Cavedweller

by Dorothy Allison

  “But it looks so silly.”

  “Who sees it but me? And an’t I the one that matters? I like colors, bright and loud and full of energy. Don’t have to wash them as often, and they don’t go that sad gray. Besides, they look cheerful out on the line.”

  It was true. Cissy did the laundry, but never Delia’s sheets. She did not even go into Delia’s room. Delia liked to do her sheets and hang them out on the lines strung from the back of the house to the ramshackle garage, where she kept her garden supplies. She got up late on Sunday morning and put a quick load in cold water while she drank her coffee. She did a little weeding in the small garden off the back steps through the spin cycle. Then she hung those sheets out in the sun and sat on the steps to watch the cartoon figures billow and flap. With her knees pulled up and one hand trailing through her loose hair, she hummed softly to herself while Dede and Cissy banged around in the kitchen. She could have been a young mother with small children, not forty years old and still mourning what she had lost.

  Delia’s bed was a joke awaiting comment.

  “My bed suits me,” she would say, “and it an’t like I’m inviting company.”

  “You an’t dead yet.” M.T. did not approve.

  “And I an’t crazy. I like my bed and I like it alone.”

  After Clint’s death, men looked longingly at Delia, but few had the nerve to approach her. Delia barely noticed. As far as she was concerned, that was over. Oh, she went out with Emmet, but there was nothing to that. She’d had enough trouble in her life, she told M.T., and when Rosemary called they joked about how many men a woman could go crazy over in this lifetime. One, maybe two, never three. “Well, I’ve had my two,” Delia swore. “I’ve had all I can stand.”

  The secret was that Delia’s sheets saw little use. Her insomnia had gotten so bad, she used her bedroom as little more than a storage place for her clothes. Her naps were brief and restless. Mostly she needed to move around. She strung Christmas tree lights along the back of the house and the side of the garage, and took to gardening at night by the dim light of the parti-colored bulbs. When there was nothing left to do in the garden, she started refinishing furniture. She sanded and sealed some lawn chairs Steph had given her, then worked her way through the tables and chairs in the house. She picked up a few pieces of furniture at the Goodwill, fixed them up, and gave them away—a dining room table for M.T., a rocker for Amanda, and a splendid cherry side table for Emmet, with little drawers set on two sides.

  “You built me a table?” Emmet smiled at her when she brought it over.

  “You don’t have to take it,” she told him. “I just liked the way the finish came out and I remembered you had that cherry armoire. Thought it would look nice with it.”

  It would, Emmet agreed. He said “It would” with his head down. His fingers stroked the finish. He had asked her to marry him when Amanda married Michael. He had thought she would stop seeing him from the way she had looked at him, but so long as he pretended the question had been a joke, pretended she had not been spooked. They went out almost every other week, eating greasy food at Goober’s and seeing movies at the drive-in near Marietta.

  “Wasn’t nothing,” Delia said. “You’d be amazed at the beautiful stuff people throw away sometimes. This treasure was just sitting by the road.”

  “Thank you,” he said. He lifted his head.

  “Oh, you’re welcome.” Delia was already looking back at her car. “Why don’t you come over next Sunday and I’ll show you what I’m working on for Stephanie’s birthday.”

  “I’ll do that,” Emmet said, his fingers gripping the edge of the little table.

  “Well, Lord damn!” Steph said when Emmet and Delia delivered her birthday present, an antique vanity. “Girl, you should go into business.”

  “I got a business,” Delia said. “Anyway, sanding is like doing hair. Feels like something I know with my muscles more than my brain. It makes me feel good to do it, and I like the way the wood looks when you sand it down real fine.”

  “Just as long as you don’t start building flats and compost bins like that crazy woman on television. This is the kind of thing you can take too far.” Steph winked at Emmet.

  Delia had a few moments when she thought about giving up the Bonnet and restoring furniture for money. She would never have to smile at a woman with her head in a towel again, and that might be nice. But the truth was she was just restless. Her hips hurt no matter what she did, and no matter where she slept, bed or couch or a mat out on the grass, things seemed to press on her.

