Valley of Bones

Nineteen

My religion, such as it is, was a pure gift, a complicated densely layered device that I can barely understand. I have had the glory, yes, treats for beginners as St. Teresa says, the sweetness, as St. John calls it, of God’s embrace, but probably I would have walked away from even that God forgive me had I not loved Nora Mulvaney, of which more later, although it was not what you probably think.

The Rome headquarters of the SBC is a vast seventeenth-C. pile called the Palazzo Treschi, on Via Giulia between the Palazzo Ricci and the Criminological Museum. You go through an iron gate in a wall made of those purply brown stones they like for palaces in Rome and then you’re in a paved courtyard with a fountain and the original bronze statue of Marie-Ange and the dying lad. On its marble plinth are carved the names of the sisters who have died in service, and although the names are quite small two sides of the plinth are already full and a third has been started.

They have the language school and the residence and the administration there, one in each of the three wings. Nora took me there just after we got to Rome and I found we were both in a heap of trouble. We were called in to see Constance Mucha, the prioress general, the woman in charge of the daily operations of the Society, second in command to the Mother General herself. She was a sharp little woman with the face and small round glasses of a Gestapo inspector in a bad movie, who for twenty minutes reamed us both out about my escape. Then I was sent out while she and Nora argued about my fate. The memory business was the key. Nora convinced her that I could learn languages real fast, and that I’d be a boon to her work in Africa, and so all through that damp Roman winter and for a year afterward I worked on learning Arabic and Dinka. My Arabic teacher was Mr. Sulieman. He said I had a terrible accent, but he was amazed by my progress in reading. Before the year was out I had read and memorized swaths of the Quran and the Thousand Nights and a Night, not particularly useful, we thought, but it gave him delight to see me do it.

Nora and I lived in a little apartment in Monti near Trajan’s Market. Not much time for sightseeing, not interested much, Rome a little overwhelming for a hick white girl from Caluga County, the most distinguished architecture I had ever been in were the Caluga County Courthouse (1911) and Miami hotels. Out for daily mass at Chiesa Nuova, a tradition. In the old days we used to march out two by two from our palazzo to the church, but now we just show up. I didn’t mind this at all, the one part of going to church that always pierced me through and through, the Eucharist as poor Robert Lowell said, perfectly real like getting your hand wet, well he was crazy too. Once to St. Peter’s, horrified, clearly the Hall of the Demon King, full of Japanese tourists viewing the ruins of my dying civilization.

(Do you need to know about this? I am determined to finish this miserable story in the present notebook, the four books according to Emmylou, do I dare take more than the Gospels, no, and besides I am aware that I am a danger to you and others. Being crazy officially has been a nice rest, but this must end soon.)

Evenings, we hung out in an Irish saloon on the Via Leo-nina, drinking Guinness while she laid out for me the complex politics of the Society of Nursing Sisters of the Blood of Christ. Power corrupts she said, as our good old Lord Acton used to say and you know he was talking about the church and the pope. And money is power and it’s corrupted us, I mean the Society. You have no idea how much money we have darlin’, we’re living on the interest of the interest of it, and now we have some of us saying, well why are we always sending our poor girls out to foreign shores to be shot and raped by ignorant heathens, why not change things so that the ignorant heathens get some lumps too, a bribe here and there, a little private army, so that we can do God’s work and help more people? And you know the prioress bloody general Mucha-do-about-nothing, that’s her goal in this life. Why, she says, the Templars and the Hospitallers took up arms to save the sick and the poor pilgrims in the Holy Land, forgetting that they also helped destroy the Holy Land and made the name of Christ a stink in the nostrils of those people unto the present day, and the Templars all got burned at the stake for their greed. But a lot of the sisters don’t see that, especially the ones from the third world, they’ve got a different attitude, and the kind of war they’ve seen is different from the kind the Society used to know. Now it’s just gangs of thugs wandering around looting and killing, not proper armies with front lines and command structures, and they’re thinking, oh, if we just had us a troop of boys with rifles, maybe poor sister Angela wouldn’t have got the chop, what’s wrong with that? Now, see, the mother general’s got a head on her shoulders, but she doesn’t want to split the Society, so she temporizes and she’s got me to toss in Sr. Con Mucha’s face, so as to stay above the fray in a manner of speaking, between them who want us to hire private armies and me and me friends, who think it’s a rotten idea. And the whole issue would’ve never come up if it weren’t for the Trust, our golden calf, because even though the Trust keeps us independent, and allows the pope to wink at some of the stunts we pull from time to time, it also lets us contemplate hiring soldiers, so it’s still a gilded cage, d’you see.

I did not. Oh, darlin’, she said, didn’t you read the little book? Where do you think the Trust gets its money, and of course I remembered and I said, oil, and she grinned and said right you are, and oil means politics, and it puts us in with some of the world’s worst, because what did oil ever do except make despots rich and ruin the people so unfortunate as to have oil under their feet, and I don’t even mention burning up the world. By God, if it was me in her chair I’d sell up and give the money to the poor and beg on the streets for the little we need. Dying for Christ is the cheapest game in the world, you know, it hardly costs a thing.

We didn’t have a sexual relationship I should say here. Nora was a strangely asexual sort of person, but with terrific erotic energy channeled into charismatic rather than genital lovemaking. There are people like that, although rare. Her brother was another. I came back from my Arabic lesson one evening and there he was in our kitchen, pouring drinks, Nora in drag, and twice her size. Peter was on leave from the army, thinking about getting out, and when I asked him what he did he said quartermaster, counting the sheets, and Nora laughed and said, he’s coddin’ ya, he’s in the specials, killed hundreds with his bare mitts, and he actually blushed red. I’d never met a man so sexy and at the same time without a hint of lust. Married with three kiddies and devout as Nora, it turned out. We went out and got drunk and he had to carry the pair of us home.

The next week we went to Nettuno, south of Rome, to the parachute center there, and I learned to jump out of airplanes. It took two weeks, one of ground school and leaping off towers, and then three actual jumps from a light plane, wheeling above the Tyrrhenian Sea, flying through pure blue and landing on a broad beach, and then once at night. The Society runs its own planes and pilots and has the largest air force of any religious order, the reason being ubi vademus ibi manemur, the Society is often unpopular among nations, but that makes no difference so we sometimes have to stay off the roads and away from borders and then we move people and goods by air drop. Also parachute training tends to strip out the easily frightened and those with an excessive fear of extinction. I found I didn’t mind it at all, no, going out the door after Nora seemed the most natural thing in the world, flying nuns, although it was considered tacky to so express it.

Last night in Rome, the fourteenth of March, me having been nearly two years in the city, and being able to make myself understood in Italian, Arabic, and Dinka, we wandered through the old city, giving away all our lira to beggars, something she did all the time anyway even though it was clear to me that nearly all of them were scam artists. But she saw them as suffering people doing us a favor, allowing us the grace of charity.

