Acts of faith (21 page)

Weldon knows his son well enough to see that he’s telling his parents what he thinks they want to hear. Except for number six. That’s for the kid himself. Wanted to fly ever since he knew what an airplane was. One and two are intended to please Mom and Dad both, three to please Dad, four and five go to Mom, the family do-gooder. Weldon feels a twinge of resentment that two goals have been tailored to Lucy’s tastes, only one to his. The emotion troubles him. He would have thought himself too large-minded for such petty jealousy, though he knows that he and Lucy have been wrestling for years for possession of Douglas, the youngest of their three children and their only son.

Lucy had wanted a boy as much as he, and Weldon figures that’s one reason why they have waged a kind of custody battle for the greater share of Douglas’s love and loyalty. Then there are the differences between him and his wife. She’s a westerner, born in Flagstaff; he’s from New England
,
like every generation of Braithwaites going back to
1640
;
he was raised Presbyterian, she’s a Mormon, a lapsed one who nonetheless exhibits, in her crusades for the rights of Native Americans and Mexican immigrants, the self-sacrificial, and sometimes self-righteous, spirit of her proselytizing forebears. Weldon is all for helping the disadvantaged, but to his mind that’s best done with charitable contributions, preferably tax deductible, not by spending time away from your family teaching English in barrios or on Indian reservations.

He looks at the paper and then at his boy, so scrawny now, having grown four inches in as many months without gaining the weight to go with the height; scrawny and awkward, his brain unable to figure out how to communicate with the suddenly longer limbs. He is fidgeting, and Weldon guesses what he’s thinking: “The old man wants me to set an ‘A’ average as a goal; he’ll say he wants me to get a real job over Christmas vacation, not dish out soup to derelicts.” But that’s not what the old man is going to say. He’s had a flash of insight. What’s the kid really telling me with this list? That he doesn’t want to be the prize in a war between Mom and Dad. That he wants to please both of us because he belongs to us both.

“You misspelled ‘Massachusetts,’ ” Weldon says. “Look it up.”

“Okay.”

“Make you a deal. If you really do one through five, you’ll get six next summer.”

“Don’t say that if you don’t mean it,” Douglas pleads after several moments of silence.

“Solemn promise. You’ll be in the air when you’re sixteen.”

Douglas is there already.

Redeemer

W
HILE THEY WAITED
for a boat to be brought up, in a heat like none she’d known back home, even on the stillest, muggiest days her mother called “dog days” (Quinette in her childhood wondering what hot weather and dogs had to do with each other), she remembered how wide the Mississippi had looked the first time she saw it from the Dubuque levee, near the foot of the bridge arching like a steel rainbow into another state, the trees on the Illinois side and the hills beyond appearing so distant she felt as if she were looking across a lake rather than a river, her idea of a river being the Cedar or the Shell Rock or the Little Cedar, slender enough that two people on opposite banks could talk to each other.

The Mississippi lived up to the way she’d pictured it in sixth-grade geography period. Mrs. Hoge told the class that Mississippi was an Indian word meaning “Father of Waters,” because it was the longest river in North America. Not, however, the longest in the world. That honor belonged to the Nile, she said, moving her pointer to the world map pulled down over the blackboard like a window shade: more than four thousand miles from here—the rubber tip stabbed at a country called Uganda—to here in Egypt—the tip moving to the river’s mouth, opening onto the Mediterranean Sea.

As Mrs. Hoge went on, Quinette recalled the story of Moses from Sunday school—how he had drifted in a reed basket coated with pitch until he was found by Pharaoh’s daughter and spared from her father’s cruel edict to have all firstborn Hebrew boys killed. Her thoughts ran from there to an old movie she’d seen about Moses, starring Charlton Heston. Because the subject matter met with her mother’s approval (unlike her father, who’d gone to church only at Christmas and Easter, her mother was a devout Lutheran), she allowed Quinette to stay up late to watch it on TV. Nicole and Kristen weren’t interested and went upstairs to listen to Kristen’s new Pat Benatar tape. How small and vulnerable Moses’ basket looked, how miraculous that it stayed afloat on the immense river. Her mother, sitting beside Quinette on the old sofa with its brown and gold pattern like late autumn leaves, looked at her out of the corner of her eye and smiled gently, the smile telling her that there was good in everyone, even in heathen Egyptian women, and that God’s hand was everywhere. He had guided the basket into the arms of Pharaoh’s daughter so the baby inside could grow up to be Charlton Heston and lead his people out of bondage.