  One of M.T.’s new boyfriends, George, put a big antenna up on the back porch so Delia could tune her radio to stations as far away as Phoenix. After 2:00 A.M. there were several stations that came in from the Southwest and they all seemed to carry phone-in talk shows hosted by deep-voiced religious commentators. These were the very shows that Delia had never been able to stand before, but suddenly they were her passion. She set up a workstation for herself out back with the colored lights and the radio. Sanding, she would hum along to country rock, switching stations to find music that matched her pace. She tried to time her work so that she was smoothing stain or sealant by the time the talk shows started and got her all excited.

  “I get so mad,” she told Cissy. “Mad or disgusted. You can see it in the wood. Sometimes I come close to grinding the grain right down to nothing or gouging whole strips off.”

  “Then why do you listen?”

  Delia looked at her daughter as if what she was saying was perfectly obvious. “ ’Cause sometimes mad is what I need. A good mad or a good cry. Cussing out loud or kicking a bucket across the porch, just something. Something strong. Sometimes a woman just needs to get mad as sin.”

  What Delia could not have guessed was how closely the rhythms of her body were matched by those in Amanda. She could not have known that when she was sweating under her Christmas tree lights, grunting and cursing at some far-off preacher, Amanda was moving with her all the way across Cayro, ironing T-shirts and chanting her prayers. For every “Fool!” of Delia’s, Amanda would whisper an “Amen!” Now and then, as if in harmony, they would stop together, hearts pounding in counterpoint, to lift their heads at the same moment and breathe “Lord!”

  Chapter 13

  At fourteen, Cissy Byrd loved folk music—especially Gordon Lightfoot and Delia’s old Joan Baez records—the high school swim team, the sausage biscuits Nolan brought her from his daddy’s early shift at Biscuit World, the straight-leg jeans Dede said were cool, and science fiction books featuring orphan girls with amazing hidden powers. She hated okra, the marching band—from which she was expelled after blowing spit on Mary Martha Wynchester—her sister Amanda, and the entire congregation of Cayro Baptist Tabernacle, where Amanda spent all her time. And Delia. In a completely matter-of-fact way, Cissy hated Delia and tried to make sure she knew it, but Delia never acknowledged the hatred, and sometimes Cissy almost forgot it herself.

  The Saturday after Cissy’s fifteenth birthday, Nolan came over early. “You free?” he asked when Cissy appeared at the back door. He had called the night before and asked the same thing.

  “As a bird,” Cissy told him. “What you got in mind?”

  “It’s a surprise. A birthday surprise. Did you tell your mama you’re going to spend the day with me?”

  “Yeah.” Cissy put on the birthday present Dede had given her, a straw hat shaped like a tractor cap, with a red, white, and green ribbon tied around the brim. “She said to go and be damned.”

  “She did?” Nolan was shocked.

  “No! Lord, Nolan. It’s a joke. It’s what she would say if she ever said what she was thinking. We an’t getting along too good.”

  Nolan was undaunted. “Well, never mind. My cousin Charlie is coming in twenty minutes. He’s going to give us a ride out.”

  “Out where?” Cissy was not sure she liked this bossy Nolan.

  “Where the surprise is.” Nolan grinned and shook his dark hair back.
“Don’t ask questions. Just wait and see.”

  Charlie was late picking them up, and not terribly pleasant about making the trip at all. “You’re gonna owe me, cousin,” he said. Nolan nodded and avoided Cissy’s eyes. It was some kind of trade, she could see from the look of concentrated misery on Nolan’s face. Whatever his surprise, he had gone to a lot of trouble. There was a big satchel of gear he had not allowed her to touch, a cooler filled with sandwiches and Cokes, and a blanket that Charlie boasted had been “seasoned by Keenan men for generations,” whatever that meant.

  “Pretty damn skinny, an’t she?” Charlie said as Cissy climbed into the truck. She glared at him while Nolan flushed and sweat beads of hot shame.

  “Don’t talk about her like that,” Nolan said.

  “Oh, I won’t hurt your girlfriend’s feelings.” Charlie winked at Cissy. “Hell, son, I’m just proud you finally got one.”

