Cavedweller (20 page)

The vacation was not a success. The substitute preacher discovered that a great deal of money had been going to pay for subscriptions to magazines that came to Call in brown paper wrappers. The Ladies’ Aid Group gossiped that the minister’s wife was spending a lot of time visiting her mother.

Reverend Call was forced into retirement after his wife revealed that it was he who had been making late-night phone calls to the new English teacher at the high school. The reverend swore it wasn’t true. He told the deacons that the English teacher was a member of the international Communist conspiracy, as was obvious when she organized a performance
of Jesus Christ Superstar.

“A blasphemy,” Reverend Call told Emmet Tyler as he picketed the high school auditorium. “Another nail in our national coffin.”

“Oh, it’s not that bad,” Deputy Tyler said. “Some of the music is pretty catchy.”

“You’ve lost all judgment,” the reverend said sadly, and the deputy just nodded. No one wanted to argue with Reverend Call.

The deacons at Holiness put out a call that brought Reverend Hillman back. Folks said Reverend Call had moved to Arizona, where he was preaching on the radio in the dead of night, taking phone calls and continuing to inveigh against the threat of Communism. Some Sundays at Tabernacle, listening to Reverend Myles, Amanda would daydream about Reverend Call. He had appreciated her. He had given her a silver bracelet engraved with the name of a missing soldier and squeezed her shoulders when she told him how much she loved God.

“Stay strong,” he said to her the last time he preached at Holiness. Grandma Windsor had baked him a butter cake and insisted that Amanda give it to him. The old man put his lips on Amanda’s forehead when he took the cake. “You’re an American child blessed by God,” he whispered to her solemnly. She nodded and refused to wipe her forehead, though the spot he had kissed itched with the damp, rough feel of his tongue.

“I’m staying strong,” Amanda promised God. In her imagination God looked like Reverend Call, but with Grandma Windsor’s eyes and U.S. Army sergeant’s bars on the wings of his white high-collared shirt.

 

 

A
manda didn’t confine her evangelical efforts to Dede. At Cayro High School, she set herself to organizing a Christian Girls’ Coalition that met in the cafeteria to plan a crusade against abortion and loose living. She told Dede that their high school was the front line in her struggle to spread God’s love, and ignored her sister’s pleas to let everyone make up their own minds.

“This is life and death, Dede,” Amanda declared. “This is God’s word we are talking about, not some special program on comparative religions on the educational network. You can talk all you like about Buddhism and Muslimism and sky worship and poetry, but this is people’s immortal souls hanging in the balance. You just want to shut me up so you can be popular and talk about nonsense? Be just like everybody else? Well, go ahead and be like everybody else, everybody on their way to hell!”

Amanda did not pause for more than a day after the principal turned down her request to distribute leaflets in the homerooms. She simply persuaded a couple of girls from church to hand her flyers around. When she was told she couldn’t use the cafeteria anymore, Amanda sent the girls to the parking lot behind the Bonnet and promised to arrange rides for everyone who missed the bus home. She had in mind putting together a militant antiabortion group that would link arms in front of the Marietta women’s clinic on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, the days the clinic made referrals to Planned Parenthood in Atlanta.

“You’re minors, you won’t go to jail,” Amanda told the potential recruits who showed up for her first impromptu rally. “But think what an impact we could have on this town. We’d be standing there like soldiers for the Lord. We could put that clinic out of business in a month.”

The problem with Amanda’s notion was that most of the girls at Cayro High kept the clinic phone number tucked in the back of their diaries. The clinic provided birth control information, confidential counseling services, and those vital referrals to the clinics in Atlanta that would actually perform the abortions. Even though they hoped they would never need the help, most of these girls did not want the Marietta clinic put out of business. One small error in the heat of the moment and they might be slipping off to that clinic on a Tuesday or Thursday afternoon. Twenty-six days out of twenty-eight, the clinic was nothing anybody would want to think about, but every now and then those last two days could come on a woman the way hot iron came down on cold. Two days of terror and the world looked different. Two days of “Please God, no!” Two days of “If I have to, Lord, I will.” Two days of praying you did not need what you suspected you did. Then blood and terror—the intervention of a merciful medical procedure—and you could draw a deep breath and think like a sane woman again. No, the clinic was terrible but necessary, a place where a woman could do what she had to do even when it was the last thing in the world she wanted to do.

