Cavedweller

by Dorothy Allison

  On the fifth Saturday, Delia shuddered and went back to the car. She gripped the wheel with all her might, let go, and turned the key. “Old woman, you have gone too far,” she said.

  The words were as flat as the stone-set pupils of Delia’s eyes.

  Old woman.

  The wheels spun. Dust rose and the car moved forward. Delia had talked about her girls to Granddaddy Byrd, M.T., Stephanie, and Reverend Hillman. Now she talked to her own soul and made her plans.

  Chapter 7

  Delia drove straight from Grandma Windsor’s to Terrill Road and the little yellow tract house she had shared with Clint all those years ago. She parked in the driveway and sat for a moment while memories flooded her. The place had been her home, but it was all run-down now, yellow paint flaking off the plank walls, the yard scraggly and bare in patches. There were two almost dead old peach trees out front, and a thoroughly dead hedge that had gone blackish brown. The porch was missing some boards, and the steps at the side were covered with plywood and hammered braces to make an awkwardly steep ramp. Everything was dirty and worn.

  Delia thought of the river house, with its mildew and neglect. She had already scraped out a patch where she could put in a little garden once the weather turned. She planned tomatoes and squash and flowers chosen for their big, wide blossoms: sunflowers and dahlias and leafy zinnias. She had always loved to garden. What had happened to everything she had planted here? She lifted her head. Above the roofline she could just see the soft shadows of the pecan and walnut trees where she sheltered with her babies that last summer.

  The door swung open. A tall gaunt man with ragged hair stood there gripping the jamb with both hands. He swayed a little, then steadied.

  “My God.” Delia’s face was stern with shock. Dime-size spots of red showed on her suddenly ashy cheeks. Her head turned slowly from side to side, as if protesting what she was seeing, that body in the doorway, so familiar and so changed.

  The two of them stood looking at each other, Delia motionless and Clint swaying slightly. His eyes were trained on her like searchlights on a moonless night. His mouth hung open, and his tongue, gray and thick, touched his lower lip.

  “Delia,” he said. “I wondered if you would come.”

  “Are you sure this is a good idea?” M.T. asked as she wrapped dishes and glasses in newspaper. She was helping Delia pack for the move to the tract house.

  “Don’t you remember what you told me? If Clint dies while Grandma Windsor has my girls, I’ll never get them.”

  M.T. couldn’t argue with that, but she was worried still. “Maybe he’ll get better,” she said. “We don’t know how bad he is.”

  “I know how bad he is. I saw him. He might have a little more time than you thought, but not much. He’s no threat to anyone anymore.”

  “Even a dying man can shoot you in the head.”

  “Clint an’t going to shoot nobody.” Delia looked tired. “Way it is, it’s almost like he got religion or something. He’s different. He’s changed.”

  “Well, I hope so,” M.T. said. “Son of a bitch was surely going to hell if he didn’t change. You think the cancer put the fear of God in him?”

  “I don’t know and I don’t care. All I know is that we have an understanding. We made a bargain.” Delia shoved a handful of frayed dish towels into a plastic bag. “A hell of a bargain. He’s going to help me get Amanda Louise and Dede, and I’m going to take care of him till he dies.”

  “You lived here?”

  Cissy was sitting in the passenger seat of the Datsun staring at her mother. She couldn’t believe her ears when Delia told her they were moving in with Clint and insisted that Cissy come with her to meet him. Now she couldn’t believe her eyes. The yellow tract house did not look like anywhere Delia would ever have called home.

  “This is where we lived when your sisters were born,” Delia said. “It was a sweet little house when we took it.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  Delia shifted uncomfortably. She pulled a tissue out of the box on the floor behind her seat and wiped her neck. “You were born just after Dede turned two. She’s a Taurus baby, May fourth. You’re August twenty-eighth, a Virgo.” She folded the tissue and blotted under her eyes. “Amanda was born March fifteenth, a Pisces. She’s four years older than you.”

  Cissy could tell that Delia was trying to keep the shame out of her voice, to talk casually about what she never talked about at all. “How old was Dede when you left?” she asked, knowing the question would hurt Delia, wanting it to.

