No Dark Valley

by Jamie Langston Turner

  She could still see the hoe her grandmother was using to break up the ground on either side of the front steps that March day, jabbing furiously at the hard ground in preparation for planting dahlias. Less than six feet away from her, Celia herself was sitting in the porch swing, something she rarely did during those last few months at Grandmother’s house. The two of them weren’t talking right then, but there were hot bitter words still hanging in the air.

  The subject had been the high school prom. Celia had demanded money for a dress, to which her grandmother had replied that a Christian girl didn’t have any business going to an event where the devil was going to be having his way all night long, to which Celia had replied that maybe a Christian girl didn’t, but she was going to, and if Grandmother didn’t fork over the money out of the hoard that was rightfully Celia’s anyway, she’d find some other way to get the dress. Over and over she kept repeating to herself Ansell’s advice: “Stick up for yourself, Celia. Don’t let the old witch run your life.”

  Celia rarely looked directly at her grandmother during these blowups because she knew she’d lose her nerve if she did. Right now she sat on the swing with one leg tucked up under her and looked instead at her grandmother’s hoe. It was a big hoe, much too big for the job at hand in Celia’s opinion, but Grandmother wielded it with the ease of someone who had many years of experience with farm implements. She wasn’t a tall woman, but she was strong. With her large hands she gripped the handle of the hoe firmly and chopped at the dirt like a madwoman. Any worms hiding in that flower bed would be mincemeat before she was done.

  Smoky was on the porch, too, lying beside the front door, his wicked tail swishing ever so slightly as he watched Grandmother hack away with the hoe. Celia was waiting for Grandmother to speak, waiting for some kind of commitment about the money for the dress. As the seconds ticked by, she grew worried, for she had learned by now that total silence wasn’t a good sign. If Grandmother continued to grumble and mutter objections, it meant she was beginning to concede defeat. If she said nothing, then her mind was already made up.

  Though it was late March and still cool, Celia was barefoot, another thing her grandmother frowned upon, along with almost everything else she did, and as she continued to watch the rise and fall of the hoe, she must have started wiggling the foot that wasn’t tucked under her, the one hanging down from the swing. Maybe it was twitching in rhythm with the hoe. She wasn’t aware of doing it, or she surely would have stopped, for she knew Smoky’s neurotic behavior well enough by now. It wasn’t until later, after Smoky pounced, that she realized what she must have been doing.

  All she remembered was a sudden projectile of snarling gray fur and the shocking pain of claws and teeth sinking into her bare foot. She screamed, she remembered that, too. But the cat latched on, going for a kill, and wouldn’t let go. When she tried to shake him off, she felt a ripping of flesh and the warmth of blood. It was almost as if Smoky had waited long enough and now was finally taking his revenge on her for the past two and a half years.

  Somehow she had managed to get off the swing and began hopping around the porch, blood dripping from her foot, but still Smoky hung on. Snarls, shouts, screams, it was hard to tell where they were all coming from—the porch was pure bedlam. For a brief moment Celia pictured a terrifying scene of the cat launching himself from her foot to her face, scratching out her eyes, ripping her scalp open. She heard her screams escalate and felt herself going weak, as she imagined a person must feel right before fainting, and then all at once she heard a mighty whack against the floor of the porch and saw Grandmother’s hoe come down inches from her foot.

  Smoky immediately went limp and released his hold. Both Grandmother and Celia stood motionless for several long seconds, staring down at the cat, whose hindquarters were almost severed from the rest of his body. Later Celia would generate a fresh wave of anger at her grandmother for coming so close to chopping her foot off with the stupid hoe, but for now she was stunned by the amount of blood pooling under Smoky, mingling with her own blood, and she suddenly saw the floor of the porch start to spin and felt herself falling down into a gaping black hole. When she came to, she was lying on the porch close to the door and Grandmother was bent over her foot, sponging it gently with warm soapy water in a tin bucket.

