Cavedweller

by Dorothy Allison

  In the county library Cissy found a book of martyrs. There had been saints, the book revealed, who went years in one garment. One robe. No mention of how or when it was washed. Perhaps it never was, or only incidentally, the face turned up to the rain, the body rolling briefly in a summer stream. The robe would tatter and rot and fall off the gaunt and fervid frame, to be replaced by another the same as the first. No vanity, no thought. No fear, no desire. The garment served to mask the flesh, not adorn it.

  Maybe the saints had some disease, and maybe Delia had caught it.

  Sleeping away the days in the little house by the river, Delia dreamed of her girls again. She dreamed Amanda and Dede and Cissy were babies pushing up to her breasts with open, hungry mouths. They were all the same size, shrieking for her, flailing their arms as she tried to lift them together, to pull them up into her embrace. Invariably one child slipped. One baby fell away. Delia screamed and reached to catch her daughter, and another one slipped, while the third gasped as if dying in Delia’s grip. She struggled and struggled, but she could never hold them all safe. Waking from those dreams, Delia felt her wet cheeks and her aching arms. All she had was her need to shelter and care for her girls, no matter that Dede and Amanda were almost grown. All the way across the county, Delia could feel their hunger and persistent need. They’re my babies still, she told herself.

  Sometimes Delia’s dreams were not nightmares but memories of what had been, the loved bodies as they had first been given to her. Amanda, still flecked with blood and mucus when the nurse handed her to Delia, was shockingly tiny and desperate. When the nurse shifted that elfin creature to Clint’s hands, his eyes widened in panic.

  “My God,” he gasped, unable to believe that anything so vibrant and powerful had come out of the numbed and passive creature Delia became in the last months of pregnancy. He had thrust the infant back to her in a reflexive movement, then looked uncomprehending at the tableau of mother and resistant child. Amanda would not take Delia’s bursting nipple. The baby cried and kicked and wailed while Delia sank into the overstuffed pillows and sobbed blindly, heartbroken. Their misery had drawn Clint back to the bedside, his callused hands awkwardly patting and comforting, first Delia, then the infant girl.

  That moment was among the most awful and tender Delia had ever known. She could not make peace with the contradiction, the bloody-minded horror of the Clint who stormed strange and dangerous through the house and the Clint who so feared harming Amanda that he wept at the sight of his rough fingers near her baby-fine cheek.

  Maybe it was the smell of milk and blood. At each birth there had been that fleeting instant of tenderness. When Dede was born and latched immediately onto Delia’s nipple, her little fists bright pink against the creamy breast, her cheeks pumping like bellows, Clint leaned forward in awe, his hand coming down on Delia’s hip. She hissed in startled pain, dislodging the baby’s mouth, the greedy tongue still outthrust and hungry for the love-tit. Delia flinched when the cool air struck the burning, cracked nipple, and Clint jerked back, looking up at Delia’s face with red-rimmed eyes. Their glances locked, and Delia felt her heart thud stubbornly with hope.

  Once he recaptured Delia’s look, Clint had seemed oblivious to those two yeasty warm bodies. It was Delia he breathed in and out, Delia he bruised and dreamed of lying limp in his arms. It was her wet, broken flesh that called to him, the children they had made together ghostly, distracting. Delia knew she was the only thing in that house that had ever seemed real to Clint. Only when she was gone did the girls register, and then only for the piece of her they were. Clint had held on to Amanda and Dede because they were anchors for Delia’s heart.

  “He doesn’t want them,” Delia told Randall after the judge in Atlanta gave Clint full custody. She clutched her few pictures and ranted like a madwoman. “What he wants is to hurt me, bleed me from every pore. That is the sin God will judge him for, that is the crime. The man could open his veins on the throne of heaven and no mother would ever forgive him what he has done. He is damned, by God, damned forever.”

  In the little house by the river, Delia dreamed Randall and Clint, Dede and Amanda, her babies and her rage, and woke to lie in bed with her eyes burning and her hands in her fists. How would she explain? Her girls would have so many questions, and how could she face them? Delia rocked in the bed, her breasts as swollen and painful as they were on the day she left ten-month-old Dede dreaming in her crib at the house on Terrill Road. “God,” Delia prayed, “let them forgive me. Let me have the chance to make them forgive me.”

