by Zakes Mda
“Native Americans,” piped up a politically correct girl.
Another girl, most likely Beth Eddy herself, suggested that it was all that mixture that had made him into such a hunk.
One would have thought young women would be bored by such stories, but they were all agog. Maybe it was because it had something to do with their Nicodemus.
Beth Eddy is the sweetest of the women, and he hopes to see more of her. But I must not think that is the reason for his eagerness to return to the house. It is the responsible thing to do. After all, he did make a solemn promise at the mediation that he would paint the house. He will do exactly that and complete the job.
Nathan arrives with his two kids—a boy of about twelve and a girl of eight or so. He has also brought his turkey for the barbecue. There is a slight tension between him and Obed. They face each other hesitantly. Then they break out laughing while they exchange profanities about how stupid they can sometimes be. The kids run to Orpah, who is sitting on the swing with Mahlon. They are all over her and she is at ease with them and is full of laughter. For some reason there are pangs of jealousy in me.
I offer to take Nathan’s turkey to Ruth. She is in the kitchen cutting part of Obed’s hen into tiny pieces. (She has deep-frozen Mahlon’s bird for the future.) She browns them in a pan with cooking oil. In the meantime she asks me to cut the breast of Nathan’s bird into slabs for the barbecue, while she puts the pieces of hen into a pot on the stove and adds chopped celery, chopped onion, garlic, cayenne pepper, marjoram, cumin, chili powder, paprika and salt.
“Them men have no use for a wild turkey chili that ain’t hot,” she says, perhaps in response to my face that must have shown surprise at the hot spices that were all being used together at the same time. “I would add jalapeño too if I had some.”
She then adds a can each of undrained pinto beans, diced tomatoes and tomato juice to the whole mixture and lets it simmer on the stove.
She asks me to dip the turkey breast slabs in lemon pepper and Heinz 57.
“That what they call us, Son of Egypt—Heinz 57,” she says, as we both use our hands to thoroughly mix the sauce with the meat.
“I hate that name,” I tell her.
“And you know why they call us Heinz 57?” she asks, ignoring my protest. “’Cause there’s a little bit of everything in us. Get it? Like Heinz 57. See Mr. Quigley? See the high cheekbones?”
At this point I am carrying the tray with the turkey breast past Mahlon, Orpah and the kids. Ruth is heaving behind me with her walking stick. But I do not stop to examine Mahlon’s high cheekbones.
“That’s the Indian in him,” Ruth continues. “Indians don’t age. They just fade away. That’s why Mr. Quigley don’t age. He’s Indian through and through. You wouldn’t know his mama was a Caucasian girl from Stewart.”
From Heinz 57 to Mahlon’s mother. I like Ruth!
“It don’t matter no how if Grandma was Caucasian or not, Mama,” protests Obed, as he takes the tray from me and places it on a metal frame that used to be a chair next to the barbecue stand.
“Did I say it matters, boy? Don’t you get into things you don’t know nothing about.”
She walks to the back garden to get some green onions for the pickle that she plans to make.
“Ruth…she makes a bad pickle,” says Nathan, obviously looking forward to the prospect of tasting it.
“She likes to judge people,” whines Obed. “Mama does.”
“She still makes a bad pickle,” says Nathan.
“It ain’t nice to say things about my grandma,” says Obed.
He is basting the meat on the grill. The young men argue about the best way to barbecue the turkey. They agree on one thing though: Heinz 57 is not the best sauce for wild turkey. Nathan should have come early to boil his secret sauce made of butter, lemon juice, thyme, parsley and broth. They are still arguing on how a dose of beer would or would not redeem the sauce when I decide to join Ruth in the back garden. She is no longer there. I find her in the kitchen chopping the green onions. There are three bowls of chopped cucumber, zucchini and okra ready to be mixed for the pickle. These vegetables are not from her garden but from Kroger since the soil is still too cold for them.
“What happened to Mahlon’s mother?” I ask.
“Nothing happened,” says Ruth. “She died.”
