Acts of Faith

Redeemer

WHILE THEY WAITED for a boat to be brought up, in a heat like none she’d known back home, even on the stillest, muggiest days her mother called “dog days” (Quinette in her childhood wondering what hot weather and dogs had to do with each other), she remembered how wide the Mississippi had looked the first time she saw it from the Dubuque levee, near the foot of the bridge arching like a steel rainbow into another state, the trees on the Illinois side and the hills beyond appearing so distant she felt as if she were looking across a lake rather than a river, her idea of a river being the Cedar or the Shell Rock or the Little Cedar, slender enough that two people on opposite banks could talk to each other.

The Mississippi lived up to the way she’d pictured it in sixth-grade geography period. Mrs. Hoge told the class that Mississippi was an Indian word meaning “Father of Waters,” because it was the longest river in North America. Not, however, the longest in the world. That honor belonged to the Nile, she said, moving her pointer to the world map pulled down over the blackboard like a window shade: more than four thousand miles from here—the rubber tip stabbed at a country called Uganda—to here in Egypt—the tip moving to the river’s mouth, opening onto the Mediterranean Sea.

As Mrs. Hoge went on, Quinette recalled the story of Moses from Sunday school—how he had drifted in a reed basket coated with pitch until he was found by Pharaoh’s daughter and spared from her father’s cruel edict to have all firstborn Hebrew boys killed. Her thoughts ran from there to an old movie she’d seen about Moses, starring Charlton Heston. Because the subject matter met with her mother’s approval (unlike her father, who’d gone to church only at Christmas and Easter, her mother was a devout Lutheran), she allowed Quinette to stay up late to watch it on TV. Nicole and Kristen weren’t interested and went upstairs to listen to Kristen’s new Pat Benatar tape. How small and vulnerable Moses’ basket looked, how miraculous that it stayed afloat on the immense river. Her mother, sitting beside Quinette on the old sofa with its brown and gold pattern like late autumn leaves, looked at her out of the corner of her eye and smiled gently, the smile telling her that there was good in everyone, even in heathen Egyptian women, and that God’s hand was everywhere. He had guided the basket into the arms of Pharaoh’s daughter so the baby inside could grow up to be Charlton Heston and lead his people out of bondage.

All those memories, of Mrs. Hoge’s class, of the day on the levee, and of the Nile as it appeared in the movie, rushed at Quinette as she sat with her companions under a wide-spreading tree, hot sunlight slivering through the branches as through pinpricks in a worn awning, and gazed at the real Nile. Colored like mud mixed with wet cement, and sluggish and less than half as wide as the Mississippi, it was not the mighty, awesome river that had surged in her imagination, and she felt cheated. She usually did when things turned out to be less beautiful or exciting or inspiring than she’d hoped—as if she were the victim of an intentional fraud.

It had been that way when she was born again. Most of the congregation at Family Evangelical Church had described their salvation as a rapturous experience—the Holy Spirit moving through them like a wind, and nothing the same afterward. Like they were all Saint Paul on the road to Damascus. Quinette had been stopped at a red light, on the road from work to her night-school computer class at the University of Northern Iowa, when she accepted Jesus Christ as her personal lord and savior. She immediately recited the sinner’s prayer, as her minister had advised her to do. “Jesus, I admit to you that I am a sinner, in need of savior.” The light turned green, but she continued. “I repent of my sins.” The driver behind her honked his horn, she waved to him to go around. “I believe that you died on the cross and rose from the dead as a substitute for our sins, and accept that you have come into my life, amen.”

Her words were as honest as any she’d ever spoken, but the woman who drove on was still the same Quinette Hardin, twenty-four years of age, a saleswoman at The Gap in the Cedar Falls mall, a recent divorcée temporarily living with her elder sister and her brother-in-law on Hyacinth Street, in a new subdivision across from a cornfield. Passing the UNI-Dome, lit up for a night basketball game with Illinois Wesleyan, she found herself, just as she always did, looking forward to going out for a drink after class, hoping to meet a cute, intelligent guy tall enough to date a woman who stood six foot one in her bare feet. If she’d been saved, and she was sure she had been, why was she eager for the taste of a bourbon and Coke and an encounter with some dude in a bar? She was as disappointed as she was baffled. The moment that was supposed to change her life forever had been no more thrilling or transforming than when she’d grasped how to do square roots in freshman algebra. She pulled into an Amoco to call Pastor Tom Cullen on the pay phone. When he answered, she told him that Jesus had come into her life. (Tom had asked her to call, no matter what the hour.) In his staccato voice, he said he was very happy for her, this was as joyous an event for him as it was for her. Picturing him in his old frame house, his narrow head, topped by a peninsula of flaxen hair, leaning into the phone, Quinette didn’t have the heart to tell him that she did not feel joyful or different, so she pretended that the experience had been like everyone else’s, laid it on with a trowel, affecting a breathless voice as she told him that the Holy Spirit had swept her into a whole new life of the soul. She felt a little the way she had faking orgasms with her ex, part of her hoping that the real thing would somehow, some way arise out of the deception, if it were done well enough, disgusted with herself afterward, angry at life for denying her what it gave to other women (unless they were all lying). It was kind of like that, and it wasn’t fair.

“I thought it would be bigger than this,” she said to Jim Prewitt, sitting next to her, his forehead spangled with sweat.

He looked at her questioningly. She pointed at the river.

Jim took off the short-brimmed hat and ran a bandanna through his damp hair: sparse strands of brittle gray, like the bristles on an old paintbrush.

“You should see the Jordan,” he said. “First time I did, oh, it must’ve been twenty-five years ago, I was really expecting something. All those stories in Joshua, all those hymns. Turned out to be not much more than a muddy creek. We crossed it by way of the Allenby Bridge. Took about five seconds. We’d gone over Jordan, and everybody on the bus looked at each other and you could tell we were all thinking the same thing—Is that it?”

Jim was also a reverend. At one time he’d led tour groups on trips to the Holy Land. Now he was chairman of overseas missions for a family of ministries in California.

“Know what you mean,” she said, and then told him about the first time she’d laid eyes on the Mississippi.

