Valley of Bones (45 page)

Emmylou becomes aware of Lorna staring and grins sheepishly. “I’m sorry. I’m such a pig now. The Dinka would be mortified.”

“Don’t they eat?”

“Yes, sure, but modestly. It’s against
dheeng
to show hunger or
gluttony. Of course their cooking is pretty bland. It’s mostly sorghum porridge studded with dead flies. Insects ingested with food or eaten purposely are a big source of protein in Africa.”

Lorna feels her stomach heave.

“You get used to it, everything crawling with flies, and it’s interesting,” says Emmylou, picking up the yogurt container. “The Dinka have tons of milk but they don’t have yogurt or cheese. I made some of both while I was there, but it wasn’t a hit. They have butter, though. Also, they don’t care about the actual yield from their cows, only how many cows, like thinking twenty nickels is more valuable than ten quarters.”

Lorna listens without comment, recognizing nervous chatter when she hears it. A précis of Dinka husbandry and custom flows forth, including items that Lorna could have lived without knowing—such as Dinka men pressing their lips to the anus of a cow and blowing air into its gut, to fool it into thinking it was still pregnant—and then the phone rings. Lorna goes into the house and comes back a moment later with a surprised look on her face and the cordless in her hand.

“It’s for you,” she says.

Emmylou takes the instrument as if it were a live grenade. She listens more than she speaks, and that mainly monosyllables. When she closes the connection she says, “That was the Society. They want me back. Unless our friend is going to arrest me again.”

Lorna barely wonders how the Society knew what number to call. “I very much doubt that. What will you do, go back to Sudan?”

Emmylou looks up at the mango tree. “No, I don’t think so. As you probably picked up from my writing, there’s a debate going on about arming our missions, and I’m a prime example of the success of that side of the debate. That’s why they paid to have me rescued and that’s why they’re sending someone to take me away.”

“So you’ll be a military consultant to the nuns?”

She laughs. “Sisters. Yeah, right, a master of war, just like Skeeter. Sister-Colonel Garigeau. No, Nora was right and the prioress general
is wrong. I’ll be happy to fold sheets or do anything they want, but all that’s over with for me.”

“But you won your war. You proved her point—I mean the prioress general.”

“God won the war. Saying it was me is like saying a bat and ball won the World Series. No, He formed me from the beginning, the memory thing, making me sneaky, sending the devil into me, my family, Orne and his war library and his weapons, meeting Nora and getting civilized, the bombing of Pibor, all those things made me into an instrument of His will and He used me and gave the Peng Dinka what he wanted them to have. He chose another people for His covenant, and that will go on. They don’t need me anymore, just like the Israelites didn’t need Moses once they got to the Promised Land.”

Lorna now experiences a flash of irritation. She has been keeping a good deal of her real feelings about Emmylou Dideroff bottled up, but now that the woman is no longer a patient, she feels them froth into new life. The infernal arrogance! The shameless manipulation! The lack of caution and respect for the lives of others! Every string of her liberal heart twanged ire and she says, “What about the oil, Emmylou?”

“There is no oil. Didn’t you read the notebook?”

“Yes I did and I saw what you were trying to do. You were totally frank throughout the whole thing, letting out all the awful things that were done to you and that you did, creating an impression of guileless honesty, all to conceal one big lie. They found oil, a lot of it, or Richardson wouldn’t have radioed out, and the Sudanese wouldn’t have launched a huge attack on you, and especially Richardson wouldn’t’ve tried to smuggle out a CD when you searched him. What was it, a
blank
CD pasted to his skin? You slipped up a little there, it was a detail we didn’t need to know. Sonnenborg must’ve spotted it too.”

“There was no oil. The CD had financial records on it. He was a consultant and he was interested in getting paid.”

“I bet.”

“Lorna, if there was an oil find, don’t you think I would’ve confessed it? He tortured me for days….”

“You’re a religious fanatic. Torture doesn’t work on religious fanatics. As a matter of fact, you’re the kind of paranoid fanatic who regards torture as a vindication. You would have let him shoot me.”

