No Dark Valley

by Jamie Langston Turner

  “And what about now?” Bruce asked. “Do you still think that?”

  Well, actually, no, she said, she didn’t think that anymore.

  “So it’s settled,” Bruce said. “I guess this is the place in the script where it says, couple kisses passionately.”

  “I guess so,” Celia said, “if it’s one of those formulaic plots.”

  Bruce got out of his truck and went around to open Celia’s door. It was a cold crisp night. He knew it was a Thanksgiving hymn, and Thanksgiving was long past, but he heard the words anyway: “Come, ye thankful people, come, raise the song of harvest-home.” He had no idea why this particular hymn should come to him now. Maybe it was because he suddenly felt overwhelmed with thankfulness, with the sense that he had labored well and now the harvest was in and he was coming home.

  “Have I ever told you how the words of hymns race around in my head all hours of the day and night?” he said as he helped Celia out.

  She stopped and looked up at him. “Really?” she said. “How strange.”

  They walked to her porch stoop. “Are you happy?” Bruce asked.

  “Happy?” she asked. She looked into the treetops. “That’s sort of like asking if the sky is big.” She took her key out and unlocked the door, then looked up at him. “Yes, I’m very happy.”

  And after loving God with his whole heart, Bruce thought, what higher aim could a man have than to make a good woman happy?

  Part Three:

  THOU

  HAST LOVED US,

  LOVE US STILL

  38

  Through the Storm, Through the Night

  At the Church of the Open Door the next morning, the usher escorted Bruce and Celia to seats on the aisle just as the choir was filing in. Celia saw Elizabeth and her husband in the choir and Margaret Tuttle at the organ. The pianist looked familiar, too—oh yes, it was the woman named Jewel she had met at Elizabeth’s house the night of the poetry club meeting. The daughter of Eldeen. Celia glanced around for Eldeen but didn’t see her. She felt a sudden thrill of hope at the thought of meeting the old woman again.

  Early in the service, Celia decided one thing: Though she had heard a lot of preachers in her life, there was something about this one that called out to her soul. Pastor Monroe over at Community Baptist, where she had attended with Bruce a couple of times, was a good man, and even though his style of preaching was like bland cooking—it did provide nourishment, but without much seasoning—he seemed solid in his theology and solicitous in his care for his people.

  It was clear, however, during the preliminary announcements that the preacher here at the Church of the Open Door had a gift for public speaking, which, all other things being equal, could only serve to enhance the effectiveness of a pastor in Celia’s opinion. To be able to listen to God’s truth imparted with such fluency and clarity of style, well, it would be like sitting down to a banquet every Sunday. It would be like the difference between the meal last night at Capriccio and the sandwiches she often threw together for supper when she didn’t feel like cooking.

  The song leader also seemed to stir the people to worship in a way she hadn’t seen before. All the music seemed purposeful, not just perfunctory. She could imagine attending this church every Sunday. As the choir sang an arrangement of “I Love to Tell the Story,” she wondered if Bruce would ever be interested in joining the choir here at this church. For herself, she would love to. He would probably hold back, claiming that he knew nothing about music. But he could learn. After all, she would point out to him, there was supposed to be a high correlation between mathematical and musical skills. Some famous musician, she couldn’t remember who it was right now, had also been a respected scientist.

  Celia closed her eyes during “Wonderful Grace of Jesus” when they came to the words “Taking away my burden, setting my spirit free,” and again in the chorus when she sang with the women, “Wonderful grace, all-sufficient for me, for even me.” How perfect that they would sing this particular song on this particular day. She and Bruce had had long talks about God’s grace. They had laid their sins open, had looked full into each other’s eyes, knowing the hard truth about themselves. And God’s grace had covered it all.

