Valley of Bones (35 page)

Come come he was tugging at me and we pushed through the mob and out into the compound. The SPLA who had gone to church had neatly stacked their rifles outside with their bandoliers and I saw Dol grab an AK and some ammunition. I saw he had a bag too. As we left I saw also the child who had saved me by running out, a bit of debris had ripped her from my arms and taken off half her head I envied her I wanted the flies to be eating me too. But I followed him, and again why not? Nora was gone and God was finally silent in my head, no medieval saints to guide me today only a Dinka boy.

We walked east. This was the
sudd
itself, meandering rivers cutting across clay plains, and papyrus marshes that in the wet season make huge rafts of matting that sometimes blockade the rivers.
Sudd
means blockage and gives the nation its name. It was the end of the dry season and so travel was easier than it would have been at another time. There was just enough water still on the land, and he had brought food, bean cake, mashed groundnut, dried fish, cooked rice. We barely talked. I sat where I was placed, I moved when tugged, when food lumps were placed in my hand I carried them to my mouth.

Several times we hid from Baggara raiders. The Baggara are Arabized tribesmen who traditionally prey on the
abd,
mainly the Dinka but also the Nuer. We hid in the grass, he with his rifle ready, I silent but uncaring. It’s hard to recall emptiness, there is nothing there to respond to the world. I know we crossed
rivers and there were crocodiles and hippos in the deep places. He was a fearless boy, but he was wary of hippos, ridiculous beasts that kill more Africans than crocodiles do, yet another example of God’s deceptive ways. Once we waded across a wider river than usual and he said that is the Pibor and this is my land. Now we stayed at night in villages, in the round houses of the Dinka. Dinka manners require eating with the mouth open, but what did I care? It was a sad country then, the GOS was expelling Dinka from the oil lands, pushing them east, stealing their herds, making them paupers, arming the Baggara and the murahileen, the Muslim tribal militias, who took the girls and boys for slaves. No one paid me any mind. I crouched against the wall invisible. But him they treated well. Every Dinka is an aristocrat, but some lineages are especially honored, and he was the last of his line, the last male descendant of Peng Biong and Atiam, the holy woman. There I first heard the song

In the days of Peng Biong and Atiam

No one could count our cattle

The holy people took us across the river

To rich pastures

But now the land is full of sin

And our wealth is no more

No one has the power of spirit

Unless Atiam and Peng Biong return

From their graves

How long we traveled I don’t know. It was Ker by their reckoning, the first division of the rainy season, and all that the people talked about was the rains being late. The sky was a thin stretched hot membrane the clouds hung on the horizon and never seemed to come nearer they seemed painted on blue china. The more we traveled the emptier I became as all the days resolved into the same day, endless. He was refining me in His holy fire
to make me a fit instrument of His will. Now I know it but not then.

So we arrived one night at a reed-thatched hut such as the boys make when they go on the summer herding, the
toc,
and abandon to decay when they leave. There was a dead thorn tree nearby and the boy built a little fire of thorn sticks. We ate, we slept.

I awoke in the dark, and the hut was full of smoke, so thick I thought I must choke, but there was no rasp in my throat, and in the center of the smoke a flame glowed but not from a little fire of sticks, it was bright as a welder’s torch. And the hut was full of beings, too, huge, inhuman, full as a crowded elevator, I could feel them pressing around me, not with my senses but with my soul and this host cried holy holy is the Lord of Hosts the whole earth is full of His Glory. Now imagine the worst embarrassment you have ever felt in your life the greatest shame that you know will stay with you all your days and I say that is nothing to what I felt then, I fell on my face and ground it into the soil, pissing my pants in terror, earth gritty in my mouth, clawing with my hands until my nails cracked digging with my knees to get away from It, light too hard to stand, away from Him. No no I said aloud I’m too filthy filthy but they held me and pulled me back and I howled in pain. And I saw one of them take a coal from that fire and it placed the flaming coal on my mouth (and it burned with the most terrible pain, but my flesh was not consumed) and it said lo your sin is purged.

