Cavedweller

by Dorothy Allison

  Oh, Amanda thought. Michael was praying. Oh dear. She sighed. Maybe she should join him. She opened her mouth and a long gray pearl of song came out. Perfect carved butter beads of prayer. A bead for God, a precious sphere of her faith. Michael’s voice receded. Amanda remembered the feel of his skin pressed to hers. He had such a beautiful body. God bless, she said, and the words became pearls while Michael’s sweet mouth came down on her own.

  Praise God, Amanda said. Let us both praise God. She rocked her hips in pulse to Michael’s voice. Oh, thank you, Lord. I come to you with my hands full and open. It made no sense but it did, and Amanda loved every word that moved through her. Praise God. Praise God. I am dead and most heartily glad.

  They took her downstairs in the morning, keeping the line in her arm feeding just enough magic juice to keep that sweet buttery feeling in her body. “Am I dead?” Amanda asked past a thick dry tongue. A nurse gave her a tiny sip of water. “No, sweetheart, you’re fine, and we’re going to fix you up perfect.”

  “Perfect,” Amanda said. She looked around. Everything was white and bright. Dr. Brown leaned over her. Amanda knew him. She had never liked him. “Oh dear,” she said.

  “Mrs. Graham, Amanda.” He had a fat tongue, Amanda thought. A smug expression. He thought he knew so much. “We’re going to take care of those gallstones, Mrs. Graham.”

  Gallstones? What was he talking about? She had cancer. She was dying. It was all so obvious. So easy to die, Amanda thought, when you have faith.

  Dr. Brown leaned over her again. “Now you’re going to feel something. It’s just sound waves. They will come in pulses and won’t hurt you, but you will feel things. It’s going to break up the stones, going to make you all better.”

  Metal moved. Machines. Amanda tried to sit up, but straps held her in place. Her abdomen, her thighs, her shoulders, everything was pinned to the surface of the table. Smite them, Lord, Amanda prayed. Something large and peculiar stirred the air, making everything electrical. God, Amanda prayed. Oh God.

  The pulse came, a sound inside Amanda’s body like no other. It moved the molecules in her bones. It moved the electrical current of her brain. It was like the morphine, butter-smooth and awful as the breath of God, terrifying and magical. The wave went through Amanda and stirred her soul.

  Praise God, Amanda prayed, this cannot be a machine.

  There was a low murmur in her mouth, a prayer and a song. The pulse came again. A deep, ivory-smooth shudder went through Amanda’s middle. God was speaking, that was what she felt. She could hear him in her bones. It was like the moment when she and Michael had made their sons. Not sex but prayer, Michael’s lips on her breast, his teeth touching her skin, his gasps feeding her own, and her name an invocation in his mouth. There had been that moment when every muscle in Amanda’s body had tightened and throbbed in a psalm of joy. She had wept, held on to Michael, and known without doubt that they had made a child. Far past orgasm, that moment had been an incantation of love. This feeling brought that moment back, all trembling tenderness and impassioned satisfaction, but this was not the act that made a child, this was something acutely unsettling. Dr. Brown murmured above her. For an instant Amanda was offended by her body’s betrayal. Her muscles tightened to struggle, but then the wave came again, speaking far down inside her, a reverberation that lifted as high as her heart.

  Amanda turned her head. It was the only part of her body she could move. This is not the machine, she thought. This is something more. “That’s good,” Dr. Brown said, and Amanda stopped fighting. The wave came again, rolling and moving, talking to her bones. Jesus, Amanda thought. Jesus is speaking to my heart.

  Yes, Lord. Yes. The oscillation was repeated and sang in her molecules, the voice of God was speaking. Amanda nodded. She understood. She knew what she was meant to do. Yes, Lord, she whispered. Yes.

  Amanda woke to Michael’s murmured prayer, his head bent over hers, his hands on the frame of the bed. She looked at his head. Michael could never get his hair cut right without her there to tell them how to fix it. She closed her eyes and felt inside. The pain was gone. Nothing. No pulse. No song. No pearls. Her eyes were wet.

  Gallstones.

  Lord, forgive my arrogance, Amanda prayed.

