Cavedweller (25 page)

“Maybe there is something to all that stuff people say about making babies. Sure looks like it’s pretty much taken over whatever it was that Delia wanted before you came along. I don’t think she even remembers who she was before she made you girls.”

“You don’t know who we are,” Cissy sputtered.

“And you don’t know who your mama is.” Rosemary cupped the neck of the open bourbon bottle in her palm and rocked it on the step.

“And you do.”

Rosemary rocked the bottle again. “Maybe not. Hell of the thing is, I’m not sure I do know anymore. I look around at this, and it doesn’t make sense to me. There isn’t enough money in the world to make me do what Delia’s doing.”

“She’s just doing what she’s supposed to do.”

Rosemary laughed. “Yes, exactly. Being Mama, and Lord knows I do not have any of that. Oh, I had a baby, you know. That was part of what your mother and I had together. She’d left hers and I’d given mine away. She was always talking about getting hers back, and I was just grateful somebody else was raising mine. For being so much alike, we were nothing alike, your mama and me.”

Cissy was confused. “You lost a baby?”

“No, no.” Rosemary tilted the bottle and spilled some of the bourbon out. Cissy wrinkled her nose. “What I lost was a life. One I wasn’t intending to have anyway.” The tea-dark liquid trailed down the steps.

“Damn,” Rosemary said softly. “Goddamn. All that time I was saying I didn’t want any children, I was thinking I could have them someday. When I was ready, when things got right for me. Now here I am, no children, no husband, no settled family. None of it. Just a curse in the belly and a song in the air. My grandma’s never-to-be grandchild.”

A door slammed behind them in the house. Amanda’s voice and Dede’s rose together. “You’re driving me crazy,” Dede shouted. “You’re crazy already,” Amanda yelled back. Then Delia’s contralto spoke something low and soothing and unintelligible.

“Family,” Rosemary whispered. “Sounds like a family sure enough.” She upended the bourbon bottle and emptied it, shaking the last drops onto the grass. Then she extended the bottle to Cissy. “You want to give this to your sister? Let her add it to her list?”

“No.”

Rosemary put the bottle down on the step, and they sat listening to the wet swish of the sprinkler as it got cooler and darker. When Cissy finally spoke, she surprised them both.

“Delia says you are her best friend.”

Rosemary grunted.

“She says you are the only person in California she ever trusted.”

“Only person she should have trusted. I was about the only one wasn’t trying to get something out of her or off of her.”

“You were in the band.”

“God, no.” Rosemary lit another cigarette. “I can’t sing. Not all of us can, you know. I can dance, but why would I do that? No. But I gave her that yellow convertible.”

“With red seats.”

“Red leather seats.”

“I remember.” Cissy closed her eyes and saw the car, seats gleaming in the sunlight, the back full of boxes and bags with Christmas wrapping.

Rosemary looked at her. “You don’t,” she said. “You were a baby. But it was something to remember. Best damn car I ever owned.”

“I do remember,” Cissy said stubbornly.

Rosemary ignored her. “It was Randall’s car first. He gave it to me, I gave it to Delia. Bothered the hell out of Randall.”

Cissy was getting lost. “Randall gave it to you?”

“Sort of. Traded it for something I had that he needed. And don’t ask, ’cause I am not going to tell you.”

“Drugs.”

Rosemary laughed. “You’d think that, but you’d be wrong. There was more than that going on. Ask Delia.”

Cissy shrugged. “She won’t tell me nothing.”

Rosemary took a drag on the cigarette and stroked her forehead thoughtfully with her free hand. “Mud Dog’s second album, the one called
Diamonds and Dirt.
You know that one?”

“The one where Delia sings ‘Lost Girls’? The one that made all the money?”

“Made some money. Made some of us almost rich.”

Rosemary ran her hand over her head. Her short hair had kinked up in the damp. As Cissy was thinking it was the first time she had seen Rosemary look less than perfectly put together, that hand reached out and touched Cissy’s cheek.

