“I hate this stuff,” Jean complained. She scraped the guano off her boot on a rock. “Rot,” Mim called it. “Just bat rot.”
Rot was not what Cissy saw. Consummation, the slow alteration of what people thought they knew, that was what Cissy saw in the cave. Down there everything ripened. In the dark, deep slow changes took place. That package of closely wrapped tissue paper provided the sack where pale apples were nurtured into red flush flavor. The unaccustomed heat of her body dried the dark mud on her jeans so that it crusted and flaked from her hips and thighs, marking her passage up the wedge in the rocks.
The farther they crawled, the more careless Cissy became. Sliding on the rocks and scraping her elbows and knees made Cissy feel not wounded but more powerful. She could take damage and keep moving. She was stronger than rock, more determined than the tides of sand and grit that moved along the underground creeks. Climbing out of the lower shafts, her body trembling with satisfied exhaustion, Cissy knew she had done something extraordinary. Every time she crawled up into the light again, she knew herself different. It was as if her passage through the dark offered Cissy what she had always wanted, confrontation with God in the imagined body of a woman, the mama-core, the bludgeoned heart of the earth.
Little Mouth was not supposed to be anything special. Paula’s Lost was the cave everyone talked about. “Oh yeah, those parties,” Jean said when Cissy talked about Nolan’s family. No doubt a few of the people who talked so loud about Brewster’s parties had actually gone to one or two—a few perhaps, but not as many as said they did. Once the girls got past the passages Cissy knew, Little Mouth was far more spectacular than anyone had ever hinted.
“Look at that, Cissy,” Mim kept saying as they went through the back reaches of Little Mouth. “Look at that.”
Cissy looked. She lifted her head and leaned back into the beam of the flashlight so that the stream of light swept up and past her, picking out the limestone edges of layered, overlapping rock. Glitter, height, pitch, and angle, the slope reared above them and shone with mica flecks like a shattered mirror on a flagstone floor. Looking at the rock was like looking at clouds. They saw faces, bowls and chalices, angel wings and dragon’s teeth.
“Somebody could make a fortune down here,” Jean kept saying.
“If they could open it up and tame it,” Mim said. “Turn it into Disneyland underground, like Ruby Falls with those flat concrete paths and colored lights.”
Cissy watched the pulsing beam of the light pick out pea gravel, marl, and alluvium. The air was sharp with the stink of bitter water. A scum of bone-white dust coated her upper lip. She had to keep wiping her mouth and sipping at the canteen on her hip. Mim complained about the dust. Jean borrowed Cissy’s canteen. Finally, they all had to stop to rest. In the crisp shadows between the rocks, ghost light seemed to shimmer and move. Cissy could not imagine what it was. This far down there were no bugs, no butterflies or birds, no snakes or living things to be feared. Down here only microorganisms were dangerous, ancient viruses waiting for the warm medium of blood and human stupidity.
“Lord damn!” Jean cursed. “Every separate muscle in my hips and shoulders is bruised.”
“Got to watch that bouncing off the walls,” Mim teased her.
A vibration rippled out from Mim’s gentle contralto and echoed in the belly bowl of Cissy’s pelvis. The feeling was small, wonderful, and secret. It made Cissy want to smile, but she only repeated Jean’s phrase in the sofest whisper. “Lord damn.”
“Look up there.” Mim waved one hand up into the light beam, gesturing to the sparkling rise of stone and adamantine. “Like a cathedral, like a goddamned cathedral.”
Cissy nodded, and then realized that the light was pointed away and Mim could not see her. She whispered. “It’s like a church, like a secret temple.”
Cissy thought that Little Mouth was the cave she loved best. In the old maps, it was described as a small narrow cavern, but in the last decade the grotto had been broken open. The little mouth had opened to the larger one, the deep behind the shallow trench, and that furrow had opened again so that a series of awkward climbs lured the girls through a linked maze of caverns and crawl spaces.