And off we go to Africa, a couple of plane rides, Cairo, Nairobi, and now a Land Cruiser over red dirt roads, to the border between Kenya and Sudan. I found I was right at home, because Africa is like one huge bad trailer park in north Florida, very hot, bug ridden, rich in biting flies, sweaty, smelling of sewage and vegetable decay and cheap cooking, full of poor poor people wearing Tshirts with sports logos. There are fewer shoes and no wrecked cars in the front yards, however. We went to Lokichoko, in Kenya, which is the main base for the vast empire of Help. Nora despises Loki and all it stands for, the rich working out their guilt in relatively comfortable surroundings, eating three squares a day among the starved, trying out their improving schemes upon the wretched of the earth, oops that didn’t work, let’s try this! and when the bullets fly, it’s oh my, so long poor folks, we can’t stay, because we’re white and our bodies are simply worth more than yours are.

The Society had its Sudan operation headquartered at Mokilo about ten kilometers closer to Sudan so as not to be contaminated by the Helpers. There was an airfield, tents to sleep in, an office tent, a field of storage containers surrounded by barbed wire, and a wooden control tower. On the field was an antique Convair 580 being worked on by a couple of greasy sisters in cut-down bleus, and a little bit after we got there a newer Fokker 27 landed in a cloud of red dust.

In the Society the head of a regional operation is called a prefect, and the prefect here was Sr. Isobel Alecran, a barrel-shaped Filipina with a hard flat face that converted itself into a broad gold-toothed grin when my Nora walked into the office tent. She greeted me more formally and announced that since they had no need for my language skills at Mokilo, she was going to put me in logistics. It turned out that logistics was yet another thing, like religion and languages, that I was not much interested in but I was a dab hand at, I am a walking demonstration of God’s mysterious ways.

Medical logistics starts with the patient-day (and the treatment unit for outpatient work) and from each of these there flows a physical stream of necessities from drugs to rubber gloves to pillowcases. These are embodied in packagings of a zillion different weights and dimensions and these in turn must be entombed in standard air-droppable palletized crates of particular volumes and weights, so given that say a F-27 can haul 6.3 metric tonnes in a usable volume of 62 cubic meters, figure out how to get the maximum number of packages per flight while ensuring that there is no day when your recipient has all catheters and no morphine. Needless to say the Society has been doing this for a long time and they have it down, but still it is useful to have a person who has all the logistics charts in her head, especially when the computers crash, as they so often do in African conditions.

So I worked in the ops center writing out pack tables for the Sudan sites, Wau and Juba and Bor and the outlying places, Wibok and Pibor Post, where we were going. Our flights were made at night because they are all into the no-fly zone that the Government of Sudan has declared in the regions controlled by the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, with whom it has been fighting a war since 1955 except for a short break in the 1970s. GOS and SPLA, as we call them, have between them caused the death of around two million people and made another five million into refugees. There have been many efforts to stop the war but all have failed because all the valuable resources are in the southern part of the country, especially the oil in the Bahr al-Ghazal basin, and the political control is in the northern part, and the northerners think they are Arabs and thus superior to the southern people, who are Nilotics, although I believe every single person in that country would be considered a nigger in Caluga County, Florida. The northerners are Muslims and would like the whole country to be ruled by Muslim shari’a law, but the southerners are mainly Christians or traditionalists, what we used to call pagans I suppose, and they don’t want this at all.

The real reason is racial and cultural, according to Nora. The Islamized Sudanese used to raid slaves in the south, that was the only real business in the country before the Brits took it over, and they still call any southernerabd, which means slave, and they still have slavery, that’s how they drive the southerners away from the oil regions, they give Islamized tribes weapons and set them loose to raid and rape. And all that about Islam is a crock anyway because they attack the Nuer, whoare Muslims, but that doesn’t count because they are alsoabd.And so the SPLA are the good guys? Well, no, not really because they’re always breaking off little tribal or clan or warlord groups, sometimes siding with the GOS or some local confederation of thugs. Honestly I never got the politics and now it’s so boring that I can’t talk about it anymore and it would be just crap except it killed all those people.

But Nora loved the Dinka. Not what they call themselves, the first literate person who met a Dinka asked him what people he sprang from and the Dinka said we are of Deng kak, giving the name of their clan ancestor, and so Dinka they became, but they call themselves Monyjang, which means the husbands of men, meaning they are so manly that other men are women compared to them, which gives you some idea of their haughty views. But they also call themselves the slaves of cattle. They loved their cows, and not in the 4-H way they did in Caluga County, cattle are wealth, pride, honor. They write love poetry to their cows, one of their major art forms. Every boy has what they call a personality ox to which he devotes the kind of attention Americans devote to their girlfriends if the girls are lucky. Women are valued by how many cows they bring as bride-wealth and if they produce sons. So women get the shaft as usual I said, but Nora said, not really, it’s hard to explain, the women are as proud as the men, they’re all aristocrats, even if they have nothing they own except spears, cows, pots, and poetry. There’s also a great tradition of women warriors among the Dinka, the thing they respect more than anything is spiritual power. The Dinka we were going to stay with?the Peng Dinka?traced their origin to a woman named Atiam 150 years ago, who led them across the Nile to a promised land, just like Moses.

Nora was a tribal kind of person like all the Irish are, she thought Africa was like Europe was in the Dark Ages, desperate, murderous, but laden with hope, she thought it could be converted, not missionary-converted, but really, by the Holy Spirit and saints, like the European barbarians were. She thought the Dinka were just like the Irish before St. Patrick?warriors, poets, kings of little plots of land, lovers of cattle, she saw in their tall black forms Cuchulainn and Finn, Queen Maeve and King Ailil and the Cattle Raid of Cooley. I believed her because she had a degree in history from University College Dublin and besides I would have believed the Dinka were Choctaws or the Ten Lost Tribes on her say-so, not only because I was entranced with her but also because she could talk the hinges off a door.

What we did at Mokilo after the long days, we would lie in the hot tent under our netting and she would talk and drink whiskey from a tin cup, a drop to carry her off as she said. We’re of a dying race me girl she would say, alas Babylon, with all our gold and power we can’t make our women bear children or keep our children from killing themselves or keep off the hatred of all the world and don’t you think one day it’ll all come crashing down? Oh not next year or in our lifetimes even, but the mark of death is on us sure, and the church is dying and so is the Society, oh I don’t mean it’ll vanish, but there’ll be a change of form into something new with its own new glory, by God even Rome didn’t vanish after the sack, and the church is not after all a mortal thing.

T’ing. A morrtal t’ing, I can still hear her voice, the accent got thicker with the drink. I guess she was a drunk when all’s told, but I never saw her take a sip between sunrise and sunset there was that much iron in her, but she needed her drop when it got dark in Africa. As who the fuck doesn’t?

