No Dark Valley by Jamie Langston Turner Page A

only way to live. Follow the rules! Stay inside the lines! Walk the straight and narrow!
    When he came to the final words, the pastor slowed down and let each one hang in the air a little longer: “‘For the Lord thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest.’” He closed the Bible and leaned forward. “And that promise is as true for our departed friend today as it was for Joshua. Mrs. Burnes has gone to a new place, but the Lord God is still with her. In fact, he’s with her now in an even better way, for she’s resting in his bosom as a lamb with its shepherd.” Celia suspected that this was intended as a transition so they could all stand and sing something like “Savior, Like a Shepherd Lead Us.”
    She continued to study the pastor as he returned to his seat. He wasn’t the same pastor as the one she remembered from eighteen years ago. Pastor Thacker had been the name of that one, but he had probably retired or died by now. He’d been an old man even back then, but he’d had a strong voice, with which he had loudly denounced “the rampant worldliness creeping into our homes and churches.” That was one thing Pastor Thacker had loved to harp on—how much like the world Christians were becoming. “‘Come out from among them, and be ye separate’!” he would shout at some point during almost every sermon he preached. She remembered the looks of silent reproach he gave her that last year the few times she went to church. She remembered the day he visited their house, no doubt at Grandmother’s request, and tried to talk her out of going to a liberal state college.
    Celia’s prediction proved wrong. The congregation wasn’t asked to sing “Savior, Like a Shepherd Lead Us” after all. But she hadn’t been all that far off. The other man came to the pulpit now and began singing all by himself a song Celia remembered from the old book of Tabernacle Hymns : “The Lord Is My Shepherd.” At least she had been right about the shepherd part. Next to her she saw Aunt Beulah wipe her eyes with an embroidered handkerchief.
    Celia knew all the words to this hymn, also. “The Lord is my shepherd, no want shall I know.” When the man got to the part that said “He leadeth my soul where the still waters flow,” the pastor leaned forward in his chair and nodded earnestly.
    She studied the pastor again. He was sitting with his hands on his knees, both feet flat on the floor, looking steadily at the man who was singing. He was probably in his late forties, Celia guessed, and not at all handsome, with thin hair he was clearly in the process of losing. He looked exactly like the kind of man who would be Grandmother’s pastor. Not one glimmer of prosperity about him. He had probably “felt the call” early in life and devoted himself to studying the Bible as a youngster, never experiencing anything remotely close to an adventure.
    But adventure wasn’t a word people like Grandmother understood. The sameness of her life was remarkable to Celia. And totally unthinkable—she couldn’t imagine such dullness. Not only had her grandmother lived in the same house for all those years, but she had also attended the same little clapboard church only three blocks from her house as long as she had lived there, and most of that time she had walked to services, even in winter.
    She had owned only one car in her whole life—a tan Mercury Comet that her husband, Celia’s grandfather, had bought used in 1970 only two years before he died. Actually, he had bought it wrecked at an auction and had gotten it home and fixed it up like new out in the barn. Before that they had gone everywhere in an old Chevy pickup. Grandmother was over fifty when she learned to drive the Comet, and she drove it mainly to the grocery store. Come to think of it, that was probably the great adventure of her life—learning to