In the Belly of the Elephant

by Susan Corbett

I stood in the street, under the moon.

  If Allah forgave us every year on the fifteenth of Sabaan, should we not in turn forgive others? Had my father really thundered off in a huff, determined to punish me, or had he just spared me worry over my mother’s health? Did my brother not have the right to get married without waiting for my sorry ass to arrive? How could I hold against Jack the fact that he had someone who cared enough to come all the way to Africa to see him?

  The trouble with forgiveness was that it took away one’s right to wallow in self-pity. I was going to have a hard time taking advantage of Laylat al Baraat this year.

  I entered my courtyard and lit several kerosene lamps. The puppies tumbled out from under the table to greet me by crawling all over my feet. Rocky was nowhere to be found. She often jumped the fence to carouse around town at night with the other dogs of Dori.

  Outside the circle of light toward the fence between my compound and David’s, the Dutch volunteer, came a shuffle and a tumble of dirt. Rocky limped into the light, dragging her hindquarters. She was bleeding and whimpering. Her back leg and flank were riddled with buckshot.

  “Rocky! Damn! You’ve been chasing chickens again, and this time you got it.”

  I shimmied the fence and knocked on David’s door. It was around eleven but light glowed through the window. He answered, gathered up a first aid kit, and followed me back over the fence.

  He gave Rocky a shot to calm her, and we laid her on the dinner table. For the next few hours, we dug buckshot out of Rocky’s hind quarters, cleaned the wounds, and bandaged what we could. Around 2 am, I hugged David in thanks, and he climbed the fence back to his house. With Rocky bedded down, her puppies at a safe distance, I crawled into bed.

  Before drifting off to sleep, I thanked Allah/God/The Force for gifting me David’s help in the middle of the night, and asked forgiveness. I sent silent words of love to my mother and my dad, congratulations to my brother, and a promise I would do my best when Jack’s girlfriend came.

  The sky was quiet, the naughty stars snug in their beds.

  Chapter 21

  With the Wind

  Late July/Ramadan

  Hamidou, Nassuru, and I stood, once again, on Sambonaye’s hill. At its base, men shoveled mud into wooden molds, while others laid wet bricks in rows to dry under the sun. Troops of boys carried dried bricks up the hill to dozens of sites where men built circular walls around family compounds. Women and girls lined the paths in and out of the village. Some carried buckets of water on their heads. Others had gathered millet stalks to thatch the roofs of their new houses.

  Home Office had accepted our humbled request for emergency funds, but had yet to allocate it. On their own, the people of Sambonaye had begun to rebuild. Below, where the lake of black water and bloated cattle had covered the ruined fields a month before, only patches of water remained. Small herds of cattle grazed on the higher ground where new grass grew. The air held a hopeful smell of manure and wood smoke.

  After Nzalan destroyed the world, God looked at the earth, all black, without anything, and idle. God was ashamed and wanted to do better. Over the black earth covered with coal, he put a new layer of earth.

  I breathed in, puffing out my chest with air and renewed energy. I liked a god who could feel shame. It made him more like me.

  Shading my eyes against the sun, I smiled. “They’re doing it. Even though they lost everything.”

  Hamidou nodded. “Fulanis have large families.” He stood next to me, watching small boys herd the cattle with long sticks. “The Fulani of Sambonaye did not lose their place or their people. As you see, they rebuild their houses with the help of their neighbors,” he pointed at the cattle, “and restock their herds with the help of their families in other villages.”

  “But why do they rebuild in the same place when they don’t trust the river?”

  Nassuru crouched, picking up clods of dirt and tossing them. “Their families have built and rebuilt their village in this place for over a hundred years. It’s the place of their ancestors.”

  I thought of the huge cottonwood tree in Foequellie—the town’s ancestor tree. They, too, would have rebuilt in the same place. Their history lived in their forest world of sun and shadow, alongside the spirits of their ancestors. But, unlike here, the people of Liberia lived in a forest, rich with good soil, plentiful rain, and tropical fruit that hung from the trees.