  Crying season ended suddenly and completely and without apparent explanation. One morning Delia came home from work pulling at the T-shirt, lifting the cotton and wrinkling her nose.

  “Damn,” she told Cissy. “This thing smells.” She peeled the shirt off in the kitchen, balled it up, and wiped it once down her bare midriff. Her small breasts startled Cissy, too small, it seemed, to have nursed babies.

  Delia saw Cissy’s expression and laughed. “Nothing here you won’t have soon enough.” She dropped the shirt in the garbage and went to shower, staying under the hot water for a long time.

  When M.T. came over later that day, she did not ask questions. She saw Cissy’s face as she was walking up the steps, nodded, and said, “I’ll get us a chicken. We’ll cook something special.”

  Cissy had wondered what was going to happen. The old Delia had never been one to cry or fall on anybody’s neck. The returned Delia wasn’t either. She gave her friend one kiss and stepped back, and the surprise then was that nothing changed. It did not seem to bother M.T. that Delia no longer joined in her tears or held still to be comforted. M.T. wept and laughed and cooked her chicken, as happy with the recovered Delia as she had been with the tragic heroine. She didn’t even mind when Delia refused to go to church with her that first Sunday after she came back to herself.

  “Got things to do,” Cissy heard her tell M.T. over the phone as she made a big breakfast.

  “What kind of day you think it’s going to be, Cissy?” Delia asked as she set a plate of ham and eggs in front of her daughter with a smile.

  “Good day to leave,” Cissy said.

  Delia laughed. “Lord, girl. We barely got here.”

  Chapter 5

  On her own, Delia drove over to Holiness Redeemer to watch the congregation gather three Sundays in a row. It was the one place she could be sure to see them—Amanda and Dede, and Grandma Windsor prodding them before her. Her eyes sought out her girls as soon as the doors opened at the end of the service. But just as Delia remembered, Grandma Windsor was always the last to leave. The old woman stayed in her seat until the pews around her were empty, eyes down and lips moving in prayer while everyone shifted and stood and wondered if they should sit back down and contemplate their sins. When Clint and Delia went to church with her the week before the wedding, Delia knew the moment she stood up that Grandma Windsor had been looking forward to her blunder. The woman had stared at her in pleased disdain, her lips curling slightly and her black eyes flickering to Clint’s face to be sure he knew what Delia had done. Before then Delia had not realized how much Clint’s mother hated her. Afterward there was no denying that Grandma Windsor was waging a war of contempt, that she would rather her son had gone to his grave than take up with the Byrd girl, who didn’t know enough to sit quietly in a pew until her betters signaled that she could rise.

  Delia watched people come out of the church two and three at a time, and when it seemed there was no one left, Grandma Windsor stepped out with the girls. She hugged her big purse and nodded once at the preacher, Reverend John Hillman, Delia saw on the sign out front, which also proclaimed, “Repent! Repent! The blood of the Lamb cries out.” Amanda and Dede kept their heads down and made no move that did not mimic Grandma Windsor. Delia drew breath as if there were not enough air in the world to ease her emptiness. Her eyes widened and followed the girls while her face went stiff with pain. They were exactly as she had imagined and nothing at
all as she had hoped. Amanda was a taller, sterner version of Grandma Windsor, but Dede looked so much like Delia’s own lost mother that it hurt her heart. Delia bent forward and pressed her chin to the steering wheel to keep from rushing out to embrace them. Her girls looked miserable. Her girls looked like they wouldn’t know how to be happy if someone paid them to try.

  Dede’s mouth was swollen and pouty. She trailed after her grandmother and sister, with her shoulders angling away from them and her hips moving jerkily, like a mechanical toy yanked along by a string. Beside her Amanda hunched her shoulders and clung to Grandma Windsor’s hip, though the old woman never looked back at her. Amanda appeared to be modeling herself on her grandmother, her hair tied back in a little-old-lady bun, her lips pressing her teeth in a practiced line of disapproval, her teenage legs stepping gingerly as if her hips were calcified and arthritic. Tears blurred Delia’s vision, and all she could think was how much like her the girls seemed, like Delia at their age, angry and lonely and fighting all the time to keep what she felt from showing in her face.

