Cion (37 page)

This comes out of the blue. Move on where? What amazes me—pleasantly so—is that she is including herself in that moving on.

“Didn’t you say you was going in search of mourning?” she asks. “Don’t you want me to come along?”

“Yes, I do. I do, Orpah.”

“And you can do your mourning thing or whatever and I’m gonna play my sitar.”

“I once heard of Virginia mourners. That will be our starting point—Virginia. We’ll search for the Virginia mourners. But you can’t drive alone. You promised you’d teach me to drive.”

“We’ll do that on the road. I am gonna pack right away. We gonna leave today.”

“It can’t be today, Orpah. It can’t be tomorrow either. We’ve got to take our time. Plus I’ve got to find your grandma’s grave. I’ve got to mourn for her.”

She is disappointed. No. She is crushed. She glowers at me, her eyes flaming flames. Then she stands up and stamps her feet and yells at me. She throws a tantrum that would be the envy of any spoiled brat. Why should we stay to mourn people who died decades ago? Why should it matter to me if I find the grave or not? Why should I expect her to stay in Kilvert when her daddy won’t even talk to her?

She takes one of her pictures lying on the pillow and tears it to pieces.

“Now you’re doing Ruth’s work for her?” I ask. I have never seen her like this. This thing with Mahlon must really be getting to her.

She jets out of the RV and runs all the way to her house.

I don’t see Orpah for many days after this. Since she won’t come to the RV anymore I go to her house. I can hear her playing her sitar furiously. It is
the
sitar. The one that makes my blood rage all over the place. Ruth tells me gleefully: “She don’t wanna see you.”

She lets me use her phone and I call a cab from Athens. I need to get as far away from the damnable sitar as possible. I also need to locate the grave, mourn the dead and leave Kilvert and southeast Ohio once and for all. I will go the way I came. I will not take the RV with me. I can’t drive the damn thing in any case. They can do what they want with it. Maybe Obed will sell it to finance one of his shaky ventures. Although he has been quiet for quite some time now about them. Since the Beth Eddy thing got more serious. He has been quiet even about the casino, although he continues to await the outcome of the Shawnee claim with eagerness.

It’s high time I bought my own cellphone and that’s the first thing I do when I get to the East State Street stores. I get a phone book and call Terry Gilkey. He is prepared to talk to me even at such short notice. He gives me directions to his place of employment, and I ask the cabdriver to take me to the city’s Division of Water and Sewer on the west side of town.

Gilkey tells me he is the keeper of the records of the city cemeteries. He was assigned that role by the mayor around 1988 because no one was interested in it. It has been his hobby over the years and it results from his interest in genealogy. His forebears lived in these parts even before the city was established slightly more than two hundred years ago. For the city it is a public relations exercise to let Gilkey help people locate the graves of their loved ones for no fee. He is regarded as an expert in the field. Even the historical society directs people to him.

The process of locating graves is a painless one. Gilkey has records. He got some of these from the State Department of Mental Health and from the psychiatric hospital on West Union Street. After giving him the name and estimated year of death of old Mrs. Quigley he pages through an old book titled
Athens Mental Health Center Grave Record #1 Female 1880
–
1945
. I think the woman will be in this book. Mahlon is about sixty-five years old. The woman was committed while she was pregnant with him. He was actually born at the mental home at The Ridges. He was handed back to the Quigleys when he was about six months old. I think being separated from her baby broke the poor woman’s heart even more and she died a year later.

“Lots of these folks were not crazy at all,” says Gilkey. “Some of them had Alzheimer’s or something that we understand today.”

“I know,” I say. “This one’s madness was that she was Caucasian and fell in love with a colored man from a neighboring village.”

“That was madness all right. Back in the day they were dead scared of intermarriages.”

“It was fine…at least it was tolerated…for guys like the first Tabler and the first Quigley to have colored wives, but for a colored man to have a white wife was a crime. I just wonder what reasons were documented for her committal.”

Gilkey suggests that we can find the committal papers of these patients in the archives at the university. They have an index of all the committal papers on microfiche. From these papers we can see where the patient came from, who committed her and what reasons were given for the committal. I thank him for the offer but tell him that that kind of information is not important for my purposes. All I need is to locate the grave.

Gilkey pages through the book. The names are listed alphabetically with grave numbers next to each name. But there is no Quigley here. I call Ruth.

“I didn’t think you was gonna do it,” she says. “Of course there ain’t no Quigley there. It ain’t the Quigleys who committed her. It’s her own family. They wouldn’t have used no Quigley ’cause they didn’t recognize the marriage. She was of the Tobias family. Margaret Tobias.”

And there is her name with a grave number. She died and was buried in 1943.

“Her grave’s gonna be at Cemetery Number 2,” says Gilkey.

We drive to The Ridges. As the van makes its way on a steep hill I recognize the cemetery I visited that night of the pagans. It is Cemetery Number 1, says Gilkey. Everybody here was buried much earlier than ’43. The graves date from 1880 to 1901. This is the cemetery where people were buried with only numbers on their gravestones. Most families cannot pay respects to their relatives who died condemned as lunatics because there is no information on the graves. They are not aware how easy it is to locate these graves if only they can consult Terry Gilkey.

