Free Cavedweller by Dorothy Allison Page B

bent in prayer. Nothing in him leaned toward Delia.
    “You got to talk to Clint.” That preacher’s voice.
    Cissy turned away and squatted on the rough tarmac. She watched a line of ants circling a sun-heated piece of broken glass. Behind her Delia’s voice was choked with misery.
    “Granddaddy, don’t. You know Clint an’t gonna let me see my girls.”
    “Well, how you expect to see them if you don’t see Clint?”
    Delia rocked back and forth on the porch step. “I’d hoped you’d help me,” she said. “I thought you might speak to Clint.”
    “What have I got to say to him?” Granddaddy Byrd spat again.
    Cissy looked at the spot in the dust where his spit had landed. There was a barely a mark. The dirt looked like gray powder, but it was unyielding.
    “Delia. You never did listen to a thing I said. Wouldn’t think you’d start now. But you should. You should.” Granddaddy Byrd rolled his tobacco bag between his palms. “You married the man. Clint Windsor might have been a son of a bitch, but there’s lots of sons-a-bitches around. You married that one. You made babies with him. Then you run off and left him like you were never coming back.”
    Delia covered her mouth with one hand. The other remained locked around her shins.
    Granddaddy Byrd glowered in Cissy’s direction. “Hell,” he said, “you can’t just waltz back into Cayro and think you gonna get what you want. An’t a soul in this county thinks you got any right to those girls. Not a soul.”
    He got to his feet slowly, straightening up as if in pain, and grunted again once he was standing.
    “You won’t help me?” she said, so softly he could have pretended not to hear.
    “No.” He stopped. Without looking back, he spoke again. “You go talk to the Windsors. They’re the ones you should go see. You get down on your knees and tell those girls what you been doing all these years. Don’t tell me.”
    Cissy gritted her teeth and took up a rock. Delia sat rocking as Granddaddy Byrd went across the porch and through the door. If she hadn’t been so angry at Delia herself, Cissy might have run after him, thrown herself at the old man, and screamed out all the pain she could feel growing in Delia’s body.
    “Cissy. We got to get going.” Delia stood up abruptly and headed for the Datsun.
    Cissy ground a line of ants into the hot tar surface of the old driveway, tossed the rock aside, and followed Delia to the car.

Chapter 4
    A bout the time Delia left Granddaddy Byrd’s house, Marjolene Thomasina Jackson was pulling into the driveway of her newly ex-husband Paul’s house. Six carloads had shifted M.T.’s property to her own new place near the high school. There were a few dishes and curtains left, but it was the delphiniums that drew her back, the cut and prepared seedlings and the box of garden gear beside them.
    “Curtains and dishes are easy to replace,” she told her sister Sally, “but damned if I’m leaving my rootstock to Paul and whatever he’s gonna bring in.”
    A seventh trip across town then, without Sally. M.T. left her sorting boxes and helping the twins, Ruby and Pearl, make up their new bedroom. She did not want Sally to see what she intended to do to the perennial bed by what was now, legally, Paul’s kitchen.
    M.T. was a big woman, muscular under soft pads of flesh. She grinned widely as she took her spade to the tall delphinium spears and reduced them to a gray-green mash.
    “Man got twelve years off me. Thinks he got the best of me. Stupid son of a bitch.” She chopped and tore into the plants, pouring all the rage she had never directed at Paul onto those loved green shoots. “Son of a bitch,” she cursed. “Stupid man. Show his ass.” When she was done, her eyes were full of tears, but she was satisfied.
    “Something might come back here,” M.T. said to herself as she turned toward her car, “but it won’t be pretty.” She was swiping at her dirty cheek and arching her aching back when a