Acts of faith (37 page)

“I’m saved,” she murmured when she finished reading.

“Since when did they start notifying you by mail that you’re saved?”

“Not that kind of saved,” Quinette said, and gave the letter to her sister to read. She hadn’t told Nicole, or anyone, about Ken’s offer.

“Omigod, Quinny, you don’t mean you’re going to take it, do you?”

That voice, its pleading whine marbled with the snappiness of a scold, was so like their mother’s. At twenty-eight, Nicole was beginning to look as well as sound like Ardele. Flab was robbing her chin of definition, her hips and bosom were growing ponderous. The first thing that had struck Quinette when she came back from Africa was how fat people in her hometown were. Women with upper arms like kneaded dough, men with gourdlike bellies hiding their belts—that rural midwestern lumpiness resulting from a tradition of heavy eating passed on by grandparents and great-grandparents who’d hauled water from draw-wells and chopped firewood and plowed with mules and horses. Not that everyone had put on twenty pounds in the time Quinette had been away. They hadn’t changed; she had, noticing their thick, coarse bodies because of the contrast they made with the slender Dinka. Over there all was subtraction, over here addition, and lots of it.

“You bet I am,” she said to Nicole.

“They want you to sign a two-year contract. You might, you know, give it ten seconds of thought?”

“Don’t need to. Ever since I got back all I’ve thought about is going back.”

“To
Africa
? And for not a whole lot more than you’re making now?”

“Twenty-five there is like a hundred here, and it’s not for the money anyway.”

And then her older sister teared up and embraced her in her squishy arms.

“Oh, Quinny! It’s so far. And two years! It scares me. Like if you go, you’ll never come back to us.”

Quinette said nothing. The prospect of never coming back wasn’t disagreeable.

There were sobs from her mother as well, and then an attitude of sullen disappointment. Her troublesome, unpredictable middle daughter was letting her down again. One cockeyed thing after another. Why, even when she mended her ways, she didn’t return to the solid Lutheranism she’d been raised in, but to some evangelical sect of hand-clapping holy rollers. Why couldn’t Quinette get married to a decent guy with a decent job and start giving her grandchildren, like Nicole? Kristen phoned from Minneapolis to tell her that she was making a dumb move. What kind of future could there possibly be in working in some African shithole for a bunch of starry-eyed do-gooders? Just the argument she expected from Kristen, the pick of the litter in the brains department, winner of a scholarship to Iowa State and now in her first year of graduate business school at the University of Minnesota. Even Pastor Tom questioned if she was ready for the hardships, the commitment.

As it happened, Quinette discovered that breaking away wasn’t as easy as she thought. She’d typed her acceptance and was going to fax it to Ken, but she carried it around for two days. Small-town midwestern caution, that don’t-stick-your-neck-out-someone-might-cut-your-head-off conservatism, was a gravitational force that bound people to the land of flat horizons generation after generation. It made them afraid of breaking away, and the insidious thing was the way it pulled you from the inside as well as from the outside. Quinette could feel that fear tugging at her guts. Her father and some other family farmers, she reflected, had taken a risk when the Farm Bureau advised them to “get big or get out.” Disaster was what Dad got when prices fell in the eighties and he couldn’t keep up his payments, and the only blessing was the cancer that spared him from seeing the farm, in the Hardin family for four generations, go on the block.

Troubled by self-doubt, she drove out to the old place, barely recognizing it because the corporation that had snapped it up at auction had replaced the barn and outbuildings and the house where she and her sisters had grown up with industrial pens occupied by thousands of hogs whose excreta made her eyes water. The stench and the sight of those steel-roofed sheds, all of it managed by some guy who had no more of his heart in the land than a foreman did in a factory, stirred up her hatred of the invisible, intangible, indifferent forces that had robbed her family of its legacy and ruined its happiness.

She spoke to her father as she stood at the roadside, the barbed-wire fences singing in the wind, and asked him to help her make the right decision. Then she closed her eyes and pictured the L-shaped white frame house that had once stood in the shade of cottonwood windbreaks. She saw her twelve-year-old face in the window of the bedroom she and Kristen shared, with its two maple beds on either side, under an angled ceiling so low that you had to watch your head when you sat up. It was a bleak November morning and she was dressing for school when a movement outside caught her eye. She looked past the barn and silo toward the cornfield sloping down to the trees lining the Little Cedar River. A flight of starlings, bunched into a dense, dark ball, then drawn out into a whirling funnel, then squeezed to a ball again, rose and dipped above the khaki stubble, their perfectly synchronized movements making them look like a smoky kite that changed shape instant by instant. It was almost hypnotic, watching them. Ardele called her to breakfast, but she didn’t respond.
I’m not going to be like her,
she thought, soaring and dipping with the starlings in her imagination.
I’m not going to be like any of them, I’m going to be different.
It was so weird, in a nice way, how the words came from out of nowhere, sounding in her head not like the expression of a desire or hope but like a declaration of her fate. She accepted it happily. Would she marry a rock star and tour the country? Would she become rich and live in a great city like Chicago or New York? Who could tell? The important and marvelous thing was knowing that she was destined to live a bigger life in a bigger world and would never ever be like the woman her mother was now and her sisters and friends would grow up to be. Farm wives, housewives, beauticians, bank tellers, schoolteachers, check-out clerks in a convenience store. She knew that was what would happen to them, even if they didn’t. She could see it in them. Something in their eyes, in the way they carried themselves, in the clothes they wore, in their voices, as plain as the land they’d been born to and would be buried in, marked them for ordinariness. Quinette felt sorry for them, even as she rejoiced in her exemption, and she smiled to herself, looking out at the barn and fields and the Little Cedar, sliding under the distant trees.