  She opened her eyes and turned her head. Michael looked up, the prayer ceasing as he saw her open eyes. “Oh, my beloved,” he said fiercely. Amanda nodded. She wondered what God wanted from her now. She closed her eyes. Whatever God wanted, she would think about that later. For now she just wanted to lie still and listen to the stillness within her own body.

  While Amanda was recovering in the hospital, Cissy stayed over at Amanda and Michael’s house. She did it with poor grace. Jean and Mim had wanted another overnight down in Little Mouth to map the dogleg and search out the section that Cissy thought might link several caves in the system.

  “When’s your sister coming home, then?”. Mim had been impatient.

  “Should be home already,” Cissy told her. “They said she would be out and home today, but she’s pretty wiped out. If it was anybody else, I’d think they were using her illness as an excuse for a little vacation, but Amanda isn’t the type. I think she needs the sleep.”

  “When she gets home, we’ll go.” Jean’s shrug was eloquent. “It’ll wait. Cave’s been there forever, an’t going nowhere.”

  For Cissy, every day at Amanda’s was a revelation. When she cooked the boys rice cereal, she read the index cards Amanda had taped to the cabinets. When she threw their jeans in the washing machine, there were more cards affixed to the shelves in there. Crabbed handwriting recorded numbers and dates. “My Lord, she writes everything down,” Cissy whispered. She tracked the cards through the house, each carefully annotated and pinned securely to a drawer or shelf or cupboard.

  “Your mama is crazy,” Cissy told little Gabe. “Just absolutely crazy.” He bubbled milk at her with a smile. The two boys, Michael and Gabriel, were as sweet as their mama was sour. “Only Amanda would name her children for archangels,” Dede teased when they were born, but neither Dede nor Cissy had ever spent much time with them. Amanda did not let her boys out of her sight very often, and did not care for the idea of other people watching them. “I get it now,” Cissy told Delia. “She never wanted us to know what they were like.” Cissy was sure that Amanda’s boys were also the most exhausting creatures on the planet.

  “You can’t leave them for a minute,” Cissy complained.

  “You can’t leave any baby, and toddlers are just a little bit beyond babies,” Delia told her. “Amanda’s boys are like anybody’s babies, only cuter than most.”

  Cissy had not had the energy to argue, but she was sure Delia was wrong. Nobody could be as exhausting as those two. Little Michael was three and a half, and talked every moment he was conscious, telling stories that intertwined angels and truck drivers. He recited Bible verses in a chirping soprano, and sang “Jesus loves me” when nothing else came into his brain. The baby, Gabe, only fourteen months, barely spoke, though he clearly worshiped his big brother and worked his mouth like some baby guppy soundlessly echoing the endless stream that Michael produced.

  “Bet Gabe doesn’t learn to talk till he leaves home.”

  “Oh, he’s learning. Just won’t be able to get a word in till then.”

  Delia came over every day at noon to see if Cissy had lost her mind yet. She found the idea of Cissy as mom-substitute endlessly amusing, and her stint as baby-sitter a marvelous opportunity, letting Delia play grandma to her heart’s content. Cissy had no intention of wasting any chance to take a minute away from the boys. Grandma and the boys quickly developed their own language and games, little rituals that the boys seemed to enjoy as much as Delia did.

  “You just eat it up, don’t you?” Cissy accused Delia.

  “With a spoon,” Delia said. “With a great big grandma spoon.”

  When Delia came in the morning, Gabe started to crow and wave his arms. Delia leaned over him and licked the spo
t just between his fine blond eyebrows, prompting a stuttering giggle. It was their way of greeting each other, and Delia loved the way Gabe’s face would wrinkle and brighten at her kiss. Gabe was easily her favorite. He was not yet walking, so following after his big brother was difficult for him, but he did it anyway, accomplishing forward motion by hanging on to anything he could reach—furniture, tablecloths, people, or the dog. For every few feet the child accomplished, he fell or staggered sideways another few. The wonder was that for all his troubles, Gabe never cried when he fell. He merely pulled himself up and set off again in pursuit of his oblivious older brother. If Cissy had not snatched Gabe up half a dozen times, he would have split his head on the steps or the prayer stools Amanda had planted strategically all over the living room.

  “It’s no wonder Amanda has wound up in the hospital,” Cissy told Delia. “I’m surprised she never put sleeping pills in their cereal.”

