Acts of Faith

“YOU SLIP THE poles through the sleeves, then fit the ends into the bottom pockets and the thing pops right up, like this.”

In the tukul’s dim interior, Phyllis demonstrated the technique, Quinette mortified that she, a country girl, couldn’t figure out how to erect her tent. Phyllis had hers up in half a minute and went outside. Quinette assembled the sections of the poles and felt a sense of accomplishment when the shapeless folds of mesh and cloth ballooned into a dome, just big enough to accommodate one person. Like Phyllis’s, hers wasn’t exactly a tent but a mosquito net with a sewn-in ground sheet. Side by side the two shelters resembled giant soap bubbles, risen out of the hard-packed dirt floor. She dragged her sleeping bag and air mattress into the bubble. Probably she wouldn’t need the sleeping bag—the air inside the windowless tukul, smelling like damp hay too long in the barn, was stagnant and hot. She lay down for a moment and, looking up through the mesh, searched for snakes and spiders in the thatch ceiling. Her head began to swim again; she felt herself teetering on the brink of sleep, the desire to fall into it checked by the grumbling in her stomach. She rummaged in her pack for a PowerBar and a bag of trail mix and went out with the food and her water bottle. Phyllis was sitting on a camp stool, her back bent as she gazed into a hand mirror propped against a rock at her feet and rubbed her face with cleansing cream.

“Thinking of entering a beauty contest?” Quinette said, peeling the wrapper off the half-melted PowerBar.

“In my business, every goddamned day is a beauty contest.” Phyllis’s eyes peered through a white mask. “Got to keep the crone at bay. A lot of cute patooties about your age would love to have my job. Think they want it, anyway. One day like today, walking ten miles in hundred-degree heat, sleeping in some native shithole, and those darlings would be whining to be sent back to the air-conditioned studio.”

She was speaking again in her natural voice, stone grinding on stone. Quinette held out the bag of trail mix.

“Thanks. I’ll be dining on my own delicious stuff in a minute.”

Phyllis pointed at a can under the camp stool. Quinette was dismayed to see that it was a can of beans.

“Like some tea with your gourmet granola?”

“Sure. Okay.”

The reporter set the jar of cream aside and looked toward the soldiers, squatting in a circle around the steaming pot on the campfire. Holding two fingers in a V she called out, “Tungependa mbili chai, tafahadli.”

The soldiers turned toward her with blank faces. Matthew was with them.

“Forgot, these characters don’t know Swahili,” Phyllis muttered, then called out again, “Ideenee etnayan shi, minfadlik. And if you don’t understand Arabic either, I’d like two cups of tea, pah-leese.”

“This is not safari, you know, and we are not camp boys,” Matthew said, the smile on his lips absent from his voice.

“But you are gentlemen, aren’t you?” Phyllis shot back. “And I did say ‘please,’ in three languages.”

Quinette asked, “So what is your job that all those cuties want it?”

Phyllis looked at her askance. “Hello? Where have you been all day? I’m a foreign correspondent for CNN, Nairobi bureau chief.”

“ ‘Only doing my job,’ you said to Ken. That’s what I meant. I didn’t think you were being fair, digging at him like that. So is that your job?”

“If you saw me when I’m in a mood to be unfair, then you’d know I was being anything but.” Phyllis contemplated herself in the mirror, turning her head one side to the other. With a tissue she carefully wiped off the excess cream from her forehead, her nose, the arrowhead of her chin. “Varnish removal, that’s my job,” she said, facing Quinette. “People put a high gloss on things, layers of it. I rub it off, get down to the bare wood, because nothing is ever what it appears to be, and nobody is what they make themselves out to be.”

“Wait a minute. Are you saying you think Ken . . .”

“Nah. Your Ken . . .”

“He’s not mine,” Quinette interrupted. “What did you suppose, that I’m f*cking him?”

Phyllis drew back, in a burlesque of shock. “Doesn’t sound like language from a good Christian girl.”

“I wasn’t always.”

“Bad girl gone good? Listen, don’t be so damned defensive. That’s the last thing I’d think, you and him in the sack. I was going to say that he strikes me as straight and earnest as they come. A true believer in what he’s doing, and maybe that plays into the agendas of some of the people he deals with.”

“He doesn’t seem like the kind of guy people could take advantage of. Seems pretty smart to me.”

“He is, but you know how it is with true believers.”

