Acts of faith (39 page)

“Oh, Lord! How long have you been waiting?”

“Not long. What are you doing here? What is this place?”

“Orthopedic workshop!” the other man shouted, as the band saw started again. “We make here the prosthetic limbs! Who are you?”

She didn’t answer, a little nonplussed by his enthusiasm.

Malachy waved her to come on in. “Sorry for keeping you. This poor sod, one of my parishioners”—he motioned at the Turkana—“gangrene. He’s in here to get fitted—”

“From this!” the ebullient European said. He dipped a hand into the rope and pulled out a ball of red and blue and green strands tangled up like multicolored spaghetti. “Polyprop! We melt it down and from it make new legs for those who have not theirs!”

“And it’s free if you’re Sudanese, but if you’re a local, the Red Cross charges you,” the priest said. “I’ll be but a minute, and then we’re off.”

“I’ll wait outside,” she said as the workman with the belt sander started up again, putting the finishing touches on a well-shaped calf.

Orthopedic workshop! she thought, her nostrils twitching from the polypropylene dust. Kind of like Santa’s workshop? With the happy elves making new legs as stocking stuffers? The young Sudanese came out, swinging on his crutches, went past her, and then pivoted so quickly he nearly fell.

“Sister! Sister Kinnet!”

She narrowed her eyes, as if looking at him in dim light.
Kinnet.
She faintly remembered someone calling her that.

“You don’t remember me? Because of this?” He tapped the stump of his upper thigh, over which his trouser leg was folded and pinned with safety pins.

“My God! Matthew? You gave me a ride on your bike?”

He beamed in affirmation.

“But how . . . what happened?”

He’d been wounded, not in a battle but while herding cows; one of the animals stepped on a landmine. It was killed outright, and shrapnel pierced Matthew just above his left knee—not a serious wound, he said, but it became infected, and by the time he was evacuated, it was too late to save his leg.

“I am so sorry, Matthew.”

“I will soon have a new one,” he declared, with such absence of rancor and sadness that she wondered if he was still in shock. “But did you see them, Kinnet? They’re
white.
I think I will have to paint mine black, or I will be a Dinka with the leg of a
hawaga
!”

“Your sister. I remember she was one of the ones set free that day. Is she all right?”

“Very much. She got married. To SPLA commander, an important man, a captain.”

Moved by his stalwart optimism, she cried out, “Oh, Matthew!” and embraced him.

He seemed not to know what to make of this expression, to be slightly embarrassed by her clinging to him, so she let him go.

“It’s not so bad, sister,” he said, then lowered his voice. “I have been fighting for a long time, Now I won’t have to anymore. But with the new leg I can herd cows. I will be able to sing to my ox all day, with no fighting.”

“I hope so. How I hope so.”

“Amin Madit speaks of you,” he said.

“Amin Madit?”

“My sister.”

“Oh, yes. She remembers me?”

“Very much and speaks of you. About the hawaga lady who made such fine words to make her happy.”

“Not really?”

“Yes, yes. All the captives spoke of you. They liked your words very much.”

The pleasure of hearing this instantly pumped in a warm transfusion of pride, for which she pardoned herself.

“And I think Amin Madit would like very much your dress also.”

“Oh? And what do you think?”

“Very much,” Matthew said as Malachy emerged from the workshop, wiping his glasses with a handkerchief. “Sister, can you find for me the black paint? The kind in the can with the button? Like this.” He mimicked a spraying motion. “They don’t have it here.”

“I don’t know. I’ll try. Promise.”

“You know that lad?” the priest asked as they walked toward his Land Rover.

She told him how she and Matthew had met and how he’d lost his leg and that sometimes she felt such fury toward the Sudanese Arabs, it frightened her.

“They do a lot to make one furious, don’t they now? But
Iram est brevem insaniam.
So said Seneca, quoting Horace. ‘Anger is a temporary madness.’ ”

Nothing caused her more embarrassment than moments like this, when the paucity of her education was made plain. Who was Seneca? Who was Horace?