All those memories, of Mrs. Hoge’s class, of the day on the levee, and of the Nile as it appeared in the movie, rushed at Quinette as she sat with her companions under a wide-spreading tree, hot sunlight slivering through the branches as through pinpricks in a worn awning, and gazed at the real Nile. Colored like mud mixed with wet cement, and sluggish and less than half as wide as the Mississippi, it was not the mighty, awesome river that had surged in her imagination, and she felt cheated. She usually did when things turned out to be less beautiful or exciting or inspiring than she’d hoped—as if she were the victim of an intentional fraud.

It had been that way when she was born again. Most of the congregation at Family Evangelical Church had described their salvation as a rapturous experience—the Holy Spirit moving through them like a wind, and nothing the same afterward. Like they were all Saint Paul on the road to Damascus. Quinette had been stopped at a red light, on the road from work to her night-school computer class at the University of Northern Iowa, when she accepted Jesus Christ as her personal lord and savior. She immediately recited the sinner’s prayer, as her minister had advised her to do. “Jesus, I admit to you that I am a sinner, in need of savior.” The light turned green, but she continued. “I repent of my sins.” The driver behind her honked his horn, she waved to him to go around. “I believe that you died on the cross and rose from the dead as a substitute for our sins, and accept that you have come into my life, amen.”

Her words were as honest as any she’d ever spoken, but the woman who drove on was still the same Quinette Hardin, twenty-four years of age, a saleswoman at The Gap in the Cedar Falls mall, a recent divorcée temporarily living with her elder sister and her brother-in-law on Hyacinth Street, in a new subdivision across from a cornfield. Passing the UNI-Dome, lit up for a night basketball game with Illinois Wesleyan, she found herself, just as she always did, looking forward to going out for a drink after class, hoping to meet a cute, intelligent guy tall enough to date a woman who stood six foot one in her bare feet. If she’d been saved, and she was sure she had been, why was she eager for the taste of a bourbon and Coke and an encounter with some dude in a bar? She was as disappointed as she was baffled. The moment that was supposed to change her life forever had been no more thrilling or transforming than when she’d grasped how to do square roots in freshman algebra. She pulled into an Amoco to call Pastor Tom Cullen on the pay phone. When he answered, she told him that Jesus had come into her life. (Tom had asked her to call, no matter what the hour.) In his staccato voice, he said he was very happy for her, this was as joyous an event for him as it was for her. Picturing him in his old frame house, his narrow head, topped by a peninsula of flaxen hair, leaning into the phone, Quinette didn’t have the heart to tell him that she did not feel joyful or different, so she pretended that the experience had been like everyone else’s, laid it on with a trowel, affecting a breathless voice as she told him that the Holy Spirit had swept her into a whole new life of the soul. She felt a little the way she had faking orgasms with her ex, part of her hoping that the real thing would somehow, some way arise out of the deception, if it were done well enough, disgusted with herself afterward, angry at life for denying her what it gave to other women (unless they were
all
lying). It was kind of like that, and it wasn’t fair.

“I thought it would be bigger than this,” she said to Jim Prewitt, sitting next to her, his forehead spangled with sweat.

He looked at her questioningly. She pointed at the river.

Jim took off the short-brimmed hat and ran a bandanna through his damp hair: sparse strands of brittle gray, like the bristles on an old paintbrush.

“You should see the Jordan,” he said. “First time I did, oh, it must’ve been twenty-five years ago, I was really expecting something. All those stories in Joshua, all those hymns. Turned out to be not much more than a muddy creek. We crossed it by way of the Allenby Bridge. Took about five seconds. We’d gone over Jordan, and everybody on the bus looked at each other and you could tell we were all thinking the same thing—Is that
it
?”

Jim was also a reverend. At one time he’d led tour groups on trips to the Holy Land. Now he was chairman of overseas missions for a family of ministries in California.

“Know what you mean,” she said, and then told him about the first time she’d laid eyes on the Mississippi.