  Delia looked at the house as if it were the only thing she could see. “Ten months. She was ten months.”

  “That’s little,” Cissy said. “Awful little, a baby still.”

  The moments stretched. Cissy could hear Delia’s teeth grinding. She was wondering if her mother would ever speak again when Clint came out on the porch and stood looking at the car. Cissy’s eyes flew to him. For a moment she was reminded of Granddaddy Byrd—the long, lean frame and the patient way the body hung motionless. But the dark eyes were shocking, soft and glowing and full of pain. And young, too young to be in that worn, pale face.

  Clint Windsor did not look anything like what Cissy expected. M.T. had said he was a big old nasty boy grown into a big old nasty man. This man was not big, though maybe he had been at one time. He made her think of the first book Randall had read to her, a book about a stick cricket—a walking stick. This man was like that, long and odd, a walking stick that could no longer carry his own weight.

  A roar went through Cissy then, echoes of all the stories she had ever heard about the man Randall called “that evil stubborn redneck son of a bitch.” Delia herself had cried his name like a curse, pounding the wall by the phone as she talked with Randall’s lawyers. “That son of a bitch! That goddamned son of a bitch!” So much rage and power. So many memories. All of it compressed into one stick-thin figure hanging in a doorway.

  Cissy pulled her legs up on the car seat and hugged her knees. She wondered if Clint was strong enough to hurt her mother. He might be, but he didn’t have to touch Delia to hurt her. He had been ripping her up for years. Cissy looked out the window to the roofline and the trees behind it. They had been living here when it all happened, when her sisters were born and he nearly killed Delia, when Delia ran off and Randall found her and everything started over in California. This was where the band started, where Cissy started, too, if she really thought about it. Delia was shaped here. Everything that happened afterward was because of what had happened in this house.

  “Come on, Cissy.” Delia’s voice was loud in her ear.

  Cissy swallowed and got out of the car. Together she and Delia walked to the porch.

  “Cecilia,” Clint said in a husky voice. “I’ve wondered what you would look like.” His eyes lifted to Delia and then dropped back to Cissy. “You look like your mother.”

  “You look like a grasshopper,” Cissy said.

  Clint grinned. “Yeah,” he said, “’cept I can’t hop much.” His shadowed eyes found Delia again. “She’s your girl,” he said. “Your girl for sure.”

  On the way back to the river house, Delia pulled another tissue out of the box and blew her nose. “It’s going to be hard, Cissy,” she said, her eyes level, insistent. “It’s going to be very hard. But it’s going to be good too, living there with Clint and your sisters.”

  In California, when Delia said “your sisters,” Cissy imagined figures from an overexposed photograph, strangers who did not matter, family, but not really. They were unimportant, distant, the kind of family you never had to think about or confront. After all, they had remained in Georgia with Clint. Cissy didn’t know exactly what had happened between Delia and Clint, but she didn’t care. Her world was Delia and Randall. The world was the three of them, and the friends who came around to hug Delia’s girl and tell her how pretty she was, how much like her famous daddy, her beautiful mama. Maybe Delia was always drunk and Randall hardly ever ther
e, but Cissy had never known anything different.

  From the day crying season ended, Cissy’s world was remade. Everything was about “your sisters.” Everything was Dede and Amanda. The world was full of people who looked at Cissy like she was some dog who might bite, some girl who didn’t matter at all. Granddaddy Byrd, M.T., Pearl and Ruby, Stephanie and the women who came into the Bee’s Bonnet Beauty Salon—the world was suddenly full of people who did not love Cissy. From the first moments, Cayro, Georgia, had settled down on Cissy like a clamp on her heart, the weight and substance of two girls she had only known in dreams.

  “Your daughters,” she said to Delia. “Your daughters, not my sisters.”

  Clint’s promise was good, the bargain exact. Even before Delia and Cissy moved into the tract house, he made the arrangements. It would take a little time, he said, but Delia would have her girls. He was the father. Grandma Windsor could not block him.

