Cion Page 15

  The persecution of poor Lynndie England infuriates Ruth and she wonders aloud why they don’t want to let the matter rest. They have been on about the Iraqi prisoners from the time the scandal was exposed seven months ago, as if nothing else of importance has happened in the world since then. “Why they make all that noise about them prisoners in Iraq? The Iraqis would’ve done the same to American prisoners.”

  Again it is one of those moments when I’d rather not voice a contrary opinion. But Ruth is very clever. She can sense that I don’t quite share her sympathies with Specialist England. “Todoloo!” she says. “Enemy prisoners are enemy prisoners. Even God drowned Pharaoh’s soldiers to save Moses and the Israelites.”

  I shift uncomfortably on my chair. Through the window I can see Mahlon on the porch. He is standing on a chair and is polishing the wind chimes. Ruth yells at Orpah to shut the darn radio off or at least lower the volume. She opts for switching it off. After a brief moment I see her standing next to Mahlon, looking up at him and telling him something that makes him stop his work and climb down from the chair. He embraces Orpah and she breaks out into sobs that visibly shake her body. The two walk together to the swing and sit on it and it begins to sway in a slow rhythm.

  Ruth is watching them too. She shakes her head pityingly. Then she tells me as she walks to the kitchen that she is going to make some dandelion salad. Orpah loves dandelion salad. She will forget about her silliness when she tastes the salad.

  That’s the Ruth I have come to know. Food is her solution to every problem, although I do not know what her problem with Orpah is. Yes, she is a moody woman, but surely she can’t be crying just because her mother demanded that she lower the volume or switch the radio off. And why is Ruth so eager to make amends?

  “Ain’t you gonna ask where I get dandelions in winter?” she asks.

  “I don’t know anything about dandelions,” I tell her.

  “I have my secret ways,” she says in her conspiratorial voice.

  In spring when the weed is plentiful she uses the leaves for salad. She also harvests the flowers, wraps them in flour mixed with eggs and deep fries them. She has her own way of drying the flowers so that her family can enjoy this delicacy all year round. It will never be as good as fresh dandelions though, but it is better than no dandelion at all. And it is important to use only yellow dandelion flowers, she stresses, as if I threatened to go get some. White dandelions are bitter. So when she talks of dandelion salad in this case, she is really talking of deep-fried dandelion flowers.

  “I always tell them kids,” she says, “don’t kill the dandelion. It’s more than just a weed.”

  As Ruth is busy with her delicacy in the kitchen—taking care to make it just as her Orpah likes it—I wander back to the living room. That’s when I see the drawings in the trash can. They are all in pieces. I retrieve them and spread the pieces on Ruth’s quilting table. I try to put them together. It is not easy because some pieces are just too small. But I can make out the usual ghost trees. Usual only in that they are ghost trees. They are all different and each one seems to have a life of its own, with symmetric roots poking through the ground for some distance, then re-entering the earth. From the few pieces I am able to put together I notice that there are human figures this time. Two figures, one white in a black background and the other black in a white background sitting like fetuses in the stylized heart of a ghost tree. The same figures in another picture are ice skating on what is obviously a frozen river. The pose is more like that of the figure skaters that I have seen on television, although these are in silhouette.

  At this point Obed arrives and I know immediately that he will have the scheme-of-the-day for me since I haven’t seen him since last night at dinner time.

  “What’s up, homey?” he asks. Then he sees the jigsaw puzzle on the table and warns me in a very serious tone: “You don’t wanna mess with those.”

  “She’s very talented…Orpah is,” I say.

  “Yeah,” says Obed. “And she’s got issues too. It’s because of the mark of the Irishman.”

  “What on earth is the mark of the Irishman?”

  Obed is suddenly quiet and when I look up I know why. Orpah is standing a few feet away, glaring at us.

  “You little shit,” she says to Obed. “You gonna announce to the whole world about the fuckin’ mark of the fuckin’ Irishman?”