We were waiting for a full moon and for our complement of people going to Pibor, a town more or less besieged by GOS forces where we had a refugee hospital. Then a final planeload came in and we were ready, a couple of sister-doctors, some nurses, a sanitarian, some technicians, and among them I found my original Blood sister, Trinidad Salcedo from Miami. She was not surprised to see me or what I’d become, but I was surprised to find her an ordinary person, pleasant, efficient, nothing special, not the strange mystic figure I had made her out to be in Miami, and when I said all this to Nora she said, it’s you who’ve changed darlin’, Trini didn’t shrink down, you grew and of course it turned out that Trini was some kind of special disciple of Nora, and had lived with her once upon a time, which made me jealous, no it was just the ghost of jealousy and I told Nora about it and we had a laugh.

We went in at night on the first of April, many jokes about the date, eight of us in blue coveralls and hockey helmets in the Fokker, flown by a couple of sister-pilots and a sister-jumpmaster and four men, Africans, for cargo kickers. We took off at sundown, a tin tube full of nerves and noise. I looked over at Nora her face strange in the red glow and she smiled a rack of pink teeth at me. Then the plane veered and dropped to altitude and the cargo kickers got up and harnessed themselves and the clam shell yawned open aft and the gritty African wind poured in and the kickers ran the pallets out. We came around for another run, leveled, the red light turned ghastly green, sister-jumpmaster gave the commands, we hooked up our static lines, and then in just a little more time than it takes to tell it, we trotted down the aisle and into the moonlight.

It was a good drop. None of the containers burst, the trucks from Pibor were where they should be, no one got a pallet on the bean, no brokens among the sisters. We sang as we rode back, a Salve Regina from the eleventh century in four parts and then “Finnegan’s Wake,” Nora’s addition, she knew all the verses and the rest joining in the chorus, lots of fun at Finnegan’s wake. Nora broke out one of her precious bottles of Jameson and we all had a taste and then Nora hung around my neck a chain with a little brass angel on it and everyone clapped and kissed me. That’s what they were for. And thinking of where I was and who I was when I first saw one of the things, I cried shamefully.

Life at Pibor. Pibor is in thegnk,a Dinka landscape term meaning a woody area with sandy fertile soil above the flood zone. This particulargnk was well outside the usual Dinka tribal regions, which lie to the north and east, and people had fled to the area to escape the GOS depredations. There were Dinka cattle camps all around, with huge round cone-roofed thatched cattle byres and smaller sleep huts of the same design. The zone was considered relatively quiet, and the SPLA sent their wounded there for treatment and recovery along with the larger number of civilians who’d been hurt by the GOS bombings of villages. Our operation was protected by a SPLA militia, a not very effective-looking bunch of teens with Kalashnikovs and grenade launchers and a fleet of battered pickup trucks. The Society bribed the local warlord to keep up the protection and also bribed the local GOS commander to lay off. Nora said much can be done with a little money in a place where everyone is dirt poor and loyalties are local. She didn’t think much of the SPLAs either. If there is a real soldier in the whole of the Sudan, I’d like to see him, was her opinion, she said one disciplined brigade could go through the whole blessed country like a dose of salts. But there wasn’t one on either side, and so the war continued without hope of an end.

But something was up and Nora was worried. There had been two bombings in the last month, which meant that the orders had come from higher up, maybe from Khartoum, maybe they thought we were getting too comfortable in our little corner. So there was a lot of digging now, and filling of sandbags. They had an air raid shelter built under one of the tents and another under construction for the post-op ward, the sound of scraping went on all day and night. Wheelbarrows and shovels had filled one of my crates.

We had air raid drills. You could hear the slow Antonov 32s that they used from a long way off, so there was plenty of time and besides they were just cargo planes not real bombers, they just rolled the bombs, welded oil drums packed with Semtex, out the rear cargo door, just barely accurate enough for terror.

I saw Nora working as a nurse for the first time, and also for the first time I saw the white aprons of the Society actually soaked in blood. There was always a slow trickle of casualties, occasionally a flood when a village or another hospital got bombed. Also diseases, malnutrition, although we had plenty of food, if you consider sorghum porridge a food, and dysentery. When necessary I cleaned up diarrhea, working alongside Nora and the others, her always cheerful, ah the romance of the Cat’lic religion! she would call out, wiping filth.

I made myself useful, inoculating and distributing stuff, keeping inventory, and since I was Dinka-speaking, I also helped Father Manes, our priest, another American. Manes was a classic whiskey priest, a big shambling man with a mess of long gray curls, wore a dusty cassock and a straw fedora, God knows where he got the booze. He was always half in the bag, never more, never less. Rumors of a voluntary exile because of a taste for altar boys. The sisters treated him friendly enough, like a large dirty hound, and besides his religious duties he ran the school.

That’s where I met Dol Biong, at the school. I was teaching a class of boys. They loved me, not because I was anything of a teacher but because I had given each of them a notebook and a pencil. Giving an African kid a pencil is like giving an American kid a sports car. I had to insist that they use the pencil to write with, they were so much more useful as cult and status objects. Also, none of them had ever been to school before, so I had to invent the concept for them, me the high school dropout, and I was just describing the wonders of the alphabet, when I saw him, standing one-legged in the Dinka way just outside the circle of the class. I called to him, but he didn’t budge. One of the boys said oh Dol Biong will never come to class he is tooadheng for us. He says he is a chief’s son but we don’t know of what tribe, and they all laughed. So I went on. He never joined the class, but never missed one either, standing there, his eyes burning with something, hate or desire, black as tar, skin and bones, naked except for a ragged T-shirt and shorts. I asked Father Manes about him and it turned out he was an escaped slave, Baggara tribesmen had raided his village and stolen his whole clan. He was from north of here around Wibok. Manes intended to take him back there the next time he could join a SPLA convoy.

He ate alone too. On the other hand I seemed to run into him more than simple chance required. Once or twice he helped me carry the heavy ice chests we used for vaccines, just appearing at my side. Never said a word except with those eyes. The last week in May, the SPLA sent half a dozen trucks with soldiers and supplies and some of our sisters up to Wibok. Wibok was full of orphaned kids who had fled the slave raiding in the north, around Nasir. Manes went with them in the hope that he could get the SPLA commander up there to let him start a school instead of recruiting them all into the rebel army. Trini went to take charge of the aid station there. I thought that Dol Biong would have gone with them, but I spotted him later that day, lurking. I asked him in my best Dinka why he hadn’t gone, and got no answer but that stare.

In all a happy time and the days flew. In the evenings, Nora and I would sit in our tent, she on a cot sipping whiskey and pontificating about the events of the day or the fate of man, me crouched usually at her feet leaning against her thigh like a dog while she idly stroked my hair. I liked being her dog. There is a lot to be said for mindless devotion after a life such as I had lived. Looking back I suppose she had the same relationship with Christ, she was His dog as I was hers, although at the time that was quite beyond my imagination. I would from time to time recite poems from the 500 Best, she liked Yeats Auden Donne Carlos Williams Southey Marvell Herbert. Ah, you’re a wonder, Emily, I niver could remember a blessed thing I had to cheat like a gypsy to pass me exams.

Speaking of gypsy, I got dark again. When I was a tiny kid I used to get very brown in the summers, my Cajun blood, Daddy used to say, but after he died Momma would make me cover up, them Garigeaus had a nigger in the woodpile sure as shit she used to say, but now Africa turned me brown as an Arab.

