I open my eyes just before sunrise. Fall leaves of golden brown and yellow have piled up on me under the tree at the West State Street ball fields where I spent the night. I am debating with myself as to whether I should look for Nicodemus or not. For all I know he may be a scoundrel who deserves to be in jail. But what if an injustice has been done? He mentioned something about his people, whoever they are, who have suffered indignities and he asked me to pay bail for him. There may just as well be an injustice here; but who am I to right American wrongs? I have left quite a few where I come from.
I pick up my little suitcase and slowly walk back to the uptown area. I find my way to the police station. After waiting for almost five hours — many pagans were arrested last night for unruly behavior or for carrying open containers of beer in the street or even one or two for stabbing fellow pagans — my turn finally comes to be assisted. At first the police do not take me seriously because they think I am one of the pagans. I tell them about Nicodemus and they say there was never anyone of that name in their custody. They do not seem to have much patience even after I have given them a detailed description of the young man. Did I perhaps dream Nicodemus under the ball fields tree?
Fortunately on my way out I see the cop who arrested him and I confront him about Nicodemus. He arrested quite a few offenders last night, but none of them was named Nicodemus. I must be talking about someone else. Recognition dawns on his face after looking me over and he asks me to follow him back into the office where he punches a computer.
“His name is Obed Quigley,” he tells me.
As soon as he mentions the name the other officers laugh.
Obed Quigley, I later learn, is in jail for impersonating the ghost of Nicodemus, a slave who was murdered in the basement of a house on Washington Street about a hundred and sixty years ago. He had escaped from the plantations of Virginia across the Ohio River through the Underground Railroad. He found refuge in a house that served as one of the Underground Railroad stations in Athens. But pursuers got wind of his whereabouts and invaded the house in the deep of the night. He fought back valiantly, but was shot dead.
Today the house belongs to a sorority. The ghost of Nicodemus continues to take permanent residence in the basement. For long periods, sometimes months, it rests silently and everyone forgets its presence. And then out of the blue there’ll be strange noises on an otherwise calm night. Invariably when there are such scratching and moaning sounds a sleeping sorority girl will feel her breasts being fondled. In the morning the girl will have a strange giddy feeling and her sisters will say she has been “touched.” All the females who have had contact with Nicodemus feel touched.
Some girls are known to go to the basement alone just to challenge Nicodemus. A girl may be by herself in the house and she would hear whining sounds and footsteps coming from the basement. She would tiptoe to the basement hoping to be touched. Often she would come back disappointed because Nicodemus ignored her. But sometimes Nicodemus fondles the girl’s breasts with his long thin fingers, and she runs up the steps giggling and breathing quite heavily in what she professes to be fear. No one has ever admitted to the others that she has gone to the basement to be touched. And yet everyone knows that everyone else does just that when no one is around. A girl really feels like the chosen one when Nicodemus touches her in her sleep without any provocation from her.
Apparently last night when everyone was busy appropriating identities from American icons — living or dead or fictional — Obed Quigley decided to steal Nicodemus’s identity. He did not only end there; he stole his pastime as well. He slipped into the sorority house and hid himself in the basement. In the evening when all the girls had left for Court Street, Beth Eddy went down to the basement hoping to be touched before she joined the others. And she was touched. She giggled as Nicodemus’s fingers dug deep into her firm mammary glands. But soon she realized that there was something different about the fingers today. She had been touched before and Nicodemus’s fingers never felt solid at all. The fingers she knew so well were like mild electric currents that ran through her veins. But these seemed to be crude and fumbling. And the breath that came from the ghost stank of a combination of beer and garlic. She screamed and reached for the switch that dangled in the middle of the room. And there was Obed cowering in the corner, bloody tattered clothes and all. He dashed out and disappeared in the night. Beth Eddy told the cops that she was just grateful that she had not been raped by the bloody imposter. Of course in the police report she omitted the little fact that she had remained alone specifically to be touched by the real McCoy. And that lately she had developed an addiction to the touch.
I get most of this story from Obed himself after I had paid the bond for him. It is late in the afternoon by now because I had to wait for a long time at the police station. Then the police sent me to the sheriff’s office to pay the bond. Again there I had to wait for three hours before the papers could be processed and Obed released from jail.
“I slept in the pokey,” he complains. “I thought you was gonna bail me out last night.”
“I slept under a tree…you were better off,” I tell him as we walk to a bagel place for a very late breakfast.
Here we find one of those rare commodities in the city of Athens — a public telephone. Obed calls his mama to come and pick us up, but she says she is too busy making relish so he’ll have to see how he gets home without her assistance.
“We can take a cab,” I suggest to him. “I’ll pay for it. How far is it?”
“It’s a village called Kilvert…about eighteen miles from here.”
“Maybe you should have told her you are coming home with a visitor.”
“She won’t mind. She likes folks from Africa.”
As the cab drives on East State past the sign that marks the Athens corporation limits into Route 50 East Obed pleads with me not to say anything about his arrest to his mother. “She’s gonna kill me,” he says.
We are racing on the freeway. The Hocking River follows us a few feet from the road, winding with it. Its muddy water flows quite lazily in small ripples that belie the volumes of water, some of which overflows on patches of cultivated land on the banks. Sometimes the river disappears among the trees whose summer greens remain only in fading whispers and a fall cacophony of brown, purple, yellow, orange, red and yellow now dominates. Some are already naked while others are ready to shed their final leaves. And then the river appears again, meandering its way close to the road.
It is important that I observe the landmarks very carefully in case I have to return this way on my own. I cannot put my total trust in this man who is now dozing next to me.
After about eleven miles or so we turn left at a Marathon gas station onto 329 North. We drive into the village of Guysville, with its houses that line both sides of the road quite closely. They are all residential houses — except for the community church and a mini-storage place. Some are very old but well maintained. Where I come from houses are built by bricklayers and stonemasons, whereas here they are built by carpenters.
The Hocking River flows in a deceptively slow drift only a few yards from us; I didn’t quite see at what point it abandoned Route 50 to follow this narrower country road. We are driving above the river, and once again it twists and turns with the road. Despite the sharp bends the cabdriver speeds on without paying attention to signs that warn of school bus stops ahead. But then every other motorist seems to relish turning the road into a NASCAR track. Cars going in the opposite direction swoosh past us like bullets. Our cabbie does not make even a feeble attempt to avoid a squirrel that is crossing the road. It becomes part of the roadkill that I have seen splotched on the road; vultures feasting on it and only flying away when the cars get too close.