  This is the first time I hear her voice. She sounds like a younger Ruth. Except for the cussing, of course. I have never heard Ruth use this kind of language.

  I break into a friendly smile and look into Orpah’s eyes. Even though the content of her voice is so crude, its texture is gentle. And tired. I am ashamed to tell you that her profanity gives me a hard-on; not, of course, in the way that her sitar did. But every shit and fuckin’ she utters makes my body tingle. I wish I knew more about the mark of the Irishman.

  “I was telling your brother that these are wonderful works of art,” I say. “What I don’t understand is why you would want to destroy them like this.”

  “I didn’t,” she says. “Ruth did.”

  So Ruth is Ruth to her while she is mama to Obed.

  “Why would Ruth do such a thing?”

  “She hates anything beautiful.”

  “But this is wonderful art. Only the Taliban destroys works of art.”

  She almost smiles. Her face becomes gentler.

  “She is the Taliban in the house,” she says.

  Obed laughs. “That’s a good one,” he says, and then in rap style: “Mama is da Taliban in da house!”

  That accounts for the drawings in the ghost tree. She was not throwing them away. She was hiding them from Ruth. That’s what she has to do every time Ruth is spring-cleaning. And when Ruth is spring-cleaning she leaves no room unscathed. She cleans mine too, although I am always there, pleading with her to leave it alone since I do clean it on a regular basis. So every time Ruth is in her cleaning mood Orpah must hide her artworks. But sometimes Ruth decides on the spur of the moment to storm through the house cleaning everything in sight because her nostrils have detected an odor that no one else’s nostrils can. Then of course Orpah is caught off guard and has no opportunity to hide her work. Ruth pounces on it and destroys it. Orpah cries because she says she will never be able to repeat those particular designs.

  “She should be encouraging this work instead of destroying it,” I say.

  I have been careful not to tread on Ruth’s toes. But I think I must take this matter up at the dinner table. Taking advantage of the vulnerability that I have seen in Orpah, and hoping that she now sees me as an ally and not the enemy she must have taken me for, I invite her to join the family for dinner. I think it is important that the matter is discussed openly in her presence. The irony is not lost on me that I, a visitor, am inviting her to dinner in her own home. She turns the invitation down because she will not sit at the same table with her mother until she learns to respect both her art and her privacy.

  I am beginning to understand Orpah. I remember how my own father used to despise my artistic attempts as a little boy, and what that used to do to me. He was a blacksmith and used to create metal figurines from dreams. He mocked my creations because they did not come from dreams. He was not impressed even when my painting won a prize and was made into a calendar. Perhaps now I would have been a successful artist if I had not received such early discouragement.

  At dinner time I share this memory with the table. But no one responds to it. Mahlon just keeps on smiling and chomping on the deep-fried dandelions. Obed looks at me with a don’t-you-start-now expression and pays close attention to his grits and pork. Ruth looks at me inquiringly for a while, and then urges me to try the dandelions since she can’t wait to hear what I think of them. I try them and like them. I say so. I commend her for her culinary skills, but still I am not prepared to let the matter of Orpah’s works rest.

  “Orpah was crying this afternoon,” I say.

  “She’s got is
sues, that’s why,” says Ruth.

  “It’s that darn mark of the Irishman on her,” says Obed. “It’s giving her the temper of our Irish ancestor, the first Quigley.”

  “You shut up about that, boy,” says Ruth. “You don’t know nothing about it. Orpah just got issues, that’s all.”

  “Her main issue is that you destroy her artwork,” I say.

  “You think it’s normal for a woman of forty-plus to sit in her room all day scribbling meaningless children’s drawings?”

  “I saw some of her work,” I say. “I think it is charming. It would make wonderful quilts.”

