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[EDITOR'S NOTE: For the second time in less than a year, against my standing editorial policy, I've agreed to publish a work of fiction. For the second time, the work in question is from an African writer. I trust that after reading the work, you'll agree with my reasons for featuring it on these pages. - RA]"So," she said, "you're one of them."
Sylvia Faraja watched her friend Matt Kress lean back into his chair, trying not to look annoyed, but his mouth settled into a thin line and his gray eyes lost their gallantry.
The woman's tone of voice had galled him, Sylvia could see. This old woman with long white hair stylishly wrapped on her narrow head had galled Matt. Matt, the impassive man. Sylvia tried to remember her name or how this conversation, argument really, had started but could not. It was awful. Here they were, at Our Lady of Lourdes church in Lewiston, Idaho, in support of the Knights of Columbus annual spaghetti dinner, because Matt was part of the brotherhood, only to have an old woman lock horns with him.
"Yes," he replied. "I work with the Forest Service and burning is good for forests. Besides, the worst ones only occur because previous fires have been suppressed time and again."
Secondary growth - that was the word that had started this whole thing going. Matt and his forestry terms, which were such an innate part of his work at the research station, and the old woman endowed with an ear for them. She had been talking about a fire on her property many years ago, the wind blowing a little prescribed burning totally out of control and the Forest Service not very interested in putting it out. Or miserably failing to; Sylvia could not remember which. Whatever the case, in the midst of that innocuous visiting, Matt had mentioned secondary growth, and maybe accumulation of too much fossil fuels, so that he had suddenly looked very knowledgeable on the topic as he sat there, across the table, in his checked work-shirt and rimless glasses. It was then that the old woman in a purple sweater had blurted out the accusation, saying he was "one of them."
"The Forest Service would rather have trees burn than sell them to loggers like us. Can you believe that, sweetheart?" she asked Sylvia.
Sylvia looked into her lined face and did not know whether to appear sympathetic, especially with Matt seated there looking increasingly unsympathetic. Despite the age on the old woman's face, Sylvia could still discern the angular lines of its youthful days, the sharp nose of obstinacy that was hardly wrinkled at all, and her small blue eyes behind glasses very much like Matt's own. There was an elaborate brooch on her purple sweater. There were brooches of sorts on the sweaters of the other old women at the table too, Sylvia noticed. But the old woman in the purple sweater had a yellow gold bird brooch edged with rhinestones. It was by far the most elaborate of brooches and shone on her breast like a stubborn monument of happier and more prosperous logging days.
When they had entered the church hall, Matt had surveyed the crowd and spoken to Sylvia with a voice bordering on dismay: "Have you noticed that only the old people here look happy? The young people are bored and the kids are crying."
It had only made sense then, after they had made their ten-dollar donation at the counter, and their plates were laden with spaghetti and meatballs, that they should seek after the happy company. Thus they had found themselves at the end of this table of old women and men, and in close proximity to the old woman in a purple sweater.
Now, with her looking into SylviaĖs brown eyes, seeking an answer to her question, Sylvia could only summon a vague smile.
The old woman turned from Sylvia to Matt. "Pass the salt," she said.
Matt passed the salt. "ItĖs not as easy as you think," he said, "selling the trees. We have to take into consideration what environmentalists are talking about."
"Environmentalists don't know what they're talking about," she snapped. "All they do is sit on trees and wave placards."
"That's the exact kind of attitude that has things all tied up in the federal courts," Matt replied. "Loggers say environmentalists don't know what they're talking about. Environmentalists say loggers don't know what they're talking about. Nobody is willing to listen to the other and so the Forest Service is dragged into the whole thing."
"Coffee?" one of the boy scouts asked. The boy scouts were helping the knights serve the coffee and the juice.
Sylvia declined. Matt extended his hot cup.
"Where are you from, sweetheart?" the old woman in the purple sweater asked, wiping pasta sauce off the corners of her pink-lipsticked mouth.
"The Gambia - Africa," Sylvia replied.
"That's a long way from home," she said, peering closer at her. "Married?"
"No," Sylvia replied. She was used to people alluding to marriage, especially those who regarded she and Matt a twosome. She had met Matt in church almost a year ago in a small university town outside Lewiston where she was an exchange student studying anthropology.
"Now, don't you go looking too hard," the other woman said and chuckled. "You know what happens when you look too hard."
Sylvia smiled, but did not hazard an answer. The flyer above the cafeteria read: family life. It read other things too, like charity, unity, fraternity and patriotism - things that the order of the Knights of Columbus stood for. But it was family life that caught Sylvia's eye. She imagined knights clad in armor fighting for family life. "Is your husband a knight too?" she asked.
