first published in december magazine
My mother was not a Mennonite, by any means, but they often enlisted her to work for Mennonite Disaster Services because she could get shit done. My mother, for her part, would only take short term assignments with NGOs. She liked to say she wanted to be responsive; to be free to move between organizations from crisis to crisis. In this way, she could choose where we went next.
The Mennonites not only accepted her, they embraced her, especially in large scale disasters. Hurricanes, floods, earthquakes; when there were a number of cogs that had to mesh and turn. She was a master at driving, coaxing, or shaming people into doing what she wanted and the Mennonites knew it.
She’d allow them their moments of prayer, their mild proselytizing to the afflicted; she’d even allow their sometimes stilted language and the occasional quote from the Bible; but when it was time to work, it was time to work. You put the Bible down and picked up the jigsaw or the hammer. That’s why you were there.
I know they sometimes puzzled over her. I wondered if they called her a bitch under their breath. Suppliers, staff at Home Depot, the heads of other non-profits did, I’m sure. I’d heard them more than once. I don’t think the Mennonites knew the word except in relation to breeding. Besides, they had the expectation of a hard life. They saw it as a gift from God. Who were they to question the form their tribulations came in?
Much about my mother was a secret even to me. I heard about her life in snatches on the planes or in the buses we took between disasters. She didn’t like to talk about herself but the occasional fact slipped out.
She’d always relate events in an offhand way, as if listing flight delays from an arrival and departure board. Her story was an abandoned jigsaw puzzle, so loosely assembled I couldn’t discern the image.
“Found Jesus my first year of college, lost him soon after; too much whimpering and smiling went along with him. All these grown white people whining about their life then smiling just enough in this manufactured joy to get you to listen to more of their whimpering. I couldn’t deal with the Jesus.”
I’d nod, the way I usually did. Sometimes I’d ask questions and she was almost always good about answering, but sometimes I couldn’t think of any. I’d just nod and return to my book. My mother kept me in books; she was perfect that way.
She took me with her everywhere and told people I was being home-schooled but, really, she simply bought me any book I wanted. If she was working a soup line I was beside her; if she was jerking wet drywall from the frame of a house I was there, standing in the shin deep mud slime, surrounded by blooms of black mold. She didn’t believe in protecting children.
“The world is what it is and it ain’t nothing else. We got to stand up to it.” She didn’t believe there was any protection to be had.
John Yoder met us at the airport, forty miles outside the flooding. It was still raining further south near the delta—23 inches in 18 hours—and nearer airports were closed. John was tall, lean, with sandy hair raked across his forehead, a full beard and mustache. His shoulders were square, his eyes a bright blue, and for years I thought he and my mother should get married. When I was younger, I liked to imagine climbing into his lap at night and pressing him to read to me. Or his scratchy beard leaning down to kiss me on the forehead before bed. Now, I was ten. I’d given up on that plan and hadn’t come up with a replacement.
John embraced my mother before she could stop him, partially, I believe, because he knew the attention made her uncomfortable. My mother’s arms flapped at her sides, her shoulders rising, her palms turned upward. John Yoder chuckled. “Constance, God bless you for coming. It’s so good to see you.”
Without waiting for a response, he turned to hug me. “Abigail, you’re growing up so fast.” He winked. It always made me smile when he winked.
I sat in the truck in the middle as we drove South, John Yoder briefing my mother on the situation, my mother asking questions, something in me finding a quiet and still hollow between them. She and I always seemed to be a blur in motion, never exactly where we were, always moving instead toward the next thing. So, it was nice to feel John’s body on one side and hers on the other, to feel held in place for moment.
John Yoder asked me about our travels and the books I’d been reading but my mother was ready to get down to business. She wanted the updated forecast for the next few days. She wanted to know which services were in place, what materials were in route. She wanted to go out in the boats tomorrow morning.
“You’re going to need as many people as you can get.”
He nodded. “The North Part of town. It’ll take the Guard a while to get there. Water’ll be worse, houses will be shakier.”
