Valley of Bones (34 page)

Nora was a tribal kind of person like all the Irish are, she thought Africa was like Europe was in the Dark Ages, desperate, murderous, but laden with hope, she thought it could be converted, not missionary-converted, but really, by the Holy Spirit and saints, like the European barbarians were. She thought the Dinka were just like the Irish before St. Patrick—warriors, poets, kings of little plots of land, lovers of cattle, she saw in their tall
black forms Cuchulainn and Finn, Queen Maeve and King Ailil and the Cattle Raid of Cooley. I believed her because she had a degree in history from University College Dublin and besides I would have believed the Dinka were Choctaws or the Ten Lost Tribes on her say-so, not only because I was entranced with her but also because she could talk the hinges off a door.

What we did at Mokilo after the long days, we would lie in the hot tent under our netting and she would talk and drink whiskey from a tin cup, a drop to carry her off as she said. We’re of a dying race me girl she would say, alas Babylon, with all our gold and power we can’t make our women bear children or keep our children from killing themselves or keep off the hatred of all the world and don’t you think one day it’ll all come crashing down? Oh not next year or in our lifetimes even, but the mark of death is on us sure, and the church is dying and so is the Society, oh I don’t mean it’ll vanish, but there’ll be a change of form into something new with its own new glory, by God even Rome didn’t vanish after the sack, and the church is not after all a mortal thing.

T’ing. A morrtal t’ing, I can still hear her voice, the accent got thicker with the drink. I guess she was a drunk when all’s told, but I never saw her take a sip between sunrise and sunset there was that much iron in her, but she needed her drop when it got dark in Africa. As who the fuck doesn’t?

We were waiting for a full moon and for our complement of people going to Pibor, a town more or less besieged by GOS forces where we had a refugee hospital. Then a final planeload came in and we were ready, a couple of sister-doctors, some nurses, a sanitarian, some technicians, and among them I found my original Blood sister, Trinidad Salcedo from Miami. She was not surprised to see me or what I’d become, but I was surprised to find her an ordinary person, pleasant, efficient, nothing special, not the strange mystic figure I had made her out to be in Miami, and when I said all this to Nora she said, it’s you who’ve changed darlin’, Trini
didn’t shrink down, you grew and of course it turned out that Trini was some kind of special disciple of Nora, and had lived with her once upon a time, which made me jealous, no it was just the ghost of jealousy and I told Nora about it and we had a laugh.

We went in at night on the first of April, many jokes about the date, eight of us in blue coveralls and hockey helmets in the Fokker, flown by a couple of sister-pilots and a sister-jumpmaster and four men, Africans, for cargo kickers. We took off at sundown, a tin tube full of nerves and noise. I looked over at Nora her face strange in the red glow and she smiled a rack of pink teeth at me. Then the plane veered and dropped to altitude and the cargo kickers got up and harnessed themselves and the clam shell yawned open aft and the gritty African wind poured in and the kickers ran the pallets out. We came around for another run, leveled, the red light turned ghastly green, sister-jumpmaster gave the commands, we hooked up our static lines, and then in just a little more time than it takes to tell it, we trotted down the aisle and into the moonlight.

It was a good drop. None of the containers burst, the trucks from Pibor were where they should be, no one got a pallet on the bean, no brokens among the sisters. We sang as we rode back, a Salve Regina from the eleventh century in four parts and then “Finnegan’s Wake,” Nora’s addition, she knew all the verses and the rest joining in the chorus, lots of fun at Finnegan’s wake. Nora broke out one of her precious bottles of Jameson and we all had a taste and then Nora hung around my neck a chain with a little brass angel on it and everyone clapped and kissed me. That’s what they were for. And thinking of where I was and who I was when I first saw one of the things, I cried shamefully.