  The sun beat on my shoulders, burning my skin through my T-shirt. This was not the lush rainforest of Liberia. The flood had destroyed the few trees that had grown in the town center, and stolen the shade. Below, the wind blew a cloud of dust across the fields, skimming away another layer of top soil a bit at a time. Here, there was nothing. Only an unforgiving sun and a vague promise of rain three months out of the year.

  Yet they still hoped, still believed.

  In this new layer of earth, a tree grew, bigger and bigger, and when one of its seeds fell down, a new tree was born. The earth began again.

  Once, the Fulani had been nomads, roaming the edges of the Sahara at will. But the colonizers came, and the Great Drought, forcing the Fulani to settle the places too arid for the Europeans. The people of Sambonaye had built their village here in this valley, next to the river. Could God/Allah still replenish this land? After so much devastation for so long, could one tree still grow, and its seeds grow more? Could a leaf, when it severed, still grow and grow into an animal, an elephant, a leopard, an antelope, a tortoise?

  Laughter rang from a nearby courtyard. I followed the tinkling of their chatter and found a group of women weaving mats. They sat in a circle, their legs stretched out like the spikes of a wheel, their toes nearly touching at the center. Their hands worked the dried stalks into crisscrossed rows—the same hands as my aunts, shelling peas or knitting winter scarves. Deft, worn fingers that moved in patterns repeated thousands of times. Hands that created the simple things of daily life. Mormon women and Moslem women—so alike in their work, in their determination to survive.

  The Mormons had also wandered like nomads, hounded out of cities from Maine to Illinois until they found their valley near the Great Salt Lake—a place nobody else wanted. Nature had challenged them with locust, drought, freezing winters, and sometimes floods. The Mormons had always helped each other build and rebuild. Their shared history connected them the way bloodlines connected the Fulani. And like the Fulani, the Mormons had trusted to God and one another and had survived despite the natural law of a chaotic universe. How similar these two families of mine were: the Fulani and the Mormons—tough and stubborn people whose roots pushed deep into sand and salt.

  Hamidou and Nassuru arrived. Three of the masons who had built the stoves and grain stores came up to greet us. They spoke in rapid Fulfuldé, pointing to various places throughout the village. Nassuru talked with them for a few minutes, then they shook our hands.

  When the masons left, Nassuru straightened his shoulders. “When the emergency money comes, we will rebuild the grain stores and fill them with grain. No one will starve this year.”

  Hamidou nodded. “Al’ham de l’Alah’ai!”

  In the town square, a young man planted a sapling and a little girl poured a can of water on its base. They surrounded it with a fence of thorn brush. I nodded. One tree to grow and grow, and perhaps to drop a seed.

  Praise Allah. People kept faith and trudged on despite the pitfalls of life. Home Office had found extra funding and given it to us despite our earlier rejection of it. And I had learned a thing or two about stubborn pride. Like Elephant with Squirrel, sometimes pride just led to bad manners and stubborn stances.

  Sometimes you had to turn around and spit in the same direction as the wind.

  Chapter 22

  Witches and Devils

  October/Dhu-al-Hijja

  Past midnight, Hamidou drove Nassuru, Nouhoun, Fati, and me home from a village meeting. The night was so dark, our world was a moving eight-foot half-circle of headlights. The harvest was go
ing well and we were meeting with the villagers at all hours to organize grain store projects. Fati had her baby with her, who breast-fed with little sucking noises. Back to her robust self, Fati’s humor had gone sour as of late.

  “My husband has taken a second wife,” Fati informed us, the weight of disappointment in her voice.

  My great-grandmother’s reaction must have been similar when my great-grandfather took a second, younger wife. By hell, I would have pitched a fit.

  Nassuru turned. “I am sorry for this new wife.” His teeth flashed white in the darkness. “She has to live in the same compound as Fati!” The three men laughed.

  Fati assured us that she had told her husband in no uncertain terms how she felt about the new marriage.

  “You tell him, Fati,” I said. Damned ungrateful men.