I was wilting, whether from the narcotic effect of the airport or a sense of anticipation for the coming days. In times like these, we slept where and when we could. My mother often worked eighteen to twenty hours a day at the height of a disaster. When I was younger, I’d find a place to curl up and someone would toss a blanket or a coat over me.
Waking up, I’d have to go looking for her. She would have moved to the next tent or the next house. Now, I just worked beside her. I knew to rest when I could.
The conversation unfolded around me as I drifted in and out of sleep. At first it was all practicality. What happened tomorrow my mother called the devastation tour. The idea was to assess the damage and begin to decide what could and could not be saved. I’d heard this conversation many times and the details weren’t all that interesting, so I dozed, my head falling to John Yoder’s shoulder.
Later in the drive, their voices had lowered to a range of skeptical intimacy that seemed to pull me from a dream.
“What is it you want, Constance?”
“You should know that by now, John Yoder.”
John Yoder wasn’t present at every storm and flood MDS handled. I think he worked the Southern States. But, whenever we saw him, there were conversations like this, often into the night. It was a way of talking that never seemed to conclude, merely pause, in the weeks or months between.
“Maybe I do. Maybe I just want to hear you say it.”
Constance sighed. It wasn’t the sigh I got when I wanted to go to a movie or buy a new CD. It was a patient sigh, with a little bit of care present as an undertone.
“I want to burn all the ego out of me,” she tells him.
He is silent for a moment.
“The Lord doesn’t want you to burn, Constance.”
“Makes no difference what The Lord wants, John Yoder,” my mother’s voice nearly as soft as his. “No difference at all.”
My mother inhales—an inhalation replacing a sigh—then straightens herself in the seat beside me. My eyes are closed but I know she’s staring directly out the windshield before her into the opening night.
“I’m not going to talk about your faith, John Yoder, because you know me and you know I think your faith is for shit. Not just yours, mind you. Anybody’s.”
I have to assume he talked about these things with my mother precisely because she didn’t care and that my mother talked to him because she knew there was no way to offend him. It was a connection that had nothing to do with words or belief and this must have been somehow liberating for them both.
Soon, rain began to pound the windshield and I could hear the larger puddles sweep up around the doors of the truck, as if we were already in tomorrow’s boats, the water swirling around us. John Yoder held the truck steady through the standing water and I dozed, imagining myself riding a bubble just above the surface of the water channeling into gutters and downspouts. Soon, I was asleep for good.
I wouldn’t remember him carrying me into the motel and lowering me to the bed, his scratchy beard at my cheek. I wouldn’t remember Constance turning out the light and she and John Yoder standing in the open door to the street talking into the night. But, knowing that it happened was the closest I ever got to a feeling of home.
===========
The connection is bad, of course; it always is. So, it takes patience to have a conversation. We try to accept the delays, the fading signals, the sentences we have to repeat. My mother is not known for her patience, but she’s trying. She’s in some river village in Venezuela while I’m pacing a hotel room in Khartoum.
She’d been talking about dysentery and alcohol wipes. I’d been talking about the drought. This is how it goes between us.
Nearing sixty, the work she does isn’t as dangerous as before. It’s mostly clinic setups for WHO and supply lines for vaccination programs, though now and then I hear she’s in a refugee camp somewhere in Pakistan or Turkey. She still doesn’t have a mailing address.
By now, she’s sort of an NGO legend, having lost none of her ability to cajole and blackmail over the years. Often, at conferences, I’m called upon to smile blankly as someone relates still another story about Constance and her unique gifts. To which I reply, because it’s true: “I don’t know anyone who’s saved more actual lives than my mother.”
“Goddamn drug companies and the government scalping every cent,” she’s telling me, as if I didn’t know, as if I’d never heard this before. “Think of what we could get done if we didn’t have to deal with assholes.”
The Sudanese night outside my window is spread black, stars above and city below. It’s a dark river studded with the pulsing colors of buoys and boats. Everything wavers; the air is in motion with the heat which just adds to the liquid illusion. I watch the shimmer as my mother talks about paying off the Governor, the local officials, the truck drivers, about paying twice as much as she should for a boat and motor, then paying three times the going price for gasoline.