  I shouldn’t have placed Orpah’s work and quilts in the same sentence. There is a flash of anger in Ruth’s eyes. But soon she controls herself, I suspect because she figures she is dealing with an ignoramus here. Her face now displays the patience of a saint as she explains to me that in the same way that her mother taught her how to quilt, she took the trouble of teaching Orpah as well. But she gave up in disgust when Orpah haphazardly appliquéd bits of cloth on top of the revered ancestral patterns and embroidered what she claimed were sycamores on some of the pieces, and even went so far as to attach beads and sew collages of found objects on the quilts. The whole thing was hideous to behold and disrespectful of the wonderful culture of quiltmaking passed from one generation to the next. Ruth remembers an instance when the “girl” actually sewed feedsack batting at the back of the quilt, on the outside! Every fool knows that batting belongs inside a quilt in order to make it into a comforter. That was the day she vowed that Orpah would never touch her sewing machine again until she learned some manners. That is why now she resorts to drawing the patterns on paper and colors them with crayons like a little child. And that is why Ruth will continue to destroy them. If it were not for these drawings that have captured her soul like the demons that Jesus expelled from a certain guy named Legion into the very swine we are eating today, the “girl” would have made something of her life. But of course there is the sitar as well, a new demon that has taken over her life and sunk her deeper into a world of her own.

  So, the problem did not really begin with the sitar as I was led to believe. It did not begin with the Gothic stories and Native American tales either. The stories don’t seem to be much of a factor because ever since Ruth mentioned them as “ghost stories” once I haven’t heard anyone talk of them again. The fact is it all started with the drawings and their destruction!

  “Them newfangled designs are not our tradition,” says Ruth. “We’re people of tradition. Our patterns have come down from our great-great-grandmothers, and ain’t no little squirt’s gonna change that.”

  Yes, that darn sitar, Obed adds with a mischievous twinkle in his eye, it’s a sacrilege to play bluegrass—such wonderful hillbilly music—with a strange instrument of “them Indians.” Especially that these are not “our” Indians but those that hail from India. I can see that the scoundrel is just trying to get on the good side of Ruth. Orpah’s sitar and its origins have never bothered him before.

  Of course Ruth is too smart to buy into this false alliance. She slaps his shoulder gently and says: “You ain’t no better yourself. You ain’t done nothing with your life.”

  “You screw up everything I try to do with my life, Mama. Like my hand trembling business.”

  “Look at Nathan,” says Ruth. “He’s got a real job; not some hand trembling scam.”

  “It ain’t no scam, Mama. It’s tradition. You want Orpah to do tradition but you don’t want me to do no tradition.”

  “It ain’t the same thing, boy. Now she draws people too. Like she’s God or something. My folks never did them people on their quilts. Only the Monkey Wrench and the Drunkard’s Path and meaningful things like that.”

  She vows she will continue to destroy Orpah’s work even though it hurts her no end to do so. That’s what tough love is all about. She will do it for the next hundred years if it comes to that. She has the stamina for it. This has been going on for years, from Orpah’s high school years or even earlier. And we better believe that she will go on until the “girl” learns to behave like the adult she should have been by now. And when she says this she looks at Obed and then at me, as if challenging us to dare oppose her. I notice that she does not challenge Mahlon.

  This is not an empty threat. Ruth is relentless in the destruction of the designs whenever and wherever she finds them, burying Orpah deeper into solitude. She destroys them with religious fervor because she believes they are the work of the demon that inhabits her daughter, making her sluggish and ambitionless.

  “The Monster with the White Eyes,” says Mahlon with a distant look in his eyes. Everyone looks at him expectantly but he does not proceed. He just looks at each one of us and smiles.

  “We all know that one, Mr. Quigley,” says Ruth. “The warning of the Cherokee elders and all.” Then to me: “Mr. Quigley likes the old stories. He told them to the kids when they was little. Maybe if he told them Bible stories instead they wouldn’t be the way they are.”

  “A prophecy,” says Mahlon as if to himself. “It says them folks were the walking dead ’cause they didn’t have no connection to the memories of their ancestors.”

  “Ain’t no true prophecy but the one in the Bible, Mr. Quigley,” says Ruth respectfully.