Well, things always look bigger to you when you’re a kid, Jim remarked, as if she didn’t know that, then informed her that the river before them was the Upper Nile, the White (as if she didn’t know that either). After it joined the Blue in Khartoum, it got bigger, and by the time it made it down to Egypt, he would bet it was as broad as the Mississippi. He’d seen it there more than once, leading his pilgrim tourists.

He spoke slowly, with an undertone of condescension that made Quinette bristle. Talking to her like she was still a kid in Mrs. Hoge’s geography period. Okay, she wasn’t the brightest bulb in the chandelier, but she wasn’t stupid, and she hated it when people talked down to her. Maybe the heat was making her irritable—it must have been a hundred degrees—and she stood and fanned herself with her hat and blew down into her shirt. She had to watch her temper, anger being a sin she fell into fairly often. That had been true since the day when she was fourteen and yelled curses at the people bidding for her father’s tractor, the John Deere she used to ride on with him when she was little; vile curses hurled at the top of her lungs, and then she hurled something more tangible at the auctioneer—a rock. Threw it as hard as she could, almost knocked him cold, and she didn’t feel sorry about it for a long time.

Remaining on her feet, swiping her hat past her face, she allowed her thoughts to return to the river, pushing slowly past its reed-choked banks. Papyrus reeds, she believed, like the kind Moses’ basket was made of as it floated into the saving arms of Pharaoh’s daughter upriver, no, downriver in Egypt. Somehow, she couldn’t get used to thinking of north as down, south as up. “And then Pharaoh’s daughter went down to the water”—the old hymn sang faintly in her memory—“went down to the water so blue.”

Out from under the tree, where the light was better for filming, the CNN reporter was interviewing Ken Eismont. He had the look of a strict high school principal—round rimless glasses, hollow cheeks, a sharp chin, short brown hair. The man in charge, executive director of the WorldWide Christian Union. Also its chief fundraiser and PR man. It was Ken who got the CNN team to report on his latest mission into Sudan. The reporter’s name was Phyllis something, a scrawny, auburn-haired woman with the gravelly voice of someone who smoked and drank too much, though Quinette had yet to see her with a cigarette and of course there was nothing to drink out here, except tepid water. The Kenyan camera crew, two young men who didn’t smile much and wore worried looks, moved around, changing angles on Ken, and when Phyllis was done with him, she turned to Mike and Jean, the Canadian couple who were taking their vacation time to help Ken redeem the slaves. Not redeem them in the spiritual sense, but to buy them back from their masters and then set them free.

In the meantime, making jerky movements with his hands, Ken was asking Santino to find out why it was taking so long to find a boat to ferry everyone across the Nile. Santino was a heavyset Sudanese with the blackest skin imaginable and short knotty hair matched to his complexion, so that he looked bald from far away. Ken called him his “banker.” He carried the cash that bought the slaves their liberty: on this trip, more than ten thousand dollars in hundred-dollar denominations, stuffed into a blue and white airline bag. Quinette watched him hand it over to Ken, then walk off toward the village of mud-walled huts clustered on a low hill above the river. Ten thousand dollars was more than half what she would earn this year at The Gap, and Ken stood with the bag slung over his shoulder, out here in a war zone in the middle of nowhere, as nonchalantly as if it contained spare socks and underwear.

In a few minutes Santino reappeared, flanked by the two SPLA soldiers who had been searching for someone with a boat. The three men came down the path leading from the village, the huts behind them crowned by thatch roofs layered like wedding cakes, the soldiers wearing floppy green hats and camouflage uniforms, assault rifles swinging at their sides and ammunition belts draped over their chests, the bullets gleaming in the late morning light. Two more guerrillas lounged nearby, beneath a tree rising out of the reeds on a trunk pale green as a stalk of early corn—a fever tree, someone had told her. She was glad to have the four soldiers on her side; they were scary-looking guys, each over six and a half feet tall, with tribal scars etched into his forehead in shallow V’s and his bottom front teeth missing. A custom, Santino had informed her an hour ago, when the soldiers appeared at the airstrip and grinned their hellos, the jagged gaps in their teeth startling her. They were Dinka tribesmen, and it was customary among the Dinka to have their bottom front teeth chopped out when they were ten years old. Santino didn’t know why, not being Dinka himself. That was the way they did things.

He was conferring again with Ken, in low tones. Ken set the airline bag down and pointed toward the river. Suddenly Quinette’s knees felt rubbery, and people and objects wavered before her eyes, as though a translucent curtain had dropped between her and them. Thinking she was about to faint, she sat down and leaned her head against the tree trunk and took in deep breaths, her heart beating as if it were trying to get out of her chest.

“Are you all right?” Jim Prewitt asked.

She nodded.

“You look white as a sheet.”

“Got woozy for a second. I’m okay.”

“It’s the heat,” Jim said, wiping his brow for emphasis. “Jet lag, too, I’ll bet. Maybe that malaria medicine. That can do it, too.”

She nodded again, although she knew, now that the vertigo was gone and her heart rate was returning to normal, that it wasn’t the heat, the malaria pills, or jet lag. It was the airline bag, stuffed with ten thousand dollars and Ken standing there so casually with it at his feet. It was the rebel soldiers with their fierce, scarred foreheads and missing teeth and the trees with green trunks instead of brown and the knowledge that she’d been plunked down in a place without electricity, telephones, highways, cars, TVs, or a single familiar thing. She’d left home only three days ago. Actually, she wasn’t sure if it had been three days. She’d lost track of time, flying from the small airport in Waterloo to Chicago O’Hare, from O’Hare all the way to Geneva, Ken and Jim meeting her there, then whisking her off to a connecting flight to Nairobi, where she’d tried to sleep but couldn’t, and then at dawn this morning winging on to Lokichokio in a twin-engine plane, stepping off it into the single-engine Cessna that had delivered her to this nameless place on the White Nile. Her mind and senses had been in suspended animation until that dizzying instant, moments ago, when they were awakened to the foreignness of her surroundings and to the reality of the incredible turn her life had taken. She who had been out of Iowa only a few times, never for very long and seldom very far, and who’d never done anything exceptional in her life, unless you counted the mess she’d been making of it until recently (and you really couldn’t because it had been an unexceptional mess—“trailer park trash, that’s what you’ve turned into,” her mother had scolded her, as if the commonness of her bad behavior was what made it offensive), had journeyed to a country at war in the heart of Africa, on a mission to liberate two hundred and nine black people from captivity. She felt inadequate to the task and completely out of place and a fleeting but intense longing to be home again, amid its everyday routines.