“I think,” Mim kept saying, “it must connect to Paula’s Lost. Something has to. It’s all linked by water, and water moves along the flat until it can fall, then it will push anything aside. I’ve been looking at the topographical maps. There’s no way the water would not move down; it would push through the limestone and open it up. I think the caverns connect from the southern pit of Paula’s Lost to the upper reaches of Little Mouth, maybe not in a way we could get through, but maybe. We could try anyway, map from here to the old back passages at Paula’s Lost.”
“I don’t know.” Cissy closed her eyes, picturing the passages she had climbed so many times. Both caves were limestone, but there was shale and granite, and other qualities of stone behind that. Paula’s Lost was slightly uphill from Little Mouth, but only by a few degrees. “It might connect. It might not. Remember how many people have been looking for the links between those caves in Kentucky? Isn’t that how Floyd Collins made all those headlines? He went down in early January convinced he knew his way, and was going to show the world. The books say that when they got him out on February sixteenth, they had to cut off his foot to do it.”
“I an’t going to stick my feet in no crevices.” Mim was indignant. “We’re careful. When are we not careful?”
“It’s not about careful. Things happen.” Cissy was thinking about the back passages at Paula’s. There was all that red and gray sand, unique to the site. Had she seen anything like that in Little Mouth? If there was, would it mean the water carried it from one place to the other? Water would move south and downhill, so nothing from Little Mouth would be carried to Paula’s Lost.
“That pea gravel,” Jean suggested when they talked about it over pimento cheese sandwiches and hot tea. “Pea gravel is loose, moves easily along in a stream. The pea gravel in the upper passages of Paula’s Lost is all pearly-silver-looking in the arc lights. It should show up in Little Mouth if it got carried there.”
Cissy sat with her sandwich in one hand, thinking. After a moment she nodded her head. “Yes,” she said. “I’ve seen pea gravel here. Not much but some. In the far back northern passages on the dogleg’s cutback.” She looked at Mim carefully. “It might connect,” she said finally.
“Then we could map it.” Mim was thrilled. “And if we prove the connection, we could get in the record books. We’d be the most famous cavers in the Southeast!”
“We could start anyway. We could start mapping and see what we get.” Jean sounded less excited than Mim. Cissy took another bite of her cheese sandwich and nodded. No reason not to try, if they were careful.
Exploring the southern reaches of Little Mouth proved torturous and challenging. It felt as if there were always something waiting, something past that little cut or through that sandy wash, something like a rocky death or a fast descent down an open chasm.
“It’s a bitch,” Mim declared. “Keeps pulling me on till I forget how many hours we’ve been crawling. I start losing feeling in my fingers and toes. I start wanting to lie down and nap.”
“Oh, that would be a good idea,” Jean laughed.
“Maybe it would,” Cissy said. “We could bring sleeping bags and hot coffee. Go as far as we could, flake out, wake up warm and rested, eat and go on again.”
“And again,” Mim laughed. “No matter how far you go, there will be another passage. Always another reason to go a little further. Sometimes I start thinking all it takes is stubbornness, but if you lose your blankets and your thermos, forget your path out or lose track of how many hours you been in, you’re dead. You get stupid down here, you get lost. There’s a reason expeditions set limits and go in organized groups.”
“When are we not careful?” Jean asked, repeating their motto. They looked at each other.
They did it for the first time the
next weekend, with bags, blankets, food, and a little Coleman for making hot tea. For Cissy it was a new revelation, the idea of staying so long underground. When she curled up in her sleeping bag, she realized how happy she was with the feel of the darkness close and safe around her. She had napped on her own, lain down for moments at a time, but this was different. The dark closed around her like a blanket. She curled into it with a sigh. This was bread and meat to Cissy, what she had always needed and never had enough of at any one time.
