Acts of faith (24 page)

“Horses and Islam,” Ken said.

She quizzed him with a look.

“That’s why the Arabs are able to do what they do.”

“Because of horses?”

“And Islam.”

“All right. Horses and Islam. So?”

“Think about it.”

“I hate riddles,” she said.

Ken was silent.

Her thin canvas hat barely softened the rap of the sun’s knuckles against her skull. Despite the steady breeze, flies swarmed around her face.

“The Dinka don’t have horses,” Ken said. She guessed he was giving her a hint. “North of here is desert and Arab territory. When the wet season comes, this part of the country is loaded with tsetse flies. A horse wouldn’t live a week, but the Arabs can take theirs north, into the desert, and then come back down here in the dry season. That’s when most of their raids take place.”

She conjured up an image of mounted Arabs galloping over the sun-dazed plain, a tide of horseflesh and man-flesh washing over whatever stood in its way. “Okay, I get the horses part. I don’t get what the Arabs’ religion has to do with anything.”

“It unites them,” answered Ken. Quinette swiped at the flies, hoping they weren’t the tsetse kind. “No matter what tribe they’re from, they’re fighting for the same idea. It gives them the go-ahead to kill infidels or to capture them and force them to convert, at gunpoint if need be. You could say the Arabs are evangelists and their Kalashnikovs do the preaching. They really believe they’re doing it for Allah. Not all of them, but enough to make the difference.”

“It’s holy work to them, in other words? They think
they’re
doing what Jim said
we’re
doing?”

“We’re not killing people or forcing anyone to believe in anything,” Ken said flatly.

“I didn’t mean that!” Her face flushed.

“I know.” He squeezed her arm in a fatherly way, which appeared to be as demonstrative as Ken ever got. “And listen, Quinette. I’m grateful to you and Jim. Every dollar was raised by you two, but don’t make more out of this than what it is. It’s necessary work, but holy? I wouldn’t call it that.”

“That isn’t real inspiring,” she stated, hoping she didn’t offend him. An expression of gratitude from him was a rare and precious coin, not to be squandered.

“I don’t trust inspiration,” he said, “or enthusiasm. They don’t last. I’ve been doing human rights work for twenty years, and the big lesson I’ve learned is that burnout is an occupational hazard. People get into it fired up, thinking they’re going to change things overnight. Work their hearts out for a while, find out they haven’t made much of a dent, get discouraged and worn out, and quit.”

“I’m not the quitting kind,” she said. “If I were, I would’ve quit on myself a long time ago. I almost did, but in the end I didn’t.”

Quinette’s psyche had not lost all its baby fat; she was still young enough to find herself fascinating and to think that the story of her journey from darkness into the light of grace was unusual, if not unique. She was inviting Ken to ask her to tell it, but he said nothing.

“The Lord wouldn’t let me quit, I guess.” Trying a different approach. “A lot of people were praying for me, and they wouldn’t let me either. I wouldn’t be here otherwise.”

It was hard to interpret the movement Ken made with his head. A nod encouraging her to go on? But there was an impatience in the motion, suggesting that, whatever her story, it was one he’d heard before and didn’t care to hear again.

The red road ran on, hard underfoot and cracked everywhere, as if it had been paved with broken bricks. Termite mounds and anthills made of the same sun-baked clay rose out of the grass to heights of five feet or more, some resembling obelisks, some eroded sand castles, with wind-worn towers and turrets. Quinette marveled at the industry of the insects and wondered how many ant and termite generations it had taken to build those structures. She thought of the stonemasons who’d built the cathedrals in medieval Europe—fathers, sons, and grandsons working on the same project and not a one living to see it completed.

