Cavedweller

by Dorothy Allison

  “It’s like music in my head,” he said to Cissy one afternoon as she was clearing away his tray. He was down to eating a few mouthfuls at a time, though Rosemary took care to send in heaping bowls of potato puree. “It’s like Delia’s music is always playing in the bones of my neck, that voice of hers singing out.”

  Clint’s eyes were enormous. It had been a bad day, a bad week, the drugs never seemed to work right anymore. He was either a lolling doll with empty eyes or a burning bush, sometimes from moment to moment.

  Clint’s right hand, lying loose on the chenille bedspread, lifted a little as if counting time, like a skeletal version of Rosemary’s.

  “God, the way she’d sing.” His fingers counted. “Lord, love, Lord, love,” he whisper-sang in his scratchy voice. “You know when she sings that song, that kind of gospel thing of hers?”

  “Delia don’t sing that,” Cissy told him. “It’s on one of the records, but she don’t sing that stuff no more.”

  “Yeah, I noticed. It’s a shame.” He smiled as if he knew something Cissy didn’t.

  Cissy put the tray down. She was thinking about that long drive cross-country in the Datsun, the headlights picking up road signs and the radio’s tinny music under the roar of wind through the smashed back window. In California, Delia’s voice was the one constant, a familiar resonant lullaby, but on that hellish trip the words had faded. Once they were back in Cayro, Delia gave up singing for crying. Only when she took over the Bonnet did she begin to hum and murmur, sometimes following out a melody, but she never did what she used to do—close her eyes, put her head back, and sing as if the song were all she knew.

  “Shame,” Clint repeated, slurring the word. His afternoon shot was kicking in, the morphine music overriding the pulse of pain. His mouth opened and closed, and his eyelids moved as if marbles were rocking gently in there. There was a slight hum in the room, and Cissy realized it came from Clint, as if the words Delia had abandoned were still sounding in his body. He opened his eyes and looked up in a drifting gaze. In the front of the house they could hear Dede and Rosemary giggling.

  “Put on the radio,” Clint said in that gaspy whisper. “Put on the radio and let me hear it.”

  Clint’s face went slack. He was still making that humming noise. A little breeze moved the curtains, and Cissy heard an echoing hum from outside, just audible through the window. Delia was hanging sheets on the line, singing to herself, oblivious of who might be listening. Cissy looked back at Clint, the shifting marbles under the translucent lids, and felt a wave of rage and pity so intense that her whole body shuddered. She reached blindly and clicked the radio on. There was a squawk and Clint’s hands twitched, settling again as Emmylou Harris’s whiskey drawl came in soft and low. She was singing about rocking the soul in the bosom of Abraham and Clint’s hands rocked with her.

  Cissy looked back through the window at Delia. They both were crazy, she thought, always had been. She put her hands to her cheeks and felt the tears she had not known she was crying. Emmy Lou crooned and Clint stirred.

  He was crazy, but he was like her, or she was like him. She was more like him than his true daughters. Maybe it was the silence they both wore like a long cotton shirt. Delia and Amanda and Dede were always talking or shouting or slamming doors, radiating outrage and crackling energy. It was only Clint who had nothing more to say. Cissy only spoke when she had to, but he had been turned by pain and sickness into himself, into a core of great silence. He had begun talking to Cissy a lot in his brief stretches of lucidity, but even then his silence was what she noticed, that and a passionate eloquence of the body. His limbs would twist in that bed and speak agony, his jaw clench with an awful endurance. All his strength was needed to stay in that body. None was left to waste.

  Maybe he had been angry and full of hate at one time. Maybe he had been ashamed. But somewhere in that long dying, he came to some other place. Clint had lost the need to be anybody but himself, and he seemed to be constantly looking inside to see who that might be. It was as if he were creating himself over in that bed, a stark, essential Clint with no padding, no insulation, no pretense. Looking at him, Cissy saw suddenly a thing that was nowhere in the books she had read. She saw how demanding the act of dying could be. She extended her hand and took Clint’s cold fingers in hers. He breathed out softly, and his body seemed to loosen in the sheets. Cissy wiped her wet cheek with her sleeve and held on tight.

  If Clint knew what kind of anger he was provoking between Delia and Cissy, he gave no sign. To Cissy he talked about Delia whenever he was awake. That the talk was obsessive never became clear to Cissy at all.

