Cavedweller

by Dorothy Allison

  Amanda’s sense of God’s favor was heartfelt and absolute. She had been born in sin. She had been raised hard, but God had his eye on her. She would work to spread God’s light, that light He had personally shown to her. She went to church the way some people went to bed, gratefully, happily, and with utter peace in her heart. She let Michael Graham take her hand in his, looked up at him, and felt God’s breath mix with her own. The only fear she had was that she herself was not worthy of the light she had seen, that no one would take her dying body in hand, bathe it tenderly, and love it utterly. In the back of her head there was always the sound of her grandmother’s voice, speaking her name with impatience. “Amanda, go home.”

  Amanda looked long and hard at herself, her plain face, her barren heart. God, teach me love, she begged. Make me worthy. She was Delia Byrd’s daughter, Clint Windsor’s girl. She was that child no one had loved enough to keep with them. She was one of the ones who would have to work to deserve the light, but life was full of hard bargains and hers was not as hard as some.

  Amanda set her teeth and went about it, the pursuit of a love she only dimly imagined.

  Chapter 12

  Four months after Clint died, Emmet Tyler walked into the Bonnet with a large brown paper sack clutched under one arm and a look of infinite despair engraved on his face.

  “It’s my wife’s. She’s sick.” He extended the bag to Delia tentatively. “I was hoping you could do something with it.”

  The bag contained Amy Tyler’s second-best wig. The best one had suffered what the home care nurse called “an unfortunate accident” because she would not admit that she had left Amy alone long enough for the woman to fall asleep with a cigarette askew in her mouth, blackening a big hunk of the side of the wig. Amy wasn’t supposed to be alone, and certainly not to smoke.

  “Well, things happen,” the nurse had told Emmet.

  “They do, they surely do,” he replied. His hands shook. He wanted to hit her, and he had never hit a woman in his life.

  The second-best wig was now all Amy had, though she still spoke dreamily of the lost one, the one her friends from the insurance office had given her, a real-human-hair wig ordered from a specialty supply outfit in Florida. “Where is it?” she kept asking. She seemed to think Emmet had hidden it from her, or given it to some woman down at the courthouse.

  Amy had a tendency to lose track of things these days. Between the haze the drugs spread over her brain and the slow eating away of her memory, a lot was slipping. Sometimes she remembered she had set the wig on fire, and should be grateful she had not burned herself too. Sometimes the wig and the cancer and even Emmet’s face retreated into a reality she could no longer comprehend. Was she truly a grown woman with two dead children and a husband who worked too many nights driving along back roads and sipping black coffee? Or was she still the girl who had not yet decided to marry that sweet-faced Tyler boy, the girl who was thinking about going up to Nashville for LPN training? How had she wound up typing insurance forms, miscarrying until she thought herself cursed by God, and then getting so sick so fast? Wasn’t this just a bad dream? Emmet could never be sure anymore which Amy he was talking to, only that his wife was frightened and confused and in pain.

  “Dying is hard,” the Baptist minister told him. Emmet knew he meant to be comforting, but somehow the words rang harsh.

  “It’s work,” Emmet said. “It’s more work than I ever knew.”

  He had come into the Bonnet wanting the wig cleaned and styled, but with no real hope that they could fix it. It was only a cheap backup the clinic had given Amy to use before her good one came. The nurse had told him just to get a couple of terry-cloth wraps from the Kmart, said they would do fine, but Emmet knew that would make Amy cry. He wanted this wig to be transformed somehow, to look like her real hair had before the drugs and lying in bed so long turned it to fine, sparse straw. He didn’t want anything more to hurt Amy’s feelings, to interrupt the moments in which she imagined the bed a dream and herself a girl giggling when he flirted with her. He wanted her to stay in that dream all the way through what the doctor warned was going to be a long and terrible progress. But if she was going to be awake, he wanted her to be as well taken care of as he could manage. He wanted to be ready, just in case she should come fully awake again; he wanted her to be able to put on that wig and see her friends once more without shame or self-consciousness. He wanted Amy to die without having to show her almost bald head to anyone but him.

