Cion (31 page)

Instead of calling off the search, Orpah creates her own ghost orchids from thin plastic material and sticks them on the sycamore trees. Where else should ghost orchids grow but on ghost trees?

I observe all these things silently. At first I don’t understand what is happening. But the saga of the ghost orchids becomes clearer as it unfolds.

Orpah continues to bug me. She asks me to accompany her to the Silent Chinese Auction at the Center one Saturday morning.

“Why don’t you go with Nathan?” I ask her.

“He didn’t ask,” she says. “Anyway the auction is from ten this morning…to two. Nathan’s at work.”

“Well, maybe you should go with your father,” I suggest.

“I’m sure he’ll be there as well. I wanna go with you.”

I was going to go to the auction in any event. And so Orpah and I walk silently to the Center. She would be exquisite if it were not for her heavy makeup that almost cakes her face and the loud, mostly plastic, jewelery.

There are cakes, pies, hot dogs and sloppy joes on one of the long tables. I buy Orpah a hot dog and we walk from table to table looking at the wares. All these have been donated to raise funds for the Center so that it may pay its utilities and purchase more food from the food bank. There are children’s toys, boxes of cutlery, cookbooks, television sets and the ubiquitous quilt. There are also washing machines, sewing machines, a new bike and a number of other household items. Next to each item there is a sheet of paper where one writes one’s bid.

Mahlon is glaring at me, sans the smile. I did not know he was capable of not smiling. I have seen him smile at the worst of times. Why, even when a fight was imminent between Nathan and Obed he was smiling. But here he is, looking at me with a smileless face. He certainly does not approve of my “date” with his daughter. Hard luck; I am with her now. And to emphasize that point I grab her hand, which takes her by surprise. But she does not draw it away. She greets him and he responds with a smile. But his face becomes stern again when his eyes shift to me. Orpah adopts the voice of a little girl when talking to Mahlon. I find this very unsettling.

Orpah is fascinated by a gnome. She tops the last bid on it and I am amazed that people want this gnome so much that they are willing to pay a very high price for it. Orpah explains that this is not just any old gnome. It is a famous George W. Bush gnome invented by one Sam Girton, an Athenian no less, and it sells internationally on eBay and always creates a flurry of bidding. It comes with accessories: If you love Bush then you place an American flag in his hand. If you hate Bush you make him hold a bag of money with a dollar sign on it or a machine gun. The gnome is popular with Bush haters and Bush lovers.

“I didn’t know you’d be interested in this sort of thing,” I say.

“It’s not for me,” she says. “I’m buying it for you to give to Daddy as a present.”

“Why would I give your father a gift?”

“Because he don’t like you and you want him to like you.”

“I don’t want him to like me.”

“You staying at his house.”

She says she is not going to move away from the gnome so as to outbid anyone who has the intention of topping her bid. And she does so. I have never seen her this happy before. She whispers to me why it is necessary to appease her father. For some time now he has been trying to sabotage my stay at the house. For instance, he was the one who “lost” the key to the cellar and I had to find a place to sleep in Obed’s room. I remember the night but didn’t know Mahlon had anything to do with it. She finds this very funny and laughs. Now I hear that he has done other things too, but they were always foiled by none other than Orpah. Obviously she is enjoying what she perceives as rivalry between her father and me.

At the end of the auction I discover to my surprise that she has been writing my name on the bid, instead of hers. I am not amused at having to pay for the gnome but I don’t argue about it. Later that evening she gives it to her father in my name. In the morning I see it basking in the sun among other gnomes in Mahlon’s garden. The man never thanks me for it.