  “Delia tell you about me?” he asked Cissy over and over, as if he could not keep in mind that she had already said yes.

  There was a stubble along Clint’s jawline. His beard came in slowly and sparsely, speckled with gray and certain evidence that his body had little substance to spare. Half a dozen times he’d decided to let the beard grow. Each time it came in worse than the time before. Clint would run his hands over his cheeks and sigh, finally asking Delia to take it off for him. He couldn’t shave himself anymore. His hands trembled too much to control even the electric razor. Part of the reason for growing the beard was his desire to make less trouble for them. It was a lot of trouble shaving him.

  “He looks terrible,” Cissy complained to Delia. “Tell him he can’t grow no beard.”

  “He’s not growing much of one, just working himself up to ignore it,” Delia told her. “Let him do it at his own pace.”

  Cissy fumed; she didn’t want to tell Clint how bad he looked either. The problem was that while Clint might whine about the itch, he rarely looked in a mirror, and so had no real notion how gaunt and gray his face had become, the bony nose and sharp chin growing steadily more prominent. The sunken hollows of the cheeks were wearing so thin you could see the movement of the tongue in his mouth. It was just as well that Clint didn’t see himself very often, Cissy told herself. Lying in there with the radio on and the windows open, he could pretend he was resting, getting better. Looking in the mirror would have meant facing the mortality written on his bones. Maybe there would come a time when he didn’t care what he looked like anymore. Maybe there would come a time when he didn’t care that he was dying.

  “Delia talk about me?” Clint said to Cissy. “Delia tell you why she left me?”

  Cissy smoothed one of the towels she had been folding at the foot of the bed.

  “Oh, come on now. She told you. I can tell.”

  Cissy looked up. Clint’s red-rimmed eyes were fixed on her.

  “She told you I beat on her, didn’t she?”

  “She told me some stuff.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  His hands were on top of the bedspread. His wrists looked too thin and fragile to hold them up. The knuckles were swollen, the skin oddly discolored. Already his hair seemed to have stopped growing, his nails lengthened constantly. Now the skin beneath them was blue-gray all the time.

  “She was right to leave, you know.” Clint’s voice was matter-of-fact. “Wasn’t much choice. The night she took off, I was past crazy. I even scared myself.”

  Cissy looked at him directly, right into those wide, stubborn, unblinking eyes.

  “It’s hard to think about some things, but it’s pretty much all I do think about these days. What I did. What I didn’t do. What I said. What I was ready to do. You know, I think I might have killed Delia if we’d gone on. I was working up to it. So full of rage, you can’t imagine. I wonder at it now, how I let myself get that far into it. A craziness. A literal, dry-eyed madness. I tell you, I was as ready to cut my own throat as hers. Every time Delia looked at me—that way she had, all sad and hurt and stubborn—I got crazier. It was like sliding downhill. If you don’t catch yourself, you hit bottom. I just about hit bottom.”

  His hands lifted slightly, fingers spread. Bird wings trying to take off, featherless and sad. He was having one of his high-energy days, needing to
talk, needing Cissy to listen.

  “Lord. It’s a good damn thing she ran.”

  Cissy’s bones seemed to quiver to the reality of what Clint was saying, the frank admission that he had been as bad as everyone said. She wondered if he could see as deep into her as it seemed he was looking—X—raying those bones, memorizing the beat of her heart.

  “Why?” Cissy hadn’t intended to speak. The question came out of her on its own.

  “Why?” Clint nodded. “Exactly. That’s the whole point. Why? Why would a man go crazy like that? I loved her. Always had. Delia an’t like most people: She’s got something inside her—something hard and strong and beautiful. A man gets close to her and he knows.”

  He stopped and looked away. When he spoke again, his voice was lower, more careful. “Most people,” he said, “most girls anyway, ones as young as Delia was, they’re soft in the middle. You get close to ’em, you feel that softness turn to you. And that’s what a lot of men want. Like a clay center, you can make it into what you want, fire it, harden it. You think you can make it fit you. I got to where I expected a woman to make herself over for me. All the women I had ever known, I could feel that center place turning to me, waiting and wanting. I couldn’t believe Delia wasn’t like that. I got it wrong.”

