Read Online Cavedweller by Dorothy Allison - Free Book Online Page B

painfully conscious of what she must look like, her hair blowing across her sunburned face and her wrinkled clothes covered with dust. “Hello,” she said carefully.
    The old man turned from Delia to Cissy, his expression as distant and stern as any stranger’s. “Girl.” He nodded curtly, then did something funny with his mouth so that his lower lip moved down and pulled flat. “Harrumph.” It was not quite a grunt. Maybe it was some Southern expression, some Cayro code for welcome, but Cissy didn’t think so.
    “I wasn’t sure we’d make it.” Delia pushed her hair back. She looked almost drunk with relief. “I swear, Granddaddy. It felt like we were racing against fate, like the ground was going to open up and swallow us if I didn’t get home as fast as I could. Like you wouldn’t be here.” She gazed at the blue-white empty sky.
    “Where would I be?” Granddaddy Byrd’s voice was a scratchy, irritable whisper, as if he were out of practice talking to people. “I don’t go running around. This is where I always am.”
    “I know, I know.” Delia’s hands swiped through her hair again and gripped the back of her head. “It didn’t make sense, you know? It was like Cayro itself wouldn’t be here. Like one of them terrible television shows where people and places just disappear and you think you’re crazy.” Delia dropped her hands. “Nobody ever talks about how long it is, driving all the way across the country.”
    “I don’t have no television set,” Granddaddy Byrd said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
    Delia said, “No, of course you don’t. It’s all right. I’m all right. I’m just tired.” She turned to face the house. “And I’m filthy. Let me get a shower, make us all some tea.” She looked down at her dusty sandals.
    “You want some tea, Granddaddy?”
    The old man shook his head. “I don’t need nothing,” he said. “You go get yourself cleaned up. And be careful of that shower. The pipes are backwards, the hot handle turns on the cold.”
    Delia grinned at him. “You never fixed that? All this time and you never fixed that?”
    He shrugged. “What’s to fix? It works.”
    Delia opened the screen door tentatively and stepped inside as if she were afraid the floor would give way. Cissy bit her lips. Granddaddy Byrd took a seat on the front steps and dragged a folded bag of Sharpe’s tobacco out of his shirt pocket, not even bothering to move up into the shade of the porch. Cissy sat down beside him, trying to make herself small and unobtrusive but wanting to look at this man.
    Granddaddy Byrd shot her a narrow glance. Cissy dropped her head and kept her eyes on his hands on the tobacco bag. None of what was implied in the word “granddaddy” seemed to fit this craggy-faced reptile. His fingers were thin and long, with big knobby knuckles, the nails ragged and black. As she watched him work the tobacco paper, she saw that the left hand shook slightly, a steady palsied trembling, though the right was firm and he spilled not a flake of the crumbly reddish brown tobacco. His technique was to cup the paper against that firm right hand and roll it deftly with the fingers of the trembling left. He did it slowly, with great care, and the loose cigarette he produced took the flame easily.
    “Pretty good,” she said admiringly.
    “Harrumph.” A language all his own. He held the cigarette with his left hand and Cissy wondered briefly why he didn’t use the right.
    From inside the house came Delia’s voice: “Cissy, you want anything?”
    “No,” Cissy called back. She canted her head and looked again at the right hand, which still held the Sharpe’s bag. Something strange there. The long, skinny fingers with the swollen knuckles lay precisely against each other, ending in an even line. Cissy flattened her own hand against her thigh and immediately saw the difference. Her middle finger extended more than a quarter of an inch past the two on either