It was as if life had made a pledge to her, a pledge it withdrew after her father died. It seemed she’d been wrong, it seemed Kristen was the blessed one, her brains boosting her out and away. Every day of Quinette’s life had been a handful of commonplace dirt, thrown on that thrilling moment of childhood promise, interring it under so many layers for so long that she’d all but forgotten it. Now Ken’s letter was offering her a chance to repossess it, a lawful inheritance denied to her all these years. She was being called to Africa to do no small thing. She drove back to the Mailboxes outlet in town and sent the fax.

“J
ESUS
M
ARY AND
J
OSEPH
, what the hell time is it?”

“Seven-thirty,” Quinette said, pulling her dress over her head—a Dinka woman’s ceremonial dress, bright yellow with brown and gold swirls. She’d bought it at a market on her most recent trip into Sudan.

“Half seven of a Sunday morning, and you’re up and about?” asked Lily Hanrahan. Quinette loved her accent and her quaint way of phrasing things. “Did you ever consider that some people might want to be sleeping in?”

“I have to meet Father Delaney at the Red Cross hospital.”

“In that?” Lily poked a finger into her mosquito net to indicate Quinette’s dress, over which she now draped a green and white bead necklace. “What’ve you got, a
date
with the old goat? Going to show him what he’s been missing all these celibate years?”

Quinette hung her small gold crucifix over the necklace. “He’s taking me on his rounds of the Turkana villages. Guess I’ll be going to church in a way—so, my Sunday best.”

“Would you two kindly shut up? I’d like to sleep,” Anne Derby grumbled in the far bed.

Lily pushed her net aside and sat up. She was a short, broad-shouldered woman with lank brown hair and an almost-pretty face. Wearing a snug singlet and panties, she sat the way a man would sit, her squat legs spread apart. A few pubic hairs peered out from the crotch of her underwear.

“I know you know that the bloody Turkana killed four people just three days ago,” she said. “Shot ’em dead and left their wallets and money and took their shoes and clothes, and you’re going to go on a tour of their villages?”

“Malachy said I’ll be perfectly safe with him. They respect him. I mean, he’s been out here since before any of us were born, and he ain’t dead yet.”

“Who do we write if you don’t come back?” Anne asked. She swung out of bed, a wraithlike figure in her cotton nightdress, swigged from a bottle of Evian at her bedside, gargled, and then unzipped the front flap and spat noisily. “Mouth feels like the army marched through it in their socks.”

“Which army?” asked Lily.

“The bloody army. Who cares which one?” Anne took another drink. “ ‘Let us have wine and women, mirth and laughter, sermons and soda water the day after.’ Byron.”

“Why, thank you. Should be ‘wine and men’ for us, but that doesn’t scan right, does it? How about this? ‘Heaven has sent us soda water as a torment for our crimes.’ G. K. Chesterton.”

“Happy hour the crime, a bad mouth and headache the torment. He was a cute one, that pilot with the guitar. Not a bad voice either.”

“My ex could sing twice as good and he was tenth rate,” Quinette said, slipping into her flip-flops. They didn’t go with the dress but were an improvement over sneakers or hiking boots.

“As a husband or singer?” Lily asked.

“Singer. As a husband, no rating, none, zero, zip,” Quinette answered in a tough, worldly voice. As a divorcée, she had a certain status in the eyes of her better-educated but never-married companions, and she tried to sound like a woman who’d been around whenever she had the chance.

She grabbed her minicamera and went out, hearing Anne call from behind her, “Ta! Say a prayer for us, will you?”

It looked as if the rains would fail again today. The sky was cloudless, and dust swirled and sparkled in the thin light air, reminding her of the soap flakes in those glass bubbles that are turned upside down to create an illusion of snowfall. Farm life had fine-tuned Quinette’s sensitivities to weather, and she knew that if she were a Turkana, she would curse this brilliant sky. “Their cows and goats are perishing by the dozen,” Malachy had said last Thursday, after news of the ambush spread from compound to compound. The bandit gang had waylaid four aid workers, two Kenyans and two white guys, as they were driving out to drill a bore hole. “What a bitter irony,” the priest intoned in his deep Irish voice, “that they should kill those trying to help them survive.” Quinette reckoned it was, though she didn’t understand how killing people for their clothes and shoes would fill a stomach or help anyone get through a drought.

She strode toward Hotel California’s mess hall, imitating the supererect bearing of a Dinka female. Back home she habitually slouched or crooked her knees to make herself look shorter, especially when she was around men of average height, but here she felt free to stretch herself to the max. “White Dinka Woman”—that’s what the people in Sudan had taken to calling her, and she cherished the nickname.

“Hey-ull, if that airstrip doesn’t have foxholes dug in it, I’ll land on the goddamned thing.”

It was the Texan, and he was sitting with four other people at one end of the dining room, which wasn’t a room really but a broad patio surrounded by a low stone wall under a vaulted grass roof with wooden poles running down from its center. There were Fitz Martin, Knight Air’s operation chief, and the woman who flew as the Texan’s copilot, and two people Quinette didn’t recognize—a short, bald guy and an older woman with dyed blond hair. They stopped talking the second she walked in. She wanted to believe that they’d been struck dumb by her outfit and regal carriage but sensed by the suddenness of their silence that she’d intruded on a private conversation. Not surprising. The bunch from Knight Air were secretive and standoffish. At mealtimes they sat by themselves, speaking in low tones, like a clique in a high school cafeteria. Quinette herself hadn’t had any contact with them, except for a brief, inconsequential exchange with Fitz a couple of weeks ago on the compound’s volleyball court. The girls’ team was playing the boys’, and she was at net opposite Fitz because she was tall and had played intramural volleyball in high school and was pretty good at spiking. Afterward Fitz complimented her on her play and then, patting his belly, said something about needing to get exercise to lose weight.