“Looks like we might be here for a while longer, so I might as well take advantage and do you two.” It was Phyllis, with her cameramen. She was done up in a Jungle Jane outfit—short-sleeve safari jacket with lots of pockets and green, lightweight pants and a wide hat over her long hair.

Phyllis motioned for her and Jim to come out into the light.

“I’ll start with you.” She indicated Quinette with a movement of her head. “You’re the reason I’m here. You’re the story.”

Quinette flinched and gave Phyllis a puzzled look. True, Ken had invited her to go on this particular mission and paid her travel expenses to draw attention to his cause, but she didn’t think of herself as the story.

“It’s the kids. They’re the story,” she began.

“Right. Sunday school kids from the American heartland, that’s the spin,” said Phyllis in her rough voice. “But you organized the campaign, right?”

“No. I helped out, but I—”

“Let’s make sure I’ve got your name right.” She took out a notebook from a side pocket of her Jungle Jane jacket and spelled out Quinette’s first and last names, and Quinette nodded that she had it right, and then was asked her age and what she did for a living and if she was married and had children, the reporter jotting down her responses in the flip-up notebook. At a gesture from Phyllis, the man holding the video camera on his shoulder zoomed in on Quinette.

“Do you mind if I brush my hair first?” she pleaded, with a sidelong glance at her rucksack, where her hairbrush was.

“This is an interview, not an audition. Better if you look a little rough. You’re in Africa, the bush.”

“Okay, but there’s one other thing.”

“What’s that?”

“I didn’t organize it. Our minister and the two Bible study teachers did, Alice and Terry. I worked on it, sure, but they put it together. The only reason they’re not here is because they’re, you know, middle-aged and married, with kids to take care of.”

“Are you saying you’re here instead of them because you’re expendable?” Phyllis asked, in a jokey sort of way that wasn’t entirely jokey. Quinette felt that the woman was trying to put words in her mouth.

“No!” she answered. “It’s just that it is dangerous out here, and—”

The reporter raised her hand like a crossing guard stopping traffic.

“I’ll be sure to get your role in this right. I’ll say that you were one of the organizers, how’s that? So let’s get started. Are you rolling?” she asked the cameraman. He nodded. In a twinkling, Phyllis’s posture and demeanor changed. She struck a pose, putting one foot forward and straightening her shoulders. Even her voice changed, no more gravel, just a smooth, formal, oh-so-clear TV-reporter voice, asking: “Your campaign is called CLASS. What does that stand for?”

Quinette hesitated, rosettes of sweat blossoming on her shirt. During the fundraising drive, she’d been interviewed by the Des Moines Register and by a cable TV station out of Iowa City, becoming a local celebrity for a brief time. It had been exciting to have perfect strangers come up to her in the mall to say that they recognized her, but that hadn’t made her a media veteran. This was CNN. Her face, her voice would be broadcast all over the country, maybe the world.

“Did you understand the question?” asked Phyllis.

Quinette said she did, then explained that CLASS was an acronym standing for Christian Love Against Slavery in Sudan.

“And of course it also refers to a Sunday school class. It was the children who thought up the idea. Could you tell us about that? How it got started?”

Quinette didn’t know where to begin. She wished she would stop sweating, but how could she, standing in the sun? Phyllis, though, looked dry as a pressed leaf. Kristen once kept a whole book of them—oak and maple and cottonwood leaves flattened between thin sheets of paper and all so crinkly they would crumble into fragments if you didn’t pick them up by the stems.

“The kids were studying about the captivity,” Quinette said, “the Babylonian Captivity. A girl in the class, a thirteen-year-old, raised her hand and said she’d read a newspaper story about how black Christians were being captured and put into bondage by Muslims, you know, like the ancient Israelites had been by the Babylonians. Well, that was news to everyone, not just the kids, but the teachers too, Alice and Terry. It was news to them.”

“They were shocked that this sort of thing is going on today?” Phyllis asked.

“Sure, of course they were. The girl had cut the story out and brought it to the class and showed it to, I think it was Alice, and Alice read it out loud and the kids heard about Ken and the WorldWide Christian Union, over in Switzerland. How it sent people into Sudan to buy back slaves with money that was donated by, you know, church groups and ministries like Jim’s here. The kids decided they had to do something to help. To raise money and send it to Ken. Alice and Terry figured out how to do it, but like you said, the idea came from the kids.”

“How much money and how did they raise it?” was Phyllis’s next question.

The goal was twenty-five hundred dollars, enough to purchase liberty for fifty people. They did it by selling T-shirts and running bake sales in the church basement. A special collection was taken up at services one Sunday, donations were solicited by telephone and by going door-to-door in Cedar Falls and in neighboring towns like Waterloo and Waverly, and the response was overwhelming, it was just so gratifying. When the drive ended, three months later, it had collected five thousand dollars.

“So half the people who are going to be freed on this trip will owe their freedom to these children from Iowa, who probably never heard of Sudan before. That’s pretty impressive.”

Quinette couldn’t tell if it was a question or a statement, and there was a canned, faked quality to the emotion Phyllis had thrown into her voice, like she was trying to tell her viewers what to feel when she didn’t feel it herself.

“Tell us, Quinette, what led you to get involved?”

She hesitated. The rosettes were spreading, their petals touching at the tips. Another five minutes of this, and she would look like she was in a wet T-shirt contest. People would see her bra line, strangers in their living rooms all over the U.S.A. Where the hell were those guys with the goddamned boat? Forgive me, Lord.

“That’s kind of personal,” she said.

“In what way?” Phyllis persisted.

