“But I’m not!” Lannie answers, flushing. She pushes loose strands of her hair back from her face, forces a laugh, and its falsity makes her blush more. Rita doesn’t answer her, rises, goes quickly to the medicine cupboard. Lannie turns away. She catches a glimpse of her reflection in an aluminum basin hanging on the wall. She’s a ghost, the freckles dusting her high cheekbones and the bridge of her narrow nose barely visible. Two dark holes for eyes, a blur of palest pink her lips. Shaken, she skims her eyes away from the image, erases it, leaves the hospital.
And yet she does not wonder what she’s doing here. She knows now, in this camp, what it is: it is escape from her own too-marginal, too-pitiful, too-ugly history. There is a part of her that is grateful for this famine, this drought, this pneumonia, this tuberculosis, leprosy, the spear-wounds, the kwashiorkor and endless, desperate cases of marasmus, even the grenade wounds — no, not for the bloody, inhuman war — she is grateful for all the rest of it because it saves her from her own hopelessness, from the pointlessness of her life. But she hates herself at the same time, for her heartlessness, that she would use this devastation to escape the pain of her own wounds.
Rob is sitting in their living room being entertained by Lucy and Maggie when Lannie and Caroline get back. Lannie sees at once that Maggie is smitten — the way she laughs too much, fingering her long, blonde hair that she has to keep pinned up at work, as if she’s calling his attention to it. In the background they’re playing a tape of a rock group unfamiliar to Lannie, and it seems to her annoyingly loud.
“There’s some supper left in the kitchen,” Lucy says. “If the bugs didn’t get it.” They all laugh.
“Thanks, but I’m having supper in town,” Lannie says. Rob doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t want to sit here with all of them trying to eat while Rob waits. She isn’t really hungry anyway, would rather have a plate of injera wat in town.
“I’m ready whenever you are,” Rob says. “Thanks for the conversation,” he says to Maggie, smiling at her. Maggie smiles back, brightly. She wants to make an impression.
“Don’t forget curfew,” Caroline sticks her head out of the kitchen to warn them. Rob says, “They kept Todd and Larry in jail overnight a couple of nights ago when they didn’t make it back to the camp before curfew. Our director had to get them out. He was pretty mad.”
“Wars!” Caroline exclaims, a mixture of disgust and acceptance. She should know, she’s seen enough of them, Lannie thinks, in northern India, in Guatemala, in Angola, and elsewhere. But just this, the famine and the war in Ethiopia, are enough — more than enough — for Lannie.
She and Rob go out, shutting the door carefully behind them; if they leave it ajar, rats and snakes get in. Rob steps away from her, then comes back quickly. She sees with gratitude that he’s carrying a long, heavy stick.
“A man came into the hospital today with a hand half-eaten by a hyena,” she says. “I didn’t see him, but Lucy said he was trying to save his son. Some other men came along and drove the pack off.”
“We found a body,” Rob says in a low voice. “Or what was left of one. Not here, out of Dire Dawa. I was working on a water project there. She was collapsed from starvation, we think, that was how they got her. It was pretty awful.” They walk along in silence for a minute. She shivers and Rob draws close to her, puts his arm over her shoulders. “Are you cold?”
“A little,” she responds. Her impulse is to shake his arm off, it’s heavy, and allowing it to stay says too much about the possibilities of the relationship, possibilities she doesn’t want to contemplate. But its very heaviness is comforting. His Canadianness, the world they’ve both come from that they know exists solid and stable back there — that, like it or not, must surely be what gives them the courage to stay here — is implicit in the warm weight she feels across her back, stilling her. It’s shaking down the day’s horrors, steadying her, loosening her stride. After a while he drops his arm and takes her hand in a light, casual grasp. Again, she’s glad it’s dark. And she wonders, too, which of the kitchen or the camp staff is the government informant who will report that she and Rob have walked to town together.