  All of that grief and hope was in Emmet’s face as he held the bag out to Delia. When he stuttered his request, she heard an echo of the last months she had spent with Clint. She looked at him with the steely eye of a woman who was still not over burying two husbands. She understood immediately the exhausted love that motivated the man. Can’t do much, but can do this. She knew the feeling. When she looked at Emmet Tyler, Delia was looking at an earlier version of herself.

  When you are helping someone to die, there comes a point when everything but the necessary falls away. Old angers and resentments sharpen, then dull. Passion recedes. It took everything Delia had to keep moving forward during Clint’s illness, and half the time she was moving forward to escape what she knew was inevitable—the shameful relief that would follow when the task was done, the body buried, and the real grieving begun. In the months since Clint died, she had finally begun to remember him as he was when she married him, and as she thought he was. Some days it seemed she was straining at the seams with realizations that before had been too painful to imagine.

  “What is it?” Delia was sure that Emmet would know what she meant. It—cancer. It—emphysema. It—any of the dreadful ways there are to die slowly, draining those around you until they walk the way Emmet walked, look the way he did, the same way Delia had looked when Clint was dying. There is a place past exhaustion that is not numb but prescient, and Delia spoke to that place in Emmet.

  “Liver cancer.”

  His eyes drew her in. She took the wig from the bag and shook it out. Behind her M.T. coughed and announced she was going to go sweep up under the sinks.

  “How soon you need it?” Delia’s tone was matter-of-fact. She kept her gaze on the wig, running her fingers through the tangled coils of dark auburn hair. She wondered if it had been chosen to match the hair Emmet’s wife once had, or if it was just whatever was available from the clinic support group. She had seen women come in wearing the most astonishingly inappropriate wigs, all of them with that curiously imperious, brittle manner. You never knew if they were ready to snarl or cry, and sometimes they did both. The worst were the ones who tried to pretend they were not sick.

  Delia looked up at Emmet. He was staring at the wig, as stricken as any woman who had ever burst into tears under Delia’s cool fingers.

  “You need it back quick?” she prompted gently.

  With both hands he pushed his hair off his face. He spoke in a voice thick with the refusal to show how badly he was hurting. “Pretty quick. Yeah. If you could.” He pushed his hair back again, though not a strand was out of place. He did not seem to know what to do with his hands. He dropped them to his hips, then shoved them into his back pockets.

  “I can pay whatever, you know. I just ... just want to get this to her as quick as I can.” Every muscle in his body was locked tight, the slight bob of his head marking the only loose cord in a skein of knots. Delia felt a wave of heat go through her, not lust but rage. God should be paying attention, she thought, then bit her lip. She didn’t want to start thinking like that again.

  “Might be able to get it washed and set tonight. Then you could come get it tomorrow after I comb it out. You got any particular style in mind?”

  “No. Just kind of wavy and loose. Amy never wore no curls or nothing. Hated permanents. Always said she didn’t understand women who would go through that for something that didn’t look any good anyway.” He smiled for the first time. Delia wondered if he knew he was already speaking of his wife in the past tense.


  “He’s a strange one,” M.T. remarked after he left. “Little bit soft as a deputy, they say.”

  “Deputy?”

  “You didn’t see the shirt? Uniform. He an’t wearing his deputy jacket, but I know the shirt. Don’t know him, but I know the type. So upright he don’t know about sin, you know?”

  Delia grimaced. A deputy, the law. She didn’t much like the law. But she had liked what she saw in Emmet’s face. Doing the best he could with an impossible situation. Upright maybe, but full of heart.

  Delia stayed late that night to wash and set the wig. She treated it as if it were her own, shampooing it twice, conditioning the imitation fibers with a compound she had discovered in a beauty catalog, then setting it on big plastic rollers and putting it on a high shelf to air-dry overnight. The next morning she came in early, scented the wig lightly to cover the persistent sickroom smell, and styled it simply with soft waves. At lunchtime Emmet showed up looking as if he had not slept at all for fear the wig would be no different. Delia felt odd knowing she had done all this for a woman she would never see alive.

  Awe broke on Emmet’s face. “It’s perfect,” he whispered. “Thank you.”