I am avoiding again I see and I mustn’t there is hardly space to tell the rest, how clever of me it means I will have to stint on some of my crimes. June 13, a Sunday and we are all gathered in the church of the old Italian mission, even the atheists, for Father Manes has left for Wibok and there is no one to say mass, except Nora is doing it anyway, yes our dirty secret we do it all the time in the Bloods when there are no priests, as there very often are not where we work. Perhaps that’s why the atheist Euro docs are in attendance, solidarity with feminism, or one in the eye for the patriarchy, although I know all that’s far from Nora’s mind. Technically the host is already consecrated by the priest on such occasions, but Nora is doing it proper, proclaiming the Gospel, giving the homily, singing the words of the mass in her clear voice, lift up your hearts and so on, and we lifted them up. I didn’t actually see her do it because I was the youngest sister and by our tradition I had my back to the altar, looking out the door for the enemy.

Out the door I could see Dol Biong standing motionless in the shade of a water tank looking like a child’s stick figure drawn in charcoal against its bright corrugated steel. Behind me they were singing the Agnus Dei. In a few minutes one of the sisters would bring me the bread and wine, another little tradition. Then I felt something brush by me and I saw that a little kid, maybe four years old, had dashed out of the church laughing and I called out to her mother I’ll get her! and I ran out. I caught the little girl and tickled her and called herrac (naughty) and started back, at which moment I first heard the engines.

In the Spanish Civil War the fascist bombers used to cut their engines off over the sea and glide inland soundlessly, cranking up only as they approached the target, which worked pretty well before they had radar and it shows you that a good idea is ever green, because the pilot of the Antonov had done it too. I screamed out a warning and started to run back to the church, but they were all singing dona nobis pacem and besides it was too late. The Antonov coasted over at about twelve hundred feet and dropped four large bombs, I could see the long black cylinders tumbling out of the rear cargo bay door. The first bomb hit the motor pool and our fuel dump, the second a group of tents. I had not been bombed before but I knew something about explosives and these blasts were enormous, five-hundred-pounders, a mind-numbing bowel-loosening noise. The third crashed through the tin roof of the church and exploded inside. I didn’t see where the fourth one landed because I was standing there flat-footed with the kid on my hip when the shock wave and the rushing cloud of atomized bricks pews statues hymnals bread wine chalices and people knocked me flat.

I was blown out of your world, really, now that I think about it, and this makes the next part difficult to tell. Out of prose into poetry. Out of the secular into the mythos. Out ofchronos intokairos, God’s time.

No, but not at first. I came to myself and found I was blind and someone was pulling at my arm. Gelling blood lay thick in my eye sockets from a gash on my scalp. I wiped it away. I saw smoke and hanging dust and crumbled ruin with shards of tin roof sticking up, so small, these ruins couldn’t have held so many souls. I screamed her name and began to claw at the rubble like a dog, but I was pulled back by the boy, Dol Biong. Emily, Emily, they are all dead, they are all dead, he said and I struck at him tears washing away the sticky blood, but he held me. Come with me he said there is nothing here, and after the bombings the Baggara always come. I cried no no and ran away from him to the dorm tent, I suppose I was thinking that somehow she was still there God had brought her away from the church at the last moment but no, and I saw that the refugees were already looting the possessions of the dead helpers. And why not? But still I screamed and beat at their dull black skins and forced my way to where Nora and I had slept and took the old rucksack she kept her things in and swept into it her crumpled clothes her little carved crucifix her rosary and some of her books, things that smelled of her alive I wanted to cover the stink of death that came from the ruins scorched hair and bone and the barbecue smell that’s the most hideous thing about burning people your belly says mm good meat! Despite what you know.

Come come he was tugging at me and we pushed through the mob and out into the compound. The SPLA who had gone to church had neatly stacked their rifles outside with their bandoliers and I saw Dol grab an AK and some ammunition. I saw he had a bag too. As we left I saw also the child who had saved me by running out, a bit of debris had ripped her from my arms and taken off half her head I envied her I wanted the flies to be eating me too. But I followed him, and again why not? Nora was gone and God was finally silent in my head, no medieval saints to guide me today only a Dinka boy.

We walked east. This was thesudd itself, meandering rivers cutting across clay plains, and papyrus marshes that in the wet season make huge rafts of matting that sometimes blockade the rivers.Sudd means blockage and gives the nation its name. It was the end of the dry season and so travel was easier than it would have been at another time. There was just enough water still on the land, and he had brought food, bean cake, mashed groundnut, dried fish, cooked rice. We barely talked. I sat where I was placed, I moved when tugged, when food lumps were placed in my hand I carried them to my mouth.

Several times we hid from Baggara raiders. The Baggara are Arabized tribesmen who traditionally prey on theabd, mainly the Dinka but also the Nuer. We hid in the grass, he with his rifle ready, I silent but uncaring. It’s hard to recall emptiness, there is nothing there to respond to the world. I know we crossed rivers and there were crocodiles and hippos in the deep places. He was a fearless boy, but he was wary of hippos, ridiculous beasts that kill more Africans than crocodiles do, yet another example of God’s deceptive ways. Once we waded across a wider river than usual and he said that is the Pibor and this is my land. Now we stayed at night in villages, in the round houses of the Dinka. Dinka manners require eating with the mouth open, but what did I care? It was a sad country then, the GOS was expelling Dinka from the oil lands, pushing them east, stealing their herds, making them paupers, arming the Baggara and the murahileen, the Muslim tribal militias, who took the girls and boys for slaves. No one paid me any mind. I crouched against the wall invisible. But him they treated well. Every Dinka is an aristocrat, but some lineages are especially honored, and he was the last of his line, the last male descendant of Peng Biong and Atiam, the holy woman. There I first heard the song

In the days of Peng Biong and Atiam

No one could count our cattle

The holy people took us across the river

To rich pastures

But now the land is full of sin

And our wealth is no more

No one has the power of spirit

Unless Atiam and Peng Biong return

From their graves

How long we traveled I don’t know. It was Ker by their reckoning, the first division of the rainy season, and all that the people talked about was the rains being late. The sky was a thin stretched hot membrane the clouds hung on the horizon and never seemed to come nearer they seemed painted on blue china. The more we traveled the emptier I became as all the days resolved into the same day, endless. He was refining me in His holy fire to make me a fit instrument of His will. Now I know it but not then.

So we arrived one night at a reed-thatched hut such as the boys make when they go on the summer herding, thetoc, and abandon to decay when they leave. There was a dead thorn tree nearby and the boy built a little fire of thorn sticks. We ate, we slept.