All her life Cissy had had trouble sleeping. She would lie awake in bed long after her sisters’ breathing had stilled and shifted into sloop-sloop patterns, steady and quiet. She would turn, rock, twist, and drum her fingers on her hip bones. She would squeeze her eyes tight shut to watch the starbursts that followed. Moonlight on the windowsill. Bathroom light slipping around the frame of the closed door. When they had shared the room, she had been comforted by the green twinkle of Amanda’s digital alarm clock, the tiny red gleam of the battery light on the radio Dede always kept by her pillow, earphone cord moving as Dede breathed, now blocking the ruby, now exposing it.
How was it possible anyone could survive on so little sleep? Cissy did not know. When her sisters slept, she told herself stories and cataloged the phases of the night, the slow way light altered as time passed, the way sound became somehow longer and thicker in the deepest part of the night. Dog barking slowed down after the moon set, howling receded to something more subtle and desperate. Grief rode the night air and thickened perception. Cissy could do nothing but endure, though some nights her restlessness got so bad she would get up and read a book or listen to the broken TV set out on the side porch, the one that got no picture but brought in the late-night stations’ voices. That never helped. It was better to lie in bed and let the body rest while the brain ticked on like an old clock, to count minutes or years or indrawn breaths. More times than she could count Cissy had watched the dawn birth past Dede’s shoulder. She had cataloged the shades of light from first flush to slow bright and plush morning white. When Amanda married and Dede shifted into her room, the room had seemed still and lonely. Even sleeping alone, Cissy lay awake more than she slept.
When Mim and Jean talked about the weekend expedition, Cissy worried about sleeping with them beside her. Mim and Jean brought sleeping bags and hot thermos jars. Cissy brought rope, extra lanterns, and a deck of cards. She grinned ruefully at the notion, but expected she would be playing solitaire while Jean and Mim slept. Were it not for the added weight, she would have packed her tape player to pass the time, but obediently she unrolled her sleeping bag and hunkered down. Pretend to sleep, she told herself. Rest. Mim flicked off her lamp and rolled over. The dark came in, and with it the silence. Far off something beaded and thunked, then thunked again. Water falling a short distance made a slow sound and then stopped. There was no light. Sound was slow or absent entirely, the breathing of the other girls, moisture pearling on rock in response to their warm breath. Bats, Cissy told her brain, but the dark pulsed color. Images moved across her retinas. Blind fish. Black butterflies. Larvae. Delia. Dede. Amanda. Breathe in, pearl out. Nothing.
Mim’s hand was on her shoulder. A careful light purposefully shielded pointed away from Cissy’s eyes. Mim’s eyes were huge and bright.
“Girl! You sleep hard.”
Sleep. Four hours like nothing. Four hours like four minutes. Let me sleep again, Cissy thought. She shook her head and pushed herself up. She looked around her like a blind fish who had suddenly grown eyes, opened her mouth, and grunted a laugh. Not a dream, not a pause, just an indrawn breath and simple unconsciousness, her body made new in four hours of complete rest. Heaven no doubt lay on the other side of a long cave.
Cissy did not tell anyone but she knew. If she made her home in a cave, she would never have another bad night, never miss another moment’s sleep.
In the days after the overnight trip down Little Mouth, Cissy found herself thinking about the base of the last cliff they had passed in the northern passage. Pea gravel was there, and sand that was almost red. Something was there, something that called Cissy on. A little more endurance, a little more care, they could have found how far back it went. That was how you lost yourself in the big caves, Cissy kept scolding herself. You started thinking you could find the passage that had to be there, the northwest connection or the link to Mammoth Cave.
Cissy had been to Mammoth with Delia for her seventeenth birthday. They had rented a motel room where they could stay overnight, and done the whole tour. It had been spectacular but predictable, a tame cave, another walk-through with colored lights and plank paths, bigger than any Cissy had seen but still less interesting than the wild caves. They went with a group down predictable corridors of dim shade and reflected light. Cissy persuaded the guide to turn off the big lights and let them stand for a moment where once someone had lain on his belly, cold and exhausted and exhilarated with discovery. That dark had been tantalizing but too brief.
