by Zakes Mda
The spirit child instructed him to pay particular attention to ghost trees, for they are the likeliest hosts of ghost orchids. The medium man therefore looks into the hollow hearts of those ghost trees that have hollow hearts. It is in the hearts that secrets are hidden.
The moon is full; the ghost trees are ghost trees.
The medium man is not in the forest today as a medium man. He is looking for ghost orchids to make the spirit child happy, and is beginning to be despondent that he has not found any. The ghost trees do not care that his mission is different today. To them a medium man is always a medium man. Therefore they whisper stories to him. As they are wont to do when he walks in the forest. Be it day or be it night. From the branches that touch the sky the leaves breathe out stories of another time and gently blow them down to him. Memories of how an Abyssinian Queen flapped her wings and swooped to the ground and of how the sun was once lonely because it had no one to play with. His body soaks in these memories, so that his mouth may retell them later.
Yet he does not forget his quest. And his persistence later pays. At sunrise when he is walking home he discovers his first ghost orchid. At the edge of the forest. On the first tree he would have encountered when he got there. And yet he had missed it. There it is in all its glorious whiteness. Stuck on the mottled part of the trunk so as to stand out, waiting to be discovered by him. He is jumping with joy as he plucks it. His smile is not only on his lips, but in his eyes as well.
He knows what he’ll do that night. He will dress up like…he will decide later what character he will assume. But he will be in full costume when he presents it to the spirit child.
These things had not been revealed to me yet, for the sciolist kept them close to his chest. I did not know about the medium man and the spirit child. That is why I am wondering where Mahlon Quigley comes from so early in the morning and why there is a bounce in his gait. I am standing at the front door when I see him approach. I give way and he enters without giving me a glance. I think he has made up his mind that I don’t exist. He goes to his room, perhaps to sleep.
Ruth stands up from her workstation and walks to the kitchen. I follow her. She starts fussing around preparing breakfast of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and coffee for her Mr. Quigley.
“Where does Mr. Quigley go at night?” I ask.
“Mr. Quigley has his ways,” says Ruth.
She sets the food on the table.
“What are his ways?” I persist.
“The question is: what’s your ways, mister? You think we don’t know you slept in Orpah’s room the other night? And Mr. Quigley don’t like it one bit. I don’t like it neither.”
“Who told you that?” I demand, ready to deny the incident if only to protect Orpah’s reputation. After our moment of weakness Orpah and I have avoided each other. Our eyes don’t meet when I chance upon her. We behave like two guilt-ridden teenagers.
“Mr. Quigley knows everything,” says Ruth, glaring at me. “And he’s gonna protect his own.”
As I make a shamefaced exit I brush against Mr. Quigley, who is coming for his breakfast. He ignores me as before.
It is too early to go to the Center so I loiter in Mahlon’s garden, wondering how I’ll continue to live under his roof after my scandalous behavior. If only Obed were here he would advise me exactly how to handle this…how to control the damage. But he has been scarce lately, thanks to Beth Eddy.
I need to talk to somebody, but there’s no one here but the gnomes. And there’s one of mine standing on a pedestal squinting at me. The Bush gnome, I mean, which really belongs to Mahlon. It holds a machine gun, which tells me that Obed was here not so long ago. Maybe last night. That’s what he does when he is here: places a machine gun in Mr. Bush’s hand. After some time Ruth will notice what Obed has done and will yank the weapon out of the President’s hand and replace it with an American flag. This has happened many times over—a battle of wills fought over Mahlon’s gnome. I don’t know why Ruth hasn’t thought of breaking the plastic machine gun to pieces and throwing it away where Obed will not find it. Maybe she is just respectful of it because it is Mr. Quigley’s property.
Mahlon witnesses this battle without comment, and never interferes with either the machine gun or the American flag.
Orpah walks out of her room toward the swing. She is in a pink robe and her hair is in curlers. She makes for the living room door when she sees me. I call her name and she stops, but does not look at me. I walk toward her.
“Ruth knows,” I blurt out. “How the heck did she know?”
“About what?” she asks, looking at me innocently.
“What we did.”
“We didn’t do nothing,” she says, averting her eyes.
“I know. But they don’t know that,” I say, not looking away this time but staring into her eyes.
“They know we didn’t do nothing. I told my daddy.”
“You told him I spent the night?”
“Yeah. I tell my daddy everything. He wanna kill you.”
She walks away.
“Oh, that’s just great,” I call after her. “Your father wants to kill me and you just walk away like that?”
She stops and smiles. She can afford to smile at a time like this. She looks cherubic without her garish jewelery and makeup.
“I got new pictures,” she says. “Wanna save them from the tsunami?”
Without waiting for my response she rushes to her room and in no time is back with a stack of drawings. She dumps them in my hand and runs back to her room.
She has incorporated the ghost orchid motif in her designs.
I have lost Ruth. I do not know if I will ever regain her. And it hurts me very much. Especially when she starts waging a campaign against me, telling all and sundry that I am up to no good and have brought evil to her family. I will surely go to hell “one of them days,” and the unfortunate thing is that I will take her children with me to the eternal fires. Her children used to listen to her until Obed dragged me into the peaceful Quigley home. Her conscience is clear, however, because she has done her Christian duty by all of us, and will continue to show us the path of righteousness by sharing with us relevant biblical passages that will be responsible for our salvation if we follow them.