I awoke in the dark, and the hut was full of smoke, so thick I thought I must choke, but there was no rasp in my throat, and in the center of the smoke a flame glowed but not from a little fire of sticks, it was bright as a welder’s torch. And the hut was full of beings, too, huge, inhuman, full as a crowded elevator, I could feel them pressing around me, not with my senses but with my soul and this host cried holy holy is the Lord of Hosts the whole earth is full of His Glory. Now imagine the worst embarrassment you have ever felt in your life the greatest shame that you know will stay with you all your days and I say that is nothing to what I felt then, I fell on my face and ground it into the soil, pissing my pants in terror, earth gritty in my mouth, clawing with my hands until my nails cracked digging with my knees to get away from It, light too hard to stand, away from Him. No no I said aloud I’m too filthy filthy but they held me and pulled me back and I howled in pain. And I saw one of them take a coal from that fire and it placed the flaming coal on my mouth (and it burned with the most terrible pain, but my flesh was not consumed) and it said lo your sin is purged.

Then I heard His small clear voice in the center of my head saying

Whom shall I send and who will go for Us?

And I heard my own voice saying aloud: Here I am. Send me.

And the Lord said, go and save this people who are despised and afflicted and make them understand My words with their hearts and convert and be healed. And lead them in the ways of righteousness for My name’s sake, for they will be a great people.

Yes, what they call a topos, a set-piece chunk of religious experience, but who knows but that it’s always like that when God chooses you, like chocolate ice cream it is always what it is or a hand in cool water, real. Maybe Isaiah also had to change his shorts, Scripture is silent here.

The remainder of the night was interesting too. Nora was there and St. Catherine of Siena and the Devil as well. I was so happy to see Nora again, covering her hands and face with kisses and she said don’t be stupid girl don’t you know when you love someone they live forever and surely you didn’t think that the communion of saints was just a figure of speech? I was surprised to see my old shiny man there it now being holy ground, but when you think of it he has to be there to twist every good thing to evil if he can it is the way we play here on earth and he said congratulations we’re both working for the same outfit now and I told him to be quiet and sucked him into me again.

Then the morning and I was a different person, so different that Dol looked at me strangely. I ate with good appetite, more than I had for days, I was empty and needed my strength to do God’s work, but I wanted more than a handful of bean paste I said I needed meat and he said there is no meat Emily the bush meat is all gone because of the war and all the hungry people. But when we came out of the hut we heard a thrashing in the reeds and out stepped a little reedbuck kid and stood there and I took our rifle and killed it with one shot and butchered it and we built a big fire and ate our fill of meat. Then we packed and I picked up a staff of thorn wood and set off. I set the pace now, no longer having to be tugged along, amazing the boy.

I saw his dismay and said I am not a witch nor have I been witched in the night, but the Lord (Nhialicas the Dinka call Him) has enlarged my spirit and told me to save the Monyjang Peng from the wars and the slavers and make them great in cattle again as in the time of Atiam. At this his eyes grew wide and he said but you are a pink foreigner. I said I am not very pink at all anymore and also, who saved me when the church was bombed and who sent the meat to us and who made you follow me around like a calf after a cow in Pibor? You knew it in your heart already. I saw in his eyes that he believed and that made me believe the more and so we set out again for Wibok.

We crossed the Kongkong the next day and there was Wibok close by the river. Nora had told me that it was once a place of considerable importance. Located on the confluence of the Kongkong and the north and south forks of the Sobat, it was the seat of abeylik in the Turkish days. Muhammed Ali, the khe-dive of Egypt, had built a fort there nearly two centuries ago to overawe the Abyssinians and also as a barracoon to confine the slaves he took in huge numbers from the lands between the Nile and the other rivers. The Brits had taken it over in their day and built a little town, the seat of a district commissioner and his colonial troops. After independence the Sudanese had allowed it to fall into disrepair, and when the SPLA moved against Wibok in this recent war the GOS troops had not put up much of a fight. There was nothing to fight for in Wibok or its hinter-land, the principal product of the area being a little arms smuggling from Ethiopia and a rich crop of starving refugees.

These lay in vast dying fields surrounding Wibok town, a valley of bones as in Ezekiel, and the hand of the Lord had truly set me down in the midst of them so they might again have life. They were women mainly and old people and young children, the military-aged men and boys having been swept up in the wars. We walked through these fields Dol and I unsurprised, for he had seen it all his life and I like everyone in the rich world had seen this on television but it’s not the same without the smell: dust, and shit, and the abrading odor of thousands of dead and dying bodies. Stick-figure babies lying in the sun covered by flies and ants, being eaten alive actually, swell-bellied and red haired from the kwashiorkor. The first fifty maybe clawed at your heart and then it was like beer cans on an American street. The babies were starving, the women and the old people were starving, but sleek and fat were the men with guns.

I found Trini Salcedo in the Society hospital tent and she dropped a pan when she saw me walk in. Of course she had heard over the Society radio about the catastrophe at Pibor and she thought I was dead with the others. Are you okay, she asked looking closely at my face. I said I was fine and she said, good we need someone to organize this place. She told me that there were three different medical establishments, plus maybe twenty charities, operating, all with their own logistics, generators, distribution systems, priorities, whatever. The only thing they all had in common is that they gave the SPLA guys whatever they want, off the top, or else they get kicked out of town. The fort was stacked with food and medicine that the commandant used for barter with the Ethiopian smugglers for fuel, generators, booze, weapons. I said I would like to help and I walked out of the tent.

With Dol by my side we went to the fort. First a crumbling wall with an arched Turkish gate and a square tower out of Beau Geste on either side. There was a SPLA guard at the gate with an AK. He was seated on a backless office chair and drinking from a can of Orangina, both symbols of unapproachable status in this part of the world. He waved us through, my Euroness substituting for ID, as it often does in Africa. In the center of the courtyard was a two-story brick building with Turkish arches for doors and windows, painted faded green with a square tower battlemented in the Moorish style on the two facing corners. It had a wide tin awning running around it at the upper edge of the first floor so that in the rains supplicants to the bey or the Brits could wait dry. A flagpole rose before the main door, but no flag flew. At ground level a row of small windows grilled with iron had been blocked with concrete, evidence of the old barracoon. There were tons of supplies stacked in the courtyard, guarded by raggedy-assed SPLAs.

I ignored them and went into the church. The church itself was built by the Verona Fathers in the 1920s and was called St. Philip Neri, a substantial mudbrick structure, nicely stuccoed in white, with a high tin roof set up on posts and beams above the walls leaving a wide gap for air, much like the blown-up church in Pibor. There was a simple altar and a large crucifix in the Italian fashion and a wheezy pump organ. Father Manes was there rehearsing his choir. The Dinka are maybe the greatest singers in east Africa, all they have ever had really besides their cows are their songs. They sang an Ave Maria and a Dinka hymn about Christ bringing the rain. Father Manes was also surprised to see me and even more so when, later in the tiny back room he used as his rectory, I told him what had happened to me in the smoky hut and also what I intended to do. I could see he thought I was crazy and also I could see the fear that I might not be. White people go nuts in Africa all the time, and sometimes, especially among missionaries, it shows as religious mania. So he was smarmy-kind and solicitous through the whiskey fumes until I said he had to stop buying booze from the SPLA with the money he got from America for keeping the church. He stared at me gaping.

