“This is the back route. It’s quicker.”
“If we make it,” I said, bracing my hands against the dash.
Dirt ground against the undercarriage, then we topped the hill, heading for the mountains. I didn’t speak. Past Seguela the air grew heavy—more moist or stagnant, as if a thunderstorm threatened, although the skies were clear. Breathing the weighted vapor repulsed me. I wanted our bouncy trip to end. Devoe’s casual dismissal of the workers nauseated me, or maybe it was a persisting effect from the long sea voyage. I shut my eyes and pictured the serene St. Sebastion’s cathedral in Josephine Bay in the afternoon, where the stained glass art glowed and the Chesapeake glittered outside the heavy, wooden doors.
At age seven I saw the cathedral for the first time. My father gave me canned food to put in the basement: creamed corn, tomato soup, mushrooms, asparagus. He stored them there for emergencies. There was a little survivalist in him. Instead, I put the cans in my wagon and pulled it to the Sisters of Hope shelter next to St. Sebastion’s. It took most the afternoon, clicking wagon wheels over concrete sidewalk seams to reach the shelter. Sweat ran down my face.
An elderly nun, her knuckles painfully large, dampened her habit’s sleeve in a fountain and bathed my forehead. I remember the cloth’s smooth coolness; how camomile followed her. She took me into the cathedral, showed me the heavy leaded glass, the wall of martyrs, sun shining through beatified faces. I had never been inside a church, and I wondered if God lived there, but I didn’t see him, only mellow sunlight transformed in colored glass. The nun said, “They were God’s tools. The spirit filled them like empty vessels, and they did God’s work.” She held her hands clasped at her chest.
“My family is atheist.” I didn’t even know what it meant then. “But I want to give these cans to the poor.”
She said, “You’re an absolute saint, child. An absolute saint.” My wagon floated on the way home. I went back often afterwards to do chores for the nuns, and when I wasn’t busy, I crawled beneath the pews, searched the vestibule, peeked in the Father’s private study for some sign of God, but I never found him. I prayed for God to fill me, to make me his tool, but my folded hands were empty when I opened them, and even as a little kid, I thought speaking words to a silent room was ridiculous. The saints were real, though. The devout turned them into paintings and leaded windows.
I saw nothing so moving again until at twenty I visited the Vatican’s library. Morning light pierced the high reaches where motes swirled like tiny angels. Intricately illuminated texts, hundreds of years old, lay open in heavy glass cases. And once again, saints and martyrs stared out, their heads shrouded in halos, their images curiously separate from the background scenes, as if they didn’t belong to the landscapes. These men and women gave all they had to their faith. They persevered in service, a greater good than their own. I rested my fingers on the glass, and, before I left, burned a votive candle for them. “Hail Mary,” I said, “full of grace,” but I didn’t know the rest. To be full of grace. To be utterly outward turned. To do good. It’s corny sounding, I know, but it’s the highest calling. I didn’t believe in God—I saw no evidence for the supernatural—but I believed in good.
We arrived at the mining headquarters at sunset. Sun burnished hilltops, while shadows filled the valleys. The foreman’s shed, an unpainted two-story building with plastic sheets for windows leaned against a sandy bluff. Below, huge pits tore into the grass and brush. Sterile dirt piles, plantless and cut through with erosion channels, surrounded each pit. Devoe parked our car beside one, the sloped sides falling twenty feet down to a lumpy and muddy bottom that reached a hundred yards to the other edge. Dirt crumbled under my shoes, so I backed away.
I couldn’t see the latrines, but I could smell them. My nose wrinkled as I pulled my duffle bag from the car.
Devoe shouted a French phrase at workers below. Some looked up, but none waved. I hadn’t noticed them at first; they were dirt colored, and moved slowly, like animate rocks, bent over, digging with picks, dumping pebbly soil into bags beside them. A worker—I couldn’t tell the age or sex—slung a bag over a shoulder and climbed toward us, one hand pressed against the ground for support.
“They take the ore to the stream to wash it,” said Devoe. “Shaker boxes separate worthless material from the diamonds. Maybe we find a couple thousand carats a year. Last year the company made 73 million francs from this pit… um… about $120,000 American.”
The thin-limbed worker pushed toward the top, every step up resulting in a half-step slide back. A yard from the edge, the worker looked at us; a girl, maybe twelve or thirteen years old. I couldn’t tell; she was boy-slender but tall. Mud dappled her face, and her eyes looked tired. Very wide, and tired, as if she needed to sleep for a year.
Devoe stood back, his arms crossed on his chest. “The biggest diamond we found last year was just a half carat, not gem quality.”
I offered a hand to help her up. She stared at it for a long time, not moving, a hand jammed into the dirt, the other clenched around the bag’s top. Then she reached for me. Her fingers were callused and hard-ridged, almost stone themselves. “Merci,” she said.
“Be careful of that one, Bailey. She thinks she’s a shaman.” Devoe winked at her although she had looked away from him.
The bag may have weighed more than she did. She walked around the car to a path along the bluff’s base. A stream burbled in the background below a constant rattling. Later I found out these were Devoe’s fourteen shaker boxes, three feet wide and eight feet long. Water poured in one end where the workers dumped their bags. Old men rocked the boxes from side to side, washing away dirt and separating the sand from the occasional diamond, shiny chips that looked like quartz or hazy glass.
“One day we’ll find a big diamond, and I’ll be quit of this place,” said Devoe. He took a folding table from the car’s trunk and set it on the uneven ground. Then he tore the top from a box in his car. Batteries filled it. “I make more selling these than my salary.”
“Batteries?”
“Twenty kilometers to Seguela from here, and no other manager thinks to bring back batteries. These people all have a radio or a tape player or those little hand held video games. They don’t mind my markup.” He grinned his brown smile. I wondered when he’d last seen a dentist.
The girl came back, her bag empty, and trudged past Devoe as if he weren’t there.
“Her name is Seydou. Hey, witch doctor Seydou. Show the foreigner your scars, eh?”
She turned at the pit’s top and spat French and a dialect I didn’t recognize at him. He lifted his hands, palms up, eyes wide and mock-innocent, as she slid down the slope toward the other workers filling their bags. In the pit a child set torches in cast iron sleeves on the ground, igniting each with a lighter he wore around his neck.
“She’s beautiful, no? If you are lucky, she will show you tribal marks. They’re on her backside. I’ve seen them more than once. Yes I have, I’ve seen them.” He licked his lips and rolled his eyes.
By the time I thought to take pictures, darkness had risen. Torches flickered in the pit, belching gasoline odors. Shadows moved: workers, the new shift, digging, filling bags, toting them one by one to the stream for washing. Beyond, in the hills, other lights pulsed sluggishly. Devoe told me the company ran fifty-six pits like the one at our feet. Silent blacks formed a line ending at his table. Men, women, children. Many children, underfed, muddy clothes. I wondered how they afforded radios. Most wore the same outfits: canvas shorts, short sleeved T-shirts, all mud-stained. Nothing like the colorful prints the natives displayed on the train. Women wore scarves tied over their hair, or braided it into a dozen tight strings. They slid small papers across the table to him, then he counted out batteries, sometimes clinking them together like dice. Mentally, I took notes.