“If a gun had been handy, I could’ve just shot them. Saved myself the expense.”
She comes to visit Max and I once or twice a year in Silver Spring, but she really just comes to see Sadie. She’s completely comfortable rolling on the floor with the dog or tossing a ball in the backyard but when Sadie is finally exhausted and collapses into her bed, my mother is at sea. She paces the room, scratches at her skin as if allergic to clean clothes. It’s never more than a day or two before some new crisis sweeps her away again.
My mother sways into another conversational lane. She’s ready to talk about me now.
She asks about Max and the dog but these are really just her opening moves. There is no doubt where she is going.
“I understand you not wanting to get dirty. It’s the New Yorker article that bothers me, those fluffy HuffPost pieces that make you out as some kind of Celebrity of Misery.”
The line crackles with stray electricity. My suitcase is open on one of the beds, files spread across the desk and the dresser, on top of the television. I plant my feet before the window and take a deep breath.
“I know it must feel good,” my mother says, “but, I mean, once you start believing that shit, how do you ever know you’re doing any good?“
Any pause is an admission of guilt.
“I don’t believe it but it gets the word out. People begin to understand the struggles here. Congressmen begin to take notice. Sudan becomes part of the global conversation. Besides, Constance, how do we ever know we’re doing any good?’
“Well, I see the people who survive,” she parries. “They’re here in the next room.”
I know this isn’t an attack, that she’s simply trying to make a point. It’s a question she needles me with when she can because she’s needled herself with it her entire life. I also know she won’t accept any answer I offer.
I could tell her the job gives me the semblance of a normal life. I only travel a couple of weeks a year, the rest I can spend with Max and Sadie. But it’s the guilt of comfort she’s holding over me; it’s the way a lifestyle fundamentally betrays the people we try to help.
Constance apologizes after a few minutes in the muttering, nebulous way she always apologizes, as if wrestling with an impenetrable ritual newly discovered and barely understood. She asks again about Max and Sadie, forgetting she had already, but I can tell she’s depleted the resources she reserves for personal conversation. I can tell she’s planning her day tomorrow as the words lose force.
I float above the city and the night. Though I have a beautiful view, the glass and the height protect me from the particulars of the Sudanese streets. I can rest safely above them. Even the noise of the traffic becomes a slight ambient tone barely audible beneath the hum of the air conditioning.
Maybe one day, we’ll have mundane conversations about gardens, heirloom tomatoes, and hummingbird feeders, she and I. Maybe, we’ll rock together on a wide porch overlooking a freshly mown field. With cups of tea. Maybe we’ll have tea.
But for now her identity, and mine, require catastrophe.
============
The boats smell. The volunteers smell. The water smells worse; brown water like a sewer mixed with mud and stirred with branches, weeds, plastic bags, garbage. And bodies. Dogs float by. A bloated deer. John Yoder turns the boat away from the corpse of a man in red shorts, his blue t-shirt twisted around his frame, beached in a field of mud that was once a front yard, then discretely radios back to report it.
The smell is a mix of sweat, damp clothes, mud and shit. It’s too soon for rot, but in another day or so, as the water recedes, more corpses will be stranded and the stench of death and mold will become overpowering. The water itself protects us from that now.
It’s 8 a.m. and already hot. Our clothes cling to our skin in the thick humidity and sweat runs down my sides. I’m sitting on a thin aluminum bench in the center of the boat, John Yoder behind steering with the motor, my mother at the bow. After the chaos of the staging area, where someone is always wailing, the water has its peace. There’s the kind of reassurance in the force of nature and the way it puts us in our place.
Strangely, the smell of rot always has this cleanness nested within it for me; it’s the quiet emptiness I can feel after vomiting, or when a fever begins to subside. A kind of surrendered emptiness that I can’t imagine until it’s somehow wrenched from me. It’s a momentary pause in which new things can happen. The possibility of something else.
We are always working in the poorer parts of every town. MDS looks for the houses where the residents might not have the money to fix the roofs, mend the porches, replace the windows; the whole point is to help those in the most need. The Mennonites are good that way; quietly marching into areas others might avoid.
