No Dark Valley (72 page)

He looked over at the window. Everything outside had the defeated look of early winter. No sign of rain here, though, which was a relief. How strange to think that a mere thirty miles away tree branches were falling onto power lines because of ice. He heard someone at a table behind him say, “Yep, Teddy says his crew's gonna be working all night.”

The couple across from him ordered and then began scuffling over the peg game. “Hey, give it back, Gracie, I wanna go first,” the man said. How old were these two anyway? Bruce wondered. The woman released another ear-piercing giggle and let go so suddenly that pegs went flying. One landed by Bruce's foot. “Oh, Grace, for crying out loud,” the man said, getting up to retrieve them.

Of all the names in the world, her name had to be Grace. Bruce wished it wasn't. That was too pretty a name for somebody like her. He reached down to pick up the peg by his foot and handed it to the man, who said, “Thanks—sorry, she's a real live wire” and cut his eyes back toward the woman, though the self-satisfied grin on his face said, “But I'm the kind of man who can handle live-wire women.”

While the man continued gathering up all the pegs, the woman stood up and made a big production of taking off her coat, which looked like a long limp sweater, then undulated her way over to the coatrack by the big stone fireplace, making it clear, with all the extraneous movement of her hips, that she wanted everybody in the place to notice her. When she turned around, Bruce saw that she had on a fleecy red sweater with a V-neck—a capital V—and a little black clingy skirt that hit her about midthigh. Her long legs were bare all the way down to her highly impractical shoes, which were skimpy red backless heels that made a flip-flap sound with each step she took.

Bruce quickly looked up at the wall again, fixing his gaze on a metal sign that said Aunt Tidy's Foot Powder. There was no safe place you could look at a woman like that. Someday he'd like to address all the women of the world and tell them a few things about the clothes they wore. If he ever had a daughter, he would never . . . But no use getting off on that.

She sat back down and the man said, “Okay, Grace, here we go. Whoever does best gets to . . .” Thankfully, he dropped his voice and leaned across the table to inform her of the prize for winning the peg game, at which Grace slapped his hand and said in a little-girl voice, “Oh, you bad, bad boy, you.”

Bruce felt like groaning out loud. There should be a law against couples who acted this way in public. He took up his own peg game again and decided to try figuring it out by going backward. At least he would have something to look at while he was waiting. He emptied it of all the pegs, then started inserting them one at a time, thinking back to the previous jumps that would result in each configuration. It was hard to concentrate, though. At one point he heard the man at the next table say, “Hey, you're cheating. You can't jump two.” Grace laughed giddily and told him to shush,
she
was making up a
new
game with
new
rules.

Bruce was so grateful when Peter appeared with his food that he decided right then and there to give the boy an especially generous tip.

He stared down at his plate of good food, then closed his eyes briefly. This wouldn't take long. He would eat fast. He would block out everything and think about . . . what? “Cut it out, Grace!” he heard from the next table.

That was it—he'd think about
grace
as he ate his supper. It was one of his favorite topics, one big enough to dwell on for days on end. He started eating his carrots. It was something he and Elizabeth Landis had talked about several times after school—the marvel and mystery of God's grace.

“Amazing grace, how sweet the sound”—it was a favorite hymn at Community Baptist. Pastor Monroe, a gem of a man though not exactly a gifted preacher, had told the story in one of his sermons of John Newton, a converted slave trader who wrote the words and music to “Amazing Grace.” Bruce liked the way the hymn encompassed the past, present, and future of a believer—that was exactly what grace did. In the back of the hymnal he had found a listing called Topical Index, in which he had discovered five hymns with the word
grace
in their titles. They had sung only three of them, however, during the time Bruce had been attending.

Sometime he would like to have a word with the song leader, who often had them sing little catchy choruses that weren't in the hymnbook. Though Bruce didn't know much about music, he recognized these songs as sort of a bridge between popular tunes and traditional-style hymns. If anybody had asked him his preference, Bruce would have voted to stick to the hymnbook, but because no one had, he didn't say much. As Virgil Dunlop had explained it, the new songs were for people like Bruce, who were new converts. “We're trying to provide something more familiar and contemporary,” Virgil had said.

