Zakes Mda - Cion

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.”