  Delia laughed. “I told you that you had no idea what Amanda’s life was like. Raising babies is how God sorts us out. Only the strong survive. The weak call their mamas to come help.”

  “Well, I’m weak.” Cissy wiped one last streak of dried rice cereal off the back door and dropped into a kitchen chair. “I give it up to you. I’m as weak as they come, and a damn fool for agreeing to stay over.”

  “All babies are angels,” Delia said, and left it at that to lean over and lick her grandson again. Gabe cackled and flapped his arms so engagingly that Delia took a moment to rub her cheek on his little pink instep. “Baby skin,” she sighed. “It just smells so good.”

  “Lord God.” Cissy stared at Delia as if the woman had lost her mind. “You are just past yourself, aren’t you? You talk like you are on drugs.”

  “You just wait till you have your own.” Delia untangled Gabe’s curls with gentle fingers.

  “Oh, you can give that notion up right now. I’m with Dede on that. Amanda is the only one going to give you grandchildren. Far as I can tell, babies are shit factories, little industrial-waste sites. Rice and cereal and ca-ca just oozes out of them, and I think Michael is deliberately doing his business in corners and trying to hide it.”

  “Well, he was just getting the notion about the potty when his mama got sick. Three and a half is about right. With Amanda gone, I’m not surprised Michael is acting out a little.”

  “Three and a half is way too old. I thought two was when they learned to use the toilet.”

  “You’ve read a lot about it, haven’t you?” Delia was enjoying herself.

  “I’m doing on-the-job training, and I can tell you Michael is going to be a sneaky man. He hid his dirty underpants in the potato bin. Don’t even know how long they’d been in there when I found them. I had to throw out the potatoes, pour bleach in there, and set the bin in the sun.”

  Delia smiled and carefully scooped warm water over the gleeful and struggling Gabe. She had him propped in his baby bath on the kitchen counter. Cissy was doing well at keeping the house clean, but was stark terrified of bathing the boys. She had nearly dropped Gabe, and Michael had pissed in her face while she was sponging him clean. “He laughed,” she told Delia. “He knew exactly what he was doing.”

  Delia had told her then how Cissy had done the same thing when she was still a toddler, standing naked on the side of the tub and pissing as far as she was able. “It’s just what you should expect,” Delia told her. “It’s a sign of spirit, not meanness.”

  Cissy was not so sure. Little Michael was waiting his turn while watching the Amanda-approved Bible cartoons, special-ordered from the cable evangelical program. The toddler’s piercing soprano could be clearly heard over the deep bass of the announcer. “Watch out. Watch out.” It sounded as if he were warning Daniel not to put his hands in the lion’s mouth. Cissy sat back on her heels and cocked her head. “Did any of us talk that much? Did Amanda?”

  “Not Amanda.” Amanda and Dede were pretty much quiet. Early walkers but quiet. “You talked a bit, but I think that was Randall. He was always putting his face up next to yours and urging you on.”

  “Lord, why?”

  “It’s a daddy thing.”

  “It’s crazy. I like these boys when they’re sleeping. Unconscious, that’s when they’re at their best. Awake, they’re enough to give anybody gallstones. Gallstones, hernias, high blood pressure. It’s a wonder more mamas don’t just up and keel over. Did you read those pamphlets Michael brought home from the hospital? Stress and bile, that’s what got to Amanda. Pregnant women, diabetics, and folks with high cholesterol—that’s who comes down with gallstones. I bet Amanda has been living on leftover baby food, applesauce, and butter gravy since Michael was born. And bile? Amanda was born with buckets of bile. I think it is babies that kill you. Having children, that’s a life-threatening undertaking.”

  Delia pulled Gabe up to her shoulder in his warm terry towel. She shook her head at Cissy but said nothing. She remembered Amanda as an infant, eyes full of stars and mouth open and soft. Her hard-eyed oldest girl had been the sweetest baby. It was Cissy who was born grumpy—a little leaden-faced, angry creature. Sullen, resentful, every inch Randall’s daughter. Colic at six weeks, croup twice, she was the most difficult of the three girls, but Delia knew better than to tell her that. She watched as Cissy emptied her bucket into the sink with Gabe’s bathwater. No. She would never tell her. Gabe rubbed his face against her neck, and Delia clucked softly into his hair.

