by Zakes Mda
“Does it matter which motel?” asked Orpah.
“It does. I want you to take it back. What was you doing in a motel anyways?”
She was not in a motel for any hanky-panky though. She was caught in a flood and couldn’t come back home for three days and everyone was worried. She had to find a cheap motel and sleep there. Ruth had assumed she stayed with friends all that time because when she phoned she had not specified that she was staying at a motel. But anyway, Orpah was worried to death staying at that motel and the floods continued as if they were fulfilling some biblical prophecy. She was driving Ruth’s GMC and made an attempt to take the gravel New England Road just after Guysville, which is the alternative route when there is a flood. But it was flooded too. She did not even try the road via Amesville for it is always the first to be flooded. So, she was marooned in Athens. She cried most of that time, and an Indian girl, the daughter of the motel owner, played her the sitar. She thought it was the most beautiful instrument ever, and begged and cajoled, until the girl sold it to her on credit. Her father could bring her another one since he would be going to India soon.
That was the beginning of her life as a loner. She gave up her daytime soap operas to spend time with her sitar. She gave up Oprah in the afternoons. She does not even come out in the evenings when everyone watches prime time sitcoms and reality shows or in the night when Obed spends his time flipping channels and giggling between Jay Leno and David Letterman—incidentally his main source of news about the world.
Orpah hasn’t come out this evening as we sit in front of the television watching a beautiful war lighting up the screen, depicted like a series of video games. Live night bombings hitting the targets with startling fire in the black background of the night. Targets hit as they sleep. Obed and Ruth cheering. It is fine, for no one sees any death. There is no human element. Just the sound effects and the flare of the fireworks. Mahlon Quigley dozing off. Smiling still. Embedded journalists emerging in their neat camouflage jackets, analyzing every move in the game, and condemning surreptitious attacks on the homeland forces by the enemy as cowardice. If they were man enough they would come out and face our firepower, and not attack us when we are not looking. Big titles on the screen: Operation Thunderbolt! Just like in the movies. Just like in the superhero comic books. Court Street parade superheroes. Kapow! Boom! There are the good guys and the bad guys. The bad guys are ugly and evil and envious. The good guys are beautiful and altruistic and have God on their side. The good guys are sure to triumph. Just like in the movies. Only here real people die. Mothers and their children. Young beautiful soldiers who are only children themselves. Although we never see them. We shall never see them. We are therefore able to sleep in peace at night and dream beautiful dreams.
Bombs rain some more and light the sky. Ruth and Obed cheer. Mahlon smiles. Still no one dies. Only the depersonalized collateral damage. Superheroes rise unscathed from the rubble and fly to the sky to save the world elsewhere.
Bombs plough the lands of ancient civilizations cultivating new crops of terrorists. Again and again we cheer.
A knock at the door interrupts our beautiful war. It is Nathan and he has brought Ruth coupons from a fast food restaurant in Athens. When I first saw him in that big truck he was an imposing figure. Perhaps it is just the memory of his booming voice. He is a tiny man with the features and the hairstyle of the Jesus on the wall. He is developing a roundish paunch though, and it is beginning to strain the buttons of his shirt. Unlike Obed, he does not seem to pay much attention to his appearance. I am not sure if Nathan is one of the WIN people or not. He looks Caucasian—although Ruth did tell me that her people come in all colors.
Ruth spreads the coupons on her lap, and Nathan points at the choice dishes with his dirty fingernails. There are special offers for fish and shrimps and other seafood delicacies, all pictured in mouthwatering color. Ruth and Nathan admire the pictures and he says he knows that fish is Ruth’s favorite food and when he saw these special offers the first person he thought of was her. She thanks him and says that indeed next time she visits Athens she will go to the fast food place, provided the offers have not expired.
“I know you wanna see Orpah,” says Ruth with a naughty twinkle in her eye.