  When Amy died the following week, Delia went to the Catholic funeral. She gave the deputy a nod and lit a candle before she left. Months later Emmet came into the Bonnet just as it was closing, moving unsteadily on his feet like a toddler or an old, old man. His hair was lank and hanging in his eyes, and the eyes themselves were red-rimmed and watery. Drunk, Delia thought, looking up at his sweaty face.

  “Mrs. Delia.” He slurred the name.

  Numb-drunk, she amended, noticing that he wore no socks.

  “Ms. Delia.”

  “Byrd, I’m Delia Byrd. What do you think you are doing?”

  “I was thinking maybe you would like to go have a drink with me, or a bite to eat or something.” His air ran out. He swayed on his feet.

  Delia shook her head. “You going to shame her in the ground?” she asked him.

  Emmet looked into her face. For days he had been thinking of her in the church, the way she had leaned over that ·candle so that the light reflected on her neck. It was like the gentle way she had put Amy’s wig into his hands. He had imagined coming to her and leaning into her as she took him in her arms. She was alone, he had heard. She’d lost her husband the way he’d lost his wife. He had imagined that she would understand, that she would take him in and comfort him, that the touch of her mouth on his was what he needed. He had not imagined this, her face set against him and her arms crossed tight across her belly as if she knew what he wanted and hated him for it.

  “Will you go out for a drink with me?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “I’ll have coffee with you, but not now. You come back in here sober, and I will try and remember what an upright man you used to be. Then I will go and have one cup of coffee with you.”

  Ashamed, he lifted his hands and ran them through his hair. “All right,” he said. “I understand. All right.” He managed to turn and walk fairly directly out the door.

  Two days later Emmet returned, shaved raw and hanging his head like a boy who needs a mama to slap him on the back and tell him to stand up straight. Delia watched him come in the door, the loose way his body shifted on those strong hips. Randall had walked like that, and Clint. It was something she always noticed, the way a man walked when he was hungry for a woman. Emmet hadn’t worn his deputy’s uniform. He had taken care. Trimmed hair, pressed shirt, pegged trousers, polished shoes.

  She sighed and saw Emmet’s face go still and stubborn.

  We’ll see, she thought. Aloud she said, “All right, coffee.”

  Dede finally found the limits of the Datsun one summer night on the Bowle River overpass. She was allowed to drive the Datsun now and then, but only when Delia was with her. She was not supposed to go driving at night alone, but Dede had driving in her blood, and Delia seemed not to understand the risks of leaving the car keys on the hook by the kitchen door. The first few times she took them, Dede felt a momentary qualm, but the feeling passed. She wanted to drive on her own at night, to speed down the nearly empty roads and feel the cool, damp air on her face. She was fifteen, she was careful, and she knew what she was doing.

  Dede waited until Delia was sound asleep, and carefully pushed the Datsun down the driveway until it was safe to turn on the ignition. From the first night, she was intoxicated. Night was the best time to drive, the very best. With the breeze swirling in the windows and the crickets booming, she opened her mouth and started to sing. She pretended she had run away from home, that somewhere ahead waited the man she loved, a man rich and strong and longing for her to lie down beside him and croon into his neck.

  “Whoa, sinner man,” Dede sang. In her voice, the hymn Grandma Windsor had loved became rock and roll, the best kind of blasphemy, call and praise for the sinner who waited for Dede’s kiss. She had a select batch of tapes acquired secondhand or as gifts sent from Rosemary. Her favorites were the Patti Smith Group and Todd Rundgren, music she sang with raw passionate emphasis. “G-L-O-R-I-A!”

  “They never play Patti Smith’s best stuff on the radio,” Dede complained to Delia. “Just that one she does with Bruce Springsteen, none of her kick-butt stuff. I think they’re scared of her.” Dede even tried telling Amanda that Patti Smith was a kind of gospel singer if you paid attention. “God is her subject. Listen to the words.”

  She might have had more success with that argument if she had not been so fond of quoting the introduction to “Gloria” where the cadence drawled and Patti dragged out the phrase “Jesus died for somebody’s sins—but not mine!”

