Cavedweller

by Dorothy Allison

  Ruby and Pearl had been right about Dede sneaking off with boys, if not about “it.” For most of the year at Grandma Windsor’s, she had been slipping away with the Petrie boys while Amanda was off at prayer meetings. She told Delia that they were teaching her how to drive. When they turned up at Clint’s one day, Delia took one look at the rawboned sixteen-year-old twins, with their flushed features and shifty eyes, and knew they had been teaching Dede more than downshifting in that Chevy truck of their daddy’s.

  “You’re too young.” Delia kept her gaze on the nervous boys.

  “Both my sisters been driving since they was fourteen.” Leroy Petrie was trying to look Delia in the face. He knew that was what. he needed to do to convince her he was harmless, but every time his eyes lifted to hers, a shock seemed to pass from his upper thighs to his navel. He looked over at his brother, but there was no help there. Clearly Craig was just as terrified as he was, both of them trying to hide the effect Dede had on them, and their fear that Delia would no longer let them see her.

  “I’m a good teacher,” Leroy said. “Really, ma’am. I’m careful.”

  “I have no doubt.” Delia looked back at Dede, who was sitting on the couch with a magazine, a half smile showing on her face. She made no effort to join in the conversation.

  Dede had lost interest in Leroy and his brother, though for months she had fought Grandma Windsor for every moment she could steal to wedge herself between them in the cab of that truck. She had learned to drive, but it was less to do with the boys than with her own hunger. When she thought about those months of practicing, it was the lessons of her body that resonated—her knees hot and bruised between the gearshift and Craig’s thigh, her hip pressed to Leroy’s, their hands drifting across her skin like little animals, hungry and heedless. The boys had not actually let her drive more than a few blocks at any one time. The height of her accomplishment with them had been to steer the truck and work the gas pedal while sitting in the middle of the seat, the brothers on either side of her, cupping her breasts through the sheer material of her blouse. Both of them were intoxicated with the smell of Dede’s skin and hair, so much so that they panicked as she steered them down the road—afraid not that she would crash but that they would lose control of themselves.

  “Dede’s good,” Craig managed to say to Delia. “She’s got natural talent for driving. Real talent.”

  Dede grinned at him. It was Craig who had told her that their price for a real chance at driving the truck would be the removal of those layers of cotton and nylon that had so far obstructed their approach to her body. It was a problem. While Dede really wanted to learn to drive, she was not fool enough to give the Petrie boys anything more than they had so far managed—brief moments of access, severely limited and carefully accounted for, just like her access to the truck, but she had been yielding steadily as she coaxed more and more driving time, and sooner or later, the situation was going to get out of hand.

  “I appreciate what you’ve done, boys. I truly appreciate it. But I can teach Dede what she needs to know just fine.” Delia watched their faces turn to Dede, the longing so plain on them. She saw, too, how Dede smiled at them, the easy control her daughter had, and disdained.

  “You want me to teach you, Dede?” she asked.

  Dede gave a shrewd grin, turning from the boys to her mama. “In that beat-up old Datsun of yours?”

  Delia tried not to let her disappointment show.

  “I’d love to learn stick,” Dede said, her face alight. “That would be great.”

  Delia turned to the stricken boys. “Leroy,” she said. “Craig. Thank you for coming round.” She eased them out the door gracefully, ignoring the mournful glances they kept shooting at Dede.

  Delia always said the smartest move she ever made was teaching Dede to drive. It was the decision that broke the ice between them. She also said it was the scariest six months of her life. Craig was right, Dede was a talented driver. Her instincts were astonishing, her eye and reflexes extraordinary, but the girl had no governor, no stopping point, no fear. Delia’s greatest challenge was to convince Dede that driving was not about racing or pushing the limits of the car.

  “A car is a way to get somewhere, nothing else. It’s no reflection of your soul, nothing you can use to prove who you are. You play games in a car, you’re playing with other people’s lives,” Delia said, watching her daughter’s distracted, careless face.

  “You understand me, Dede? You understand?”