“No, I explained to Detective Paz. He would have only shot me, and in any case there was the angel—”

“Oh, please! And what if Sonnenborg had been able to pull us off the street to some secret basement? You would have watched the bunch of us being tortured to death and you still wouldn’t have said a word.”

The other woman looks away. “God allows people to be tortured to death all the time.”

“You’re not God!”
This comes out in a yell, and Lorna is gratified to see Emmylou jump a little.

“No, of course I’m not God, but I believe he used me for a time. For a while we made one little tribe secure. We did something against the toxic, vicious misogyny of Africa, we turned them away from being stupid proud victims, and taught them that God had a special use for them, that He cared about them being righteous. There’ll be a seed, like the one He planted in Israel. When the rich world collapses—”

“Oh, thank you! I should have figured there’d be apocalyptic stuff in there too. Do you have a date figured yet?”

Emmylou looked startled for a moment. “Oh, gosh, no, I’m not talking about
judgment
day. I’m talking about the fact that it’s unreasonable to assume that ten percent of humanity is going to control ninety-eight percent of the world’s wealth forever. I’m talking long time scales here. A thousand years ago Paris and London looked like raggedy-ass trailer parks and Baghdad was the intellectual capital of the world. There were more books and literate people in Timbuktu than there were in England. New York was an Indian village. For all we know the world will be ruled from Wibok a thousand years from now, or someplace we never heard of. It’s no crazier
than telling some sheik in Basra in the year one thousand that his descendants would be kicked around by Englishmen. And look around you, Lorna, look at what’s happening to your country, the stupid apathy, the addiction, the violence, the mercenary army, the corrupt political system, the rich and the poor becoming practically different species again, the collapse of religion…”

“I thought this was the most religious country in the world.”

“I’m talking about actual religion, not these rich pharisees with their rules and their delicate purity, rotting inside painted tombs, hypocrites, and the pagans praying for washing machines; they are all utterly corrupt and God has cast them out. Can’t you see it? ‘And the kings of the earth who have committed fornication and lived deliciously with her, shall bewail her and lament for her when they shall see the smoke of her burning, standing far off for the fear of her torment, saying alas, alas that great city Babylon, that mighty city! For in one hour is thy destruction come.’ ” Her voices rises, becomes a different voice as she recites this, not unlike what happened with the Oya lady at the
bembé.

A little breeze rattles the croton leaves and Lorna shivers and tries to think of some logical argument against the fall of the West, and then she thinks What am I doing here, trying to make sense to a maniac? But the maniac has something else to say.

“And have you ever thought that He may be using you too? That this between us, our passing and touching, is part of a larger thing, vast and twisted? He’s brought you through all these dangers for some purpose, some great thing, even if you never learn what it is. You or your seed, a child who might be the one who saves the world. We never do know.”

Now Emmylou swings her head around slowly and faces Lorna and fixes Lorna with her eyes. In these she sees bottomless sorrow, unlimited compassion. Lorna feels all the anger running out of her, although she wishes to cling to it, it is like water through her fingers.

“I’m not going to have any children,” Lorna cries. “I’m going to die and there is no God.”

And collapses utterly. She shrieks loud enough to frighten the birds away and pounds on the table and throws a cup shattering against a tree trunk. I’m going to die and there is no God, this is her wail, interspersed with wordless blubbering, shameful, beyond all control, God was going to torture her to death even he doesn’t exist, unfair, unfair! Emmylou jumped from her chair and held her in a wiry grip, stroking her hair and cooing meaningless comforting noises.

“I’m sorry,” she says when she can speak sensibly again. “I have cancer. Would God cure me if I prayed?” Lorna was appalled listening to her mouth say this, and in a little squeaking voice too.

“I don’t think it works that way,” says Emmylou, “but it never hurts to pray. If you want, I’ll pray for you.”

“Oh, what’s the point!” Lorna snaps as her self-disgust rises to overcome the terror. “Every plane that goes down must be screaming with prayers, but the plane still crashes.”

“That’s true, but if any of them are praying sincerely, they’re praying for God’s mercy in their final moments. That’s really the only thing we
can
pray for, you know, thy will be done, and let me align myself with it.”

“This is all about heaven, right? The so-called afterlife?”

