Cavedweller

by Dorothy Allison

  Cissy thought about Grandma Windsor’s face at the funeral and about Amanda and Dede growing up in her house. They had been standing within a few feet of her and she had never looked at them. “What’s your worst memory?” she asked.

  Dede didn’t even pause. “Clint, he’s all my bad memories.”

  Cissy flinched. Her face felt hot, and the skin below her eyes was sweaty. She remembered how scared and desperate he had been the last week. “What’d he do?”

  “Do?” Dede sounded angry. “He didn’t have to do nothing. He’d just come around, and everything would go bad. Grandpa Windsor would start cursing and being mean to Grandma, and she’d get all hunched over and start being mean to us.” She shook her head. “Mostly Clint didn’t do nothing. He’d show up drunk or looking like he just got sober. He’d say things to Grandma you couldn’t make out, and stare at us like we were dogs in the road. He was just bad news, bad news always coming around.”

  The cigarette butt in Dede’s hand had burned down to the filter. She crushed it out on a rock between her legs. “Grandma was always making us go over to see him. We’d get all dressed up and go over there and sit at the table, and he’d just look at us with that stupid expression on his face, like he’d got hit by a truck or something. Always smelled like he had been sitting in spoiled milk. Always looked like he had shaved himself raw. Wasn’t nothing to do or say. We’d eat what Grandma had sent over, and we’d try to talk some, but it was no use. It was purgatory, sitting there waiting until we could get away. Worst thing was, everyone knew he was our daddy, and they’d look at us like we were gonna turn out as useless as he was. Like being some criminal’s child or something. God.”

  Cissy licked her lips. “People used to stare at me that way. ’Cause of Randall and Delia and everything.”

  “That was because they were famous.” Dede spat once on the ground. “It’s not the same.”

  “Maybe not, but it would get bad sometimes.” Cissy rubbed her temples, remembering the embarrassment. Once, when Randall was arrested for speeding, reporters came out to the house and took pictures of her and Delia through the windows.

  “Okay, your turn,” Dede said. “Tell me the absolute worst thing you remember.”

  “Fighting,” Cissy said immediately. “Delia and Randall fighting. Yelling and breaking things and cursing each other and Delia crying and screaming. Before we moved out, they were fighting a lot.”

  Dede raised an eyebrow. “He hit her?”

  “No. Randall never hit nobody.” Cissy wiggled uncomfortably. “He broke things, though. Worst time, he got so mad he went through the living room kicking the furniture over. He smashed the little tables and the lamps, pulled down the curtains, and threw stuff in the fireplace—all the ashtrays and dishes and stuff.”

  “You were there?”

  “I was up on the staircase. They didn’t even know I was watching.”

  “Oh.” Dede sounded disappointed.

  “Randall kept shouting,” Cissy went on, “and shoving things over. While Delia was telling him he was a sorry excuse for a man or a dog, he went to kick the big coffee table in front of the couch. Delia yelled, ‘You crazy son of a bitch,’ but he did it anyway. Broke his foot.”

  “Broke his foot?” Dede laughed.

  “Yeah, had to wear a cast for two months. Told me it was a lesson for us all, not to let your temper run away with your good sense.”

  Cissy leaned back against the garage wall and watched the clouds bunching overhead. Randall had a fast temper, but his anger would go away just as fast, like clouds racing across the sky. His sense of humor was the same, sudden and wry and turning sad without warning. Changeable. Her daddy had been changeable. She still had trouble believing that he was gone, that he would not someday walk in on them and give that lazy smile, and hug her tight. He could not be dead. She could not keep it in her head. Some thoughts just did not want to stay.

  “Broke his foot!” Dede rocked forward and came up on her bootheels. “Wish I could have seen that. Wish Clint had broken his sorry ass one time and I could have seen it.” She tucked her cigarette tin in a back pocket and smiled down at Cissy. “You tell good stories, little sister. Really good.” She kicked leaves up on her way back to the house, kicked them so they scattered before her.