  “Yeah, I know. But I was wondering, how fast can this thing go?”

  Amanda remained unrelentingly hostile. She didn’t even try to get Delia and Cissy to go to church with her, though she nagged her sister mercilessly. Dede was fascinated with the idea that a person could just decide on Sunday morning whether she would go to church or not.

  “I can stay home if I want, right?” Dede asked Delia every Sunday.

  “Yes, if you want,” Delia said, and Dede would grin and go back to the bedroom. Then she might come out all dressed and ready, but there was no predicting.

  “Cissy said you were Buddhist. Don’t Buddhists believe in hell?” she asked Delia once.

  “I wouldn’t call myself a Buddhist,” Delia told her. “And Buddhists have a whole different idea from the heaven and hell the preachers talk about. They think it’s life that is hard. The goal is not to get to heaven but to get off the wheel of life.”

  “Wow!” Dede beamed. “You think I would make a good Buddhist?”

  “I think you might want to take a little more time before you go jumping religions just to avoid getting out of bed on Sunday morning.”

  When Dede stayed home, Amanda blamed it on Delia. “You don’t care if we go to hell, but I do,” she said. “You don’t even believe in your immortal soul, but God does.” She went on and on, quoting Reverend Hillman and Grandma Windsor and various pamphlets she had read, while Delia nodded and shrugged and refused to argue, finally reminding Amanda that if she didn’t leave soon she would be late. Amanda would plead one last time with Dede and then go out the door with a martyred expression.

  If Dede did go to church, Amanda did not seem any the happier. “Well,” she would say when Dede came out dressed for services, “won’t God be surprised!”

  It wasn’t easy to get to Holiness Redeemer from the house on Terrill Road, but Amanda refused Delia’s offer of a ride and doggedly took the bus. The first Sunday after the move, Reverend Hillman winced when Amanda rushed up to hug Grandma Windsor before the service and the old woman turned away. Sunday after Sunday, Louise Windsor rebuffed her granddaughter as if it were her fault that she was living with the harlot who had taken advantage of Louise’s weak, worthless, dying son and sweet-talked him into forcing her to give up the girls. When Reverend Hillman offered to pray with her, Grandma Windsor turned glassy eyes on him and told him he had done enough already.

  Grandma Windsor’s coldness broke Amanda’s heart, and she finally started going to Cayro Baptist Tabernacle. The congregation was big enough that she could avoid M.T., and she liked Reverend Myles. She had come to take a dim view of Reverend Hillman, the agent of her exile to Delia, and Reverend Myles reminded her of the minister at Holiness before Hillman came back. They had a similar style of preaching, heartfelt and loud. Grandma Windsor always said that the church was truly a church of the Word under Reverend Call. “That was a preacher,” she’d declare, “a real Bible man.”

  Amanda remembered Reverend Call’s big booming voice and the bright spots of color that appeared on his waxy cheeks when he got excited. He got excited a lot, so much so that Amanda was afraid of him when she was small. Reverend Call loved to preach on the world Communist threat and the perfidy of Washington liberals. He was a regular guest speaker at the Americanism versus Communism class back when it was required at the junior high, and he had never gotten over the school board’s decision to redesign the class as Issues of Freedom about the time Jimmy Carter was elected.

  “Issues of F
reedom!” Reverend Call stormed from the pulpit. “God’s issue of the chains on our immortal souls.” As far as he was concerned, the Vietnam War never ended, and he was a mainstay of the MIA chapter in Marietta. The local papers printed his letters to the State Department passionately insisting that thousands of American soldiers were being held in the underground prisons of Hanoi.

  “Where’s Hanoi?” asked one of the boys in the Bible class at Holiness. The minister promptly turned as red as a beet, his eyes bulging and his neck swelling, and fell back on a gray metal folding chair.

  Apoplexy, not a stroke exactly, more like a blow from God, the minister told his deacons later. “The children are being raised in ignorance. The devil is laying seeds in their hearts.” Tears leaked from his bloodshot eyes.