Well, things always look bigger to you when you’re a kid, Jim remarked, as if she didn’t know that, then informed her that the river before them was the Upper Nile, the White (as if she didn’t know that either). After it joined the Blue in Khartoum, it got bigger, and by the time it made it down to Egypt, he would bet it was as broad as the Mississippi. He’d seen it there more than once, leading his pilgrim tourists.

He spoke slowly, with an undertone of condescension that made Quinette bristle. Talking to her like she was still a kid in Mrs. Hoge’s geography period. Okay, she wasn’t the brightest bulb in the chandelier, but she wasn’t stupid, and she hated it when people talked down to her. Maybe the heat was making her irritable—it must have been a hundred degrees—and she stood and fanned herself with her hat and blew down into her shirt. She had to watch her temper, anger being a sin she fell into fairly often. That had been true since the day when she was fourteen and yelled curses at the people bidding for her father’s tractor, the John Deere she used to ride on with him when she was little; vile curses hurled at the top of her lungs, and then she hurled something more tangible at the auctioneer—a rock. Threw it as hard as she could, almost knocked him cold, and she didn’t feel sorry about it for a long time.

Remaining on her feet, swiping her hat past her face, she allowed her thoughts to return to the river, pushing slowly past its reed-choked banks. Papyrus reeds, she believed, like the kind Moses’ basket was made of as it floated into the saving arms of Pharaoh’s daughter upriver, no,
downriver
in Egypt. Somehow, she couldn’t get used to thinking of north as down, south as up.
“And then Pharaoh’s daughter went down to the water”
—the old hymn sang faintly in her memory—
“went down to the water so blue.”

Out from under the tree, where the light was better for filming, the CNN reporter was interviewing Ken Eismont. He had the look of a strict high school principal—round rimless glasses, hollow cheeks, a sharp chin, short brown hair. The man in charge, executive director of the WorldWide Christian Union. Also its chief fundraiser and PR man. It was Ken who got the CNN team to report on his latest mission into Sudan. The reporter’s name was Phyllis something, a scrawny, auburn-haired woman with the gravelly voice of someone who smoked and drank too much, though Quinette had yet to see her with a cigarette and of course there was nothing to drink out here, except tepid water. The Kenyan camera crew, two young men who didn’t smile much and wore worried looks, moved around, changing angles on Ken, and when Phyllis was done with him, she turned to Mike and Jean, the Canadian couple who were taking their vacation time to help Ken redeem the slaves. Not redeem them in the spiritual sense, but to buy them back from their masters and then set them free.

In the meantime, making jerky movements with his hands, Ken was asking Santino to find out why it was taking so long to find a boat to ferry everyone across the Nile. Santino was a heavyset Sudanese with the blackest skin imaginable and short knotty hair matched to his complexion, so that he looked bald from far away. Ken called him his “banker.” He carried the cash that bought the slaves their liberty: on this trip, more than ten thousand dollars in hundred-dollar denominations, stuffed into a blue and white airline bag. Quinette watched him hand it over to Ken, then walk off toward the village of mud-walled huts clustered on a low hill above the river. Ten thousand dollars was more than half what she would earn this year at The Gap, and Ken stood with the bag slung over his shoulder, out here in a war zone in the middle of nowhere, as nonchalantly as if it contained spare socks and underwear.

In a few minutes Santino reappeared, flanked by the two SPLA soldiers who had been searching for someone with a boat. The three men came down the path leading from the village, the huts behind them crowned by thatch roofs layered like wedding cakes, the soldiers wearing floppy green hats and camouflage uniforms, assault rifles swinging at their sides and ammunition belts draped over their chests, the bullets gleaming in the late morning light. Two more guerrillas lounged nearby, beneath a tree rising out of the reeds on a trunk pale green as a stalk of early corn—a fever tree, someone had told her. She was glad to have the four soldiers on her side; they were scary-looking guys, each over six and a half feet tall, with tribal scars etched into his forehead in shallow V’s and his bottom front teeth missing. A custom, Santino had informed her an hour ago, when the soldiers appeared at the airstrip and grinned their hellos, the jagged gaps in their teeth startling her. They were Dinka tribesmen, and it was customary among the Dinka to have their bottom front teeth chopped out when they were ten years old. Santino didn’t know why, not being Dinka himself. That was the way they did things.