Modern Gods

by Nick Laird

  CHAPTER 20

  The rest house was about half the size of the other village huts and raised on foot-high stilts. The floor was halved logs, the walls wattle, the interior divided into two small gloomy rooms. When she entered there was a silent moment when Liz tried to realign her expectation with the reality. She had imagined something like a guesthouse—a room with dormitory beds, white sheets: plain, functional, clean. This was a hut, a tiny filthy one at that. Also, dark. A little door, only a few feet high and a couple of feet across, allowed access to the second inner chamber—the “panic room,” as Margo dubbed it. The ladies, she announced, would sleep in there, since it was enclosed, with all the gear, and Paolo would sleep across the entrance. There was a front door they could tie shut with wire from the inside, and in case anyone tried to get in, he’d be there to fight them off.

  “Fight them off?” Paolo asked. “What with?”

  “Your charm,” Liz offered, smiling.

  “A stick,” said Margo, not.

  “I don’t think anyone’s going to try to get near you two. Maybe near my camera. And where’s Stan going to sleep?”

  “He’ll bunk with you.”

  Even though it was still light outside, they needed lantern torches inside the rest house. They left one hanging in the back room, and one in the front section. Liz donned the head torch Margo had brought for her, and they rolled out their mats and sleeping bags in a determined silence, then stored the gear, locking the rucksacks together with a chain.

  In front of the hut a delegation was arriving.

  “You guys must be the BBC. Sarah told me. I’m Josh Werner. Come up and eat with us. We have more than enough.”

  His hand was outstretched. Beside him stood Sarah, the girl from the plane, smiling, a little shyly, at Liz. Three more children appeared from behind her, descending in height to a scrappy little toddler in a washed-out Texas Rangers T-shirt and a low-hanging terry-cloth nappy. He held a thin yam pointed at them like a gun and said, “Prepare to die.”

  —

  “You know, I like to make this joke,” announced Josh from the top of the table, in his utterly humorless way, “I say we’re basically like Star Trek, the New Truth Mission. We boldly go where no one’s gone before! I came out here by myself for six months and just lived among them. Got to know the culture. Learned how to make their food and build their houses and talk to them in their own tongue.”

  “You earned their trust,” Liz said, adding in her head, in order to betray it.

  “Exactly. I’d go off hunting with them for days. Got pretty good with a bow and arrow. Can take a tree kangaroo down at thirty yards. I mean I’d done a bit of hog hunting back home, but this was the real deal. You don’t eat if you don’t hunt, you know. We took everything very slowly. The initial steps in discipling were pretty tentative, you know, pretty—”

  “In disciplining?” Paolo asked, and it was impossible to know if it was a genuine question.

  “In discipling—though the Lord knows there are times they need some disciplining. But we had to teach them to read and write in their own language. So me and another guy, David Lawrence—he’s dead now, God rest his soul—we spent a year just teaching them basic literacy, and then those we taught would pass it on. But you want them to be able to read the Bible themselves. You need to see the truth with your own eyes”—he pointed at his—“and not just take our word for it.”

  A Frisbee appeared in midair for a moment below the verandah of the Werners’ house and they saw Stan’s hands reach up and pluck it. He’d disappeared with the kids as soon as the dinner was finished.

  “You’re the piggy,” Liz heard him shout. “You’re the piggy in the middle.”

  “The thing is,” explained Josh, “you have to start at the very beginning. My first choice was what to even call God. I mean what word do we even use for him in Bible lessons in Koriam or tok ples, the pidgin. The first choice is just to use the word God, and I know that in some missions they’ve done that. But the word God has no meaning for the Koriam. And we thought of using the name of one of the most powerful spirits in the Koriam culture, but none of these spirits had attributes that were even remotely similar to the creator of the whole universe.” Josh raised a finger and twirled it, including the evening, the mountains, the children. “In fact many had negative characteristics that should not be associated with God. And then I thought of this word they have—Collinka—it’s a verb that means to make something out of nothing, to create. It’s an archaic word, they hardly use it. Pata Al-Collinka—it’s the term I came up with to mean the Father of Creation. That’s what they call God now in their language.”

