Cavedweller (49 page)

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.

 

 

D
elia 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.

G
randdaddy 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.

“Like I said, he was sitting up out there on the porch in that old rocker I’d put out for him. Took me the longest time to get him to use it and stop squatting on the steps. Always had nail holes in his britches right in the seat. Got him in that rocker and it made a world of difference. Think it made his knees hurt less too, but he would never say so. You know how he was.” Mrs. Stone looked around for an ashtray, and smiled gratefully when M.T. handed her a souvenir glass dish from Stone Mountain.

“I’ve been there,” Mrs. Stone said, putting out the cigarette in the dish where the peak of the mountain pushed up against the rim. She smiled again, reflexively, pushed her hair back one more time, and turned to Delia.

“Well, like I said. It had been a long time since I’d seen him light another cigarette. And I’d shaken out the rugs right by him, and he hadn’t complained like he usually did, and that wasn’t right. I was used to him always making his harrumph noises, spitting off to the side like I was driving him mad with dust. Only this time he was not moving. I was starting to feel grateful when I saw the ash fall off his finger, saw his finger was scorched. Man had died between one drag and another. That cigarette had burned to an ash between his two fingers.”

Mrs. Stone smiled gently. “He died right,” she said, her head going up and down emphatically. “Man just died peaceful and right.”

Past her shoulder Cissy could see Delia’s face, the hollows beneath her cheekbones sucked in tight, her teeth clamped together. She’s going to cry, Cissy thought. But Delia only shook her head once and pushed her hairpins back in her twist. Cissy saw her lips move then, repeating an inaudible curse.

“Goddamn,” Delia said. “If so, it’s just about the only thing he ever did right.” She turned around to get her purse.

 

 

C
issy drove out to Granddaddy Byrd’s farmhouse with Delia. Dede pulled in behind them at the 1-84 junction, driving the little VW, the one she called the turnip, that she had bought off Marcia Pearlman’s nephew Malcolm. It was painted purple and white and had dirt crusted over the back bumper where Dede kept ramming it into the dried mud bank of the ditch by her trailer park.

“Got a call from M.T.,” Dede told Cissy when she climbed out of the car. She was wearing cutoff jeans and one of the black and white Goober’s T-shirts, emblazoned “Can Hold My Own” with two hands drawn in so that they cupped her breasts. She nodded at Mrs. Stone. “He died then?”

“He did.” Mrs. Stone smiled. “He surely did. Went as easy as you please. Best death I ever saw.” She glanced once at the T-shirt’s legend and pinked up, but kept her smile and led them up the steps into the house.

For Cissy it was the first time she had been to the farmhouse since they moved to Cayro, and it looked as if it had barely changed, though Mrs. Stone must have been watering the bushes at the sides of the steps. They were fuller and not so brown and dry. Otherwise, the house seemed untouched, except that the porch steps had been torn down and rebuilt, the new wood making the rest of the place look even more worn and silvery. The pine siding seemed almost marshmallow-soft in places, and the entry was marked with greasy handprints and mildewed smudges shoulder-high along the pink wallpaper surface.

“I never could get that clean,” Mrs. Stone said when she saw where Cissy was looking. “Mr. Byrd said it was from Luke dragging his wet self along when he’d come in late nights. Might have been. It’s an oil stain, won’t come off.” She seemed nervous with the three women looking around.

“He’s in there. I didn’t do much, just cleaned him up and got him covered. That boy Jasper from the Texaco station helped carry him in for me.” She waved toward the bedroom that opened off the side of the living room next to the arched fireplace. The headboard was just visible against the wall past the door—a big dark-wood headboard whose posts were cut off ragged so that the lighter core of the wood showed raw and dusty. The pillows had been taken off the bed, and Granddaddy Byrd’s prominent chin was visible where his head lay tilted slightly backward.

“Amazing how heavy he was. The dead always are, though. I remember my husband Howard, how heavy he got.” Cissy and Dede couldn’t help but stare at Mrs. Stone. Delia ignored her, looking to the open bedroom and the body that lay there.