"No," the old woman replied. "We're Episcopalians."
Sylvia nodded.
"Being an Episcopalian," the old woman continued, looking at Matt who had a somewhat surprised expression on his face, "isn't as bad as worshipping trees. There are some people who worship trees nowadays. Closer to a tree than any Indian has ever been."
Sylvia saw that Matt was letting it all slide but not without effort. Grimness settled into the shadows of his handsome face and its chiseled edges tightened. An old knight in shirtsleeves appeared, red apron over blue jeans, mangy hair, teeth all but gone, and proffered a basket of warm bread with horny hands. The white emblem on his red apron read: "In Service to One. In Service to All."
"Breaking bread under Douglas firs!" the old woman in the purple sweater said, her thin pink lips curled.
It seemed to Sylvia that the old woman was about to spit in her anger, but she only turned to one side of her chair and rummaged through her hanging purse for a piece of tissue into which she coughed severally. Her cough was rough and snotty and it made her chest heave. She returned the tissue into her purse, which Sylvia was now seeing for the first time. The purse had a dull surface of hairline cracks on leather that looked like it might have once been white. The old woman pulled it close to her side, as if to hide it.
"The Forest Service can't offer loggers as much stumpage as they demand," Matt said. "There're just not enough trees." He drank more of his coffee after he finished speaking, despite the fact that he did not seem to like it, and poked halfheartedly at a meatball. His face had turned red and his eyes could not seem to meet Sylvia's.
The entire table was silent, Sylvia suddenly realized, as if they had been listening to the whole conversation between Matt and the old woman in the purple sweater above the din of their own.
Sylvia stared at them and was met with the silent, coarsened looks of old loggers and old loggers'wives. An odd face marked by a jumping saw here and there, some hands missing fingers, some lucky and intact, but all the loggers' hands rough. As rough as some of the poorest farmhands she had seen in the Gambia. She imagined those hands on their women's bodies and suddenly Matt's smooth hands embarrassed her. They were strong hands, naturally enough. They shoveled snow off his drive, weight-lifted and went skiing often. But they were smooth and everybody at the table was looking at them as he played around with a meatball.
It was then Sylvia had to get up and go to the bathroom even though her bladder was empty and unwilling. She was scrubbing her hands under the faucet when she looked up into the mirror. Looking deep into her own eyes, she could envision Matt's own gray eyes. She could imagine those gray eyes narrowing each year as he presented research data to the Forest Service, advocating for less and less trees to be logged. The Forest Service would offer fewer and fewer trees for sale. The loggers, with not enough to live on, would look for work further and further away from home; their women would pawn their brooches and no new purses would be bought for years. Their families had seen happier days, Sylvia knew.
In the Gambia, the loggers were having to do with less and less too. Her elder brother had closed down his sawing mill in Georgetown and moved back home to Bathurst on St. MaryĖs Island. He was now a trader just like their father and their three other brothers were; like most of their Wollof ancestors had been for centuries. He rarely went up the river to Georgetown again; it was a place, it seemed to Sylvia, that her brother wished not to remember.
Sylvia, herself, loved going up the Gambia River. Sometimes she would pass Georgetown and ride the ferry all the way up to the last stop in Basse Santa Su. On each side of the river there were mangrove swamps with pygmy hippos lingering under the shadows and aerial roots. Beyond the mangrove swamps there were forests of cedar and mahogany. But then it had seemed to Sylvia that - with each passing year - the shadows beyond the swamps had became lighter and lighter, and grass-covered river flats appeared where there had been none before. The golden-winged sunbird, which glittered under the sun like the brooch on the old woman in the purple sweater, no longer flew over the ferry that often either. There were times Sylvia would ride the ferry and not see the sunbird's flaring orange and yellow colors at all. Where a river flows, there is abundance, people said in Africa. But her beloved river was changing and perhaps that is why the sunbird had lost the heart for it.
Now Sylvia dried her hands slowly, wondering how Matt was doing in the face of all those old buckers, fallers, choker setters, their old wives and the old woman in a purple sweater. She should have been supporting him, she thought, but then she knew Matt well enough to know he could parry and remain on his horse long enough, his smooth hands notwithstanding. Nonetheless, she drew her lean Wollof figure to its full height, smoothed her black pant suit, and left the bathroom suddenly determined to set her face in favor of Matt."What do you mean that is a peripheral opinion?" an old logger was asking Matt when she arrived at the table.