The houses are often small, old, and in need of much repair even before a storm so that, sometimes the rising water tears them from their roots and they simply float away whole, or they buckle at a crumbling foundation losing one wall at a time until they collapse on themselves.
The boats ahead are collecting people, from second or third storey windows, from their roofs, people who have been standing knee deep in water since yesterday in the second floor of their house, people who have pushed family albums, quilts and keepsakes onto their roof through a hole they chopped with an axe kept there for the purpose. One boat holds an elderly woman wrapped in a blanket and shawl sitting in a wheelchair and I have to wonder where they collected her and how they maneuvered both her and the wheelchair into the boat. She looks regal, though, like a queen transported in her palanquin. Helicopters buzz by overhead but, for now, they’re en route to the south side of town where the money is.
There’s almost no visible current on the surface of the water but we can sometimes hear the submerged cars shift or a house shuddering as we pass. In water like this, the situation can change in a moment.
My mother pushes large branches, floating barrels, and other refuse from the front of the boat as John Yoder steers among the trash. They’re quiet with each other now, and I’m quiet too. Yet, now and then at intervals, we call out loudly to the water and the empty houses and the tops of trees, “Hello! Anyone here?!” Just in case someone has fallen asleep or is away from a window.
John Yoder’s voice sounds first, low and booming, then my mother’s, then I chirp in. I like to believe that it’s my voice any children will hear, as if the adults are pitched at too low a frequency. I like to imagine a young girl waking to my call in the darkness then shouting back to me in a language only I can hear. I would give John Yoder directions; he would be confused at first but he would trust me.
He had promised me pancakes for dinner and I could taste them already, light with a thin brown crust soaked in maple syrup. Maybe I’d even get sausage. Links, not patties.
The boat continues in the rank water, past the submerged roofs of cars and second floors of houses, their windows broken and empty. We see the boats ahead of us picking up the stranded then turning back to deliver them to the staging area. Eventually, we become the lead boat.
Turning the corner around a stand of trees, we find a partially submerged house with movement on the roof. As we approach we can make out two figures, both standing, waving their arms in wide arcs above their heads.
“We’re coming!” John Yoder booms.
It’s a girl, younger than me and a woman who must be her grandmother. The girl wears a blue and white patterned dress with a white collar, her spindly limbs splaying out at all angles. Her grandmother is heavier, her stocky legs planted in broad, black shoes. There are stains on her dress where it has been wet and dried numerous times. There’s a raw hole in the roof where they escaped, the shingles pushed up like jagged black teeth around it.
As we approach, we can see the Grandmother is breathing heavily, hands on her knees. She stares down at the roof for a moment, attempting to catch her breath, then returns her gaze to our boat for reassurance.
My mother speaks calmly as the boat nears, repeating her name and asking theirs, attempting to normalize the situation as much as she can so they don’t panic when the boat arrives. She asks them if they’re hurt and they say no. She asks if there’s anyone else in the house and they say no. She asks them to sit and they do.
The grandmother is crying now in relief, large tears rolling down her cheeks as she clutches her granddaughter, whose name is Tasha. I’m talking to Tasha, my mother is talking to Linda, when John Yoder draws the boat alongside the roofline.
My mother takes Linda’s hand, easing her toward the rim of the roof and the side of the boat. Linda’s other hand slides from around Tasha’s side as she stands, lowering one foot then the other into the boat and, suddenly alone, Tasha becomes too terrified to move. She’s trembling, staring before her into the dirty water, her eyes wide and unblinking.
I don’t really think about it. I step onto the roof and sit down beside her. I don’t know what I’m saying to her; I’m just trying to tell her everything will be alright. I can hear my mother soothing the grandmother in the boat. At some point, Constance steps onto the roof.
I offer Tasha my hand and she rakes her wrist across her face at her tears, then takes it. Her fingers are bony and cool. We stand up slowly, balancing against the slant of the roof. We’re about to turn toward the boat when the house shudders and shifts. We stumble backward, tripping over the upraised shingles, tumbling into the open hole in the roof and the water beneath and I lose her hand in the fall.