Although in Bruce's opinion it seemed a little like serving SpaghettiOs to an Italian, he had already begun to learn that the kingdom of God included a wide variety of tastes. He could quietly prefer the old hymns—there was nothing wrong with that. It was probably one more piece of evidence illustrating a recurring theme: “Bruce Healey is over the hill.” But that was okay, too. After cresting a hill, the view could be breathtaking.

He finished his carrots and started on the green beans, proceeding in his usual one-food-at-a-time method of eating. Next would come the mashed potatoes and then the pork chop. He always saved his meat and bread till last.

But back to grace. Maybe someday he would learn not to keep beating himself up over sins that God had eternally forgiven. When you find yourself alone in a dark valley, he told himself, you've got to keep coming back to the mountaintop of grace. It was grace that found you, opened your eyes, saved you, and kept you safe. “And grace will lead me home,” as the hymn said—what beautiful words.

But an old niggling question kept intruding. What if the day did come when he could finally consistently remember that the mercies of God were from everlasting to everlasting—that would be fine, but what about the mercies of people? How could he ever expect a good woman anywhere on the face of the earth to want a man with such a history as his? For it wasn't just any woman he wanted to make a life with—it had to be a good woman, someone who knew about the grace of God. And what right under heaven did he have to hope for the love of a good woman?

How ironic that he could finally see a permanent, binding relationship with one woman as a desirable and holy thing—a God-sanctioned gift, one of the highest goals a man could set for himself—yet at the same time he now realized how ineligible he had rendered himself to a godly woman. He could have had marriage any number of times in the past, but he had never wanted it. And now that he was beginning to want it, it wasn't available.

Loretta Vickery hadn't been the only woman who had tried to talk him into marriage, but she had come the closest to getting him. Though she had used deceit, it had almost worked.
Don't think about Loretta
, he said to himself, but almost immediately a reply came:
Yes, do think about her. Review the lessons you learned from her
.

Okay, he would do that, and he wasn't really getting off the subject. Being rescued from Loretta Vickery was certainly under the category of grace. He slowly pulled apart his biscuit and spread it with butter.
Lesson number one: Physical beauty isn't the most important thing
. Loretta had had plenty of that. Even the early warning lights that had flashed in his mind over some of the things she did and said didn't have enough wattage to overcome the sight of her. He kept thinking, foolishly, that he could help her change.

He cut into his corn-bread muffin and also spread it with butter.
Lesson number two: Sins of the flesh lead to destruction
. Oh yes, it had been fun at first, until he started learning about all the lies. Loretta, one of the trainers at a fitness club he belonged to in Montgomery, had lied to him both by what she said and what she didn't say. She
hadn't
told him she was still married, for example, which was a fact, and then after they had kept company for a couple of months, she
had
told him she had tested positive with one of those home kits from the drugstore, which wasn't true. What had started out as an exciting little fling ended up as a nightmare.

By the time it was all sorted out, thanks to an anonymous phone call from one of Loretta's co-workers, Bruce had rued the day he first laid eyes on her, that day he had seen so much that he couldn't think straight. If he hadn't already known by then how unstable she was, another phone call a couple of days later would have clinched it, this one from a neighbor of Loretta's who had discovered her in the process of slitting her wrists in a final effort to convince Bruce that she couldn't live without him.

And then when the husband finally got involved, showing up at school one day waving a gun at Bruce in the parking lot, Bruce saw why the man and Loretta had married each other in the first place—they were both a couple of wackos, crazy out of their minds. The police came and there were questions and paperwork, then rumors and tearful phone calls from Loretta, even a visit to his classroom right in the middle of a math lesson one day. No one had told Bruce to leave town—it was a demand he placed on himself. He couldn't wait till the last day of school, when he could load up his pickup and get out of Montgomery, Alabama, for good.

