In the Belly of the Elephant

by Susan Corbett

  *

  That evening, as shadows bundled into corners in the last light of day, I strolled the empty streets toward Jack’s house. Rocky trotted at my heels. The night turned cool, a gift from the rains to the east. The burnt odor of dust still clung to the air, and a gentle quiet enfolded the houses and courtyards along the way.

  After the busy week, it was good to be alone. Strange how I had fought loneliness for so long, yet cherished being alone. The two were not the same. One was a parasite, the other a privilege.

  I needed the quiet to gather my thoughts. That cool evening in late May, the light fading, on my way to have dinner with Jack, I let anticipation replace thoughts of staff and projects. The wind kissed my hair, and contentedness caressed my cheek. For that moment, I was the only human walking that small patch of paradise on earth. It all blended into a yearning for the moment to stretch eternal.

  I stopped in the street. Rocky sat at my feet and cocked her head. Her swollen abdomen hung to just above the ground. Rocky had joined the office crowd. My dog had turned out to be a she. When her maturation time had come, she’d jumped the fence, and the inevitable had occurred.

  To the shame of my Idaho friends (had they known), I had never checked Rocky’s underside to see whether she had a little hose in the middle or a well at the base. At the time, I guess I had needed a male friend and so had assumed she was a he. I had always had men friends, Bill in high school, Dave and Steve in College—the kind-natured guys I was smart enough to be friends with but too stupid to be attracted to. After several years of friendship, our senior year in college, Steve and I had finally become sweethearts. But I had left him, twice. He was just too, well, nice. It was a problem I had with men—I left the good ones, was attracted to the jerks. Dave had once said to me, “I love you Corbett, but where is your horse?”

  Now I knew. Good friends made the best boyfriends. It was the gentle horse that gave the safest ride. Certain kinds of chemistry just had slower ignition rates than others. Since meeting Jack, my brain had not melted nor had my hormones raged as they had with Drabo at first, and with Rob all along. Able to be myself around Jack, we had become good friends.

  I reached the end of the street and unlatched the gate to Jack’s compound. Past the side path, light glowed from around the corner of the house. The path led to a patio with a tin roof. Candles cast pale light onto a small table covered with a cloth. Napkins, knives, forks, plates, and clear glasses composed a perfect setting for two. A bottle of wine stood in the center. Music drifted from somewhere inside the house—a country western love song.

  Something was afoot.

  Light poured from the kitchen, splashing a bright yellow rectangle onto the path that led to the patio. A silhouette leaped across as Moses, Jack’s cook, stepped through the kitchen door. He paused.

  “Bonsoir, Moses,” I said with a nod.

  “Bonsoir, Mademoiselle.” He carried a casserole dish to the table.

  I smelled meatballs and brown gravy.

  Jack walked out onto the patio in a pair of worn Levis and cowboy boots.

  Moses added another bowl of mashed potatoes and peas. I applauded. Moses smiled, a crack in a usually somber face. He turned and walked back to the kitchen.

  Jack pulled the cork from the bottle of wine with a pop and poured ruby liquid into both glasses. “Moses says you’re too thin. He made me ask you to dinner.” He smiled with the same charm that sent Fati and Adiza into shoulder-hanging giggles.

  The light in the kitchen dimmed. Moses came down the steps and over to the table. “Bonne nuit, I will go home now.”

  “Bonne nuit, Moses.”

  “Merci for the wonderful dinner,” I said.

  We shook hands and Moses disappeared around the side of the house. The gate’s metal latch clicked as he left. Jack brought out the tape player and slipped in a cassette. A female voice sang something about knowing a heartache when she saw one. Jack scooped potatoes onto both plates, pushed craters into the middle, and filled them with gravy. We sat and ate.

  Laya always cooked rice or couscous and soup, which was delicious. But Jack had nabbed Moses from an American family in Ouaga who had taught him to cook dishes like meatballs, mashed potatoes, and gravy.

  A slow song slithered out of the cassette player, an octave-hopping lament about a lover being held by somebody else’s arms. Country-western songs were so sappy. A little nervous, I kept the conversation on projects and people we knew.