Life at Pibor. Pibor is in the
gòk
,
a Dinka landscape term meaning a woody area with sandy fertile soil above the flood zone. This particular
gòk
was well outside the usual Dinka
tribal regions, which lie to the north and east, and people had fled to the area to escape the GOS depredations. There were Dinka cattle camps all around, with huge round cone-roofed thatched cattle byres and smaller sleep huts of the same design. The zone was considered relatively quiet, and the SPLA sent their wounded there for treatment and recovery along with the larger number of civilians who’d been hurt by the GOS bombings of villages. Our operation was protected by a SPLA militia, a not very effective-looking bunch of teens with Kalashnikovs and grenade launchers and a fleet of battered pickup trucks. The Society bribed the local warlord to keep up the protection and also bribed the local GOS commander to lay off. Nora said much can be done with a little money in a place where everyone is dirt poor and loyalties are local. She didn’t think much of the SPLAs either. If there is a real soldier in the whole of the Sudan, I’d like to see him, was her opinion, she said one disciplined brigade could go through the whole blessed country like a dose of salts. But there wasn’t one on either side, and so the war continued without hope of an end.

But something was up and Nora was worried. There had been two bombings in the last month, which meant that the orders had come from higher up, maybe from Khartoum, maybe they thought we were getting too comfortable in our little corner. So there was a lot of digging now, and filling of sandbags. They had an air raid shelter built under one of the tents and another under construction for the post-op ward, the sound of scraping went on all day and night. Wheelbarrows and shovels had filled one of my crates.

We had air raid drills. You could hear the slow Antonov 32s that they used from a long way off, so there was plenty of time and besides they were just cargo planes not real bombers, they just rolled the bombs, welded oil drums packed with Semtex, out the rear cargo door, just barely accurate enough for terror.

I saw Nora working as a nurse for the first time, and also for
the first time I saw the white aprons of the Society actually soaked in blood. There was always a slow trickle of casualties, occasionally a flood when a village or another hospital got bombed. Also diseases, malnutrition, although we had plenty of food, if you consider sorghum porridge a food, and dysentery. When necessary I cleaned up diarrhea, working alongside Nora and the others, her always cheerful, ah the romance of the Cat’lic religion! she would call out, wiping filth.

I made myself useful, inoculating and distributing stuff, keeping inventory, and since I was Dinka-speaking, I also helped Father Manes, our priest, another American. Manes was a classic whiskey priest, a big shambling man with a mess of long gray curls, wore a dusty cassock and a straw fedora, God knows where he got the booze. He was always half in the bag, never more, never less. Rumors of a voluntary exile because of a taste for altar boys. The sisters treated him friendly enough, like a large dirty hound, and besides his religious duties he ran the school.

That’s where I met Dol Biong, at the school. I was teaching a class of boys. They loved me, not because I was anything of a teacher but because I had given each of them a notebook and a pencil. Giving an African kid a pencil is like giving an American kid a sports car. I had to insist that they use the pencil to write with, they were so much more useful as cult and status objects. Also, none of them had ever been to school before, so I had to invent the concept for them, me the high school dropout, and I was just describing the wonders of the alphabet, when I saw him, standing one-legged in the Dinka way just outside the circle of the class. I called to him, but he didn’t budge. One of the boys said oh Dol Biong will never come to class he is too
adheng
for us. He says he is a chief’s son but we don’t know of what tribe, and they all laughed. So I went on. He never joined the class, but never missed one either, standing there, his eyes burning with something, hate or desire, black as tar, skin and bones, naked except for a ragged T-shirt and shorts. I asked Father Manes
about him and it turned out he was an escaped slave, Baggara tribesmen had raided his village and stolen his whole clan. He was from north of here around Wibok. Manes intended to take him back there the next time he could join a SPLA convoy.

He ate alone too. On the other hand I seemed to run into him more than simple chance required. Once or twice he helped me carry the heavy ice chests we used for vaccines, just appearing at my side. Never said a word except with those eyes. The last week in May, the SPLA sent half a dozen trucks with soldiers and supplies and some of our sisters up to Wibok. Wibok was full of orphaned kids who had fled the slave raiding in the north, around Nasir. Manes went with them in the hope that he could get the SPLA commander up there to let him start a school instead of recruiting them all into the rebel army. Trini went to take charge of the aid station there. I thought that Dol Biong would have gone with them, but I spotted him later that day, lurking. I asked him in my best Dinka why he hadn’t gone, and got no answer but that stare.

In all a happy time and the days flew. In the evenings, Nora and I would sit in our tent, she on a cot sipping whiskey and pontificating about the events of the day or the fate of man, me crouched usually at her feet leaning against her thigh like a dog while she idly stroked my hair. I liked being her dog. There is a lot to be said for mindless devotion after a life such as I had lived. Looking back I suppose she had the same relationship with Christ, she was His dog as I was hers, although at the time that was quite beyond my imagination. I would from time to time recite poems from the 500 Best, she liked Yeats Auden Donne Carlos Williams Southey Marvell Herbert. Ah, you’re a wonder, Emily, I niver could remember a blessed thing I had to cheat like a gypsy to pass me exams.