Light is defined by its edges, Cissy realized early on in Little Mouth. The beam of a flashlight was edge-sharp, cutting past rock so that you had to teach yourself to see it. It was so easy to see what was not there, miss what was. Diffuse soft daylight was kind. It helped the eyes. Cave light challenged perception and invited hallucinations. The light in wild caves was tricky and strange. It tricked the eyes, seduced fear, and manufactured terror. It made you feel yourself utterly mortal and at risk. Cissy loved it.
After Nolan took her down in Paula’s Lost and Dede moved into Amanda’s old room and gave her the bedroom, Cissy had hung double-thick curtains over all the windows, sealed the edges of the doorjamb, and put a muffling quilt over the door itself. “You turned it into a tent,” Dede had said of the room, but that was not true. Cissy had turned the room into a cave, a place where the dark was welcome bur never deep enough. The deep dark was what she wanted, and it was under the ground, always waiting for her, a landscape of black and white and gray. Like the moon on video, the dark in the cave made color irrelevant. When color did appear in the cave, it startled Cissy so much that she went blind for a moment. What she saw burned on her pupils, yellow crust on an overhang, pink flush at the circular edges of a sunken bed of sand, gray-green shading into pearly, lustrous blue. What she saw in the deep places was too subtle to be noticed aboveground. Everything down there was a stage, a place where something was meant to happen. The dark waited for light but did not need it. The dark was ancient and sufficient and patient. If Cissy had not come, it would have waited for another—the eye that could take it all in and glory in the beauty. Down in the dark everything waited all the time, for all time.
“I want to be buried down here,” Cissy told Mim as they sat with their lanterns dimmed down, the shadows close in and comfortable.
“Lonely.”
“No. Quiet.”
“Safe,” Jean said. “Nobody could get you down here.”
“Maybe,” Cissy said. “Maybe not. Just quiet and alone. I like that idea. I like it a lot.”
M.T. had gotten so fat her upper arms seemed to be part of her breasts, great soft mounds of flesh that moved together. With her broad face and small features, delicate and close together, she looked like Glenda the Good Witch, but Glenda with a glandular problem, her aura warm and enveloping, her rosebud mouth almost always pursed to smile or laugh. For all her size, M.T. seemed no less attractive to men. Men waited on M.T. as if for spring. She was always “with” someone, though she swore she would never marry again.
“Did it once,” she told Delia. “Did it for real. Not like some of these children do it today. I married Paul, I meant it. And I just an’t like that no more. Wouldn’t mean it again, not like that, and won’t do it without meaning it. So everybody should just be warned.”
The warning deterred no one. M.T. kept company steadily, though never too seriously. The first surprise was always how she could blush, look over, and snare a man. The second surprise was how gracefully she could ease that ma
n out of her bed. Men walked away bemused by the experience. They would say, “Yeah, we had a thing.” Then they would smile in remembrance, shake their heads, and give the rueful grin that so clearly expressed their confusion about just how that thing had gone the way it had. They didn’t talk bad about M.T. the way they might have been expected to do. Most took to calling her “good thing” as if that were her nickname. “Good thing,” they would murmur in M.T.’s direction, and she would smile and put her hand out in that delicate gesture that acknowledged the affection but asked nothing further.
“Woman’s got a hell of a talent,” Stephanie would complain. “She should get her own television show and teach us all how to do it.”
If pressed, most of M.T.’s old boyfriends would admit they thought about her and wouldn’t mind seeing her again. It was almost as if she had drained off all their urgency and what she left behind was a kind of deep contentment. If called upon, they would come right over easily enough, help her out and do a job for her. Jackson Melridge cleared her gutters and checked her roof every fall. Garret Sultan would ride over on his riding mower and cut back the field behind her house, asking her solicitously how her allergies were doing. Charlie Peachhill would drop by to share a cup of coffee and take a look at the engine of her old Chevy. When she decided to buy a new one, he came along, saying, “An’t gonna let no slick old boy do you wrong.” After, he collected compliments for the deal he got her. “Got to take care of our M.T.,” he replied to the men who teased him. “Got to make sure she’s all right.”