  The man who had managed to name God smiled broadly at Liz. The Father of Creation had placed some green fleck from the stir-fry between his two front teeth.

  —

  Paolo was avoiding the conversation by playing with the dog Nipper, tugging a rope chew away from him and then waving it in his face again. The mongrel had a lengthy, chunky body, short strong legs, and an unquenchable desire for the rope. His soil-brown coat was patched with white and his little wispy beard made him appear the wisest of all dogs, a dog philosopher.

  “I was losing the battle with the bottle. Had lost it, really.” Josh’s laughter like the rattle of coins in a tin. “I mean I was far from God, about as far from God as you can get.”

  There was something needy in the way he hunched forward and talked to them now, eager to convince them of the depths of his depravity.

  “It wasn’t immediate. Lord knows it took time. But through God’s will, when I was twenty-six I gave up the demon drink, and joined the Fleeting Pentecostal Church of Our Lord God and Savior Jesus Christ. I began to understand that God had called me—to leave behind my old ways, to leave behind Kansas, to serve him . . .”

  His wife, Jess, reappeared with a wooden tray of cups and a teapot, and Josh eyed her with a dimly guilty air.

  “I was telling them how I came to God—”

  “From Kansas,” Liz said, and got a guarded laugh from Jess.

  Liz was thinking about landscapes. The flatlands of Kansas. It was no surprise that the deserts of the Middle East had given birth to the three big monotheisms. A landscape’s character directed the minds of those born in it, their imagination, their interactions with the seen and unseen. Out there in the Kansan prairies—or the wilderness of sand where Jesus fasted forty days and nights—it was just you and God under the sky, staring down the huge horizon. It was unilinear. It was strict. It was personal. The jungle spoke a different tongue. It talked of fertility, the immanence of objects, the many spirits lurking in the trees and ferns and rocks and rivers. There was constant activity, displacement. It reminded one of mortality, the endless simmer of rot and renewal. And where was her own Ireland in the system? A tidal zone. A recurrence of folds. Early mist rising up like all the ghosts in the hollows of the fields.

  “Oh, we make what we can get,” said Jess, in response to polite murmurs from Liz about the stir-fry. “Kaukau with everything. Had you had kaukau before? It’s basically sweet potato. Maybe not so flavorsome.”

  Jess’s nose was a pale dorsal fin, a perfect quadrant. A nose like that led its owner through the world, parted it before them. It entailed a certain affirmation to truths on the side of life and made Jess difficult not to like. Her blond hair was tied back loosely in a ponytail and she had the capable aura of someone used to physical work. All of her was freckled and taut and full with a cheery American tension.

  “We had it for lunch,” Margo said shortly.

  “You make your peace with it,” Josh added. His eyes narrowed. He was staring at Liz’s arm, at the red string tied round it. “I see you’ve already met Belef.”

  Jess said, “They have lots of onions and cucumbers, this time of year, and the plane comes once a fortnight, if the weather’s fine. I meant to say, Josh, the water pump’s s
till not working properly. Could you even hear yourselves talk out here? Inside it sounds like the house is about to take off—”

  Liz understood Jess was trying to keep her husband in a good mood, trying to divert the river of his anger. Darkness was beginning to fold in over the valley. Moses—a short, broad-shouldered eight-year-old with tangled brown curls—stood on the grassy slope, waiting for the Frisbee to come to him. Behind him, at the edge of the rainforest, the trees seemed to step backwards into the darkness, and it all made Liz almost unbearably sleepy.

  Sarah banged the screen door, carrying out a wooden platter of cookies.

  “Here she is,” Josh said.

  Sarah replied, not looking at him, “You know the oven still doesn’t work either. I had to stand in front of it for forty minutes to make these. It turned itself off like every three seconds.”

  “I’ll have a look at it tomorrow. And the water pump.”