The water is cold and I gasp, coming up for air, my arms thrashing against the attic roof. I can see the sunlight through the jagged hole. The water churns around me in the sudden darkness. It’s carrying me back into the attic and I struggle against it.
Constance’s hand reaches down from the hole in the roof, she must be kneeling or lying on her stomach. Her hand comes down and snatches Tasha, first by the dress, then by the arm, hoisting her up into the sunlight.
The house shifts and drops, pulling at its moorings. I go under again, the dirty curtain folding over me. There are leaves sticking to my mouth and it hurts when I gulp in water, some space in my chest filling with darkness. I can see the hole in the roof from beneath the skin of the surface and I struggle to get there but it’s suddenly so much further away.
Something falls on my head and I go under again. When I open my eyes Constance is there, still clutching the other girl, both of them staring at me, eyes wide with horror, and John Yoder, soaked to the skin, is pressing hard at my chest. I turn my head and the dirty brown water pours out. My mouth is left with grass and grit until I vomit again.
For years, I couldn’t really remember what happened that day; it was a long, bright blur that ended back at the staging area by an ambulance in John Yoder’s arms. That was all I could remember, resting in his arms. Then the dreams began and the memories returned slowly, one shard at a time, sharp things that worked themselves to the surface of my skin from deep inside.
So, I was never completely sure of everything that happened, never felt I could trust my memory. And, I never knew for certain whether God had spared me through grace or spite.
================
Six months later, I was sent away to boarding school where there were clean sheets and hot meals and girls who talked about Nirvana and had never read a single book straight through. I learned, over the years, to wear a dress, giggle, and do quadratic equations. I went home with friends for weekends to houses with compounds larger than many of the villages I had lived in.
I became the kind of student who was accepted to NYU and, once accepted, the kind of student to go. I never stopped feeling I’d somehow failed my mother. Or God. Or both. In the dank alleyways of my soul, perhaps there is no difference between the two.
Eventually, I abandoned God completely, feeling no loss. It was unceremonious; accomplished with a shrug. My loss was deeper, something not quite an emptiness. It had no particular center in my body. It simply permeated every cell, leaving me with an absence. That absence was an active, gnawing thing.
And because I’ve always been haunted by John Yoder’s simple faith, the absence is difficult to accept. His faith itself I can rationalize away, but not the way it haunts me. It awakens an organ deep inside my body that longs for surrender. Total abandonment.
It brings about a specific hunger. It’s impossible to say whether the hunger itself, or the inability to be filled, is the remnant of my mother. So, even after a Masters in Psychology, I found myself back at one NGO after another. Nothing else could promise even the possibility of satisfying the hunger.
I know my mother has saved many lives. I know I have, too. I can’t stop asking myself what those lives were saved for. The saved are forgotten the next day. The saved continue to struggle in appalling conditions. The saved live in a country where the same thing will happen again in two years, five years.
My line of sight is filled by the grim immensity of need. I believe I’m doing good; I just don’t have faith that it’s true. And what is there in the absence of faith? Doubt. Only doubt. And the same questions, again and again.
I realize I’ve been standing before the window for a long time and the phone is still in my hand. Some of the shops below have closed, so there are fewer lights now and the heat has abated just enough that the landscape has stabilized, losing its liquid shimmer. I press my free hand against the glass, hoping to feel the warmth of the night outside but the air conditioning has taken care of that. The glass is hard and cool.
The phone line is dead, of course. As so often happens with these calls, eventually the connection just drops out. There are no goodbyes, no plans for the next rendezvous, the conversation simply ends. We don’t attempt to re-establish the connection.
I slip the phone into my pocket, wishing there were a window I could open, wondering if I should take the elevator down to the street and walk in the heavy night air. I know what the State Department would say about that.
When I was young I believed the Mennonites talked to their God, possibly in a secret language only they could claim. They seemed peaceful and confident. They seemed unwavering.