After she ran away with Mahlon’s father her parents declared that she was insane. They had her committed at The Ridges where she died, was buried and became just a number. What has bothered Mahlon lately is that when he was doing well raising animals for sale he forgot about her and never honored her memory. This continues to torture his soul to this day. If only her grave could be found, then erecting a proper tombstone with appropriate words to the effect that she was fondly remembered by her son, daughter-in-law and grandchildren, and asking for her forgiveness, would bring peace and good fortune to the rest of the family.
“I’m gonna show you something,” says Ruth in her conspiratorial tone. I follow her to her bedroom where she gets an old Bible from the top drawer of a dressing table. She takes out an old black-and-white—actually brownish—photograph from the Bible and hands it to me with a flourish as if she has performed a magic trick.
“That’s Mr. Quigley’s mama,” she says. “Ain’t she pretty?”
I can’t see any of the prettiness because the picture is too faint.
“Though I last saw her when I was a little kid I remember her pretty black hair.”
I think pretty black hair is a big thing with Ruth. I remember on a few occasions when she was telling me of Abednego’s descendants she would add with great pride: “They had pretty black hair and high foreheads like white people.” Or when she was telling me of the fugitive slaves who arrived in Tabler Town: “They didn’t look like Africans when they came here. They had pretty black hair. My own great-great-grandfather looked almost like a white man. He had pretty black hair.”
With Mahlon’s mother, of course, it goes without saying that she would have pretty hair because she was Caucasian. Even though I cannot see it so well in the photograph, she adds, I must take her word for it because she remembers it quite vividly. The dress she is wearing is made of feed sacks.
“Back in them days they made dresses from feed sacks.”
Even when she herself was a little girl she wore dresses made from feed sacks, though her very special Sunday dresses were made from muslin or gingham. When her mother sewed the dress she cut the pattern on a newspaper and measured it against her body. Then she cut out the neck and the sleeves. After that she would have the whole pattern and would then use the cut newspaper as a stencil on the material. As I can see in the photograph, that is how Mr. Quigley’s mom’s dress was made.
I reckon that feed sacks are like the maize meal or flour sacks we have back home. I have seen Ruth use that kind of material as backing for some of her quilts.
“There was nothing wrong with her,” Ruth says after considering the photo for some time. “She just fell in love with a colored man. And for that they sent her to a madhouse.
“All because white folks are dead scared of being bred out, which is bound to happen sooner or later,” she adds in her conspiratorial tone.
“I suppose that’s the price you pay if you go around colonizing people and enslaving them,” I say light-heartedly.
“It ain’t no price,” she says quite adamantly. “Though they don’t know it now, it’s good for them. It’s good for the world.”
Just as it happened to her Indian people, it will happen to the white races of the world and to the black races too until everyone looks like the Kilvert people. Her people are harbingers of a new human race.
I have heard this before. Just as I have heard of her boasts of being a Cherokee princess—even though a vindictive Brother Michael has declared publicly at his chocolate church that there is no such a thing as a Cherokee princess—and her claims that her great-great-great-grandmother was a queen in Afric
a. This last one I heard a lot last January when the Kilvert Community Center celebrated Martin Luther King Jr. Day. At breakfast she hammered it into her children’s heads—who would be going for lunch at the Center that day—that they should always hold their heads high because they were descendants of an African queen. It was the first time I heard her talk of her African strand with so much pride. Most times her African and Native American ancestors are mentioned in generic terms whereas the white ancestors have names and individual histories. Abednego Fairfield and Harry Corbett were resurrected from the depths of collective imagination by the sciolist to remedy this situation.
I cannot pretend to understand some of the contradictions in the lives of my hosts. The people here claim “we don’t belong to nobody,” yet they celebrate Black History Month in February and the Center organizes a big dinner on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. I do not see them celebrating any other day honoring their Native American or Caucasian heritages. Not even St. Patrick’s Day.
