“You want me to say she’s fine, Mama, don’t you? So she’s fine.”
“She’ll get over it soon enough,” says Ruth, as if to convince herself.
She must have done something to Orpah, but I am afraid to ask what. I do not want to seem to be prying into the family’s affairs, though I must admit I am intrigued by this Orpah. I have gathered already that she enjoys indulging herself in solitude. She imposes it on herself for she identifies closely with the tales of female confinement of classic Gothic narratives that she devours relentlessly when she is not playing the sitar or drawing quilt designs that never get translated into quilts. She is not exactly the “mad woman of the attic” though. She is very brilliant and her hands know how to create beautiful things. She sees herself as a tortured soul that will one day be released by the return of a stranger mentioned in some Native American tales.
“Maybe it’s because of the mark of the Irishman,” said Obed the other day, in a vain attempt to make sense of Orpah’s behavior. Ruth shushed him immediately. Whatever this mark of the Irishman is, it is not something that should be mentioned in the company of strangers. Certainly there is a lot of secretiveness about it.
Ruth, on the other hand, curses the sitar. Before the sitar the “girl” was outgoing, even though she still made her “fancy drawings” and read her “ghost stories.” She taught herself the instrument and started playing bluegrass on it. At first to everyone’s annoyance. But ultimately they all learned to live with it. Ruth remembers the first day she came with the sitar.
“I got it from an Indian family that runs the motel,” Orpah said.
“Real Indians from India,” Obed interjected.
“Which motel?” Ruth asked. “All motels are run by Indians.”
“Does it matter which motel?” asked Orpah.
“It does. I want you to take it back. What was you doing in a motel anyways?”
She was not in a motel for any hanky-panky though. She was caught in a flood and couldn’t come back home for three days and everyone was worried. She had to find a cheap motel and sleep there. Ruth had assumed she stayed with friends all that time because when she phoned she had not specified that she was staying at a motel. But anyway, Orpah was worried to death staying at that motel and the floods continued as if they were fulfilling some biblical prophecy. She was driving Ruth’s GMC and made an attempt to take the gravel New England Road just after Guysville, which is the alternative route when there is a flood. But it was flooded too. She did not even try the road via Amesville for it is always the first to be flooded. So, she was marooned in Athens. She cried most of that time, and an Indian girl, the daughter of the motel owner, played her the sitar. She thought it was the most beautiful instrument ever, and begged and cajoled, until the girl sold it to her on credit. Her father could bring her another one since he would be going to India soon.
That was the beginning of her life as a loner. She gave up her daytime soap operas to spend time with her sitar. She gave up Oprah in the afternoons. She does not even come out in the evenings when everyone watches prime time sitcoms and reality shows or in the night when Obed spends his time flipping channels and giggling between Jay Leno and David Letterman — incidentally his main source of news about the world.
Orpah hasn’t come out this evening as we sit in front of the television watching a beautiful war lighting up the screen, depicted like a series of video games. Live night bombings hitting the targets with startling fire in the black background of the night. Targets hit as they sleep. Obed and Ruth cheering. It is fine, for no one sees any death. There is no human element. Just the sound effects and the flare of the fireworks. Mahlon Quigley dozing off. Smiling still. Embedded journalists emerging in their neat camouflage jackets, analyzing every move in the game, and condemning surreptitious attacks on the homeland forces by the enemy as cowardice. If they were man enough they would come out and face our firepower, and not attack us when we are not looking. Big titles on the screen: Operation Thunderbolt! Just like in the movies. Just like in the superhero comic books. Court Street parade superheroes. Kapow! Boom! There are the good guys and the bad guys. The bad guys are ugly and evil and envious. The good guys are beautiful and altruistic and have God on their side. The good guys are sure to triumph. Just like in the movies. Only here real people die. Mothers and their children. Young beautiful soldiers who are only children themselves. Although we never see them. We shall never see them. We are therefore able to sleep in peace at night and dream beautiful dreams.
Bombs rain some more and light the sky. Ruth and Obed cheer. Mahlon smiles. Still no one dies. Only the depersonalized collateral damage. Superheroes rise unscathed from the rubble and fly to the sky to save the world elsewhere.
Bombs plough the lands of ancient civilizations cultivating new crops of terrorists. Again and again we cheer.
A knock at the door interrupts our beautiful war. It is Nathan and he has brought Ruth coupons from a fast food restaurant in Athens. When I first saw him in that big truck he was an imposing figure. Perhaps it is just the memory of his booming voice. He is a tiny man with the features and the hairstyle of the Jesus on the wall. He is developing a roundish paunch though, and it is beginning to strain the buttons of his shirt. Unlike Obed, he does not seem to pay much attention to his appearance. I am not sure if Nathan is one of the WIN people or not. He looks Caucasian — although Ruth did tell me that her people come in all colors.
Ruth spreads the coupons on her lap, and Nathan points at the choice dishes with his dirty fingernails. There are special offers for fish and shrimps and other seafood delicacies, all pictured in mouthwatering color. Ruth and Nathan admire the pictures and he says he knows that fish is Ruth’s favorite food and when he saw these special offers the first person he thought of was her. She thanks him and says that indeed next time she visits Athens she will go to the fast food place, provided the offers have not expired.
“I know you wanna see Orpah,” says Ruth with a naughty twinkle in her eye.
Yes, he does want to see Orpah because he wants to invite her to a concert in Nelsonville. After calling her name twice without any response, Ruth sends Obed to call her, and then introduces me as the man from Africa. Nathan tells her that we met before and wonders how I like it so far in Kilvert. I tell him how beautiful it is and how hospitable Ruth and her family have been.
“Yeah,” he says, “our people are like that. It don’t matter that we are poor.”
“Todoloo,” says Ruth, tapping her forehead. “Today they call it poverty; back in them days we called it our way of life. We didn’t know we was poor until they came and told us we was poor.”
Outsiders instilled it in the minds of her people that they were poor and gave them food and clothes. That changed their way of looking at the world. Now they cannot do without the charity of strangers.
Nathan explains, for my benefit, that despite Ruth’s misgivings about the dependency mentality that has been created among her people by well-meaning donors, poverty is a fact of life in southeast Ohio, not just in Kilvert. Even the CBS television program 60 Minutes featured a whole segment on the subject. People were shocked to see on their screens Americans waiting in food lines, and to hear of the increasing numbers that now have to depend on food banks and pantries for their meals; of retired veterans and workers going hungry because they have lost their jobs to plant closings; of children forced to rely entirely on the school lunch program for daily meals; of families going to bed without supper. And this situation continues year after year. It is more than a year since the program was aired. Yet nothing has changed. People are still hungry.