  “This’ll hurt,” she told Celia bluntly, then applied something that felt like liquid fire and started wrapping the foot with a long strip of gauze. Over this she put a length of stretchy bandage, clamping the end with a little silver clip. Celia didn’t dare turn her head to the left to see if all the blood was still there, or the mutilated cat. She didn’t say a word, just kept her eyes fastened on Grandmother’s face, unyielding and intent as she bent over her work.

  Though it didn’t make a bit of sense, Celia’s dazed mind kept pulling up pictures from Bible stories—the Good Samaritan, Jesus washing the disciples’ feet, Mary wiping the feet of Jesus with her hair, and, most inexplicably, the Crucifixion. When it was done, Celia made herself look only at the screen door while Grandmother helped her stand up and hobble into the house to lie down on the couch in the living room.

  Always squeamish about blood, Celia couldn’t quit thinking about all that blood on the front porch. How would they ever clean it all off? The front door had been left ajar, and through the screen she could hear her grandmother thumping around out there, grunting softly as she . . . did what? Celia couldn’t resist limping over to the window to look out. She covered her mouth as she watched Grandmother running the hose right over the planks of the porch, the water washing the blood over the edge, down into the flowerbed where the dahlias were to be planted. She didn’t see the cat anywhere.

  She continued watching as her grandmother got down on her hands and knees and scrubbed for all she was worth with a large stiff-bristled brush, then rinsed the floor again and again. She did it all with such grim purpose, the same way she did everything. If Celia had been asked to pick a hymn that personified her grandmother best, she would have chosen “Work, for the Night Is Coming.” If asked on any given morning what she was going to do to fill up the day, Grandmother would have lifted her chin and said, “I’m going to work, that’s what. I’m going to work through the morning hours, right on through the sunny noon and the sunset skies. I’m going to work till the last beam fadeth. That’s what I’m going to do today.”

  When she finished with the floor, Celia saw her grandmother get up and head out toward the store, then return shortly with the two pieces of wood, a hammer, and nails. She watched her fashion the cross, then saw her pick up the tin bucket from the top step and gaze down into it silently, her mouth set in a taut line. That’s when Celia knew where the cat was. How like Grandmother. She had emptied the soapy water she had used to cleanse Celia’s foot and put Smoky’s dead body in the very same bucket. Same receptacle for victim and culprit alike.

  “Uh, here you go, one more time, Ms. Coleman,” the lawyer said, clearing his throat, which made Celia think he had probably already said it before. And as she wrote her name another time on a line at the bottom of yet another page, Celia once again saw her grandmother tuck the hammer into her apron pocket, then pick up the cross with one hand and the bucket with the other. She saw her walk around the side of the house and disappear behind the barn to bury her cat.

  21

  Those Wide, Extended Plains

  The next day when Celia was on her way back to South Carolina, her mind returned again and again to the cat incident. Never had she paused to think about Grandmother’s loss all those years ago. Her main concerns that day had been whether she could play tennis in an upcoming match against a rival school in nearby Burma and whether she could wear a pair of slinky sandals with her prom dress next month.

  She had never bothered to wonder about trivial things such as how Grandmother felt about losing the only pet she had ever had or whether she stayed awake that night, and for nights after, thinking about the fact that she had killed that pet with her own hands.
And neither had Celia stopped to reflect for even a minute on what it said about her grandmother’s feelings for her that she would bring her hoe down so swiftly on the soft gray fur of Smoky’s back.

  Superficial wounds, that’s what Grandmother had labeled Celia’s injured foot when they argued later that day about making a doctor’s appointment. Though Celia brought up the possibility of rabies, Grandmother hadn’t given it a passing thought. “I kept up with his shots,” she said gruffly. And she had. Though she always took Smoky to a mobile clinic that didn’t charge much, she was faithful about it and kept a careful record of the dates in the same ledger where she accounted for every penny of the budget.

  Oh yes, she had spent money on Smoky’s rabies shots all right, but when it came to taking her own granddaughter to a doctor, Celia had pointed out, that was a different matter. Celia knew it was the money more than anything that made Grandmother reluctant about seeing a doctor, and she came right out and said so, accused her of caring more about money than about whether Celia was maimed for life.