  “What do you think of Luanne being pregnant?”

  “More important. What will Home Office think?” Jack sipped his wine.

  I laughed. “She doesn’t care what Home Office thinks. She got pregnant on purpose.”

  Luanne had let it be known early on she wasn’t interested in marriage. She didn’t trust men, especially white men. But she wanted a child. Not one to let details get in the way of what she wanted, she got pregnant. Luanne had fulfilled my father’s greatest fear. It was impressive in a scary, thrilling kind of way. Unlike Anna Karenina, Luanne would never throw herself in front of a train over a man. I liked her for that.

  “Well, nobody around here seems too shocked about it.” Jack cut into a meatball.

  “Except maybe Djelal. He always goes into his office and shuts the door whenever she comes in.”

  “Adiza’s pregnant and she isn’t married. Djelal hasn’t seemed to make a big deal about that.”

  “Yes, but she’s engaged,” I said. “That’s different. There’s an old Fulani tradition of getting pregnant before you marry to prove you’re fertile.”

  Luanne wasn’t proving anything, except maybe that she was going to do whatever she damn well pleased. Aside from Djelal, Muslim and non-Muslin alike had withheld judgment of Luanne and offered her support. And so far, Home Office had avoided any comment. Unlike some. We knew an American woman in Ouaga who had worked for a Christian charity. When their home office had discovered she had an African boyfriend, they had refused to renew her contract.

  “She’s just lucky she’s working for a secular organization,” Jack said.

  “She’s Catholic, you know.” Twirling the wine in my glass, I recalled the many sermons about lust and the seven deadly sins. “Did you hear the Pope’s latest announcement?”

  Jack shook his head.

  “Divorced Catholics who remarry are only allowed to take communion as long as they abstain from sex.” I rolled my eyes. “Can you imagine how he’d react to Luanne?”

  Jack smiled at me over his mashed potatoes. “Better not tell him.”

  I sipped my wine and wondered what Mary Magdalene would have said about all this.

  Jack stood and walked around the table. “Want to dance?”

  A forkful of mashed potatoes in my mouth, I chewed slowly, thinking it might not be such a good idea given the epidemic of pregnancies.

  He held out his hand. “Come on.”

  I swallowed. What the hell, it was just a dance. I let him pull me to my feet. He put an arm around my waist and began to dance a two-step. We twirled around the patio. I closed my eyes to the warmth of his chest, the roughness of his cheek. He smelled delicious, like warm wine. The song ended and another took its place, the same one-two rhythm. A voice crooned would she ever know how true love felt?

  Just as Jack pulled back his head to look at me with those dark eyes, Rocky was suddenly whimpering at our feet.

  “What’s wrong girl?”

  Whining, she ran from me to the corner of the house and back to me.

  “She’s about to have her puppies!”

  I bolted from the patio and followed Rocky out the gate. We ran all the way home. Seconds after we got into my compound, Rocky dropped the first pup. I gathered up some towels and made her a nest inside the house. By midnight, she had birthed four. By morning, I was the proud grandmother of eight short-haired, yellow, wrinkly examples of the universal mutt.

  Rocky had taken the fast track to motherhood. I helped the puppies wiggle into place at Rocky�
��s teats for their first meal and thought about my evening with Jack. I smiled. Seemed Jack and I were on the slow road to romance.

  Chapter 19

  Flood

  June/Shabar

  I awoke in the night to the pounding of heavy rain on the tin roof. It had rained the past three nights, chasing me off the patio and inside the house to sleep. Adapted to spending my nights out in the open, I had slept fitfully inside, dreaming that the walls closed in to crush me. I stared into the darkness until the fists of rain beating the roof lessened to the snapping of a thousand fingers, then I went back to sleep.

  Someone shook me. Dim light through the window slats illuminated Jack’s face.

  “Hurry! Get up! There’s been a flood!”

  I sat up, confused. “Here?”

  “No, Sambonaye. News just arrived. Wiped out the whole village. We’re heading out there now with relief supplies. You have five minutes to get dressed.”