Then I heard His small clear voice in the center of my head saying

Whom shall I send and who will go for Us?

And I heard my own voice saying aloud: Here I am. Send me.

And the Lord said, go and save this people who are despised and afflicted and make them understand My words with their hearts and convert and be healed. And lead them in the ways of righteousness for My name’s sake, for they will be a great people.

Yes, what they call a topos, a set-piece chunk of religious experience, but who knows but that it’s always like that when God chooses you, like chocolate ice cream it is always what it is or a hand in cool water, real. Maybe Isaiah also had to change his shorts, Scripture is silent here.

The remainder of the night was interesting too. Nora was there and St. Catherine of Siena and the Devil as well. I was so happy to see Nora again, covering her hands and face with kisses and she said don’t be stupid girl don’t you know when you love someone they live forever and surely you didn’t think that the communion of saints was just a figure of speech? I was surprised to see my old shiny man there it now being holy ground, but when you think of it he has to be there to twist every good thing to evil if he can it is the way we play here on earth and he said congratulations we’re both working for the same outfit now and I told him to be quiet and sucked him into me again.

Then the morning and I was a different person, so different that Dol looked at me strangely. I ate with good appetite, more than I had for days, I was empty and needed my strength to do God’s work, but I wanted more than a handful of bean paste I said I needed meat and he said there is no meat Emily the bush meat is all gone because of the war and all the hungry people. But when we came out of the hut we heard a thrashing in the reeds and out stepped a little reedbuck kid and stood there and I took our rifle and killed it with one shot and butchered it and we built a big fire and ate our fill of meat. Then we packed and I picked up a staff of thorn wood and set off. I set the pace now, no longer having to be tugged along, amazing the boy.

I saw his dismay and said I am not a witch nor have I been witched in the night, but the Lord (
Nhialic
as the Dinka call Him) has enlarged my spirit and told me to save the Monyjang Peng from the wars and the slavers and make them great in cattle again as in the time of Atiam. At this his eyes grew wide and he said but you are a pink foreigner. I said I am not very pink
at all anymore and also, who saved me when the church was bombed and who sent the meat to us and who made you follow me around like a calf after a cow in Pibor? You knew it in your heart already. I saw in his eyes that he believed and that made me believe the more and so we set out again for Wibok.

We crossed the Kongkong the next day and there was Wibok close by the river. Nora had told me that it was once a place of considerable importance. Located on the confluence of the Kongkong and the north and south forks of the Sobat, it was the seat of a
beylik
in the Turkish days. Muhammed Ali, the khe-dive of Egypt, had built a fort there nearly two centuries ago to overawe the Abyssinians and also as a barracoon to confine the slaves he took in huge numbers from the lands between the Nile and the other rivers. The Brits had taken it over in their day and built a little town, the seat of a district commissioner and his colonial troops. After independence the Sudanese had allowed it to fall into disrepair, and when the SPLA moved against Wibok in this recent war the GOS troops had not put up much of a fight. There was nothing to fight for in Wibok or its hinter-land, the principal product of the area being a little arms smuggling from Ethiopia and a rich crop of starving refugees.

These lay in vast dying fields surrounding Wibok town, a valley of bones as in Ezekiel, and the hand of the Lord had truly set me down in the midst of them so they might again have life. They were women mainly and old people and young children, the military-aged men and boys having been swept up in the wars. We walked through these fields Dol and I unsurprised, for he had seen it all his life and I like everyone in the rich world had seen this on television but it’s not the same without the smell: dust, and shit, and the abrading odor of thousands of dead and dying bodies. Stick-figure babies lying in the sun covered by flies and ants, being eaten alive actually, swell-bellied and red haired from the kwashiorkor. The first fifty maybe clawed at your heart and then it was like beer cans on an American
street. The babies were starving, the women and the old people were starving, but sleek and fat were the men with guns.