“I’ll confess to feeling a touch of the temporary madness a few minutes ago,” Malachy said, pulling out of the hospital gate. “A lad like your Sudanese friend gets treated gratis. But a Turkana has to pay a hundred shillings just to be seen by a doctor. Where on earth is a Turkana to come up with a hundred shillings? Any wonder they turn to banditry?”

He stopped in front of a tukul and beeped the horn. A man in Western clothes came out, Catholic missal in hand, and climbed into the backseat. Malachy introduced him as his deacon and said that he spoke English and would help Quinette follow the morning’s services.

They headed down an excuse of a road paralleling a dry watercourse, its banks hedged by shrubs and thornbushes. Without the dashboard compass, Quinette never would have known they were traveling southwest. Her sense of direction wasn’t all that developed, and the country offered no landmarks: a featureless pan of pale brown, with only a few acacias, spread like umbrellas, to relieve the desolation. Some places lacked even those sparse trees, and she looked out at flat expanses devoid not only of life but, it seemed, of the hope of life. This was her first close look at the world that lapped the compound’s perimeters, and she wondered aloud how people lived in it.

“With great difficulty.” The priest flapped a hand, indicating a herd of camels swaying along in the distance. The Turkana walking behind looked like a dark reed in motion.”There are settlements all up and down these riverbeds. Don’t you worry.” He patted her knee. “I know where I’m going. Blazed this track we’re on myself, thirty years ago. No GPS then, didn’t even have a compass. Dragged a log behind my truck each time I came out, and eventually I had a road. Put a few turns in it to give it an Irish twist.”

“John said to tell you that he expected you to look out for me.”

“John Barrett? You saw him?”

“This morning at breakfast. Gave me a lift to the hospital.”

“Haven’t seen him in weeks. What sort of trouble is he causing now?”

“You’d know more about that than me. He said you two go back a long way.”

“We do.” Malachy slowed down to ease over a washtub-size bump. Several yards away, like blackened tarps, lay the rotted hides of dead cattle. “But Johnny doesn’t keep me abreast of all he’s up to.”

“Since priests never lie, I’ll take your word.”

He looked at her, silently asking what she meant.

“There are all these stories that IPA and Knight Air are flying into the Nuba mountains, but they won’t say so,” Quinette said. “Why the big secret? We fly into places that are off limits and we’re not shy about admitting it. We don’t advertise where we’re going, but when we get back, we put out newsletters about where we’ve been. We put it on the Internet. Why do those people act, you know, like they’re on some CIA mission?”

“And why are you so intrigued about what they’re doing?” he asked, giving her a quick look, then as quickly returning his eyes to the road.

Quinette shrugged. She wasn’t sure why. It was more than mere curiosity. Fitz, Wes, and the others formed a kind of club, and it bothered her to be left out. True, they barred everyone in the compound from their tight little circle; nevertheless, because she wasn’t like everyone else, she thought she was entitled to be let in.

“To answer your question,” Malachy said, “if I were flying stuff into the Nuba, I would want it known only by the people who need to know. Your organization goes into no-fly zones, sure it does, but you have to understand that even though the Nubans are as black as the Dinka, their mountains belong to northern Sudan. In the south you can get away with some things because the south is much more in the public eye. Khartoum absolutely loathes the spotlight you people have put on the slave trade, they would love to stop you, and they probably could, but they don’t because Sudan already has a reputation as a rogue country. But the Nuba, it’s so very isolated, and the government has a free hand to do as it chooses. It could blow an aid flight out of the sky and the world wouldn’t know, and probably not care if it did. Is it necessary to say more?”