  After the offering was taken, a quartet of boys appeared at the pulpit and began a tightly harmonized rendition of “At Calvary.” They were all tall, good-looking kids, two of them obviously twins. How odd, Celia thought, that four teenagers in the twenty-first century would be singing such an old gospel song. She knew the words by heart, from the opening of the first stanza, “Years I spent in vanity and pride,” to the closing of the last, “Oh, the mighty gulf that God did span at Calvary.” And those glorious words of the chorus: “Mercy there was great, and grace was free; pardon there was multiplied to me; there my burdened soul found liberty, at Calvary.”

  The boys’ voices blended well. Something like this had to take a lot of time. Celia wondered when they rehearsed and how long. What had they had to give up in order to prepare this song? She could hardly take her eyes off the boy on the end who was dressed in a madras plaid sport coat, seventies style, a red polyester shirt, and a wide navy necktie. She remembered a certain photo of her father holding her when she was a little girl. He had been wearing a sport coat just like that one.

  When Ken Landis came out from the choir before the sermon, lifted his trumpet, and began playing “Precious Lord, Take My Hand,” Celia kept her eyes straight ahead. She didn’t know how he had managed it, but she suspected that Bruce had something to do with this. Probably with the “Wonderful Grace” song, too.

  As Ken played, the words of the song spoke themselves to her, taking her back to her grandmother’s house, “through the storm, through the night” of their years together. But, what a happy ending to the song—being led by the hand to the light of home.

  After Ken Landis’s trumpet solo ended, the pastor prayed a prayer rich in allusions to all the songs and Scripture passages of the service thus far. His closing sentence was “And now, take us by the hand, precious Lord, and lead us to the light of the truth within your Word,” after which he began to read one of Celia’s favorite chapters in the whole Bible: “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels . . .” What better passage of Scripture for a sermon on the day after Valentine’s Day than First Corinthians thirteen? What better passage to remind Celia of the source of all love, of God’s wiping away the sin of her past and reclaiming her as his own, making her heart ready to give and to receive love?

  At the end of the service, the song leader encouraged everyone to greet the visitors after the closing prayer. By the time they had made it back to the vestibule, Celia’s hand felt numb from all the squeezing and shaking, and just as she was wondering if there was anyone in attendance that morning who hadn’t greeted them, she heard a voice above the crowd and saw a large form looming over a dozen or more heads, waving what looked like a man’s handkerchief. “Wait just a minute there, hold on, don’t let ’em leave yet. I been hittin’ snags right and left tryin’ to work my way back here!”

  And as the people fell back like waves against the shore, she came chugging into full view, a great steamboat of a woman, rounding the bend with continuous tooty blasts. Bruce leaned down to Celia, who looked up at him, and, as they had done more than once before, the two of them spoke simultaneously, the general message practically the same: “Just wait till you meet this woman. You won’t believe it.”

  * * *

  Eldeen greeted them warmly and at great length, telling Celia, “I remember you! You came to our poetry meeting and gave us a little talk about a picture. And you’re still pretty as a picture yourself!” After they finally left Eldeen, Elizabeth Landis invited Bruce and Celia to meet her husband and her at Juno’s for Sunday dinner. “It’s not fancy,” she said. “It’s a buffet, just good country cooking.” She laughed. “Sort of like a southern family reunion.”

  “Oh, I know all about southern family reunions,” Celia said. “I’ll
feel right at home.”

  On their way to Juno’s, Bruce looked over at her and said, “Have I ever told you how beautiful you are? If I was writing our story, here’s how I’d start this scene we’re in right now. ‘He looked across the seat at her and knew he’d never get tired of looking at this woman.’”

  “That’s not very flowery,” said Celia. “No one would want to read a romance novel like that.”

  Bruce laughed and told Celia about the sappy novels he used to snitch from Suzanne’s room when he was a kid. He would read them aloud through the closed door as she soaked in the bathtub and yelled at him to stop: “‘Thaddeus clutched Miranda’s limp, white-clad form to his broad, heaving chest, lifted his contorted face to the driving rain, and bellowed his impassioned grief into the leaden skies.’”