There is a third cemetery across the lane from the Dairy Barn. All the graves in that one have names and it goes up to 1949 or perhaps 1950—Gilkey can’t quite remember.

At Cemetery Number 2 the grounds are as well kept as in the others—thanks to The Ridges Restoration Project. Half of the graves only have numbers and the rest have names and numbers. Men were buried on one side and women on a separate side. The decorum of the age: no mixing and no hanky-panky even in death.

Margaret Tobias’s grave has no name, but it is not difficult to locate it because of Gilkey’s meticulous records.

“So now that you found it what’re you gonna do with it?” asks Gilkey.

“The relatives will construct a tombstone when they can afford it,” I tell him. “In the meantime I will mourn her death.”

“Hey, she died decades ago,” he says. He thinks I am joking.

“I mourn deaths. Even if they happened centuries ago,” I explain. “I am a professional mourner.”

He still thinks I am joking.

“Like the Aztecs? They used to have this funny guy who stood at the entrance of the pyramids and made a hell of a noise every time somebody died. Until the bereaved came and paid him money.”

“I am that guy.”

Sunday morning. September leaves are falling. Golden. Yellow. Red. The sun is shining starkly through the branches once hidden. The wind playfully picks up the leaves and lets them float in the air before dropping them on the grass. We stand around Margaret Tobias’s grave. There is Ruth in her blue sweats despite the hot weather, Obed in his khaki shorts and red plaid shirt, Orpah and Mahlon, both in denim jeans and T-shirts. I am, of course, in my professional mourner costume of black top hat, black cape and black pants.

The gravestone with the number is under a pile of assorted flowers bought from Kroger. There is a pile of pawpaws with their rough green skins next to the flowers. They are some kind of offering since one of the Native American ancestors used to grow the fruit. This one, however, is from the wild and was brought by Obed a few days ago.

“We should of invited Brother Michael to do them prayers,” says Obed.

“We ain’t gonna taint your grandma with no Brother Michael,” says Ruth. “We all know how to pray.”

Then she goes on to tell us about biracial kids. She is obviously referring to Mahlon because she is looking at him. It is good that her visitor found the grave. Biracial kids need to know their history because biracial kids pick up all sorts of diseases. Blacks give them black diseases such as diabetes and whites give them their own white diseases.

I don’t know why she says Mahlon is biracial. Maybe tri-racial is not in her vocabulary. No one questions her about how locating this grave will help Mahlon escape white diseases. She reminds her small congregation that her people come in all colors of the rainbow, and therefore they are the race of the future. Unfortunately during the days of the very same Margaret Tobias we are honoring today, those who had pale faces and blond hair changed their names and did not want to associate with those of color anymore. They tried to live like Caucasians among Caucasians. But guess what? Many are now coming back to claim their heritage. It is now fashionable to be a person of color.

“And you know why?” she asks looking at each one of us expectantly. But no one wants to provide the answer.

“Because of them programs,” says Ruth.

“It is more like they are drawn back by the ancestors, not some darn programs,” says Obed, getting fed up with his mother’s digressions.

I thought the young man had learned not to contradict Ruth unnecessarily. Otherwise he’ll get her started. Before she can lash out I appeal for calm in both of them. We have come here to return Margaret Tobias’s dignity. The discussion is important, but there will be time for it later.

“Today I am going to mourn for you like I’ve never mourned before,” I tell the small congregation. “Your culture frowns upon excessive display of crying at a funeral. You were taught to be embarrassed to show grief in public. I am therefore going to do it on your behalf. I am hoping that your genes still understand public wailing. After all, some of your ancestors came from Ireland and the Irish have mastered public mourning at wakes. They know how to keen and lament for all the world to witness. When the Irish bereaved can’t do it themselves they hire professional mourners to do it for them. Surely your genes have memory of this? Surely Mahlon’s stories have memory of this?”

“My memories ain’t got no memory of their own,” says Mahlon quietly. “I can only tell what the ghost trees tell me.”

He is defensive, but I was not trying to blame him for anything. I don’t want to agitate him. It was not easy to convince him to come here. He is still unhappy with Orpah and did not want to involve himself in anything that has to do with me. It was only after Obed sat out on the porch with him and showed him that he would not be coming here for me or for Orpah or for anybody else but his own mother. Ruth also helped to persuade him. When he got into the GMC this morning he kept on repeating that he was only doing this for his wife.

Ruth asks Obed to lead us in prayer. It is at this stage that I begin my mourning routine. I do not sit on the mound as I usually do. There is no mound to sit on. But also I want to perform the mourning. For the first time in my mourning career I want to perform. I want to dance to my wails. And I wail my laments so loud that the trees begin to shake and shed more leaves. I howl and growl and cry like the wind. Tears run from my eyes like the waters of the Hocking River. I incorporate some of the movements I saw Mahlon perform through the window. My whole performance routine, except for the sounds, is informed by his routine.

Mahlon recognizes himself in my movements and breaks out laughing. Everybody looks at him in astonishment. Mahlon has not laughed for ages.

I screech like an animal in pain. I am drenched in sweat and tears. I perform variations that draw from his movements. I can see that he is mesmerized. Orpah is open-mouthed. Obed is wide-eyed. Ruth is befuddled. This is the crowning glory of my mourning since I arrived in this country. I continue furiously for about an hour. Then I fall down in utter exhaustion.