As they passed her row, Celia stared intently at the casket. And this is how it all ends, Grandmother, she thought. You’re put in a box, then carried in, then carried back out, then dumped in a hole. The end. Of course Grandmother wouldn’t agree. If she heard Celia sum it up that way, she’d turn at once in her Bible to the book of John and start reading aloud those verses about mansions, and then she’d flip back to Revelation and read about the twelve gates and the crystal river and the light that shines eternally and all the rest of it. If there was one thing Grandmother had had plenty of, it was faith.
Celia felt a thick suffocating sadness. How pathetic, she told herself, to live eighty-seven years in the same area and never see the world, to rise day after day and do the same things, to have such a long list of rules to live by, to miss out on so much. But even before she finished the thought, her grandmother’s face, which she had seen less than a half hour ago in the open casket, rose before her—the set of her lips, the strong brow, the parchment skin—and she knew beyond a doubt that Grandmother would take issue with her on this point, also. “Don’t go feeling sorry for me,” she would say. “I did exactly what I was supposed to do. It suited me just fine.”
At least I got away from here and didn’t end up like her, Celia thought. At least I’ve seen what the world outside the state of Georgia looks like. At least I know something about real life and art and culture. Still, a disturbing thought nibbled at the edge of her mind. As far as happiness went, she knew that was probably one area in which she hadn’t really surpassed her grandmother. Money, yes. Education, yes. Experience, at least of a certain kind, without a doubt. Even a moderate measure of success. But happiness? Not by a country mile, as her relatives were fond of saying.
Not that Grandmother had seemed all that happy on the outside. “Doesn’t she ever smile?” Celia’s friend Ansell had often said when he came to pick her up in his car. Or, “There she is, the old woman with the contagious laugh.” But something spoke very clearly to Celia right this very minute as she watched the men gently place her grandmother’s casket on a stand in front of the pulpit: She was contented with her lot in life. She couldn’t have liked much of what had come her way, but she accepted it and went on living.
Grandmother had lived in the same little white frame house next to the railroad track for sixty-some years, had raised three children of her own in it, had planted a garden every spring and kept chickens in the backyard. Celia had seen her snatch up many a chicken with her bare hands and wring its neck for supper that night. Then she’d chop off its head with a little hatchet she kept in the shed. She’d fling the head out into the tall weeds behind the garage for the stray cats to fight over.
For all those years she had washed clothes and hung them on the line outside, sewed and mended and ironed, mowed the grass, scrubbed the floors, cooked meals. Not fancy meals and usually not even very good ones. She fixed the same things over and over, as Celia remembered it, and she didn’t hold much to the principle of seasoning, believing that Americans used far too much salt. She also thought Americans ate their meat too rare, so she went to the other extreme. Though Celia had never taken the trouble to actually keep a tally, she knew that at least two out of every three meats her grandmother put on the table were seriously overcooked, usually downright burned.
A funny thing about human adaptability, though, was that you could get used to almost anything. Celia recalled the way her grandmother would fix fried potatoes—dice them up, then fry them in hot oil until they were dark brown. Very dark brown. Later, living in her first apartment, sharing her bed with a grad student named Benjie, Celia had made fried potatoes one night to go with the hamburgers Benjie had grilled on her hibachi. When she put them on the table, Benjie had laughed and said, “Whoa, what have we got here—potato pellets?” He took only a couple of bites, and Celia ate all the rest. He couldn’t believe she actually liked them fixed that way, that she had been watching them carefully the whole time they cooked, deliberately waiting until they were almost black to transfer them from the skillet onto a paper towel.
* * *
One of the men stood behind the pulpit now and introduced himself as the pastor of “our dear sister, Mrs. Burnes.” As far as looks went, he fit the bill for a backwater southern preacher. Tall and thin, with an apologetic stoop to his posture, everything about him bland and nondescript. He told about visiting Mrs. Burnes daily during her last week when “she knew she was soon to depart to Glory.” And he read from what he claimed was her favorite passage of Scripture: Joshua 1:5–9.
The words were familiar to Celia. She could have recited them from memory. When the pastor came to the words “observe to do according to all the law” and “turn not from it to the right hand or to the left,” Celia felt the old bitterness rise up within her. There was that same old rigid code of behavior being held up as the only way to live. Follow the rules! Stay inside the lines! Walk the straight and narrow!
When he came to the final words, the pastor slowed down and let each one hang in the air a little longer: “‘For the Lord thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest.’” He closed the Bible and leaned forward. “And that promise is as true for our departed friend today as it was for Joshua. Mrs. Burnes has gone to a new place, but the Lord God is still with her. In fact, he’s with her now in an even better way, for she’s resting in his bosom as a lamb with its shepherd.” Celia suspected that this was intended as a transition so they could all stand and sing something like “Savior, Like a Shepherd Lead Us.”
