Missionaries

“color”: a newly orphaned child wailing and looking around helplessly for her parents, the green pickup truck used to bring the wounded to the hospital, the shattered glass and ruined fruit stalls, businesses, livelihoods, lives. Omar’s photos will help . . . not just the ones we’ll use, but Omar’s always good at taking a few purely documentary shots so we can run down mundane details that don’t do much in a photo but pop in a story, like the elderly Pashtun man in the last bombing, who with blood running down his arms held his coat over the corpse of a woman to protect her modesty. The key is finding a detail that might make someone, some reader looking over the morning paper, drinking coffee, eating a hard-boiled egg, about to rush to work, to make that person stop, and care. It’s difficult, in part because these days I find it hard to get those details to even make me care. When I first came here, I was full of rage at the indifference most people back home showed to the deaths of Afghans. All these human beings, suffering, dying, and fighting with unbelievable courage to live in this brutal country, courage that can inspire you for at least a few years. It’s a feeling I doubt I’ll ever get back. These days the thought will sometimes run through my head as I lie in bed, trying to sleep: I am broken, I am broken, and I do not know how I will ever fix this hole I’ve carved into my soul.

And then I hear the much larger sound of the second bomb.

3

ABEL 1999

Abelito was in the boat with his father when they came. “Quick!” Father said. He pushed Abelito under the seat and put rags and netting over his body, the stench of stale river water at the bottom of the boat filling Abelito’s nose. Parts of his body poked out from underneath the seat. Surely, no one could fail to see him there. But Father made a quick circle of protection with his index and middle finger, sealed it with the sign of the cross, and Abelito became invisible. The guerrilla called out to Father and, as before, as always, he obeyed.

“Everyone must come,” they said. “For the justice of the people.”

Someone laughed. It was a cruel laugh. Or a nervous laugh. Or both.

Father said nothing, but Abelito felt the boards in the boat shift, and then Father pulled the boat ashore, and he heard the guerrillero saying, “Don’t bother to tie it off.”

Abelito felt taps on the wood of the boat. His father’s knuckles, rapping four times. “I love you,” his father’s knuckles were saying. Stale air filled Abelito’s lungs, the sound of his own heart filled his ears, an enormous sound, as if his heart had grown bigger and stronger to protest his cowardice. The boat shifted again as Father released it, and the current of the river pulled and tugged at the boat until it released the shore. Abelito felt himself moving downstream, toward all the places his grandfather had told him about, but where he no longer wanted to go.

Justice, the guerrillero had said. Abelito knew that meant an execution, but who? No one would have dared speak about Franklin—to speak of evil was to invite more. The guerrilla only knew that those paramilitary sons of bitches in this paramilitary town had murdered the Carpenter, a good and kind man, who always took pity on the orphans whose parents he had killed. Worse, they had killed his pregnant lover, which is not just a crime against man, and not just a betrayal of the revolution, but a sin against God.

I have spent far too much time wondering if there was anything Abelito could have done to save his family. These are stupid thoughts. The most he could have done was die with them, but he didn’t have the courage for that.

Instead Abelito, sick with worry, got up and piloted the boat to Cunaviche. The town was filled with scared and angry people. A man in a torn shirt and dried blood spattered around his left eye shouted at a crowd of women with their heads down. Two old indios who Abelito recognized from the town next to his sat in the street, heavy sacks plumped beside them in the dirt, food and pans and tools spilling out from the top. There were people carrying bundles wrapped up in sheets, people with household items thrown this way and that in carts, people with hunted looks, milling about, people who wanted to run but did not know where to go, carrying their lives on their backs or dragging them behind like pack animals. Abelito ran to the church, but outside of the church was only more chaos, more hunted people, more anger.

“Animals!” a woman shouted. He heard the sound of wailing. The sky above was pure blue, mocking the earth below. Abelito pushed his way in through the doors. Inside were more people, more shouting, a crowd bunched in a rough circle near the altar, under the Holy Christ. Abelito pushed forward, knowing nothing else to do, nowhere else to go. As he approached, the eyes of the Holy Christ followed him and only him, ignoring all the crowd, and the wound in the side of the Holy Christ seemed no longer to gape and devour, but to scream along with the people in the street. Abelito pushed to the front of the rough circle of men and women, and at first did not understand what he saw. An old woman, on her hands and knees, scrubbing the floor.

“Father Eustacio was playing a stupid game,” a man said. “And he lost.”

She was cleaning up some liquid spilled across the floor of the church. It was only Abelito’s stupidity, his childishness despite everything, despite every reason to be a man, that did not allow him to see what the liquid was, spattered and oozing across the