Quinette paused, images reeling through her mind of the Sunday morning service in the church that didn’t look like a regular church, with pews and stained-glass windows, but more like an auditorium, with lots of flowers on the carpeted stage and the choir in pale blue robes at the back and the band on one side, warming everyone up with the hymn “I Want to Be a Christian,” before Pastor Tom got up and led off with Isaiah—” ‘The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me; because the Lord has anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound’ “—pausing to let Isaiah’s words sink in, then describing the wonderful thing that had happened in the Sunday school the week before, how the Holy Spirit had touched the children’s hearts, so they could hear and answer the cry for deliverance that was coming from across the ocean. And it’s coming to us, too! Tom thundered, his voice ringing off the walls. He was really fired up, it was one of his best sermons ever, holding four or five hundred people spellbound. “And we must heed it. . . . Our brothers and sisters in faith are being persecuted over there in Africa. . . . Our children are giving us a lesson in Christian duty, and we cannot let them down!” He stood without speaking for a while, his hands on the lectern, his glance sweeping over the congregation so that he seemed to meet each pair of eyes. The kids were going to need a big hand from adults, organizing the drive and making sure it ran smoothly, he said, his tone cooler now and more matter-of-fact. Alice and Terry were busy women, with families to watch after, and couldn’t manage everything by themselves. Anyone who wanted to volunteer to assist them should check in at the church office after the service. Then he announced the special collection and called on everybody to contribute, to get the drive off to a running start. Ushers started down the aisles, passing polished offertory plates from row to row, and as Quinette watched men reaching for their wallets, women opening their purses, she heard a voice. It was her own voice, but it was coming from outside of herself, telling her that here was what she had been seeking ever since she’d been saved: a real purpose, a cause she could devote herself to, and this as well: a channel for the restless energies that tempted her to backslide. She didn’t wait for Pastor Tom to return to his office but approached him at the church door, as he was saying good-bye to his flock. He looked at her and said, “I knew you’d be the first, you’re just who I had in mind when I asked for volunteers.”

How could she sum up all that in a soundbite?

“It was the right thing to do,” she replied to Phyllis’s question. “I’m a Christian, these people here are Christians—”

“Not all of them, maybe not even most of them,” Phyllis interrupted.

“Excuse me?”

“Some of them practice their traditional religions. Nature-worshippers, ancestor-worshippers, old-fashioned pagans. You didn’t know that? Did the kids in your Sunday school know that?”

There was a slight, scornful curl to the reporter’s thin lips, a vague hint of ridicule in the way she’d spoken.

Flustered, Quinette didn’t know what to say. She and everyone in the congregation assumed the slaves were Christians, because that’s what the newspaper had said—the story the girl had brought to class.

“If you had known that, and all the people who contributed to your drive, do you think it would have made a difference?” Phyllis asked into her silence. “Would you still have raised five thousand dollars?”

A dislike of Phyllis rose, a hot little flame. The woman had made her feel dumb and look dumb.

“Slavery is a violation of human rights, and last we checked, these people are human beings,” Ken Eismont declared in the hard, no-nonsense voice he could put on when he needed to. He’d been standing a little ways behind Quinette all the time, and she could have kissed him for rescuing her.

He gave the reporter a brief lecture about how the Arabs had raided Dinkaland for centuries, stealing cattle, capturing women and children, making concubines out of the women, and forcing the children to gather firewood and tend livestock. It was like a tradition, so much so that the Arab word for Dinka—for all black people—was abid, slave. Slavery had been abolished in Sudan seventy-odd years ago, he said, but then the new Islamist government revived it, for political reasons. It supplied the Arab tribes with horses and modern weapons, it ordered them where to raid and when.

Quinette listened, rapt. Ken was a smart, tough-minded guy who’d had a good deal of experience dealing with the media and had testified before Congress and the UN Human Rights Commission. She had watched videotapes of his testimony in Nairobi, and it was almost like observing a fine athlete in action, the way he fielded questions from congressmen and commissioners, giving quick, sharp answers, and he didn’t act as if he was grateful they’d invited him to testify, but as if they should be grateful to him for accepting. A man with an attitude, all right, more than a match for the acidic Phyllis.

“So what concerns us is that Khartoum deliberately violates human rights,” he was saying. “The religious beliefs of the victims are beside the point.”

“I take it you would agree with that?” Phyllis turned to Jim, the cameraman turning with her, like they were one person with two heads.

“This is my third time out with Ken,” Jim replied, sweat dripping from his long nose like raindrops from a gutter spout. “So sure I agree. But I, we—the ministries I represent—we do hope these people will be more receptive to the gospels, once they learn that Christian people have helped them gain their freedom.”

“So for you this is missionary work?”

“I believe Miss Hardin stated it perfectly,” answered Jim, Quinette swelling with pride. “It’s the right thing to do.”

Phyllis cut the interview when Santino announced that the boats were here at last.

Heads turned toward the riverbank. The two vessels were long dugout canoes, wider in the front than in the back, each with two paddlers, Dinka boys with twisty muscles, as if there were ropes under their skin. They stood in the shallows beside their vessels, leaning on their paddles.

Quinette and the others hoisted their rucksacks and filed down the muddy path through the tall papyrus reeds. Now that she was beside it, the Nile looked bigger, the current more powerful. Gobs of dirty foam bobbed downstream, a tree branch with the leaves sticking up sailed by, at the speed of a man walking fast.

“Let’s pray first,” Jim said. “All of you, if you please. Pray with me.”

He knelt down, and Quinette knelt beside him, there in the mud at the river’s edge. The others hesitated for a beat. They were anxious to get on across and start walking, to make sure they got to the town well before dusk. It didn’t seem an appropriate moment for prayer, but then Jean and Mike dropped to their knees, and Santino followed. Ken was the last. He wasn’t the praying kind, even though he worked for a religious organization, but Phyllis had signaled her crew to start filming, and Ken must have figured it would look bad on TV if he was on his feet while everyone else was kneeling.

“Heavenly Father, we call upon you to guide and protect us on our journey,” Jim intoned in a booming voice. He’d done some radio evangelizing on the Christian Broadcast Service. Head bowed, Quinette could feel the camera trained on her and the little band of redeemers. “Bless all who have come so far in your holy name and for your holy work.” Jim’s head wasn’t lowered, and he wasn’t looking up at the sky either; he was staring straight into the Nile, as though the Heavenly Father dwelled in its murky depths. “Bless our brothers Ken, Santino, and Mike, bless our sisters Quinette and Jean.” Quinette was trying to focus on God, but she was distracted by the self-consciousness the camera aroused in her. Did she look all right? It was hard to keep your mind on prayer with a TV crew videotaping you from only a few yards away. “Bestow your blessing, Heavenly Father, on the captives we seek to set free. Hold your hand over them as you held it over your children in captive Israel. We ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.”

