Cavedweller (11 page)

“Crying season,” Cissy called it when M.T. asked her how they were doing. Some days Cissy envied Delia her free-flowing tears. Some days she hated her for them. Cissy’s tears had dried up after that one outburst at M.T.’s.

Cissy passed her eleventh birthday at the river house, immersed in a biography of Elizabeth I that Pearl had grudgingly given her. When M.T. was moving them in, she had asked the girls to give Cissy some of their old books as a housewarming present. When the two went through their prized collections and complained loudly that their favorites were missing, M.T. caught the smirk that flickered across Cissy’s face and quickly declared that she had borrowed them herself and loaned them to some of the ladies from the church.

“I’m sorry, baby,” she told Ruby. “We’ll see if we can’t get you some new copies, replace your favorites.” At her insistence, Ruby and Pearl picked out the most battered and boring titles they had, and M.T. cadged a couple of cartons of used books from friends.

“Delia’s girl’s a reader,” she told people, “and you know Delia an’t got a dime to her name.” No one believed her—all Cayro thought Delia was rock-star rich—but they were willing to part with some worn paperbacks, a couple of King James Bibles, and a shelf’s worth of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. That was fine with Cissy. Taylor Caldwell and A. J. Cronin weren’t bad, and as for the rest, they were worth their weight in trade-ins for Kate Wilhelm and anything at all by James Tiptree. Cissy would never admit that she had read Ruby and Pearl’s books before she took them to Crane‘s, but she spent most of crying season away in her head, talking Regency French and swishing her skirt, or Creole patois and fingering a knife. Now and then she made cat’s-cradle designs with her fingers and tried hard to believe in the power of a curse.

 

 

L
ate one Sunday afternoon when M.T. was helping Cissy fix up her room, Stephanie Pruitt showed up with a big basket of vegetables from her garden. “I haven’t seen you since you got married right after we graduated,” she cried out, and hugged Delia like it had been ten weeks instead of more than a decade.

Steph asked Cissy for something to drink, “some tea if you got it, sugar,” and settled down at the kitchen table to tell Delia all the gossip, ignoring M.T.’s warning looks. First on her list was Clint Windsor.

“Man has never looked well since you left,” Stephanie said, smiling as though it pleased her to say so. “There’s a lesson in that, you can bet your life. A lot of people blamed Clint for how you had to take off, you know. Everybody knew he was just like his daddy, only crazier.”

M.T. leaned over and put a hand on Delia’s arm. “Don’t start worrying yourself now. Wasn’t nothing you or no one could have done.”

“That family’s been stiff and mean forever,” Stephanie went on. “Old man Windsor, holier-than-thou Louise, they knew what was going on, and what did they do, huh?”

M.T. squeezed Delia’s arm again. “Steph’s right, honey. You remember what Clint was like. He didn’t change. Lord, none of us could keep up with Clint after you left. Everybody knew he was drinking, working out at the Firestone place and drinking himself into the ground.”

“Yeah,” Steph said. “Got all skinny and rangy like an old man, gray-faced and drunk all the time. I heard he was sleeping on the porch at your old house, showering in the backyard, not using the inside at all. Probably wasn’t no room with all them empty whiskey bottles stacked up in there.” She beamed at Cissy.

“Drinking men, they like to live alone, all lazy, messy, and evil-hearted, full of hatred for everything an’t drunk or dead.”

M.T. tried a grin. “Lord, yes, crazy drinking men. Only wise thing Clint did was keep it at home. It’s good that the girls were with Grandma Windsor, Delia. She took care of them better than he ever would have.”

Delia sat up and looked at M.T. as though she had just woken from a trance.

“I thought Clint had Mama Windsor come live with him,” she said. Randall had hired an Atlanta lawyer. There had been investigations, reports, an official notice of abandonment, and rude letters from the county social services people. Old man Windsor had judges in his pocket and righteousness on his side. Nothing Delia and Randall did made any difference. But through the whole struggle Delia had always thought of the girls in their house, the old tract house on Terrill Road that she and Clint had fixed up together. As much as she disliked old lady Windsor, she had been comforted by the thought of her girls in that kitchen eating meals on those carnival-colored plates Delia chose when she and Clint first married. It was a fantasy, Delia realized now. It was all a dream she had created to ease her fear. All that time her girls had been with Grandma Windsor, out at that farm where Clint swore even the ground was dry and sad. Delia put her palms flat across her eyes.