“No. How is it?”

“Their belief gets in the way of their brains.”

“If you believe in something, then you’re stupid?” A sudden wind blew through Quinette, and it wasn’t the wind of the Holy Spirit but the Enemy’s wind, rousing her to anger. Realizing that she was being tested, she silently beseeched God to help her contain her temper and to feel, if not a little Christian love for this harsh woman, then at least a little Christian forbearance.

“Not stupid, no—” Phyllis began.

“Madame.”

It was Matthew, looking sullen as he held a calabash of hot water and two tea bags. He dropped the bags into two cups the women had retrieved from their bags, then filled the cups from the calabash.

“Asante sana, shukran, and thank you,” Phyllis said.

Matthew turned on his heel and went back to his comrades. The smoke from their campfire rose in a pale gray pillar that leaned to cross a band of sunlight, shooting almost horizontally over the tukul’s roof. Phyllis picked up where she’d left off.

“Not stupid. Belief is a virus, and once it gets into you, its first order of business is to preserve itself, and the way it preserves itself is to keep you from having any doubts, and the way it keeps you from doubting is to blind you to the way things really are. Evidence contrary to the belief can be staring you straight in the face, and you won’t see it. No, not stupid. True believers just don’t see things the way they are, because if they did, they wouldn’t be true believers anymore.”

The Lord answered if you called on Him with an honest and contrite heart. Belief a virus, faith a disease that blinded you? Awful words, yet Quinette was able to listen to them without the least bit of anger.

“So you don’t believe in anything, not even in God?” she asked, not completely sure she wanted to hear the answer. She’d known sinful people in her trailer trash period, but she’d never met a real atheist before, at least not an atheist willing to admit he was one.

“Read much of Ernest Hemingway?”

The reporter raised one knee and clasped her hands around it. From up in the trees, where the campfire smoke split into delicate tendrils, a bird sang a soft, plaintive note, while off in the distance somewhere cowbells rang.

“In high school,” Quinette said. “We read a couple of his short stories.”

“He once said that a writer needs a built-in, shock-proof bullshit detector. That goes double for a news correspondent, triple for a news correspondent working in Africa. I guess I believe in that. In skepticism. When you’re in the varnish-removal business, that’s the active ingredient. My apologies if that offends you, but you asked.”

“No offense taken. I think I feel sorry for you, and I’m going to pray for you,” Quinette said with brittle calm.

“Make it from the Old Testament. I’m Jewish.”

She didn’t know any Old Testament prayers. How did you pray for a Jew anyway? she asked herself, taking her Bible from her rucksack. She walked to the edge of the compound, and there, with the wide yellow plain stretched out before her, she opened her Bible. It was small, designed for travelers, and difficult to read in low light. Straining, her eyes fell on Psalm 115: “Wherefore should the heathen say, Where now is their God? But our God is in the heavens. . . . Their idols are silver and gold, the work of men’s hands.” The answer was right there—her hand must have been guided to it. Phyllis was a kind of idol-worshipper, and her idol was her skepticism. Quinette closed the book and asked God to show Phyllis the falseness of her beliefs, prayed for help in learning to love Phyllis the sinner while hating her sin. Oh, she could feel the love beginning to course through her, as if she’d been transfused with warm honey. The wonderful thing about being saved was that it made you feel better about other people because it made you feel better about yourself. You couldn’t love your neighbor if you didn’t love yourself first, the way God loved you, without condition. That was how a father was supposed to love his children. Her own father had loved her like that, even when she was bad, and how she missed his all-forgiving embraces and the way he would call her “Quinny” while holding her in his lap as he drove the John Deere through the hayfield, the mower tossing golden dust into the air and the rows of chopped grass waiting to be bundled into the cylindrical bales that looked so lovely, like huge butternut cakes, in the autumn meadows.

The liquid light of the dying sun poured that same color across the savannah. And was that another reason she felt at home here? Dinka boys in tattered robes tied over one shoulder were herding cattle toward a byre, the cattle with horns shaped like crescent moons and the boys striding so effortlessly on their wiry legs, they seemed to float over the plain. She watched them tie the calves to tethering pegs and start a fire, its smoke turning a faint peach in the sunset. Some of the boys were singing, a few others laughed while the cows bellowed for their bound calves and the calves lowed for their mothers and the bells on the oxen chimed. As the red sun vanished, the birds in the tree above her began to chorus, as if to celebrate dusk’s commutation of the sun’s sentence. From somewhere back in the town, a drum call sounded, slow and rhythmic, like the heartbeat of a man asleep, and birdsong and man-song, laughter, drum, bell, bleat, and bellow merged into a whole as harmonious as a symphony: Africa’s natural orchestra, and it was playing just for her.

