No Dark Valley (48 page)

“Travis?”

“My son, Travis. When he was a little kid, I mean really little, like three or four, he pointed to a picture of a possum in one of his nature books and said, ‘Candy corn.' I told him no, it was a possum, and then he put his finger on its nose and said emphatically, ‘Candy corn.' And you know what? That possum's nose did look exactly like a little piece of candy corn stuck on the end of its snout. So now every time I see a dead possum on the road, I think of candy corn.”

One thing Celia had always appreciated about Elizabeth was that she wasn't forever talking about her children the way a lot of the women on the tennis team did. It never ceased to amaze Celia how mothers naturally assumed that you wanted to know all about their kids' accomplishments, their interests, their personalities, their illnesses, every little fact of their short histories. Whenever someone started talking about something one of her children or grandchildren said or did, Celia tried to ease away from the group. And if she was stuck and couldn't escape, say at a table or in a car, she would drift away to some other place in her thoughts.

Which is what she almost started doing now until she realized that Elizabeth had already quit talking about Travis and had returned to the subject of food. Celia was surprised. That had to be a record for the shortest amount of time spent by a mother recounting the charms of her child.

“ . . . one of my very favorites,” Elizabeth was saying now as she studied the forkful of field peas she was preparing to put into her mouth. “I like all the brown vegetables,” she continued. “Crowders, blackeyes, colored limas, pinto beans—the whole bunch of them. Of course, it makes a difference when you grow up on them. My mother fixed them a lot.”

Celia nodded. “We ate them a lot, too.”

They ate in silence for several long seconds, during which Celia heard Patsy Stewart clomping down the basement stairs, followed by a thump as she dropped her laundry basket on the floor, followed shortly by a metallic clank as she shut the lid of the washer. These were sounds as familiar to Celia as her own heartbeat. Always on a regular schedule, too—Monday, Wednesday, and Friday nights without fail, around six-thirty, after Patsy and Milton had eaten supper. Then right after
Wheel of Fortune
Patsy would plod back down to transfer the washed clothes to the dryer, and sometime after
Jeopardy
she would come back down to fold them, using the big table next to the dryer. This part would take only a few minutes so that by eight-fifteen or so she was climbing back up the steps with her basket of clean folded laundry.

Celia had often wondered if Patsy ever considered varying her routine just for fun. Naturally, she couldn't say too much, being a creature of habit herself. For all she knew, Patsy could listen to her doing her own laundry every Thursday night or see her driving off to do her weekly grocery shopping every Friday morning and think,
Well, there goes Celia again, regular as clockwork
.

Elizabeth took another bite of her corn bread and chewed contentedly. Just as she appeared ready to say something, Celia decided to try again. “So what about those poems—the ones the poetry club wrote? Were there any good ones?”

Elizabeth started nodding. “Well, there were some very—”

But just then a most startling sound interrupted whatever it was she was going to say. Although Elizabeth merely stopped and stared curiously toward the kitchen window, from where the sound seemed to come, Celia herself actually gasped out loud. She felt a quick fluttering of her heart. There it was again, a series of high-pitched sirenlike mewlings that sounded exactly like . . . well, exactly like a baby.

And then a vision appeared at the kitchen window. A flash of jet black fur and suddenly there was a cat perched right on the windowsill. He must have leapt straight up from the ground in that odd springy way cats had of getting somewhere quickly. Celia had never seen this cat around here, so at first she was more surprised than annoyed. And the cat itself seemed scared, smashed up against the window screen like that, swiveling its head as if looking for a way of escape. Celia might have remained merely surprised in a detached sort of way if the cat hadn't kept emitting those horrible demanding infantlike cries.

Just as she felt her anger rising, she saw a hand reach up to retrieve the cat, and when Celia saw the scars, she knew exactly whose hand it was. What a low-class thing to do—creep up to somebody's kitchen window right at suppertime. She wondered if this was his idea of a joke, to chase a cat, the very animal she most detested, up to her window and then leave it there to screech its fool head off. She felt like calling Kimberly on the phone and saying, “Please come get your husband. He's prowling around my apartment again.”

