No Dark Valley by Jamie Langston Turner Read Free Book Online

didn’t realize she was smiling until Al gave her a long look. “Hey, what’s going on?” he said. “You look like you know a secret.”
    â€œMaybe I do,” she said, but she stopped smiling. Inside the family waiting room she chose a straight-back chair by the window. They were the first three in the room. She knew it would be full before long. She could hear their voices already, strident and contentious, with no sense of discretion.
    She could imagine Aunt Elsie pointing her out to someone on their procession into the chapel: “Up there, that’s Celia. Look at her worldly haircut and that little bit of a dress, and not even wearing a coat!” And then Aunt Clara would add her commentary: “Still as stubborn and contrary as she was before! Not one ounce of concern for the things of the Lord! Made poor Sadie’s life one endless tribulation!” Even Doreen might chime in: “She used to be real sweet till she got mixed up with the wrong crowd in high school.”
    There was a little table by the window where she sat, and Celia looked hard at the artificial flower arrangement sitting on it. It was in a white wicker basket, an unseasonable mixture of fake irises, roses, and daffodils in colors much too bright for a January day. As could be expected, the petals and leaves were coated with a fine film of dust. The basket was too large for the arrangement in it, and it sat a little lopsided on the table.
    Looking at the basket, Celia was taken back to a summer afternoon when she was sixteen, before she had gotten mixed up with the so-called wrong crowd, when she and Grandmother had gone blackberry picking along the railroad track that ran beside their house. They had spent hours filling their baskets and pails with berries. Grandmother could pick them twice as fast as Celia, deftly avoiding the thorns, and when her basket was full she came alongside Celia and helped her fill hers.
    They didn’t talk much, just picked. And broiled like hot dogs on a grill. Celia remembered how unbearable it was, how long the day had seemed. She wondered now why they hadn’t risen early and done their picking in the morning when it was cooler. She hadn’t complained, though, not even about the long sleeves Grandmother had insisted she wear. That was before she had wised up and found out about freedom. Those were still the days of conforming, of accompanying Grandmother to church and praying four times a day and doing as she was told.
    They had finished with the baskets and set them side by side, then taken up two buckets they’d also brought along. The bushes were loaded with ripe berries, and even after both buckets were full, her grandmother put her hands on her hips and looked off down the tracks. “We could empty these and fill ’em all over again,” she said, shaking her head. For a minute Celia was afraid she was going to insist they do just that, but she didn’t. She took off her straw hat and bent over to wipe her forehead with the hem of her dress. “Let’s go,” she said, putting the hat back on. “Time to get us some supper.”
    After they ate that night, Grandmother took out some plastic grocery store bags and divided up all those berries, every last one. Then they walked up and down Old Campground Road delivering them to all the neighbors. Grandmother kept one bag for herself. One bag out of probably twelve or fourteen. The next day she made one blackberry pie and two jars of preserves. Not much to show for all that hot work under the July sun. Their fingers were stained for days afterward, and Celia had scratches all over her hands and wrists from the brambles.
    Not that her grandmother made a proud show out of her generosity. Not at all. It had often seemed to Celia that Grandmother hardly knew how to go about being neighborly. It almost seemed as if she were embarrassed by her attempts. As Celia remembered it, she was terse,