  “You’re tired,” one of the deacons said. “You need a rest.”

  “The devil never sleeps,” Reverend Call intoned. His mouth was slack and wet. “God doesn’t nap.”

  “Just a few weeks,” he was told. He closed his eyes and put his hands over his face.

  The vacation was not a success. The substitute preacher discovered that a great deal of money had been going to pay for subscriptions to magazines that came to Call in brown paper wrappers. The Ladies’ Aid Group gossiped that the minister’s wife was spending a lot of time visiting her mother.

  Reverend Call was forced into retirement after his wife revealed that it was he who had been making late-night phone calls to the new English teacher at the high school. The reverend swore it wasn’t true. He told the deacons that the English teacher was a member of the international Communist conspiracy, as was obvious when she organized a performance of Jesus Christ Superstar.

  “A blasphemy,” Reverend Call told Emmet Tyler as he picketed the high school auditorium. “Another nail in our national coffin.”

  “Oh, it’s not that bad,” Deputy Tyler said. “Some of the music is pretty catchy.”

  “You’ve lost all judgment,” the reverend said sadly, and the deputy just nodded. No one wanted to argue with Reverend Call.

  The deacons at Holiness put out a call that brought Reverend Hillman back. Folks said Reverend Call had moved to Arizona, where he was preaching on the radio in the dead of night, taking phone calls and continuing to inveigh against the threat of Communism. Some Sundays at Tabernacle, listening to Reverend Myles, Amanda would daydream about Reverend Call. He had appreciated her. He had given her a silver bracelet engraved with the name of a missing soldier and squeezed her shoulders when she told him how much she loved God.

  “Stay strong,” he said to her the last time he preached at Holiness. Grandma Windsor had baked him a butter cake and insisted that Amanda give it to him. The old man put his lips on Amanda’s forehead when he took the cake. “You’re an American child blessed by God,” he whispered to her solemnly. She nodded and refused to wipe her forehead, though the spot he had kissed itched with the damp, rough feel of his tongue.

  “I’m staying strong,” Amanda promised God. In her imagination God looked like Reverend Call, but with Grandma Windsor’s eyes and U.S. Army sergeant’s bars on the wings of his white high-collared shirt.

  Amanda didn’t confine her evangelical efforts to Dede. At Cayro High School, she set herself to organizing a Christian Girls’ Coalition that met in the cafeteria to plan a crusade against abortion and loose living. She told Dede that their high school was the front line in her struggle to spread God’s love, and ignored her sister’s pleas to let everyone make up their own minds.

  “This is life and death, Dede,” Amanda declared. “This is God’s word we are talking about, not some special program on comparative religions on the educational network. You can talk all you like about Buddhism and Muslimism and sky worship and poetry, but this is people’s immortal souls hanging in the balance. You just want to shut me up so you can be popular and talk about nonsense? Be just like everybody else? Well, go ahead and be like everybody else, everybody on their way to hell!”

  Amanda did not pause for more than a day after the principal turned down her request to distribute leaflets in the homerooms. She simply persuaded a couple of girls from church to hand her flyers around. When she was told she couldn’t use the cafeteria anymore, Amanda sent the girls to the parking lot behind the Bonnet and promised to arrange rides for everyone who missed the bus home. She had in mind putting together a militant antiabortion group that would link arms in front of the Marietta women’s clinic on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, the days the clinic made referrals to Planned Parenthood in Atlanta.

  “You’re minors, you won’t go to jail,” Amanda told the potential recruits who showed up for her first impromptu rally. “But think what an impact we could have on this town. We’d be standing there like soldiers for the Lord. We could put that clinic out of business in a month.”

