CROCODILE TEARS
Global Village Mystery #1
Excerpt

They waited hours for Daniel to come home before setting out.

“Don't worry,” Hannah took Nyakal’s hand and swung it as they approached Kam village. “He’ll show up at the feast.”

“I know,” Nyakal agreed bravely. “My boy will want to show off his new anklet.”

The drums changed tempo. Their heads turned, with many others, towards the open space under the encircling mango trees giving onto the broad, brown river flowing smoothly towards the Nile. Nyakal’s hand tightened on Hannah’s as a double row of tall, slim-muscled men entered the dancing space, with her husband Matthew in the lead.

The men sang as they advanced, pounding their feet, of hunting, of victory. Victory over the sharp-toothed crocodile that would no longer attack and eat the goats of the village, the calves, the children, even the adults, while they were fishing, or fetching water. A body much larger than any of them hung heavily from two poles digging deep into their shoulders. Matthew’s hunting co-op would earn a whole cow for this day’s work.

“Only ten more cows and he may buy a new wife.” Nyakal’s tone said she was joking, but Hannah thought she was still trying to distract herself from worry about her son.

The hunters came to rest under the spreading branches of the largest tree, the one opposite the river, just as there was a stir on the side of the fenced village. Through an opening in its reed wall emerged a man Hannah had known for all of her fifty years. Omot Okeo, the village headman, followed by a train of notables, office holders, and the traditional headman’s bodyguard.

Omot was very dignified today in his one-shouldered ceremonial robe as he and his retinue took their places on a raised earth platform to one side of the gathering place. Still, Hannah could see the lines that had bitten deeper and deeper into his face this past year, since he’d lost his only son to the same infamous crocodile, the Croc, whose killing they were here to celebrate today.

The hunters stretched the beast belly-up on the ground and stood over it, some pressing a foot or hand on limb, jaw, or tail to hold it steady. The pulse of the drums mounted. Murmurs of anticipation rose from the gathered people, a suppressed “Ah!,” some scattered cries of triumph. Most of the villagers here had to bathe in the river, or fetch water, many at the change of light, when crocodiles liked to attack. Few were untouched by the pain of their ripping jaws—either to themselves, or to ones they knew or loved.

Matthew raised his knife high, then swung it down in a strong, two-handed pull that ripped the beast open from ribs to groin. Edible portions of the Croc’s latest kills would be salvaged from its stomach now, the time-consuming hide and meat—for those who would eat a man-eater—dealt with later. Crocodiles did not chew, they snapped, dragged their victim under water, snapped some more, and gulped, and whole carcass parts could be found in their stomachs after a kill, a nice large fish swallowed by accident, or a haunch of antelope, if the beast had not secreted all the sections in hidey holes along the riverbank to age like limburger cheese.

The Croc had eaten recently. Its belly was rounded, displaying promising lumps and bumps. Hannah hoped it would not be someone’s pet goat or calf, or even a Nuer male’s beloved namesake ox, a decorative tassel hanging from his ear. But, no, she hadn’t heard that any were missing.

Matthew sliced what had to be stomach lining. The slick viscera around the cut rippled. Hannah braced herself for the sight of a small hoof or the waxy white lip of a calf.

What emerged was a toe, a set of toes, dark human toes, attached to a dark human leg, too small to be adult.

All motion stopped. In Hannah, around Hannah.

She lost her grip on her friend’s hand. She grabbed after it, but Nyakal’s fingers were digging, now, hard and cold, into her arm. Then they ripped away.

Nyakal fell to her knees and keened her son’s name.

∆∆∆

The next morning, Hannah slumped, exhausted, at the old grey metal desk some government had donated to the hospital in Gambela town, shards of memory clashing in her head.

The scrape of tools—hoes, digging sticks, even shells, Nyakal’s, Hannah’s, a few of the family’s female relatives’. The smell of women’s sweat as they took turns with the digging hoes that would have been better used planting seeds to grow food for people to eat.

The touch of Daniel’s small hand on her knee when he’d looked up at her, telling her a story from his day.

The smell of the freshly dug earth as it piled higher and higher around the top of the pit, closing in around them when they took their turns in the deepening hole, until Hannah, who loved the earth and the smell of the earth, thought she might choke. And finally, the small, steep-sided burial pit where it should be, to the left of the entrance to Nyakal’s house, so her son would be near her always. Nyakal tucking a piece of precious cloth around the small limbs, so heartbreakingly inconsequential as she placed them at the bottom of the pit when they were done. One still bore the new anklet that had so surely identified him.

Spirit Mother Hannah, he’d called her, his way of saying godmother.

Hannah was used to long hours of labor in the late hours of the night, but usually she hoped, from it, for a new life, not a young one laid to permanent rest. This kind of thing, Hannah admitted unwillingly to herself, might just be getting harder with every passing year.