  On the Little Mouth Road they stopped to get ice for the cooler, and Nolan apologized to Cissy while Charlie bought cigarettes and gas with money Nolan had given him. “I’ll get my license next year,” Nolan told her. “Daddy said he’d sign for me to get a permit. Then I can start driving us wherever we want to go. Won’t have to put up with Charlie.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Cissy said. “He’s just your cousin. Not your brother. You can’t help it if he’s a damn fool.”

  “I got it all planned,” Nolan said. “This is the bad part. Once we get there and Charlie leaves, it will be fine.”

  But once they got there, Charlie did not want to leave. He drank two beers while Nolan hauled the cooler and gear into the woods. He kept winking at Cissy and teasing Nolan until Cissy thought her friend was going to lose his temper. Finally, Charlie asked Nolan for another five dollars. He’d be back at sundown, he said, but he was going to be low on gas, and it was better to be on the safe side, didn’t Nolan think? Nolan gave him the money, and Charlie drove away.

  “What a pain in the ass,” Cissy said as the truck spit dirt and rock behind the spinning tires.

  “Always has been,” Nolan agreed. Then he smiled for the first time in an hour. “Come on,” he said. “I got something to show you.”

  It was a hole in the ground, a deep hole in the ground. Cissy leaned over and saw that there was a meandering sort of path along one edge. You would have to hang on to roots and rocks, but you could climb down pretty easily from that side. Nolan pointed out a few places where the incline had been dug out or shored up, making a rough staircase.

  “A very rough staircase,” Cissy said.

  “Wouldn’t want it to be too easy,” Nolan told her. “There’d be people down there all the time if it was. It’s called Paula’s Lost. We used to own it. My uncles shared the plot, almost two hundred acres.”

  “That’s a funny name,” Cissy said.

  “Well, it was lost for more than a decade. Found and lost more than a few times, Uncle Tynan used to say. It wasn’t put on the maps until they gave it to the state in the fifties. It’s a reserve now. Too rocky and sandy to be any good for farming. Uncle Tynan got a deal passing it over for taxes, but the cousins have been holding target practice weekends down in here forever. It’s famous. The sheriff keeps coming out and busting up the camp, but the hollow down at the entrance is a great place for shooting. Can’t no bullets go astray and kill nobody down in that hole.”

  “Why is it famous?”

  “Well, that’s a story.” Nolan wiped his face and beamed. He pulled open the cooler, handed Cissy a Coke and a sandwich, and smiled again.

  “It was my uncle Brewster made it famous. He mapped the first three passages and then threw all these parties out here. Strung a set of lights down the hollow. Sent out invitations with detailed maps. Called the parties Lost Weekend Extravaganzas. They were free, and Brewster gave away a lot of beer and marijuana.”,

  Cissy took a bite of the sandwich, egg salad with pickles. Nolan knew she liked egg salad. He had really thought ahead, she realized. She hid her smile with a bite of egg salad and watched Nolan enjoy himself telling the story of Paula’s Lost.

  Brewster had come home from Vietnam minus most of his teeth, three toes, half the cartilage in his left knee, and more than a few of the bones in his left foot. His buddies tried to cheer him up by sending him back with a large supply of marijuana. The idea was for Brewster to make a little money on that stash, but he was just not the business type. He shared what he had until his supply was gone and never complained when he was not offered much in return.

  “Hell, you got to make do with what comes, keep your head level,” Brewster told everyone with a laugh. “What comes around, after all.” He laughed harder after the deputies raided one of the last parties and found none of the killer weed everyone had sworn would be there.

  “You shoulda come here last month,” Brewster told Emmet Tyler after the deputy snapped on the cuffs. “You could of put me away for life.”

  Emmet grunted but said nothing. He was new on the job and hadn’t wanted to hike so far out in the woods in the first place, and Brewster was just too genial a man to provoke much indignation. There was only a few years’ difference between them, and Emmet could not look at Brewster without feeling grateful that he had not come back from his stint in the army in the same condition—partly crippled and more than partly crazy. The whole raid was a joke anyway. There wasn’t even an underage drinker at the party; and the county had to settle for a vandalism charge to put Brewster out of business. Technically the cave was on state-owned land, and Brewster’s light sconces were hammered into the cave walls.