“ ‘Lost Girls,’ ” Rosemary said. “ ‘Minor Chords of Grief.’ ‘Walking the Razor.’ ‘Tall Boys and Mean Dogs.’ All of those songs are mine. I wrote them, the parts that Delia didn’t write herself. It was another thing she didn’t care about. It was Randall busy being the legend. We’d get a little stoned and she’d start it. It would come out of her like a river, and I would write it down. After, she wouldn’t remember a bit of it, though sometimes she’d cry when she heard one part or another. It all came from what Delia said. She’d get to me so badly I’d go write my own version of it. I wanted her name on those songs, but Randall and the record company guys were all over me. Hell, it all had to be Randall. Another Jim Morrison snake-eyed boy poet with a direct line to a woman’s heart. Shit.”

Rosemary lifted both hands, then dropped them, like a conductor setting a tempo, music in the way her hands moved in the air.

“Delia didn’t care. Randall did. I did a little. Half the songs say ‘Randall Pritchard and R.D.’ Nobody said R.D. was me, but I had a good lawyer. I got my cash. Delia got nothing. When she brought you back here, I was glad to help her with that damn shop. It was only a piece of her share anyway. It was us, you know. We were the ‘poets with a feel for female grief.’ ” She sighed.

“But Randall was why the record made money. He was so damn pretty, and so good at working the game. The rest of us didn’t even know enough to care. That’s why Delia is here and not in Los Angeles. She never cared the way Randall did.”

“She don’t care a thing about Los Angeles.”

“Oh yeah, right.” Rosemary raised one classically shaped brow. “Like I said, you don’t have any idea who your mama is.”

Cissy flinched. “You never understood my daddy. He was special. He did understand the heart. He understood a lot of things.”

“Oh, hell.” Rosemary put her arms around her knees and pulled her legs up to her breasts. “It’s probably just as well I can’t make babies anymore. I’m not any good even talking to you.”

“Delia’s happy, you said so.” Cissy pushed up off the steps. Her legs were all pins and needles from sitting still so long. She stood in front of Rosemary and scowled.

“Happier than she was in Los Angeles, yeah.” Rosemary nodded. “She’s doing what she always wanted to do. Doesn’t make any difference to her that she could have walked away from Randall anytime, made her own music, and been more famous than he ever got to be. That wasn’t what your mama cared about.”

“She wanted to come home,” Cissy said. “She wanted to be here more than she wanted any of that.”

“Yeah. That’s right, sugar biscuit. She wanted to drag her butt back to Georgia and pick up after you and your sisters till the day she dies.”

Cissy’s breath hissed between her teeth. “It’s you don’t know who Delia is,” she said. “You don’t understand her at all.”

“Maybe not.” Rosemary hugged her knees. “Maybe there’s a whole lot I just am not designed to understand. Look at me here talking to you like you some grown-up, and you are nothing of the kind. Can’t understand a thing I am saying.”

“I understand plenty.” Cissy felt like crying but was too angry to let herself show it.

“I swear, you are just like your daddy. You think Delia doesn’t know what she threw away? You think she didn’t throw anything away? You think all she amounts to is what you need her to be?” Rosemary’s voice was hoarse.

“Diamonds and dirt, legends and rude boys, poets that are no poets at all, babies that never get born or get lost through no fault of our own. Life sweeps you away like a piss river. Saddest thing I know is that there isn’t anybody who knows who Delia is, not even her girls. Saddest thing I know is that she is in there with that evil man, burying herself alive to save you and your sisters, and not a one of you knows what she is doing. Nobody knows who my Delia really is.”

Rosemary stood. “Nobody,” she repeated, and went up the stairs and into the house.

Cissy sat unmoving on the step. She heard Dede’s cheerful “Hey, Rosemary!” and then a door opened and closed. “Where’s she going?” Dede asked plaintively. Delia’s voice said, “Leave her alone.”

Cissy tilted her head back and looked up at the night sky, the stars that were slowly brightening as the dark became deeper. The stars in California had not been so clear and big. The night had not been so still. The sky was always glowing and the night full of noise and movement. Cissy used to sit out behind the cottage in Venice Beach and stare up at that bright sky and listen to Delia’s low crooning inside the house. Drunk or sober, Delia moaned out melody, the words slurred and painful, that voice of hers as rich and strong as melted chocolate. People came to the house and offered her work, wanting her to sing with other bands or make her own records. Cissy remembered their eager expressions, the way they spoke Delia’s name, and Delia’s flat refusal. She could have done something different. She could have made a different life altogether.