Loud voices brought her back to the present. They came through the archway from the waiting room. Male, combative, with a whuff in them like water buffalo pawing the ground. Hannah pressed a hand to her forehead. Not this morning, please. No raised voices. No posturing male chests thrusting towards each other, thumping together, until weapons were drawn and blood was shed. Not after last night.

“Could you wait here a moment, please, Yay?” she asked the young woman walking up to her, straight and centered, a pencil and pen clipped neatly into the breast pocket of her white lab coat, a sheaf of papers in her hand. “I’ll be right back.”

She marched directly up to the handful of men bristling at each other in the center of the reception-room floor. All dark as ebony: Nilotic. The three on one side were somewhat taller and thinner: from the Nuer branch of the Nilotic ethnic tree. The three on the other side slightly denser, more compact: from the Anuak branch. All flew battle flags of torn cloth from head or limb, stained with brighter or darker red. One hothead on each side, and two “seconds” trying to calm each hothead down, the time-tested Nilotic formula for keeping face-saving confrontation from turning fatal.

She recognized Simon Gatbel, Matthew’s lieutenant in the Nuer hunting co-operative, and her shoulders relaxed a notch. She’d worked closely with him at a nearby United Nations camp for refugees from the Sudan. Now, he was trying to talk down a fellow co-op member who was grabbing for one of the Anuaks, shouting, “The boy’s legs were found in your village—”

“You brought them there!” yelled back the young Anuak man Hannah recognized as one of Omot’s bodyguards. “In a—”

“In a crocodile we killed on your behalf!” returned the co-op member, lunging against Gatbel’s restraining arm.

It was only mischance, it seemed, that brought these two parties, who had tangled after the aborted feast at Kam the night before, to the clinic at the same time this morning to have their wounds treated. Still, Hannah shivered, afraid she’d be hearing these phrases, or phrases like them, for days now, or weeks, or months. Until it boiled over into general violence, and the central government would have an excuse to send in “peacekeeping” forces which would be only too glad to break a few heads, Nuer and Anuak alike.

It was one of Hannah’s worst nightmares. She’d been so heartened when Omot’s Anuak village trusted Matthew’s Nuer hunting co-op to kill its marauding crocodile, then delighted when the co-op found and killed the beast. But now, on top of her personal devastation at her godson Daniel’s—it was all falling apart into this.

Ignoring Gatbel to avoid charges of favoritism, Hannah clapped her hands sharply, then stood, hands on hips, waiting for them to turn to her. “My sons, my sons,” she chided in both languages, the long-suffering mother, maybe even grandmother, she could, by age, be to most of them. Now that she was closer, she could see that she had, in fact, delivered two of them. “How is your mother?” she asked a third, strategically reminding him of the time she had nursed that woman through a bad case of malaria.

He had to reply politely, which lead to a discussion of other relations and female connections, and Hannah steered towards well-known stories of times when they had kept peace between men and villages. Soon, wisdom was aligned with voices of the mothers and the seconds, and the two combative groups had retired to opposite corners of the waiting room.

As she turned to leave, one of the young men said, “Maar, my mother, you are good with the talking for peace. Maybe you should become an earth priest.” This was good for a laugh because, of course, earth priests, sometimes erroneously called leopard skin chiefs because of the leopard skins they wore across one shoulder, were always Nuer and always men.

“Humph!” retorted Hannah. “As far as I can see, those men do very hard work, trying to talk good sense into the heads of young men such as you, and get very little for their trouble except more trouble!” Since it was not far from the truth, her pronouncement sobered them up a bit. Gatbel, however, looked thoughtful, “Yes, I think it would be a good thing, in these times, to have some who could help with problems between different groups, like Nuer and Anuak, and maybe highlander, too.”

Hannah regarded him seriously. “Yes. I think that would be a very good idea. Maybe that is what we need in our government.”

And that really got them laughing.

Hannah walked away with a frown between her eyebrows. She wanted to speak to Simon Gatbel about exactly what the co-op had seen on the crocodile hunt. There’d been something about Daniel’s legs, something other than the anklet. But this was not the time.

In the open archway going back to her office she nearly ran into a man, a large and solid man. He had a hat, the kind that seemed joined to his head by the toil of travel in these parts. As she approached the doorway, he stepped forward and tipped the hat. “Excuse me, ma’am, if you don’t mind.” When she stopped and turned her attention to him, he added, “That was very nicely done.”

Hannah didn’t have time to spend listening to people tell her what a great job she was doing. She had other, more important, things to do. Like her job. “That?” She looked back over her shoulder, at the space no longer boiling with quarreling men. “Oh. That wasn’t me. That was Gatbel.”

“Gatbel?” The man leaned closer as he turned to fall into step with her, ignoring the receptionist poised to greet visitors in plain sight across the waiting room.

