Futures Near and Far (6 page)

“I’m sorry,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady.
“Lokomol told me.”

“He sent you, didn’t he? I told him not to do that.” Her
voice softened. “He is well? And the little ones?”

“There is food in the refugee camp, for the moment. He wouldn’t accept help. But he did beg me to come
to you.”

“And you have come. What will you do now?”

“Greg and I plan to take you to back to Kampala,” I said.
“We want you to live with us.”

“I live here,” she said, standing up. She had always been thin
and spare; now the effect was more extreme, but the vigor — and determination —
in her body was still obvious.

“What happens when that sack is empty?” I asked, pointing at her food supply. It was nearly
depleted already.

She ground a toe into the dust, and dislodged a hidden
stick. She tossed it in the firepit. “I am waiting for the government
officials, coming to tell me that now I can eat dirt.”

I started to speak, lost my momentum, paused.

“What is there for me in Kampala, Chemachugwo?” she continued.
“Do they have grindstones? Can you farm there?”

“Can you farm
here
?”
I found my tongue. “Do you remember the time you had the fever? I started to
leave the hut one night, but you begged me not to go. Do you remember what you
said?”

She faced me for the first time. “You are not fair, Janet.”

“You said you didn’t want to die alone. Have you changed
your mind after all these years?”

The flies were devils. KoCherop, with her African composure,
paid them no mind, even when they sipped fluid
from the rim of her eyelids. “Lokomol should not have sent you.”

“But he did.” I reached out and clasped her shoulder. She
leaned into my hand. “We won’t have to stay in the city all the time. You can
come with us when I do my field work in the
Ituri forest. The pygmies will call you a giant.”

KoCherop, who was rather
short, smiled faintly, then lost it. I could feel her tremble through my
palm. “Yes. Yes, Janet, I will come. But give me one more night. I must say
goodbye to Cherop.”

I am ashamed to say that, for an instant, I did not believe her. I envisioned her hiding from us when
the time came to leave. But if she did, I would have to respect that
choice, so I told her where the truck was and climbed down the mountain.

KoCherop was giving her two-year-old son Lokomol a bath
Pokot style: squirting water out of her mouth in a pencil-thin stream and
scrubbing him with her fingers. The baby wailed, watching forlornly as the mud
he’d so diligently splattered over his skin was rinsed away. Not far away his
slightly older sister laughed at his discomfiture, while KoCherop’s three other
children clambered up and down the acacia
tree under which we sat.

“You have been married half a year, Chemachugwo,” she said.
“Why aren’t you pregnant?” I knew she was scolding me; she reserved use of my
Pokot name for times when she wanted to lecture or argue.

I paused, keeping my glance on Lokomol, marveling at how
much he had grown in the year and a half since I had last visited my tribal
friends. “Greg and I don’t plan to have any children just yet.”

“You are over thirty years — well over. You could be a
grandmother by now.”

I thought of the crow’s feet in the corners of my eyes and
the strands of gray hair that I’d found a couple of months back. I didn’t need
KoCherop’s reminder.

“What about you?” I asked. “Are you going to stop at five?”

“Oh, no!” she said emphatically, sending Lokomol off to his
siblings with an affectionate pat on the butt. “Seven, eight, nine — whatever
luck brings me. I am already behind. KamaChepkech already has six,” she said of
her younger sister.

KoCherop was twenty-four years old.

Morning arrived with the suddenness of the tropics. I,
lying awake on the bed of the Land Rover, watched the sun illuminate the tracks
of the snakes that had crawled past the vehicle in the night. I heard footsteps
scuffing the path and my heart began to pound.

KoCherop had come.

She had brought her sack and her gourd. She stood like a
statue, her wide, Nilo-Hamitic features impassive. She was dressed in the
traditional style: a skirt of thick brown muslin covering her from the base of
her rib cage to her knees, huge hoop earrings, and a cornucopia of bright,
multi-colored beads in the form of belts, anklets, bracelets, armbands, a
headband, and row after row of necklaces draping her collar, shoulders, and
upper chest, leaving her breasts bare. This was her best outfit, and a rare
sight in days when most Pokot women had long since begun to mimic Western
fashions.

