Acts of faith (118 page)

And yet she wasn’t, but rather a woman caught in the cleft between two worlds. She returned to the Nuba mountains to discover that one of her sister spouses was pregnant. Not long afterward Quinette was, too. The last time Fitzhugh saw her was when he flew to New Tourom to discuss aid deliveries with her husband. His relations with Michael were distant. He didn’t condemn him as severely as he did Douglas; the man had been at war most of his life, he’d been fighting for the survival of his people. Those were circumstances in extenuation and mitigation, but a long way from exoneration.

Returning to the airstrip, Fitzhugh came upon Quinette at the town well, scrubbing clothes with other village women, fully one of them now, their sister in toil. Seeing him, she stood up, pressing the small of her back. She was wearing a dark blue kanga, bulging slightly in the middle. He noticed that the African sun was beginning to tell on her skin, which after all wasn’t meant for it. At thirty-two she looked leathery, the signs of middle age already upon her; and if her life followed the course of most African women, her middle age would last but a few years, and she would be old by forty-five. She glanced briefly at the man’s shirt spread out to dry on a rock at her feet, then at Fitzhugh, and with a hand on her swollen midriff, rolled her head back, her eyes shut. There was everything in that brief movement, everything of weariness, of regret, of resignation, and of a bitter knowledge: she had asked Africa to redeem her from the bonds of the commonplace and give her an extraordinary life. It had, but now it was extracting the price. It was keeping her.

PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material.

BUG Music: Excerpts from “Pride And Joy” and “Love Struck Baby” written by Stevie Ray Vaughan. Copyright © 1985 by Ray Vaughan Music (ASCAP)/administered by BUG. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of BUG Music.

Universal Music Publishing Group: Excerpt from “Texas Flood” by Larry Davis and Joseph Scott. Copyright © 1958, 1986 by Universal-Duchess Music Corporation/BMI. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Universal Music Publishing Group.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

After serving with the Marines in Vietnam, Philip Caputo spent six years as a foreign correspondent for the
Chicago Tribune
and shared the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for reporting on election fraud in Chicago. In 1975 he was wounded in Beirut and during his convalescence completed the manuscript for
A Rumor of War,
a Vietnam memoir that was published while he was living in Moscow, back on assignment for the
Tribune.
In 1977 he left the paper and turned to novels, of which he has written four, plus another memoir. He lives in Connecticut with his wife, Leslie Ware.

ALSO BY PHILIP CAPUTO

A Rumor of War

Horn of Africa

DelCorso’s Gallery

Indian Country

Means of Escape

Equation for Evil

Exiles

The Voyage

In the Shadows of Morning

Ghosts of Tsavo

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A
.
KNOPF

Copyright © 2005 Philip Caputo

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Caputo, Philip.
Acts of faith / by Philip Caputo.
p.    cm.
eISBN 1-4000-4491-X
1. Human rights workers—Fiction. 2. Americans—Sudan—Fiction. 3. Conspiracies—Fiction. 4. Violence—Fiction. 5. Sudan—Fiction. I. Title.
PS
3553.
A
625
A
626 2005
813′.54—dc22      2004048982

v1.0