as broad as the Mississippi. He’d seen it there more than once, leading his pilgrim tourists.
He spoke slowly, with an undertone of condescension that made Quinette bristle. Talking to her like she was still a kid in Mrs. Hoge’s geography period. Okay, she wasn’t the brightest bulb in the chandelier, but she wasn’t stupid, and she hated it when people talked down to her. Maybe the heat was making her irritable—it must have been a hundred degrees—and she stood and fanned herself with her hat and blew down into her shirt. She had to watch her temper, anger being a sin she fell into fairly often. That had been true since the day when she was fourteen and yelled curses at the people bidding for her father’s tractor, the John Deere she used to ride on with him when she was little; vile curses hurled at the top of her lungs, and then she hurled something more tangible at the auctioneer—a rock. Threw it as hard as she could, almost knocked him cold, and she didn’t feel sorry about it for a long time.
Remaining on her feet, swiping her hat past her face, she allowed her thoughts to return to the river, pushing slowly past its reed-choked banks. Papyrus reeds, she believed, like the kind Moses’ basket was made of as it floated into the saving arms of Pharaoh’s daughter upriver, no, downriver in Egypt. Somehow, she couldn’t get used to thinking of north as down, south as up. “And then Pharaoh’s daughter went down to the water”—the old hymn sang faintly in her memory—“went down to the water so blue.”
Out from under the tree, where the light was better for filming, the CNN reporter was interviewing Ken Eismont. He had the look of a strict high school principal—round rimless glasses, hollow cheeks, a sharp chin, short brown hair. The man in charge, executive director of the WorldWide Christian Union. Also its chief fundraiser and PR man. It was Ken who got the CNN team to report on his latest mission into Sudan. The reporter’s name was Phyllis something, a scrawny, auburn-haired woman with the gravelly voice of someone who smoked and drank too much, though Quinette had yet to see her with a cigarette and of course there was nothing to drink out here, except tepid water. The Kenyan camera crew, two young men who didn’t smile much and wore worried looks, moved around, changing angles on Ken, and when Phyllis was done with him, she turned to Mike and Jean, the Canadian couple who were taking their vacation time to help Ken redeem the slaves. Not redeem them in the spiritual sense, but to buy them back from their masters and then set them free.
In the meantime, making jerky movements with his hands, Ken was asking Santino to find out why it was taking so long to find a boat to ferry everyone across the Nile. Santino was a heavyset Sudanese with the blackest skin imaginable and short knotty hair matched to his complexion, so that he looked bald from far away. Ken called him his “banker.” He carried the cash that bought the slaves their liberty: on this trip, more than ten thousand dollars in hundred-dollar denominations, stuffed into a blue and white airline bag. Quinette watched him hand it over to Ken, then walk off toward the village of mud-walled huts clustered on a low hill above the river. Ten thousand dollars was more than half what she would earn this year at The Gap, and Ken stood with the bag slung over his shoulder, out here in a war zone in the middle of nowhere, as nonchalantly as if it contained spare socks and underwear.
In a few minutes Santino reappeared, flanked by the two SPLA soldiers who had been searching for someone with a boat. The three men came down the path leading from the village, the huts behind them crowned by thatch roofs layered like wedding cakes, the soldiers wearing floppy green hats and camouflage uniforms, assault rifles swinging at their sides and ammunition belts draped over their chests, the bullets gleaming in the late morning light. Two more guerrillas lounged nearby, beneath a tree rising out of the reeds on a trunk pale green as a stalk of early corn—a fever tree, someone had told her. She was glad to have the four soldiers on her side; they were scary-looking guys, each over six and a half feet tall, with tribal scars etched