Scott Ezell

Poems · Music · Gonzo

PROSE

The Chief is Dead

THE OLD CHIEF DIED HERE a few days ago, 72 years old, stomach cancer. What dies with a village elder? I remember him leading the village songs, stepping out at the head of the circular dances, the intertwining pulse of hands and voices, cutting bamboo into cups for wine, slicing palm leaves into plates, the long iron-gray machete hanging from his hip in a weathered wooden sheath banded with copper wire, his toothy humble smile.

The chief was warm and affable, with a dignity hard to imagine anyone cultivating in the electronic dollar grab that too often is our world. He stood strong and broad, like an old thick tree, and moved with slow, deliberate ease, arms like the braided ropes that moor giant tanker ships. Unassuming, self-contained, self-possessed, he came from a time when songs and singing were integral to the estimation of a man.

Moving here I was astounded to hear friends my age speaking their traditional tongue in conversation. In America I’d conceived of aboriginal languages as existing only in museums, mausoleums. It’s hard to fathom a life that began when tribal language was primary. Japanese was second, in school, and far into adulthood, mandarin Chinese, which the elders only half get, it is always a foreign language to them.

Rice wine makes its way around the song circles in a tiny bamboo cup. A young person pours from a plastic bottle, stomps a foot down hard to earth, and offers the singers a ritual sip, essence of community and cultivation. Traditionally, wine is sacramental, an offering for ancestors and spirits, and a blessing for weddings and harvest celebrations. But what we drink now is agribusiness, grain emasculation, soil erosion and industrial distillation — a gutload of wine is cheaper than a living wage, and wine satisfies today even if you’re hungry tomorrow.

The chief’s deathbed scene was harrowing, drew disks of steel fear across the soil of my heart. He lay on a narrow cot in his living room, a rasp of pain heaving with the strain to breathe. In a few months we’d have been married 55 years, his wife said, sitting next to him. He jerked and spasmed, staring into nothing. Years and flesh were flayed away, his skeleton just beneath the skin and rising. Arms now string-thin, bled with purple intravenous bruises. Fetid bile drained green into a plastic sack.

I touched his hands, strong and beautiful still, as if 60 years of work could not be eradicated. As if his hands were the last place his life would leave.

Autumn is here, the wind swings down from the north, lamps sway from the ceiling, shadows lurch and howl — I see already that my friends here, virile, bear-chested and half-wild, lifting logs to their shoulders, pouring wine past their teeth straight into their guts, will soon be frail, gray-haired, mystified to have grown so old.

African guitar on the radio with Ry Cooder, but where is Africa, where am I?
The days move slow, no coffee in the house, I do little besides jangle my guitar, tangling fingers into songs — plain noodles for dinner, I put a beer in the freezer to cool and forgot it, damn thing almost blew, popped the bottle with hangnail clippers and glugged it down, the moon wanes and fades across the sky, waves splay up to ten feet where they crash across the stones of earth —

There is no problem with being drunk at 10 a.m., the problem is where to go from there?

I STOPPED BY THE NEXT MORNING and on the street old crones crooked their index fingers — dead. How long, I asked them. Just now, they said, half an hour. Inside the chief’s middle-aged children cried, back from Gaoxiong and Taipei, but the grandkids were sleek in city fashion slick and spoke to me in English. His wife had not moved, still sat by his cot, betelnut spittled on her lips. I took her hand, big and warm as a beefsteak, and said nothing. The chief’s dead eyes were half-open to the ceiling or whatever lies beyond that. He didn’t look peaceful, he looked tired, broken, but his face was no longer carved and chewed with pain.

Fifty five years, she said, and guided my hand to his skull, gray blurry gleam of her shrunken cataract eyes, her body enormous, a slowly sloughing mountain, amorphous, decaying to its component parts, reconciled to entropy. She placed my hand atop his dead hair and skin and headbone. The crown chakra, I thought.

I didn’t want to touch his head. I touched his hand instead, large, strong, meaty, hard and thick with calluses smoothed to shininess with decades of work.

Tears slurred and crumbled from the old woman’s eyes — 55 years next January, she said, we had already planned a celebration, Siki said he would kill a pig, but now he’s gone, ah, Rekal (my Amis name), he couldn’t wait, he was holding on for his brother to return, but he couldn’t wait, couldn’t hang on, couldn’t say goodbye, it was the last thing in this world he tried to do…Someone poured her a slug of whisbih, the bubblegum truckdriver wine, she knocked it back, swayed slightly as if about to topple, but straightened and handed back the plastic cup. I want one, I said, pour me a shot. They went to find a clean glass. No, I said, the same cup, the same — her lips red with betelnut, glossy wet with wine and tears. The same cup, I said, half-standing up. No, they’re embarrassed, someone said, you’re a guest. The glass came and filled my hand, and I didn’t know then what to say as I dripped out three drops of whisbih offering to the chief, we were of different worlds, there was nothing to say. I wish to inhabit my life as certainly and completely as the chief lived his, to quietly, silently, love a people and a place as integral aspects of my being, but I didn’t know how to say that then. I like your songs, chief, I said, I like your singing. I lifted the clean glass and drank down the dirty wine. Everything was inadequate, my words and bones all hollow.

