Cion (38 page)

Mahlon breaks out into applause. The others join him and they applaud for a long time. Even Ruth applauds, albeit briefly.

Mahlon helps me up. There is a glint in his eyes. He says, very softly as if he does not want the others to hear: “We must die so the earth should continue.” I whisper back: “The earth is a cannibal. It feeds on our corpses. That’s how it continues.”

Obed gives me a quarter.

“A professional mourner must be paid,” he says. The man has learned fast.

Orpah is jumping about in excitement.

“We should of brought our costumes, Daddy,” she screams. “I wanna be a mourner. I wanna mourn with you. We gonna mourn up a storm!”

Mahlon embraces her. The ice is melting.

“That was silly,” says Ruth laughing aloud. “Good, but silly.”

“Thank you, Son of Egypt,” says Mahlon.

It sounds like a term of endearment when it comes from Mahlon.

October 31. The seasons have come full cycle and the creatures have returned to Court Street. The madness is mild for the night is still young. As it ages the pagans will rage on the paved street. Many of them are still in the process of transforming themselves, stealing identities from American cultural and fictional icons. Fueling their bodies with the spirits that will give them pluck to be as free-spirited as the occasion warrants.

Quite a few of the pagans are here already. Grown men in diapers are strutting about. They mingle with cowgirls and pirate wenches in miniskirts. Giant spoons dance with giant forks. The uninspired superheroes are obviously the staple of the parade. They were here in great numbers last year—Superman, Spiderman, the Incredible Hulk, Batman and the rest. They are here again this year—the last resort for a lazy pagan who can’t think of original ideas for the night.

This is a day of saints, although the pagans don’t recognize the fact. None of the saints with whom I aspired to socialize at the Durham Cathedral will be seen here tonight. No Venerable Bede. No St. Cuthbert. This is also the day of the disembodied spirits of those who died last year. They come back in search of living bodies to possess for the next year. That is their only chance of an afterlife. The Court Street creatures, of course, do not have in their minds the Celtic roots of the feast as they prance around, even though their ghoulishness is reminiscent of the original Celts. It was a look that was meant to frighten the disembodied spirits away so that they fail to take possession of any living man, woman or child.

I follow Orpah. We elbow our way through the crowds. She looks sensual in a nun’s habit—black flowing gown, white collar, black veil with white headpiece, rubber sandals, a rosary for a belt. She bought it especially for the occasion at an East State Street mall. I, on the other hand, am in my regular mourning costume.

We stop to watch a man frying on the street. His whole body is made of rashers of bacon. He is squirming as a girl made of deep yellow yolk and white albumen is dancing around him. She has red horns on her head; she is deviled egg. Orpah is enjoying this bacon and egg show and she is laughing like there is no tomorrow. I have never seen Orpah so carefree.

As we move on I am struck by the absence of politicians this year. No Dick Cheney. No Donald Rumsfeld. No George W. Bush. No Jimmy Carter. Unless they will invade the parade later in the night. But the usual enemies in Arab garb are here. And an odd renegade with an unpalatable statement about Guantánamo Bay:
Charge or Release Detainees
. The slogan sounds very familiar. It takes me back to years ago. Protesters used to chant it during the apartheid years of detention-without-trial in South Africa. During those sad times in the history of that country politicians said their normal laws of due process could not deal with terrorism. It was therefore necessary to do away with the niceties of habeas corpus. Exactly as they are saying here. The state was under threat, the apartheid government said, the country was at war. Civil liberties were undermined, and white citizens accepted that it was for their protection. Until they woke up one day and found that they had been living a lie. Even their own liberties as citizens had been eroded. Not only the enemy’s. I have gone back in time. Things have come full cycle. Lessons have been learned well.

Besides the Guantánamo Bay man I do not see as many political statements as I saw at the last parade, which was in an election year—except for the bejeweled Billionaires for Bush whose messages on their placards are
Bring the Troops Back Home
and
No Billionaire Left Behind.

Instead of hard-core politics we are entertained by a fight between a white cock and a yellow chicken, Milli Vanilli dancing down the street, Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz cuddling with Raggedy Ann and a bluegrass band at the corner of Court and Washington Streets.

We stop here for a while. I wish Orpah had brought her sitar with her. She would liven up things with this very dull band. She doesn’t seem to think it is dull though. She is giggling and softly singing along. She has been giggling a lot today. Since we left Kilvert this morning. She is excited like a little girl. The journey we are about to undertake fills her with joy. It fills me with joy too. Especially because she is part of the journey.

Days of blissful mourning await us.

We spent the better part of September perfecting our lamentations—our plan was to leave early in October in search of the Virginia mourners. I did not know who they were, nor where in Virginia they were located. The sciolist didn’t know either. All he had were rumors of their existence. Orpah and I talked about them. We imagined what they did and romanticized them. We were rehearsing for Virginia. After that we would go where the mourning wind blew us.

