No Dark Valley

by Jamie Langston Turner

  Something suddenly snapped inside him, and he got angry, returning to the window to fire back a few insults of his own, which may have been the best thing he could have done because it pushed her to say something that finally cleared up a major misconception in her thinking. And just what would Kimberly think about him hanging around under her window, she had asked, to which he had replied that he didn’t know that Kimberly would think much about it one way or the other.

  “Oh, I think she would,” Celia said, at which point Bruce saw the curious face of another woman, who turned out to be Celia’s dinner guest, peering at him from behind Celia. And at the exact same moment that he was realizing that he knew this other woman, he heard Celia say, “I think any wife would have something to say about her husband spending a little too much time next door, especially if the person next door happened to be a single woman.”

  And then it was as if the sky suddenly burst open and a thousand pieces of a wacky puzzle suddenly rained down and fell right side up into a huge, full-color picture. Evidently Celia had somehow gotten it into her misguided head that Kimberly was his wife instead of his sister. And it wasn’t at all easy to convince her otherwise. She held out for a while, insisting through the window that no, he was so married, that he was just trying to pull another prank. “Another prank?” he wanted to say. “And when did I ever pull the first one?”

  Fortunately, the other woman standing behind her, the one who often subbed at the school where he taught, had even subbed for him a couple of times, whose name he suddenly remembered—Elizabeth Landis—stepped forward and stood up for him, telling Celia that she knew him, that he was trustworthy, reasonably sane, gainfully employed as a teacher, and, as far as she knew, unmarried.

  But ever since then, almost three whole months now, the two of them hadn’t spoken much. He couldn’t believe she would actually think he’d be so low and unscrupulous as to flirt with her less than fifty yards away from his wife and child, all of which was proof that she must think pretty highly of her charms.

  The jack-o’-lantern was done now. Bruce centered it on the table, put its little stem cap back on, then stepped away to study the finished product. Well, no one would ever mistake him for an artist, that was for sure. His middle schoolers could do better than that. Madison could do better than that. As he tried to form his mouth into a close approximation of the jack-o’-lantern’s grin, he heard a rap-rap and looked up to see Kimberly standing at the nursery window upstairs, holding Madison. He saw Kimberly’s mouth moving as she pointed at him, and he could imagine what she was saying to Madison. “There, see Uncle Brucie? See him standing there grinning? Isn’t he a silly man?”

  26

  Fast Falls the Eventide

  That night after church, Bruce’s friend Virgil Dunlop asked if he and his wife could stop by to see his apartment sometime. Virgil had helped Bruce move in back in March, but he had never seen the basement apartment after it was finished and everything was in place.

  “Well, there’s not really much to see,” Bruce said, “but sure, come on by. How about right now? I could probably use some decorating tips.” As they headed toward the door of the church, Bruce realized this would be the first time he would have real company in his new apartment. Thus far Kimberly, Madison, and Milton Stewart had been his only visitors.

  He really didn’t want any decorating tips, though. He had just said that. He was perfectly satisfied with his present decor, which, if asked, he would describe as Monochromatic Minimalist. He liked the spare, uncluttered, neutral look of his apartment and took care to keep it that way. Not that he was a fastidious housekeeper by any means. He could go for several weeks before breaking down and vacuuming the carpet, and he had been known to write notes to himself or record telephone numbers by means of his index finger on a dusty tabletop. One thing he wouldn’t tolerate anymore, though, was a lot of unnecessary stuff lying around.

  Before they separated in the parking lot outside the church, Joan, Virgil Dunlop’s wife, said, “Say, why don’t we bring a pizza with us when we come by? Or did you already eat before church?”

  “I did, but that wouldn’t keep me from eating again,” Bruce said.

  When he got home twenty minutes later, he unlocked his door and took his jacket immediately to the bedroom to hang in the closet. He laid his Bible on his desk, where he kept all his books and papers from school in neat stacks, transporting them back and forth in his black leather briefcase.

  Back in the living room, he looked around. When you didn’t have much to get messed up, it sure made things easier. He always went upstairs to play with Madison rather than bringing her downstairs. That way none of her toys found their way into his apartment. Except for the dishes in the kitchen sink and the books on his desk, someone could peek into his apartment and think it was uninhabited, that it was kept in reserve for the occasional guest.

  His living quarters hadn’t always been so sparsely furnished and free of junk, though. He used to have quite a reputation as a pack rat back in college. At the end of his four years at Jackson State University, he had boxes full of stuff he had saved. The last roommate he’d had, a muscular guy named Rush Stapleton, majoring in physical education and coaching, used to tell Bruce regularly that he reminded him a lot of his sister back home, who saved every shred of evidence against the day that someone might accuse her of not having been sought out by the opposite sex—every movie ticket, every withered corsage, heart cutouts from the box tops of Valentine candy, notes passed in the hallway, pictures, birthday cards, you name it.

  Bruce was unfazed by Rush’s mocking. He didn’t consider it at all effeminate that he liked to save mementos of all the different girls he had been with. He laughed, told Rush it was a pity, not to mention a great irony, that big beefy PE types like him were so insecure about their manhood, and then went right on stuffing his boxes with everything from play programs and restaurant menus to small tokens either snitched or left behind—a hair clip, a flashy button, an earring, a pressed flower, a bottle of red nail polish labeled Fox on Fire.

  “Someone runs across all this,” Rush said once, “they’re sure gonna wonder about your sexual orientation.” To which Bruce had replied, “Let them wonder all they want. I have a list of girls as long as my arm who’ll be glad to testify enthusiastically as to my sexual orientation.”