  “Big damn hole in the ground, an’t it, Emmet?” Brewster was cheerful as he was helped into the back of the green and tan cruiser. “How you imagine it was ever lost?”

  “Country’s going to hell,” Emmet said. “We could probably lose most anything.” He wiped his neck and waved a mosquito away, looking back at the incline that sloped down to the cave mouth. “There was a bunch of trees and shit here, garbage people had thrown down before the dump opened. It all grew over like this, kudzu and stuff.” He kicked at an exposed clump of red dirt and watched it crumble. Black and silver metal fragments glittered in the harsh light of the lamps.

  “You wouldn’t have known there was nothing here. Nothing. Ground’s so ripe, you spit on it and it shoots up green.”

  The mystery of how such a large hole in the ground could be forgotten did lend Paula’s Lost a mysterious aura. In the last few years trees had fallen and the entrance seemed to have dropped farther down the slope. The park service had to put up signs warning the curious just how dangerous amateur caving could be—the ground could easily fall in; crevasses full of rock and silt waited for the unwary, particularly people who had heard about Brewster’s old parties and came around to see what remained. Most of them showed up with only a couple of flashlights, a six-pack, and no idea what they were risking when they climbed down into that dark and dangerous hole. The ones who climbed out did so gratefully, sucking clean air and whistling at the muddy depths behind them.

  Cissy leaned over the edge again. “How far down does it go?”

  “No one knows.” Nolan was opening the satchel. “It goes on quite a ways. People say Paula’s Lost connects to Little Mouth, but no one has found the connection. Little Mouth is bigger, better known. This one is just family.” He pulled out flashlights with clip-on rings that fastened to your belt. He had even brought an extra belt, in case Cissy wasn’t wearing one, and a couple of long-sleeved flannel shirts.

  “It’s cool down there,” Nolan said. “Always fifty-eight degrees underground, like air-conditioning left on all the time. As hot as it is up here, it’ll feel nice when we go down, but it gets cold after a while. Makes you tired faster.”

  He looked at her with an open smile. “You ready to go?”

  The rock was loose on the climb down. Cissy almost fell twice, but after a few minutes she learned to handle the rope Nolan had strung from one of the big trees at the top. Goo
d thing I’m a swimmer, she thought when Nolan had her hold on to the rope and wait for him to get a better footing as he went ahead. Her shoulders ached a little by the time they were at the bottom, but climbing was fun. Like swimming, it didn’t depend on anything but your own muscles and nerves.

  Cissy lagged behind Nolan. The cave was like nothing she had imagined. She had seen a movie once in which people went exploring in a cave, but they just stepped over a few rocks and walked right in. This was nothing like that. After the descent there was a mouth, a big, wide opening that quickly narrowed down.

  “Brewster dug some of this out, Uncle Tynan said.” Nolan kicked at the rough ground. “But the real cave opening is back here.”

  It was a narrow slice in the rock. Cissy turned to step through and then had to turn again. After about six feet, the slice took a sideways turn and they had to stoop. Soon they were crawling, holding the flashlights ahead of them. It was like swimming, she thought again, using her shoulders and hips and hunching over to keep from hitting her head. Every now and then the rock would open, then close down again. No, it was like nothing Cissy had ever seen.

  They were both panting when they climbed through another gap into a little cavern with slanting walls and reddish sand scattered on the rock. Nolan got Cissy down knee to knee with him and produced a canteen. “Have a drink,” he said, “and then we’ll shut off the lights.”

  “Shut off the lights?” Cissy took a gulp from the canteen. Nolan was playing his flashlight over the walls. The surfaces of the slanting rock were as broken and rough as the ground. That was the biggest problem, Cissy thought, the rough ground. She had never realized how important a flat walking surface could be. She put her hand on the rock beside her knee. It was cool and smooth, but it felt as if it might break if she hammered on it. Limestone, most of the rock was limestone. Soft, easily shaped by water.