No Dark Valley (53 page)

But his sisters soon forgot about the contents of his pickup truck when he told them why he had left Montgomery. He didn't try to gloss it over—he told them the whole story, introducing it with a modified quotation from the movie
Judgment at Nuremberg
: “It is not easy to tell the truth, but I must admit it whatever the pain and humiliation.”

And his sisters immediately launched into a sympathetic flurry of plans for him to relocate there in Columbia, refusing to accept the fact that this was just a visit. Suzanne was never happier than when she had someone's life to repair. She wanted him to stay at her house and sleep on the daybed in the rec room. “You need to be here with us,” she kept saying. “You're vulnerable; you need to be around family; you need to rest.” As if it would be restful to live in a rec room in the same house with her and her three sullen teenagers.

It was Kimberly, whom Suzanne always described as ditzy, who came up with a workable plan. She and her husband, Matt, were moving from Columbia to Greenville in a month or so, only a hundred miles away, and for the first few years of his new job with BMW, Matt was going to have to travel a lot. They had already made arrangements to rent a house until they found one to buy, so why couldn't Bruce move with them to Greenville and live with them, at least for a while? That way Kimberly wouldn't be so nervous when Matt was out of town. Bruce could surely get a job teaching somewhere in the area, and because he didn't have much stuff, he could fit it all into their extra bedroom.

It all seemed so simple that Suzanne was sure there was some major hidden defect in the plan. She did her best to create one, recited whole lists of potential hitches, but in the end Bruce drove his pickup to Greenville and moved in with Kimberly and Matt.

Which had led to his meeting Virgil Dunlop, a history teacher at Berea Middle School, not far from Greenville, where Bruce ended up teaching. Which in turn had led to months and months of verbal warfare with Virgil, first about the existence of God and, later, after Bruce was beginning to consider that yes, okay, there might be a God, about the puzzling nature of a God who allowed such horror to go on in the world he had supposedly created and that he supposedly
loved
so much. Unspeakable horror such as war and murder and starvation and painful disfiguring diseases, all of it coupled with such unrelenting sorrow, like what had happened to Bruce's own father and mother, and of course to Bruce himself.

It had actually been quite easy to surrender on the point of God's existence, Bruce himself having supplied much of the evidence in his arguments with Virgil, citing flaws that had always troubled him in the theory of evolution. He remembered speaking up one time in a college physics class, long before he had even met Virgil Dunlop, and asking the teacher how scientists could explain the origin of all these interactions between matter and energy that kept the world in microfine balance, all the properties and phenomena of nature, down to every little intricate function of the human body—how had it all fallen together in an interdependent way that just happened to work? To believe in a God who created it all made a lot more sense to Bruce than that physics teacher's answer had.

The time came when he finally agreed to go with Virgil to one church service—one and
only one
, he kept reminding him—where he read along with the words as the congregation sang a hymn from the old red hymnals that the First Baptist Church had donated to Community Baptist when they ordered new, more modern ones. “Abide with me; fast falls the eventide,” it started out. Oddly, though he had never heard the song before, Bruce felt that the words were somehow coming from somewhere inside him, as if they were an echo from an old storybook he knew well.

Though he had never prayed one time during his adult life, had never had any interest in doing such a thing, he glanced at those sitting around him and found himself wondering what it would be like to be the kind of good clean man with the simple faith it would take to make this song his life's prayer. A man like Virgil Dunlop, who, with his pink skin and thinning reddish hair, could never in anyone's wildest dreams be called handsome, yet whose eyes told you he could be trusted.

The hymn talked about the deepening darkness, about the failure of people and things to give lasting comfort. It spoke of man's helplessness, of the swiftness of “life's little day” and the dimming of earth's joys. And beside him, Virgil sang out confidently with the words that Bruce would hear again that night and for many nights thereafter as he tried to go to sleep: “O Thou who changest not, abide with me. . . . Through cloud and sunshine, Lord, abide with me. . . . In life, in death, O Lord, abide with me.” What would it be like, he wondered, to have an abiding, unchangeable, omnipotent
presence
with you every single moment of your life?

Without seeming to, Bruce had watched Virgil Dunlop like a hawk during the first year or so of their acquaintance. Pretending not to be much interested, he had observed his every move. When Virgil had met a woman who wasn't “saved,” as he put it, the very woman he had ended up marrying, in fact, the woman who was coming over to Bruce's apartment this very night, Bruce had watched him especially closely, for he knew there was no surer thing than a woman to make a man throw over all his so-called convictions.

Bruce remembered things he had given up for women in the past, though in each case only temporarily—things he would never have relinquished in his right mind. Things like red meat, caffeine, late-night talk shows, doughnuts, open windows, and such. He had refrained from carrying books and opening doors for one woman in grad school who called such things a “slap in the face of every able-bodied woman.”

And for a girl named Bunny, he had agreed one year not to watch the Miss America Pageant on television, although it was something he had done every fall since his early teens. It didn't matter one bit that he made it clear to Bunny that the main reason he watched it was to laugh at the whole farce, especially the part where they asked the girls questions about current events or politics or social issues in an attempt to show that it wasn't just a beauty contest. He also loved watching all the hilarious efforts to display the qualification called “talent,” which very few of the contestants actually possessed, although a recent marimba player and a singer who sounded like Barbra Streisand had both come close.

But Bunny, not exactly the brightest candle on the birthday cake, had turned steely on him and said she couldn't possibly have a relationship with any man who watched such a
sexist
program. Which was exactly what Bruce was trying to get her to see—that the amusement derived from the whole Miss America thing was that it was so blatantly sexist while pretending not to be. He even slipped and told her that he could never truly respect anybody who entered a beauty contest, which he secretly suspected that Bunny had done at some point in her past. With a name like Bunny—well, you just knew certain things.