  Cissy looked down into the glass tumbler between her legs. It was empty now but coated with a sticky residue of Coke and scotch. Clint had told her he liked to drink whiskey, Wild Turkey or Jim Beam. He had talked about it like it was the best thing in the world. She tried to remember what Randall drank, but all that remained was the memory of some unlabeled red-brown bottle sitting at the top of his bed. Her eyes flooded again. This time she didn’t know who she was crying for, Clint or Randall or herself.

  Amanda had not been to see Grandma Windsor since a few weeks after she and Dede moved into Clint’s house. The visit had been humiliating and brief. Her grandmother met her at the road with a couple of paper bags and told her to make herself useful and help pick up some of the windblown trash. Obediently Amanda trailed behind her, picking up cans, bottles, sheets of newsprint, milk cartons.

  “Don’t put them together. Sort them out,” the old woman yelled at her, and when Amanda tried to talk about Delia, Grandma Windsor sent her to pick up on the other side of the road. “You going to help me, help me,” she said, making it plain she did not want to talk about Delia or the move or Clint and what was happening in that house. Amanda finally crossed the road to kiss her grandmother’s cheek, packed up her bags of trash, and walked back down to the bus stop. She didn’t go back to Grandma Windsor’s and wouldn’t tell anyone why.

  Three days after the funeral Amanda decided to try again.

  “I brought you some pecans,” she told Grandma Windsor, setting a paper bag of nuts on the kitchen table.

  The old woman pursed her lips. “Those from them scrawny trees on Terrill Road?”

  “From Clint’s.” Amanda nodded.

  Grandma Windsor snorted. “Those make little mealy nuts, not fit for anything but feeding pigs.”

  Amanda flushed. She had not expected her grandmother to make a fuss, but did the old woman have to insult her? It hurt her that Grandma Windsor kept looking away. Grandma Windsor’s neck seemed even scalier than it had at the funeral, and her cheeks and hands were red and chapped. It was fall, and the trees were dropping their leaves all over the yard and along all the ditches. Grandma Windsor led Amanda out to where she was shifting her flowerpots, knocking the old dirt out and lining the pots up to be rinsed with her hose. She had a pair of pruning shears in her apron and kept pulling them out to cut things—a blackberry vine that had crept over the fence, a weed in the vegetable flat, a few branches off the bushes by the steps.

  “Grandma, I wanted to tell you something.”

  “Tell me something?” Grandma Windsor stopped working long enough to catch sight of Amanda’s flaming red cheeks. Grudgingly she settled on the bench by the fertilizer bins, near a pile of branches that had been cut from the apple trees in the fall. Amanda remembered how Grandma Windsor always insisted the branches be pruned and clipped in the fall. Grandma Windsor pulled a couple of the long branches toward her and began to clip pieces off in short lengths to toss in her wheelbarrow. She liked applewood for her smoker, Amanda remembered. She looked at her grandmother’s stern face and saw again how she had aged. Guilt shot through her. All this time and Amanda had not even visited.

  “So what was it you wanted to say?” Grandma Windsor’s eyes were on the pieces of wood she was trimming down. Maybe she meant to be kind, to let Amanda speak without pressure, but it felt to Amanda like impatience, just like her own. It was as if Grandma Windsor had cleared her mind of her granddaughters when they went to live with their mother and now she resented being faced with Amanda again.

  I won’t think that way, Amanda told herself. I will be a loving spirit. She made herself take several deep breaths.

  “It’s about Daddy,” she said finally. �
��All those months I would sit with him and try to pray the way you taught me. You know—your will, 0 God, not mine, be done. Only I wasn’t really sure what my will was, what I wanted.” Grandma Windsor went on whittling branches and slowly filling the wheelbarrow.

  “I didn’t love him.” Amanda spoke softly, but Grandma Windsor’s shears stopped. “Sorry,” Amanda said quickly, and covered her face with her hands.

  When Grandma Windsor was silent, Amanda went on. “I used to be afraid of him. I’ve always had to fight not to hate him. I remember that time he hit you.” She heard her grandmother’s shears sniping again, faster now. “I knew he was drunk. I know you said he didn’t mean it. But it seemed like every time we saw him, it was terrible. Either he was drunk or angry or fighting with Grandpa or being mean to you. I never thought about him as my real father at all.”