“That you don’t believe in,” said Emmylou.

“Of course not!”

“Then what are you afraid of? Extinction? You have extinction every single night of your life. What can it possibly mean if the lights go out permanently? You’d never know it, by definition.”

Lorna blows her nose into a paper napkin. “Oh, thanks! Why am I not comforted by that? I suppose for you it’s going to be choirs of angels and eternal hymns.”

“You know, I have no idea. We’re advised not to speculate: eye has not seen nor ear heard nor has it entered into the heart of man what the Lord has prepared for those who love him. I’m assured of a welcome into eternity and the resurrection of my body, but we really haven’t the faintest idea what that’s going be like, having an exalted body like the risen Christ had. It’s outside time, you see, and
my brain just can’t bend around that, the idea of existence without duration, just like I guess the caterpillar doesn’t understand the butterfly, though it’s the future him.”

Lorna is staring at her, preparing some cynical remark, when a butterfly flies in from the yard and lights on Emmylou’s shoulder. It is small and bright blue, with orange eyespots in its wings. Then another comes and another, dozens of them, on Emmylou, the table, the chairs, on Lorna herself. Time slows and seems to halt, the breeze dies, the leaves fall silent, and for some incalculable period they share existence without duration. Then, in a blue flash the creatures take off all at once and disperse into the sky.

“And gone,” says Emmylou, smiling with delight.

Lorna felt something wrong in her mouth, a peculiar dryness, and realizes that her jaw has been hanging open for the whole time. Emmylou goes on as if nothing unusual has taken place. “I’m remembering something Teresa of Lisieux said. She was real sick, she died when she was twenty-five or so, and she said something like, It really doesn’t matter to me if I’m alive or dead, because I feel like I’m in heaven now, so what could death change? That’s pretty much how I feel, I guess. Of course, most people are in hell.”

Lorna misunderstands. “You think I’m going to hell?” she cried.

“Of course not. You have a much better chance of getting into heaven than I do. You’ve probably never done a consciously evil thing in your life. You work with the sick and try to cure them, and accept less money than you could earn in other ways. And you do it from pure goodness, since you don’t fear hell or seek heaven. I’m commanded to goodness and charity by my Lord, but you generate it like a pure fountain from your soul. You’re a far better person than I’ll ever be, and the devil has no grasp on you at all.”

Now Lorna jumps to her feet. These last remarks, with the butterflies, Eskimos, schizophrenic angels, the Little Flower: all too much for her. “I have to go,” she blurts out, “I have to go to the hospital now.” Racing toward materialism, escaping from all this…
hope,
whatever, but she can’t help herself.

She doesn’t even wash her face, just grabs her keys and her wallet and the medical records from GWU Hospital and gets in her car, and while she drives she dials Dr. Mona Greenspan and gives her secretary such a good impression of a patient just falling over the edge of psychosis (not much of a stretch now) that the frightened woman tells her to come right in.

Lorna in her paper smock, hours have passed, she has been probed and rayed and she has been waiting a long, long time, and now the door opens and Dr. Mona Greenspan, a small woman with a cap of silvery hair and an intelligent open face, enters holding a thick sheaf of folders. She sits on her little stool. “Well, the good news first,” she says. “You don’t have lymphoma.”

“What do you mean? I have all the symptoms of stage-four lymphoma and I had a positive biopsy and CAT scan in Washington.”

“What can I say? GWU is a good outfit, but people make mistakes. There are abnormal lymph cells there, but they’re not malignant. You have an infection. That’s why your nodes are blown up and why you’ve got a fever and why you’re losing weight.”

“An
infection
? What kind of infection?”

“Brucellosis, strange to say.”

“What? I thought that was a cattle disease.”

“It is, but people get it too, and it’s no joke. Have you been around any livestock lately?”

“Some cows. But the symptoms started before then.”

“Then what about unpasteurized or imported milk products, cheeses, like that?”

Lorna thinks back to before the weirdness started. The gym. Betsy. “Oh, God. I had some Albanian goat cheese in a health food restaurant. It was zero fat. Oh, Jesus, what a moron!” She slapped her head.