Twilight was a brief intermission between day and night. Just as Ken had said, it was light and then it was dark. The stars began to show themselves, sharp and clear in the moonless sky. She searched for the Southern Cross, which she’d read about in the guidebook she’d bought in Nairobi, and found it: not so much a cross as a diamond. The Dipper was there, but much closer to the horizon than it was at home. The birds had fallen silent, the cattle had settled down. Soon crickets filled the silence, so many chirping at once that they made a single high-pitched cry, like locusts in late summer. Frogs croaked in the green corridors along the stream forming the town’s northern border. They also made one unbroken chorus, the croak of each individual lost in the din of countless throbbing throats. Quinette felt the racket of insect and amphibian more than she heard it; it seemed to penetrate her skin and vibrate inside her, becoming one with the rush of blood through her veins; then in an instant her flesh became like the smoke from the herdsmen’s fire, all sense of herself as a separate being evaporating as her soul, set free, dissolved into an ecstatic union with frog song and cricket screech and the vast dark plain lying under the stars of an alien hemisphere. It was like nothing she’d ever experienced before, and when she came back to herself just seconds later (though she felt as though she’d been gone for hours), she tried to make sense of it. There was no drug or drink on earth that could have produced such a sensation, such an intense joy. Starting back toward her tukul, her head as buoyant as a balloon, her limbs tingling, she remembered something Pastor Tom had read to her in one of the counseling sessions she attended when she joined his church. “That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.” That was the transcendent emotion she’d sought but hadn’t found in her spiritual rebirth. She’d discovered it here. More than ever she wished she could remain. In this immense, unknown country she could begin her life anew.

 

IN THE MORNING, with the smells of woodsmoke and dung fires lingering in the air, a small army mustered to escort the redemption team to where the slaves had been brought during the night. Two dozen soldiers, a few armed only with spears, lined up in front of the bungalow. Shellacked in dried sweat and dirt, Quinette felt in need of a shower and also a few more hours’ sleep. Phyllis’s snoring and pungent bean farts had kept her awake till past midnight. She’d tried to read herself to sleep with a Christian romance novel, holding a penlight between her teeth. When that didn’t work, she got her diary, propped it against her upraised legs, and attempted to describe her out-of-body experience, but it was impossible to find the words. Finally, a wave of exhaustion washed her into unconsciousness, but soft thuds above her head woke her up. She flicked on the light and saw spiders and beetles dropping out of the thatch ceiling onto her mosquito net, crawling down the sides with a scratching of busy legs. A bat darted through the flashlight’s beam, quick as an apparition. She lay wide-eyed and cringing until dawn. Two cups of freeze-dried coffee barely cleared her head, but now the scented air and the soldiers standing at attention and the early light glinting off rifle barrels and spear points quickened her senses.

The walk was a short one down a footpath through the dun grass, past a dried-up water hole ringed by palm trees, a background against which the spear-carrying soldiers made a picturesque sight—click. They came to a small homestead, with a beehive hut where two Arabs waited, sitting on bamboo chairs—the same two she’d seen in the marketplace yesterday, the one bearded, the other clean-shaven. The retrievers. We are the redeemers, they are the retrievers. She heard Ken call the one with the beard by name, Bashir, but the other remained anonymous. They’d put on their Sunday best for the occasion—fresh robes and turbans, leather shoes instead of sandals, rings on their fingers, dressy watches on their wrists. The soldiers fanned out to encircle the homestead and an enormous mahogany tree nearby. It cast its branches out for fifty feet in all directions, the lower branches hanging almost to the ground to form a tent of leaves. The Arabs stood and greeted Ken and Jim and Manute. There was a bit of conversation, then the retrievers led everyone to the tree; the one called Bashir parted the branches and held them aside. Ducking her head, Quinette followed Jim into the shaded circle, and there the slaves huddled in the cool red dust, faces blending with the shadows so that all she saw at first were four hundred eyes, shining white and lifeless, like fragments of clamshells set in lumps of mud. They were all women and kids and teenagers, barefoot, dressed in rags, in shorts, in what looked like feed sacks with armholes. Her vision adjusting to the dimness, she saw a naked chest ridged with scars, and the absence of pattern told her that they were not the decorative marks with which some Dinka ornamented their bodies. No one spoke, even the babies were silent, lying limp in their mothers’ laps, hair reddened and tiny bellies bloated from malnutrition. The only sound was the hum of flies, the only movement the flutter of bony hands brushing the flies away, and one adolescent boy did not have a hand, swatting with the puckered stump of his wrist. Another, sitting with his legs spread-eagled and a crude crutch at his side, was missing a foot.