  “And the showerhead. It’s still cracked,” Sarah added.

  “So can you tell us a bit about the Story, about Belef’s movement?” Margo asked, pushing her plate away from her as if she were in a restaurant.

  A look was exchanged between the spouses. Jess bent down and swept the plastic tablecloth with only her hand, swiftly herding crumbs into the other cupped against the table’s side. Josh sighed.

  “Movement is a very grand word to give to it. Look, we were sad to lose her from the church. She was part of the church family.”

  “And our family,” Sarah added.

  “And she was very close to us, the six of us. I think God is still in her, somewhere,” Jess said, “and we pray for her to return to His ways. She’s just a little lost right now.”

  “More than a little,” Josh corrected.

  Margo asked, “And what actually happened to the daughter?”

  Josh spaced his hands as if for cat’s cradle.

  “It was a tragic accident—”

  “I will eat you up!”

  Stan’s voice shouting from just beyond the verandah.

  “Gobble gobble gobble!”

  He was ambling around like an ogre, growling and howling and lunging at the kids as Esther and Moses tried to throw the disc around him, and Noah banged an empty plastic bottle off his own head.

  “I can see the difficulties she’s placed you in,” Margo said softly. “It must be very”—no other word came—“difficult.” She added, in an even softer voice, “And can you tell us what happened? How did she come to start her religion?”

  That hard, metallic laugh again from Josh.

  “I’d hardly call it a religion. Maybe a cult. Look, with Belef, like with so many women, she takes it all personally. If a leaf falls on her when she sleeps it has to be about her. You see—”

  “I suppose Margo only means it in the way all religions begin as cults. Even Jesus started somewhere,” Liz offered reasonably. “Yeshua of Nazareth as a protest movement against the Roman occupation and all that.” Josh was staring at her with light amusement in his face but she continued. “It’s just that some village religions achieve a kind of full spectrum dominance and then we begin to accord them—”

  “You know”—Josh’s turn to interrupt. He spoke calmly but irritation flickered in his eyes—“things here in New Ulster, in all of PNG, they were very dark for centuries. Cannibalism. Constant tribal warfare. Widow-killing. Even when we first arrived, there was so much violence. They were sick of their lives. They wanted the light of God to enter them. I remember Usai telling me that they were starving for the truth. That was the phrase he used in pisin—starving for the truth.”

  “Usai is one of our church’s elders. I don’t know what we’d do without him,” Jess added. “Will you have tea? I’m afraid the milk’s only the powdered stuff.”

  “You met him on the plane,” Sarah said, offering a cookie to Liz. Liz had the impression that Sarah wanted to get her away from here and talk openly. There was a censored aspect to her presence. She seemed years younger, smaller, plainer than the girl she’d met the day before.

  “He sat beside you? Britney Spears T-shirt?”

  “Normally Sarah would have flown on an MAF flight, but there was none coming this week so we sent Usai to go get her and take her with Hastings. And then she met you. Imagine the BBC coming all the way out here—”

  “Do you have Internet?” Margo asked.

  “Sometimes,” Jess answered brightly. It would be hard to rile this woman, Liz thought. She had the hard patience of a pioneer. This woman was the kind of mother Liz knew she could never be, if she ever did, if it ever happened, if she ever met . . . Capable, calm, many handed.

  “You see that stump by the crest of the hill? Where the post sticks out of the ground? I stand there with my Samsung held in the air for hours at a time. You can sometimes send e-mail, but so slowly. It must depend on where the satellites are, but I haven’t figured it out. And there’s no point in thinking about downloading or uploading anything. And forget Facebook or Twitter. People send me photographs sometimes and I want to scream. The villagers think I’m mad standing out there, my arm in the air.”

  “Waving at planes,” Sarah said.

  “What about electricity?” Margo asked.

  “We have solar panels on the back here, facing north, and when the weather’s good like today, they’re more than enough. Do you want to charge your phones and computers? You’re more than welcome—”

  Josh sat back up and interrupted, unable to help himself. “We’re more than happy to give you every help we can, but I would ask one thing of you.”