I guess he had some words later with Trini because she came to see me the next day. I was staying with Dol Biong in a mud-walled grass-roofed sleeping hut belonging to his mother’s family. This was one of the traditional Peng Dinka villages that ringed Wibok, full of people trying to maintain the tribal discipline and customs and keep a small herd of cattle, although this was nearly impossible, given the thousands of starving refugees that surrounded them. We spoke outside, in the shade of a large fever tree. I could see by her expression that she was surprised to find me not obviously raving. Like many devout people raised in the faith, she had never had a religious experience. I have found that such people have a mixed attitude toward those who have, it is wistful longing mixed with resentment and just a taste of envy like the good son in the parable: I’ve worked in the vineyards all my life oh Lord and no fatted calf for me? I told her what had happened to me and what God had told me to do, but I don’t think she really heard me.

I went back to Wibok fort then and confronted the SPLA commander, a chubby fellow named Nyoung. Feed the people, I said, in the name of the Lord, and the Lord then put into my mind all his iniquities and I spoke them out and he gave a cry of rage and called me a witch, and pointed a pistol at me and pulled the trigger. But the Lord protected me and the weapon did not fire. I walked very close to him and said, you know I am no witch, Nyoung, but a prophet of Nhialic Himself. Aren’t you Monyjang? Did you learn from your fathers to steal food from the hungry? Is thiscieng? Is this noble, to live like foreigners? When did the Monyjang learn to stuff their mouths so? Your fathers are ashamed. Their spirits are calling on Nhialic to judge you. If you don’t repent, will he not cut you off, you and your whole line?

I could see the terror grow in his eyes. The whole courtyard was silent except for the thump of the generators. Even the wind seemed to have stopped blowing. I said, in a voice only he could hear, Nyoung listen: God has sent me to cure the spoiling of the Monyjang and give them new life. For every measure of food you give, ten measures, a hundred measures will be given you. There will be cattle again and peace and the foreigners will trouble you no more. Only believe and follow me!

So then he believed and gave orders to distribute the food they had stored. I said that his soldiers must see that the food went to the women and that the women must feed their children first. After that, the men could eat. They were astounded at this, as it went against custom, it was notcieng. But I said that God had ordered a newcieng for the Dinka and was watching and would strike down any man who took food meant for the children, and I went out then and said the same to the multitude. So it went over the next days, and two men who opposed this were found dead on the edges of the camp, their mouths stuffed with cooked rice and after that there was no more opposition.

I had Nyoung lend me one of his trucks and went with Dol around the neighboring cattle camps and villages, speaking to the people and the elders about my mission, or rather I had Dol speak for me and say what had happened at Wibok and how what the Dinka call the spoiling-of-the-world could be made good again. The young men were excited at this and wished to take up their spears, but I said not yet, not yet, because the government and the militias were well armed and it would be a waste of life. I told them God would provide them with sufficient weapons when the time came and give them the victory. Dol was wonderful at this; he haddheeng in great measure, the combination of grace, beauty, manners, comportment, fine speech, that is the quality most prized among Dinka men. He looked like a chief, and I heard the people speaking of him and his lineage, and recalling the old song about Peng Biong returning. It is an interesting thing about being a prophet of God that you never have to think about what to say. Sometimes the words just come into your head and you say them out loud and for the rest it is a matter of relaxing into faith. God would act or not; meanwhile it was up to us to follow and be patient.

Some weeks passed while Dol and I preached the newcieng. The whole tenor of the settlement began to change. With a little more food, the people could begin to work. They could dig latrines and build sleeping huts. There were tools enough in Wibok for this. The women could begin to plant beans, groundnut, and sorghum against the coming of the rains. People began to sing again. I went to mass every day and sang with the choir. Around now I began to hear people calling me Atiamabi, or Atiam-again, I was sliding into the mythos as was foretold. They asked me, Atiamabi, when will the rains come? And I answered soon, soon, until the day when God spoke through me and I answered, tomorrow.

The next morning dawned red and off to the west we saw that the cloud that had lingered so long on the distant rim of the world had grown and become black and purple and full of lightning and there was a little wind. That was also the day we woke to find the town occupied by Baggara murahileen. They had captured or killed our few soldiers, finding them sleeping in the dawn, and had chased off the rest, and taken the town. Now they were spreading through the settlements and the huts, grabbing children and women and beating or shooting the men that resisted. They were hard-faced black men in turbans and robes and the scraps of uniforms, but they were well armed with assault rifles. Amid the screams and shots and crying we could hear the sound of thunder coming closer. As I ran into the courtyard of Wibok fort the first heavy drops began to fall and the sky lowered and became black.

There were a couple of dozen of them there, all of them had Kalashnikovs. Several SPLA soldiers lay dead. One was crawling away slowly like a crushed beetle, nobody paying him any attention. The Baggaras were assembling their catch, girls and young boys and tying their hands with commo wire or rope. I saw the whole girls’ choir bound and weeping. There was a battered Toyota pickup parked by the corner of the fort, with a Russian 12.7 machine gun mounted in the bed of the truck, and behind the gunner stood the man in charge, a big confident-looking man in a camo uniform, shouting orders.

The rain had started in earnest now and the commander told his driver to move the truck under the tin eaves out of the downpour. I climbed up on an oil drum and cried over the sound of the rain and thunder Arabic words I had memorized in Rome: In the Name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate. O believers! Dispute not with the People of the Book save in the fairer manner, except for those of them that do wrong; and say, ‘We believe in what has been sent down to us, and what has been sent down to you; our God and your God is One, and to Him we have surrendered.’ “

I spoke the holy words of the sura in the slow chant oftartil so my words would carry better. I saw wet black faces under turbans turn to me, amazed. They were not used to hearing Quran from people who looked like me, and never from a woman. I continued: hasn’t the Prophet, peace be unto him, said, God is gentle and loves gentleness in all things. O believers, is this gentle? Stealing children? Is this what men do? No! Cowards and idolators do this, and assaulting the People of the Book is forbidden. Hear me now, who speaks in God’s name. From this day all the land on this side of the rivers is proscribed you. Go to your own lands in peace and raise your cattle and your sons. Those who do not will meet death and their souls will be ladled with boiling water in Gehenna.

But the commander called me a whore of an unbeliever and they beat me to the ground with their rifle butts and kicked me into the mud. The rain was now coming in sheets and the thunder was an unremitting roar. I rose to my feet and cried out again, Let fire from God consume you and blacken your bones! Today, this very hour, demons shall eat your flesh in Hell. The curse of God be upon you and upon seven generations of your sons!

I saw the commander speak to his gunner and the muzzle of the 12.7 swiveled around to point at me and then the lightning struck the fort.

A great thick white bolt of fire, deafening all who heard it, traveled down from the tin roof through the drainpipe to the tin eaves and struck the roof of the pickup. The driver, the gunner, and the commander were instantly turned into smoking corpses, and all the ammunition in the belt and cartridge box went up at once, tracer rounds flying through the air. The murahileen were yelling and running around and a number were knocked down by the big bullets.