“Amen,” Quinette murmured with the others, then stood and brushed her knees. Her baggy safari shorts dropped over them. Not the kind of thing she would have chosen for herself, loving as she did bright figure-flattering clothes to offset her drab brown hair and a face that was a little like Iowa, neither pretty nor ugly. Back in Nairobi, Ken had taken her to a camping store on Biashara Street and made her buy the shorts and the olive drab shirts to go with them. He’d objected to the outfits she’d brought from the States: a kaleidoscope of canary yellows, teal greens, salmon pinks. It was the dry season in Sudan, Ken had told her. Government planes could be flying, militia might be patrolling the countryside. Making herself so obvious could prove dangerous, to her and her companions.

They took off their hiking boots and sandals and waded in, the water warm as bathwater, and with the paddlers holding the unstable craft steady, got on board: Phyllis, her crew, Mike and Jean in one with two of the soldiers, Quinette, Ken, Santino, and Jim in the other with the remaining soldiers. They sat on the gunwales, three to a side, their gear between them. With sign language, one of the soldiers cautioned them to sit very still. A pod of hippopotami wallowed a little ways downstream, their gray-black backs humped out of the water. Quinette had never seen a hippopotamus before, except in one of those National Geographic specials Jake Mueller, her brother-in-law, liked to watch. The most dangerous beast in Africa, Ken had informed her on the flight from Loki. Killed more people every year than all the lions and leopards put together.

The stern paddler launched the dugout with a strong shove, then hopped in so nimbly that it barely rocked. Just then Quinette spied a crocodile basking on a mud bank toward the far side of the river, stationary as a log, its long head tilted slightly, like someone with his chin in the air, its plated back silvery green in the sunlight. Ken had given her some information about crocs as well—if hippos got the gold medal for killing people, crocs got the silver. They usually nabbed native women, washing clothes by the riverbank, dragged them in and rolled them over until they drowned, then devoured them. The thought of such a death stirred a primal dread in Quinette. Back home you tossed dirty clothes into the Maytag and forgot about them; here doing your laundry could have gruesome consequences. She could only trust that the Heavenly Father had listened to Jim’s petitions.

Eddies creased the surface of the dark Nile, little whirlpools formed and vanished and re-formed. Angling upstream to make up for the river pushing the dugout in the opposite direction, the paddlers dug in hard, their ropy muscles writhing. They were a beautiful people, these Dinka, so tall and lithe, with big, oval, slightly slanted eyes and skin so dark it looked as if God had cut bolts out of the midnight sky and made human beings from them.

The croc slipped off the mud bank with a leisurely sweep of its tail and disappeared. She pictured it cruising through the half-light below and felt vulnerable, sitting on the edge of the canoe. The soldier across from her must have seen the look on her face because he made a reassuring movement with his hand, then patted his automatic rifle. Yeah, she thought, a lot of good that’ll do you if you end up in the drink with the rest of us.

The paddlers in the second boat, lagging a little, quickened their strokes and pulled up parallel to the one she was in, allowing the cameraman to film it broadside as it crossed. The camera’s glass eye stared straight at Quinette from five yards away, and she stared back at it and forgot her fears as she imagined everyone she knew looking at her on TV. It was a little like sneaking into a room full of people viewing a home video of yourself. You saw them and your own screen image at the same time; you were both the observer and the observed. Her mother, Kristen, Nicole and Jake and her nephew Danny, Pastor Tom, Mrs. Hoge, Alice, Terry, and the pupils from Sunday school—she saw them all watching her, sitting in a dugout paddled by bare-chested tribesmen, with a croc-infested river in the background and an African rebel beside her, wearing his ferocious scars and garland of ammunition. The Quinette in that inner picture did not appear as out of her element as the real Quinette felt; nor did the papyrus reeds and fever trees and soldiers’ faces, framed by the flickering rectangle in her mind’s eye, look as foreign and weird as they did to the eyes in her head. Visualizing the scene as it would appear on TV, before all those familiar people, had somehow domesticated it. An odd and wonderful thing happened when she turned away from the camera’s hypnotic stare to gaze at the world around her: the mental image dissolved, yet its feeling of familiarity lingered. The soldiers’ faces had lost their exotic menace, appearing no more peculiar or frightening than the faces of punked-out kids back home, with their pierced tongues and noses and spiked, tinted hair. The strangeness of her surroundings and this whole experience, which had nearly made her faint, had dissolved completely, and the sense that she was a stranger here dissolved with it. The thing she was doing no longer struck her as bizarre but seemed perfectly natural, something she was meant to do. A gusher of joy sprang from her stomach into her throat, and for a second she thought it would fly right out of her mouth in a birdlike cry, like lyrics that made you so happy you could not contain them inside yourself but had to sing them out loud. All that kept her silent, as the boats drew close to shore, was the knowledge that she was to be here for a short time only—five days, that was how long Ken figured it would take. Then she would begin the journey home, back to the routines she had longed for barely half an hour ago and now, suddenly, dreaded.

They entered a cove where the water was only knee deep. The soldiers and paddlers got out and walked the dugouts ashore, swinging them parallel to the bank so the passengers could disembark without getting their feet wet again. There was a large tree atop the bank, and from beneath the umbrella of its branches, another squad of four guerrillas stood up suddenly, surprising Quinette as she was lacing up her hiking boots. Where had they come from? Who were they? Dinka, she observed, noticing the same chevrons slashing across foreheads, as if they’d been clawed by an animal with a sense of precision. The same gap-toothed grins. Not just a cruel custom, she thought, but a tragic one, because the Dinkas’ teeth were as white as their skin was black; if they were allowed to keep them all, they could blind you with their smiles.

“Quite a bodyguard. Expecting trouble?” Phyllis said to Ken.

“Expecting it? No. Ready for it if it comes, yeah,” he replied. “But we’ll try to avoid making you a war correspondent,” he added in a patronizing tone of voice.

“Sarajevo, the intifada, Afghanistan. Been there done that, so it would be no problem,” Phyllis shot back, and you could tell it wasn’t just bravado.