  God means this to hurt, Delia thought, as a bitter, prickly tingling ran up and down her arms. She could almost feel Dede’s soft shoulders under her fingers, smell the soap-sharp scent of Amanda’s flaxen hair. She wanted to jump out of the Datsun and run to them, and shake love into their wounded hearts. Her eyes tracked the members of the congregation, women she had last seen at her wedding and men she remembered sipping whiskey on Granddaddy Windsor’s front porch. Not all of them had hated her. A few had looked at her with pity. But there would be no pity in them now. She was the fallen woman, the whore of Babylon, the bitch-whelp who had abandoned her young. No one on that lawn would let her near her girls. With one will, they would chase her away.

  On the second Sunday, Delia’s stomach lurched when Clint pulled up in his rusty white Chevy pickup before the service started, and leaned out to hand an envelope over to Grandma Windsor. He was thinner and older than she expected, his dirty blond hair scraping the collar of one of those white uniform shirts Delia had ironed so many times. She pushed the apple of her palm into her mouth and bit down hard as he turned his head in her direction and she saw the face clearly. No, not Clint, but some blue-eyed white man just about his age. Delia realized that she was shaking. She remembered Clint’s charcoal eyes under that blond hair, the gray that darkened when he got angry. Those eyes had seemed almost black her last two years in Cayro. The man lifted a hand to wave at the minister, and Delia started her car too unnerved to think about seeing her girls again.

  The third Sunday, Delia got out of the car and walked up the church steps behind the last of the congregation just as the choir broke into “All Blessings” and the organ boomed out over the worshipers. From the back row she could see her girls up near the front, their bowed blond heads right beside Grandma Windsor’s tight gray bun. Delia stared at them, steeling herself to keep her seat once Reverend Hillman closed the service. She wanted to be sitting there when the girls walked past. She wanted to put her hand out and touch them, lift her eyes and see their faces when they realized who she was.

  Tears slipped down Delia’s face. She did not hear the sermon. She barely registered the choir. Only halfway through the service did she notice that the family in the pew across the aisle was looking in her direction, the father glaring angrily and the mother pick-faced and rigid. The two brown-haired youngsters with them kept squirming and looking up at their parents. No more than eight or nine, the boys had no way of knowing who Delia was, but there was no missing their parents’ outrage. Their big, curious eyes kept shifting to Delia and back to their dad.

  A flush bloomed on Delia’s cheeks. Sweat broke on her forehead and beneath her dress. Her eyes roamed the nearby pews. A dozen people were shifting and craning their necks. Each glance was scalding. Each pursed mouth pressed a nerve. As the stir increased, more people turned to look. Delia locked her hands together in a double fist and kept her eyes on them through the rest of the service. She had told herself that she could stand it, the outrage and contempt, the likelihood that Grandma Windsor would slap her face and curse her—anything to stand close to her girls and speak their names. But at the benediction Delia stood up and walked out without looking back. She had been wrong. She was not ready. If these strangers looked at her with such loathing, what would she find in her daughters’ eyes?

  But as Delia was driving away from Holiness Redeemer, the hand of God reached out to her again over at Cayro Baptist Tabernacle. Mrs. Pearlman looked for Delia that morning and, when she didn’t see her, spoke bluntly to M.T. on the church steps. The arthritis in her wrists and elbows had grown so bad that she was keeping the Bonnet going only through stubborn determination and a high tolerance for pain. Her stubbornness was limitless, but the flexibility in her fingers was almost gone. She no longer trusted herself with a pair of sharp scissors, and neither did her customers. Even her regulars had started to go over to Marietta, and her business depended on occasional strangers who didn’t know better.

  “Have Delia come see me,” she told M.T. “If we can come to an agreement, I might have some work for her at the Bonnet.” Her powdered cheeks trembled as she spoke, and her right hand settled more tightly on her cane, but her voice was firm and her words audible to the women standing around. M.T. nodded.