Of course, Ruth has never said any of these things to me directly. I hear of them at the Center. The women seem to enjoy my distress and every time I am at the Center they give me new titbits about my road to eternal damnation as mapped out by Ruth. Obed has also intimated his mother’s displeasure, although he never really goes into as much detail as the women at the Center.
Ever since Obed established his life elsewhere I spend a lot of my time sewing and listening to village gossip at the Center. But this also does not sit well with Ruth. She continues, not to me but to others, with her woeful story of how the Center stole her African. If I wanted to know how to make a quilt why didn’t I say so? She would have taught me herself. In any case, making quilts is a woman’s job. What kind of a man am I? Why doesn’t anyone see how right she is when she says I am up to no good?
I am working on my quilt when one woman offers me unsolicited advice: “You should of left Orpah’s problems with her mama alone.”
“Yeah, that’s where it all starts,” another one concurs. “You should of minded your own business.”
“It’s all Mahlon’s fault,” says the first woman. “He’s gotta pay more attention to Ruth and stop playing his silly games with Orpah like they was little children.”
I prick up my ears, but the arrival of a guest disrupts the gossip. She is selling rotary cutters and makes a spirited demonstration on how they make the usually tedious and boring work of cutting blocks easier. They look like pizza cutters to me. She folds the fabric many times over and using a broad flat ruler with grids on it she first cuts a square, which becomes many squares because of the folds, and then cuts the squares into triangles.
“The rotary cutter will change your life,” she
says, and then points out that my squares wouldn’t be so terribly uneven if I had used a rotary cutter.
Barbara comes to the defense of her star pupil and points out that I am new at this. She says a few encouraging words, adding that what I am doing is a new design.
“I’ve never seen one like that,” she says. “Your fingers are becoming finer. Your quilt becomes art…like a sculpture.”
But the guest doesn’t buy it. She insists that a rotary cutter will make things much easier for me.
“And he’ll never learn to cut straight on his own with scissors,” says one of the women.
“You are cutting on your own when you use a rotary cutter,” the guest says. “It doesn’t cut by itself. You direct it.”
I like the idea of a rotary cutter and I buy two. I also buy two rulers.
“One’s for Ruth,” I say when I see their puzzled look.
“Yeah, maybe she’s gonna change her mind ’bout you,” says another woman and everyone laughs. I let them have their fun at my expense and go on with my sewing.
It is late afternoon when I leave the Center. The sun is still shining. I dread going home. Perhaps I should sit and while away time with the brooding elders who are sitting on the porch chewing Kodiak and spitting onto the grass a few feet away, silently competing as to whose black jet will get the farthest. At the risk of losing my appetite by the time I get home for dinner I take one of the car seats, which would have been Mahlon’s if he were here. I guess he’s gone back to the forest.
The brooding elders don’t talk much. They just brood. I am hoping to change that, so I ask after their friend Mahlon.
“You don’t wanna cross Mahlon,” says an elder. “We know what you’ve done and he don’t like it no ways.”
Everybody knows. The whole world knows.
“I didn’t do anything,” I say.
“That Mahlon,” chuckles another elder, “he’s gonna whup you ass so bad you gonna wish you never laid your darn eyes on his li’l girl.”
I may think I am younger, another elder observes, but their Mahlon is stronger. It is because he never worked in the mines. Every man they know was finished by coal dust, but Mahlon was too smart to go underground. He worked on his farm and kept animals instead. The Quigley family has always been smart, from the very first Quigley—Lord have mercy on him—who was a prophet and used a red scroll to tell the future right up to Mahlon’s generation. I am rather disappointed that Obed and Orpah don’t seem to feature in the generations that have distinguished themselves with their wisdom.
“Yep,” says an elder with a mouthful of Kodiak. “Them Quigleys fought damn hard when coal and timber companies was kicking our grampas’ ass off their land.”
But another elder decides to burst the Quigley bubble. Not all the Quigleys were good guys, he points out. Doesn’t anyone remember that one of them used to be a gunslinger hired to force striking miners from their houses back to work?
“It was back in them days. It was before our time,” says one elder dismissively.
“Yeah, but my pap tol’ me about them Quigleys that was hired guns for the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency,” says the elder.
“We didn’t have nothing like that here,” argues another elder.
It was in West Virginia, explains the elder. That was where the Quigleys who were hired guns worked. They took all their thuggery from Kilvert to West Virginia where miners were fighting for the right to unionize. The Quigleys were mine guards and became strike breakers, sometimes fighting pitched battles with the miners.
These events remind another elder of yet another Quigley who was not as good as Mahlon or as the revered first Quigley. This one ran a store owned by the mining company in Kilvert. Oh, yes, there was once a store in Kilvert!
“It left folks in debt by giving them scrip,” says the elder. “All their wages went back to the company.”