The girls who came to Amanda’s rallies were the ones who neither dated nor had friends who did. That was exactly five girls for the first meeting, and two of those dropped out after a couple of hushed conversations in the school bathroom. The three who remained were so nervous about linking hands for anything that Amanda decided the forces of the devil had come up against her.

 

 

T
he day came when Amanda found herself in the parking lot behind the Bonnet all alone. That night she dreamed of the crucifixion, her palms outstretched and pierced as she stared down at those who had betrayed her. Grandma Windsor covered her face with her hands while Dede wept and fell to her knees. A recovered, penitent Clint stood behind them, while Delia, wearing bell-bottoms; beads, and a red poncho, called out, “My God! My God, forgive me.” A ragtag mass of teenage soldiers in camouflage pajamas and brown-skinned nuns in black smocks stared up at Amanda in awe. Lying back on the post as if it were a bed draped in linen and silk, Amanda looked down on all of them with tired compassion. The bruises on her body bloomed shades of purple while a thin trickle of blood crept down her left temple. She had come to them as a nurse and a teacher, and they had beaten her and hung her up to die. Through the ordeal she had clung to the name of Jesus, refusing to curse God and be set free. Her courage would be legendary, her example preached to young girls down the generations.

Amanda did not know exactly how all these people came to be there to witness her martyrdom, but it was right that they were present, that they saw her for who she truly was, a blessed daughter of the living God. Hers was a faith so powerful she could reach past the trivial categories of denomination, of Catholic or Baptist, of nation or race. After this day there would be a wave of conversions. Satanists would renounce the devil, and one after another the lands where her story was told would petition to join the United States. Reverend Hillman would preach a revival about Amanda’s devotion to God. Reverend Call would come back from Arizona. The geography teacher at Cayro High would ask forgiveness for making fun of Amanda’s desire to lead a mission to Cambodia when she didn’t know where it was.

Amanda groaned out loud, and below her Grandma Windsor cried out her name. Delia dropped her poncho and reached out for the daughter she claimed she loved. Dede shook her head and looked up at Amanda as if she were waking from a daydream.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Dede giggled and put a hand up to cover her mouth.

Desperately Amanda twisted her body and turned her face up to heaven. “No,” she said, and her blood ran faster as the crowd stirred and the soldiers grinned and poked each other like boys in a school-yard.

“No, no,” Amanda whimpered, and the nuns hurriedly lifted their skirts and scuttled away.

Dede rocked back and forth on her knees, giggling helplessly. “For God’s sake, Amanda, this is too far. This is too much even for you.”

Delia picked up her poncho and shook the dirt off it. “Well, maybe it’s all for the best. I know you never wanted to come live with me.” She looked around at the milling crowd and stepped back. “Can you see Cissy from up there? I don’t see her anywhere.”

“You get down from there,” Grandma Windsor said, paying no attention to Amanda’s increasingly violent struggles. She brushed dust off her skirt and scowled angrily. One of the soldiers lit a cigarette for the last departing nun, who pushed back her wimple and scratched absentmindedly at a mosquito bite under her ear.

“My God, my God!” Amanda cried out. “Why have you forsaken me?”

 

 

“D
amn hippie bitch.” Cissy heard it as she was leaving the Cayro middle school walking to her bus stop and reading Nolan’s copy of
The Left Hand of Darkness.
She turned and found herself facing Marty Parish and two boys with hair so short their heads looked scraped.

“We know you,” Marty said to her. “We know all about you.”

“Like what?” Cissy said. Her heart was pounding, but she was not going to back down. Her daddy had faced people like this. She had heard stories about overturned plates and thrown bottles, sneering, angry faces, men with crew cuts and rude manners. Why would anyone want to wear their hair so short that their ears stuck out and you could see the funny shape of their skulls? Randall’s hair had been a soft river over his shoulders, glossy and sweet-smelling and framing his face like in those paintings of Jesus in the
Children’s Illustrated Bible.

“Your mama’s a Commie, one of them libber bitches running the country into the ground. Your daddy was a hippie bastard stole another man’s wife.” Marty stepped forward. “And you,” he said, stabbing a finger at her heart, “you’re a bastard too.”