  We hit a bump and the circle of light bounced up and down, lost for a moment in the infinite depth of the sky. Amazed that Hamidou knew which camel paths to follow in such darkness, I peered upward. The three stars of Orion’s belt glittered, pointing due west. As we drove, Hamidou kept the four stars of the hunter’s shoulders and knees within his side window, as though navigating a boat on an open ocean. Gazing upward, I wished the road of life had such a clear beacon. We cast ashore in Dori just before midnight.

  The next afternoon, I sat in my office, yawning over the typewriter. The growl of a motor grew to a shout as Jack drove the staff motorcycle into the courtyard. Through my window past the pointed leaves of the neem tree, Lori, pretty and petite, sat on the bike behind Jack with her arms glued tight around his waist. Her Tinker Bell laughter echoed off the office walls.

  Some people say that life is destiny, that we meet the people we are destined to meet, and our lives are determined by how we deal with the situations presented to us. Destiny or not, out on the edge of the Sahara, I had listened to the advice of Crosby, Stills, and Nash to “love the one you’re with,” and taken advantage of having a good man at hand.

  Unfortunately, Jack also knew that song, and the one he happened to be with right then was Lori.

  I’d been grinding my teeth so much lately my jaw ached. Jack parked the bike and walked with Lori into the main building where he had his office. In the other direction, beyond the square, the voice of the imam called the people to five o’clock prayer.

  Ever since I turned twenty and began traveling on my own, I had grown to believe that people’s true characters emerged when they were in situations they could not control. I had traveled through Europe with my first college sweetheart on four dollars a day and discovered a stingy side of him that had ended our relationship.

  Lori had landed in Dori three weeks earlier. My promise to the universe to do my best when Jack’s girlfriend arrived had worked for about two days. Her presence quickly turned into a situation I could not control. So far, my true colors had disappointed me. I had turned a very deep, very ugly shade of green.

  Consequently, I had decided to escape to another planet while Lori was there. Off-work hours, I hid in my courtyard and buried myself in the deserts of Frank Herbert’s Dune, becoming a Bene Gesserit, one of the witches in the story. “Ever sift sand through a screen? We Bene Gesserit sift people to find the humans.”

  I had been sifting Jack through the screen of my green eyes for the past three weeks and was finding him less than human.

  “Suzanne?” Adiza waddled into my office and handed me a report she’d written on tontines. She pressed fingers against her lower back and sucked in air. Only seven months along, she was already huge with child.

  A sugary “Oh Jack!” laced with a southern twang rang from inside the main office, like nails down a chalkboard. My teeth clenched. Adiza gave me a sympathetic look and quickly waddled back out.

  I’d been getting lots of sympathetic looks from the rest of staff. And lots of extra space. Luanne would have loved all the intrigue, but she was in the states having her baby and wouldn’t return until after the new year.

  So far, October had been a lousy month. The heat that returned in late September was smothering me, my personal life stank, and, as usual, the world was going to hell.

  A few weeks before, members of a militant Moslem group had assassinated Anwar Sadat in Cairo. Amnesty International reported that the new Islamic revolutionary government in Iran had executed 1,800 of its people since July.

  Sweat trickled down the path of my backbone. I took the Time magazine from my desktop and fanned my face and neck.

  A frightening thing was happening. Ultraconservative religious movements were on the rise—Moslem in the Middle East, Christian in the United States. How long before, like Iran, religious zealots would be running the government in America? I shuddered at the thought.

  Laughter spilled out of the main office and into the courtyard. Usually, I liked a happy person, appreciating them as a rare gift in an unhappy world. But Lori was just, well, too happy. I was not being a good sport and I knew it. But, damn it, I couldn’t do a thing about it.

  Though you talk sense to a deaf person, they cannot hear you.

  “Well, gentlemen,” I said to my bat-landlords, dangling in their corner, “unlike you, I’m not hanging around here to watch Jack and his ladylove have a good time. I’m off.”

  I straightened my papers, put them in a drawer, and slipped through the office doors and out the gate without conducting the obligatory farewells with staff. This was rude, but saying goodnight would have required going into the main office building, and I didn’t want to run into Jack and Lori.