“You know this place is yours.” Mrs. Stone was trying to get Delia to look at her. She stepped forward so that her body blocked Delia’s view. “From your parents,” she said. “Your daddy held the paper on it before he died. And he never left no will. I went through everything when I was helping Mr. Byrd get the Social Security started. No will anywhere. So it is all yours. Always was.”

Delia said nothing. She stepped around Mrs. Stone and headed for the bedroom. Cissy hesitated to follow her, and Dede had already stepped over to the fireplace and the crowded mantel.

“I did him as nice as I could,” Mrs. Stone went on. Cissy thought she was talking about the laying out, but it quickly became obvious she was not. “He wasn’t no trouble once I got used to his ways. He always wanted it quiet. Said he didn’t like to hear no hen-scratching woman talk. Well, I didn’t put up with that, you can imagine. Told him I wasn’t going to tiptoe around while I did my work. No sir.”

Delia finally looked at the woman. “He always wanted it quiet,” she said.

“Well, he was old. Old men are like that.” Mrs. Stone was nodding again.

“How old was he?” Dede’s voice was frankly curious. “He’d never say.”

“Oh, near about a hundred for sure. When I got his Social Security going, they were real surprised to hear about him. Must have thought he was dead. Don’t get too many men in their nineties going in to apply for benefits.”

Delia had turned away toward the death room again. She walked to the doorway and stopped. Cissy was looking at Dede. “You’ve been out here?” Cissy asked.

“A few times.” Dede’s face was guarded, her mouth pulled back at one corner as if she were thinking something caustic. “I come out to see him a couple of times. He wouldn’t never say much.”

They just looked at each other. Mrs. Stone was going on about her accomplishment—getting that old man to do the paperwork for his Social Security. Delia looked back at the woman briefly with eyes that had gone hot and dark. The skin around Delia’s eyes looked tight. Cissy felt a momentary pulse of anger. There was something Delia and Dede knew, something in their eyes.

“Course we only got them to pay $154 a month,” Mrs. Stone went on. “Nothing really, but with the chicken eggs and the garden produce we would sell off the porch I managed. Managed pretty well.” She looked pleased with herself, her face alight with achievement.

“And he got to die at home. He got to die right.” Mrs. Stone beamed at Delia.

They all looked at her. Her moon-wide face flushed, and she looked hastily from Cissy to Dede.

“Well, think of the tragedy he endured. Losing his sons. That Luke’s been in jail about all his life. And you daddy.” She gestured at Delia and made a sad face. “So much loss,” she said. “So much loss.”

“Let me see him.” Delia walked through the doorway, away from the suddenly stricken Mrs. Stone. She looked back once from the room and pushed the door closed behind her. Mrs. Stone nodded, took out a hankie, and wiped her eyes. She turned to the girls. “So much loss,” she said again. Cissy could see no tears, but the grief seemed genuine.

Mrs. Stone blew her nose and shook her head sorrowfully. “He was all the family she had left, wasn’t he? Except for you girls?” She clearly was not going to stop talking. It was as if all those years of taking care of Granddaddy Byrd had left her with an ungovernable tongue. Or perhaps she did not know how to be around people who were supposed to be grieving but seemed more curious than despondent.

“Oh, I heard a lot about you.” Mrs. Stone waved her handkerchief at Cissy and Dede. “Delia’s girls. Oh my, yes. Delia’s two pitiful girls.”

Cissy narrowed her eyes, If the old man had said that, he meant Dede and Amanda, not her. She could bet he’d never mentioned her.

Dede stepped over and put a hand on Mrs. Stone’s arm. She said, “We’d like a minute too. I know you have things to do, stuff to get together. So don’t let us stop you.”

Mrs. Stone’s mouth gaped a little. “Well, I wanted to talk to your mama,” she said. “There are things ... well, there are things I’d like to discuss.”

She’s going to want to stay here, Dede thought. She probably has nowhere else to go. Dede was nodding, her hand patting Mrs. Stone’s arm.