“Way Clint was, old Louise probably saved your girls, honey,” Steph continued blithely. “They’re doing just fine, good-looking as you ever were, towheaded and smart. That Dede is your spitting image. An’t that right, M.T.?”

Delia looked over at M.T. Her mouth opened and closed several times as if she wanted to speak but could not. Steph did not notice. “Well, I’ve got to get back. Did you hear I got a settlement from the fire we had? Got us a great set-up now, two trailers side by side, and a big old screened-in porch. You got to come see the place sometime.” She drained the glass of tea, then set it down and wiped her upper lip.

Delia rose from her chair without a word and walked straight back to her bedroom. M.T. stared after her, her frown a match for Delia’s stricken face.

“Well, Lord!” Stephanie stared blankly at M.T. and Cissy. “Was it something I said? Was it the girls? Lord knows she should be over that by now. How long has it been? Lord, must be at least ten years.”

 

 

A
ll through crying season M.T. used her hard-won capital for Delia. All the sympathy and understanding that came her way for how Paul had cheated on her and how she had stood up to him—all that she directed at her oldest, dearest friend.

Most of Cayro felt that Delia’s condition when she came home— the empty grief that burned on her face, the months she spent working on Sally’s cleaning crew—was penance for a woman who had abandoned her girls. Opinion had not shifted enough in Cayro to forgive or understand the sin, not enough to consider that a woman in danger might have lost her girls running from a man who would have surely strangled her in Parlour’s Creek if he had caught her before she climbed on Randall’s bus. No, Cayro still believed Delia a sinner, and crying season was a penance they understood. They liked to see it, Delia with her mouth soft and her eyes sore at the corners.

M.T.’s smartest move was to drag the unresisting Delia to Cayro Baptist Tabernacle week after week. Every Sunday, Delia sat on that hardwood pew, sallow and pale, eyes vacant, hands raw and swollen from scrubbing floors and swooshing toilets.

“God surely keeps track, don’t he?” Reverend Myles said to M.T. the first Sunday. M.T. linked her arm with Delia’s and gave one careful acknowledging nod. She knew what she was doing.

On the tenth Sunday, Mrs. Pearlman put one hand on Delia’s shoulder as she pushed herself painfully up the aisle. It was an accolade. No matter arthritis, hip replacement surgery, or pain past comprehending, Marcia Pearlman would never have touched the sinner without proof of repentance. It was a promise of forgiveness, if not actual forgiveness as yet. In the way of things, women screwed up just as men did, but women’s sins were paid for by children and women friends. The debt had a ready and simple dimension. The woman who had run off and fallen into the good life could never be forgiven, but the woman who came back ruined and wounded, painfully sober and stubbornly enduring, the woman who suffered publicly and hard—that woman had a chance. That woman could be brought back into the circle.

Suffer a little more, girl, Marcia Pearlman’s hand said, we understand this. It was fortunate that Delia was beyond understanding. Her pride could not have survived that touch. The Delia of Mud Dog would never have stood it. The Delia who had fought and fled Clint would never have endured it. Only the Delia of crying season could sit, head down, and never notice when the hand of God reached toward her. Not forgiven but understood. Not forgiven but enjoyed. Oh, the simple pleasure in seeing her like that. No woman in the congregation would speak it, but all knew. Look at her now, Lord. Look at her now. Marcia Pearlman’s hand on Delia said more than all M.T.’s whispered justifying on the steps outside.

M.T. was a rock for Delia in those first months back in Cayro, proving her friendship by a hundred good works. There were times when Delia would not speak to her, but M.T. refused to take offense. She would check in with Cissy every few days, asking only, “How you doing?” It was a code.

“We’re fine,” Cissy would say, and M.T. understood that Delia was not better.

“That’s good, honey. Just give her time. It takes what it takes.”

Every day in Cayro took Delia back to her adolescence. She sank into herself and became again the wild girl no one dared approach. The odor of her own rank body never registered. The pitying looks she drew from the other women on Sally’s crew passed her by. Delia had no energy to think about anything but moving one foot in front of the other. She wore the same loose T-shirt and cutoff jeans over and over, pulled them off and put them on again until Cissy switched them for clean ones. If she could have, Cissy thought, Delia would have showered in them and gone to bed wet.