John Yoder, tossing lumber into a truck or wiping away sweat and sawdust by a spreading tree: he’d look around himself at all the work going on. He’d be anchored and peaceful and he’d allow himself to relish that peace for a moment before returning to work.
His self was never in the way. It never occurred to him he could do anything else. Helping was natural, nearly genetic; not a thing he had to think about. And because there were no motives, he never had to question them.
God was hard for the Mennonites—a demanding absentee landlord due back any minute—but He was harder for my mother. Apparently, mother had one raging argument with Him, then they vowed never to speak again. Ever after, they stood like angry five year olds at opposite ends of the playground, backs to each other.
My mother denied God’s existence in a way that made Him ubiquitous. I deny my mother much the same way. The irony doesn’t escape me.
We rely on the storms, she and I, the earthquakes and mudslides, to give our life purpose. We thrive on the need and curse it at the same time. The need supplants our private desires. The need allows us to believe we matter. In the clearest moments, the need overwhelms us and all that is left is action. When the personal rears its ugly head and it’s not the storm we want, we simply choose another.
I turn to the suitcase on the bed and for an instant I don’t remember whether I’m packing or unpacking. My clothes look like they belong to another person; I can’t imagine anyone actually wearing them. The files spread on the comforter must have been left by the last occupant.
Eventually I find myself again, where I am and what I’m doing here: the dress for the reception tomorrow night, the program outline for the Interior Minister, the number for my contact at The Times. I decide I should be unpacking and that’s what I do.
I want to know what to hold on to and what to give up. I want to be back home in Silver Spring, not half a world away. I want to be climbing into a crisp bed beside a sleeping Max and I want him to roll toward me, still asleep, slip his arm around my waist and hold me until sleep takes me. I want just one of those unpredictable, random moments when I completely forget myself.
What I feel is small, blue, and hard. What I feel is something less than an emptiness.
One day, my mother will be old and alone and our story will still be raw, unexamined. She was trying to burn her self away and I, as an extension of that self, was simply collateral damage. I want to think I’ll be there for her when she needs me. But maybe, when the time comes, I’ll reach for someone else.
=============
The next day we’re back in the boats. My mother wouldn’t hear of John Yoder’s protestations that I should, perhaps, stay at the motel and simply rest, watch TV for the day. There was work to be done and we were going to do it.
Everyone is concerned about me. Everyone is impressed with how strong and fearless I am. They congratulate my mother for having such a resilient child and for her own fortitude.
“Miss Henry, you are a saint.”
“Saint’s a machine can only do one thing,” my mother winks. “I got more tricks than that.”
I sit shivering in the middle of the boat, the dark taste of the river still in my mouth. John Yoder had loaned me a sweater—-a dark green, practical sweater I would keep for years—-because I’d been cold all morning. I sit, in the folds of his sweater on the center bench, my hands between my knees, trying to keep myself from trembling. My thighs clenched around the aluminum bench, I try not to move.
I try not to look at the water, to imagine everything in the water and every living thing dead and alive the water has touched. I try not to catalog the contents of that fecal stew still in my mouth and lungs. I try to imagine something beyond the damp, swampy smell of mud.
I keep my eyes above the horizon on the grey woolly clouds just beginning to break up, revealing the new skin of the sky above. It’s better than staring into the bottom of the boat where murky water and mud slosh side to side.
I keep my eyes on the tops of the trees, the spiky branches reaching upward, swaying slightly in a sudden, cooler breeze. I close my eyes, imagining the solidity of the bed at the motel, the weight of the blankets on my body, the impersonal darkness of the room.
John Yoder and my mother are calling out, to the wrecked houses and twisted trees, but I don’t call out. Secretly, I hope we find no one, no one who will rock the boat climbing in, no one who will sit across from me on the other bench to cry or talk. I hope there is no one to rescue and we will go home soon. I no longer want pancakes; I want the firmness of my refugee bed.
Somehow the day passes and thankfully, while other boats discover other survivors, we do not. My mother and John Yoder begin to scribble notes about certain houses and locations so they’ll know how to find them again once the water recedes.
