemplating, and with no good results. What did it matter, really? Maybe the whole subject of couples looking alike was just something she had dreamed up. Maybe nobody else saw it at all. Sometimes she had to laugh at herself for getting so carried away. She had once read somewhere that marriage was never more interesting than to someone who was single.

The closing for the house was scheduled for Tuesday, two days after Celia had attended Bethany Hills Bible Tabernacle. When it was over, she would be around thirty-four thousand dollars richer, not counting what they'd brought in from the yard sale. She would give Aunt Beulah something for all her help with sorting things and organizing the sale. And Uncle Taylor, too. There was no way she could have cleared out the storage building and barn without his help. He had filled up the bed of his pickup truck countless times and carried loads to the dump, to the Salvation Army, to his own workshop. Luke Franco had been interested in the old tractor and several other things in the barn, so some of it was staying.

Late Tuesday morning before the one o'clock closing at the lawyer's office, Celia went out to the barn one last time to make sure the paper wasps were all gone, that there wasn't a contingent hanging around the rafters somewhere trying to build another nest. She also wanted to check the inside of the old store again to see if she had overlooked anything there. Ashley Franco had asked to keep the coal stove that had been shoved into a corner, had said she wanted Luke to clean it up and paint it with black enamel to use as an end table in the living room.

Celia swung open the barn door and stepped inside. It looked like a totally different place than it had five days ago. It was big enough and clean enough now to hold a moderate-sized square dance in. She smiled at the thought of sending invitations to Grandmother's sisters and her brother, Buford, and the legions of cousins. One of those preprinted ones that read, “You are cordially invited to” and then had a blank after it, in which she would write “A Square Dance!” in big bold letters. In the blank after “Where,” she would write “The Late Sadie Burnes's Barn on Old Campground Road.” What pleasure she could derive from such a parting shot as she took her leave of Dunmore, Georgia.

She could imagine all the aunts on the telephone, gasping at the thought of holding a
dance
on Sadie's property. They would never catch that it was a joke. They would assume the invitation was for real. She'd be willing to bet that every one of them would sneak by in their cars at the appointed time, hoping to catch a horrified glimpse of swirling petticoats and stomping feet in the barn. It would almost be worth the time and trouble to hang around and watch their disappointment when they found it was a hoax.

Celia walked around inside the barn, squinting up at all the rafters. No sign of more wasp nests. She was circling back toward the door when she saw a small box behind the tractor. She hadn't noticed it before, and obviously Uncle Taylor hadn't, either. When she opened the top, she saw that it was more than half full of broken walnut shells. No telling how long they'd been here. Years ago there had been an old walnut tree out near the railroad track, but some men from a county work crew had cut it down the summer after Celia had come to live with her grandmother. They said the branches were too close to the track.

Grandmother hadn't been happy about losing the tree even though the railroad line had paid her a little something for it. She kept talking about how she would miss it. She had gathered the walnuts every fall and, like Milton Stewart back home, had spent hours in the evenings cracking the hard shells and picking out the nutmeats. The Thanksgiving after Celia came to live with her, Grandmother had cooked a turkey outdoors in the open pit her long-dead husband had dug for that purpose. She had placed walnut shells on top of the coals, telling Celia it would give the bird a better flavor. And it
had
tasted good, even though, as usual, Grandmother had overcooked it. The skin had been charred black, and the meat was dry.

Grandmother grumbled about the loss of the walnut tree for weeks and weeks. Celia, however, had gotten in on enough of the gathering and shelling of walnuts during that one fall to make her want to hug the men who had cut it down, but she stayed quiet and never let on. She tried to look sympathetic when Grandmother talked about not having walnuts for pies and cookies and not having the shells to use for roasting in the pit. To be honest, Celia knew by now that Grandmother's pies and cookies would never win any blue ribbons at the Georgia State Fair, and she still remembered how hard it had been to chew that turkey.

She couldn't help wondering now how long this box of walnut shells had been sitting out here. It would have been over twenty summers since the tree was cut down. No doubt Grandmother had forgotten all about them, for she never would have willingly let something go to waste. She would have built an outdoor fire and cooked over it every night if she had to until the shells were used up. So what could have happened to make her grandmother forget about them?