Now, from the round thatched houses on the edge of the town, they can hear the sound of drumming. Voices, impossible to tell if male or female, rise mournfully in singing, sounding more Asian or Arabic than African. The voices fall away slowly, but the drums go on. Lannie and Rob walk, listening without wanting to.
“The army came into town today,” Rob says. “They were looking for boys.” Lannie doesn’t say anything, although this would be what the drumming is about. “They went straight for the school. The story is that the teacher’s helper held them up at the door while the teacher dropped the boys out the window so they could run away.” He laughs a little at the audacity of it.
Lannie draws in her breath quickly. “Did they take the teacher away?”
“No,” he says, “but they got two of the boys for cannon fodder. Twelve-year-olds. Their parents are devastated.” They listen again, in spite of themselves, to the elaborate rhythms of the drums. A single voice rises eerily, discordantly to Lannie’s ears, full of woe.
“What a country,” she says. Surprisingly, her brother, Dillon, comes to mind. Of how she’d feel if she knew he’d been conscripted. But I hardly know him, she thinks, and anyway, by now he’d be old enough to go on his own. Still, she’s glad there’s no war back in Canada.
The group of workers crowded around a long table on the deck of the café is too boisterous for Lannie’s taste, bringing back her years at university in Saskatoon, Tim and Armand, and all the nights she’d spent with men — she would not think about it. It was done with, it would never happen again. In the light of what she has seen here in this country, all her transgressions seem so much less horrifying, have dropped into the realm of the truly trivial, another reason why she isn’t sorry she has come here, another reason to stay, to never go back again. She thinks again of Iris and Barney, but their faces are remote now, and fade quickly.
Shouts of welcome greet them and Rob, smiling, slides a beer toward her. She stops it with her hand, smiles back at him. She mouths her thanks, since he can’t hear her over the laughter. Two of the workers she doesn’t know, one with an Irish NGO — the shorthand they all quickly fall into for non-governmental agency, meaning everyone from obscure little church groups to the United Nations — and the other from the United States, have begun to sing “Michael, Row Your Boat Ashore,” while a second Irish nurse accompanies them on a guitar. They’ve just begun to sing, and for a moment nobody joins in.
The Ethiopian men sitting here and there at the rickety tables against the corrugated iron wall turn their heads and listen, interested. Slowly others gather, amazed by these ferenjis, men who allow women to sit with them in a café, treating them like equals, women who sing, too, and laugh and touch the men with their hands, rub shoulders, even kiss them briefly in public. Rob opens his mouth and softly half hums, half sings. Soon all of them are singing, even Lannie.
Much later when Daniel drops them back at Lannie’s door, then roars off to drop another worker at his house a mile down the road, Rob steps close to her, gathers her slowly, tentatively at first, and when she doesn’t resist, more firmly in his arms, and kisses her. She kisses him back as hard as he’s kissing her. She kisses him as if his mouth, his body, will blot out all the outrages and sorrows around them. She can’t stop herself, even though a part of her knows all too well that she — they — will pay for this down the road. He pulls back abruptly.
“Do you think a person can fall in love with somebody the first time they go out?” His voice is husky.
“I’m not in love,” Lannie states clearly. She can feel him go rigid, for just an instant, holding himself away from her.
“You’re right,” he says. “All right.” They stand like that for a moment longer, close enough to feel the heat radiate from each other’s body, but not touching. Hyenas yelp and growl at the far edge of
the black shadow that is the field. He sighs, the sound is diminished by the rumble of Daniel’s vehicle coming back down the road toward them, the headlights appearing and disappearing with the dips in the road.
She wants to explain to him that she can’t fall in love, that she’s a bad choice, that she can only damage men. But while she’s still struggling to find a way to say this to him, or something like this, the Land Rover pulls up beside them. Its headlights pick out a figure making its way down the path from the hospital with the help of the wavering beam of a flashlight.
“It’s Caroline,” Lannie says. They wait in silence, the Land Rover rumbling beside them, until she reaches them.