  “He was your father. I taught you to honor him.” The words were faint but clear.

  “Yes, yes. And I did what you said, Grandma. I pretended Jesus was with him, watching by and waiting for him. But when we had to go live over there in the same house with him—and with her—I just couldn’t stand it. I realized that nothing stopped what I was feeling, that I hated him.” Amanda’s shoulders were shaking. “I was so ashamed,” she said, “so ashamed.”

  Grandma Windsor looked at Amanda, her face impossible to read, the eyes red-rimmed and wide. “He was your father,” she said, “my son. It’s for God to judge him, not us.”

  Amanda started to cry.

  “There’s no need for that, girl.” Grandma Windsor put both her hands in her lap, cradling the shears in one palm. “God knows your soul. Couldn’t be expected to be no better than you are. You’re your mother’s making as much as you are Clint’s or mine.” She curled her lips. “I doubt she taught you much charity. Way she hated him, what else could you learn but hate?”

  “It wasn’t like that,” Amanda said. “She took good care of him. She didn’t ever say a word about him to us.”

  Grandma Windsor grunted. “She hated him.”

  Amanda leaned forward. “He was dying. I hadn’t seen Daddy in almost two years, and the first time I walked in there, I knew it was not going to be long. He looked so bad and smelled so bad. It was like mice were breeding in that room, some grassy stink and a kind of old blood smell on that. I would go in there and read the Bible, but it made me gag to be in the same room with him.” Amanda wiped her eyes.

  “But she would go in there, her and Cissy. Delia would go in there and take care of him, and Cissy would feed him or just sit with him and talk. You could hear their voices, right through the walls of our bedroom.”

  “What were they saying?”

  “I don’t know. I couldn’t make out the words.”

  “Telling lies.” That edge of impatience was back in Grandma Windsor’s voice.

  Amanda took another deep breath and closed her eyes. She did not want to see Grandma Windsor’s face when she said what she was about to say. She did not want to see pity or contempt or disbelief.

  “I think I saw the Holy Spirit.”

  “The Holy Spirit?” Grandma Windsor’s voice was careful.

  “Yes.”

  The old woman reached up and rubbed her neck. Her eyes wandered from Amanda’s stricken face to her garden. So much work to do, her look said. So much work to do and I’m sitting here.

  “Grandma, I thought he was damned.” Amanda spoke in a rush. “I thought for sure he was going right to hell. He wouldn’t have no preacher in the house. Said it wasn’t God he needed to make peace with. He asked us to forgive him. One night he got Dede and me to come in the door and asked us to say right out did we forgive him. So of course I said yes, but I knew I didn’t mean it. I think he did too.”

  “What did Dede tell him?”

  “She told him he was a fool and to leave her out of his mess.”

  Grandma Windsor smiled.

  “After that I was afraid to go in there. When Cissy told me to leave him alone, I was glad. I didn’t want to talk to him. But I kept going to the door and looking in. I figured I had to make peace with him one way or another. I knew God was talking to my heart. One night I went and stood in the door while Delia was washing him down.”

  “She was washing him?” Grandma Windsor sounded skeptical.

  “With alcohol. She was wiping him down and toweling him dry. He kept saying, ‘Lord bless, Lord bless,’ and I was thinking how strange it was for him to say that. All he had on was these baggy undershorts, and he was lying in those sheets so they were in a kind of cupped shape all around him. It looked like a painting from the Middle Ages, like Jesus in the sepulchre before the angels came to get him.” She stopped, shivering at the memory.

  Into her silence Grandma Windsor said, “She washed him.”

  “Yes,” Amanda said. “Yes, I know. It was all strange. It was like a dream. They looked like they were in some cave in that little dark room with only the lamplight, and him going ‘Lord bless, Lord bless’ in that deep hollow voice, and Delia saying ‘Hush hush.’ ”

  “I can’t imagine her to wash him. After all that time, the way she behaved. I can’t believe that.” Grandma Windsor was looking into the branches of her apple trees. Amanda felt a wave of resentment go through her again. “But I haven’t told you what I saw,” she said. Grandma Windsor looked at her.

  “Well, tell me then.”