She continued to study the pastor as he returned to his seat. He wasn’t the same pastor as the one she remembered from eighteen years ago. Pastor Thacker had been the name of that one, but he had probably retired or died by now. He’d been an old man even back then, but he’d had a strong voice, with which he had loudly denounced “the rampant worldliness creeping into our homes and churches.” That was one thing Pastor Thacker had loved to harp on—how much like the world Christians were becoming. “‘Come out from among them, and be ye separate’!” he would shout at some point during almost every sermon he preached. She remembered the looks of silent reproach he gave her that last year the few times she went to church. She remembered the day he visited their house, no doubt at Grandmother’s request, and tried to talk her out of going to a liberal state college.
Celia’s prediction proved wrong. The congregation wasn’t asked to sing “Savior, Like a Shepherd Lead Us” after all. But she hadn’t been all that far off. The other man came to the pulpit now and began singing all by himself a song Celia remembered from the old book of Tabernacle Hymns: “The Lord Is My Shepherd.” At least she had been right about the shepherd part. Next to her she saw Aunt Beulah wipe her eyes with an embroidered handkerchief.
Celia knew all the words to this hymn, also. “The Lord is my shepherd, no want shall I know.” When the man got to the part that said “He leadeth my soul where the still waters flow,” the pastor leaned forward in his chair and nodded earnestly.
She studied the pastor again. He was sitting with his hands on his knees, both feet flat on the floor, looking steadily at the man who was singing. He was probably in his late forties, Celia guessed, and not at all handsome, with thin hair he was clearly in the process of losing. He looked exactly like the kind of man who would be Grandmother’s pastor. Not one glimmer of prosperity about him. He had probably “felt the call” early in life and devoted himself to studying the Bible as a youngster, never experiencing anything remotely close to an adventure.
But adventure wasn’t a word people like Grandmother understood. The sameness of her life was remarkable to Celia. And totally unthinkable—she couldn’t imagine such dullness. Not only had her grandmother lived in the same house for all those years, but she had also attended the same little clapboard church only three blocks from her house as long as she had lived there, and most of that time she had walked to services, even in winter.
She had owned only one car in her whole life—a tan
Mercury Comet that her husband, Celia’s grandfather, had bought used in 1970 only two years before he died. Actually, he had bought it wrecked at an auction and had gotten it home and fixed it up like new out in the barn. Before that they had gone everywhere in an old Chevy pickup. Grandmother was over fifty when she learned to drive the Comet, and she drove it mainly to the grocery store. Come to think of it, that was probably the great adventure of her life—learning to drive a car. The children were gone by then. There had been two boys, uncles Celia never really knew, and one girl, Celia’s mother.
Everyone talked about how strange and sad it was that her grandmother had outlived not only her husband, whom Celia barely remembered, but also all three of her children. One son had died at the age of twenty-three in Vietnam, the same year Celia was born, and the other had died of cancer when Celia was in junior high. He had been only forty-seven. And in between the two boys, of course, Celia’s mother had gone out with her husband one day to buy a clothes dryer.
There was a sudden metallic clanking in the rear of the chapel, and Al turned around to look. “They’re setting up folding chairs in back,” he whispered to Celia. “People are still standing.”
Celia marveled again at the crowd that had come out on a cold January afternoon in the middle of the week. Church friends and neighbors—those had been her grandmother’s main contacts. Now that she thought about it, though, Celia supposed that there would be enough of them to account for most of the people here at the funeral. After all, it wasn’t a terribly big chapel, not as large as the auditorium of Bethany Hills Bible Tabernacle, for example.
Grandmother had never been what you’d call “a people person,” though, so it was curious to Celia that so many would come to her funeral. She wasn’t the kind of woman to talk on the telephone a lot or pay visits just to pass the time of day. For her, the time of day was not to be frittered away but spent profitably, which always meant some kind of work.
Her grandmother wasn’t a leader at church, though she attended faithfully and served wherever she was needed. It had become one of Celia’s frequent criticisms during that last year of high school, however, that her grandmother’s service was so rigidly and sternly rendered, almost by rote. “You’re just following a bunch of stupid rules somebody made up centuries ago!” Celia had said more than once. “They don’t even have anything to do with now. I’d hate to live my life like you! You’ve never even known what it’s like to have a good time!”
“Doesn’t she ever smile?”—the first time Ansell had asked that question was when he had come to pick Celia up for a party at Renee’s house. She had told Grandmother they were going to the library to work on some research for a debate they were having the next week in economics class. Ansell thought it was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. “And she believed you?” he asked. Celia said yes, though she wasn’t at all sure about that. Grandmother had a way of looking through what a person said and knowing things intuitively.
It was early in Celia’s friendship with Ansell and the others, and he pulled up in their gravel driveway in his red souped-up Camaro and honked the horn one long toot. Grandmother had been trimming some bushes at the other side of the house and, at the sound of the horn, came charging around to the driveway frowning and holding the long clippers in front of her with both hands as if ready to whack off somebody’s head. She walked up to the car, according to Ansell’s report, and said, “The only thing I can figure out, young mister, is that your hand must’ve slipped and landed on the horn by accident.”