  Her grandmother had shot her an inscrutable look but had relented and called the same elderly doctor who had tended to Granddaddy during his last illness. Celia was disappointed when Dr. York confirmed her grandmother’s diagnosis. Surely anything that had hurt so much and produced so much dark blood all over the porch couldn’t be merely superficial. There was some swelling, which he said would subside within the next few days.

  The foot, Dr. York had told her, was a pretty tough appendage, capable of withstanding all kinds of abuse. “Not a whole lot of meat on these bones,” he had said with a smile. The cat had raked at her skin but hadn’t torn away big chunks of flesh. “My guess is that he was just playing with you,” he added. “If he had wanted to hurt you, he sure could have, big old cat like that.”

  Celia could have explained that Smoky wasn’t a playful cat, that he hated her as much as she hated him, and that he most certainly had wanted to hurt her, but she decided it wasn’t worth the effort, especially not with Grandmother sitting right there ready to dispute her word. Though Dr. York complimented Grandmother on her dressing of the wound, he had taken Celia through another painful cleansing, followed by more antiseptic that felt like he was pouring hot tar over her foot, and a tight rebandaging.

  In the car on the way home, Celia had called into question both Dr. York’s eyesight and his soundness of mind, to which Grandmother hadn’t bothered to reply. For three days Celia had to bathe with her foot sticking out of the bathtub, and then for another few days she wore only a light bandage, and finally no bandage “so the air can get to it and make it scab up dry,” as her grandmother put it.

  Two weeks later she rebandaged it and played in the tennis match against Burma, winning in two sets, and four weeks later she wore a pair of silver sandals and a light blue gauzy dress with a sequined bodice to the Dunmore High School prom. When Ansell came by to pick her up that night, she had flown out of the house before Grandmother could intercept her and add a coda to the dirge she had been singing ever since she gave Celia thirty whole dollars to buy a dress. As if thirty dollars were enough to buy anything fit to wear—that had been her first thought. But, remarkably, it turned out that it was. Her friend Renee knew about a consignment shop over in Cartersville, where she and Celia found the blue dress for only eighteen dollars.

  “I never thought I’d see the day when my own flesh and blood would want to consort with evil”—that was the main tune of Grandmother’s sad song. She also interjected dire warnings about “not letting anybody force you into doing things,” which, being interpreted, meant no drinking, no smoking, no drugs, and, above all, no sex. She had to know by now that Celia had dabbled in both drinking and smoking, but she would have no way of knowing that neither one really appealed to her, and Celia wasn’t about to tell her. She knew Grandmother was probably worried to a frazzle about whether she had tried drugs and sex, but she had no intention of enlightening her about those, either. If she was going to act the way she did, Celia reasoned, then it served her right to be eaten up with worry.

  Actually, prom night wasn’t something Celia wanted to think about, and as she drove south on Highway 41 toward Calhoun, she tried to put it out of her mind and concentrate on other things. She had called Ollie at the gallery two days ago, and he had told her about Macon Mahoney’s wanting another show in the fall. She did have a six-week slot starting in mid-November that was still unfilled, so that would save her the trouble of having to come up with something.

  Ollie had also told her about selling two more of Lenny Bullard’s pieces to a collector from Flat Rock, North Carolina, and about Craig running into an old classmate of his from college and how this man had a French friend, a brilliant artist, who was in the States, living in Greenville for a couple of years with his wife, who had some kind of short-term contract with Michelin. The gallery might be able to work a deal with him, Craig thought, to show his stuff. According to Ollie, Craig had seen some of it and was uncharacteristically enthusiastic about it.

  So Celia tried to turn her thoughts homeward, thinking about what she could do for opening night if Macon Mahoney really did have enough new pieces for another show. He was hoping for a mystical theme was how Ollie put it—or, as Macon himself had described it, “supernaturalism, the afterlife, antimaterialism, and such,” which sounded a bit worrisome to Celia. They sure couldn’t allow any of their artists to use the gallery as a platform for promoting a particular religious or political ideology.