  “I was standing in the door and I was looking at them like I told you. They were in this little circle of light from the lamp. And all of a sudden it went funny, it reversed. One minute they were in the circle of light surrounded by the dark, and then they were all dark and the rest of the room was brightly lit. I looked at the walls, and the walls were glowing. I looked up and the ceiling looked like it had taken fire. It was diamond-bright, and then it got soft and yellow as butter. It came down on them until they were lit up again, all yellow and warm. It lit them up so bright I could see the bones in their bodies, the light just pouring through their skin. Only Daddy’s bones were trembling and moving, and I realized that when he was saying ‘Lord bless,’ he was not saying thank you or ‘That feels good.’ He was saying, ‘Please. Please, God.’ And God heard him.”

  Grandma Windsor frowned, but Amanda nodded firmly. About this point she was definite. This was what she had wanted to tell her grandmother. This was the thing.

  “It was just a moment, Grandma. Just a moment, but it was a moment full of light. I knew everything that was happening. I could see his soul in the trembling of his bones. I could feel God’s love in that yellow light.”

  “Oh, Amanda.” Grandma Windsor scratched at her forehead.

  “No. Grandma, no. Listen. I saw it.” Amanda’s lips quivered with concentration. “When that light went from dark to bright and bright again, when the ceiling and walls burned with it and it came down on them, it moved between them like something alive. It moved from her to him, and it was inside them both, and then it lifted up. And I could see it reached through the ceiling and past the sky, right up to heaven, right up to God’s right hand.”

  “You saw God’s hand.”

  “No. I felt it. I felt God’s hand and the light coming from it. It was the Holy Ghost, Grandma, and it was breathing on Daddy. I felt it. I knew it. And I knew right away that I didn’t have to forgive him, ’cause God already had.”

  “Oh Lord.” Grandma Windsor suddenly sounded tired. She looked at her granddaughter again and saw her face fall.

  “I knew it, Grandma, it spoke inside me. It was a whisper from God’s own mouth.”

  “From God.” The old woman looked up at the sky. “Well,” she said. “Well.” She gripped the shears in both hands.

  “She ever say anything about me?” she asked suddenly.

  Amanda was wiping her eyes. “What?”

  “Delia. She ever say anything about me?”

  Amanda stared at her. “She told us to call you. Said we should come see you. Said she would drive us out here to visit.”
r />   “Humph.”

  “She doesn’t talk about you, Grandma.”

  “Good.” The old woman started cutting apple branches again. Amanda watched in confusion.

  “Don’t you have anything to say?”

  “Say about what?”

  “About what I saw. About the Spirit and the light.”

  Grandma Windsor sighed. “I think you think too much, Amanda. Way too much, and too much about yourself. Why don’t you go home and do something useful instead of telling me all this nonsense?”

  Amanda’s mouth hung open. Her eyes flooded with tears. Grandma Windsor stood up, grabbed the handles of the wheelbarrow, and gave it a shove toward the woodshed.

  Home, Amanda thought. Grandma Windsor called Delia’s place her home now. She looked around the yard where she had lived for more than ten years. This was supposed to be her home, but it wasn’t. Amanda swallowed a sob, remembering that buttery light, the way Delia’s hands had moved on Clint’s wasted body. With such great tenderness she had washed him, bathing him the way a mother bathes an infant.

  There had been love in that room, Amanda was sure, forgiveness and acceptance. God had sent His love down into that room and made it safe for two people who had reason to hate each other. Amanda shuddered at the memory, the comparison with the cold she felt radiating from her grandmother. All her life it seemed she had been cold. All her life she had been alone. But God had made that room warm and full and safe. God could heat iron. God could warm even the coldest heart.

  “Lord,” Amanda whispered into the cool fall air. “Lord, forgive me too. Lord, bless my dark and bitter heart, and I will honor You as my Father. I will magnify Your name and spread Your light. Lord bless me, I will be Your child.” She reached down and picked up a thorny scrap of dry wood, turned it into her palm, and gripped it tight. She rocked slightly, feeling her skin tear and imagining the blood pooling in her palm.

  “I will be Your child,” she said.