Yes, he does want to see Orpah because he wants to invite her to a concert in Nelsonville. After calling her name twice without any response, Ruth sends Obed to call her, and then introduces me as the man from Africa. Nathan tells her that we met before and wonders how I like it so far in Kilvert. I tell him how beautiful it is and how hospitable Ruth and her family have been.
“Yeah,” he says, “our people are like that. It don’t matter that we are poor.”
“Todoloo,” says Ruth, tapping her forehead. “Today they call it poverty; back in them days we called it our way of life. We didn’t know we was poor until they came and told us we was poor.”
Outsiders instilled it in the minds of her people that they were poor and gave them food and clothes. That changed their way of looking at the world. Now they cannot do without the charity of strangers.
Nathan explains, for my benefit, that despite Ruth’s misgivings about the dependency mentality that has been created among her people by well-meaning donors, poverty is a fact of life in southeast Ohio, not just in Kilvert. Even the CBS television program 60 Minutes featured a whole segment on the subject. People were shocked to see on their screens Americans waiting in food lines, and to hear of the increasing numbers that now have to depend on food banks and pantries for their meals; of retired veterans and workers going hungry because they have lost their jobs to plant closings; of children forced to rely entirely on the school lunch program for daily meals; of families going to bed without supper. And this situation continues year after year. It is more than a year since the program was aired. Yet nothing has changed. People are still hungry.
“Oh, yeah, them kids are hungry,” says Ruth, “but their parents don’t have no trouble buying beer and cigarettes and lottery tickets.”
Appalachian poverty is news to me. You do not see it from the landscape: from the hills and the forests and the valleys and the creeks and the fields whose beauty inspires awe and effectively hides the suffering that Nathan is outlining for me to Ruth’s consternation.
“We always raised our own food,” she insists. “It was our way of life. Things only got bad when we stopped raising our own food…when they brought free food from them food banks.”
Obed returns without Orpah.
“What took you so long?” asks Ruth.
“Orpah…she won’t come. She won’t see nobody ’cause mama messed her stuff bad.”
Ruth is furious. There must be something terribly wrong with that girl. Where does she get off treating a gentleman such as Nathan like this? The very Nathan with whom she went to school at Amesville. The Nathan who was her after-school playmate. The Nathan with whom she used to ice skate on the Federal Creek and on the pool next to the river when it was frozen in winter. Most importantly, the Nathan who has a regular job, unlike some people she knows—and she looks at Obed. Orpah missed her chance to marry the man the first time he asked her. She turned him down until he married someone else. Unfortunately that someone else died, leaving him with two lovely kids. Orpah should be grateful that the man once again is showing some interest in her. Nathan is a good man and Orpah will surely die an old maid. She is already an old maid as it is.
Of course this diatribe embarrasses Nathan. He keeps on assuring Ruth that it is okay; Orpah will come around one of these days. He is a patient man. He will wait.
Ruth is too cross to enjoy the war on television. She takes her cane and waddles to her room.
As if on cue Orpah strums her sitar. The sound cuts through my insides and reverberates on the timber walls.
“She is a very sad woman,” says Nathan sadly.
He takes leave of us and Obed offers to walk him to his truck.
Before I saw Orpah in person her sitar caus
ed a feeling of nostalgia in me. Now that I am able to associate the sound with the person it no longer does. Instead it arouses me. It arouses me so terribly that I think my veins are going to burst. My heart is pumping blood in such a crazy rhythm that I have to walk away from here. I have got to be as far away from Orpah’s sitar as possible. As I walk out in agony I can see the wicked glint in the sciolist’s eye. Whatever did I do to him to be punished like this? Does he perhaps resent the independence and the freedom to determine the course of my life that I seem to have gained since joining these wonderful people? Is he taking vengeance on me for having lost myself in the lives of the living and momentarily forgetting my mission in life: to mourn the dead and to search for ways of mourning?
Obed and Nathan are standing next to the truck gossiping. They cannot see me as I attempt to flee from my own erection. I can hear Obed boasting: “I told you I was gonna walk, man.”
“So you did?”
