Zakes Mda - Cion

In no time I am sewing together two blocks. My stops and starts are not clean at all, and my first block is a bit messy. But the women cheer and are encouraging. They claim that my first attempt is better than their own first attempts when they were learning to quilt as little girls, even though the blocks have come out uneven because my seams are not equal. Barbara teaches me how to correct this by having a pin between the seams when sewing blocks together.

As I am beginning to enjoy this, a tall graceful middle-aged woman enters and announces in a husky voice that she has come to see how her relatives are doing. She is obviously one of the daughters of Kilvert who have done well and live in a city somewhere. Everyone is excited to see her. Her name is Marge, I am told.

“His name is Toloki,” Irene tells Marge. “We’re learning him how to sew.”

At least now I am not just Ruth’s African.

Marge is pleased to see me and wants to know how I discovered Kilvert. But even before I can answer she breaks into a song. She is a happy soul, this Marge. She goes to the piano in the corner, uncovers it with a flourish and starts playing. She sings in a beautifully robust voice: Why should my heart be lonely? When she gets to the chorus they all join her and sing in unison: I sing because I am happy. Oh, yes, I sing because I am free. There are unshed tears in my eyes. I love these people. I join in the chorus. No one cares that my voice was not made for singing. What matters is that the song moves me. It is very much unlike the music I heard at the chocolate church the other day.

A baritone joins the chorus from the door. It is Nathan and he is in hunter orange. When the song comes to an end, and after exchanging greetings with Marge, he says he is looking for me.

“What are you doing with a sewing machine?” he asks.

“We’re learning him how to sew,” says Irene.

He’s going to join Obed and Mahlon at the turkey hunt and would like me to come with him. He couldn’t leave with them at dawn because he had to make an urgent delivery of a septic tank at some construction site. Ruth told him he would find me here. He doesn’t have to tell me that she urged him to take me with him to do “man things.”

“It’s fun,” he says. “You won’t regret it.”

I have been quilting for an hour or so, observes one woman. That is enough for my first day lest I get bored and never come back again. The other women agree that it will do me a world of good to get some fresh air in the woods while shooting wild turkeys, which, if I do not know it yet, are much tastier than domestic ones. But Irene dampens their enthusiasm by noting that since I had not planned to go turkey hunting in the first place I do not have a hunting permit. What is Nathan going to do about that?

This is my chance to wiggle out. Much as I would have loved to join the turkey hunt, I announce grandly, I would not like to break the law. If spring turkey permits are required for turkey hunting, then I will get one at some later date and will join the men for their next hunt. This ruse will hopefully buy me time.

The next turkey hunting season will be next fall, Nathan explains. The hunting season is very short. This one, for instance, started on April 18 and ends on May 15. And since hunters are allowed only two bearded turkeys per hunter per hunting season the Quigleys and Nathan himself will not be going hunting again until next fall. If I thought this was good news for me, I was wrong. Nathan is very persuasive.

“Okay, you won’t hunt,” he says. “You’ll just follow me to see how an experienced hunter works, but you won’t shoot nothing.”

Perhaps we’ll be fortunate enough not to find any turkey to shoot, so I let everyone prevail on me. This may also be an opportunity to learn more about Nathan, and therefore about Orpah. Especially about Orpah and her relationship with her father. This is something that has bothered me ever since I saw the man waltzing into her room that first night. And it had bothered me even more when I saw it happen again. And again. On two more occasions. He was in a period costume on both of them. A knight in armor one night, and a Sultan in flowing robes on another. I do not know if Orpah was in costume too, since she did not appear at the door. Both instances I went to the window to listen but could only hear mumblings and humming and declamations with indistinct dialogue and singing and giggling and laughing. He was in her room for more than an hour before he snuck out and Orpah played her sitar. Although she plucked the strings with a vengeance the music did not arouse me this time, though I could not ignore its melancholy.

I had been determined to save Orpah from Mahlon. But after these two visits I decided that she was too far gone to be saved. Despite myself I began to feel some resentment toward her. Even when she tried to reach out there was some resistance in me. Such as one early morning when we both rushed to the bathroom at the same time. She smiled and said I should go ahead. I did not return the smile. I merely turned and walked away, even though I knew that she was going to spend hours in the bathroom as is her habit. No one knows what she does there all that time. She called after me but I walked on. I went to take a dump in the woods — a practice I found strange and unacceptable at first, until Obed asked me: “What do you think we do when we go hunting in the woods? Take our shitter with us?” So, everyone else does it when Orpah is hogging the bathroom. Except Ruth, who hollers and stamps her feet until Orpah scurries out of the little room.

But later I was ashamed of my open resentment of her, although I still felt that I should stay as far away from her as the circumstances of my living under her parents’ roof would allow.

We drive in the woodlands in Nathan’s red Chevy Blazer. The dirt road is so narrow that I wonder what he’ll do if another vehicle approaches in the opposite direction. He tells me about the trees. I didn’t think he cared about them. I seem to remember that he was dismissive of Obed’s ghost trees that flood day we rode with him in his truck slightly more than six months ago. But here he talks of them with passion. I guess you can’t live in the midst of this wealth and then fail to appreciate it. This forest is not more than seventy years old, he tells me. It was planted as one of the Public Works Department programs during the Depression. Some kind of poverty alleviation. His late grandfather told him that when he first came to settle here (he married into the Kilvert community after being recruited from Wales for his expertise in the smelting of iron) there were only bare hills and poor cornfields. There were no wild animals either. Not a single deer or turkey. Not even a beaver. All the trees that used to grow here hundreds of years ago were destroyed. They had been cut down for wood and lumber, and exported to New York and other states. Some of the timber was used for charcoal to feed the iron furnaces where his grandpa worked. Then of course there were the deep wounds left by strip mining.

“You can’t see them no more now ’cause of the new forest,” he says.

“After the old forest was gone how did it come back?” I ask. It is such a thick forest with gigantic trees that it is hard to believe that these were once barren hills only a few generations ago.

The farmers were starving to death. They couldn’t pay the taxes either. They couldn’t even sell the land to anyone because nobody would buy such poor land. Some abandoned it and went to look for work in the cities. So, the federal government bought more than a million acres. The farmers, one of whom was his grandpa, who had by then retired from the iron furnaces and was scraping the land for a meager livelihood, were told they could live free of charge in their houses and could keep only a small vegetable garden. The rest of the land was used for planting trees. Many people got employment planting the millions of trees that have today become the Wayne National Forest.