  “The whole village?” A noose tightened around my heart. “You mean everyone was drowned?”

  “As far as we know, nobody was killed.”

  We had just visited a few days ago—Emma and the women, the gardens, the stoves, the grain stores. My limbs wouldn’t move.

  Jack went to my armoire, pulled out a pair of long pants and a shirt and tossed them to me. “Let’s go!”

  Ten minutes later, Jack and I sat in the back of the Land Cruiser with Nouhoun. Hamidou, Nassuru, and Djelal sat in front. Luanne, Adiza, and Fati were staying behind because of their pregnancies. We were fourth in line of a relief caravan led by two Voltaique military trucks hauling soldiers, tents, and blankets. The FDC and U.S.AID trucks were loaded with sacks of millet and corn. Last in line, the ORD (the government Organization of Regional Development) truck carried four bariks of fresh water.

  The trip to Sambonaye that normally took about an hour stretched into two as the trucks slid along the flooded roads. Halfway there, the ORD truck got stuck in mud up to its axle. A military truck stopped and soldiers dressed in beige camouflage got out with shovels.

  Djelal turned toward the rest of us. “It’s good to have a few soldiers along in these situations.” He adjusted the sleeve of his boubou.

  “Are floods common?” Jack asked.

  The soldiers began to dig mud from around the ORD truck’s tires.

  Nassuru nodded. “When the storms come one after the other.”

  When Gueno bakes the land too hard, I thought, remembering when I had first arrived, when I had asked how the Sahel had come to be a desert.

  “The rain falls too fast,” Hamidou said. “The ground cannot accept it.”

  “The flood came in the middle of the night.” Djelal told us the rains had begun the previous Tuesday morning and had continued through Thursday night, just as in Dori. But northeast of Dori, where the mountains came together, rain had spread across the hills. Water had gathered into streams in the cleavage of those mountains. The streams had met and flowed into washes that snaked between and around the mountain bases down into the lowlands. In the valley west of Sambonaye, the washes had joined to become rivers, overflowed the shallow banks, and spread across the plain. Just past midnight, during the first hours of Friday, a three-foot wall of water had washed across the valley and through the village of Sambonaye.

  I finally understood why the Fulani didn’t trust a river.

  “All’ham de l’Allah’ai, no one died.”

  The soldiers shouldered the ORD truck. The tires spun and mud flew in all directions, splattering the windshield. The truck finally popped out of the hole and slid onto firmer ground. The caravan moved forward again.

  Not long afterward, we approached Sambonaye from the upper valley. Hamidou slowed as we entered the village, and our voices trailed away to silence. Where thatched-roof houses of mud brick had stood the week before, only wet mounds of mud remained. People stood in groups, their faces blank and hollow-eyed.

  Hamidou parked next to the U.S.AID Land Rover and the two military trucks. ORD pulled up and parked in the line. Soldiers jumped from the backs of the military trucks and began to unload enormous squares of green canvas onto the ground.

  Djelal and Nassuru left to find the village elders. Jack, Nouhoun, and I walked to the ridge of the hill that overlooked the village fields. I stopped. My mind froze up, like a deer in headlights.

  Below, black water stretched from the base of the hill across what had been gardens of okra and beans and fields of millet and sorghum plants. Large round objects lay half submerged in the water. I couldn’t figure out what they were. Then the stench of dank hair and rotting flesh turned my stomach. They were the bloated carcasses of cattle, the Fulani’s most prized possession. I covered my nose with my hand.

  “So much work, so many days, years, all gone.” Nouhoun gazed out at the devastation. “In one hour of one night.” He shook his head and his eyes filled with tears. He was young, in his late teens, and his face was that of a scared child.

  A hollow cave opened up behind my belly, fear creeping along its walls like poison ivy, and I was suddenly six years old, hypnotized by the horror of a burning barn.

  When the fire first appeared on the horizon, my father had put us all—me, my mother, brother, and sister—into the car. We had driven through the darkness along the country road toward the beacon of orange against the black sky. “I’m a doctor,” he had said to the policeman, who waved us through.