Nor did the lightning cease. North Florida has plenty of lightning and I’d seen some doozies in my time there, but I never set eyes on the match of this. The whole fort glowed blue from the strikes. Balls of white fire ran along the ground, and the sky was so black and the rain so heavy that everything seemed to be in stop motion like at a rock concert when they do the strobes the air so thick with ozone it hurt to breathe. I kept on yelling out the most bloodthirsty parts I could recall from both the Quran and the Psalms about the wrath of God and the punishment awaiting evildoers although it’s hard to believe anyone heard me. I can’t swear I saw a militiaman point his rifle at me and then explode into a pillar of flame, but it could’ve happened. Nearly everyone who was there saw wonders, one of which at least was real: aside from the SPLA shot in the initial attack, not one of our people was harmed. At last there was a God-almighty crack as a bolt struck the right-hand tower and the gas tank of the pickup went off in a smoky fireball at the same time and the whole tower came crashing down like Jericho.

The militia fled on horse and foot, leaving their dead and wounded. When they were gone and we were picking ourselves up, tending our own wounded and unbinding our captives, the rain lifted and out came the sun sending beams like church-painted heavens down on us, raising steam. It was like the creation of the world. Then I saw that the fall of the tower had ripped a hole in the building’s side clear down to grade, and there was a triangle of black emptiness showing at the corner of the building.

Now everyone in Wibok believed that the Brits had filled the old dungeon with rubble and poured concrete in to seal it off, but I saw that this was not the case. They had poured concrete yes, but over a steel mesh, making a false floor. Beneath this was a void. I grabbed a boy and sent him to ask at the hospital for a flashlight and when he returned I sent him through the hole to see what was there. He came back out, covered in dust and cobwebs, and when I asked him what was there he said, boxes and things wrapped in cloth and there were guns too.

I said out loud, although there was no one to understand me, a Depot of the Damned, and I knew that God had sent this to us in our need. After what had just happened, of course, everyone was anxious to do my bidding. I directed men with pick and shovel to widen the gap and then went down into it myself. It was clear to me what this was. All over East Africa in the British days there were army units and army units have quartermaster sergeants and these had materiel in excess of regulation or broken under embarrassing circumstances that could neither be thrown away (for what if an officer should find it in some native souk with the broad arrow of British army bold upon it) nor returned to whence it came, and these quartermaster sergeants had said to their corporals I never want to see that bloody?????again and off it had gone to an obscure place. No place more obscure than Wibok, and when the order came in 1956 to pull out and give the country back to the niggers, and at the same time orders to seal up the old barracoon so the niggers couldn’t use it to enslave other niggers, why there was a gift from God. The crap was shoveled down into the cellars, landing mesh was dumped on top of it and concrete poured in afterward, all done at night surely, without any nosy natives looking. And off they went to Blighty singing a merry tune.

This is what we found:

121 tools, entrenching, w/pick

200 shirts, undress, cotton, khaki, other ranks

650 sandbags, burlap, in bales

18,000 rounds.303 ball ammunition, in cans of 500, stamped “expired/for disposal”

12 Lee-Enfield Mk III rifles, in crates, in Cosmoline, crates stamped 1918 Aldershot

8 Lee-Enfield Mk V rifles, marked “unserviceable” in yellow paint

2 Mk III Bren guns, ditto

31 Bren gun magazines, empty

4 five-hundred-yard spools of concertina barbed wire

6 binoculars, Mk II, stamped 1943, all with at least one lens broken

2 Very pistols in boxes

6 Very flare sets in sealed boxes

3 immersion heaters, gasoline burning

12 whistles, chromed, NCO, for the use of

16 Wilkinson blade bayonets, 17 inch, w/sheath

122 helmets, steel, Mk II, 1916 pattern

10 machetes w/sheath, marked Sam’l. Kitchin amp; Co., Sheffield, 1917

214 cloths, ground, rubberized, 6? by 4?

plus boxes of metallic junk, webbing gear, bandoliers, rotting rubber products, unit shoulder flashes, chains, ropes, camouflage netting, tin cans bulging with bacteria, radios dropped off the back of trucks, puttees, various optical equipment of unknown function, holed buckets, left boots, etc.

We brought it all out of its cave and spread it on the ground cloths and the people gathered around and stared at it amid the rising vapors and the acrid stench from the burnt truck. In the next days I showed the people how to clean off the Cosmoline with gas and how to grease and oil the weapons with the cleaning kits that came with each new one. I loaded and test fired each weapon. One of the Mk V’s really didn’t work, and one of the Brens was missing its bipod, but both of them fired. Not much, but my memory spat out that in 1945 the Viet Cong had owned three rifles and a pistol. I had the materiel taken into the fort with Nyoung and his remaining men to guard it. Then I went to the Dinka to prepare them for war.

The Dinka are great warriors, which means that they know nothing of war, although they are brave as saints in battle. Through yet another miracle, Dol Biong got it, my melange of Clausewitz and The Combat Leader’s Field Guide, eleventh edition, me pumping the germs of both volumes into his head as we sat together night after night after the militia raid. Then we went to the Peng elders, and he spoke and I sat and radiated spiritual energy, which is the only authority the Dinka recognize. The typical Dinka war starts with an affront; the tribe gathers, organized in age-set platoons. They beat drums and dance and make updor, their war songs insulting the enemy and praising themselves. Then they run singing at the enemy tribesmen, with the women alongside them carrying food and extra weapons and they fight hand to hand. Wounded enemy are always killed. It is considered shameful to ambush and fight from cover. If they prevail they carry off the enemy’s cattle. It is very plains-of-Troy, magnifique mais ce n’est pas la guerre against troops armed with Kalashnikovs.

The elders conversed and argued and at last they said we could have an age-set, the one called the Lion-men, aged seventeen, to train in the new way. Dol told them this would not compromise theirdheeng, that ever-present consideration among Dinka men, this too a part of the new dispensation. Then I said I wanted a girl age-set too. More arguing, but I was after all now the voice of Nhialic, and they agreed and said the Tawny Lion Cubs could join our war. Dol picked the twenty most likely of each sex and we went into basic training.

They were good kids and easy to train, in perfect physical shape to begin with, agile and tireless, and they took to marks-manship with delight and impressive skill. They were naturals with the machete and the bayonet. The hardest thing to teach them was silence and patience. Dinkas love to sing and make noise; they were not born ambushers. But the most remarkable thing about them was their ability to run. Any of them could’ve wiped the floor with a top-ranked AAU college track team, and that with a full combat load. I gave them two months. When they could maneuver and dig in and establish a perimeter and fire twelve shots into a number ten can at three hundred yards in less than a minute, and I had picked out the best of them as squad leaders, we took up our pathetic arms and went after themurahileen.