Anyway, he and Bunny had gone to a movie the night of the Miss America Pageant, a movie that Bunny had selected, in which one beautiful blonde was chopped into pieces, another was tortured for hours by a psycho, and yet another was strangled and thrown off a bridge. He knew there was no way Bunny would catch on to the fact, even if he tried to explain it in the simplest terms, that this particular movie was far more sexist in its depiction of the value of women than the Miss America Pageant.

Concerning the woman Virgil Dunlop had met—after colliding with her in a grocery store aisle of all things—it was clear that he was very interested in her. His manner of approach was so different, however, from what Bruce had always found successful, so deliberate in pace, so measured and careful, that Bruce was certain nothing so seemingly passionless could qualify as real love. He had considered giving Virgil a few words of advice, but with the memory of the fiasco in Montgomery still so fresh in his mind, he had kept quiet and watched.

And he still felt the shock of it all, now more than a year later, that the woman, apparently a mature, intelligent, artistic person, had eventually come around to Virgil's religious views, had begun going to church with him, and had agreed within months to marry him, apparently responding quite warmly to his poky and cautious method of courtship. Here was just more proof of the great mystery—how could you ever figure women out?

Living with Kimberly and Matt had worked fine. At first he spent so much time at school that he did little more than sleep at their house. Later, however, Bruce had been the one to take Kimberly to the hospital when Madison was born three weeks early, and though some bachelors might want no part of a household where a new baby lived, Bruce found that he actually wanted to stay home more after that. As an uncle, he was so crazy about Madison that he couldn't imagine what kind of overpowering, incapacitating love a father must feel.

Though he already knew he was different from most men in a lot of ways, the fact was confirmed whenever his brother-in-law was home, for Bruce would marvel that Matt could hold his daughter so casually in one arm while gesturing with the other hand and talking about the stock market or a football game or a new BMW prototype, could at other times walk right by her crib without stopping to lean over and gasp in amazement that she
was
, could blithely wolf down his own dinner at the table without even noticing all the cunning ways she devised of getting food to her mouth. Not that Bruce doubted for a second that Matt loved Madison. He was just so nonchalant about it.

When Matt and Kimberly had found a bigger house, one with a basement that could be converted into an apartment, he had moved with them again, doing most of the move himself during his spring break with the help of a few friends, since Matt was out of town again. And he had done most of the work on the apartment, too, with some help from Milton Stewart.

Not that he planned to live with his sister and her family indefinitely, serving as a stand-in for Matt, but for now it was working. Matt and Kimberly would be in a bind right now without him, for though Kimberly had planned to take Madison and go with Matt while he was on a three-month job in Germany this fall, everything had changed when she had discovered she was pregnant again. “I wouldn't leave Kim if you weren't here to keep an eye on things,” Matt had told Bruce before he left in September. And Bruce had wanted to say, “What about Madison? How can you leave
her
for three months?”

Bruce picked up the newspaper from the floor beside his couch now and stuffed it in the trash can. That was about all the tidying he needed to do in here. He let his eyes travel around his living room and tried to imagine what it would look like to a person seeing it for the first time. As for decorations, he had only a few items that he wouldn't consider giving up for any amount of money, though it wasn't at all likely that anyone would be stepping forward to make an offer, as they were rather odd things. One was a small butter churn that had been used by someone in his family generations ago. It was one of the few things he had taken when they cleared out his mother's house four years ago. He had filled it with dried stalks of flowers and twisted twigs he had picked up on some of his weekend hikes.

The butter churn stood on a small plain maple table he had bought with his first paycheck from his first teaching job seven years ago, when he knew for certain that, after several false starts at other jobs, he had finally found a vocation that was his for keeps. The extra years of schooling, which included a semester of student teaching with a teacher not a whole lot older than he was, hadn't deterred him once the idea of teaching science and math to kids had hatched in his mind. Looking back on it, the only thing that was hard for him to believe was that it had taken him so long to gravitate toward teaching.

Maybe if his mother hadn't gotten so distracted taking care of his father, she could have given him some suggestions to save all the wasted time—he had tried sitting at a desk, standing behind a sales counter, processing loan applications, tallying columns of figures, balancing books. Majoring in business had been a colossal mistake, but back in college he hadn't been overly concerned about long-range career goals. All his goals back then had been mostly short-term, and they always involved girls. He had been good at math, had been able to coast through his accounting classes with a minimum of effort, which left him with a lot of free time to spend on his many short-term goals.

Besides the butter churn, he had a lamp he really liked. It had a black metal base in the shape of a slender tree trunk with a fat black toad sitting beside it, and the shade, the really stunning feature of the lamp, was made of mica, giving off a warm amber glow that turned out to be more ornamental than functional. When it was turned on, the lamp provided one of the few spots of real color in his living room, which was mainly different shades of tan. Beside the lamp sat an old pair of World War I binoculars that one of his great-uncles had taken from a dead German soldier.

In one corner of the living room was propped a flagpole from which hung, curiously, a large flag of Qatar, which he had found neatly folded in a trunk among his father's collection of foreign coins and stamps, college pennants, and baseball caps. The flag had appealed to Bruce for two reasons: first, because of its simple design, a rectangle with a sawtooth dividing line, and second, because of its colors, white on one side of the jagged line and brown on the other. He thought it was probably the only brown flag in existence.

At first he hadn't known what country the flag represented, hadn't even known for sure that it
was
a flag until he was looking through an atlas one day while cleaning out his mother's house and saw the name
Qatar
printed under a flag exactly like the one he had found in his father's trunk. As far as he knew, his father had never set foot in Qatar. Bruce wondered if his father had even known where Qatar was.