24

Fathomless Billows of Love

It was long past midnight. Celia didn't know exactly how long, but she was wondering how she was ever going to be able to get out of bed in a few hours and go to work at the gallery. It had been an awful night so far, and it showed no promise of improvement. Contrary to what she had originally told herself, even though she hadn't really believed it at the time, Grandmother's diaries were not the thing to read before bedtime, not if you were hoping to get some sleep.

She was tempted to reach over and switch on the light but decided against it. For now she preferred lying in the dark. She didn't want to look at the clock, which she always turned around backward before bedtime. If she woke up in the middle of the night, she never wanted to know how little time she had left before the alarm went off.

She wouldn't let herself take a pill. No, this was a night she had to get through by herself. She couldn't take the easy way out. For what must have been at least two hours now, she had tried projecting pictures onto the screen of her mind, a technique by which she sometimes tricked herself into sleep. She had started out by calling up happy times in her childhood—a surprise picnic outing to the Etowah River on her tenth birthday, a blue dragon she had made out of modeling clay and won a prize for, the first time she had waded in the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, a train ride to Mobile, Alabama. But even the happy times had sad parts attached to them. She had slipped on a rock in the Etowah River and twisted her foot, for example, and she had eaten a hot dog on the train ride that made her sick to her stomach.

When the childhood scenes gave out, she had remained very still with her eyes closed, picturing herself standing in a large field, digging for more pleasant memories with a little silver pickax. Over and over she lifted the pickax and brought it down. Surely there were multitudes of other good memories underneath all the bad ones. She even imagined that she heard the soft plunging sound of the pickax as it sank into the loose soil, little glints of mica and quartz chips flying up with every stroke.

And, happily, she at last began to see the pickax uncover what she took to be more good memories. These took the form of glowing gems, which she reached down and plucked out with her hands. But all of them were coated with dirt and long slimy tentacles, and when she tried to brush them off or pinch off the tentacles, one by one the gems broke open and oozed yellow like the yolks of eggs. Then before she could stop the film in her mind, the solid ground under her feet began to turn into a slushy bog, and she saw herself slowly sinking, sputtering and glub-glubbing in a cartoonish way as she went under, holding her silver pickax above her head.

And as she sank, she heard her grandmother's diaries intoning aloud in a low bass voice, much slower than normal, like an old LP record played on the wrong speed: “Spent two hours on my knees after Celie left for school, beseeching the Lord to rescue her soul from the devil.” “Celia still out as I write this at midnight. Oh, Lord, preserve my Celie from destruction!” “Tried to get Celie up for Sunday school. Said she was sick but was gone when I got back from church.” “That boy's got Satan in his eyes. Came for Celia after supper. Honked the horn and she left. Oh, Father God, bring her back.”

For some reason, Celia had decided to start with the diary of her last year in Dunmore instead of at the beginning. Perhaps she had wanted to get the worst one out of the way first. Maybe it was better to see the end already full-blown than to watch it taking shape. How awful it would be to read straight through from her innocent grieving fifteen-year-old self to what she had turned into that last year.

And then there was the entry that was probably the real reason she had started with the last diary, the entry she had been especially curious about, the one she had sought out first, before turning back to January 1 to read straight through the year. It was on March 22: “Had a bad thing happen today. Smoky went after Celie's foot on the porch. Killed him with the hoe. Buried him out back. Cleaned up the scratches and bandaged her foot. Later this P.M. took her to Dr. York. Said she ought to be fine. Please heal her foot like new, precious Lord. Help me know what to do. I'm so weak in body and spirit. Put your hand on Celie, dear Jesus. Planted dahlias today. Scrubbed the blood off the porch. I will never leave thee nor forsake thee, that's what you promised, and I believe it. Sweep over my spirit forever, I pray, in fathomless billows of love.”

Someone examining Grandmother's diaries for style would have to laugh. All the staccato sentences without subjects, the shifts from narrating to imploring to quoting, mixing in Scripture with hymn texts, inserting a homely detail like the planting of dahlias right in the middle of reporting a crisis. But Celia didn't laugh. It wasn't the style she was looking at anyway, but the content.