“An emergency?” Rob asks Caroline as she nears. Not waiting for her answer, he climbs into the vehicle to sit beside the driver. It’s as if he and Lannie hadn’t been out on a date, hadn’t just begun to talk about love.
“A birth,” Caroline says in that even tone all of them have come to rely on. “Dr. Habte had to do a Caesarean. The baby’s dead, but the mother made it.” She blinks away from the headlights, but not before Lannie sees her face.
“We’ve got to hurry,” Daniel warns. Rob says good night and they drive away, Daniel stepping on the gas so as to get back to their camp before curfew sounds.
The two women stand quietly for a moment side by side in the chilly Ethiopian night.
“She didn’t want the child anyway,” Caroline murmurs. “She already has eight children. I shouldn’t be sad.”
“I’m thinking of asking for a transfer,” Lannie interjects. She’s been thinking of no such thing, until now, until Rob.
“You don’t work for anybody.” Caroline’s voice is sharp. “You can go if you want to.” Lannie is silent.
“I need somewhere to go,” she says finally. “Any ideas?”
“Yes,” Caroline answers, still harsh. “Go home. Go home before you wind up like me, with no home to go to. Until home is a camp like this one, in some godforsaken country where it never rains, or it rains too much, where wars never end, and people never have enough to eat.”
Her words frighten Lannie. Caroline is the heart of this camp, she’s the one all of them turn to for advice, for help, for the courage to continue. If Caroline gives up, Lannie knows, all the camps in the whole country will collapse, because the Carolines, with their quiet hope, their bottomless courage, their gentle certainty that they are doing the right thing, the very thing required by human decency, are all that keeps the weaker of them, like Lannie herself, from bolting during the moments when they can’t tell their days from their nightmares.
“Today we fed — how many hungry people?” she asks, knowing the count perfectly well, as does Caroline, and a little surprised at finding herself the one to comfort instead of to be comforted. But she puts out her hand and rests it briefly on Caroline’s shoulder, then lets it slide away.
“And tomorrow they will be hungry again,” Caroline says. Then she laughs, a sad, tired laugh. “I’m sorry. You’re right, of course. But when this is over, I’m going to find something to do that will have a longer-lasting effect.”
“Like what?” Lannie asks.
“Oh, I don’t know. Help set up health-care clinics, maybe, with local staff, in the farthest out-of-the-way places I can find.”
They don’t say anything, each of them thinking her own thoughts of Ethiopia. Of the fight against local medicines, of prejudices and superstitions. Of Sidamo, where malnourished people live beside a lake teeming with fish and won’t eat them, eat instead the false banana, a species providing only carbohydrates. Of Mengistu’s government with its hidden agendas and priorities, caught up in imperatives out of a hideously long and convoluted past nobody but Ethiopians understand, and maybe not even them, but none of these agendas apparently having much to do with feeding hungry people. Of the vast, roadless countryside, the trackless waste, cut with perilously deep, straight-sided ravines, and too-high mountains, the unbridged rivers, the deserts. Lannie thinks of Rob, an engineer, of all the roads that need building. She thinks of Mariam in her village, watching the child recede from her forever. The drums are still muttering in the huts on the edge of the scattered, rubbish-ridden town. They’ve become one with the Ethiopian night.
From across the blackness of a farmer’s barren, unploughed field, they cannot so much see or even hear as feel the presence of the thousands in need of help. They hover in the darkness, a vague, dark shape with a million glittering eyes and listening ears, thinking of history, of how it has always been so, and maybe always will be, coughing, whispering, sighing, moaning, waiting in the shadows for the return of the intractable, burning orb to illuminate the darkness for one more day.
Lannie shakes herself, puts a hand against the rough mud wall of their house to anchor herself.
“Have you noticed,” she asks, looking up past the leaves of the eucalyptus trees to the dark night sky, “that Ethiopian stars are in all the wrong places?”