  By the day of the move, Clint could no longer get out of bed without help. “There’s not enough of him left,” M.T. whispered to Cissy, “to make a woman do a damn thing. He’s gotten so small, and he used to be so big.”

  Cissy wasn’t so sure. When she looked at Clint lying back against that stack of pillows, all she could think was that he had to be planning to shoot Delia in the head first chance he got, maybe with one of his precious hunting guns that hung on a polished pine rack over his bed.

  There were three bedrooms in the little yellow house. The big one in back was Clint’s dying room. The smallest was for Delia. The one on the other side of Clint’s room was for the girls. From the first day, Delia started getting it ready for Dede and Amanda. She squeezed three narrow beds along one wall and put a dresser and a shelf on either side of the closet.

  “You’ll have to share,” she told Cissy. “And it will be a little tight, but it will work out. We’ll make it nice so it does.”

  Cissy said nothing. The room wasn’t large enough for three big girls, but she knew what Delia was thinking. Soon enough there would be another bedroom available. When Clint died, the house would open up like a puzzle box. Cissy crowded her stuff into a corner and let Delia enjoy herself making up the rest of the room for Amanda and Dede.

  “Amanda will like these.” Delia had found small earthenware lamps with matching pale green shades. “And Dede needs a reading light. M.T. says she’s always getting books from that place downtown.”

  Uh-huh. Yes ma’am.

  Delia cooked soupy, unseasoned meals for Clint’s sore mouth and tender belly, mostly potatoes and rice reduced to a colorless puree. She scrubbed out ’the house, and swabbed down Clint’s sickroom. Sally refused to lend her crew, complaining that she had done more than enough for that family. M.T. didn’t press her. She was still unhappy about Delia’s decision to move out to Terrill Road.

  “M.T. thinks cancer is catching,” Steph said. “She thinks it’s like herpes or VD or something.”

  “I do not!” M.T. slammed the cash drawer shut. “I just don’t like being around sick people. I never have.”

  “You were over at Billy Trencher’s place every day for a week after he broke his leg,” Steph said pointedly. “You were doing his laundry and cooking for him almost every night.”

  “Billy’s an old friend, and he wasn’t sick. He was injured. There’s a difference.” M.T. glared at Steph. “And I don’t hear you offering to help.”

  “I never could stand Clint Windsor, not even when he was healthy. Wouldn’t bother me if he drowned in his own piss.”

  “You don’t have to do anything.” Delia was embarrassed. “The house is fine. All that’s left is the garden, and I’ll do that myself.”

  From the back window Clint watched Delia’s every move as she spaded and sowed. He had promised his help. She was doing her part. She would have her girls. If it took a lawyer, a judge, and a court ruling, she would have that too. Clint had promised, and Clint was the way through.

  Cissy took care to avoid the spindly body pinned to that big, blond Hollywood bed in the back room. The larger bathroom was right next to his room, but Cissy used the little one off the kitchen. She’d have showered under the garden hose rather than pass under the eyes of Clint Windsor. For three days she washed herself in the sink in that tiny bathroom until Delia lost patience and shooed her into the old claw-foot tub. Cissy climbed in as carefully as she could, trying not to splash. The whole time, she imagined Clint lying under his gun rack on the other side of the wall, listening for any sound, grinding his teeth with his patient, awful hatred.

  Cissy was almost twelve now and terribly full of everything she had figured out, everything she knew that no one thought she knew. She knew that Delia had left Clint for her daddy, Randall, knew it had broken the man’s heart and that half of Cayro hated her for it. But Cissy also knew that the other half thought Clint had it coming, that as many people cursed him as had ever cursed Delia. She had heard from M.T. and Stephanie that Clint was just like his father, a man who put his wife in the hospital half a dozen times, and that any sane woman would have left him well before Delia climbed onto Randall Pritchard’s bus.

  Cissy thought she knew the story. Delia had been foolish in her head and Clint evil in his heart. She figured Clint was like Granddaddy Byrd. Every time he looked at her, he would see Randall in the bones of her face. He would be reminded that Delia didn’t love him, that he had broken Delia’s love and driven her away. It was only a little less complicated than one of the plots in Ruby and Pearl’s romances, but a lot meaner. Either way, Cissy figured Clint had to hate Delia. He had to.

