Zakes Mda - Cion

This is my opportunity to tell her of my plan to look for Mahlon’s mother’s grave. What did she think of the idea? Would she give me her blessing?

“What for?” she asks, looking at me with suspicion.

I follow her back to the porch.

“Because I won’t do it if you don’t think it’s a good idea.”

“Why you wanna look for the grave?”

She sits on the swing but does not invite me to sit next to her as she used to.

“I like you and Mahlon and your son and daughter. I want to help. You once told me it would make all the difference in Mahlon’s life if the grave was located and a tombstone was erected on it.”

“Mr. Quigley don’t have no time for you…you know that. He’s gonna kill you one of them days.”

I laugh and say, “Mahlon Quigley can’t kill anybody.”

“He’s a good man,” she says, looking at me pityingly, “but if you piss him off too much you never know what he’s gonna do.”

It is an empty threat and she knows I know it. I can see it in her expression that even as she makes it she is aware that I don’t believe her. The nighttime performances have shown me how much of a gentle soul Mahlon Quigley is.

“No one who tells such wonderful stories can kill anybody,” Isay.

“How you gonna find the grave? You come all the way from Africa and you think you can find graves here in the good ol’ U. S. of A.?”

“I have a grave-radar,” I say jokingly. “Remember, I found Niall Quigley’s African grave under a tree in the woods.”

Of course she remembers. Was she not the one who decreed that it must not be disturbed but must be left as it was? Didn’t she overrule Obed, who wanted to turn it into a shrine for his heathen practices or even a tourist attraction to be advertised in the Athens News so that people could come and pay money to see it? How would the first Quigley, Lord have mercy on him, rest in peace with all those crude eyes ogling his resting place?

“You stealing my kids away and now you say you wanna help find their grandma’s grave?”

I don’t see the connection, but Ruth will always be Ruth.

“They’re not children, Ruth. They’re adults. You don’t steal adults away.”

“I hear Orpah is always in your RV. God knows what you do there. And Obed, we don’t see him no more ’cause your meddling got him together with that Beth Eddy or whatever. He says she’s gotten him a job or something. And now they shack together, which is a sin against the Bible.”

Throughout my stay here Ruth has been complaining that Obed doesn’t want to make anything of his life. Yet she wants to maintain a strong hold on him and doesn’t want to let him go. The specter of his independence scares her.

Mahlon arrives with tackle and a lunch box. His boots and jeans are muddy. I think he has come from an unsuccessful fishing expedition at a nearby pond.

“Hi, Mahlon,” I say displaying a broad smile to emphasize the fact that I am desperate to be friends with him. “They didn’t bite today, did they?”

He merely looks at me with his smile. I can detect contempt in it. Somehow one is able to read different moods in the unchanging smile when one gets to know the man enough. He pretends that I don’t exist and walks into the house.

“I told you he hates you,” says Ruth gleefully. “He thinks you taking Orpah away from him.”

“You think so too, don’t you? You just said I am stealing your children away.”

“I think so too. But I’m a Christian woman; I don’t hate nobody.”

“I don’t understand this, Ruth. You always complained that Orpah did not get out enough…that she was not independent enough…that she sat in her room all day long playing the sitar and drawing pictures.”

She takes out bits of red slate from one of the pockets of her sweats and chews furiously. In no time her teeth are red like blood.

“She ain’t independent when she’s with you,” she says.

“You want her to be with Nathan?”

“’Cause he’s gonna make her a good husband.”

“And he won’t take her away?”

“Damn right he won’t. Orpah’s ours. No one must take her away.”

In August the different shades of green that dominate the Kilvert summer now sport patches of yellow. The leaves become smaller; you can see further into the woods. And Orpah and Mahlon don’t talk anymore. Although Ruth thinks it is my fault, I learn from Orpah after pleading with her to tell me what the problem is that I have nothing to do with it.

Mahlon discovered her deception about ghost orchids. He learned that she was creating them from found objects and sticking them on the sycamores for him to discover. And he was presenting them to her as gifts from the memories. They ended up in her collages. I don’t know what devil got into Orpah to confess that she was the creator of the ghost orchids in the first place. She expected Mahlon to take the whole thing as the big joke it was meant to be and was astonished when he exploded and accused her of betrayal. Not only had she betrayed him she had also pissed on the sanctity of the memories. He added that she would never have betrayed him if it were not for my evil presence in their lives.

I must admit that I am a bit skeptical about Mahlon’s anger here. How could a man who knows so much about trees not have known in the first place that ghost orchids don’t grow around these parts and the ones he discovered were artificial? Was he play-acting or did his memories close his eyes and his mind to the fact?

But his anger has lasted for a few days. At first Orpah did not take it seriously and thought that her father would come around and they would have their midnight memories again. On the third day she began to worry. She missed Mahlon. She missed the memories. She begged for his forgiveness but he ignored her. He goes about his life without even looking at her when they chance upon each other in the house.

I know how it is when Mahlon decides you don’t exist.

Orpah spends even more time in my RV than ever before. But she never brings the sitar with her even when I beg her to. I am just wondering what that sitar would do to my body if she played it in my RV. Would it have the same effect that it had on me when the sound leaked from her room or would it just be beautiful music as it was at the bluegrass festival in Huntington, West Virginia? It did not have any adverse physical effect on me that night. I guess I have no way of knowing as long as she won’t play it here.

But what has happened over the days, even without the aid of the sitar, is that we have eased each other into intimacy. The first night she spent at the RV was difficult. She was all bravado, claiming great experience, and I was a whimpering fool. But soon she became the whimpering one. I have a tongue that knows its way around the strategic parts of bodies, thanks to Noria’s lessons. And her memory did intrude just at that time. Noria. She won’t rest until she is mourned.

It was different with Noria. She had been experienced by many men before me and that made her even more desirable. Orpah, on the other hand, was not only an emotional virgin. She was a virgin virgin. And this discovery did not make our first real night together particularly memorable.

I remember Obed telling me once: “Orpah, she never messed with nobody. Whenever some teenager had gotten knocked up my mama fear it was gonna happen to Orpah. She took her to the doc for a diaphragm. To Orpah that was an insult ’cause she didn’t plan to be doing nothing with boys.”

Tonight is the fourth night and our bodies are beginning to find each other. Me and Orpah are screaming like there is no tomorrow.