The Farm
March 1993
This spring from the banks of the South Saskatchewan River all the way down to the Montana border nobody has so far put a single seed in the ground. Even if it doesn’t rain another drop after today, it’ll be two weeks at least before anybody can, Iris thinks, the land’s so wet a tractor on it would sink out of sight. It’s a circumstance so unusual in this near-desert country that it’s beyond surprising, must be accepted as the end of the known world.
She’s on her way to town to help at the annual strawberry tea whose purpose is to raise funds for the upkeep of the cemetery — some call it the Cemetery Tea, but Iris has always found that name distasteful when it’s possible to make so unavoidable an event sound happy and a celebration of spring. As she turns off her own farm access road and begins to fight the muddy grid road, the car splashing through the water-filled ruts, slewing sideways when she gives it too much gas, a weariness overtakes her. Her usual good spirits have leaked away bit by bit over the last two months, she’s tired out from the arguing, the waiting, the hoping, from the loneliness with Barney away.
But at least it isn’t raining, for the moment anyway, and who knows, maybe it’s finally going to stop, this interminable downpour. The vast, soaring sky that normally fills most of her windshield is blocked off by heavy, round-bottomed, steel-grey clouds and she notes how the wet and the dull light intensify the delicately coloured landscape, giving it a rare, almost tropical richness of tone. She turns her head left for a glimpse of the deep, wild coulee that joins her land to that of her neighbours, the Normans, and for the blue river cliffs beyond and above it, with their dashes of white clay shining in the light, but the view at that distance has vanished into thick grey drizzle.
So she watches the near fields stretching out on each side of the deserted road: field after field of stubble left from last year’s harvest, or summerfallow beginning to acquire a greenish cover of weeds. She’s passing the only small pasture of native grass left on the road that leads from the farm she has lived on nearly all her life to Chinook, the town she’s driving to, and she can’t help but think, even though she’s a farmer’s daughter and a farmer’s wife, how pretty it looks, all blue-green, with tints of aqua and mauve. The pasture looks as if it’s drinking up the rain. Everything else looks in need of care, everything else is waiting for the rain to stop so life can go on.
She thinks again of pointing out to Barney that they should be getting their equipment ready to do their spring seeding; she hasn’t so far because she’s afraid he’ll say he isn’t coming home to seed, that he’ll hire Vance Norman to do it. If he says that, she’ll know their life together really is over. And the new air seeder is beyond her, all computerized, with depth gauges and a bank of mysterious lights and numbers. And Barney fertilizes at the same time, which makes the whole thing even harder to learn. This new farming is too complicated.
She remembers her father filling the drill box with bucket after bucket of pale gold seeds, she hears the rich shshshsh of the s
eeds as they pile up and spread out, smells its welcome, dusty scent. She would put her arms into the yellow seed and push it sideways, spreading it out evenly through the long box. They were cool against her palms, they flowed willingly at her touch, the precious cargo inside them protected, waiting for the right moment to spring to life. Nowadays, when Barney augers seed into the hopper of his air seeder, you can’t see it, and all you hear is that heartless, high-tech whine that she hates. She thinks how farm machinery used to clank and roar and growl in a satisfying way that sounded almost like a hard-working human.
She has reached the lip of the valley where the straight-as-an-arrow road winds down its wall to the small town clustered around a bend in the narrow river, its grain elevators — dark wine, drab grey, bright orange and gold — thrusting themselves boldly above the trees, higher even than the slim white spire of her church on the other side of town. She has been seeing Chinook all her life and barely notices it now: its few, tree-lined blocks of small, square frame houses painted white or the palest, most unassertive pink, green, or grey; its excessively wide main street, attesting to the failed dreams of its founders, and lined with the typical western false-fronted buildings, newly re-sided in up-to-date building materials. She can remember every one of their transformations over the years. Bank, grocery store, café, credit union, gas station, hotel — it feels as if the car drives itself over to the community hall and parks itself in the lot between Ardath Richards’s shiny new white half-ton and Marie Chapuis’s dark red sedan. She picks up her purse and her shoe bag, takes the angel food cake she got up early this morning to bake from the seat beside her, gets out and goes inside.
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