  “Our roots are Shawnee,” says Obed. “He should tell Shawnee stories, not Cherokee. He should talk about Our Grandmother.”

  “You don’t know nothing about it, boy. We ain’t no Shawnees. And them Shawnees were crazy anyways. How can God be a woman?”

  Obed is about to defend his Shawneeness when I butt in: “Please…let’s talk about Orpah.”

  “She’s gotta settle down with Nathan and stop being silly,” says Ruth.

  I doubt if Nathan would be the remedy in this case, I say quite boldly. Her creative spirit should be set free to go wherever it wants to go. She is a grown woman after all, and I don’t understand why she should let herself be captive to a situation she feels does not allow her the freedom to create. Ruth is taken aback because I have never attempted to state views that contradict hers before.

  I love tradition too, I continue, but sometimes people want to create their own traditions. Just as I did with professional mourning. It is not part of the culture of any of the people in my country. I even thought that I had invented it. I only discovered later that some faraway lands elsewhere do or did have this tradition. That’s what set me on the road in search of the tradition of professional mourning. And in search of mourning itself. Let Orpah be the founder of her own tradition. Or participate in other traditions that have been founded by others. People out there are already doing wonderful things with quilts. People out there have long transformed the quilt from being a mere bedcovering with geometric patterns that, granted, have cultural significance, into works of modern art that make statements about their world today. Orpah has something to say to the world, let her work give her an unhampered voice.

  Ruth is stunned. She glares at me. It is the glare that usually makes everyone freeze or jump into action, depending on the situation, and has been christened “the evil eye” by her children. But I do not flinch. Mahlon looks at me and at Ruth. And then back at me. His smile has faded a bit and his eyes show some vague traces of anxiety. Obed looks at me and at Ruth. And then back at me. He shakes his head and says under his breath: “She ain’t gonna like you after this, man. She ain’t gonna like you no more.”

  “This ain’t Africa, Mr. Professional Mourner,” Ruth finally says, trying to muster as much sarcasm in her tone as she can. “We got our way of doing things here.”

  This shuts me up. She orders Obed to clear the dishes, but while he tries to do so she stands up and clears the table herself. She always does that. Gives her children chores to do, but ends up doing them herself, not because they have shirked but because she thinks they are not doing a proper job of it.

  I have heard her ask Obed to do the laundry. But even before he gets to do
it Ruth takes over and does it herself with her rickety washing machine in the small room adjacent to the kitchen. She then wakes up early in the morning to hang it on the line. The clothes, especially the sheets, become rock solid even before she has properly hung them. She dips her hands in a bucket of hot water and then hangs another garment, while complaining that her children are lazy and want her to do all the work. The winter sun dries the clothes by the end of the day and they acquire a beautiful fresh winter scent.

  With these dishes for instance, she takes over because she says Obed is doing the job half-heartedly. I also stand up to assist her, and in the kitchen we decide that we might as well wash the dishes rather than leave them there for another time. I wash, she dries. Not a word passes between us, which makes me very nervous. I miss the Ruth who is always ready with a smile and the stories of how her “race of people” came into being, and how they are the future of the world, and of the greatness of her favorite politician of all times, who is the chosen one since he gets his messages from God. This smarting Ruth is not the Ruth whose company I would like to keep. As soon as I finish washing the last plate I dash out to the living room to join Obed and Mahlon.

  They are staring at the blank screen of the television, a ritual they have been following since the set broke down a few days ago. We have been waiting for Nathan to come and fix it—another feather in his cap since he is handy at fixing gadgets and Obed is not. Ruth returns from the kitchen and we all silently watch the television. For the past few days it has been painful to watch the withdrawal symptoms of the family, especially Ruth and Obed. Orpah, of course, could not have cared less since she has her drawings and her sitar in her room. I don’t know if Mahlon was bothered at all since his expression never changes. But Ruth and Obed! They became irritable and cantankerous. But now they are getting used to the absence of television and are waiting patiently for Nathan’s return from construction sites in neighboring counties.