Jean and Mike began a head count. Quinette volunteered to help, because she wanted to do more than gawk at these wretched souls as if they were a sideshow attraction.

“Okay, take the bunch on the right, we’ll take the ones on the left,” Mike said. “Count ’em twice to make sure.”

Quinette moved in closer, her finger wagging left to right, right to left. These are people, these are human beings, she said to herself, for the slaves sat so passively, so devoid of emotion that she felt as if she were making an inventory of inanimate objects. Swaddled in unlaundered clothes, bodies that hadn’t known soap and water for weeks or months threw off a dense, sour, salty stench. People, human beings who’d been whipped, who’d had a hand or a foot lopped off because they tried to escape. Making her second count, she noticed a small, deep scar gouged into many faces, beneath the left eye. Wondering what the marks signified, she lowered her gaze, squinting at an emaciated woman with a stained blue scarf on her head. She tried not to make her curiosity obvious, but the woman noticed and hissed. Quinette looked away, a little ashamed. The woman hissed again, pointed at the scar, and stabbed the air with a fist. Hssss.

“She’s trying to tell you that she was branded,” Jean said matter-of-factly. Jean was a nurse back in Canada, a pert woman with curly chestnut hair and a bowed mouth. “That’s what most of the owners do, brand them with the same brands they use on their cattle. It’s always under the left eye. If you look closely, you’ll see the brands are different. That way each owner knows who belongs to who. How many?”

“Fifty-eight.”

Quinette backed away, trying to imagine what that felt like. A branding iron in your face. She wasn’t ready for this.

“Takes some getting used to,” said Jean, giving her a maternal pat on the arm. “But you don’t ever want to get too used to it.”

She and Mike had counted a hundred and fifty-one, so that made two hundred and nine all together. The Arabs had “delivered the merchandise,” as Mike indelicately phrased it. He was a paramedic, with a wrestler’s torso and a streetwise toughness about him, and Quinette wondered if his wife was thinking of him when she warned about getting “too used to it.”

Now it was time to pay the retrievers. Ken passed the bricks of Sudanese pounds to the Arabs, who licked their thumbs and counted, slowly, carefully. When Phyllis’s crew moved in for a close-up, they stopped, the clean-shaven one ducking behind a pair of windowpane sunglasses, Bashir masking himself with a length of his turban. Mike, who was standing just behind them, lit a cigarette. Both men flinched and whirled around, wadded bills falling from their laps.

“Jumpy as long-tailed cats in a room full of rocking chairs, that’s what my dad would’ve said,” Quinette murmured to Ken. “What’s the matter with them?”

Ken laughed his cold, enigmatic laugh and said they must have mistaken the click of Mike’s lighter for the cocking of a pistol.

“They’re worried we’re going to rip them off?”

“No. They’re playing a dicey game. If the government found out they’re dealing with us, they’d be shot or thrown into a ghost house. That’s what they call the jails in Khartoum, and for damned good reason.”

Phyllis jumped in, practically hitting Ken in the teeth with a thrust of her microphone. She looked rough and disheveled, swollen half-moons beneath her eyes.

“It’s a dicey game that pays pretty well, isn’t it?”

A note of distaste was folded into the question, and for once Quinette found herself sharing the reporter’s sentiments. The gold rings, the watches, the sheen of greed on the retrievers’ lips as they counted the money and stuffed it into canvas sacks stirred feelings of shame and taint, as if she were watching something she was not supposed to see. She wished this part would end; it had the trappings of a drug deal.

“If I understand the economics right, your retrievers pay around fifteen bucks a head, and you pay them more than three times that,” Phyllis went on. “Pretty hefty markup.”

“They take big risks, rounding up these people, so I have to pay them a risk premium.”