There were more carcasses on the desert now, some recent and bloated, swarming with maggots, others old and mummified. A horned skull with birds’ nests in its eye sockets, a ribcage, and fragments of leg bone lay at the foot of a termite mound like the remnants of an animal sacrifice at an altar. A cow’s backbone, white in the sun, writhed alongside the road. At last they arrived at the settlement. Turkana women wearing stacked necklaces that looked like colorful neck braces stood around a well, pumping water into calabashes and waterskins. Malachy parked near a stick-and-thornbush boma ten feet high, got out of the car, and stretched, his white hair ruffled by the wind, an aggressive wind that seemed to suck the moisture out of Quinette’s skin. Missal in hand, the deacon went out among the tukuls, calling the people to come to church, which appeared to be the ring formed by the boma. People began filing inside, women in their long drab dresses, men in striped and checkered robes knotted over their knobby shoulders, walking sticks and braided stock whips in hand.

“Look at that fella over there.” Malachy’s hand fell heavily on her shoulder, and he turned her partway around to face a tall, wiry man who looked to be about fifty and wore an ostrich feather in his bark skullcap and ivory bracelets on his arms. “Can you see the scars on his chest, like a row of beads?”

She cocked her head forward, squinting, and said she couldn’t.

“You will in a moment, when we’re inside. He’s the senior elder here, more or less the boss. Each one of those marks represents a man he’s killed in battle. Toposa probably, and I’ll wager they weren’t all killed in self-defense. It’s a hard, hard place, this, and it breeds hard people, and my mission is to make it a little less hard so as to make them a little less hard. More Christian. I see to it that wells are dug for them, that they get medical care, that they get fed in times of drought.”

Looping her camera’s cord around her wrist, Quinette followed him into the boma, where the whole settlement had gathered, cramming themselves into a circle not thirty feet in diameter, the men on one side, elders in front, women and kids on the other, sheltering under a tall tree that broke the torrent of direct sunlight. People who barely had water to drink had none for bathing, and the smell of so many bodies in so small a space was powerful—not sour or rank, just strong. The deacon motioned for Quinette to sit on a flat rock. He gave her permission to take pictures, and she boxed the priest in the viewfinder as he turned to the elders and uttered a single word in a booming voice. They answered in unison.

“Father Malachy has addressed the elders,” the deacon translated, “and they have said, ‘Apoloreng, we are here!’ That is what we call him. Father of the Red Ox.”

Turning to the women, Malachy called out to them, and they responded with a rhythmic chant.

“Now Father Malachy says that he is glad to see all the Turkana here, and the women say, ‘We are here.’ ”

Then a melodious litany was sung, the priest leading, the women answering him first, the men coming in, high voices blending with low, rising, falling in a slow tempo. The African cadences pierced her to the depths.

“We are here to call on God,” Malachy sang in his baritone.

“Oh, yes!” the congregation sang in response. “We are here. We are here calling on God.”

“God of Abraham . . .”

“Yes!”

“God of Saint John . . .”

“Yes!”

“God of Mary . . .”

“Yes!”

“All you people are calling on God.”

“Oh, yes! We are calling on Him.”

“God of Matthew . . .”

“We call on him!”

“God of Mark . . .”

“We call on him!”

“God of Luke . . .”

“We call on him!”

“God of John . . .”

“We call on him!”

“All you people are calling on God.”

“Oh, yes! We are calling on Him.”

It was beautiful, elemental, bewitching, and Quinette’s eyes flooded. She wished she knew Turkana so she could join in, although there was a whiff of paganism in the ceremony that made her a little uneasy: the chanting worshippers assembled in a circle under a tree, Malachy presiding over them like a white witch doctor rather than a minister of Our Lord. When the litany ended, the deacon rose and preached a homily. With no one to translate, Quinette had no idea what his message was. He spoke with a great deal of fervor, now stabbing the air with a finger, now tearing at the missal’s pages to read a passage aloud, pacing back and forth as he read, the people shouting “Eh-yay!” whenever he made a point they particularly approved of. Feeling out of things, she looked at the ostrich-plumed elder and tried to count the scars beneath his left shoulder. How strange and thrilling to be in a church—if this could be called a church—with a man whose chest bore the record of the blood he’d shed. Endeavoring to be unobtrusive, she balanced the camera on her knees, swiveled her legs to point directly at him, and pressed the button.