  During his early days of bachelorhood after college, while he was floundering around in different jobs, Bruce had spent a great deal of money on furnishing an apartment in Birmingham, Alabama, where he had lived and worked for over seven years. Back then he imagined that the goal of having your own place was to fill it up. He had bought way too much, a lot of stuff he didn’t need and ended up not even really liking.

  But he had carted it all with him when he had moved from Birmingham to Montgomery and had kept adding to it for another five years. It was in Montgomery that he had gone back to school for his teaching degree, an addendum to his education that was cheerfully financed by his grandmother, and when he started teaching science and math to middle schoolers a couple of years later, he resumed spending his paychecks on stereo cabinets and bookshelves, appliances, tables, lamps, computer accessories, furniture of all kinds, even sets of dishes and flatware.

  The turning point had come four years ago when his mother had moved into an assisted living facility, which in Bruce’s opinion was nothing more than a glorified nursing home, and Bruce, Kimberly, and their older sister, Suzanne, had spent two weeks that summer working like dogs to clear out her house back in Mississippi.

  At some point during those two scorching weeks in Mississippi, Bruce had experienced a blinding moment of truth while sitting in his mother’s attic: If he kept on buying the way he was right then, someday people would have to wade through all his stuff just as he and his sisters were doing at their mother’s house. He imagined people holding up things of his and, before tossing them in the discard pile, making faces and saying, “What a piece of junk,” or “Whatever pos
sessed Bruce to pay money for this?”

  Not that other people’s opinions mattered, but the thought of collecting stuff just for the sake of having it had suddenly seemed not only pointless to him but also repulsive. He had been holding a big tacky light fixture in his hands at the moment of the epiphany, something he actually remembered his mother purchasing and bringing home years ago to hang in the entryway by the front door. It looked like some kind of clunky wooden flying saucer with a big bubblelike globe of streaky pale green glass in the center. Six spokes radiated from the globe, and at the end of each spoke was suspended a smaller globe of the same pale green, so that the whole thing gave off a substantial amount of light, far more than was needed for their small foyer.

  More than once Bruce remembered a visitor stepping inside their front door and looking up startled by the exceedingly bright light, like someone caught in a police sting. The first time he had attended church with his friend Virgil Dunlop, in fact, he had thought about this very light fixture when Pastor Monroe had read a verse from Isaiah: “The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light.” Later, when he heard about Ezekiel’s vision of a wheel in the middle of a wheel, he thought of it again, wondering if the designer of his mother’s light fixture had had a similar vision.

  But his father had dutifully hung the thing for his mother, replacing a small, far more tasteful fixture with the amazing whirligig from outer space, only to take it down and move it several months later when she decided it was too big for the entryway but would work fine in the kitchen where she needed more light anyway.

  Bruce didn’t know exactly when it had also been deemed unsuitable for the kitchen, but here it was, sitting in the attic, a dusty reject. The truth was, as he thought of the migration of his mother’s light fixture, it reminded him of a prissy wooden floor lamp with a little circular table skirting the pole that he had picked up at a sale. He had shifted that lamp around all over his apartment until he had recently shoved it into a closet behind some old sport coats he never wore anymore. He sat very still and thought of his apartment back home, visualizing each jam-packed room, imagining on every object a bright red tag marked Acquisition.

  Sitting in the attic that day, Bruce had made a vow to change. He was going to pare his life down to the essentials. He didn’t know how long he sat there with the light fixture in his hands, but finally Suzanne had called up to him and told him there were sandwiches and drinks in the kitchen if he was hungry. And he had set the fixture aside and come down to find that it had grown dark outdoors, which he took to be an extension of his revelation: Night was coming on, and he must mend his ways.

  And so he had changed. He had gone back home to Montgomery and had a gigantic sale one Saturday and Sunday, opening up his entire apartment to anyone who had read the ad in the paper: “Too much stuff. Bring a truck and make an offer.” On one side of his bedroom he had put everything he wanted to keep, which wasn’t much. His friends told him he was crazy, but he didn’t care. Once the sale started, he felt himself growing lighter and lighter.

  So when he heard Pastor Monroe preach a sermon on the rich young ruler, it struck Bruce funny that he himself, before he had ever learned of salvation, had unwittingly followed Christ’s injunction not only to go and sell what he had, but also to give to the poor, for more than once he had yielded to sudden inexplicable impulses of generosity.

  Like the time in a grocery store in Montgomery when he had been in the checkout line behind a woman with four small children, one of them a fretful baby with hungry-looking eyes. He had observed the few things in her grocery cart, had watched her slowly unfold a ten-dollar bill from her change purse and hand it to the cashier, as if wrenching herself away from an old friend, then carefully count the change before putting it away. He still remembered the look in her eyes, which was closer to fear than anything else he could think of, when he followed her outside and gave her all the cash in his billfold, which was ninety-two dollars.

  The whole point of the story of the rich young ruler, though—if he understood it correctly—had to do with the means of salvation, which was never ever because of anything man did. So although things like weeding out your possessions and giving away money were good, they didn’t amount to a hill of beans when it came to earning divine favor. But at least he had been able to get out of Montgomery faster when the time came since all his worldly goods had fit into the bed of his Ford 250 XLT.

  And when he showed up at Suzanne’s house in Columbia, South Carolina, she took one look at the pickup and said, “You can’t be serious! This is it? This is all you have?” Even Kimberly, who was newly married at the time and also living in Columbia, said, “Oh, Bruce, what happened? You have nothing, absolutely nothing!” Typical of Kimberly, she cried openly about it, shed real tears for her poor brother’s misfortune until he finally got her attention. “Hey, Kimbo, look at me,” he said, getting right in her face. “Do I look sad?” To which Suzanne sniffed and said, “You don’t have enough sense to be sad.”

  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 believ
e 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.