As Celia looked down into the box of broken shells, an idea suddenly took shape that until this minute had never entered her mind. She had thought plenty over the years about how her own life had been turned upside down by coming to live with her grandmother, but right this minute she stood very still and thought about the ways in which her coming here had changed her grandmother's life, had interrupted her days and maybe made her forget things like a box of walnut shells stored in the barn.

Well into her sixties at the time, Grandmother would have already lived alone as a widow for over ten years, having closed down the little store after her husband's death and having sold his pickup truck and a few personal effects in order to pay off his debts. For over ten years she would have been living off her monthly social security check, recording in a ledger how every penny was spent. Celia had run across those ledgers while cleaning out her grandmother's drawers.

She didn't know all the details of the financial arrangements, but she knew her grandmother had received some kind of government money for taking her in. Not that anyone had ever sat Celia down and explained it all to her. Ansell had been the one to tell her, when she was seventeen, that the government gave money to guardians of orphans. “What? You think the old bat's doing it out of the goodness of her heart?” he had said to Celia. “Get real, Celia.”

During her last year of high school, Celia had said some pretty ugly things about the money when she had been angry at her grandmother. She had accused her more than once of hoarding
her
money to use for herself later. She had to use the accusation of hoarding because it was clear her grandmother wasn't spending it on extravagances. The only things she ever bought were the weekly groceries, gas, and school clothes for Celia.

She remembered now how surprised she had been when she turned eighteen and learned how much money was available to her for her college education. She had gotten five thousand from Papa and Mums Coleman, the bulk of their estate going to an endowment fund at the college where Papa had taught. But there was much, much more than five thousand in what Grandmother called her “college fund.” This was when Celia had formed the assumption that her father's investments must have done a lot better than he let on. And who could tell? Maybe that was the case.

Right now, though, standing in the barn staring down at the walnut shells, she allowed a thought to circle around and round in her mind. Maybe Grandmother
had been
hoarding money all those years, but maybe she had been hoarding it for Celia's education, to add to whatever was already there from the sale of her parents' assets.

Then suddenly she came to her senses.
Wait a minute
, she told herself.
She was a stingy old woman
.
Don't start making her out to be a kindhearted philanthropist
. She made herself think of the leather jacket she had wanted so badly her senior year. It wasn't the most expensive one by any means, but at least it was real leather even if it was in the Sears catalog. She had shown it to her grandmother that fall, when the days had started turning cooler, and had strongly hinted that it would be a great Christmas present. Several times after that she had seen her grandmother slowly turning the pages of the catalog as she sat in her rocking chair by the gas heater.

One large box with Celia's name on it had appeared under the small artificial tree that Christmas, and even though they had had a rocky time at home for the preceding few months, Celia had actually let herself believe that she was getting the leather jacket for Christmas.

When she had opened the present on Christmas morning, it wasn't the jacket, of course, but a bright blue wool parka with a hood and little oblong wooden buttons that slipped through loops. She hadn't disguised her disappointment, hadn't even tried to, and when Grandmother said, “This one's more practical, Celie,” Celia had replied, “Yeah, and it's also a lot cheaper and uglier,” then had left the parka in the box on the floor and shut herself up in her bedroom.

She wondered now why she hadn't refused to wear it altogether or why she hadn't marched down to Sears and gotten a refund, then bought something else she wanted with the money. She didn't recall that such an idea had even occurred to her. Instead, she had eventually worn the stupid parka, had worn it a lot, in fact. For being such a rebel, she surely hadn't had much backbone. It had kept her warm through six Delaware winters at Blackrock College until she got her master's degree and her first full-time job at a newspaper in Dover. She had even put it on and worn it in bed in the middle of the summer fourteen years ago, in the days following her trip to the clinic when she couldn't get warm.

And the really funny thing was that when she had gone to a department store in Delaware after starting her first job, to finally buy a leather jacket, she had felt lightheaded and short of breath when she looked at the price tags. She had tried on a dozen or more and had gone away without buying one.