  The problem with Amanda’s notion was that most of the girls at Cayro High kept the clinic phone number tucked in the back of their diaries. The clinic provided birth control information, confidential counseling services, and those vital referrals to the clinics in Atlanta that would actually perform the abortions. Even though they hoped they would never need the help, most of these girls did not want the Marietta clinic put out of business. One small error in the heat of the moment and they might be slipping off to that clinic on a Tuesday or Thursday afternoon. Twenty-six days out of twenty-eight, the clinic was nothing anybody would want to think about, but every now and then those last two days could come on a woman the way hot iron came down on cold. Two days of terror and the world looked different. Two days of “Please God, no!” Two days of “If I have to, Lord, I will.” Two days of praying you did not need what you suspected you did. Then blood and terror—the intervention of a merciful medical procedure—and you could draw a deep breath and think like a sane woman again. No, the clinic was terrible but necessary, a place where a woman could do what she had to do even when it was the last thing in the world she wanted to do.

  The girls who came to Amanda’s rallies were the ones who neither dated nor had friends who did. That was exactly five girls for the first meeting, and two of those dropped out after a couple of hushed conversations in the school bathroom. The three who remained were so nervous about linking hands for anything that Amanda decided the forces of the devil had come up against her.

  The day came when Amanda found herself in the parking lot behind the Bonnet all alone. That night she dreamed of the crucifixion, her palms outstretched and pierced as she stared down at those who had betrayed her. Grandma Windsor covered her face with her hands while Dede wept and fell to her knees. A recovered, penitent Clint stood behind them, while Delia, wearing bell-bottoms; beads, and a red poncho, called out, “My God! My God, forgive me.” A ragtag mass of teenage soldiers in camouflage pajamas and brown-skinned nuns in black smocks stared up at Amanda in awe. Lying back on the post as if it were a bed draped in linen and silk, Amanda looked down on all of them with tired compassion. The bruises on her body bloomed shades of purple while a thin trickle of blood crept down her left temple. She had come to them as a nurse and a teacher, and they had beaten her and hung her up to die. Through the ordeal she had clung to the name of Jesus, refusing to curse God and be set free. Her courage would be legendary, her example preached to young girls down the generations.

  Amanda did not know exactly how all these people came to be there to witness her martyrdom, but it was right that they were present, that they saw her for who she truly was, a blessed daughter of the living God. Hers was a faith so powerful she could reach past the trivial categories of denomination, of Catholic or Baptist, of nation or race. After this day there would be a wave of conversions. Satanists would renounce the devil, and one after another the lands where her story was told would petition to join the United States. Reverend Hillman would preach a revival about Amanda’s devotion to God. Reverend Call would come back from Arizona. The geography teacher at Cayro High would ask forgiveness for making fun of Amanda’s desire to lead a
mission to Cambodia when she didn’t know where it was.

  Amanda groaned out loud, and below her Grandma Windsor cried out her name. Delia dropped her poncho and reached out for the daughter she claimed she loved. Dede shook her head and looked up at Amanda as if she were waking from a daydream.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Dede giggled and put a hand up to cover her mouth.

  Desperately Amanda twisted her body and turned her face up to heaven. “No,” she said, and her blood ran faster as the crowd stirred and the soldiers grinned and poked each other like boys in a school-yard.

  “No, no,” Amanda whimpered, and the nuns hurriedly lifted their skirts and scuttled away.

  Dede rocked back and forth on her knees, giggling helplessly. “For God’s sake, Amanda, this is too far. This is too much even for you.”

  Delia picked up her poncho and shook the dirt off it. “Well, maybe it’s all for the best. I know you never wanted to come live with me.” She looked around at the milling crowd and stepped back. “Can you see Cissy from up there? I don’t see her anywhere.”

  “You get down from there,” Grandma Windsor said, paying no attention to Amanda’s increasingly violent struggles. She brushed dust off her skirt and scowled angrily. One of the soldiers lit a cigarette for the last departing nun, who pushed back her wimple and scratched absentmindedly at a mosquito bite under her ear.

  “My God, my God!” Amanda cried out. “Why have you forsaken me?”

  “Damn hippie bitch.” Cissy heard it as she was leaving the Cayro middle school walking to her bus stop and reading Nolan’s copy of The Left Hand of Darkness. She turned and found herself facing Marty Parish and two boys with hair so short their heads looked scraped.