Safe. What Delia needed was to be safe. Who would touch her in those clothes, her skinny, stooped body leaving its imprint in the shape of the worn cotton and faded denim? Who would speak to her, look at her, hair pulled back and face bare? Who was this woman? Not Delia Byrd. Leave this one alone, her look said.

In the county library Cissy found a book of martyrs. There had been saints, the book revealed, who went years in one garment. One robe. No mention of how or when it was washed. Perhaps it never was, or only incidentally, the face turned up to the rain, the body rolling briefly in a summer stream. The robe would tatter and rot and fall off the gaunt and fervid frame, to be replaced by another the same as the first. No vanity, no thought. No fear, no desire. The garment served to mask the flesh, not adorn it.

Maybe the saints had some disease, and maybe Delia had caught it.

 

 

S
leeping away the days in the little house by the river, Delia dreamed of her girls again. She dreamed Amanda and Dede and Cissy were babies pushing up to her breasts with open, hungry mouths. They were all the same size, shrieking for her, flailing their arms as she tried to lift them together, to pull them up into her embrace. Invariably one child slipped. One baby fell away. Delia screamed and reached to catch her daughter, and another one slipped, while the third gasped as if dying in Delia’s grip. She struggled and struggled, but she could never hold them all safe. Waking from those dreams, Delia felt her wet cheeks and her aching arms. All she had was her need to shelter and care for her girls, no matter that Dede and Amanda were almost grown. All the way across the county, Delia could feel their hunger and persistent need. They’re my babies still, she told herself.

Sometimes Delia’s dreams were not nightmares but memories of what had been, the loved bodies as they had first been given to her. Amanda, still flecked with blood and mucus when the nurse handed her to Delia, was shockingly tiny and desperate. When the nurse shifted that elfin creature to Clint’s hands, his eyes widened in panic.

“My God,” he gasped, unable to believe that anything so vibrant and powerful had come out of the numbed and passive creature Delia became in the last months of pregnancy. He had thrust the infant back to her in a reflexive movement, then looked uncomprehending at the tableau of mother and resistant child. Amanda would not take Delia’s bursting nipple. The baby cried and kicked and wailed while Delia sank into the overstuffed pillows and sobbed blindly, heartbroken. Their misery had drawn Clint back to the bedside, his callused hands awkwardly patting and comforting, first Delia, then the infant girl.

That moment was among the most awful and tender Delia had ever known. She could not make peace with the contradiction, the bloody-minded horror of the Clint who stormed strange and dangerous through the house and the Clint who so feared harming Amanda that he wept at the sight of his rough fingers near her baby-fine cheek.

Maybe it was the smell of milk and blood. At each birth there had been that fleeting instant of tenderness. When Dede was born and latched immediately onto Delia’s nipple, her little fists bright pink against the creamy breast, her cheeks pumping like bellows, Clint leaned forward in awe, his hand coming down on Delia’s hip. She hissed in startled pain, dislodging the baby’s mouth, the greedy tongue still outthrust and hungry for the love-tit. Delia flinched when the cool air struck the burning, cracked nipple, and Clint jerked back, looking up at Delia’s face with red-rimmed eyes. Their glances locked, and Delia felt her heart thud stubbornly with hope.

Once he recaptured Delia’s look, Clint had seemed oblivious to those two yeasty warm bodies. It was Delia he breathed in and out, Delia he bruised and dreamed of lying limp in his arms. It was her wet, broken flesh that called to him, the children they had made together ghostly, distracting. Delia knew she was the only thing in that house that had ever seemed real to Clint. Only when she was gone did the girls register, and then only for the piece of her they were. Clint had held on to Amanda and Dede because they were anchors for Delia’s heart.

“He doesn’t want them,” Delia told Randall after the judge in Atlanta gave Clint full custody. She clutched her few pictures and ranted like a madwoman. “What he wants is to hurt me, bleed me from every pore. That is the sin God will judge him for, that is the crime. The man could open his veins on the throne of heaven and no mother would ever forgive him what he has done. He is damned, by God, damned forever.”