  “Marcia, what are you thinking?” said Nadine Reitower, head of the Mothers’ Relief Fund. “You don’t want to take that hussy into your business.”

  Ruby and Pearl snickered into their Bibles, but M.T. didn’t hear.

  Mrs. Pearlman’s eyes had sparked. “There’s barely any business to speak of. I haven’t even seen you this month. Have I, Nadine?”

  Mrs. Reitower blushed. Her hand rose toward the little hat that held back her brown curls, but she stopped herself. “That woman’s a scandal,” she said. “No one will come to the shop if you put her in there.”

  Marcia looked around at the women standing on the church steps. “Good Christians will,” she said. “Good Christian women who know what it is to sin and ask forgiveness, I think they will come. There’s no scandal in repentance, no scandal in working hard and paying your bills. And Delia Byrd used to work for me. I know what she can do. She was one of the best hairdressers I ever hired. Won’t have lost that. Could probably even take care of that cowlick problem of yours, Nadine. Save you a bundle on hats and hairpins.”

  Nadine scowled and M.T. hooted. She herded the twins back into the Buick and drove directly to Delia’s to tell her the good news. “Girl,” she shouted happily when Delia met her at the driveway, “wait till I tell you what you missed at church.”

  Delia gave Sally two weeks’ notice and started in at the Bonnet on Wednesdays and Saturdays. The rest of the week she worked at Beck-man’s department store in Marietta, in the tiny beauty shop behind the Misses’ Dresses and winter coats. The first few people who came into the Bonnet and saw Delia there stared like she had two heads and the mark of Satan on each of them, but her old detachment had come back. She just nodded blandly at the outraged faces and walked away when they complained. This was work she could do with both eyes closed and half her mind engaged elsewhere. When she put her hands on a woman’s head, Delia Byrd felt almost as powerful as she had when she stood onstage with Mud Dog. This was work she knew. This was work she was good at. It healed something in her soul to be doing good work, even if she did it on sufferance for way too little money.

  Delia did her job. She did relaxed-curl permanents for women she had gone to high school with, tinting gray hair back to brown. Impassively she did modified punk cuts for the teenage daughters of women who wouldn’t speak to her, ignoring their timid questions about Randall and the band. When Marcia told her she was a wonder and the lady at Beckman’s started paying her more money, Delia didn’t seem to notice. It was as if her brain was already overfull, too much to be worked out and too little time. She wore denim wrap-around skirts and cotton blouses right out of the Goodwill box, bought Cissy jeans from the
Sears Roebuck outlet and plain white T-shirts sealed in plastic packages.

  Once or twice Cissy came home to see Delia sitting at the kitchen table with her face stricken and empty, but as soon as she stepped in the door, Delia would be up and bustling around.

  “What you want, Little Bit, something to eat?” Delia’s voice was always loud and bright.

  Cissy would shake her head and run back to her room. This was a new version of her mother, not the familiar stumbling Delia from Venice Beach and not that banshee who drove them across the country. Some days Cissy actually missed the weeping Delia in her gray stinking T-shirt. At least that Delia had left her alone.

  John Hillman, minister of the Holiness Redeemer Church of God, lived out on the Poinsette Road southwest of town. Delia had already been out to his house one Saturday after work, when his wife told her he was visiting some sick folks out in the country. The woman had looked at Delia with a neutral expression, but her eyes were burning and intent, and her mouth reminded Delia of that cook who cursed her the first morning in Cayro. Probably hopes I’ll burn in hell, Delia thought, keeping her own face as carefully composed as Mrs. Hillman’s.

  On her second try Delia spotted the minister on his way out to his car just as she was driving up. She called to him with relief. She had figured she could face his wife once, maybe twice more before losing her confidence.

  “Reverend,” she said, “I’m Delia Byrd.” She considered using the Windsor name, but she could not bear to say it. Besides, she told herself, surely the man knew who she was as well as his wife did.

  Reverend Hillman reached for her hand. “Mrs. Byrd,” he said. “I’ve been expecting you.”