They passed near a village: conical-roofed huts perched on stilts to discourage rats and snakes from coming inside, cattle byres that looked like pyramids made of sticks, forests of stakes driven into the ground for tethering cows and calves, and the smell of smoke and manure heavy in the overheated air. A man in shorts came by, walking in the opposite direction on legs so thin they didn’t look capable of supporting his weight, much less the weight of the bundled grass he carried on his shoulders in a sheaf maybe two feet thick and six long. A young woman wearing bead ankle bracelets and big hoop earrings sat in front of a hut, nursing a baby that looked too old to still be breastfeeding. In fact, the kid was standing up, as if he were at a drinking fountain. He stopped suckling, and as he turned to look at the strangers parading by, flies lighted on the dried milk smeared around his lips. Quinette had an almost overpowering urge to wipe his mouth and to scold the mother for not doing so herself. And yet the primitiveness of the village appealed to Quinette at some basic level, and she was drawn to the austerity of the landscape, with its thorn-bristling trees and earthy tones of beige, brown, rusty red. Life stripped down to its essentials. Two women came up the road, one behind the other, the first wearing a dark, saronglike gown and a five-gallon water can on her head, like a plastic top hat. The second was in a sundress that must have been donated by a mission or the UN, and carried on her head a woven basket of ground maize, with a rolled-up mat atop it. The women barely glanced at the soldiers and cameramen but shot a long look at Phyllis and stopped to stare at Quinette with an expression of startled curiosity in their dark Nilotic eyes.

“Hello,” she said, offering a tentative wave.

They didn’t speak or smile or do anything except continue to stare as she walked on by, and she looked back at them over her shoulder, trying to figure out why she was the object of their attention.

“They’re not used to seeing white people out here,” Ken explained, without being asked. “Especially white women on foot, and a white woman as tall as they are is a real novelty.”

They stopped for a break at midafternoon, the hottest part of the day, and rested in the shade of tamarind and ebony trees around a dry water hole, its banks dimpled with the hoofprints of the cattle that had watered there during the rains. Seedpods hanging like brown tongues from the tamarinds rattled in the wind, and brilliant birds ornamented the branches—birds with golden breasts, or black heads and iridescent purple wings, or feathers that were palettes of pale green, turquoise, and lilac.

“I told myself the last time that it was going to be the last time, “ Jim Prewitt said, leaning into the trunk of a tree. “I’m too old for this, but here I am.”

“And we’re all here with you,” Ken stated. He took a GPS from his pocket and tapped the buttons.”Five K’s. Three miles. You can make that.”

“I’ll have to.” Jim smiled wanly. “But I don’t like walking around like this in broad daylight.” He gestured at the whitened sky. At first Quinette thought he meant the heat; then she realized he was indicating the danger of enemy planes.

“Can’t be helped,” Ken said. “Too easy to lose somebody at night. Wouldn’t want one of my team snatched by a lion.”

“There’s lions out here?”

The idea that there were simultaneously frightened and excited her; it made her feel like a true African adventurer.

“Supposed to be a few left. I was just kidding about them snatching a person. Mostly they prey on cattle. Everything else has been killed off. Drought, the war.”

“It doesn’t really look like there’s a war on here,” Quinette remarked, though she did not have a clear picture of a battlefield’s landscape, except for remembered images from her father’s photographs of Vietnam, a TV documentary she’d seen about that war.

“It’s a fluid sort of war,” Ken said. “Moves around a lot. A year ago this area was a real hot spot and we couldn’t be doing what we are now. And it could get hot again, practically overnight.”

She had emptied one of her water bottles. Standing, she looked around and started toward a bush she could hide behind.

“Where are you going?”

“Do I have to raise my hand and ask permission?”

“Oh, that. Be careful.”

“Lions?”

“Snakes. Spitting cobras. Puff adders,” Ken said.