Maybe Rosemary was right. Maybe Delia was a bigger mystery than Cissy had ever imagined.

Cissy started counting stars. She began at the eastern horizon above the pecan tree. She counted bright and dim, ignoring the constellations and working in quadrants, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, stars in California, stars in Georgia, all the stars between, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one.

When I grow up, Cissy promised herself, I’ll never have children. And if I do, I’ll give them away.

I
t scared Delia how much time Cissy was spending with Clint. She was in there every day now, and she refused to let Amanda anywhere near him. “Get out of here,” she told her sister one Saturday in the middle of August. She took the Bible from Amanda’s hands, closed it, and gave it back to her with a look so steely that for once Amanda didn’t argue. She had never seen Cissy like that, but she recognized the determination in her eyes as a match for her own.

Cissy was already in Clint’s room the next morning when Amanda left for church. Delia poked her head in. “Why don’t you go outside a while?” Delia said. “It’s gorgeous out, and it’s so stuffy in here. Clint’s sound asleep anyway.”

“I’m all right,” Cissy said.

Delia frowned. “Go on, I’ll sit with Clint.”

“I’m just reading. You go out, you look like you need some air.”

Delia took a deep breath, visibly counting to ten. “Cissy, I don’t want you sitting in there all day.”

“Well, you can’t keep me out. This is Clint’s house, and he don’t mind me sitting here. He don’t mind at all.”

“No,” Delia said, defeated. “I’m sure he don’t.”

Sometimes Cissy thought that Clint was the only one of them who had finally figured everything out. He was the only one who had the time and nothing else to distract him. Thinking was better than drugs some days, thinking about how people really were, who he really was.

“It’s like music in my head,” he said to Cissy one afternoon as she was clearing away his tray. He was down to eating a few mouthfuls at a time, though Rosemary took care to send in heaping bowls of potato puree. “It’s like Delia’s music is always playing in the bones of my neck, that voice of hers singing out.”

Clint’s eyes were enormous. It had been a bad day, a bad week, the drugs never seemed to work right anymore. He was either a lolling doll with empty eyes or a burning bush, sometimes from moment to moment.

Clint’s right hand, lying loose on the chenille bedspread, lifted a little as if counting time, like a skeletal version of Rosemary’s.

“God, the way she’d sing.” His fingers counted. “Lord, love, Lord, love,” he whisper-sang in his scratchy voice. “You know when she sings that song, that kind of gospel thing of hers?”

“Delia don’t sing that,” Cissy told him. “It’s on one of the records, but she don’t sing that stuff no more.”

“Yeah, I noticed. It’s a shame.” He smiled as if he knew something Cissy didn’t.

Cissy put the tray down. She was thinking about that long drive cross-country in the Datsun, the headlights picking up road signs and the radio’s tinny music under the roar of wind through the smashed back window. In California, Delia’s voice was the one constant, a familiar resonant lullaby, but on that hellish trip the words had faded. Once they were back in Cayro, Delia gave up singing for crying. Only when she took over the Bonnet did she begin to hum and murmur, sometimes following out a melody, but she never did what she used to do—close her eyes, put her head back, and sing as if the song were all she knew.

“Shame,” Clint repeated, slurring the word. His afternoon shot was kicking in, the morphine music overriding the pulse of pain. His mouth opened and closed, and his eyelids moved as if marbles were rocking gently in there. There was a slight hum in the room, and Cissy realized it came from Clint, as if the words Delia had abandoned were still sounding in his body. He opened his eyes and looked up in a drifting gaze. In the front of the house they could hear Dede and Rosemary giggling.

“Put on the radio,” Clint said in that gaspy whisper. “Put on the radio and let me hear it.”

Clint’s face went slack. He was still making that humming noise. A little breeze moved the curtains, and Cissy heard an echoing hum from outside, just audible through the window. Delia was hanging sheets on the line, singing to herself, oblivious of who might be listening. Cissy looked back at Clint, the shifting marbles under the translucent lids, and felt a wave of rage and pity so intense that her whole body shuddered. She reached blindly and clicked the radio on. There was a squawk and Clint’s hands twitched, settling again as Emmylou Harris’s whiskey drawl came in soft and low. She was singing about rocking the soul in the bosom of Abraham and Clint’s hands rocked with her.