I do not see Orpah after that for a number of days. But I hear her relentless sitar at odd hours of the day or night. The next time I set my eyes on her we are at the Appalachian Rising Bluegrass Festival at a farm outside Huntington, West Virginia. She is with Nathan, who is holding her sitar in a case. I am here with Obed and had no idea Orpah would be here too. I am not one for music festivals but Obed begged me to come with him. He had bought tickets for himself and Beth Eddy, but at the last minute she told him she couldn’t make it because of a family commitment. He also felt that Ruth would be more comfortable parting with her GMC for the better part of the day and night if she knew I’d be wherever the GMC was. Obviously the young man has an exaggerated impression of the esteem in which Ruth may or may not hold me.

Orpah looks like a Gypsy queen in her fuchsia skirt, sequinned silver top and coin hoop earrings that almost touch her shoulders. She is ill at ease.

People are enthralled by a band of five—a sliding guitar, a banjo, a seventy-string hammer dulcimer, a fiddle and an acoustic guitar—playing Celtic traditional music. When they play bluegrass it is heavily Irish-traditional. This prompts a group of men to mount the makeshift stage and begin clogging. There are yells of excitement when the champion fiddler takes a solo while he joins the clogging.

This is my first bluegrass festival and I am enjoying it.

“Bluegrass is human,” says Orpah. “It’s about people, that’s why.”

We get pop and some hot dogs. The two guys are on their best behavior. I would have thought they would be drowning themselves in beer by now. Maybe it’s Orpah’s influence on Nathan.

We walk to another part of the festival and here a different band is on the stage. In addition to the banjo and three fiddles this one also has a ukulele and a mandolin. A woman vocalist with a gravelly voice is very popular with the crowd. People are clapping their hands and stamping their feet.

There are many other stages, but we return to the first one because there is an open mike at this time.

After much persuasion from the three of us, with Nathan holding her to the promise she made before they left Kilvert that she would play for the public for the first time in her life, Orpah takes the stage with her sitar. Its whines bring everyone to attention.

An old guy with a sliding guitar cannot help but join her. So does a flute, a lap dulcimer, a fiddle and a banjo. And soon the impromptu band is giving bluegrass standards a tone that has never been heard before. I don’t know what they call an event like this in the bluegrass culture. I would call it a jam session if it was jazz. And it is Orpah’s sitar that breaks from the standards in improvised leaps before it returns to them to find the graybeards just ready to reincorporate it in the song with their varied instruments.

The audience doesn’t dance. Doesn’t yell. Doesn’t clap or sing along. Everybody is transfixed. Including us. I am just open-mouthed. We are all mesmerized by what we hear. When the song comes to an end there is utter silence for some time. Then an outburst of cheers and screams. There are tears in my eyes. Nathan is beaming with pride. Obed’s face displays disbelief.

The crowd doesn’t want Orpah to leave the stage even after open mike time. Band members crowd around her asking for her contact details because they’d like to invite her to join them for this or that gig. At this point Nathan moves forward and takes charge of the situation. Anyone who wants to contact Orpah with any proposal should do it through him. But she dashes away in a huff, elbowing her way through the crowd. The three of us run after her.

“What’s up with you, Orpah?” demands Obed when we catch up with her.

“Where do you get off being my owner?” she asks, glaring at Nathan.

“Someone’s gotta look after you, Orpah,” says Nathan. “You know how they exploit artists here. ’Specially if they’re naive like you.”

“I ain’t no one’s artist,” she screams. “And no one made you my agent or manager or whatever else you think you are.”

Nathan is taken aback by her vehemence. He was only trying to look after her interests, he says. He accuses her of being ungrateful. After all, she didn’t even want to come to this festival and he persuaded her. It was also his idea that she bring the sitar along to play during open mike. And now that she sees fame beckoning she is turning against him. This annoys Orpah even more. She demands to be taken back to Kilvert. Not by Nathan, but by her brother and me. But Obed is reluctant to leave because he is still enjoying the festival.

“There’ll be other festivals, Obed,” I say. “Please do take your sister home.”

“Who asked you?” Nathan screams at me. “This ain’t Africa. You don’t think I know you’re into her? You don’t think I don’t see the way you’ve been eyeing her?”

A surprised Orpah looks at me questioningly.