Speaking of gypsy, I got dark again. When I was a tiny kid I used to get very brown in the summers, my Cajun blood, Daddy used to say, but after he died Momma would make me
cover up, them Garigeaus had a nigger in the woodpile sure as shit she used to say, but now Africa turned me brown as an Arab.

I am avoiding again I see and I mustn’t there is hardly space to tell the rest, how clever of me it means I will have to stint on some of my crimes. June 13, a Sunday and we are all gathered in the church of the old Italian mission, even the atheists, for Father Manes has left for Wibok and there is no one to say mass, except Nora is doing it anyway, yes our dirty secret we do it all the time in the Bloods when there are no priests, as there very often are not where we work. Perhaps that’s why the atheist Euro docs are in attendance, solidarity with feminism, or one in the eye for the patriarchy, although I know all that’s far from Nora’s mind. Technically the host is already consecrated by the priest on such occasions, but Nora is doing it proper, proclaiming the Gospel, giving the homily, singing the words of the mass in her clear voice, lift up your hearts and so on, and we lifted them up. I didn’t actually see her do it because I was the youngest sister and by our tradition I had my back to the altar, looking out the door for the enemy.

Out the door I could see Dol Biong standing motionless in the shade of a water tank looking like a child’s stick figure drawn in charcoal against its bright corrugated steel. Behind me they were singing the Agnus Dei. In a few minutes one of the sisters would bring me the bread and wine, another little tradition. Then I felt something brush by me and I saw that a little kid, maybe four years old, had dashed out of the church laughing and I called out to her mother I’ll get her! and I ran out. I caught the little girl and tickled her and called her
rac
(naughty) and started back, at which moment I first heard the engines.

In the Spanish Civil War the fascist bombers used to cut their engines off over the sea and glide inland soundlessly, cranking up only as they approached the target, which worked pretty well before they had radar and it shows you that a good idea is ever
green, because the pilot of the Antonov had done it too. I screamed out a warning and started to run back to the church, but they were all singing dona nobis pacem and besides it was too late. The Antonov coasted over at about twelve hundred feet and dropped four large bombs, I could see the long black cylinders tumbling out of the rear cargo bay door. The first bomb hit the motor pool and our fuel dump, the second a group of tents. I had not been bombed before but I knew something about explosives and these blasts were enormous, five-hundred-pounders, a mind-numbing bowel-loosening noise. The third crashed through the tin roof of the church and exploded inside. I didn’t see where the fourth one landed because I was standing there flat-footed with the kid on my hip when the shock wave and the rushing cloud of atomized bricks pews statues hymnals bread wine chalices and people knocked me flat.

I was blown out of your world, really, now that I think about it, and this makes the next part difficult to tell. Out of prose into poetry. Out of the secular into the mythos. Out of
chronos
into
kairos,
God’s time.

No, but not at first. I came to myself and found I was blind and someone was pulling at my arm. Gelling blood lay thick in my eye sockets from a gash on my scalp. I wiped it away. I saw smoke and hanging dust and crumbled ruin with shards of tin roof sticking up, so small, these ruins couldn’t have held so many souls. I screamed her name and began to claw at the rubble like a dog, but I was pulled back by the boy, Dol Biong. Emily, Emily, they are all dead, they are all dead, he said and I struck at him tears washing away the sticky blood, but he held me. Come with me he said there is nothing here, and after the bombings the Baggara always come. I cried no no and ran away from him to the dorm tent, I suppose I was thinking that somehow she was still there God had brought her away from the church at the last moment but no, and I saw that the refugees were already looting the possessions of the dead helpers. And
why not? But still I screamed and beat at their dull black skins and forced my way to where Nora and I had slept and took the old rucksack she kept her things in and swept into it her crumpled clothes her little carved crucifix her rosary and some of her books, things that smelled of her alive I wanted to cover the stink of death that came from the ruins scorched hair and bone and the barbecue smell that’s the most hideous thing about burning people your belly says mm good meat! Despite what you know.