She made a thorough search of the ground and stabbed at the thornbush with a long stick. When nothing hissed, puffed, or spit, she pulled down her shorts and underpants and squatted, listening to the stream splash against the hard-packed earth beneath her. An urgency came to her bowels, and she did that too, her own stink rising, and she cleaned herself with the roll of toilet paper in her fanny pack. Good thing Dad had taken her along on his deer and pheasant hunts—she’d learned not to be shy about relieving herself in the outdoors. He’d turned her into something of a tomboy, a stand-in for the son he would never have, teaching her to shoot and track and to look for antler rubbings on the trees. The last two autumns of his life. Walking beside him down the rows of mown corn, with Jenny, his springer spaniel ranging out ahead. Huddling with him in a deer blind in the chill gray of a November dawn, falling asleep and waking with her head on his shoulder, feeling the warmth of his body coming through the thick pile of his camouflage coat. Teddy Bear, everyone called him for his first name and size and gentle temperament. He was gone by the following fall—a rare blood cancer that the doctor said had been caused by his exposure to Agent Orange. “So that goddamned war got him after all,” his younger brother Gene had murmured at the funeral.

Oh, there are depths to grief no one can imagine until she has plumbed them herself.

She’d forgotten to take pictures! The autofocus camera Pastor Tom loaned her was in her rucksack, with a dozen rolls of film and her journal. Tom wanted her to give a talk and slide presentation at the church when she got back. She hadn’t exposed a single frame or made a single note, a situation she had better start rectifying right away.

“Excuse me, I have to get into my pack,” she said to the young soldier who’d been carrying it and was now using it as a pillow as he lay on his back, legs crossed at the knee.

She removed the camera from a side compartment, turned it on, and checked the frame counter on the lit-up display panel.

“Okay if I take your picture?”

The soldier pointed to himself, raising his almost invisible eyebrows.

She was pleased to see a silver crucifix hanging from his neck by a silver chain. “Yes. You.”

He stood, his stick limbs unfolding with movements that suggested the extension of a carpenter’s ruler, and posed as if for a guerrilla recruiting poster, a warrior’s scowl on his teenage face, his shoulders stiffened, rifle held crosswise over his front.

She flipped to the back pages of her journal and wrote “Roll 1” at the top and the number 1 at the side, and beside the number “SPLA soldier” and the date. Ken, Jim, and Santino were her next subjects. Taking the photographs, identifying them by frame number, was very satisfying. She was no longer a mere passenger on the expedition but someone with a real, active role to play. Already, she was starting to think about what she would say at her presentation and how she would say it. The thought of addressing a large crowd did not intimidate her. She had shone as a public speaker during her otherwise dismal high school career, never nervous when called on to recite in class. Her strong, rich voice, with its slightly masculine timbre, caught people’s attention. It made her feel poised and attractive, blurring the picture she had of herself as a rawboned girl with eyes set too far apart alongside a nose too long above lips too thin.

The group resumed its journey. Women at a well, one cranks the pump handle, a jet-black breast showing above the polka-dot robe knotted over the opposite breast.
Click.
Another woman farther down the road grinds grain by pounding it with a pestle the size of an oar in a wooden mortar.
Click.
Quinette would bring to them, those midwestern farmers and small-town folks, images from a world they’d never seen and probably never would, not even people like the Formillers, who owned something like six or seven thousand acres of corn and soybeans in Black Hawk and Grundy counties and had money to burn and had gone to Europe on vacation and taken cruises to the Caribbean. They would never cross the Nile in a dugout canoe or look upon Dinka boys herding belled oxen—
click
—or tribesmen squatting under a baobab—
click.

“Sister, you would like to ride on my bike?”

He had come up from behind, a soldier, although he wore no uniform, only dark blue shorts and a ratty striped shirt. A Kalashnikov with a folding metal stock was slung across his back. He pedaled alongside her for a few yards, the front wheel jerking side to side because he was going so slowly; then he stopped to stand straddling the seat, and he was so tall that there were several inches of daylight between the seat and the V of his legs. He asked her name and she told him, and he said his was Matthew Deng.

“Bye-bye, Kinnit.”

“Bye-bye?”

“He means hello,” Ken called out. “A lot of times they’ll say bye-bye when they mean hello.”

“A woman should not be walking,” Matthew declared gallantly. He had buck teeth; or maybe he just looked as if he did because his lower lip was drawn in by the cavity where his bottom teeth had been. “You are doing so much for us, I must do something for you. I can take you the rest of the way. You’ll get there before everyone else.”