Obed is sulking as we walk to the parking area. No one utters a word in the two hours it takes us to get to Kilvert. It is about 8
P.M
. when Obed parks the GMC and walks away, perhaps to kill time with a friend.

“You don’t wanna come to my room?” asks Orpah.

I do not show her that I am taken aback.

“Was Nathan right?” she asks. “Was he telling the truth?”

“What if your father finds me there?” I ask, ignoring her question.

“He don’t come at this time,” she says. All so innocently. “Anyways, he don’t come if we don’t plan it that way,” she adds, I suppose as a way of assuring me that we’ll be safe.

Curiosity gets the better of me.

Orpah’s room is a shrine to Marilyn Monroe. There are posters of Marilyn Monroe on the pink walls. Pursed lips blowing into the mike. Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe. Many posters in different sizes. Some mounted. Others framed. The wind blowing her skirt. There is a framed picture of a much younger Orpah—maybe a high school Orpah—standing on an air vent with air blowing her dress in a Marilyn Monroe pose. Norma Jean in two larger than life cardboard cut-outs. There is even a coffee mug with the face of Marilyn Monroe.

I find the presence of this dead woman in Orpah’s room unsettling.

The only chair in the room has piles of pine-scented laundry so I sit on the bed. For a while we don’t know what to do with each other. Then, as if on cue, we simultaneously reach for each other and kiss.

“Oh, I am going to smudge your makeup,” I say. “But what the heck, you only live once.”

I have not been with a woman in the biblical sense since the death of Noria almost two years ago. She is still very much in my mind because I never mourned her. My people have a saying that a doctor cannot heal himself. When a lawyer is charged with a crime he needs another lawyer to defend him. Likewise a professional mourner cannot mourn his own loss. My hope has been that in my wanderings I would find another competent professional mourner who would mourn Noria for me. Until she has been mourned she will continue to be very much part of me. Or so I thought. Until I saw Orpah and heard her sitar. Now my body is raging with desire.

We undress each other in a manner that speaks only of lust. And there in front of me stands the most beautiful thing in the world. But what strikes me about the pubic hair is that it is blonde. Almost golden. And it is gleaming in the light. She notices my astonishment and turns away as if in shame.

“It’s the fuckin’ mark of the fuckin’ Irishman and I’ve got to live with it,” she says vehemently. It’s beautiful, I assure her. It is not, she retorts. Her hair is black. Her armpits are black. Why should it be “fuckin’ blonde”?

She will never know that I have never looked at a pussy before. Never seen it and its intricacies. Never explored its various corridors. Years back, when I broke my vows of celibacy and gave up my life as a monk of my own order of professional mourners for Noria, I plunged into her without ever looking at it. She used to tease me about that: “What if there’s nothing there…that I have tricked you with an artificial one made of plastic?” And I would respond: “Guess I will never know. It’s fine that way.”

But Orpah is now withdrawn. She rolls herself in a fetal position. I hold her in my arms. We cuddle on her pink duvet. Nothing happens beyond that. I just rest my member on her thighs until the fury is over. And we both drift into a deep sleep.

Dawn is a whisper away and soon the birds will chirp. The medium man treads lightly in the forest looking for ghost orchids. Broken limbs of trees are scattered on the ground. His socks in his shoes are soggy and the lower legs of his pants are wet with dew. Before entering the forest he walked on the grass dotted with yellow dandelions waiting to unfold their petals with the rise of the sun.

The medium man has spent many days and many nights looking very closely at the trunks of trees. He hopes nighttime will bear fruit in the form of a gleaming ghost orchid. Perhaps they come out in the night and sleep during daytime. They are, after all, ghosts. That may be the reason he has failed to find them in the day. He imagines they transform from the shape of a frog that has been flattened by a car to a tiny ball particularly to hide themselves from him. And when they think he is fast asleep or he is performing his memories for the spirit child they unfold themselves and spread out and become the ghost orchids they were meant to be.

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.