“Do I look like I’m in the clink now? I nailed the bitch, man. I nailed her ass good.”
The scoundrel!
I stop under a gigantic sycamore near the road to the churchyard. Here I cannot hear the sitar and hopefully there will be some relief. I can see why they call this a ghost tree. Its trunk and branches are shimmering in the thin light of the stars and the diminishing last-quarter moon as if they have been splashed with fluorescent white paint. As soon as the trunk leaves the ground it opens into a gaping grotto, with dried-up veins and arteries running amok in it. I can see something whitish in the grotto. I retrieve it. Even in the faint light I can see that these are some of the most wonderful drawings I have seen in my life. They are designs of sorts and at the bottom of each one the artist has signed: Orpah Q and then a date. All of them were created late last month, except two that are dated the second and the third day of November. Today. One of these wonderful creations was painted on this very day.
The ghost tree. It is a keeper of secrets. It has many stories to tell.
4
Ghost Trees
The story is told by ghost trees; that’s why most of it does not unfold before your eyes but is reported in the manner of fire-side or bedtime storytelling. The ghost trees: the one in front of the Abyssinian Queen’s cabin with its wide span of white branches and others that witnessed the whole journey of her two boys, right up to the demise of Nicodemus and the exile of Abednego in Tabler Town. People remember fondly that she, the queen of stories, used to flap her wings while perching on the highest branch almost one hundred and twenty feet above the ground. But the tree was more than just a place for launching her swooping tales. Its white bark, mottled with green and brown, provided her with enchanting characters when the moon shone on the trunk like a spotlight, shaping out figures in deep contrasts of dark and light. She spoke with these characters and made them do things that none of the audience ever imagined a bark could do. She made them speak words never heard from any tree on earth. Although the tree was at its best at night, during the day it kept itself useful still. Its hollow trunk served as Nicodemus’s hiding place when he wanted to be alone and practice his writing or play his reed flute. Everybody pretended that the ghost tree produced the music. Yet they all knew it was Nicodemus inside the tree. It made them feel good to play along and call it a singing sycamore.
The singing sycamore was haunted. Not because it was a ghost tree but for the well-known fact that it harbored in its soul the spirits of little children who once sat under it listening to stories and telling their own eons before the world was killed. These were spirits waiting to be reunited with all the children from the tribes of the universe on a regenerated earth that would be free of sickness and death; an earth where man, woman and child would roam free, owned by no one. When the trills from Nicodemus’s flute became multiplied as if many flutes were playing, people knew that the voices of the little children had merged with the slurs and staccatos of his flute. So, the singing sycamore was a singing sycamore after all.
This hollowed sycamore hid another important secret in its heart. Provisions for the road. Dried fruit. Knives. Ropes. Tinder. Lots of tinder. Flint. Pairs of old socks. Rags. Odds and ends of tools and mementos. Just as the Monkey Wrench design cautioned. And all these were wrapped in two bundles of quilts. One a crazy quilt and the other a sampler. Tied securely with ropes. Waiting for the day when the boys would up and go. No one knew when that day would be. It would not be during that winter though; the Abyssinian Queen was certain of that. She had drummed it into the boys’ heads that winter escapes were hard. The boys would therefore be prudent enough to wait for the next round of slave stealers and Underground Railroad conductors who would come in spring or summer transmitting secret messages through spirituals and merging with the worshippers in the run-down barn that the Africans used as a place of worship and subversion. The Queen did not trust they would be safe on their own, and they had solemnly promised that they would wait, although no one knew when the stealers would be back in the region.
In any event escape was not a priority on the boys’ minds at that time. Nicodemus had started his duties as a stud and was enjoying it. The older studs were telling him that the self-satisfied smirk on his face would wear off and be replaced by deep lines of pain as soon as the awareness dawned in his head that copulating with unwilling females was not the greatest thing on earth unless one had the mindset of a rapist.