Celia flew out of the house about then and headed for the car. Ansell was looking at Grandmother with his mouth hanging open, as if she had posed a riddle he couldn’t figure out. He had caught her meaning, of course, which was “Surely you wouldn’t drive up to my house and sit in your car and honk for my granddaughter to come out instead of going up to the door like a gentleman.” But Grandmother would have no way of knowing that one of Ansell’s favorite ways to show his disdain for adults was to stare straight at them and act as if he was too slow to understand what they meant.
When Celia got into the car that day, Grandmother raised her voice and said, “Be home in time to . . .” but Ansell was already backing out by then, spraying gravel everywhere. He mimicked her grandmother all evening, giving his performance over and over for everybody at Renee’s party. It kept getting more and more outrageous as the evening wore on, and everyone laughed and begged him to do it again whenever somebody new arrived.
He had Grandmother’s gruff manner down pretty well, but the vocabulary was all wrong: “Hey there, young stud, my granddaughter is not some piece of trash you can pull in here and honk for! You need to get your sorry self out of that car and walk up to the door and behave like a gentleman, which I can see is a completely foreign idea to a slimeball like you!” Celia hadn’t heard Grandmother’s actual words, but she knew she would never have said stud or slimeball.
By the last time Ansell reenacted the scene that night, he was using even worse words, words that shocked Celia, though she tried not to let it show. She laughed along with everybody else. Part of the hilarity was that they were all out of their minds by the end of the night, except for Celia. She wouldn’t have anything to do with drugs, and it took her a good while to get up the nerve even to take her first sip of beer. Even months later, after she had loosened up a little, she was always very cautious, rarely letting herself get as far gone as the others.
To be honest, it scared her. You don’t grow up hearing about the evils of alcohol and then suddenly overnight start drinking. She had hated the sensation of drunkenness the couple of times it happened, especially the aftermath, and frankly, she also hated the taste of beer. Deep down, drinking seemed like such a low-class, pointless thing to do for fun, though she never told her new friends this. Anyway, she decided she could put up with the drinking, considering the fact that they were rescuing her from her old way of life.
When she came home that first night, Grandmother was up waiting for her, sitting in her old green recliner with her Bible open in her lap. Lifting her nose to sniff the air, she gave Celia a long level look, then read aloud part of a verse from James: “‘Know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God?’”
Celia walked right past her without speaking, went back to the bathroom, and stared at herself in the mirror over the sink. It’s time to quit feeling guilty, she told herself, and start having fun. When she turned to start her bath water, she was surprised to see a tall bottle of Avon bubble bath on the side of the tub. She knew it was for her. Grandmother had ordered it a couple of weeks earlier when a woman had come by the house with a catalog. She had called Celia from her bedroom that evening and asked her to choose the fragrance she wanted.
Celia knew it had pained her to spend money like that on something so unnecessary, but here it was. The Avon lady must have delivered it today. She unscrewed the lid and smelled it. “Spring Rain” was printed on the label. She wanted to pour a capful into the water and watch it turn into a mass of bubbles, but she wouldn’t let herself. Instead, she put the lid back on tightly, then set the bottle on the floor and pushed it behind the trash can.
4
And the Morning Breaks Eternal
Finally it was all over, but not until after the mourners had sung three verses of “When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder” beside the grave. Surely the preacher could have condensed Grandmother’s funeral instructions, Celia was thinking, out of consideration for the comfort of those attending. Why did they have to sing three stanzas? Wouldn’t one be enough to give the effect? Grandmother would never know the difference anyway.
It was misting by now, and combined with the bitter cold, it was a miserable day to be standing around outdoors. Celia was glad she had put her long wool coat in the car before leaving home that morning. She had seen Aunt Elsie squinting at her as she and Al had walked toward the gray tent at the cemetery. Celia knew exactly what she must be thinking: About time that girl put on somethi
ng warm.
Celia wondered why funerals had to drag out so long, especially this last tacked-on part at the graveside, and especially on such a cold day. She was sure she wouldn’t be able to remember all the parts later on as she thought back over the day, but then she hoped she wouldn’t be doing much thinking back over this day. Forget the earlier idea of making today into the beginning of a novel. The only thing she wanted now was to get it all over with and blot it from her memory.
Today would make a lousy novel anyway. Besides the funeral gimmick that opened so many bad novels, there were also way too many orphans in fiction. Orphans who had suffered through bleak childhoods, then carried their pitiful shipwrecked emotions into an adulthood doomed from the start. In many books, however, these orphans would eventually rise above their troubled past with great heartrending courage and accomplish admirable things, all of which turned out to be terribly contrived on the printed page.
Recently one of her longtime clients, a man named Frank Bledsoe, had brought her the opening chapters of a new novel he planned to publish himself, since his previous attempts to find a publishing house interested in his stories had proved fruitless. Celia had been telling Frank for years that his manuscripts lacked the important ingredient of believability, to which he always replied indignantly, “But it’s all based on something that really happened. These are people I really know.” Frank had never learned what she had learned years ago in college, that real life didn’t always convert into good fiction. He also took himself way too seriously.
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