I found Trini Salcedo in the Society hospital tent and she dropped a pan when she saw me walk in. Of course she had heard over the Society radio about the catastrophe at Pibor and she thought I was dead with the others. Are you okay, she asked looking closely at my face. I said I was fine and she said, good we need someone to organize this place. She told me that there were three different medical establishments, plus maybe twenty charities, operating, all with their own logistics, generators, distribution systems, priorities, whatever. The only thing they all had in common is that they gave the SPLA guys whatever they want, off the top, or else they get kicked out of town. The fort was stacked with food and medicine that the commandant used for barter with the Ethiopian smugglers for fuel, generators, booze, weapons. I said I would like to help and I walked out of the tent.

With Dol by my side we went to the fort. First a crumbling wall with an arched Turkish gate and a square tower out of Beau Geste on either side. There was a SPLA guard at the gate with an AK. He was seated on a backless office chair and drinking from a can of Orangina, both symbols of unapproachable status in this part of the world. He waved us through, my Euroness substituting for ID, as it often does in Africa. In the center of the courtyard was a two-story brick building with Turkish arches for doors and windows, painted faded green with a square tower battlemented in the Moorish style on the two facing corners. It had a wide tin awning running around it at the upper edge of the first floor so that in the rains supplicants to the bey or the Brits could wait dry. A flagpole rose before the main door, but no flag flew. At ground level a row of small windows grilled with iron had been blocked with concrete, evidence of the old barracoon. There were tons of supplies stacked in the courtyard, guarded by raggedy-assed SPLAs.

I ignored them and went into the church. The church itself was built by the Verona Fathers in the 1920s and was called St. Philip Neri, a substantial mudbrick structure, nicely stuccoed in white, with a high tin roof set up on posts and beams above the walls leaving a wide gap for air, much like the blown-up church in Pibor. There was a simple altar and a large crucifix in the Italian fashion and a wheezy pump organ. Father Manes was there rehearsing his choir. The Dinka are maybe the greatest singers in east Africa, all they have ever had really besides their cows are their songs. They sang an Ave Maria and a Dinka hymn about Christ bringing the rain. Father Manes was also surprised to see me and even more so when, later in the tiny back room he used as his rectory, I told him what had happened to me in the smoky hut and also what I intended to do. I could see he thought I was crazy and also I could see the fear that I might not be. White people go nuts in Africa all the time, and sometimes, especially among missionaries, it shows as religious mania. So he was smarmy-kind and solicitous through the whiskey fumes until I said he had to stop buying booze from the SPLA with the money he got from America for keeping the church. He stared at me gaping.

I guess he had some words later with Trini because she came to see me the next day. I was staying with Dol Biong in a mud-walled grass-roofed sleeping hut belonging to his mother’s family. This was one of the traditional Peng Dinka villages that ringed Wibok, full of people trying to maintain the tribal discipline and customs and keep a small herd of cattle, although this was nearly impossible, given the thousands of starving refugees that surrounded them. We spoke outside, in the shade of a large fever tree. I could see by her expression that she was surprised to find me not obviously raving. Like many devout people raised in the faith, she had never had a religious experience. I have found that such people have a mixed attitude toward those who have, it is wistful longing mixed with resentment and just a taste of envy like the
good son in the parable: I’ve worked in the vineyards all my life oh Lord and no fatted calf for me? I told her what had happened to me and what God had told me to do, but I don’t think she really heard me.

I went back to Wibok fort then and confronted the SPLA commander, a chubby fellow named Nyoung. Feed the people, I said, in the name of the Lord, and the Lord then put into my mind all his iniquities and I spoke them out and he gave a cry of rage and called me a witch, and pointed a pistol at me and pulled the trigger. But the Lord protected me and the weapon did not fire. I walked very close to him and said, you know I am no witch, Nyoung, but a prophet of Nhialic Himself. Aren’t you Monyjang? Did you learn from your fathers to steal food from the hungry? Is this
cieng?
Is this noble, to live like foreigners? When did the Monyjang learn to stuff their mouths so? Your fathers are ashamed. Their spirits are calling on Nhialic to judge you. If you don’t repent, will he not cut you off, you and your whole line?