“That’s what you call it?”

“You’ve got ideas for a better word, put it in the suggestion box. Look, I don’t particularly like these guys. They’re a necessary evil, and maybe not an evil. The Dinka respect them. Without them—”

“Right, right,” Phyllis said impatiently. “But my information is that if this slave trade were left to—to—ah . . . market forces, it would just disappear. Goes like this. The Arabs who own them have to feed them, house them somewhere. It’s trouble and expense. And if the owners want to sell them back to their families or to some other Arabs, what they would get out of the deal is a few bucks at most, a couple of goats, a cow. Not worth the trouble of capturing them in the first place.”

“The question, Phyllis? Oh, hell, you don’t have to ask it. You’ve talked to the UN people in Kenya, right? They don’t like what we’re doing any more than Khartoum does. Just leave the slave trade alone, and it’ll go away—that’s the UN party line. By buying freedom for these people, are we promoting the trade instead of ending it? That’s the question?”

“It’s the UN’s criticism. What’s your response?”

He turned on her, a quick snap of his head, and snatched the mike from out of her spindly fingers and held it close to his mouth, like he was about to sing a tune.

“Bullshit!” He handed the mike back to her. “See if that gets on the air.”

“Think you could explain your response?”

“I already told you,” he said, a weariness in his anger. “This is politics. Economics has nothing to do with it. You’re making me sorry I asked you along.”

“I’m a newswoman,” Phyllis flashed out. “You want a PR agency, hire one.”

“I’m tempted to leave you. A few weeks out here might do you some good. You might learn something.”

Jim stepped up and, resting his hand on Ken’s shoulder, said, “Easy now, my friend. You’re on candid camera.”

Ken turned aside.

“You start early in the varnish-removal business,” Quinette whispered to Phyllis. Looking at her blowsy hair and baggy eyes, and having listened to her snores and intestinal rumblings half the night, she didn’t find the woman quite as intimidating as before.

“Ya, Eismont. Tiyib,” Bashir said, rising with brown hand extended.

She gathered that tiyib meant that everything was okay. Ken shook hands and said thank you in Arabic—shukran. The Arabs, each holding a sack of money, went down the footpath, their white-clad figures growing smaller in the oceanic expanse of grass and trees.

“Do they just walk home, across all that, with all that money on them?” Quinette said, thinking out loud.

“Not something you’d try in L.A. or New York, is it?” Jim remarked with a shrug. He studied his feet, mopped his forehead with his fingers. “I don’t like it either, this end of it.”

 

“OUR HEARTS ARE heavy with your sufferings.” Ken stood making a speech before the assembled slaves, pausing between phrases to let Manute translate, his flat American voice and Manute’s sonorous bass alternating with chantlike rhythm. “Many people who care about what you have endured. . . . Donations from people in America. . . . I am happy to tell you that you are now free.”

The flies hummed, leaves rustled in a breeze, the people sat in a slack-jawed, dull-eyed silence. Quinette’s hands rested on the camera, loaded with a fresh roll for the photographs that she hoped would match those already printed in her imagination—the emancipated captives singing and dancing, embracing their liberators. Thinking ahead, she saw the pictures projected on a screen whose light reflected the rapt faces of worshippers filling every seat in Family Evangelical; she saw herself at the podium, describing the scene and her own exalted emotions as grateful arms encircled her. It would be the high point of her presentation. Everyone who’d worked so hard would be thrilled to see images of the happiness and thanksgiving their efforts had brought. But what could she tell them now? That the people just sat and stared when they heard they were free? She didn’t feel cheated this time; irritated, rather. Ken’s delivery was all wrong. The people knew they were free, but they didn’t feel it because they didn’t hear any passion in Ken’s voice. The man who’d testified before Congress and the Human Rights Commission with such conviction sounded as if he were reciting a speech he’d given once too often.

Jim did a little better; in the cadences of a radio evangelist he told the story of Jesus, sowing the seeds he hoped would sprout into a whole new crop of souls. People had given money, he said, but in the end it was Christ’s love that had broken their chains. Still, the crowd barely stirred. Maybe they already knew the story of Jesus. When Jim was finished, he asked Quinette if she would like to add a few words.

“Wha—what should I say?”

“Whatever comes to mind. Maybe you could tell them about the kids.”