  “Of course,” Margo said, and Liz could hear in the intonation that her producer was seriously enraged by the qualification. Margo’s sense of entitlement—she said “We’re from the BBC” as if she were saying we’re from NASA or NATO or the FBI—thrilled Liz, but it was not balanced in her with the institution’s slightly embarrassed sense of public service. Margo believed in Margo, and in the BBC as an extension of Margo, and she believed in that combined divine right to direct the way of all things entirely.

  “I’d ask that you talk to one of our converts. You should speak to Usai, since you’ve already met him. Would you say Usai—Jess, Sarah—would Usai be a good one to talk to?”

  Something in his tone revealed this question was not a question, and she realized that this had been prearranged—maybe not between Sarah and her parents, and maybe not even between Jess and Josh—but the Reverend had certainly been planning it.

  “Usai would be good to speak to,” Jess dutifully responded.

  “Usai is the reason we’re here at all, in some sense, you see. And of course he’s Belef’s son.”

  “Her son?” Liz asked.

  “Yes, but a Christian, a pillar of our church. He’s from Kirlassa, one of the villages nearby, from the Oguru tribe, and they’d heard that the gospel had come to Kutang, that the Kutang had received the word of God. Kutang’s a day’s hike from here, where the New Truth began to missionize in 1984. Usai went to live there, learned a bit of the language and realized he was in the dark, and all of the Oguru were being left in the dark, so he asked the mission there to send people, and we came to Slinga. All of his village, all of Kirlassa, moved here. And his mother and sister. That was thirteen years ago.”

  “Amazing,” Margo said, sounding distinctly non-amazed.

  When they left, Sarah left with them. She had to shut the chicken coop up and she touched Liz’s arm as they said goodbye at the foot of the hill and whispered, “You know . . .” She waited until Paolo and Stan and Margo had walked a few steps farther on. “My father’s trying to get Belef arrested. I heard him talking on the CB radio. He says it’s illegal that she has her daughter’s body buried next to her house—that it’s unsanitary. He’s told her already, but he’s serious about it. You should tell her that he’s serious.”

  They pa
rted and Liz hurried to catch up with the rest of them, the tiny, ranging, tangled beams of their flashlights.

  —

  On the walk back, Stan said he’d heard there’d been an accident, that Belef’s daughter had been killed, but that the villagers would not speak of it freely, and he had never asked Belef outright. She blamed the missionaries for it, though: He knew that. They talked of Josh, of his image of himself as Captain Kirk, and made loud jokes against the darkness around them. By the time they reached the hut, giddiness had overtaken all four of them. Back in their section of the rest house, as the women got ready for bed, Margo whispered, “And what was the story about the diapers? Dishtowels and duct tape? Why would you even need a nappy? The kid’s running around outside.”

  Liz laughed, and there was a desperate flavor to it. If they stopped joking for a second they might start crying. Laughter and more laughter because the world around them had shrunk to a small dank hut and the cone of light cast by a hanging torch. The walls of the rest house, like the walls of all the constructions in the village except Josh and Jess’s compound, were made of pitpit, a thin reedlike bamboo that was beaten out and woven. They were not walls in the sense of barriers; the insects came and went as they pleased, and when the wind rose above a whisper it whistled through the gaps. Liz donned her Thinsulate gloves and a wooly hat, tightened the drawstring of her sleeping bag around her face, which she’d doused with insecticide. It was amazing how loud the jungle became when they stopped speaking and lay down in the darkness. It was an entire ecosystem of sound: every species of noise, near scratches and distant shrieks, tenor bellows and shrill whistles. She found her hands were clenched into fists and relaxed them, and attended to the weight of her entire body pressing heavily into the sleeping mat, into the planks, into the earth—and in a few minutes was asleep.

  When the rain started in the middle of the night, it woke her. It would have woken the dead. There was urgency about it; it meant to tell them something, to impart their transgression, their trespass. They had no right.