The guerrillas collected the team’s rucksacks and shouldered them. Jim Prewitt blew out his cheeks, relieved that he wouldn’t have to carry his tent and sleeping bag the rest of the way. The leader issued commands in Dinka, and half the men jogged out in front, rifles clattering. The rest brought up the rear, and then the column filed through the reeds. The air was still, thick, and rank with the odors of mud and decaying vegetation. A mosquito sang in Quinette’s ear, another bit her on the forearm. She slapped it, smearing her skin with blood, then got bug repellent from her fanny pack and sprayed herself liberally.

They followed the trail up out of the marshes and onto the savannah and trooped down a narrow, rutted laterite road that cut through high grass the color of hay. This part of deepest, darkest Africa wasn’t dark at all, but light light light, as flat as Iowa it seemed, and almost as open, with the acacia trees wide apart. An arid wind blew across the vastness, relieving the heat but raising dust from the road that powdered everyone’s sweaty skin. Clouds sailed on the wind, like scattered blimps. The band of redeemers and guards walked on through the heat and dust, Jim, the oldest of the bunch, barely keeping up and the Kenyan cameramen, softened by life in Nairobi, sweating buckets as they took turns lugging the video camera. Quinette had expected Phyllis to be their weakest link; despite her war correspondent’s résumé, she looked too thin and citified to withstand a long tramp through the bush, but she was holding up pretty well, swinging along in her jaunty hat and safari jacket. Santino wasn’t having any trouble either, nor Ken, nor Mike and Jean, even though both were on the short side and had to take two steps for every one the rebel soldiers took, their legs nearly as long as the two Canadians were tall.

“I can’t figure out how the Arabs make slaves out of these people,” Quinette remarked, walking alongside Ken. She pointed at the soldiers in front of them.

“Don’t know how or don’t know why?” Ken asked. He’d clipped polarized lenses to his glasses and now looked like a blind man.

“It’s the same question, isn’t it?”

“Not exactly. You heard me tell Phyllis why.”

“Government policy. But Ken, these guys, they’re like a professional basketball team with assault rifles. Who would want to mess with them? Santino told me they’re as tough and mean as they look.”

“They are.” He was looking not at her but dead ahead, his wrists resting on his two army-style belt canteens.

“Dinka boys learn to fight with sticks and how to wrestle, and when they get their teeth chopped out, they’re not allowed to cry or make a sound, that’s what Santino said. Doesn’t make sense how Arab pipsqueaks can attack guys like that and steal their cattle and their kids and their wives. You’d think the Dinka would just kick their butts right into the middle of next month.”

Ken gave a short, dry laugh, but she couldn’t tell if he laughed because the phrase amused him or because he thought she’d said something stupid. She would be mortified if that was his opinion. She respected him for his dedication to his work and for his knowledge of this part of the world, and she wanted him to respect her. His approval seemed a thing to be coveted if you didn’t have it, cherished if you did. Maybe she should have explained the choice of clothing she’d brought from home. Taking part in the liberation of two hundred and nine people was a joyous event in her book, and she’d wanted to proclaim her joy by dressing in vibrant outfits. Nothing shallow or frivolous about that, was there? You didn’t go to a wedding dressed for a funeral, did you?

“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.”

She looked at him and the vintage one-gear bike, with its rust-pitted rims and wide bald tires. “And just how do you know where we’re going?”

“Bush telegraph,” said Ken. “It’s faster than e-mail and you don’t need a modem.”

He told her it would be all right if she accepted the offer—the town was less than two miles away and this was a liberated area, firmly under SPLA control.

Matthew stripped off his shirt, folded it, and lay it on the carrier over the rear fender. She climbed on and sat with her hands on the carrier for balance, her legs thrust out to keep her feet off the ground. They rode past fields of harvested sorghum; the strewn brown leaves and chopped stalks brought to mind her father’s lost acres, the memory causing her old grief to jab her with a keenness that caught her off guard; then the needle withdrew and the hurt passed from her. Trees bordering a stream, some tributary of a tributary, spun a filament of green across the sere grasslands. There were women bathing in the stream, skirts hiked up and knotted around their thighs, and they stopped and stared at the bike in shock, then doubled over in laughter.

“They have never seen before a lady on a bike,” Matthew explained.

“Dinka girls don’t ride bikes?”

“Oh my, no,” he said, as if she’d mentioned some inviolable taboo.

Standing up on the pedals, Matthew pumped hard to get over a gentle rise. The back side was steeper than the front, and they coasted down with alarming speed. He locked the brakes, the rear wheel slewed to one side, and Quinette flew off, landing on her rear end, clutching the camera close to her tummy, like a mother protecting an infant.

“Oh! Kinnet! You are all right?”

“No bones broken,” she said, and laughed, and the Dinka laughed with her.

“Please hold on to me the rest of the way,” he said, retrieving his shirt from where it had fallen and putting it back on the carrier.

She did as he asked, though she couldn’t see what good it would do if he lost control again. There was no fat on him. Holding him below the ribs, Quinette felt that she could have squeezed his narrow trunk like a toothpaste tube if not for the hard, tensile stomach muscles, moving under her fingers. His back, coated with sweat, had the sheen of a black lacquer table, and he gave off a strong but not unpleasant musk. She felt a stirring she knew she shouldn’t and let go of his waist and returned her hands to the carrier.

They entered the town. Well-swept dirt yards, pavement smooth and shrouded by mahogany trees faced each other across a street that was more like a cowpath, full of potholes and deep, meandering ruts made, she guessed, by rainwater sluicing through in the wet season. Some tukuls had religious petitions painted on their clay walls—“God Bless All Within,” “Christ Jesus Bless this House.” What was Phyllis talking about, saying that most of these people were heathen ancestor-worshippers? The bike ride ended in the marketplace. From stalls made of woven branches and sheet metal and roofed by plastic tarpaulins, men and women sat selling cigarettes, canned goods, amber bricks of soap, spices in small burlap sacks. There wasn’t a whole lot more—a few cotton dresses hanging from a door on wire hangers, hand towels, and flour in cloth bags stamped with a drawing of a white hand shaking a black one and a stars-and-stripes shield and the word USAID. She wondered how even those meager goods had found their way to such a remote place, and she thought of the mall where she worked, with more bounty in one square foot than in this whole market.