  She smiled and shook her head. “And the pictures on the covers of those books . . . oh my.” She looked down at her left hand and touched a finger to the ring. “Our story could never make a good book, you know that, don’t you?”

  “And why not? We wouldn’t write it like that dimestore trash. Ours would be simple and beautiful.”

  Again she shook her head. “Nope, too many problems.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like every literary cliché under the sun.”

  “Well, we wouldn’t have to put in all the sentimental Valentine stuff,” Bruce said, then added with a wounded expression, “although I sort of thought you liked it all.”

  “Oh, I loved every minute of it. But it’s more than just Valentine’s Day—the whole story is riddled with clichés.”

  “Like what?”

  “Think about it,” she said, and when he continued to look puzzled, “Okay, listen, let me help you out here.” If they gave even a little background for themselves, she told him, her part would be loaded with clichés, starting with her being an orphan and having an unhappy adolescence. “You know, right along the lines of David Copperfield, Jane Eyre, and all the rest.” Then there was her grandmother’s death, she said, and the obligatory funeral scene, where the worldly wise heroine returns home to her roots to bury the family matriarch—or patriarch, take your pick—and has some kind of Revelation with a capital R.

  He interrupted her. “But you didn’t have any Revelation with a capital R until months after your grandmother’s funeral.”

  “Yes, yes, but it all started with that trip to the funeral and then bringing her Bible home and then her hymnbook and all her diaries and her quilts and dishes and . . .”

  “Well, I don’t think any of that qualifies as a cliché.”

  She made a scoffing sound. “And then the whole mistaken identity thing with you. That’s the oldest gimmick in the book. The heroine hates the hero at first, until she has yet another Revelation with a capital R in which she realizes his true identity and suddenly appreciates all his sterling qualities.”

  “Wait a minute. You still hated me even after you realized my true identity, remember?”

  She ignored this. “And there’s the boy-next-door element, too. How many times has that been used? The heroine all of a sudden discovers she loves the boy who’s always been like a brother.”

  “And when did you ever think of me as a brother?”

  She frowned at him and hurried on. “And then, your background is full of them, too. The tall, dark stranger shows up with secrets in his past. The good old Odysseus figure.”

  “You forgot handsome—tall, dark, and handsome stranger.”

  “Well, okay, yes, that’s another one. The hero always has to be incredibly good-looking and strong and brave.”

  “And extremely intelligent.”

  “Yes, usually that, too,” she said. “And the hero and heroine always seem like total opposites at the beginning, but—”

  “No, no, that’s not true. You were incredibly good-looking and extremely intelligent at the beginning, too, just like me—and still are, in fact you’re even more intelligent now since you’ve gained an appreciation of the sterling qualities of the boy-next-door, that strong, brave Odysseus figure.”

  “ . . . but then they always, always eventually find out by the end of the book that they have much in common.” She paused and spoke melodramatically, as if reading from a bad story: “‘And suddenly the scales fell from their eyes as they both realized they were looking into the very mirror of their souls.’”

  “Well, that’s a funny mirror if you ask me. I mean, good grief, think about it. He’s dark and she’s blond, and he’s tall and she’s short, and he’s got scars and she doesn’t, and he’s a musical moron and she’s not, and his apartment looks like an army barracks and hers”—he lurched to a sudden stop at a red light—“hers looks like the Golden Age of Greece, and I could go on and on, not to overlook the most obvious fact that he’s a man and she’s a woman—the ultimate contrast.”

  She nodded. “Yes, and she can play tennis, and he . . . well, he tries.”

  “Oh, of course, the hero might have known the heroine would bring that up.” He pointed his finger at her. “You just wait, sweetheart. You are going down.” The tires of his truck squealed a little as he took off from the red light.

  “And we can’t forget the Day-It-All-Turned-Around,” she said. “The Chance Meeting when their eyes locked in that Grand Moment of Illumination—there’s another cliché to stick in.”