  Cissy’s hands twisted in the towel, and her knuckles cracked loudly. Clint paused and looked at her again, his face flushed.

  “Hell, I don’t know. Maybe most men think like that. I was so young myself, not quite a man. I was still a boy, but I was working so hard to seem grown-up and tough. Maybe I was afraid Delia would see the soft spot in me, see how it turned for her. I was the one who bent myself on Delia. But Delia was just herself, as true as the links on a surveyor’s chain. Beautiful and fine and herself. Guys got nervous around her, even when they wanted her. Hell, specially when they wanted her.” He smiled, proud still of what he could see with his mind’s eye.

  Cissy knew what Clint was talking about. She had watched people get nervous around Delia for years. Delia was like a magnet pulling at everyone around her. When they first came back to Cayro, Delia had seemed kind of flat for a long time, all that jangly, powerful energy tamped down. Cissy didn’t know if it was Randall, or leaving L.A., or coming to Cayro, or something else entirely, but that broken Delia was not herself, not the Delia Clint was describing. Maybe Randall had done that. Maybe Delia had bent herself on Randall. But if so, she had gotten herself back, become again a woman who made men nervous.

  “Way back I think I truly believed Delia would change,” Clint went on. “I think I imagined she was gonna go soft for me once I really had her, so I kept trying to really get her. It was like trying to bend light. Couldn’t get hold of it. Kept reaching. Now I see it all, and it’s like I’m on fire with the memory, just hot all over with shame.”

  Tears were standing in his eyes. “Damn truth is I ruined myself trying to break the woman I loved. Just broke myself, and Delia never understood at all.”

  A sob escaped Clint’s lips, though it was so strangled it might have been a curse. Cissy stared at the towels in the clothes basket.

  Clint cleared his throat, groaned, and cursed one more time. “Damn,” he said. “Lord damn.”

  Cissy picked up the basket and headed for the door. “I got to put these away,” she said. “Give a shout if you need anything.”

  She went to the kitchen and dropped the basket on a chair. Some days she felt like she was fading out. Her hair had lightened since they came back to Cayro, the sun bleaching the red out to copper. And her eyes seemed lighter too, more and more the pearly gray of Clint’s. She was getting ghostly, like a wraith in a novel, the spirit of a young girl murdered in her sleep.

  Delia came in from the yard with a pair of pruning shears in her hand. “Will you please get some air?” she said, looking at Cissy’s haggard face.

  “He should be in a hospital,” Cissy said.

  Delia sighed. “We’ve been through this before, Cissy. He wants to be here. And I promised him he could be.” Delia hated these arguments; she felt like she was standing in front of Cissy’s rage as she would before the throne of God except that God would not make her feel so guilty.

  “And the hospital couldn’t do anything more for him than we do,” she added.

  “We an’t doing nothing,” Cissy stormed. “He’s dying. He’s dying in there.”

  “Yes.” Delia’s face was smooth and her voice firm. “He’s dying the way he wants. He’s got the right to do it the way he wants.”

  Cissy wanted to hit her then, to throw herself on her mother. Save me, she wanted to say. Save me from this long, slow wearing away of my soul. She started to cry.

  “You said you hated him. You said he was a monster. You said you’d have killed him if you could. And you wash him and feed him and hold his hand in the night. I don’t understand. I don’t understand.”

  Delia reached for her, but Cissy pulled away. “Baby, it an’t gonna be too long,” Delia said.

  “It’s too long now.” Cissy wiped her cheeks and her eyes hardened. “He’s in there because of you,” she said. “He ate himself up for you.”

  “Cissy.” Delia’s face went white.

  “Well, look at him. He don’t care that he’s dying. He don’t care about anything but you. If you went in there right now and told him you loved him,’he’d probably climb right up out of that bed.”

  It was true, Delia thought. It was what Clint wanted most in the world. Maybe it wouldn’t cure him, but it might. It might. Wasn’t there magic in love?

  Cissy watched shock and grief work in Delia’s features. “You promised, huh? That’s the deal you made? He’ll give you Amanda and Dede, and you’ll see him safe into the grave. An eye for an eye. Two girls for bathing and burying a man you don’t love.”