It is very demoralizing even for trained soldiers to be sniped at long-distance by an enemy you can’t see, and the tribal militias were mere bandits. They fired lots of bullets at random from their AKs and some of them charged us and we cut them down with the Brens. In a month we had cleared the whole country to the east of the rivers and took over two thousand head of cattle, as the Lord had promised, me riding ahead of the great herds on a black Baggara stallion, spoils of war, to the cheers and singing of all the tribe. And I divided the cattle among the fighters without regard to sex or clan and the people were angry because women had never owned wealth before, but I told them this is the newcieng given you by God who gave you the victory, and they listened, for my word was law.

Yes my word was law among the Peng and my word was dig dig with our Brit shovels, air raid shelters at Wibok and at every village, because I knew the militia would tell the GOS that there was a powerful SPLA force in the area, because how else could the mightymurahileen be defeated? Not by slaves.

One morning I awoke to the sound of gunfire and saw that some of my kids were shooting at a plane, which fortunately they didn’t hit because it was the Society Fokker from Pibor and things were falling out of it on chutes, including a man, who turned out to be Peter Mulvaney.

He had come to collect Nora’s ashes, and when he heard what I was doing here he insisted on coming. He said let the dead bury their dead, which was something Nora would have said if the situation was reversed and he asked what can I do for you and I said, I have warriors but I need infantry I need a battalion of infantry for I wish to hold this country. And he looked around at my people for a day or two and said it can be done, warriors can be turned into soldiers, it worked with the Irish and the Scots after all. So I taught him enough Dinka to give orders and insults and compliments, it was nearly like having Nora again, I was so happy, but then I asked Peter how come they let him use their plane to deliver supplies to us and he said you have friends in high places, by which I knew that the prioress general had heard about what I was doing and approved, and I thought another betrayal, Nora would have hated all this, I think, and I prayed for her forgiveness.

He was much better than I was, being a pro and all and he dressed the best of them in shirts from the Depot of the Damned and found packages of shoulder flashes and made half of them the Somerset Light Infantry and half the Royal Inniskilling Fusileers, which were the badges we had, divided them without regard to sex, age-set, or clan and he made them mock fight one another and compete in various ways, you have to break down any identity they have except the regimental he said and it was true, but painful all the same for them, church and regiment were the loyalties we wanted and also of course to Dol Biong, who understood the need for it, God bless him. And of course there were more recruits than we could handle now, and our original forty became the officers of them.

A month went by and then they came just after dawn rumbling up to Wibok: a truck full of infantry with a 12.7 mounted on the cab, then the command car, a Humber Pig 4?4, then the gun and the other three-tonners. They stopped about five hundred yards from the fort and began blasting away, and for the first time I heard the terrible sound of what was to be my gun shooting at me for the first and last time. Well this is no fun, Peter said, that’s an L70, it’ll take down this fort in about ten minutes and I said let’s get it, then. He took a squad of our best shots and I took the rest of our army and went out the back of the town and we made wide circles in both directions and of course they had no perimeter security at all. Peter’s group sniped all the gunners off the gun before they knew what was happening and then shot down all the officers. Most third world armies are specialized for shooting helpless civilians and this one was no exception. Leaderless, they ran around and fired in all directions, showing that automatic firepower is of no use if you aren’t hitting anything. It was over in forty minutes. The bearers came up, hacked the wounded to death with their machetes and stripped the corpses of boots, ammo, and weapons. We had two dead and ten wounded. In exchange we had the equipment of an infantry company and my gun. God forgive me I thought it was a good deal at the time.

Shortly after this, late in the day, we heard what sounded like artillery fire away to the east. Ride to the sounds of the guns is good doctrine, so we got into our new trucks and headed in that direction. There, about forty-five miles from the Akobo River and the Ethiopian border, we found an oil exploration team. The explosions we’d heard had been from seismic probes. The team had hired guards, but these all ran away when they saw who we were. The head of the team, Dr. Terry Richardson, a Canadian, invited me into the big RV he used as an office. It was air-conditioned, although it was the rainy season and cool for Sudan. He said they had not found anything significant as yet, and we talked a little about the exploration business, a civilized conversation until I told him that he was a prisoner of war and that I was confiscating all his gear. He said I couldn’t do that, as he had permits from the government of Sudan, and I had to tell him that he was no longer in Sudan. I believe that was the first time I declared the independence of my people.

By the spring of 1937, Mother General Roland, now aged eighty-five, understood that she was gravely ill and might not survive the year. She consequently did two things: first she went to Rome and met with Cardinal Ratti to seek his advice. At that period, most politically aware people understood that another European war was drawing near. Roland feared that, unlike the last one, it would be largely unsympathetic to nuns roaming the battlefields and caring for civilians, while it was likely, on the evidence of the Spanish Civil War then in progress, that there would be far more civilian casualties than ever before. The cardinal promised to consult his brother Pope Pius XI on the diplomatic aspects of this problem. Privately, he began to make available to the Society’s leadership relevant pieces of intelligence gathered from the excellent Vatican diplomatic service.

Her second action was to call a convocation of all the Sisterhood. On May 17, 1938, over seven hundred sisters?all who could be spared from the work?gathered at the Mother House in Nemours outside of Paris. Most of them were young women to whom Marie-Ange de Berville was a legend, and the ancient woman, their general, who now addressed them, was hardly less so. The speech she gave was never published, but so impressive was her delivery and so prescient were her remarks that many there would be able to reconstruct it later on. The present writer had the privilege of attending and recalls it well, although in the interests of perfect honesty, it must be said that a speech that purports to foretell the future is subject to modification in accordance with how events actually turn out. She predicted the European war, and the war came. She predicted that the women there assembled would find themselves belonging to nations at war with one another, and so it turned out. She predicted that civilians would bear the brunt of the fighting at a level not seen in Europe since the Thirty Years War, and this happened, too, although to an extent not even the pessimistic Mother General could have imagined. She spoke of the propensity of modern states to make war on civilians as a matter of policy, nor did she blanch at naming the culprits. She said that the Spanish and Italian and German Sisters might have to defy their governments in order to fulfill their vows of protection, and might have to discard their habits and work in secret. She closed the speech with an admission that she was dying and that it fell to them to elect her successor.

The following day they did, choosing Elisabeth Maria Sapenfeld as the third Mother General of the Society. Three days later, Otilie Roland departed this life after a stay on earth as remarkable as a fairy tale. Born in a Parisian cellar, a thief and prostitute by the age of twelve, a communard and atheist at sixteen, she remains a testament to the possibility of regeneration through love, and a testament also of the charisma and perspicacity of the Foundress, who saw in her what no one else ever had and through her example and the grace of God saved her for a life of glory and service. When some churchmen complained of Otilie’s unsavory antecedents, and the zeal with which the Society recruited from girls of the streets, the Foundress replied, with typical acerbity, “I can teach piety, I can teach skills, but courage is of God; we must have courage, and thegrisettes have it.”

— FROM FAITHFUL UNTO DEATH: THE STORY OF THE NURSING SISTERS OF THE BLOOD OF CHRIST, BY SR. BENEDICTA COOLEY, SBC, ROSARIAN PRESS, BOSTON, 1947.