  Wild arcs of flailing red and orange flames had encompassed the two-story building, roaring like an enraged monster. The heat had seared our faces from a hundred feet away.

  I had seen a barn built before. It took weeks of sweat and toil by many people. Years to fill it with tools and tractors. A season’s worth of hay, months of planting, growing, harvesting, filled the barn. In a few minutes, fire destroyed it.

  Nouhoun’s face blanched with the same question I had asked the night the barn burned. Why was it so much easier to destroy than to create? Why?

  When the first man grew wicked, he became arrogant and did not want to worship God. He scorned him: “God is god, Man is man. Everyone in his house, everyone for himself!”

  Furious, God called Nzalan, the thunder. Nzalan came running with great noise: boom, boom, boom! The fire of heaven fell on the forest. Foo, foo, foo!—everything in flames. The trees burned, the plants. Everything—animals, birds, fishes, all were destroyed.

  I thought of Lily and the hollow space inside expanded. Twenty-seven years to grow Lily. Years of love and nurturing by her parents. Years of struggle, sweat, and pain to grow and learn, to build the gift of Lily. All gone in the few minutes it took a gas leak to put her to sleep and stop her heart.

  And I understood why men created gods and all the stories that surrounded them: to explain destruction that made no sense; to accept undeserved tragedy, incomprehensible waste.

  Piles of rubble and mud spread out on either side of the sloping road like fingers clawing their way out of the muck.

  Chaos. We all lived just on the brink of chaos, the whim of gods. And it took so little to push us over the edge. We were just painting eyeballs on chaos, thinking we could keep it at bay; thinking we could chase away Death.

  I turned. A few feet away lay the mangled feathers of a chicken, and next to it, a dead goat. Beyond that lay the carcass of a dog. It had yellow matted hair and its legs were rigid, frozen in the midst of running. I started to cry, more upset at the sight of the dog than the cattle. Ashamed, I turned away to wipe my eyes. In Africa, dogs were not pampered members of the family, they were used as guards, less valuable than chickens or goats. Cattle kept people alive.

  Men, women, and children milled about with dazed and haggard faces, picking up broken pieces of clay pots, scattered millet thatch, and sodden bits of cloth.

  “Chaos,” I whispered.

  Jack nodded. “It’s a law of nature.”

  Nouhoun lifted his eyebrows at Jack in question.

  A ruined village, fields destroyed despite
our efforts to grow more food, dig more wells, help organize co-ops.

  “We’re just spitting into the wind,” I said.

  Jack shrugged and smiled. “We just have to spit faster than the wind blows.”

  We’d held plenty of spitting-into-the-wind contests when I was a kid, and I knew from personal experience that it was impossible to spit faster than the wind.

  I shook my head. “It always comes back in your face.”

  Djelal and Nassuru motioned for us to join them. We returned to the trucks to unload blankets and sacks of millet. Soldiers stretched out the canvas tents and secured the corners with stakes.

  Nearby, a woman I recognized from our many meetings circled several piles of debris, all that remained of her home. Two small children followed her, holding onto her skirts. She squatted and picked up the pieces of a ceramic pot, broken in half, the hand-painted treasure that had held her water and kept it cool. Her new stove was a lump of mud. The grain store behind the house lay on its side like a great cracked egg. The few precious pieces of her home that kept her and her family alive were all gone.

  The smallest of her children gave a soft cry. He reached little hands into a puddle and pulled out a square bundle of wire, bent into the shape of a toy car with wheels, roof, and windshield. His face broke into a smile that said everything that was important had been found. The little boys played with their one toy of wire and rubber as their mother salvaged spoons, cups, and pans.

  At the base of the hill, soldiers collected carcasses into piles on higher ground and set them on fire. Greasy yellow smoke rose into a sodden sky. The smell of burnt hair and charred flesh soured every breath. Older men organized groups of boys who ran about collecting intact mud bricks. The boys stacked the bricks in piles at fifty-foot intervals along the main street. More green tents popped up like monstrous mushrooms out of the damp earth.