  Delia dropped into one of the kitchen chairs and clasped her hands in her lap. The moment stretched. “You’re not a grown-up, Cissy,” she said finally. “You think you know it all. You think it’s all cut-and-dried, and exactly the way you say. But it’s not. I wish it was. I wish loving someone was something I could just decide to do.”

  Clint started coughing, the sound hollow and echoing. Cissy pushed her palms across her eyes and back through her hair. Delia smoothed down the cotton of her skirt. Both of them turned their heads in the direction of the back room.

  “I’m sorry,” Delia said.

  “Yeah,” Cissy sneered. “You sure are.”

  Cissy stopped speaking to Delia. She avoided Rosemary, and talked to Dede and Amanda only when she could not help it. She spent her evenings in Clint’s room, curled up in the armchair she had moved in there, reading her books and letting him talk to her when he wanted. When Delia or Amanda came to the door, she would look up angrily as if she were ready to fight for her right to be there. Dede stayed out of her way. Amanda prayed for her. Rosemary watched her with impartial black eyes.

  When Delia came in to bring water or carry away the bucket that sat by the bed, Cissy left. Delia would change the sheets whenever she sponged Clint’s body.

  “Talk to me,” Clint whispered each time.

  “There’s nothing to say.”

  “Tell me what you do. Tell me what you’re thinking. We don’t have to talk about us.” He spoke in a breathy whisper, his eyes devouring Delia’s face.

  “There is no us,” Delia said. Her eyes did not lift from the body she was bathing. She carefully rinsed the cloth in the alcohol and water solution she had made up, wrung it out, and ran it over Clint’s wasted thighs.

  “What about the girls?” Clint’s voice was scratchy with desperation.

  “The girls are fine.” Delia pulled the sheet back up. Her eyes went to the doorway, where Cissy was watching her. “The girls are just fine.”

  Clint clung to Cissy like a lifeline. He talked when he had the breath to speak, or stared at Cissy while she read. “You won’t forget me, will you?” he kept asking.

  “No,” Cissy said. “I won’
t.”

  Clint smiled at her, that infinitely gentle, infinitely pleased smile he developed while she sat in his room. For a moment he looked so satisfied, so settled down into himself. Then he started talking again and the other look came back, the uncertain gaze that wandered the room, searching for something it could not find.

  “Worst thing,” he said. “Worst thing is I have days when still, if I could, if I could get up from here, I would do something terrible. This dark comes down on me and I just lie here grinding my teeth like I want to grind bones. Delia’s, yours, mine. Hell, I think I was born crazy. I’ve been trying to get right ever since. Some days I’m just crazy damn mad.”

  Clint coughed thickly as if he were blowing a pipe clear, and fell back on his pillows. His eyes had gone deep pink. “Damn,” he gasped, shuddering with the effort to breathe right.

  “Delia said Jesus spoke to your heart,” Cissy said, mainly to distract him.

  “She did?” His breathing eased a little. “Well, Jesus or somebody, I guess. Might as well have been Jesus. Though sometimes I think maybe it was the cow god.” A goofy grin crossed Clint’s face. “In the army I learned about people overseas, how some of them thought cows were holy. Thought that was something. I liked it, that notion. I could get into bulls, the idea of bulls. Bullheaded. Bullnecked. Bullish. Damn foolishness.”

  He growled low in his throat, another attempt to clear it. He relaxed a little when the need to cough passed. “Didn’t know nothing about holy cows, just saw a picture once, one of them films they show you in the army. Big brass bull and we all joked about it. Bull dick. Bullshit. Jesus or bulls, I never gave a damn. Just came out that one day I couldn’t stand myself no more, the stink of me.”

  He stopped for a moment and shot a direct look at Cissy, that scrawny head nodding only slightly, nothing else moving at all.

  “You don’t know, girl. You cannot imagine. It’s bad, that stink. All the time drunk or crazy angry. Your sweat smells different when you’re a long time angry, old and mean and sour. Couldn’t stand it. Spent about a day in the bathtub at Mama’s, crying drunk and running hot water, getting a whiff of myself and hating everything about me. It’d get cold and I’d run more hot. Mama kept coming to beat on the door and yelling at me to get my ass out of there. This was after Daddy died, you know. She would never have talked like that when he was alive. I ignored her, just put a rag in my mouth and went on crying. Chewed a hole in that rag trying to make no sound.”