On a typical day we woke up at dawn and Orpah went back to her house for her ablutions. I took a shower in our RV. I call it “our RV” because Orpah had practically moved in with me. But she preferred a bath so she went to her house for that. After about two hours or so she came back all spruced up, bejeweled in her colorful plastic and smelling of some cheap perfume. After a quick breakfast of cereal we set off to Niall Quigley’s grave for our daily dose of mourning.

Orpah took charge and choreographed our routine. She decreed that we should have tattoos of teardrops on our cheeks. One drop for me would suffice, but for her she needed two drops on each cheek since she had not mastered the art of shedding floods of tears at will. We went to a tattoo parlor in Athens especially for this.

Orpah saw herself as the manager and artistic director of this whole enterprise. She went through the opening sequences of our mourning many times over. As part of the opening routine she appropriated Obed’s speech—the one he made at the funeral of Sister Naomi’s boy about the ineptness of human beings in handling grief and the necessity of professional mourning in bringing back aplomb and dignity to the art of grieving.

I was well aware that in our itinerant mourning people would resist at first. But soon they would be taken in by the novelty of it all, and by the swooping performances that Orpah was choreographing. After all, I was able to mourn professionally in South Africa where the philosophy of
ubuntu,
which espoused the universal bond of sharing that connected all humanity, would have looked askance at anyone who was demanding payment for mourning. I made a good living from the bountiful deaths of South Africa because of that novelty factor. None of the ethnic groups there ever had professional mourners in their culture, for that would have been against the very notions of
ubuntu,
where in its practice you hoe your neighbor’s field for no pay because next time the neighbor will hoe your field for no pay. It is like that in death as well: I mourn for my neighbor because when I die my neighbor will mourn for me. Yet when I came and introduced professional mourning some people took it up with gusto. My presence at a funeral became a status symbol. Of course there were those who saw me as a nuisance and drove me away from their funerals and pelted me out of the cemeteries with dead wreaths from neighboring graves. This happened a lot with funerals of the wealthy. The poor often welcomed me, shared their mourning and their food and paid me generously at the end.

It will be the same when we tour the country with Orpah mourning the deaths of Americans.

Although Orpah was eager to test our routine at live funerals right away, I thought it was important for us to search for other mourners and learn a few tricks that we could incorporate into our own mourning. Hooking up with other mourners would also give us legitimacy in the communities.

“Where you gonna find other mourners?” Orpah asked. “There ain’t no professional mourners in America.”

After nagging him about the location of Virginia mourners the sciolist came to my rescue and gave me a starting point. I found on my bed one day when I returned from the Center a letter that the sciolist received from a professor who had read
Ways of Dying,
which, as I believe you know by now, is the story of my life as conceived and recorded by the same sciolist. The professor, William Edwards, wrote:

The points that the professor raised in this last paragraph were the most important for me. I did not think we could just gatecrash a funeral and start mourning. We might need to scour obituaries, meet the bereaved and convince them that they needed us. Payment plays an important part in the practice of professional mourning. It is what elevates professional mourning from downright pedestrian mourning. We would have to convince the bereaved of this. Plus, my reserve of funds would not last forever.

As for the observation that women were more expressive, in our case I was the most expressive. After all, I perfected the art of mourning over the years. Orpah’s expressiveness came through her sitar and the quilts that we hung on rails next to Niall Quigley’s grave.

Although the quilts were sewn by me they were an interpretation of her designs. Sometimes we worked on them together at the Center. I sewed bits of discarded cloths together and she decided where the found objects—such as shells and beads and mirrors—should be placed in the collage. Those objects that could not be sewn were glued on. The shape of the ghost orchid was the theme that ran through the quilts.

“You are truly a fabric poet, Orpah,” I told her once.

The quilts, the sitar and my wails and moans gave color to our mourning. The fabrics were bright and dazzling and the mirrors and gleaming metals captured our souls and reflected them back to us. Her sitar also had a wide range of tone colors. Despite the fact that she changed her tunes in line with the sounds of my own invention, her strumming did not lose its sense of wonder and mystery.

As our joint creations developed I resuscitated the skill I thought I had lost as a child—that of drawing pictures. I remembered vaguely winning an art prize at elementary school. I also remembered the discouragement I received from my father, who ironically had extended his blacksmithing into fashioning metal figurines of creatures who visited his dreams. Here, with the influence of Orpah’s sitar, I was steadily contributing stylized human figures to her designs. And our work was an expression of joy. Joy that was not dressed with anything to make it valid. Naked joy.

And the nakedness extended into the nights at our RV. The tinge of guilt continued with our romps; as if I was betraying the memory of Noria. Things used to be different with Noria. The connection was more of a spiritual nature. I do not recall any memorable orgasms. With Orpah, on the other hand, every night brought with it earth tremors and sounds that could only be unworldly. She was no longer afraid of the mark of the Irishman. She was no longer ashamed of it. She danced in front of me naked and said: “Admit it; this is the most beautiful pussy you’ve ever seen.”