Matthew led her by the hand to one of the stalls and offered her a wooden stool to sit on and asked if she would like a cup of tea. She preferred coffee to give her a lift, for she was light-headed from exhaustion, but this didn’t look like the place to get picky. Matthew spoke to the woman sitting inside, in a darkness that would have been like a closet’s but for a kerosene lamp and the light infiltrating through the latticework of the twig-and-branch walls. In a few minutes, she set a small china pot and two cups on the counter, and Quinette’s chauffeur filled them and dipped a spoon into a bowl of brown crystalline sugar, asking how many she wanted. She said one.

“Your tea, mah-dam,” the Dinka said with a mock bow. “I was one time a waiter in the hotel in Wau.”

“Wow?”

The cup looked pretty dirty, but she decided to drink from it, to be polite.

“A big town to the south. Far away. Government town. I cannot go there now.” He swung the Kalashnikov from behind his back and slapped it. “SPLA! They would shoot me down!” His glance lifted quickly, toward a pair of men outside a stall across the way. They were watching Quinette and Matthew. Both wore turbans and long white robes, like bedsheets, and they weren’t Dinka, even she could see that, noticing their cherrywood complexions and noses like eagles’ beaks. One had a short beard, the other was clean shaven.

“Salaam aleikum,” said Matthew, his hand fluttering past chin, nose, forehead before it swept outward with a comically exaggerated flourish.

“Aleikum as-salaam,” said the bearded one. A knife in a hide scabbard was strapped to his upper arm, and he didn’t appear to be amused by the Dinka’s theatrics. He jerked his pointy chin at Quinette, in a kind of contemptuous way and said something in a language she didn’t recognize, though she could tell that he was asking a question. Matthew answered, and the man grunted without expression; then he and his friend walked off, robes swirling around their brown ankles.

“Messiriya,” Matthew said.

She cocked an ear.

“Those fellows. They are from the Messiriya tribe. Arabs.”

“What are they doing here?”

“That is what they asked me about you.”

“I thought the Dinka were at war with the Arabs.”

“We are, yes.”

“Then what are they doing here?”

“We are not at war with all Arabs.”

“You mean, with their tribe? You’re not fighting this Miserya tribe?”

“Messiriya. We are fighting them all the time. The Messiriya and Dinka—” He made fists and knocked them together, knuckle to knuckle.

She gave him a long, searching look. “I’m confused.”

“Oh, yes. The war makes a big confusion. Sometimes I am confused by it.” He gazed down the street in the direction the Arabs had gone. “The omodiya of those fellows is not at war with us. For now. A few months from now—” Matthew twitched his shoulders to indicate the unpredictability of future events.

“The omo what?” Quinette asked.

“Omodiya. It is like a very big family. How in English? A very big family?”

“Clan?”

“Yes! The clan of those fellows has made peace with the Dinka for now because they need to graze their cattle on Dinka land and also to come to Dinka towns to buy things. Soap. Sugar. Tea. Also to sell slaves. That is what those fellow are here to do. They go about in the north, buying slaves from the people who own them, and when they have so many, they bring them here to sell them back to their families for cows or goats, sometimes for money.”

Trading cows and goats for human beings? Her brain was swimming.

“Three cows for one person,” Matthew continued. “But many Dinka don’t have three cows to give. That is why you, your friends are so very welcome. You have the money for buying them, return them to their families.”

Looking past him, she observed that several women and children had gathered on the street to gawk at her with fixed, quizzical stares. Well, she was probably as conspicuous here as one of these Dinka females would be in Cedar Falls.

“Was anyone from your family taken?”

“My sister. Two years ago. I have heard she will be among those to be given freedom, so I got the permission from my commander to come here and bring her home.”

The small crowd edged closer, approaching as if she might be dangerous.

“Hello, bye-bye,” said Quinette, raising a hand.

A young woman in a long black skirt and Chicago Bulls T-shirt turned her face aside shyly and giggled.

“Ha-lo. Bye-bye,” replied another woman with two small kids at her side, a girl in a ragged dress, a younger, naked boy. The woman touched Quinette’s forearm, the way you would touch an iron to test its heat, and then spoke in a soft, musical voice.

“She is saying that you are her sister,” Matthew translated.

She liked the sound of it. It persuaded her that she’d read the glances of the two women down the road accurately.

“Tell her that I’m honored to be her sister,” she said.

She reached down and lifted the naked boy into her lap, a gesture that brought a murmur of approval from the crowd. She loved kids and occasionally regretted that she and her ex hadn’t had any (though she was more often not the least bit sorry, knowing that she would now be a single mother working two jobs, battling for child support, and probably not getting any, because Steve was an odd-job handyman five days a week, a guitarist in a tenth-rate country music band on weekends, imprisoned by the futile hope that he would be discovered and asked to come to Nashville).

Ken and Jim came parading in with the others, surrounded by a welcoming mob.

“See you’ve made friends,” Ken said to Quinette. “Our ambassador of good will.” He gave the boy’s head a knuckle rub. The movement was stiff and awkward. “C’mon. Let’s get settled in. Big day tomorrow.”

She joined the procession, holding each kid by the hand, their mother walking alongside on bare, dust-reddened feet and chattering away.

“This woman,” Matthew translated, “she wants for you to stay in her house this night.”

Quinette hesitated, looking to Ken. He shook his head and said the local commander already had designated places for them to stay. He wanted them all together, for security reasons.

She was disappointed—it would be interesting to see how a Dinka woman lived—yet her heart beat quickly with a secret excitement. Here she was, a stranger, and the woman had invited her under her roof with hardly a word exchanged between them. Why was that? Now that she thought about it, why had Matthew offered her a ride and not Phyllis and Jean? A spontaneous harmony seemed to develop between her and these towering coal-black people.

The parade ended at a compound enclosed by a straw and branch fence. The soldiers wouldn’t let the townspeople inside. Quinette let go of the children’s hands and followed Ken and Jim through a rickety gate. The soothing shadows of fruit trees striped the bare ground and climbed low tukul walls to spread a tracery of leaves and branches on the grassy slopes of the roofs. Fallen mangoes lay here and there like big ochre eggs, giving off a sharp, ripe odor just short of rotten. The place would have had the sad, romantic atmosphere of a neglected orchard if it had been uninhabited, but there were quite a few people around: a couple of soldiers stirring a blackened pot over a fire, a few more playing some sort of game with stones, two others raising on makeshift poles a canvas enclosure about the size of a phone booth—“that’ll be the ladies’ room,” Jean said in her singsongy Canadian accent. An SPLA officer in a red beret and a civilian wearing a baseball cap sat at a table in front of a small whitewashed bungalow, with a sign over the door reading SOUTH SUDAN RELIEF AND REHABILITATION AGENCY, the name of the indigenous NGO that cooperated with Ken on his missions.