I sit very still and silent against the possibility that the boat might tip and this time John Yoder wouldn’t be able to reach me quickly enough and this fear is never stronger than when we approach the temporary dock at the edge of the staging area and the promise of dry land. In that moment, I am convinced the water will reach up and close its arms around me again.
It isn’t until the second night that I finally cry. My mother and John Yoder are standing outside the room on the cement pad before the door in the glow of neon signs. I can’t see them but I know they are there. I can’t hear them but I know they are talking. There is a thin sliver of greenish light between the room and the door, left open just in case I stir. There is a thin band of light along the blank green wall by the bed. It is a motel in Biloxi or Gulfport.
I don’t know that I am crying. I think I am simply shivering still. But the pillow is wet and my face is wet and my body shakes with sobs which I bury in the pillow so that the crack between the room and the door will not widen and I smell a dirt floor, rich with clay and iron and the dank, rotting vegetation of the jungle and I remember closing my eyes, years earlier, on a pallet in the corner of a small hut in Central Africa as Constance sobs.
I’m five or six and we are following a tuberculosis epidemic across Central Africa, hoping to stay ahead of the disease. Every five days or so, we move further into the continent, set up a new base, and put out the call to the countryside to come in for vaccination. After a day or so, a truck arrives with alcohol, syringes, and vaccine. Constance delivers the injections to lines of women, children, and occasionally men, outside the door of our hut.
One afternoon, in some small, forgotten village, the truck arrives, drops its cargo and continues down the dusty, rutted road. When Constance opens the cartons later that evening in the lantern light on a low metal table, her hands rustle frantically among the packing straw. I can hear her knuckles banging the sides of the boxes as her breath grows short and tight, the straw whispering and rasping around her fingers.
The cartons are filled with junk: broken toys, transistor radio parts, pieces of old clocks. The actual supplies have been sold, or delivered to rebel fighters, or simply destroyed in some brief and personal anti-colonial protest.
She begins to curse under her breath and I retreat to the pallet. At six I know to stay out of her way. The curses are low and constant as she rifles each carton. In a moment, she abruptly stops, becoming quiet. She closes each box, stacking them on the floor by the door and as she stacks I can see her shoulders trembling, her breath coming short.
When she turns into the room, she isn’t looking at me. She isn’t looking at anything. Her breath catches in her throat with a gasp and a raking, keening sob emerges from deep in her body, a sob held there for so long that it has no history, erupting like a fact of nature. I’ve never heard anything like it. I push myself further into the corner, arms clutching my knees.
She cries for two hours without ceasing. She backs from the boxes by the door until she’s stopped by the opposite wall, then her legs simply crumple beneath her and she slides to the floor and cries. Her hands are limp in her lap, her chin resting on her chest, except in the moments she raises it to keen again.
I have no plan. I’ve never seen her cry before and the sight of it terrifies me. It has never occurred to me there is a force in the world that might make my mother cry. I don’t know what to do. I do nothing. I lie on my pallet on the other side of the room. I pretend to be asleep, but I can’t close my eyes. Listening to her sob with my eyes closed brings the entire world into negation.
I keep my eyes on the flickering lamp. The dusky yellow light. The oily silhouettes thrown to the cinder block walls of the hut. The deep shadow of the table bisecting the wall. I don’t sleep that night; I watch the shadows, listening to my mother cry, and when the crying ceases, I bunch my shirt into my fists hoping it will not begin again.
The next day, we drive into the closest, larger village where there is a telephone and she harangues anyone she can find on the other end of the line in a blue fury. She shouts, she curses, she threatens. Now and then her voice lowers to a conspiratorial whisper. Three days later, the original supplies arrive. None are missing, nothing is broken.
I never see my mother cry again.
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By the third day, the water has begun to recede but we still go out in the boat. This is the time for assessments of damage and priority. Already houses on slightly higher ground have drained, leaving a foot of mud and garbage inside, the history of the storm and its aftermath apparent by the water lines scarring the walls. It won’t take long for the mold to bloom in the heat.
