Tangent Condolences
Lucia Martin died on a Tuesday. It said so in the local Tribune, one of the last newspapers left in Northeast Ohio. I knew her as the church secretary, or, at least, she had been for over fifteen years before she got sick. I would wave through the entrance window and she would buzz me in. A God fearing woman, hair died so black it was purple in the sunshine, who beat cancer once already, and didn’t shy away when it came back.
Lots of prayers and little doses of chemo on the side. They say the medicine will save you from certain malignancies, that is, if it doesn't kill you first, or bankrupt your savings. Everyone knows it can save your life, poison your blood, make your hair fall-out, change the shape of the light in your cells and put you out on the street all at the same time.
Prayers, as a treatment, are cheaper—like pharmacy shopping on the way to a party you’re late for. Prayers are like Rite Aide cards for tangent condolences, they do the job for which they were made; broken arrows of the spirit, loosed from the hole inside our gut, messengers from the seat of the soul.
Lucia was only 53 years old when she passed. The printed obituary said she loved to sing more than anything, especially traditional hymns and gospel songs. It listed the lyrics to her favorite, an old Carter Family tune. The nurses at the Hope Center remembered she would sing it while she sat in her chair for treatment:
Let the circle be unbroken,
by and by, Lord, by and by.
There's a better home waiting,
in the sky, Lord, in the sky.
The same night Lucia died, burglars stole $180 worth of cigarettes from the Elm Road Pit Stop in Warren, Ohio. The police blotter is the page across from civic announcements. It was reported around 2:00 am. The average pack of smokes in Ohio costs $6.03 at the time of writing this. At a pack-a-day habit, the perpetrators took less than a month’s supply from the corner shop. Everything about this situation puzzles me. I can’t help but wonder if it was an inside job. Underpaid, disgruntled employees could’ve outsourced the robbery to a masked acquaintance.
Perhaps later, after they shook the heat, a couple block's away—somewhere within walking distance—in the thieve’s living room it was like Christmas morning. Little card stock boxes dumped out on the floor, piled up like presents without a tree. White and red and cellophane bricklettes. What most people likely don’t know is that the majority of mass produced cigarettes are made from reconstituted tobacco paper, state-taxed by the yard, cobbled together from split veins and stems. The scraps of the gorgeous plant are crushed, soaked and then rolled out flat. A ritual baptism: The crop is washed before it is pressed. It is purified before it is transformed.
We cannot clean with water, what we then will breathe.
I don’t smoke cigarettes, but sometimes I go outside with my friend Dave Wise on his breaks at work. The asphalt in-front of the door is carpeted with orange buttes, smashed and matted, spent filters, some half burnt, others down to the nub. Remnants of long breaks and short ones alike. The refuse of time itself. The kind of artifacts archeologist use to date a dig site: Charcoal scraps, discarded pottery, hand dug latrines and carvings of stone or wood. If what we leave behind the future names us by, they’ll call us—this whole clan—the Buttites, an expansive empire, spread out all over the rust water valley.
Dave Wise asked me if I worked overtime yesterday.
“Yeah, an hour”, I told him.
“Blood on the altar”, he took a deep drag of his cigarette, like they do in the movies, all fucking badass—greying his hair further as he held it in briefly and then let it out with a sigh. Black and white, static lines around us, it felt like we were mystic men, aloof travelers between dark spaces. Displaced, unmoored, back in time and I loved it. The smell of the spirit—something old was present between us and the work of the day. But then the end-of-break whistle blew, the gateway closed behind us.
It is said that the ancient shaman of the Warao tribe, the boat people of the Orinoco River delta, would blow tobacco as magic. The smoke that filled their hut was a celestial bridge to the hebu-hanoku, the spirit-house in the eastern part of the universe, home to bird-like gods. Warao ancestors once lived in the sky and would hunt them with arrows made of solid light.
One day, a great hunter missed his mark, punched a hole in the floor of their sky-world, and after seeing the beauty of the earth below, convinced his people to leave the air behind and settle the plentiful land he had discovered by accident. The connection is in the clouds. Ceremonial tobacco smoke, the creation of clouds on the ground by man, exhaled from fleshy lungs. It was used to heal, to draw out evil, medicinal magic—the thicker the smoke, the nearer to heaven.
We are all trying to return, even god is deciding how she may be healed or unhealed inside us.
Lucia Martin, the hymn singing church secretary, the midnight haired mystery with a smile, was survived by her husband, but only one of her two sons. As it turns out, while I was writing this I discovered the Carter's didn't originate that classic tune. It was a cover of a hymn written in 1907 by Ada Habershon. The musical progression was reused, but the lyrics of the chorus were slightly altered from the original. The Carters rewrote it to be an affirmation—changing it from what began as an uncertain question about the life to come:
Will the circle be unbroken,
by and by, by and by?
Is there a better home awaiting,
in the sky, in the sky?