  But how could she call it a chance meeting, he asked indignantly, when she knew good and well that there was a lot more of the supernatural than of chance in that meeting in the Cracker Barrel parking lot? Why, she had said herself that after hearing about all the power outages in Derby and Berea that day, she had been fully intending to drive all the way into Greenville to shop a little and then eat supper at a place called Aunt Cassie’s Kitchen, but that upon seeing the billboard advertisement for Cracker Barrel on I-85, she had suddenly felt strongly and inexplicably compelled to stop there, even though it was earlier than she really wanted to eat. It was almost as if “somebody else turned my steering wheel”—isn’t that exactly what she had said?

  And she looked chastened and said yes, yes, he was right, it wasn’t a chance meeting at all but an appointed one. And forgetting about all the clichés, she said, which didn’t matter anyway because they certainly wouldn’t ever write their story for publication, in her opinion the two of them had more than enough differences to provide interest and variety.

  They had already talked at some length about the ways they were alike—their mutual dislike of storms, for instance, the fact that they both drove Fords, their disapproval of sweet corn bread. They both loved the South, had moved to other fields of work outside their original college majors, and dreamed in color. And they had found out less than fifteen minutes ago that they were both fascinated by Eldeen Rafferty.

  “By the way, did I ever tell you I had a grandfather who was a science teacher?” Celia asked Bruce. No, he said, and had he ever told her that his grandmother had been a portrait artist as a young woman and had a small gallery in Mississippi where she displayed her work?

  But all the coincidences would never fly in a book, Celia pointed out. “I mean, two messed-up single people over thirty-five living in basement apartments right next door to each other and falling in love? Why, readers wouldn’t stand for such tripe in a plot.”

  Tripe? he said. How could she call reality tripe? And who was she calling messed up? Even if there was a little bit of truth in it, well, the world was full of messed-up people. The chances of two of them living next door to each other were enormous. He ought to know. He had taken math courses in probability.

  “Well, besides all that,” Celia said, “another big reason we could never write our real-life story would be because of all the parts we’d want to leave out. A lot of readers want to see everything right out in the open, you know, and a lot of writers feel compelled to give it to them in living color.” She groaned. “You wouldn’t believe some of the stuff I’ve edited. No sense of subtlety—it all just slaps you
in the face.”

  Bruce nodded. “Yeah, same goes for plays and movies. The worst ones show it all.”

  Readers would complain, Celia said, if the story wasn’t finished. “They’d want to be seated in the front pew to observe every detail of the wedding. They’d want to stand by the car to throw rice and peek out from behind the curtains in the honeymoon suite. They’d want to know if we bought a house, how many kids we had, and on and on.”

  “Well, hey, I can sympathize,” Bruce said. “I want to know those things, too.”

  Celia laughed and related something she had read once about Kafka’s story Metamorphosis, in which the main character turns into a gigantic insect. When the publisher was considering ideas for the cover art, someone suggested a picture of the insect, to which Kafka replied, “No, please, not that.” His point being that you had to leave certain critical parts to the reader’s imagination.

  “And you would never be a convincing male character in a book anyway,” Celia continued. “Nobody would ever believe a man like you could exist. It would all sound made up. And it would cause strife in homes everywhere. Women would be reading it out loud to their husbands, saying, ‘Why can’t you be like that?’ and you’d get calls from all kinds of men threatening your life.”

  “But think of what a difference our story could make in marriages all across America,” Bruce said. “After our book hits the New York Times Best Seller list, then we’ll start the talk-show circuit and . . .”

  “Books about Christians don’t hit the New York Times Best Seller list,” Celia said.

  “Yeah, you got a point there,” Bruce said. They were pulling into the parking lot of Juno’s now. He parked his truck, turned off the engine, then looked up into the sun. “Too bad it’s not later in the day.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because when we leave here, we’ll be driving west.”