She didn't know what she had expected. The entry shouldn't have surprised her, but it did. The fact that Grandmother had dispensed with her beloved pet in two economical, passionless sentences—well, it should have just added more proof to what Celia had maintained for all these years: Grandmother was cold and unfeeling. But it didn't, mainly because of all those other sentences, the ones about Celia and her soul. And the admission of weakness—that was another surprise.

Sometimes in the past, taking inventories and reciting lists had helped Celia get to sleep, so to get her mind off Grandmother she now turned to reciting the U. S. presidents, something she used to be able to rattle off with ease. She got stalled, however, after Rutherford B. Hayes. She wrestled with it a while, backing up for another running start, but again and again coming to an empty space after Hayes. She tried moving ahead to Chester Arthur, Grover Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley, and Theodore Roosevelt, hoping the omitted name would come to her if she pretended not to care. But it was no good. She was stumped. And because she knew the reciting trick worked only if you could fall into a trancelike repetition, she gave it up.

A mental tour of the art gallery sometimes helped, so she imagined herself stepping inside the Trio now, looking at the new wire sculpture of a cobra in a basket that stood by the door on a tall wooden pedestal. Macon Mahoney had brought the piece in a couple of weeks earlier, having fashioned it out of a single long piece of fine copper wire, one end of which was the cobra's tongue. She had marveled over it ever since, that art could result from something so utilitarian as a length of wire.

She turned from the sculpture and proceeded through the entry area into the central gallery, slowly passing each of Yvette Song's pen-and-ink sketches—
Old Father Eating, Ling Su With Duck, Rice Moon, Boy on Bamboo Stilts, River Bath
—but all at once she stopped. There on the floor, propped against the doorjamb leading into one of the side rooms, was the Madonna painting. It was facing her head on, exactly where she had found it this morning upon her arrival at work. Evidently Craig had returned it to the gallery. She had always known it would come back, but she hadn't been prepared for it.

The mental tour of the art gallery stopped abruptly, and Celia's head filled with a sudden shrill buzz, like the sustained whine of a mosquito. She threw off the covers, then sat up in bed and turned on the lamp. Reaching over to her nightstand, she picked up the digital clock. It read 3:03.

She got up and went into the bathroom. Only the night-light was on, but she could clearly see Grandmother's steno-pad diary on the floor beside the bathtub where she had dropped it hours ago. It was still open to the last page, the entry for December 31 of that last horrible year.

By then Celia had been at Blackrock College for four full months, far away from Dunmore, Georgia. But not far away from Grandmother's prayers. “Wrote Celie a letter today,” that final entry said. “Please, Father God, let me get one from her soon. Hope she got my Christmas package. Please, Jesus Shepherd, wrap your arms of love around her and deliver her from the evil one.”

That letter from Grandmother must have been the one with the news of Ansell's death in it. Celia had always wanted to throw her grandmother's letters in the trash can without reading them, but she never could make herself do it. Something in her wouldn't allow this last flimsy thread between them to be broken. So she had always ripped them open with a vengeance, read them hastily, then tossed them away. This particular one, with the newspaper clipping about Ansell, had fallen from her hands, however, onto the cheap green carpet of her dorm room, where it had stayed for two days until she had picked it up and slowly crushed it into a small tight ball.

She had taken a long walk sometime later, the paper ball stuffed inside the pocket of her parka, and had thrown it away in a Dumpster she saw in back of a burger place. Never again would she have to worry about Ansell showing up to resume control of her life. He was dead, buried, gone forever. She felt like laughing but was afraid it would turn into crying.

Never had she felt more alone than those two weeks during Christmas break when she was one of only a handful of students who hadn't gone home, but it wasn't a totally unpleasant feeling. She had discovered a love of solitude. Not once did she consider calling her grandmother, though her grandmother had called her two weeks earlier, a long-distance call that Celia knew was against her principles. “You coming home for Christmas?” That was the first thing she had said when Celia answered the phone. Celia had said no, she was staying on campus to work, though she had no intention of doing so nor did she have any prospect of a job.