  “You are demented,” Amanda told her. “Seriously demented.”

  “Jesus died for somebody’s sins,” Dede sang at her. “Must have been yours.”

  The night Cissy climbed into the Datsun, Dede had the tape of Wave primed and ready to play as soon as she got well down Terrill Road. They fought in raging whispers.

  “I want to go.”

  “I an’t gonna take your ass.”

  “You take me or I’ll tell Delia.”

  “You damn tattletale whiny bitch. You better tell nobody.”

  In the end, Dede let Cissy come, but only after extracting a sacred promise. “You swear? You swear you will never betray me?”

  “I swear.” Cissy put one hand on her belly and the other on her heart.

  Dede laughed but accepted the oath. It was easier with Cissy helping her push the car down the drive, though having a passenger was not as satisfying as being alone, and it took a while for Dede to adjust. Cissy was quiet but obviously impressed with Dede’s driving. Every so often she would ask Dede to teach her.

  “Not in this life,” Dede swore. “You’ll never be able to get a license. You couldn’t pass the vision test.”

  “I could pass that test anytime.” Cissy’s mouth twisted in a devious grin. “I memorized the chart.”

  Dede laughed. “Getting ready, huh? Well, you ever manage that, you let me know. I am not going to want to be driving anywhere in Bartow County the day you hit the road.”

  Dede drove them all over Cayro, keeping an eye out for Deputy Tyler. She could fool Delia, but that old boy was nobody’s fool. Some nights they went out to the Bowle River and parked below the crest of the hill where the bridge supports were lit up by the railroad company. Dede smoked and Cissy sat and sometimes they talked. It amused Dede that Cissy did not want to learn to smoke. At Cissy’s age, Dede had been sneaking cigarettes out of Clint’s jacket and smoking them in the fields behind Grandma Windsor’s house.

  “I don’t like the smell,” Cissy told Dede. “I bet you can’t even smell it no more. But Delia always stinks of cigarettes, and you do too. You think she don’t smell it on you?”

  “She don’t say nothing to me about it.”

  “She don’t ever say nothing to you, or Amanda either. She’s still trying to get you to love her.”

  Dede shru
gged. “Feels to me like she’s still trying to love us. She looks at us like we’re some kind of creatures she found in the back of the woods.”

  “Yeah, well, she’s been looking for you all my life.” Cissy put her feet up on the dash.

  “Oh, for God’s sake. Smoke one.” Dede tossed the pack at Cissy. “You’re starting to get on my nerves.”

  “I don’t want it.”

  “What is it? You scared of getting cancer?” Dede blew smoke at Cissy. “Or you scared of Delia?”

  Cissy blushed. What she was actually worried about was that Dede would think she was trying to copy her. Cissy took a cigarette out of the pack, lit it, and inhaled. It burned her throat and tasted awful, but she wouldn’t embarrass herself by sputtering or coughing.

  “Don’t taste like much to me,” she managed to say.

  Dede grinned. “Well, it’s probably like beer and whiskey—an acquired taste, as the Petrie boys used to tell me.” She took another drag and thought about Craig. He was fun when he wasn’t being so pushy. She would like to have him asleep or drunk. Helpless. It would be nice to have him helpless. She would like to touch that boy any way she wanted, to stroke him and get him as disturbed as the brothers had managed to get her. She wondered if it would ever be possible to have sex with a boy, not get pregnant, and not have him tell everybody and their cousin you had done it.

  Maybe if he was unconscious? Could you have sex with an unconscious boy? She giggled.

  “What are you laughing about?” Cissy asked.

  “Driving,” Dede said. “The sheer power of the machine.”

  Most nights Dede took them twice around the overpass. The first time they went up and over, the old Datsun peaked out at just under 60. Dede checked the gas gauge. She’d have to get more before going home or Delia would notice. Twice already Dede had siphoned a little gas from Mr. Reitower’s car up the street. She was going to have to find someone else to borrow from this time, or maybe she could get Cissy to buy two dollars’ worth on the way back. Cissy seemed to have money now and then. She stroked the steering wheel. It was a good car, sweet. It should be able to go faster. She turned to Cissy.