“When we get to Kampala, they will know I am a Pokot,” she
explained.

I pursed my lips. They would know, all right.

I saw her glance wistfully at the hills. “It will be
temporary,” I said rapidly. “The rain will come. It has to come. Lokomol and
his brothers will plant new crops. You can return then.”

“And maybe my granddaughter will be born again,” she
replied.

I sighed. It was hard not
to agree with her pessimism. The rain
would
come again — no doubt far more of it than the vegetationless
soil could withstand — and some of the million Pokot refugees would reestablish
their homes, but for vast numbers, the old way of life had ended forever.

Greg grumbled up out of his sleep, saw KoCherop, and gave me
a questioning glance.

“Start her up,” I said.
“There’s no reason to stay here.”

As I watched the first news broadcast concerning the Termite bacteria, I remembered Grape Nuts. In a
flashback to my childhood Euell Gibbons appeared, white-haired,
fatherly, pouring a bowlful of cereal. “Ever eat a pine tree?” he asked in his
backwoods accent.

The geneticists explained how they had developed a strain of
E. coli
capable of converting
cellulose into sugar. Doctors calculated that the effects, though
disconcerting, would not be dangerous in the
long term. Politicians justified its release into test populations in
East Africa and Bangladesh on the grounds that it hailed the end of world
hunger, a new chance for the stricken nations of the Third World.

I kept thinking of Marie
Antoinette.
Let them eat wood.

We made our way to the main road, a dirt track that would
take us down the valley, past Mt. Elgon to Lake Victoria, and eventually across
the border into Uganda. The grimy windshield
showed us a view of bleak mountains and dust, broken by an occasional
cactus or bit of scrub brush.

KoCherop sat between Greg and me, taking no note of the
surroundings, a contagious gloom that kept my husband and I from saying more
than ten words to each other all morning. It
was as if each mile enervated her, until it was all she could do to
simply sit.

We approached Sigor, the
district’s marketing center, the only “big town” KoCherop had ever
visited. It was little more than a collection of dung huts with tin sheet
roofs. Nowhere on the wind-whipped ground was there a tree or a blade of grass,
only dust, rusting oil drums, black requiem birds, a scent of human poverty. In
temperate climates, poverty smells sour, but in hot regions it is sickeningly
sweet. Small knots of people gathered at the periphery of the street as we
rolled through: sad black faces, pleading eyes.

We kept our weapons visible, but here, as with the boy the
day before, no one had the energy to threaten us. They simply stood with the
passivity of the starving, hoping that perhaps we were famine relief workers. I
did not look at their faces. Though we had an ample supply of food in the Land
Rover, we didn’t dare stop and try to share it, or the spell holding them back
would have been broken. Our food stayed hidden inside plastic, metal, and
canvas, as inconspicuous as we could make it.

I couldn’t save them. There were too many. What mattered now
was KoCherop. I could, God willing, rescue one person, if she would let me.

She paid no attention to the audience, though they stared at
her beads and naked breasts, which in their minds marked her as more primitive,
and therefore poorer, than they. Perhaps they were wondering why she, and not
they, deserved to ride. We didn’t stop until long after the village had merged
with the dust of the horizon.

“
You don’t have
to do that anymore,” I said.

KoCherop continued picking bits of stems and stalks out of
the sorghum she was grinding. She looked at me with skepticism.

“You don’t have to separate the chaff,” I clarified. “Just
grind it in. The bacteria will allow you to digest it, just like the grain.”

“It is meant for cattle, not people,” she said firmly. “You
talk like the government advisors.”

“The crop’s been very poor this year. You don’t have much to
waste.”

“Do they eat chaff in
California?” she asked. She knew that I had just returned from a visit
to my hometown in the San Joaquin Valley.

“No. North America hasn’t been infected yet. But it will be.
There’s no way to stop
E. coli
. Eventually
it’ll get everyone. We’ll all be Termites.
I’m one already. So are you.”