She hesitated, a mild terror streaking through her. Nothing whatsoever came to mind; then she recalled Pastor Tom’s sermon that one Sunday and tugged her fanny pack around to her front, unzipped it, and pulled her travel Bible from between the bug spray bottle and the squashed roll of toilet paper.

“I want to read you something from one of our prophets. He told about the coming of Jesus, the Messiah.”

She turned to Isaiah, chapter 61, and began, “ ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,’ ” and waited for Manute. Coming from him, Isaiah sounded more like the word of God, even in Dinka; his deep and solemn voice could make a recipe like the word of God. “ ‘He sent me to bind up the broken-hearted’ “—pause—” ‘to proclaim liberty to the captives’ “—pause—” ‘and the opening of the prison to them that are bound.’ ” She was determined to coax a response from her listeners and repeated that last ringing verse. Pastor Tom did that sometimes, recited a biblical phrase three, even four times over, stressing different words with each repetition, building a rhythm that lifted people out of their seats to cry out, “Praise Jesus! Praise His name!”

When Manute was finished, she raised the Bible up over her head—one of Pastor Tom’s patent gestures. “Praise God. Praise Him for sending His only son, Jesus Christ, to save us all.” Two hundred pairs of eyes looked up at the book. When she lowered it, they fastened on her, clinging with an almost tactile pressure that evaporated her terror and summoned out of hiding the confident girl who years ago stood to recite and didn’t beg or call for her classmates’ attention but seized it effortlessly. “Jesus Christ proclaims your liberty”—pause—“He has opened your prison.” She told them that the river of Christ’s abiding love had flowed into the hearts of schoolchildren on the other side of the world; it made them care about the sufferings of people they had never seen, moved them to bring those sufferings to an end. She didn’t have to search for the words or think about them, but heard them with her inner ear and then uttered them, as though she were reading from a teleprompter scrolling in her brain. A rapture filled her. She felt powerful and commanding and absolutely sure that every word was right.

“That will never happen to you again.” She pointed at an adolescent boy with scars balled up into an ugly knot on one shoulder; and as Manute converted her declaration into Dinka, she waded into the crowd without a second’s forethought, lifted the boy by the arm, and led him to the front so all could see. Somehow she knew that this too was right, exactly the right move to make. “This will never happen to any of you again”—pause—“That’s what it means to be free.” Taking a step forward, she picked up the woman in the blue scarf, the one who had hissed, and turned her around to face the assemblage. “And this will never happen to any of you, ever again.” She laid her finger on the mark beneath the woman’s eye. “You will never be beaten, ever again. You will never be branded, ever again. You will never be made to tend the Arabs’ cattle, ever again.” She was really cooking now, an electric current surging through her and out of her, seeming to sweep over her audience. “You women will never be raped, ever again. You boys will not have your hands and feet cut off, ever again.” Manute, struggling to keep pace with her outpouring, seemed to catch her fervor and threw up his arms with the last repetitions of “ever again.”

“You are free!” Quinette cried out, and spread her own arms wide.

Someone made a soft clicking noise. It was echoed by another, and another, and in a moment, every tongue was making it so that it became like the crickets and frogs she’d heard last night, a single sheet of sound.

“The Dinka way of saying they like what they have heard,” Manute explained, grinning from beneath the bill of his baseball cap.

Applause! And it sounded to her ears like a standing ovation. A woman began to sing; high clear notes rose out of the chorus of clicks. The other women answered in unison, and the boys took up a contrapuntal melody and beat their hands against their thighs, all swaying to the rhythm. It was a jubilant song but not a lively one, with an undertone of sorrow, and it was haunting and lovely, that slow beat, that smooth, rich flow of voices, there under the mahogany tree. Quinette never imagined she could touch people as she just had, breaking the seal to the rejoicing she’d known was in them, setting it free.

“What is it you do for a living?” Jim asked, and his voice had the same effect as an alarm clock.

“The Gap. Salesperson.”

She almost grimaced, it sounded so banal.

“Missed your calling.”

Ten minutes ago she would have feasted on the compliment, but it seemed meager fare after the banquet of approval laid out for her by all those people. Yet it wasn’t their approval that satisfied her most, but her ability to bring them some measure of joy. Looking at the faces before her, listening to their song, she felt the craftsman’s gratification, beholding his creation; and that was a pleasure she’d never experienced in her daily life, retailing commodities she’d had no hand in making.