Acts of Faith

Redeemer

MORNING LIGHT INFILTRATED through the mesh windows and the cracks in the zippered tent flaps so that she now could see the canopy of her mosquito net and the dark blots made by the dormant flies clinging to it. Mosquitoes were not abundant in Loki this almost rainless rainy season, but flies made up for the deficiency. Was it darkness or the cooler temperatures at night that put them to sleep? she wondered. In the two beds to the right of hers, Anne and Lily, the Irish girls from Concern, lay cocooned within their nets, Anne snoring lightly, but Quinette had been awake since before dawn, taut with anticipation. She’d tried reading herself back to sleep, first with Scripture and then with a Christian romance, but neither the novelist’s stilted prose nor the dull prescriptions of Leviticus quelled her excitement.

Almost everything in Africa excited her. The most common scenes of everyday life—boys playing bau under a tree, a Turkana man striding down the road with his walking stick and wooden headrest, a flock of goats bleating along a dry riverbed—thrilled her because they weren’t mere tourist backdrop but part of her daily life. She was the WorldWide Christian Union’s field representative in Loki. She had a real place here and real work to do, and it was hers to do for as long as she wanted and for as long as she could put up with the privations, and she was sure she could because she didn’t regard living in a tent with two other women and outdoor privies and taking showers under a canvas bucket as privations; nor were the heat, dust, mud, and bugs, the isolation and the hazards of flying into Sudan in small planes. These were minor trials, the small price she had to pay for fulfilling what she’d always known would be her destiny—to live an extraordinary life. She was doing something difficult, unusual, and dangerous in a difficult, unusual, and dangerous part of the world. Best of all, it was righteous work.

Since her return to Africa two months ago, there had been times when she felt lonely and homesick, when the heat, dust, and bugs got on her nerves, when a desperate boredom seized her because there was absolutely nothing to do after working hours except to hang out in the compound bars with the aid workers and pilots. Bandits roamed beyond the compound’s fences, making it inadvisable to venture out, even in a group. Besides, there was nowhere to go, Loki being just about the most wretched town on earth—a bunch of filthy tukuls and mud-walled shops with corrugated iron roofs and streets adrift with trash and stinking of shit. Goat shit, cow shit, human shit.

When the spells of loneliness or boredom came over her, she bucked up her spirits by reflecting on the torments and hardships the early Christians endured for their faith. Not that Quinette believed there was any equivalence between those and the inconveniences she faced. It was the lesson the first Christians provided: they embraced their sufferings as gifts flowing from God’s love and favor, for He reserved a special place in His heart for those who suffered in His name.

God loved her, and Jesus was her friend. She was more sure of that than ever. If He didn’t love her, if He didn’t see her as exceptional and suited for the job, He would not have hired her. Sometimes she saw Him not as an Abrahamic patriarch in long white robe and long white beard but as a celestial executive, the CEO of the universe, sitting behind an enormous desk in a smart Armani suit, poring through thousands and thousands of résumés, rejecting ninety-nine point ninety-nine percent, looking for one that stood out. The résumé of a chosen one. She imagined Him selecting hers from the pile and remarking upon it favorably and then, through some mysterious means of divine communication, directing Ken Eismont to make good on his promise to hire her.

After returning to the States from Sudan, she’d waited a long time to hear from Ken. She feared he’d forgotten his offer, or had given the job to someone else, and grew desperately unhappy and backslid a couple of times—a night in a bar, a one-night stand with a guy in her computer class. God forgave her, after she vowed to improve. But it was hard. The excitement of her homecoming had worn off, the attention she’d received after her slide presentation at Family Evangelical—it had been a terrific success—had faded. She felt a little like Cinderella after midnight, slipping back into the drab clothing of her old life and self: Quinette Hardin, shopgirl. When six weeks passed without a word from Ken, she considered moving out of her sister and brother-in-law’s house, feeling hemmed in and tired of playing the poor relation who’s been taken in, but she continued to hope that escape was at hand.

The letter arrived on a Saturday morning. Sorting through the mail, Nicole said, “This one is for you.” In Nicole’s commonplace kitchen, the letter looked as out of place as Waterford crystal would have on the Formica table. The pale blue envelope bordered by diagonal stripes, with the words Par Avion printed below the Swiss stamps, larger and more artistic than American stamps, and the postmark that said Genève instead of Geneva, exhaled a foreign glamour, and so did the return address, the street number coming after the name, beneath the words, “WorldWide Christian Union—International Headquarters.”

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

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

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

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

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

“You bet I am,” she said to Nicole.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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