Zakes Mda - Cion

“’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.”

“She makes you read.”

“I make me read.”

“She is beautiful,” I say.

“She’s put together good,” he agrees and laughs.

Ruth walks out of the house. I suspect she is not pleased to see the “boy” who infuriated her only a few minutes ago sitting on the steps with me and laughing in such a carefree manner. She mutters something to herself. It is really meant for our ears. She says that ever since I came here her children think they know everything. And now I think I am going to buy everybody with presents. First I gave Mr. Quigley a gnome. And now I am trying to bribe her with newfangled quilting tools that she will never use since her mother and her grandmother taught her how to quilt the right way.

“That’s what the Devil gone and done to Christ…with ten pieces of silver.”

“They was thirty, Mama,” Obed calls after her as she takes the corner. “They was thirty pieces of silver.”

We no longer hear what else she has to say. Obed laughs even louder at my befuddled look.

I get another opportunity to mourn at a live funeral. Sister Naomi’s funeral. She had continued to keep the sheriff busy with her meth labs, despite the fact that Brother Michael and the congregation spent hours praying for her and on three occasions she testified in the chocolate church that she had finally seen the light and her ways had changed. The Lord had mercy on her, but super-speed was merciless. It made her do things that were frowned upon by good Christians like Ruth. Such as cruising the bars of Athens looking for men and demanding that they should do her in the backseats of their cars. Super-speed made her insatiable. She was indeed uncontrollable and people started questioning why she was set free from the slammer since she did not seem to have learned any lessons from her son’s death. Well, she was freed because she denied knowing anything about the meth lab in the van, and her boyfriend was the one who was found guilty and was serving a long prison term in Nelsonville.

Kilverters had to watch helplessly as Sister Naomi wasted away, spending up to twelve hours a day in bed, fast asleep, neglecting everything and everybody, hiding the smile that used to be so brilliant. Her teeth had now fallen out and her gums were black. She was losing so much weight she was but a skeleton. Her skin had lesions. “She looks like she’s been bobbing for French fries,” the women at the Center whispered. She was too far gone to be saved from the addiction, and when she died there was relief all around. And all this happened so fast, in a matter of weeks.