"Exactly that," Matt said. "Canadian multinationals and their low-wage loggers, or timber from the Amazon isn't the reason our timber industry is bleeding right now. It's our own loggers. They have been logging way beyond sustainable estimates for years. The result is that the Chief of the Forest Service can only approve so much standing timber for sale each year."
"The problem," one old man said, "is that there is no patriotism in American industry nowadays. We built this land, God damn it! We built the roads and the towns. What have the environmentalists done for America?"
"What we need is a man on a horse to stand up to the Chief of the Forest Service and Washington," someone else said. "A politician we can trust." "Pie in the sky," the old woman in the purple sweater said. "The last time we sent someone to the Forest Service they called him a cedar thief."
Matt's eyes met Sylvia's. A slough of despond seemed to wash through them as he left the table for their dessert. Sylvia was slowly sipping her grape juice when the old woman in the purple sweater said: "Tell me about the Gambia."
When Hanno the Carthaginian had passed by the Gambia in 480 BC., he had gazed at the majesty of the Gambia River flowing into the Atlantic and called it "the gateway to Africa." Sunbirds had filled the sky then, Sylvia believed. It was that old country of frontier forest and a crystal clear river that Sylvia liked thinking of.
"The Gambia," she said, "is small, but the Gambia River runs through it. Seven hundred miles of it."
"The Clearwater River joins the Snake River here in Lewiston," the old woman said.
"Yes, I know," Sylvia replied. "I like walking by it every time I come here."
"I'm too old to take long walks by the river now, but I feed the ducks." The old woman sighed and leaned back into her chair. "I love Lewiston. The grass is always green here. I could spend an entire day feeding the ducks, but for the bad smell coming from the mill."
Sylvia nodded. Hydrogen sulfide was the first thing she smelt every time she came to Lewiston . It was the first thing she noticed coming into town, too: a great white ominous plume rising and dissipating slowly over the town from the mill, which manufactured plywood, paper and other wood products. Industrial effluents ran into the river too, so that Sylvia could well imagine it getting darker and darker as it joined the Columbia, which finally dipped into the Pacific. If the Gambia River ever got this dark and the forest air this pervaded with hydrogen sulfide, Sylvia knew that the sunbird would be gone for good. The cuckoo too, not to mention the Tiger Fish and the Vundu Catfish. The pygmy hippos would leave too, crawling as far up the river as they could.
When Sylvia had asked Matt how the people here could stand that rotten-egg smell day in day out, he had shrugged and said they had gotten used to it. Sylvia knew that she would never get used to it and looking into the old womanĖs face, she could see that she had never gotten used to it either. The old woman coughed like she had bronchitis, the kind that hydrogen sulfide could easily bring on or acerbate.
Much later, after they had eaten their chocolate cake and Matt had gone for a second helping of cheese cake, they stood by the small bookstore corner at the end of the church hall, their backs to the table of loggers, their wives and the old woman in the purple sweater.
Matt pulled out a Gregorian Sampler CD from the music stand and studied the Offertory Recordare inscribed in Latin at the back: Record re, Virgo Mater, in consépectu Dei, ut loqu ris pro nobis bona, et ut avértat indigantiúnem suam a nobis.
When he looked up at Sylvia, she smiled. He smiled back, but somewhat sadly Sylvia felt. Then he put a smooth strong finger to the inscription and translated: "Remember, O Virgin Mother, to speak good for us in the presence of the Lord, so that he may turn His indignation away from us."
It was then he told Sylvia of the indulgence he had been granted in Madrid two years ago. He had visited a newly built cathedral there and the Pope had granted an indulgence to all who had visited the cathedral that year. The grimness in his face faded when he spoke about Madrid; it was as if the indulgence had made it possible for him to bear the burden of his conscience and the knowledge of his fellow knights' suffering. The old knight in a red apron passed by them and Sylvia stared at the white emblem again. What Matt did, she thought as she reached for his hand, was in service to one and in service to all.
LILY MABURA says of herself: "My full name is Lily Gacheri Nkanaci Mabura, born 1975 in Nairobi, Kenya. Hometown is in Meru - a small town in Eastern Province on the slopes of Mt. Kenya. I attended the University of Nairobi and graduated with a Bachelor of Science (Chemistry & Biochemistry)in 1999. Writing, however, supplanted the science as the true passion of my life. I joined the MFA in Creative Writing program at the University of Idaho in the Fall." Ms. Mabura has published two children's book and a non-fiction book. This is her first story for The World's Magazine.
© 2003, GENERATOR 21.
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