  She thought about what she could do with the refreshment table for a show with a mystical slant. Maybe she could work the theme of the decorations around outer space—hang colored balls from the ceiling to suggest planets, sprinkle glitter on a black velvet tablecloth, and such.

  She tried thinking about her car, too. It had been burning oil lately, and she knew enough to recognize that as a bad sign. Uncle Taylor had looked it over while she had been in Dunmore and told her she might be facing what he called a “ring job,” not a cheap repair. Maybe it was time to start thinking about a trade-in on a new car, or at least a newer one.

  This was the second Mustang she had owned, so maybe she should try something else, or at least switch to a four-door. There were getting to be too many times when a two-door was inconvenient. And tone down the color, too—a dark blue would be nice. Maybe she should go back over to the car dealership in Greenville and see if Todd Robard still owned it and was still giving free psychological counseling. No doubt he was married and had a couple of kids by now. But the whole complicated prospect of buying a new car gave her no pleasure. It would be less expensive to get the ring job and keep driving this one for now.

  She thought about the money she had just received from the sale of Grandmother’s house. How funny that she had netted twice as much as she had expected. If anyone had asked her six months ago to estimate what her grandmother’s estate would total, she would have laughed, first of all, at the use of such a high-sounding word as estate for the property on Old Campground Road, and second, she would have guessed no more than fifteen thousand. For all she knew back then, the house might not even be paid off yet.

  To be sure it was a meager inheritance, but an inheritance nonetheless. She could use it to buy a car if she decided to go to the trouble one of these days. Or maybe she should put all the money into mutual funds or a money market account, then buy a car with interest-free monthly payments over five years. The deals they were offering on new cars now made it silly to pay cash up front. But again she dismissed the idea of a new car. She didn’t really need one if she got her Mustang repaired. It had only sixty-five thousand miles on it.

  She had toyed with the idea over the past several years, too, of going out on a limb and buying a house. She could certainly do that now, using Grandmother’s money as a down payment for something nice, maybe in a moderately classy neighborhood on the outskirts of Greenville so she’d be a little closer to the gallery. And she could afford house payments now that the th
ree owners of the Trio Gallery had expanded her hours to full time. Ollie had been glad to hand over the bookkeeping to her, something he had always hated and never been very good at.

  But she thought about the idea of packing up to move, then redecorating a whole house, buying new furniture to fill it up, spreading out her art over more wall space. None of it really excited her. All the work, all the money it would take, all the time before she got it the way she really wanted it, all the repairs and improvements that would be her responsibility as a homeowner—really, her apartment was all she needed and more. Before she had left home for this trip, in fact, Patsy Stewart had told her that while she was gone Milton planned to take up the linoleum from Celia’s kitchen floor and replace it. They had even let Celia choose what she wanted. There was something very secure in having a good landlord to take care of your needs, even to anticipate a few of those needs before you thought about them.

  Of course, there was the old argument about throwing your money away every month as a renter instead of building up equity. That used to worry her a lot more than it did now, though. Over the past few years she had begun to realize how much money Patsy and Milton spent on their house just to keep it up, and she knew it was a never-ending process. Some emergency was always lurking around the corner, waiting until the most inopportune time to need fixing or replacing, like the hot water tank that went out one weekend last spring. And the fact wasn’t lost on her that Milton saved a bundle by doing many of the home jobs himself. If she owned a house, she would have to hire somebody to do it all—more money sucked out of her bank account.

  But as hard as she tried not to let it, prom night kept slipping back into her thoughts. She had imagined herself so free when she had skipped down the steps to meet Ansell that night, not even waiting to see if he would behave with a little more decorum than usual by coming to the door for her. All those old customs were out of date anyway. She hadn’t been given a curfew, and she surely didn’t want to hang around and risk being given one. She wanted to feel like everybody else for a change. Tonight was prom night, the climax of every girl’s high school years, a time to forget about rules and restraints and bothersome grandmothers who thought “Thou shalt not dance” should be the eleventh commandment.