“It ain’t Quigley’s fault if folks was stupid,” says a defender of the Quigley legacy.
The elders have obviously forgotten all about me as they argue about the good old Quigley days. I quietly leave.
Mahlon is not in the forest after all but is all greasy under the hood of the GMC trying to fix something. In the kitchen Ruth is arguing with Obed. I can hear them from the living room. I dare not go in there lest I be dragged into whatever they are screaming about.
“They’re jealous of our democracy, that’s why,” says Ruth. “They’re jealous of our standard of living.”
“Why don’t they bomb Sweden, Mama? It’s a democracy with a higher standard of living. Why ain’t no one jealous of Sweden?” says Obed.
“You been reading the Athens News. They gonna say anything ’cause they hate America. Ain’t no country in the world that’s got a better life than the good ol’ U. S. of A.”
“Lotsa countries, Mama,” says Obed. “And no one bombs them.”
“’Cause they appease them terrorists, that’s why.”
“’Cause we mind everybody’s business, that’s why.”
Orpah appears from the inside door of her room and shouts: “Will y’all shudap? I’m trying to sleep.” She must be feeling good that they obey her order instantly. But it is really that Obed has stormed out of the kitchen and out of the house. He does not notice me sitting on one of the car seats in the living room.
Ruth walks out of the kitchen and sits at her workstation. She sobs softly. I shift uncomfortably and she notices me for the first time. She tries to hide her eyes with her hands while bowing her head. I go to her and give her my gift of a rotary cutter and ruler. She looks at them for some time and then smiles wanly at me.
“Thank you,” she says.
“I am sorry Obed annoys you so,” I say. “I don’t think you two should take politics so personally.”
I almost add that I doubt if her hero, the man who runs the whole country, gets as many sleepless nights as she does over international affairs, but think better of it.
“It ain’t that,” says Ruth between sniffles. It’s just that her children don’t appreciate her. No one appreciates her for the sacrifices she has made for the family. Then she sobs once more. I never know what to do in such situations. I don’t have a tissue to hand her. I stand there for a few seconds looking foolish, and then I quietly make for the door.
Obed is with his father under the hood of the GMC. He sees me and his face lights up. I know immediately that there is a new money-making scheme he wants to share with me.
“Hey, homey, don’t see much of you lately,” he says, coming to join me on the porch. We sit down on the steps.
“You shouldn’t do this to your mother,” I say.
He says Ruth started the whole thing. All he was asking for was the GMC for a few days because he has to see his Shawnee brothers in Oklahoma on a matter that will benefit the family. If she had given him the pickup he would have borrowed some money from me since he knows for sure he would be able to pay me back with a hundred percent interest. When he explained his mission to Ruth she pooh-poohed the whole idea, and added insult to injury by claiming that the Quigleys have no Shawnee blood in them. They are Cherokee. It was only then that he decided to hurt Ruth by condemning America’s international adventurism. He knows which buttons to press to raise his mother’s blood pressure.
He shows me a book he is currently reading—thanks to Beth Eddy—that is opening his eyes to the things that are happening out there in the world. The Rule of Christian Fundamentalists is the title.
I congratulate him for reading a book but question the wisdom of driving all the way to Oklahoma in search of his people’s mystic secrets.
“I know you want to be a shaman, but you may be chasing a mirage,” I add.
“It ain’t nothing like that,” he assures me.
He wants to attend a tribal convocation where he is going to present a case for Kilvert to the Shawnee chiefs and elders. He takes out a page of the Athens News from his book and unfolds it.
“Athens County is
among the many Ohio counties that have been named in a recent federal lawsuit by an Oklahoma Indian tribe, which is seeking to reclaim its aboriginal possessory land rights to a large portion of the state,” states the paper. “Ohio Attorney General Jim Petro has said that the lawsuit by the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma has no strong legal foundation. He has suggested that the tribe is mainly seeking to force Ohio to accept casino gambling—an assessment that attorneys for the tribe have essentially confirmed. The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court, demands ownership of more than 93,000 acres in northwest Ohio, as well as hunting, fishing and gathering rights in a large chunk of central and southern Ohio.”
There is a map that shows the counties that are the subject of this litigation. Basically these are the counties that are enclosed by the Miami River in the west, the Ohio River in the south and the southeast, and the Hocking River in the east and a line north of Columbus. The suit, based on the 1795 Treaty of Greenville, claims that historically the Shawnee hunting grounds stretched from the Hocking River, and Obed wants to ascertain that Kilvert is included there.
“This is the chance for my people,” he says. “We gonna have a casino in Kilvert one of them days.”
He has been following this issue for quite some time, even before the paper publicized it. He wants this casino very much for his children and will not let Ruth’s insistence on a Cherokee heritage deprive him of what is rightfully his. It becomes obvious to me that here we have the present reshaping the past in its image.
“You don’t have children,” I say.
“I am gonna have them one day,” he says matter-of-factly.
“With Beth Eddy?”
He chuckles shyly and says: “It don’t matter with who.”
“She’s a good influence. Now you’re shy all of a sudden.”
“She don’t influence me no how. It don’t mean just because she’s a college girl she influence me.”