The soldiers who had been carrying the rucksacks went off to drop their burdens at the doors of the tukuls, and Quinette noticed, with a sinking feeling, that she and Phyllis were going to be roommates. Ken and Jim approached the table. The two men seated there stood up and shook hands with the Americans. Ken introduced Quinette, and when he mentioned that she had raised half the money, the civilian in the baseball cap, whose name was Manute, enveloped her hand in both of his and thanked her “on behalf of the people of southern Sudan.” She knew it was just a phrase; all the same, she felt a tingling in her chest, picturing a forest of bony black arms lifted up in gratitude.

During the flight from Loki, Ken had briefed her and Phyllis on the procedures for redeeming captives. The retrievers—the men who had bought the slaves back from their owners—were to be paid in Sudanese pounds, which were supplied by the SRRA. Now it was time for a currency exchange. Manute went inside the bungalow and came out with a metal file box, from which he drew bundles of crisp multicolored bills. He made some calculations on a pocket calculator, then turned it around so Ken could read the numbers.

“What rate did you use?” Ken asked.

“The one our Loki office gave me. I called them on the radio just this morning.”

Santino, in the meantime, began counting the Sudanese money, the airline bag with the dollars at his feet.

“It’s not what the bank quoted in Nairobi,” Ken declared. “Look, the retrievers will be expecting twenty-nine thousand four hundred a head.” He paused to tap the calculator keys. “Six million one forty-four total. I’ll be coming up fifty-seven thousand short with the rate you’re using. Fifty-seven thousand buys two people. What do I do? Pick out two and tell them, sorry, better luck next time? Do I pay for them out of my own pocket?”

“Of course not! I will make up the difference if it comes to that.” Manute pulled out his wallet for emphasis. “But it won’t. The retrievers will use the same rate like me. If they insist on the other, we can tell them, ‘Take it or leave it.’ They will take it. You know what they pay the owners for the captives. Nine, ten thousand for one. At the most fifteen. So a lot of profit for them. They will take it.”

Ken chewed his lip. “If they don’t, I’ll hold you to your promise,” he said.

Manute made a movement with his head; it might have been a nod, it might have been a reflexive twitch caused by the flies, which were everywhere.

Santino hefted the airline bag onto the table. Out came the American currency in one-hundred-dollar denominations; in went the Sudanese pounds while Manute and the officer flipped through the greenbacks, then stacked them side by side to make sure they were the same height. Quinette focused her camera on the men’s hands and the piled bills—click—and wondered what she would say about this picture when she gave her presentation. She hadn’t considered the economic practicalities of God’s holy work; they made it seem less than holy. All of Manute’s talk—“nine or ten thousand for one . . . a big profit”—like he was discussing cattle prices.

After Manute and the officer left, Quinette observed Ken throw a brusque, sidelong glance at Phyllis, who looked back at him with her quick green eyes. She straddled the bench across the table from him and drew her notebook from her pocket as if it were a gun.

“A little bush-league currency arbitrage?” she asked.

Ken said nothing. A couple of dozen flies made tiny polka dots on the back of his shirt.

Phyllis had taken her hat off, and the light slicing through a gap in the trees exposed the gray streaks in her reddish hair and the whisker-thin wrinkles etched into her papery skin. The woman might have owned a certain pale, gaunt beauty when she was younger, but now, with the honed planes of her high cheekbones raked alongside the blade of her nose and her chin tapering sharply below taut lips, her face had so many points and edges that Quinette imagined it could cut you anywhere you kissed it.

She stood aside and listened, somewhat baffled by the conversation that followed. Phyllis said, “So they’ll take the ten grand and exchange it at the Nairobi rate and pocket the fifty-seven thousand difference,” and Ken replied, “Fifty-seven thousand pounds comes to about a hundred bucks.”

“A hundred bucks goes a long way in a country with a per capita income of about five hundred. And if these guys from the SRRA do skim a hundred or two every time you come out, then they’re making themselves, oh, say about a grand a year.”

“Think I’ll grab something to eat and set up my tent before it’s dark. Hate doing that job by flashlight.”

This from Jim, rising stiffly.

“Good advice for everybody,” Ken said. “Unless you’re interviewing me, Phyllis, and if you are, just what is the question?”

“Do you think you’re getting ripped off, and if you do, how do you feel about it?”

“We’re talking human lives here, human rights, and you’re talking petty change, even if what you’re insinuating is true, which I don’t think it is.”

“Not what I heard in Nairobi.”

“What did you hear in Nairobi?”

“Rumors that this slave redemption program is a cash cow for some people.”

“From skimming nickels and dimes off a currency exchange?” Ken shook his head to highlight the absurdity of Phyllis’s suspicions.

“Then how about the redemption money?” she asked, unfazed. “What happens to the dollars after you turn it over to them? What do they do with it? A total of a hundred grand so far, isn’t that what you told me on the plane? So let’s forget their skimming the cream and talk about the whole pail of milk. A hundred grand isn’t nickels and dimes, is it, Mr. Eismont?”

Ken flinched—he’d picked up on her change to his last name.

“It goes back into the SRRA’s accounts, to repay for the withdrawals of Sudanese pounds for the redemptions.”

“You’re sure about that? In Nairobi I’ve seen movers and shakers from the SRRA in new suits, driving new cars.”

“Better follow Jim’s example. Get your tents set up. You know how it is in this neck of the African woods. Not much twilight. It’s light, then it’s dark.”

“We’re staying in a hut. We don’t need tents.”

“All kinds of critters in these roofs. Spiders, snakes. They drop down at night. You wouldn’t want them crawling all over you. Or would you?”

Phyllis snapped her notebook shut, picked up her hat by its chin strap, and swung it onto her head, tucking her hair underneath. “Don’t take things so personally, Ken. Only doing my job.”