Cissy closed her book and clutched it. The still air around her seemed to press on her skin. The three boys smiled and closed in on her.

“And you, Marty Parish, you’re stupider than your stupid daddy and your moron granddaddy.”

Suddenly Dede was walking toward the bus stop, notebook in hand and blond hair bouncing with every step.

“Least you an’t as stupid as you are ugly, though.” Dede grinned at her own wit.

Marty balled his hands into fists. “Don’t you talk about me,” he said.

Dede stopped at Cissy’s side and looked at the other boys. “But you two, I wouldn’t call you ugly at all. Give you a little time and a bit more meat and you might be almost pretty.”

Skinny Charlie Jones flushed and dropped his eyes. The third boy, Junior Hessman, backed up a step.

“Don’t go nowhere, Junior.” Dede looped an arm around Cissy’s shoulder. “I wanted to introduce you to my little sister and tell her all about you. Specially about that time you got sent to the principal’s office for playing with yourself in homeroom.”

“I never.” Junior’s face went as dark as Charlie’s.

“Oh, you did. You still do it when you think no one’s watching. You are everybody’s favorite entertainment, Junior.” Dede gave a lazy smile in the direction of Cissy’s face but did not make eye contact.

“You better watch yourself, Dede Windsor,” Marty said, raising his fists.

Dede stared at his pelvis and her smile broadened.

“You going to hit me, Marty? You going to hit me?”

Marty’s face went white. “Damn you to hell,” he shouted, and turned so fast he rammed into Charlie as he stalked away. Junior followed him. Charlie hesitated a moment, his expression shifting from embarrassment to awe and back, and then took off after his friends.

Dede laughed a slow, lazy laugh and let go of Cissy’s shoulder. “You okay?”

Cissy felt as if the world were turning around her in slow motion. “Thank you,” she stammered.

Dede looked at her with those blazing blue eyes. Her lazy smile went away. “You can’t give those little snots an inch,” she said. “Not an inch. You’ll make us all look bad.” She slapped her notebook once against her thigh and lifted her chin. “But do you have to wear those glasses all the time? They look stupid.”

Cissy’s mouth flattened. “I’m supposed to wear them,” she said. “My eye is light-sensitive. It gets all inflamed if I don’t wear the glasses.”

“Well, then, for God’s sake let’s make Delia get you some don’t look so stupid. Hell, those big old things make you look like Ray Charles.” Dede frowned at Cissy’s rigid face. “All right?”

“Yeah, all right. But you got to ask Delia.”

“You scared of her?”

“No.” Cissy was disgusted. “I just don’t like to ask her for stuff.”

“Is that a fact?” Dede looked more closely at her little sister. “Funny, it don’t bother me at all.”

 

 

J
ust left of the center of Cissy’s left eye there was a tiny blemish, like a smudge on a photograph or a nick in a windshield. Almost imperceptible, it was the only visible evidence of the old injury Cissy worked so hard to hide. Cissy wanted the world everyone else had—shadows and light, depth and distance. Instead she had a dark orb that focused poorly, watered in bright light, and gave her terrible headaches if she did not wear her glasses. It was only after reading about the artist EI Greco that Cissy began to understand her own angle of vision. There was a difference between the world she saw—flat, depthless, a photograph without perspective—and the curved horizon everyone around her saw. She could imagine the world as Dede and Nolan viewed it. They could not imagine hers. At least she hoped not. It was hard enough being Delia Byrd’s rock-and-roll love child without any additional burden of pity and contempt. Cissy had spent the first part of her life cursing her glasses, but once she came to Cayro she wore them all the time, welcoming the dark tint that shielded her glance.

As self-conscious as she was about the glasses, Cissy never actually noticed the blemish in her eye until Mary Martha Wynchester’s thirteenth-birthday-party sleepover. Mary Martha was the first of the girls who lived on the west Cayro school-bus line to become an official teenager, and her mother decided to make it an event. Cissy suspected Mary Martha had not planned to invite her, but Delia had been doing Gillian Wynchester’s hair for a long time now, and the weight of shared gossip, thinning shears, and peroxide was just too powerful.