  “Oh, you most handsome,” she whispered to him, watching as her daughter swished dirty water around the sink. “You most precious precious baby boy, you just the best. Yes, you are.” Cissy rolled her eyes in elaborate contempt, and Delia smiled to herself. Funny how sometimes being predictable was the best gift she could give to Cissy. But if that was what it took, she thought to herself, and shrugged.

  “You just the most precious precious.”

  Gabe crowed again, and all of them were happy as they could be.

  Delia told Cissy to get out of the house for a while. Amanda would be home soon and Delia wanted every hour she could get with the boys. Cissy said a quick thank you and was out the door. Delia put Gabe in his high chair, pulled over his bowl of applesauce, and settled in happily. I’m good at this grandma stuff, she thought happily. Very good at it. Better than I ever was at being mama. She looked out the door but Cissy was already gone.

  Delia could cook up a lot of outrage and stubbornness about what she had done as a mother. There never seemed to be any easy way to talk about it, but sometimes she almost felt like everything made sense. She had read a bit of Betty Friedan. She’d seen Up the Sandbox. Most of all, she’d listened to music, Janis and Aretha and even a little Loretta Lynn. Sin was the boys’ coin, she had told herself. Shame was the boys’ game. A woman left lonely couldn’t afford to think herself that kind of lost. Delia had taken it all in and worked out her own answers. No, she told herself, feeding Gabe brimming spoonfuls of his favorite strained apples, she had not been wrong to leave Clint, to go with Randall, or to leave them both. She had made Cissy and gone after her girls. Everything she had done, she had done for a reason. What dogged Delia was the price she had had to pay, still had to pay—the way Emmet Tyler looked at her and how sure she was that she dared not look back, how hard it was to get Amanda or Cissy to talk to her, and the way Dede would stare into the distance sometimes when she thought no one was looking in her direction.

  Sometimes it felt to Delia like she had Grandma Windsor in the back of her head, someone speaking God’s big mean words—a Baptist God and a Pentecostal sin. She could shake a lot of it, but she couldn’t shake it all. She knew that the first time Cissy shouted “I hate you,” the first time she looked into Amanda’s eyes, and the first time she saw Dede bite her lower lip and pick her fingernails. There was a cost, a cost to everything. Delia had paid all her life. When she looked at her girls, all she wanted was to have them not to pay as much. When she looked at her grandsons, she began to think that maybe it would all work out.

/>   Chapter 19

  Granddaddy Byrd died sitting up smoking a cigarette.

  “Looked the same as he always did, sitting there on the porch while I took care of the house,” Mrs. Stone told everyone down at the Bonnet. “Of course, it wasn’t as if I checked to see how often he moved. He’s been sitting on that porch near fourteen hours a day the last few years, but I always checked on him pretty regular.”

  Delia and the girls barely knew Mrs. Stone well enough to recognize her. The woman had moved in with Granddaddy Byrd about the time Amanda married, but no one knew how she had persuaded that old man to let her live in the house.

  “You think they’re doing it?” Dede asked Delia one time.

  “No,” Delia said. “I don’t. She needs a place to live, and he needs somebody. Just glad it an’t me having to drag out there and make sure he an’t taken to yelling at the cars on the highway.”

  “He’s a crazy old man.”

  “Well, she’s a tough old lady.” Delia had not wanted to talk about Granddaddy Byrd. She never did. “It’s the best thing all around, Mrs. Stone watching him. At least it saves me the trouble.”

  Mrs. Stone was nervous when she came in to give Delia the news, but carefully polite. M.T. said it was good of her to come, and she replied that no one should hear about death over the telephone. She pushed her thin hair behind her ears and took a quick puff on her Salem when Delia sat down beside her on the couch at the front of the Bonnet. Mrs. Stone was a big-boned woman, though the loose skin on her neck and arms suggested she had once been bigger still. The way she sat on the couch, it looked as if she were trying not to put her full weight down. Used to be a whole lot bigger, I bet, M.T. thought to herself.

  “It was a good death,” Mrs. Stone said. “A good death.” Delia nodded and took a drink of water from the little bottle she had taken out of the icebox in the back. The smell of Mrs. Stone’s cigarette was making her mouth go dry. Six months since Delia had had a cigarette, and she still wanted one desperately. Why did I quit? she wondered, and tried to focus on what the woman was saying.