Acts of Faith

“JESUS MARY AND JOSEPH, what the hell time is it?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Which army?” asked Lily.

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

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

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

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

“As a husband or singer?” Lily asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

She glided up to the service counter, where two Kenyans stood behind steam tables and a propane stove, and asked for an omelet. As she waited for the eggs to cook, the Texan said, “Damn, girl, in that getup, all you’ve got to do is slap a little shoe polish on your face and y’all could pass.” Quinette turned and saw his copilot give an exaggerated eye roll. He pulled back an empty chair and boomed, “C’mon over and join us. We’re pretty damned bored with each other.”

“Sure I’m not interrupting anything?” she asked after she got her breakfast.

“Hey-ull no.”

He slapped the chair, but she elected to sit next to Fitz, finding him as appealing as the cowboy was obnoxious. His skin was a lovely shade of burnt sienna—the longer she was in Africa, the more unaesthetic she found white skin, her own excepted—and she remembered liking his boyish voice and the way his black eyes had seemed to undress her without offending her or making her uncomfortable. He had the sexiness of a man who loved women. Not that she had any intention of encouraging him.

“What gets you up so early on a Sunday?” he asked, pouring her a cup of coffee from the Thermos on the table.

She told him and explained that Malachy wanted to show her that the Turkana weren’t as bad as their image.

“Ah, those people should pay Malachy a salary for all his advocacy,” the bald man said.

“We haven’t met. Quinette Hardin.”

“John Barrett. Malachy and I go back a long way.”

The older woman introduced herself as Diana Briggs, extending a hand that confessed to the age her tinted hair and makeup tried to conceal. Quinette recalled the reporter from her first trip, smearing on facial cream, and she thought of Tara Whitcomb, arranging her hair and freshening up her lipstick before she flew Ken and the team into Sudan. These middle-aged babes at war with the clock. It was kind of pathetic. When the time came for her to get old, she would just let herself get old, as God intended.

“Are you working with Malachy in some capacity?” Diana asked with a stiff formality, accentuated by her Anglo-Kenyan accent.

Quinette shook her head and asked, “So what gets all of you up so early?”

There was just the slightest pause, just the briefest exchange of glances, before the Texan replied.

“Got us a load of goodies to bring into Chukudum,” he said. Chukudum was a Sudanese town not far over the border. “For that hospital the Norwegians built over there. Can’t bring the stuff in by road, so they called on us, old Fly-by-Knight.”

Quinette bit into her slightly burned omelet. She surmised that Chukudum was not his final destination, if he was going there at all. Everyone knew that the people from Knight Air were flying into the Nuba mountains, which was supposed to be very dangerous. A halo of danger and outlawry glimmered around these people, and it piqued her curiosity.

“I don’t see your partner. What’s your name again? ”

“Wes Dare,” the Texan replied, his glance slipping sideways as if he were ashamed of it. “Doug’s in Nairobi with Tony, leavin’ me and Mary to do the grunt work.” His arm went around the young woman’s shoulders, then dropped. “I like that name you’ve got. Shows your mama had some imagination.”

“It was my dad thought of it. Quinette was his grandmother’s name.”

“Knew it!” Wesley Dare’s eyes again skidded off to the side. He had jug-handle ears and a squashed nose and curly hair colored the distressing red of rust streaks in an old bathtub. “It’s been my experience that women don’t have much imagination, and y’all can really see that when it comes to naming their kids. One year everybody gets named Jennifer and Tim, next year it’s Matt and Margaret.”

Mary looked at Quinette, pleading silently to forgive Wes, as if he were some idiot child who couldn’t be held responsible for the things he said. That certainly had been a stupid observation, but it described Quinette’s mother to a T. Ardele never could imagine a life other than the one she had. For some reason, alternatives never occurred to her. If they did, she never acted on them. She was only forty-four when she was widowed, but she never remarried. She was Ted Hardin’s widow; nothing else was possible.

“So who named you?” she asked Wes.

“My mama, who else? Wesley ain’t very imaginative. If it had been up to my old man, I would’ve been named Quanah.”

That drew a little shriek from Mary. His glance shot to her, then ricocheted back to Quinette.

“On account of my great-grandma was a full-blood Comanche, back when their big chief was Quanah Parker.”

Quinette squinted skeptically.

Wes pulled out his wallet and produced a laminated card, with his photo on it, testifying to his enrollment in the Comanche Nation. “Where do y’all think these come from?” He thrust his head toward her, prying his eyes into circles with his thumbs and forefingers to better display his chocolate-brown pupils. “I’m like Fitz. A genuine mongrel. This here”—he tugged at a lock of his hair—“comes from the man great-grandma married. Not the color, the curl. He was a storekeeper on the reservation. Part white, part Comanch, and part black. His grandma was an escaped slave.” Wes hesitated for half a breath, and his tone of voice changed, taking on an edge. “Now I reckon that oughta give you a nice warm glow.”

