No Dark Valley by Jamie Langston Turner Read Free Book Online Page A

bordering on rude, in her presentation of the berries throughout the neighborhood that night. They certainly hadn’t lingered over the task.
    Her grandmother would thrust the bag at whoever came to the door and say, “Here, we got lots more’n we know what to do with. You take some.” Then she’d wheel around and stalk back to Celia, who was waiting at the edge of the road. Since Grandmother’s house was set off all by itself, they had walked quite a little distance in either direction, stopping at houses where lights were on. The whole process took more than an hour, and when they got home, her grandmother washed her hands for a long time in the kitchen sink, seemingly glad to be done with the whole business.
    Celia sighed now and turned from the basket of flowers to look out the window. She saw a couple of cars pulling into the parking lot of the funeral home and felt herself wishing she could make time zoom ahead. If only she could suddenly be on the other side of the funeral, headed back home to normality. If only she could stay mad at Grandmother, if she could call up pictures of the hateful ways Grandmother had tried to control her life during that awful last year of high school, if she wouldn’t keep seeing instead all these other images of earlier times when they lived together peaceably.
    Al sat on the sofa by the window. Without looking directly at him, Celia could tell he was leaning forward, staring at her. “Celia, do you . . .” he started to say, then fell silent. Celia turned her head away from him. Again, she wished she had considered the effort it would take to have him along on this trip. The thought of riding all the way home with him after the funeral exhausted her.
    Aunt Beulah had disappeared again, but Celia could hear her voice out in the hallway: “We’re all meeting in here. Go on in. Celia’s already in there waiting.” Out of the corner of her eye, she saw several people enter the room, but she didn’t look to see who they were. She heard one of them say, “I bet you the ground is hard as cement. Sure is a cold day for burying her.” Someone else added, “Yep, I reckon it’ll be a sparse turnout.”
    But when they all filed into the chapel fifteen minutes later, Celia saw that the place was packed. She couldn’t help wondering who all these people were.
    Grandmother’s life had been so narrow. She had been born in a little town thirty miles away and had moved here to Dunmore after she married. Atlanta was about the farthest she had ever traveled. At one time Celia had thought it was pleasantly quaint to have a history like Grandmother’s, confined to a tiny pinpoint on the map, but then she had changed her mind and seen it as a horrible way to live your life. “Don’t you ever want to go places and do things?” she had asked her grandmother once, during the time she was starting to shake off her old way of thinking.
    â€œI got plenty to do right here at home,” Grandmother had replied evenly, and without so much as looking at Celia she had continued ripping an old sheet into rags.
    Celia followed Aunt Beulah into the second row of the funeral chapel and sat down between her and Al. The organ was playing softly “’Tis So Sweet to Trust in Jesus.” Celia wondered if her grandmother had chosen even the prelude hymns. Probably so. Someone directly behind her blew his nose, a sudden loud honking sound, and Celia flinched. Al put a hand on her arm, but she pulled away.
    She had always hated sudden loud noises. One of the hardest things to get used to when she had visited her grandmother as a little girl, and then later when she had lived with her, was the sudden blast of the train whistle as it rushed by the house. Actually, it wasn’t anything like a whistle. It was more like a horn or many horns—a great sustained blast of a thousand tubas. She had finally learned to