By the time Ruth and I return to the barbecue everyone is feasting on the turkey with bread rolls. Mahlon sits alone on the swing smiling at all he surveys. I look at him and I smile back despite myself. I still resent him. God knows I have tried to convince myself that what happens under his roof is none of my business. But somehow I feel that Orpah should be my business. At the same time I feel sorry for him. For what they did to his mama. I am determined to help him find her grave so that he may pay his due respects to it. Why, I’ll even mourn for the poor woman. Maybe after that whatever is wrong with Mahlon will become right again. And Orpah will be free.
She and the children have joined Obed and Nathan at the barbecue stand. The children are still clinging to Orpah, who is obviously having a great time with them. As we walk toward them Ruth says, “See? Nathan’s kids love her. She can easily be their mama.”
“I don’t think she is ready to be anyone’s mother,” I say. Don’t ask me why. I can be so stupid sometimes.
“Todoloo! No woman is never ready to be a mother.”
Late in the evening Nathan and his kids leave. Ruth insists that he takes some of the wild turkey chili with him. I am surprised that Nathan accepts the container so enthusiastically even though he knows very well it is the hen whose death he took so personally.
“You bring it back,” says Ruth. “That ain’t no cheap plastic. That’s Tupperware.”
One thing I know is that Ruth never gives her Tupperware to anyone. Not even to the two men of the house when they went on the wild turkey hunt. She wrapped their sandwiches in foil paper. Not even to me when once I needed to take my bean soup lunch with me on a hike in the woods. I had to use an ice cream bucket.
Evenings are like daytime in late spring. Since the sun is still shining I decide to take a walk. I thought Orpah would go bury herself in her room and play her confounded sitar, but she follows me. I increase my pace when I see that she is about to catch up with me. She also steps up hers to a trot. I give up because I do not want it to be obvious that I am running away from her. She catches up with me. We walk side by side for some time in silence.
“Where you off to?” she asks finally.
“Just a walk…on my own.”
“I have more drawings for you to hide,” she says.
“I don’t think I want to do that anymore,” I say.
“Come on, man! You know what’ll happen when the tsunami finds them in my room.”
“I don’t think you should call your mama names. It’s disrespectful.”
“You gave her that name.”
Trust her to remember that. I am ashamed that, yes indeed, I gave her mama that name in a moment of wickedness when she was storming through the house doing her spring cleaning in readiness for the New Year. A real tsunami had hit parts of Asia a few days after Christmas. It became part of the exciting family viewing, with every television network showing live pictures of the devastation and the helpless victims and helicopters flying about rescuing people from the treetops. It also became a source of heated argument at the dinner table, with Ruth complaining: “The people of the world think we Americans are one level below God.”
“They are right, Mama,” said Obed. “Even George W. Bush told us that as an American you’re God’s gift to the world.”
“They want us to do everything,” Ruth continued. “Now we’re sending three hundred and fifty million big ones to the tsunami victims.”
“It’s good to do this, Mama,” insisted Obed.
“Who said it ain’t good, boy?” asked Ruth. “If they don’t send no one to look after that money it’s gonna end up with them drug lords and all sorts of other lords.”
Obed did not have an answer for this and I thought it was the end of the subject. But after considering the matter for a few more seconds she burst out: “There’s many poor counties in Ohio…like ours. If they gave some of that money to us…even if it’s two thousand dollars per county…it would make all the difference.”
And this from the very Ruth who was critical of the handouts that she claimed had made her people poorer. I suppose when it comes from the government it is not a handout but a “program.”
“Don’t you mean two million dollars?” asked an increasingly impertinent Obed.
“Whatever! You like to contradict me.”
That was the end of that discussion. But it was just the beginning of the spring cleaning that month. And of the continuation of the destruction of Orpah’s designs. Hence the name. I told Obed: “Don’t provoke the tsunami,” when he was bent on picking every minor bone with Ruth. He found that funny and started calling his mother a tsunami behind her back. Orpah picked it up and liked it too.
Now she is waiting for my response and when it’s not forthcoming she repeats: “You named her that. And Ayatollah Ruth and a Taliban in da House.”
“I am sorry I did. It’s no less disrespectful that it was started by me.”
“Don’t be sorry. She messes up my stuff bad. She is a tsunami.”
“She wants the best for you,” I say.