“I’m afraid not. Should it?”

“You being in the business of freeing slaves, I figured it would.”

“It isn’t a business.”

“There’s some might say it is.”

She saw that he’d been setting her up with his genealogical discussion, and that she’d walked right into it.

“I’ve got you pegged,” she replied, whetting her own voice to cut back at him. “You like to jerk people’s chains to see which way they’ll jump. Your technique needs work.”

Fitz laughed, slapping the table, and Wes picked up his sunglasses and gave them a quick twirl. “And here I thought you were a sweet young idealist.”

“Guilty to the last two. The last time I remember being sweet, I was in eighth grade and even then I had to work at it.”

Wes said, “Would you bet that I was once an idealist?”

“I don’t gamble.”

“I was. Fresh out of Texas A and M with a degree in aero engineering in the late sixties. I think I smoked too much bad dope back then, because I decided to teach math to underprivileged Messican kids in El Paso. Did that till it come to me, like a light, that I hated kids of any creed or color. So I signed up with Air America to fly in Indochina, doin’ my bit to fight Communism. My mama wrote and asked me, ‘Wes, what are y’all doin’ over there?’ I wrote her back, ‘Mama, I’m flyin’ good to the good and bad to the bad.’ Ten years later I’m flyin’ guns into the Nicaraguan Contras for Southern Air, and I told Mama that I was flyin’ good to the good and bad to the bad, but it was sometimes right hard to tell which was which. Few more years go by, and I’m flyin’ photo-recon missions for the Royal Saudi Air Force, so we could liberate those useless Kuwaitis from those scum-suckin’ Eye-Raquis, and I wrote to Mama and said I was flyin’ good to the good and bad to the bad, but there wasn’t any difference. And now that I’m flyin’ in Africa, I tell her that I’m flyin’ bad to the bad because they’re all bad over here.”

The monologue pummeled everyone into a few moments’ silence. Then Mary said, “Jesus, did you sugar your cereal with cocaine this morning or what?”

Quinette looked at her watch and stood up suddenly. “Hate to leave this brilliant conversation, but I’ll be late. I’m meeting Malachy at the Red Cross hospital.”

“Do you have a car?” Diana asked.

Quinette shook her head.

“You intended to walk there?”

“Sure. It isn’t far.”

“Don’t be silly,” Diana said in a motherly tone. “Really, I’m surprised at Malachy, asking you to meet him there instead of his picking you up here. He ought to know better.”

“Some of his parishioners are in the hospital, and he—”

“Come along now.”

Diana and Barrett led her to a Toyota pickup, painted utilitarian gray, with the red and white logo of International People’s Aid on the doors.

“So that’s your connection with Wes and Fitz? You’re with IPA?” Quinette asked, climbing into the middle of the bench seat. It was immediately obvious that she was too long-legged to avoid being kneecapped by the floor shift, so Diana traded places with her.

“I am,” John replied, steering through the gate with a cheery “Jambo!” to the askaris. “Field coordinator for its Sudan operations. Diana is one of our benefactors.”

“A rich bitch buying her way out of white liberal guilt is how Wes would put it,” Diana said. “How he has put it. Quite the character, isn’t he?”

“He would be if he didn’t work so hard at trying to be one,” Quinette observed, pleased that she drew a laugh from both people.

“Bloody good pilot, though,” John said, as if that forgave everything.

“If what I hear is true, I guess he has to be.”

“There are a lot of rumors in Loki, and one needs to be careful about the things one hears.”

“More careful about the things one says,” Diana added, looking at Quinette sidelong. “Loose lips sink ships—and crash planes as well.”

Quinette kept silent, considering herself warned not to press them about where Wesley Dare was headed today.

They went past the compounds of Norwegian People’s Aid and Doctors Without Borders. If the UN’s base, with its neighborhoods of white and blue bungalows and offices, was the city, the camps of the independent agencies were the suburbs, though the organizational flags flying above them and the armed guards at the gates lent them the look of military outposts, an image Quinette preferred, as she preferred to think of the people inside not as aid workers but as warriors enlisted in the battle against hunger and disease and conquest. A Hercules thundered overhead, bearing westward. The four engines, sending tremors through the air and through her skin, shook her back into the excited happiness she’d felt when she woke up; and the antiquated throb of propellers caused a remote in her brain to click and bleed all color from the scene, so she saw it in the documentary black and white of the History Channel, the plane becoming, briefly, a World War II bomber, soaring away to pulverize the enemy. The Herc was going to drop sacks of grain, not high explosives, but food was a weapon in this war. So was breaking the chains of the enslaved. Her grandfathers had liberated people in France. She was carrying on in their tradition. Maybe thirty or forty years from now, this crusade would be on the History Channel, and she would be able to tell her grandchildren that she’d been in it, been part of something altogether noble and so much bigger than herself.