Lesson number three: Prevention is the best remedy for trouble
. He shuddered to think what his life would be like today if he and Loretta had gotten married somewhere by a justice of the peace, as she had almost talked him into doing “for the baby's sake.” It was enough to scare any sane man away from women for the rest of his life. He thought of the verse in Colossians: “Touch not; taste not; handle not.” That would sure head off a lot of problems.

Unfortunately though, even as horrible as the situation with Loretta had been, as much as it had scared him, it wasn't enough to keep him from now imagining the joy of finding a good woman who could love him in spite of the things he had done. Also, and this was worth remembering, that verse in Colossians wasn't condoning total abstinence from everything enjoyable. So Lesson number three could bear reexamination, at least in its specific application.

He lifted his buttered biscuit again and spread it thick with blackberry jelly, then took a big bite and chewed slowly. He had to think this through. Virgil Dunlop had read that very passage from Colossians in Sunday school recently. The verse wasn't really warning against touching, tasting, and handling as such, but against all the rules people hold up as visible proof of their better-than-thou sanctification. Not that rules were bad, Virgil had stressed, not at all. Just because you had liberty in Christ, you didn't scrap the law. The law was like your rudder on the sea of life.

He took another bite. Who needed dessert, he wondered, when you could eat a warm buttered biscuit with blackberry jelly? So because a person could pig out on biscuits and commit the sin of gluttony, did that mean you couldn't enjoy
one
? Maybe he was forcing parallels now. He wished he could reduce it to a simple ratio.

But back to grace. He still had much to learn, but on this one point he was sure: If God's grace was full and powerful enough to cancel out bad things, wasn't it also generous enough to replace those bad things with good things? And the answer to that was easy: Yes. So maybe—it was coming to him now—maybe he ought to try something very basic to Christianity, something else he kept forgetting about. Maybe he should ask, seek, and knock, as that verse in the Sermon on the Mount instructed. That was it. He would pray. If God cared about supplying the food you ate and the roof over your head, surely he cared about something as important as a wife.

He looked up to see Grace and her boyfriend staring at him. What had he done? Maybe he had chuckled out loud or hummed a bar of “Amazing Grace.” Well, who cared? He wasn't ever going to see these people again—at least he earnestly hoped not. He lifted his corn-bread muffin to them, as if toasting, and said, “Sorry, just had a nice thought.”

Grace laughed, her ponytail bobbing. “Oh, that's cute.”

“Well, good,” Bruce said. “That's my goal in life, to be cute.”

Another burst of giggles. “Oh, I
like
him,” Grace said to her boyfriend. “I like him a lot.” She reached over and cupped the man's face in her hands. “But not as much as you, Willy-boy.”

Good grief, Bruce thought, he had to finish up fast and get out of here. Thankfully, he was nearly done. He took a huge bite of his corn bread, then a long drink of tea.

The Cracker Barrel was filling up. There were now only three empty tables that he could see. He nabbed Peter on the way by and asked for his check, and as he left a five-dollar bill on the table a minute later the thought came to him—and he hoped it wasn't a sacrilegious one—that Jesus had not only paid it all, but he also gave big tips and bonuses, as well. He stood there for a moment with his hand still touching the money, and when he looked up, Grace and Willy-boy were staring at him again.

Bruce smiled at them and with perfect composure said, “And grace will lead me home.” As he left, he heard Grace erupt into a fit of spasmodic laughter behind him, then stop suddenly and say, “Hey, what did he mean by
that
? I'm not going home with
him
!”

He was standing in line to pay at the cash register, studying the glass jars of candy behind the cashier—red-hot jawbreakers, strings of licorice, malted milk balls, lemon drops—when it occurred to him that he could pray anywhere. He didn't have to wait till he was alone. A verse came to him, one Pastor Monroe had preached on not too long ago: “Pray without ceasing.” And so he did. He fixed his eyes on the canister of caramel chews right then and there and prayed a very simple prayer.