He didn’t think it was that important. It was mentioned at his home once or twice, but no one ever took it seriously enough to actually do something about it. He says there is a man called Terry Gilkey who works for the City of Athens Division of Water and Sewer. He is the keeper of records of the city cemeteries. He is well known as an expert on the mental asylum cemeteries at The Ridges. Mr. Gilkey will advise me how to go about locating his grandmother’s grave.
“I’m going to phone Mr. Gilkey sometime soon,” I say.
“Sure, he’s in the book,” says Obed.
By this time we have reached the back of the RV. I can hear Orpah arguing with Nathan at the front. We stop to listen, Obed shushing me not to spoil his fun by revealing our presence.
“I just want us back together, Orpah.”
“We was never together, Nathan.”
“We was, we was.”
“When we was kids, yes. You gone and married someone else.”
“’Cause you wouldn’t marry me.”
“I ain’t gonna marry you still.”
I really don’t want to be listening to this. Obed tries to pull me back as I walk to the front of the RV. Immediately Nathan sees me he spits out the words: “He’s from Africa, Orpah. You don’t wanna live in Africa with them lions.”
“Good afternoon to you too, Nathan,” I say with a broad smile.
“You don’t wanna take a dump in the jungle with them snakes looking at you,” says Nathan as he walks away back to Ruth’s.
“It looks like nobody likes you in this town, homey,” says Obed. He is obviously enjoying this, although he regrets that there was no real showdown.
I chuckle: “The women at the Center do.”
“Hey, Nate, you don’t wanna leave me here, man,” says Obed running after him.
Orpah gets into the RV and plunks herself on the Irish Wheel covering my bed. I do likewise. She does not say anything about Nathan; about what has just happened. I don’t say anything either.
“We better move on,” she says after a long silence. “Ain’t no reason for us to be here no more.”
This comes out of the blue. Move on where? What amazes me — pleasantly so — is that she is including herself in that moving on.
“Didn’t you say you was going in search of mourning?” she asks. “Don’t you want me to come along?”
“Yes, I do. I do, Orpah.”
“And you can do your mourning thing or whatever and I’m gonna play my sitar.”
“I once heard of Virginia mourners. That will be our starting point — Virginia. We’ll search for the Virginia mourners. But you can’t drive alone. You promised you’d teach me to drive.”
“We’ll do that on the road. I am gonna pack right away. We gonna leave today.”
“It can’t be today, Orpah. It can’t be tomorrow either. We’ve got to take our time. Plus I’ve got to find your grandma’s grave. I’ve got to mourn for her.”
She is disappointed. No. She is crushed. She glowers at me, her eyes flaming flames. Then she stands up and stamps her feet and yells at me. She throws a tantrum that would be the envy of any spoiled brat. Why should we stay to mourn people who died decades ago? Why should it matter to me if I find the grave or not? Why should I expect her to stay in Kilvert when her daddy won’t even talk to her?
She takes one of her pictures lying on the pillow and tears it to pieces.
“Now you’re doing Ruth’s work for her?” I ask. I have never seen her like this. This thing with Mahlon must really be getting to her.
She jets out of the RV and runs all the way to her house.
I don’t see Orpah for many days after this. Since she won’t come to the RV anymore I go to her house. I can hear her playing her sitar furiously. It is the sitar. The one that makes my blood rage all over the place. Ruth tells me gleefully: “She don’t wanna see you.”
She lets me use her phone and I call a cab from Athens. I need to get as far away from the damnable sitar as possible. I also need to locate the grave, mourn the dead and leave Kilvert and southeast Ohio once and for all. I will go the way I came. I will not take the RV with me. I can’t drive the damn thing in any case. They can do what they want with it. Maybe Obed will sell it to finance one of his shaky ventures. Although he has been quiet for quite some time now about them. Since the Beth Eddy thing got more serious. He has been quiet even about the casino, although he continues to await the outcome of the Shawnee claim with eagerness.
It’s high time I bought my own cellphone and that’s the first thing I do when I get to the East State Street stores. I get a phone book and call Terry Gilkey. He is prepared to talk to me even at such short notice. He gives me directions to his place of employment, and I ask the cabdriver to take me to the city’s Division of Water and Sewer on the west side of town.
Gilkey tells me he is the keeper of the records of the city cemeteries. He was assigned that role by the mayor around 1988 because no one was interested in it. It has been his hobby over the years and it results from his interest in genealogy. His forebears lived in these parts even before the city was established slightly more than two hundred years ago. For the city it is a public relations exercise to let Gilkey help people locate the graves of their loved ones for no fee. He is regarded as an expert in the field. Even the historical society directs people to him.
The process of locating graves is a painless one. Gilkey has records. He got some of these from the State Department of Mental Health and from the psychiatric hospital on West Union Street. After giving him the name and estimated year of death of old Mrs. Quigley he pages through an old book titled Athens Mental Health Center Grave Record #1 Female 1880–1945. I think the woman will be in this book. Mahlon is about sixty-five years old. The woman was committed while she was pregnant with him. He was actually born at the mental home at The Ridges. He was handed back to the Quigleys when he was about six months old. I think being separated from her baby broke the poor woman’s heart even more and she died a year later.
“Lots of these folks were not crazy at all,” says Gilkey. “Some of them had Alzheimer’s or something that we understand today.”
“I know,” I say. “This one’s madness was that she was Caucasian and fell in love with a colored man from a neighboring village.”
“That was madness all right. Back in the day they were dead scared of intermarriages.”
“It was fine…at least it was tolerated…for guys like the first Tabler and the first Quigley to have colored wives, but for a colored man to have a white wife was a crime. I just wonder what reasons were documented for her committal.”
Gilkey suggests that we can find the committal papers of these patients in the archives at the university. They have an index of all the committal papers on microfiche. From these papers we can see where the patient came from, who committed her and what reasons were given for the committal. I thank him for the offer but tell him that that kind of information is not important for my purposes. All I need is to locate the grave.
Gilkey pages through the book. The names are listed alphabetically with grave numbers next to each name. But there is no Quigley here. I call Ruth.
“I didn’t think you was gonna do it,” she says. “Of course there ain’t no Quigley there. It ain’t the Quigleys who committed her. It’s her own family. They wouldn’t have used no Quigley ’cause they didn’t recognize the marriage. She was of the Tobias family. Margaret Tobias.”
And there is her name with a grave number. She died and was buried in 1943.
“Her grave’s gonna be at Cemetery Number 2,” says Gilkey.
We drive to The Ridges. As the van makes its way on a steep hill I recognize the cemetery I visited that night of the pagans. It is Cemetery Number 1, says Gilkey. Everybody here was buried much earlier than ’43. The graves date from 1880 to 1901. This is the cemetery where people were buried with only numbers on their gravestones. Most families cannot pay respects to their relatives who died condemned as lunatics because there is no information on the graves. They are not aware how easy it is to locate these graves if only they can consult Terry Gilkey.