The hospital, in a village near Loki called Lopiding, appeared unexpectedly. There were mud-and-wattle huts and little congregations of goats lazing under tall tamarind trees, then suddenly a high gate with the usual complement of askaris, and beyond it whitewashed buildings and white tents as big as barns, the Red Cross emblem on their roofs, and people swarming everywhere: doctors and nurses in surgical smocks, ambulatory patients wearing light brown hospital gowns. Almost all were Sudanese men and boys wounded in the war, legs in casts or braces, arms in slings, heads bandaged, hands wrapped in dressings like prizefighters. One young man on crutches was trying to kick a soccer ball with his good leg. She recognized on some faces the V-shaped cicatrix of Dinka, the horizontal lines of Nuer—she was learning the various tribal marks—but most of the other tattoos were strange to her, and some were not tribal markings at all but scars left by bullets and bomb fragments and landmine shrapnel.

“Here you are,” John said, stopping in front of the admissions building. “A pleasure meetin’ you. Be sure to tell Malachy that I expect him to watch out for you.”

Several Dinka sat around flattened boxes spread on the ground, playing cards. As she waited, she was conscious of their glances; admiring glances, she hoped, though she didn’t rule out the possibility that a white woman dressed like one of theirs presented a curious figure, even a ridiculous one. It was impossible to tell what they were thinking. Their expressions revealed nothing, the famed Dinka mask made more opaque by the dead, blank look acquired by men who’d been in battle. She’d seen it on her father’s face, in a photograph of him and his buddies in Vietnam. The thousand-yard stare, he’d called it.

When ten minutes passed without Malachy, she went looking for him, peeking into the cavernous tents, catching glimpses of men with limbs in traction, of a woman sitting beside a bed occupied by a child with its face and arms burned from black to a shocking suppurating pink. Such a variety of injuries, so much suffering, more than she could grasp. From inside a tin-roofed building came the screech of a band saw, a belt sander’s rough hum, and when the noise stopped, Malachy’s voice—“I’ll pay you out of my own bloody pocket”—and another voice, speaking English in some sort of European accent—“I am sorry I must ask you, but those are the regulations.” She stepped in and saw, through a light mist of sawdust, a row of leg braces with metal clamps attached, and also dozens of prosthetic legs—knee-length and full-length, shiny and flesh-toned, standing on shelves or piled up in bins, as if some psycho had dismembered a store full of manikins. Several Kenyan workmen in coveralls stood around wielding power tools, another placed an artificial limb on a conveyor belt and fed it into what appeared to be an oven. A middle-aged Turkana sat on a chair, half of one leg sticking out like a thin stovepipe. A teenage Sudanese, missing a leg, stood on his crutches while a technician took the length of his right with a measuring tape. At one end of the room, beside rows of canvas sacks filled with coils of brightly colored rope, Malachy was deep in conversation with a crew-cut young white man. In olive shorts, a white cotton shirt, and Teva sandals, the priest looked emphatically unclerical. He spotted her in the doorway, looked at his watch, and bumped his forehead with the heel of his hand.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sister! Sister Kinnet!”

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

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

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

He beamed in affirmation.

“But how . . . what happened?”

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

“I am so sorry, Matthew.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I hope so. How I hope so.”

“Amin Madit speaks of you,” he said.

“Amin Madit?”

“My sister.”

“Oh, yes. She remembers me?”

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

“Not really?”

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

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

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

“Oh? And what do you think?”

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

“I don’t know. I’ll try. Promise.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“John Barrett? You saw him?”

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

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

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

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

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

He looked at her, silently asking what she meant.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“God of Abraham . . .”

“Yes!”

“God of Saint John . . .”

“Yes!”

“God of Mary . . .”

“Yes!”

“All you people are calling on God.”

“Oh, yes! We are calling on Him.”

“God of Matthew . . .”

“We call on him!”

“God of Mark . . .”

“We call on him!”

“God of Luke . . .”

“We call on him!”

“God of John . . .”

“We call on him!”

“All you people are calling on God.”

“Oh, yes! We are calling on Him.”