  Out past the gate, the sun rested on the horizon, threading fingers of burnt-orange light through a haze of heat and dust. I took a deep breath and imagined Jack and Lori driving down a ribbon of dirt road, over the horizon, and out of sight. Around me, the square came alive with the scent of wood smoke as meat vendors lighted their fires. Evening was my favorite time of day, when the sun surrendered, the world sighed, and night’s gentleness approached.

  Early for my dinner date with Gray and Kate at the Militaire Bar, I strolled the perimeter of the market, perusing bolts of batik cloth. A new print had arrived, a beige background with red designs. I bought several meters and carried the cloth to the far end of the market where rows of foot-pedaled sewing machines hummed like a chorus of Gregorian monks. A Rimaybé man I had done business with before stood and greeted me with a nod. We shook hands and I asked after his health and his family.

  The Lebanese merchants in Liberia had taught all Peace Corps Volunteers the politesse of greetings. At first, I had gone into Mr. Habib’s shop in Gbarnga, and with my American “straight-to-business” habits, had asked directly for the items I wanted. He had smiled and replied, “I am very well today, and how are you?” I had quickly learned that, even with strangers, polite greetings came first, business second.

  After establishing that we were both well, I presented the cloth to the tailor. Hot as it was, I wanted something with slender straps and a loose fit that fell to mid-calf. With his frayed yellow tape, the tailor measured me from shoulder to shoulder, shoulder to calf, eyeballed my width, and assured me the dress would be ready in two days.

  Past the tailor stalls and on toward the bread ovens, I greeted two village weavers who had visited the office that afternoon to take out more thread on loan. They were members of the new village central committee and would stay with their families to weave their blankets this cold season. I ambled on until the fragrance of baking bread forced me to buy several hot-out-of-the-oven baguettes. The women of the villages would be happy to have their men stay to help with the cattle and the children. With so much work, women needed their menfolk.

  The way my grandmother had needed my grandfather.

  A narrow strip of horizon glowed beyond the end of the street that edged the market. The dust absorbed the last rays of the sun and turned the sky blood-red.

  In the spring of 1911, the Mormon Church called my grandfather to go on a two-year mission. He had a pregnant wife, five young children, and a far
m to run, but the church sent him to Kansas and Missouri to proselytize, as was the duty of every Mormon man. William Corbett rented his farmland to a local man, asking him to work the land, feed the cattle and horses, and keep his equipment clean and oiled.

  That first year my grandfather was gone, the man in charge planted only half the land, sold off the livestock, and left the machinery to rust. Grandma Annie didn’t write to tell my grandfather his farm was going to ruin because she didn’t want to be the one to bring him home. Instead, she returned to her family in Smithfield, bore her sixth child, sent her older children to school, and asked my grandfather’s brother to go up to the valley and look at the farm.

  My Aunt Ethel told the story. “Uncle John, Dad’s brother in Smithfield, looked the situation over and wrote Dad a letter full of goddamn and hell and son-of-a-bitch and told Dad how his farm was going to pot.”

  When Grandpa William got the letter from his brother, he handed it to his mission president, who read that letter, swear words and all. The mission president turned to my grandfather and said, “Elder Corbett, I think you’d better go home.”

  When William Corbett came home the summer of 1912, only eighty of his 160 acres had been planted with dry farm grain. But the wheat was so infested with rye, the weeds were higher than the grain and the whole thing froze in an early frost. While on his mission, my grandfather had lost all his livestock, his machinery, and a year’s worth of harvest on 160 acres. The man who had ruined his farm paid him a hundred head of hogs. My grandfather fattened up those hogs on the ruined wheat and sold them.

  “We never heard him say that his mission set him back or cost him,” Aunt Ethel said. “He said he made money so fast after he came home, he didn’t feel like he’d lost anything.”

  I never heard what Grandma Annie had had to say about the whole thing. I don’t think anybody ever asked.

  Grandma, Great-Grandma, the women of the villages, Fati, me, damn it! How easily men left their women.