  For a week Cissy stayed away from Clint, but one late Sunday afternoon when Delia was hanging out sheets in the backyard, Cissy heard him making low strangling noises in his room. She stood in the hall and listened, then tiptoed to the door to see him bent over the side of the bed, spitting painfully into a basin on the floor. He pulled himself up, fell back onto his piled pillows, and saw her, Cissy’s big eyes catching his narrow squint, her pale face reflecting back his red one. Cissy remembered the photos M.T. had shown her, Delia and Clint at their wedding, their strong bodies and broad smiles. He had been a big man, not tall but thick and sturdy-looking. Now Cissy took inventory of the jut of his bones and the stretch of his scaly neck. There was no hate in his face, just an impassive gaze, old and tired.

  “I could get you some water,” Cissy whispered the words.

  “All right.” Clint barely nodded.

  Cissy had to hold the glass for him. She looked down at his tangled hair, flattened against the sheet, and felt heat flame on her face. She had heard so many stories, dreamed so many bad dreams. He had been so big in those stories and dreams, wild and drunk and dangerous, breaking Delia’s bones and cursing her soul. Chasing her out of Cayro and into the arms of another man, using her girls against her and never setting her free.

  “You need anything else?” Cissy asked.

  Clint wiped his mouth and shook his head. “No, no.”

  The next afternoon when Cissy came home from school, Delia was still at the Bonnet. The whole house was quiet and she went back to look in on Clint. He was sleeping restlessly, breathing hard in the stuffy room. Cissy opened the window and turned, leaning back against the sill. She saw Clint’s eyes open and his mouth relax as he looked her up and down, and up and down again.

  He said, “That’s good.”

  Cissy didn’t know if he meant the little sweep of the breeze that played through his hair, but she could see the pleasure in his face, the easing of pain. She could see in the glance he gave her that Clint prayed for something to pull him out of himself, even if only for a moment. It stopped her where she stood. In that instant she saw Clint Windsor as a needy, fragile man, someone she could comfort just by being present. Clint was a man starving for company, even Cissy’s company. She was an unknown, another man’s child, but she was also some piece of Delia. And more, she saw him as someone who could comfort her, just by looking at her with hunger and patient acceptance. Ev
ery time Cissy stepped into that room, his eyes ate her up, not hatefully but with something like love—something like Jesus’ love earned through suffering and long patience. She remembered again all she had heard about Clint, and she knew that whatever he had been with Delia was gone. He was somebody Cissy did not know anything about, truly, except for one thing. She could make him happy by standing there in front of him, not hating him and not running away.

  Grandma Windsor stalled as long as she could, but the day finally came when M.T. and Delia rented an orange truck, drove into that yard, and walked through the door. Cissy watched her sisters leave the farmhouse with their hastily packed boxes and glaring eyes, awed despite herself by the infinite patience and ruthlessness Delia had summoned to outlast one stubborn old woman.

  There was a moment at Grandma Windsor’s when Cissy felt almost sorry for her. Delia was dragging a big black sack of clothes, and M.T. was huffing under the weight of a box with one wet corner. Neither of them looked to the left or right. Neither was going to acknowledge Amanda’s sobs or Dede’s muttering. Cissy had stayed at the truck, so she was the only one who saw Grandma Windsor come out on the side porch, drop down on the steps, and let her head fall to her knees. After a moment she looked up, and her hands moved as if she were going to slap her own face. Her mouth pulled back and down in a howl, but she made no sound. She just rocked, grinding her fists into sunken eye sockets, the perfect image of grief.

  Clint was the way through, but Clint did not matter at all. This was a war of women. No quarter. No mercy. The last box thudded into the back of the truck.

  “Cissy!” Delia’s voice was sharp, but she was looking past Cissy to the side porch. “Come on, girl.”

  Grandma Windsor stood up and looked back at Delia. Cissy turned away. She did not want to see what would come next, the awful damage the two women had done and were doing to each other. The screen door banged when Grandma Windsor went inside. The truck door groaned when Delia pulled it open.