Cion (29 page)

It turns out that one of the mishaps was that Obed shot a hen and had to hide it to escape the wrath of the law. To my surprise Nathan does not take kindly to this.

“Don’t tell me you fuckin’ shot a hen,” yells Nathan.

“How was I to fuckin’ know? It had a fuckin’ beard,” Obed yells back.

Mahlon smiles, transferring his gaze from one man to the other as they exchange their anger.

“Don’t fuck with me, man! You know this ain’t the fuckin’ first time in the world a fuckin’ hen has a fuckin’ beard.”

Apparently there are other things that distinguish a hen from a gobbler, such as the black breast feathers for the latter, whereas a hen’s breast is rusty. And the white forehead and blue cheeks and back of neck for the gobbler, whereas with hens it is the whole head that is blue. Even small things such as spurs on the gobbler count. Hens have no spurs. Obviously a good hunter must be sharp-eyed so as not to make the kind of stupid mistake that Obed made. If it was a mistake at all. I wouldn’t put it past the scoundrel to shoot a hen intentionally given the opportunity, rather than go home to face Ruth without a kill. Mahlon himself had bagged the right bird, the one they had come to weigh.

For serious hunters like Nathan it is shameful and despicable to kill a hen. Real men don’t shoot hens.

“What’s the big deal, man?” asks Obed as he jumps into his mother’s GMC. “It’s just a fuckin’ turkey!”

His father jumps into the pickup as well, still smiling. It’s hard to tell if he is bothered at all by his son’s treacherous act.

“Are you coming or not?” asks Obed glaring at me. Now I am caught in the middle of a turkey war.

“You fuckin’ go with them, man,” says Nathan, also glaring at me. He gets into his Chevy Blazer and speeds away.

Saturday afternoon. The family is gathered in front of the house, each one treading carefully so as not to disorganize Mahlon’s garden. Obed is building a barbecue stand with bricks and places a gridiron on top. His busy day continues from the morning hours when he went to Athens to paint the sorority house in Washington Street. That job is not done and he is looking forward to going back on Monday. And on Tuesday. Perhaps for the whole of next week. It seems he wants to linger on this job for as long as it is possible to do so. I suspect it all has to do with Beth Eddy. There would be no other reason for Obed to be so enthusiastic about manual labor. When I told him two days ago that Beth Eddy called and had arranged that the painting should start on Saturday morning he could not contain himself. When he turned down my offer to go with him and give a hand I knew that it was not just the painting he was hoping to achieve at the sorority house.

He is boasting as he stokes the wood in the fire under the grill that the girls served him milk and cookies (at his request; they were suggesting something stronger) while he sent them into titters with stories of how Nicodemus was a wonderful stud at the slave breeding farm. He regaled them with tales of how he escaped and found his way to Athens where he was brutally murdered. The girls, of course, knew of the existence of Nicodemus since he touched them occasionally, but had never heard the details of his life before he came to cohabit with them at their sorority house. They were most fascinated by the fact that he, Obed, was related to this same Nicodemus. So, he went on to tell them about his great-great-great-grandpas Abednego and the first Quigley, and Harry Corbett, and how during the Civil War Quigley’s son married Abednego’s daughter even though they were first cousins and how Harry Corbett served in that war and was killed. He was the descendant of all these illustrious people. There were some Germans in the mix. And more African Americans. And more Irish. And more Indians.

“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 Africa. 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.