“Oh, yeah, them kids are hungry,” says Ruth, “but their parents don’t have no trouble buying beer and cigarettes and lottery tickets.”
Appalachian poverty is news to me. You do not see it from the landscape: from the hills and the forests and the valleys and the creeks and the fields whose beauty inspires awe and effectively hides the suffering that Nathan is outlining for me to Ruth’s consternation.
“We always raised our own food,” she insists. “It was our way of life. Things only got bad when we stopped raising our own food…when they brought free food from them food banks.”
Obed returns without Orpah.
“What took you so long?” asks Ruth.
“Orpah…she won’t come. She won’t see nobody ’cause mama messed her stuff bad.”
Ruth is furious. There must be something terribly wrong with that girl. Where does she get off treating a gentleman such as Nathan like this? The very Nathan with whom she went to school at Amesville. The Nathan who was her after-school playmate. The Nathan with whom she used to ice skate on the Federal Creek and on the pool next to the river when it was frozen in winter. Most importantly, the Nathan who has a regular job, unlike some people she knows — and she looks at Obed. Orpah missed her chance to marry the man the first time he asked her. She turned him down until he married someone else. Unfortunately that someone else died, leaving him with two lovely kids. Orpah should be grateful that the man once again is showing some interest in her. Nathan is a good man and Orpah will surely die an old maid. She is already an old maid as it is.
Of course this diatribe embarrasses Nathan. He keeps on assuring Ruth that it is okay; Orpah will come around one of these days. He is a patient man. He will wait.
Ruth is too cross to enjoy the war on television. She takes her cane and waddles to her room.
As if on cue Orpah strums her sitar. The sound cuts through my insides and reverberates on the timber walls.
“She is a very sad woman,” says Nathan sadly.
He takes leave of us and Obed offers to walk him to his truck.
Before I saw Orpah in person her sitar caused a feeling of nostalgia in me. Now that I am able to associate the sound with the person it no longer does. Instead it arouses me. It arouses me so terribly that I think my veins are going to burst. My heart is pumping blood in such a crazy rhythm that I have to walk away from here. I have got to be as far away from Orpah’s sitar as possible. As I walk out in agony I can see the wicked glint in the sciolist’s eye. Whatever did I do to him to be punished like this? Does he perhaps resent the independence and the freedom to determine the course of my life that I seem to have gained since joining these wonderful people? Is he taking vengeance on me for having lost myself in the lives of the living and momentarily forgetting my mission in life: to mourn the dead and to search for ways of mourning?
Obed and Nathan are standing next to the truck gossiping. They cannot see me as I attempt to flee from my own erection. I can hear Obed boasting: “I told you I was gonna walk, man.”
“So you did?”
“Do I look like I’m in the clink now? I nailed the bitch, man. I nailed her ass good.”
The scoundrel!
I stop under a gigantic sycamore near the road to the churchyard. Here I cannot hear the sitar and hopefully there will be some relief. I can see why they call this a ghost tree. Its trunk and branches are shimmering in the thin light of the stars and the diminishing last-quarter moon as if they have been splashed with fluorescent white paint. As soon as the trunk leaves the ground it opens into a gaping grotto, with dried-up veins and arteries running amok in it. I can see something whitish in the grotto. I retrieve it. Even in the faint light I can see that these are some of the most wonderful drawings I have seen in my life. They are designs of sorts and at the bottom of each one the artist has signed: Orpah Q and then a date. All of them were created late last month, except two that are dated the second and the third day of November. Today. One of these wonderful creations was painted on this very day.
The ghost tree. It is a keeper of secrets. It has many stories to tell.
4. Ghost Trees
The story is told by ghost trees; that’s why most of it does not unfold before your eyes but is reported in the manner of fire-side or bedtime storytelling. The ghost trees: the one in front of the Abyssinian Queen’s cabin with its wide span of white branches and others that witnessed the whole journey of her two boys, right up to the demise of Nicodemus and the exile of Abednego in Tabler Town. People remember fondly that she, the queen of stories, used to flap her wings while perching on the highest branch almost one hundred and twenty feet above the ground. But the tree was more than just a place for launching her swooping tales. Its white bark, mottled with green and brown, provided her with enchanting characters when the moon shone on the trunk like a spotlight, shaping out figures in deep contrasts of dark and light. She spoke with these characters and made them do things that none of the audience ever imagined a bark could do. She made them speak words never heard from any tree on earth. Although the tree was at its best at night, during the day it kept itself useful still. Its hollow trunk served as Nicodemus’s hiding place when he wanted to be alone and practice his writing or play his reed flute. Everybody pretended that the ghost tree produced the music. Yet they all knew it was Nicodemus inside the tree. It made them feel good to play along and call it a singing sycamore.
The singing sycamore was haunted. Not because it was a ghost tree but for the well-known fact that it harbored in its soul the spirits of little children who once sat under it listening to stories and telling their own eons before the world was killed. These were spirits waiting to be reunited with all the children from the tribes of the universe on a regenerated earth that would be free of sickness and death; an earth where man, woman and child would roam free, owned by no one. When the trills from Nicodemus’s flute became multiplied as if many flutes were playing, people knew that the voices of the little children had merged with the slurs and staccatos of his flute. So, the singing sycamore was a singing sycamore after all.
This hollowed sycamore hid another important secret in its heart. Provisions for the road. Dried fruit. Knives. Ropes. Tinder. Lots of tinder. Flint. Pairs of old socks. Rags. Odds and ends of tools and mementos. Just as the Monkey Wrench design cautioned. And all these were wrapped in two bundles of quilts. One a crazy quilt and the other a sampler. Tied securely with ropes. Waiting for the day when the boys would up and go. No one knew when that day would be. It would not be during that winter though; the Abyssinian Queen was certain of that. She had drummed it into the boys’ heads that winter escapes were hard. The boys would therefore be prudent enough to wait for the next round of slave stealers and Underground Railroad conductors who would come in spring or summer transmitting secret messages through spirituals and merging with the worshippers in the run-down barn that the Africans used as a place of worship and subversion. The Queen did not trust they would be safe on their own, and they had solemnly promised that they would wait, although no one knew when the stealers would be back in the region.
In any event escape was not a priority on the boys’ minds at that time. Nicodemus had started his duties as a stud and was enjoying it. The older studs were telling him that the self-satisfied smirk on his face would wear off and be replaced by deep lines of pain as soon as the awareness dawned in his head that copulating with unwilling females was not the greatest thing on earth unless one had the mindset of a rapist.