“No, I am not.”

“Yes, you are. It’s even gotten into your cattle. That’s why
the dung burns so poorly,” I said, pointing at the smoldering fire underneath
the kettle of porridge. There wasn’t enough fiber left in the cow pies to serve
as fuel. “Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed a big difference in how food passes
through your system.”

Not being Caucasian, her blush didn’t show, but the
expression was the same. I, too, had been embarrassed by the sudden, violent cycles of diarrhea and
constipation, and most of all by the methane, though more recently my
body had begun to adjust.

“I will keep doing it this way,” she insisted. “This is the
way my mother taught me.”

We began to catch up with the refugee caravans by
mid-afternoon. The first contained about fifty people, shuffling along at a
pace of perhaps a kilometer an hour. It was much worse than in Sigor, for they
made no effort to get out of the way of the Land Rover — many, I suspected,
would not have cared if they had been run over — and it took a considerable
length of time to weave our way through them, all the while aware of their eyes
an arm-length outside the windows. Their lighter coloring and thinner features
told me that they were Samburu. They had come even further than we, from the
vicinity of Lake Turkana, where the normally bountiful supplies of fish had
become exhausted from the excessive demand.

At least they were away from the water and its mosquitoes.
Fewer would die from malaria.

In due course we came upon another, somewhat larger group,
readily distinguishable because some of them still carried significant
possessions, either in carts, on packs, or slung on poles. They even drove a
pair of oxen and a few bony cows ahead of them. I noticed four men huddled
around a bowl of milk and blood, a traditional meal of the pastoralists of the
Rift Valley, while a knot of women and children watched, quiet with envy. My
hands, lubed with perspiration, slid along the stock of my rifle. Greg gave me
a glance, and I knew he saw what I did: these tribesmen had enough strength
left to cause trouble should they wish.

Three young men, painfully lean but still muscular, were
very slow to get out of our path. They glowered at us as we passed. I pretended
to be distracted by the constant bouncing from the ruts and chuck holes, but I
could feel their eyes riveted to us. It was like the sensation a woman gets
when a man blatantly undresses her in his mind.

The last obstacle was a boy who strode behind one of the
oxen with a thin whip. For a full two minutes, though it was obvious he knew we
were behind him, he refused to move himself or his animal out of the way.
Finally the track widened and Greg began to pull around. Suddenly the boy began lashing at us. The sound of leather
on metal made me jump. The boy shouted — a guttural, wordless roar. The tip of his lash struck the
steering wheel.

Greg stepped firmly on the throttle, shooting us into the
clear, and didn’t let up until the irregularity of the road shook us more than
our aging bones could tolerate. He eased off, put the .45 back into its holster
on the dash, got out his handkerchief, and wiped his forehead. The boy, his
image shrinking out of sight in the mirror, was laughing that his whip had
spurred us so well. His poor ox could not have been so vigorous.

“Bloody little blighter,” Greg cursed.

My hands were shaking. I turned to share a sigh of relief
with KoCherop, only to find her gazing ahead, lips pursed, as if nothing of
importance had occurred. Greg noticed and, like mine, his eyebrows drew
together.

Ahead in the distance, well away from the Samburu, an escarpment loomed. “We’ll pull over when we
reach that,” Greg announced, pointing. “Time for a rest.”

We were walking down a trail between two plots of
farmland, one belonging to KoCherop’s uncle, the other to her brother. For
once, the rain had come in full vigor, and neither locusts nor the flocks of
marauding queleas had come to steal the grain. Dozens of tribesmen worked the
fields, the glistening brown backs of both men and women happily bending down
to harvest a bumper crop.

“Why do you do what you do?” KoCherop asked suddenly.

The question had come from out of the blue. “You mean, why
am I an anthropologist?”

She nodded. “See my people with their scythes? See this
mountain? I am in my place. Why do you live so far from your parents? Why do
you go to the forest to study the pygmies, instead of having children? You are
too old now to start a family. How can you be happy?”