She is taken aback by this. She stops and looks at me. I walk on. She turns her back and walks away. But she changes her mind and calls after me. I pretend I don’t hear and walk on. She comes trotting after me.
“What’s your problem, man?” she asks.
“You don’t hear me complaining of anything. That means I don’t have a problem.”
I hate Mahlon for making me treat Orpah this way.
She opts for appeasement. She shows me her dry ghost orchid. Her father, she believes, will find her more ghost orchids in the woods. Didn’t I want to see her new work? It is inspired by ghost orchids.
I need an excuse to get rid of her. I tell her that I am going to mourn.
“But you ain’t in your getup,” she says.
“Sometimes I do some of my shaman things without it,” I tell her.
I don’t know if she can see through the lies or not. I don’t care either. She walks away, obviously very disappointed.
In the dying weeks of spring I spend most of my time at the Center. My quilting improves tremendously, though I find the Drunkard’s Path very difficult. Barbara is a patient teacher and shows me how to do it by cutting the shapes out on a newspaper.
“Once you master the nine-patch you can do anything,” she assures me.
Sometimes even when I have no plans to go to the Center one of the women phones me to come and assist with one thing or the other. Or to help unload the trucks on food give-away days. “You being from Africa and all, you’ll really like it when you see all that food,” the woman says. I don’t have the heart to destroy her delusion that the sight of food is an orgasmic experience for an African.
There is a lot of food to sort before Barbara phones each family in Kilvert to come for their parcels. The Center serves two hundred and forty people at a time. Like many other food pantries in the region the Center orders the food from the Second Harvest Food Bank in Logan. It costs the Center anything bet
ween three and four hundred dollars for the number of cases needed to supply the folks on their list, although almost every time some people have to go without. I assist the women to sort the food and divide it into parcels. A parcel contains two cans each of meatballs in tomato sauce, beans, corn, spaghetti sauce, green beans, and orange juice concentrate. Besides the canned foods each parcel contains boxes of rice, spaghetti, egg noodles, cereal and powdered milk.
Barbara calls each person on the list, including Ruth.
Soon there are many rusty pickups, cars and vans parked in the yard, until they overflow into the street. A long line of mostly middle-aged and elderly Kilverters forms at the door. “They’re tickled to death to get whatever they can,” says Irene. I can see Orpah in the line. Later Obed also comes for his own food parcel. After receiving the food parcel each person comes to my table where I hand out a leaflet titled Information You Can Use: Medicare Prescription Drug Coverage.
Orpah continues to look for opportunities to foist herself on me. She comes along on one of my walks to harvest dandelion leaves near the Federal Creek bridge for Ruth’s salad. This is the season for the perfect leaves because once the weather gets hot they become bitter and inedible. Orpah follows me like a lovesick puppy, asking me what it is that she ever did to me since I have become “funny” toward her. I am tempted to ask her about the nighttime shenanigans but think better of it. I do not even know if they still go on or not. I have heard the sound of the sitar in the middle of the night, sometimes after midnight, but I always cover my head with the comforter when it becomes too disturbing. I have long stopped going out to see what was happening because I no longer want to torture myself.
Something has indeed changed about Orpah. She now joins us at the dining room table and makes a point of initiating some form of conversation with me, mostly about her ghost orchids. After dinner she joins us to watch television. She argues with Obed when he complains that these days television is boring because good programs are in hiatus. He says he misses the good old days of bombings and live military action, the last of which was about four months ago when the homeland forces marched into Fallujah. Those were the days television screens lit up with big letters: Operation Phantom Fury to the background of suspenseful music. I remember, Obed used to come home early and would flip from one cable channel to another as the superheroes changed the world for the better, in the words of the Commander-in-Chief. This used to be family viewing of the highest order. But what I never really understood about Obed, even though he enjoyed the war and rooted for the forces to smother everything in their path, he vehemently argued against the war with his mother. When, for instance, after a particularly bloody battle Ruth said: “We dying to save them Iraqis against themselves,” Obed responded: “We destroyed the darn place, Mama. We destroy it in order to save it?”