People drifted by, milling in the courtyard — his wife closed his eyes one at a time with her fingers, and pulled the quilt up over his face. People hunched around the doorway, looking past each other, smoking and talking in scattered voices. The chief is dead. The bottle came back but I stood up to go. The chief’s face was covered, gone. One more, Rekal, one more — No, I said, I’m leaving. Out the dim doorway the sun hit my eyes like the flat of a blade.

Some drink and work, some just drink, some just work. The sun burns straight across the sea, like a cudgel or a mace the sun beats early in, rising hard and gold above the blue lips of the sea. We pound against the days. Pound them into something palatable when we can. Drunk at 10 a.m. there’s nowhere left to go. We drink the bile down, it fills us. We are empty. You can go to the city to work. You can stay home and there’s nothing, less every day. This culture, language, way of being evolved over 5000 years with these people in this place, cliffs and bluffs above the sea — where is it now? A handful of threads where there once was tapestry. The chief is dead, long life the chief, wherever he may be.

SQUALLS SLIDE ACROSS THE OCEAN, shudder and snap the striped plastic tarpaulins: rain slants from the sky as a flock of gray pigeons wedges and cuts the air in tight sharp turns. Shards of blue far off across the silver sea, clamoring bang of some steel machine far down the road, eulogistic drone of a tired voice thru microphones and wires. Bought a white envelope for my donation and the village shopkeepers wondered aloud who died, big orange and yellow paper-flowered Winnebago parked in the eroding street —

I showed up five minutes early for the old chief’s funeral and it was already in full swing, a one-armed chaplain with empty left sleeve pinned to his heart tried to saw his way through a doxologic homily on the pain and death of the world, all the seats in the courtyard were taken with grease-parted hair and clearing throats, I signed in at the register, took a betelnut from a basket, and stood at the back of the crowd, cellphones went off like stranded forest birds —

They put up another tarp and lined up orange plastic stools for us on-time latecomers, we crowded in from the edges to avoid the runoff rain — but we were far away, up a hill and around a corner from the podium and the casket and the flowers and the stench of too many people crammed into a space too small to contain their grief, and the stench of boredom overcoming grief or memory or pain, and the ache of plastic stool against your ass you can’t help but just wish the thing would move along.

It was a fashion show for some though, social events are too rare to waste, within the bounds of respect you got to get your belt buckle shined up, buy new laces for your boots, do up your hair because we are all veiled as we walk through the valley of the shadow but still we’re on parade, everybody knows who the single girls are and which could be single with a little persuasion, and they know we know and dress up in respectful titillation out of a sense of duty.

From so far away all we could do was bunch together away from the edge of rain and share cigarettes and talk about nothing.

The eulogy wrapped up and someone started a rollcall of some kind, the dignitaries who were present — they all stood up and bowed to the crowd when their names were called, one petrified professor in a suit of undertaker gray and a black tie bowed in all directions, started to sit down, but then jerked up like an epileptic marionette and threw out a few more bows in random directions, in case he missed anyone. They called my name out over the PA and I stood up startled, wondering what to do, but nothing happened so I just sat back down, hell, I guess I dropped more money in the pot than necessary.

The crowd struggled to its feet, and shuffled forward to file past the coffin. The family was lined up, and they were all bawling. In his final bed the chief looked like his face had been whittled out of bone, but cut down too far, like the whittler had nothing to do after he finished and so just kept carving. Even the great-grandkids 6 years old were in the handshake line, sobbing, holding limp hands out like white flags begging to surrender, they were terrified with the weeping and the anguish, no comprehension of death except that because of it they had to shake too many strangers’ hands, and their right arms became too tired to hold up so they propped them up with their left hands. Where are our friends, Rekal, the chief’s wife wailed to me, everyone is gone, big and disheveled as a falling mountain, skin sagging off her bones. The chaplain stood at the head of the old chief’s last bed looking somewhere in the distance, empty sleeve hanging from his left breast pocket. Everybody shook hands with everybody, we didn’t know what anything meant but there was a sense of dissolution and finality in the air that made individual striving and complaint seem small. Two men shook hands whom I’d seen the night before brawling over a woman, one had seduced the other’s wife — they grasped hands in grim reconciliation, didn’t pump up and down but just clasped and held, both looking elsewhere. The old men of the chief’s generation wandered through the crowd dry-eyed, preoccupied.