I sit in the middle again. I feel more settled in my skin but keep my eyes to the sky and treetops still. The water is quieter and in some places we can begin to see the roads and sidewalks, sludged in hard ripples of sand. The cars we pass leak as the water lowers around them.
My mother is in the bow with a legal pad, taking notes, and John Yoder calls out to her now and then. The neighborhood has been cleared of survivors, so there are fewer boats. Now, most of the work is in the staging area, or further back, caring for the saved, relocating them to shelters or relatives.
It takes me more than an hour to notice the birds. They have slowly crept back into the trees from their invisible hiding places. Their songs are tentative, almost ghostly; they’re calling out to each other, checking in, getting the lay of the land, and something about the process reassures me. I find a hawk in the sky above us and keep my eyes on him as he circles and dips, riding the invisible thermal currents above me.
A boat approaches from a distance and John Yoder hails them. Two young Mennonite men who can’t be much older than twenty, they cut their engine, their boat drifting toward ours. I know I’m feeling better when I don’t flinch as the two bump together.
Aaron is twenty one, from Pennsylvania, and Marlin is twenty three from somewhere in Minnesota. They wear black trousers and white shirts with the traditional broad brim hats and it makes me wonder if John Yoder has ever in his life dressed this way. They are pimply, fresh-faced and eager to please, exultant when John Yoder gives them a task for the next few hours.
After a moment, Aaron turns toward me, introducing himself anew.
“You must be Abigail, right? I’ve heard about you and your mother for years.”
He extends his broad, pale hand and I take it. His fingers close around mine for an instant then release me. I think I must be blushing, though it’s difficult to tell in the heat.
“It’s such a joy to finally meet you. We’re so thankful for the work you have done.”
Constance mutters something under her breath and I return Aaron’s smile. Marlin is quiet in his part of the boat. It’s obvious that Aaron is the talker. Within Aaron’s smile, there is some kind of certainty, bland though it is, that calms me and I feel my own smile deepen, as if it has taken hold of me.
“We heard what happened the other day. The Lord is truly glorious. It brings such peace that He watches over us.”
Aaron leans in closer to me, his fingers on my bare arm. “Perhaps, you’d like to pray with me. In gratitude and surrender.”
And, just for a passing instant, I want to pray with him. I want to pray in gratitude and surrender.
Constance rustles at the bow of the boat but John Yoder is already deflecting the prayer with a brief, nearly invisible wave of his hand. “Thank you, Brother Aaron…”
I awaken in the dark, the lap of water against the side of the boat receding into dream. It’s dark and I’m cold. I know I am not at home because Max is not beside me. There’s a wide swath of graded darkness to my right that must be a window. The only thing I hear is the hum of the air conditioner and my own low breathing. I remember where I am, floating in a glass box in the Sudanese sky.
The last time I’d met John Yoder was a couple of years ago. He was in Baltimore for a conference. Even though we hadn’t seen each other in nearly twenty years, he was much the same. The broad shoulders and large, strong hands. The clear, blue eyes now slightly damp. He sat across the small coffee shop table and he only wanted to know about me: about my work, my husband, my life and I couldn’t help but tell him everything and he smiled and nodded, occasionally patting my hand with his and he was so happy for me, so unremittingly happy for me that I felt more alive somehow, as if I had been brought into a deeper focus, as if someone had simply reached up, made a fine adjustment, and I was all at once more clear and well drawn.
I don’t know that I am crying. I think I am shivering in the cold. But the pillow is wet and my face is wet. I should never talk to my mother when I’m away from home and alone. In a moment, my body begins to shake with sobs. I don’t hold them in; I’ve learned to let them come.
“All true difficulties are a gift from God,” Aaron exclaims, joyfully raising his arms expansively. He waves to my mother and I. “May the Lord bless and keep you both.”
My mother isn’t looking at me. She’s looking past me to Aaron and Marlin when they push their boat away from ours. I don’t think they hear what she says next, as their motor has already whined to life.
“Pray for us all, boys. We’re gonna need it,” Constance calls to them as their boat pulls away, “‘This world’s a real clusterfuck of blessings.”