While Nicodemus was romping about the mating bays, Abednego was in love. He had fallen for a spindly legged and heavily freckled Irish girl from the new stock recently imported to Fairfield Farms for the purpose of breeding more mulattos. The young man was having sleepless nights thinking about this girl, and the occasions were very rare when he could steal a few moments with her since there was heavy security around these young women. They were in the process of being “processed,” which meant that some of them would be indentured workers while others would be outright slaves, depending on the ancestry that The Owner would be able to manufacture for them. But whatever title they carried, they would all be breeders of future generations that would meet the demands of the market. It was a fate that Abednego did not want to see befall his beloved. He knew, of course, that he had no control over the matter. His mother had warned him about the folly of falling in love and of ever believing that love and possession had the same meaning.
One night…deep in the night…the moonlight turned snow flurries into spirited flakes of silver. The moment caught the boys fooling around in front of their mother’s cabin with their mouths open and tongues hanging out to catch the flakes as they floated in the air before landing on the ground where they instantly melted. The guards and their dogs took shelter in the sheds and barns or sat in front of a log fire in the guardhouse telling tall tales. They would not be bothered with boys prancing about in the moonlight in any case. Unless they were contravening some of the strict rules on which The Owner, compassionate as he was, was not willing to compromise—such as drumming, which was prohibited to the extent that even at church services the Africans had now substituted handclapping. Although the boys were already in their teens, to the inhabitants of the cabins they were children—boys who would always be boys. So, everyone left them in peace to gambol and fool around and play with the flurries and get impatient with them for not piling up into real snow that would make the whole landscape ghostly white.
And then a specter materialized from one of the cabins. It was not white as specters are wont to be, but was draped in a black cape that went down to the ankles, and wore heavy black boots and a black wide-brimmed floppy hat. The specter looked to the left and to the right and then gingerly walked away from the cabin. When it saw the boys it seemed to panic, turned back to the cabin, but then again changed its mind and boldly walked away. The deliberate gait was familiar. So was the face under the floppy hat. The specter was none other than the lady of the house—Madame Fairfield, as she now demanded to be called. The boys knew immediately that their eyes had no right to see what they had seen.
They ran to hide inside the trunk of the ghost tree. But of course she had seen them and knew who they were. And she knew that they knew exactly what had been happening in that cabin at that time of the night. They were smart enough to deduce that while The Owner was carousing in Charleston after a successful auction of prime slave stock, the lady of the house was giving goodies to an African slave. They had seen the man, newly imported from Louisiana on a trip the Fairfields took to explore prospective business ventures and spend some time holidaying with their children. Apparently the lady of the house had spotted the sinewy specimen at an auction of slaves newly smuggled from the Caribbean in contravention of the prohibition of such importations. She had suggested to The Owner that they bid for the African since he would infuse new blood into their mostly inbred stock. An import like this would also silence the jealous neighbors who had been spreading rumors that Fairfield Farms was selling unhealthy slaves. Through his wife’s persistence The Owner ended up paying a lot of money for the African, even though he really did not see the need to infuse any new blood into his stock. Inbreeding had never been an issue before this, and he had long dismissed the accusation that he was flooding the markets with syphilitic slaves with the contempt it deserved. He attributed these newfangled ideas on inbreeding to the new literature that his wife had taken to reading. But then everyone knew that the lady of the house always got what she wanted.
The man was allocated a two-room cabin all to himself. At first no one thought much of this because the man was quite exotic. He didn’t even speak English but some version of French. And he was mysterious; no one knew where he came from or why he was there. If he was going to be a stud at all why was he never seen at the mating bays? Why did he prefer to keep to himself? Why did house slaves take daily supplies of food to his cabin? Now the boys knew the answers to these questions: he was Madame Fairfield’s special plaything. And that knowledge was dangerous to their lives. Unlike the guards who patrolled the grounds, and must have known about the lady’s nocturnal naughtiness but knew better than to betray her secret to anyone, she could not trust the boys to respect the virtues of silence. They were too immature and naive to know anything about discretion.