OUT ON THE STREET the casketbearers loaded the chief into the paperflowered meatwagon and a six-piece brass band in baby blue sailor uniforms looked dubiously to the sky and began to blow beneath their battered captain’s hats, big bass drum thumping out the beat, Onwards Christian Soldiers, and a slow rain fell. The engine fired up and idled as the mourners gathered in the rising smell of wet tarmac, then the procession pulled forward, the hearse-truck in front, followed by the band, and then the mourners trailing a susurrus of thin plastic raincoats like dry leaves falling from an autumn tree. We walked down to the main road, through the village, then turned towards the ocean, to a graveyard on a rise just north of Dulan Point, a few hundred meters from the shore.

The truck pulled in and the crowd circled the raw and naked grave. The band stood to one side and struck up a tune, and the pallbearers hefted the coffin to their shoulders and staggered towards the hole. Turn it around, goddammit, the funeral director shouted to them, get the goddamn head around this way, ok now back it in, Jesus what are you afraid of? They stumbled over the mound of loose earth, tripping and sliding and almost falling in, and lowered it down with ropes, nobody knowing how to do it except the director, who wasn’t helping. Swing the rope over this way, he yelled above the beginning wails of the crowd, you want to bury the sonabitch rope, give it a jerk, come on, no, jerk it HARD — the pallbearers were mystified but finally the box was in the hole and the ropes recovered. A styrofoam cross was laid at the head of the grave and the one-elbowed sermoner wove damp words into a gray wreath to lay over the occasion. While he was speaking the director scrambled down into the hole and bored two holes in the foot of the casket with an auger, two more in the head of it, then climbed out and away.

Family and friends strew flowers down, standing on the dead brown grass of overgrown graves in the slow gray rain, and then a man in a worn t-shirt with a cap pulled low over his eyes jumped forward and grabbed a shovel and heaved earth down onto the casket and the flowers, a cry rose from the crowd and next to me a woman collapsed, the other shovels were taken up and the men worked ferociously at filling up the void, they seemed to work with anger, as if paying back a personal affront — surreptitious sips of rotgut passed around from a plastic bottle and a bamboo cup, the chief’s old man friends gulped it down and rubbed the whiskers on their chins — I wanted to step in and take a shovel, I wanted to touch the earth that would entomb the chief, but I am an outsider, and I stared at the tools of immurement but felt foreign and far away, as if to intermix would break the contiguity of tribe — but an old man saw my face and said, You want to help? Yes, I told him. He spoke to one of the men and took the shovel for me and I stepped into the loose earth that was becoming mud with the smooth cracked handle in my hands. Then the interment of the chief was in my arms and shoulders and back, and the physical strain and exertion was relief. The soil nourishes us all, we have nowhere else to stand.

The earth mounded up above the lips of the grave and that was the end. The chaplain said a few more words and the band struck up a tune — their horns were bent, and patinaed with dull oxidation, but the baritone sax had one hell of a vibrato and he was swinging it. The song sounded familiar, but they were into the third chorus before I recognized “I Ain’t Got No Home in this World” from old Woody Guthrie recordings — originally a gospel song about having no true home on earth, but only in Heaven, Woody rewrote the lyrics to talk about dispossession — depression-era dustbowl American farmers who had no home in this world because a bank had taken it away. The band led the procession back up the road to the chief’s house, playing that song all the way, and I sang the words to myself, I ain’t got no home, I’m just a-roamin’ round, just a wandrin’ worker, I go from town to town, the police make it hard wherever I may go, and I ain’t got no home in this world anymore.

The old men sat in circles wearing stained shirts, polyester trousers, sandals cut from truck tires, hands of stone hanging from their skinny venous arms. Tables were laid with slabs of cold pork fat under plastic wrap, Come, Rekal, eat, the old men said, but I was tired. What dies with a tribal chief? Many things I will never know, gone before I even know to miss them. Walking to my car I saw a pile of dead branches in an empty lot, a vine of pink flowers twining and twisting through to bloom. A pack of tour buses balled north up the coast, bored faces taking in the scene through rain-streaked glass — leafless trees swayed in a cold wind, hunched old men drove mopeds through the rain, a mural of new colors sang across a dust-dun wall — in the southern sky a swath of pale gold, and far out towards the horizon the sea was a swarm of irises and violets churning.