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

She noticed that a young woman sitting beside her was wearing what appeared to be a calculator as a pendant, its buttons and display window giving off an anomalous plastic gleam among the bright beads half covering her breasts. Quinette leaned over for a closer look and made out the words TEXAS INSTRUMENTS. She raised the camera, snapped a picture, and began to mentally compose the letter that would accompany the photographs when she sent them home. She’d been debating with herself whether to tell her family about the ambush: Why worry them unnecessarily? Now she decided she would, then go on to say that she had ventured out only a few days after the aid workers were killed, with no more protection than an unarmed priest and deacon, and taken photographs of the fierce Turkana without them harming a hair on her head. She would make some witty remark about the woman wearing a Texas Instruments calculator as jewelry, and explain the meaning of the marks on the man’s chest, making sure to adopt an offhanded tone to show that she didn’t consider it any big deal. She wasn’t sure how Kristen would react, but Ardele and Nicole would freak out, and in a corner of herself, the same dark nook where her wild impulses once flourished, prompting her to do things guaranteed to outrage her family, she relished the thought of upsetting those two timid, domesticated females with a tale of her daring—and with pictures to back it up.

The deacon finished his sermon and sat alongside her again as the congregation broke into a hymn—a hymn in praise of Father Malachy, the deacon said. “Apoloreng remembers us,” the crowd sang. Malachy stood grinning against the background of bare sticks and thornbush, his hair brightened by an arrow of late morning sun piercing the branches fanned over his head. He seemed to bask in his parishioners’ adoration, which didn’t appear quite right to Quinette. Shouldn’t he tell them to offer their thanks and praise to Our Lord instead? At the same time she envied his communion with them. He’d opened his heart to this parched corner of Africa, and it had taken him into its heart. Maybe one day she would experience the same reciprocity. She loved Africa and wanted it to love her back.

“Hey, you Turkana!” the priest called out as the last trilling ululations died away. “Let us pray for rain!”

“Eh-yay!”

“May all you people be blessed!”

“Eh-yay!”

“May you elders be blessed!”

“Eh-yay!”

“God of Saint John!”

“Give us rain!”

“God of Mary!”

“Give us rain!”

Two hundred pairs of dark arms and one pair of pale arms rose toward the cruel blue sky, and Malachy seemed more than ever the tribal shaman.

“We call upon the one God to bring rain and our animals to come back from death. Make us fat! Give us oil and food! The one God, make us happy!”

“Eh-yay!”

“May all cattle thieving go away!”

“Eh-yay!”

“May peace come down on you and the Toposa!”

“Eh-yay!”

“Goodness come down!” He raised his hands high, lowering them, palms facing the ground. “All evil, go away!” He thrust his hands to one side, as if casting an object over the top of the boma. “Goodness come down! May all you people be blessed!”

The appeals went on, voices rising to such an emotional pitch that Quinette would not have been surprised if the heavens clouded over and thunder cracked that very minute. She felt herself caught up in the steam-locomotive rhythms, the football-cheer repetitions, the movements of arms, swinging up, swinging down. It was hard to restrain herself from tossing her own arms into the air, and she probably would have if the service—no, rite—had gone on much longer, but it ended in another burst of keen ululations that made the enclosure sound like an aviary. Breathless, sweating under her arms, she watched the people begin to file out, greeting Malachy at the entrance, just as churchgoers did back home when church was through.

“So what did you think?” the priest asked Quinette. Cheeks flushed, the tails of his sweat-blotched shirt hanging out of his shorts, he was standing beside the senior elder.

“It was . . . interesting? Actually, beautiful,” she added, deciding that interesting sounded too wishy-washy. “It wasn’t . . . It was strange? I mean . . .”

“Not quite Christian is what you mean. The Vatican has the same opinion.”

“Mind if I take your picture?”

“Surely I don’t.”

“With him.”

Malachy spoke to the Turkana chief, who grasped the priest’s hand and then said something to Quinette.

“He’s telling you that he and I are of the same brand, meaning that we’re brothers.”

She framed the two faces—a white square one and a black oblong one side by side.

“Turkana identify themselves by their cattle brands,” Malachy said, as Quinette stepped forward for a closer shot. “That’s why saying you’re of the same brand means you’re brothers.”

She flicked her head to acknowledge this snippet of ethnological information and took the photo.

“And I am his brother,” the priest carried on. “The secret to working with these people is that you bring yourself to them and become one of them without ever, ever forgetting who and what you really are. It’s a bit of a high-wire act.”

“Could you get my picture with him?”

She posed with her shoulder touching the Turkana’s, the print developed in her mind before the shutter clicked. She saw it laid out with the other photos on her mother’s kitchen table, the ancient white steel table with a border of thin black stripes that Ardele had salvaged from the auction because no one would buy the ugly old thing. She and Nicole were sitting at it, looking at Quinette in her long, golden Dinka dress and at the African beside her, his robe slashing diagonally across his chest, his ritual scars bared. They would show the picture to their friends, and the story of Quinette’s experience would spread, as stories do in small towns, and soon everyone would know that the distance she’d traveled from Cedar Falls could not be measured in miles alone.