Hannah stopped and turned to face him, which placed her right in his face. He had enough grace to pull back. Barely. “Gatbel,” she repeated slowly. “A friend of mine. The tall, skinny one.”

The man snorfled, then laughed, an outright laugh. “I get it.” He sobered a bit. “He must be the tall, skinny Nuer guy who was smoothing everyone’s feathers, along with you.”

Okay, so he could tell the tall, thin Nilotics, even the Nuers, apart. And he was observant. Even on his first time in a new setting—because she knew she had never seen this man here, on her turf, before.

“At any rate,” said the man, replacing the hat that looked as if it’d been run over by a truck, “you seem like someone who can get things done around here. I’m wondering if you can help me with this.” He pulled a piece of paper from a pocket of pants so worn and ingrained with work stains that Hannah couldn’t tell if they’d started as jeans or tropical khakis or what, ironed it a bit between his palm and the ball of his thumb, handed it to her and watched as she read.

“But, this is George’s,” exclaimed Hannah after a moment, “what George usually brings us, down from Addis, in his truck!”

The man saluted. “Yes, ma’am. Consider me George for today. He got tied up with something else, and I was coming on down here, in my truck, and said why didn’t I bring along the stuff he was going to bring, so here I am, and here it is.” He gestured towards the front of the hospital. “I’m wondering what to do with it.”

“George is okay? He isn’t sick?”

The large man shook his head. Strapping, Hannah thought, strapping was the word for him, even though he wasn’t young. He must be about—well, just about Hannah’s age! Somehow, the thought made her irritable. “No, ma’am, he is not. George is just fine. Sends his greetings to everyone here. He just got stuck in some business talks in Addis, asked if I could bring this stuff down for him, deliver it to folks like he usually does.” The man pushed the object he persisted in treating like a hat back onto his head. “Seems he did that for quite a few folks.”

“He did.” This newcomer with his lazy voice couldn’t begin to understand. There were a lot of nonprofits and social services that would be paying steep fees for trucking if George Makaris didn’t carry their supplies for free or little more. Descended from an original Greek trader who’d settled in Gambela even before it was part of Ethiopia, the Makaris family now incorporated most ethnic strains of the area, and was a leading community light. Hannah took a deep breath and a hold on her irritation. “You’re a friend of George’s.”

The man nodded his head. “I am.”

That would do. For now, at least. Hannah extended her hand. “I’m Hannah Craig, outreach training for village birth attendants. I can—”

“Pleasure to meet you, Hannah Craig.” He enfolded her hand in his. Enfolded! Hannah did not often have a man enfold any part of her. For a moment it stopped her cold. “And your name is?”

“Oh. Wyatt.” It came out as one syrupy syllable. “Wyatt LeGrand. But you know what they called me as a kid.” His eyes twinkled irresistibly down at her, daring her to know.

“What country were you raised in?”

“The good, old-fashioned, US of A.”

Wyatt, Wyatt Earp, Earp . . .  Hannah felt a girlish giggle rise in her chest, the kind she hadn’t felt since she was, well, a girl. She brushed her nose vigorously to subdue it, coughed, and chortled the only possible answer. “Burp.”

He let her hand go and laughed. “Got it in one.”

Hannah told him how to drive around to the unloading area. Then she stopped by the village birth attendants' desk, saw that Yay was making good progress on drawing up their work calendar for the week, answered a couple of questions, and left her to it. She felt a need, for some reason, to keep a close eye on this man.

∆∆∆  CHAPTER TWO  ∆∆∆

“Why not go yourself?” asked Becca McKay with great daring, then wished she hadn’t. Her mother, for a fleeting moment, looked as close to unsure as Becca had ever seen her. Then her lips tightened. “It is better for you to go.”

Which was not, Becca thought, really an answer at all.

“She will respond better to you,” her mother Mariam affirmed, as if to herself.

And there it was again, one of those cracks in her mother’s certainty that Becca was beginning to see more and more as she got older, whether she wanted to or not.

“Because…?”

“Honestly, Rebecca. Can’t you see? You’re younger, more . . . appealing.”

Becca scowled at herself in the mirror as her mother stood behind her fluffing her unmanageable hair. That was her, Miss Rebecca Appealing McKay. “I’m too young! How come you suddenly think I can travel by myself? To Africa?!” She heard her voice rise to a squeak on that last, terrifying, word. “You always said it was the worst place in the world!”

She should have played dumb. She should have flunked all her courses. Then she wouldn’t be in this neverland where her teachers didn’t know what to do with her, and her parents didn’t know what to do with her, and she didn’t know what to do with herself.

“At your age, I was married and pregnant with you!” said her mother, then clamped her mouth shut in that way she did when she’d said more than she meant to. More quietly, as if letting an inside thought out, she offered, “There’s no history between you. You’ll break through her armor.”

Looking at their side-by side reflections, Becca had a fleeting, almost dreamlike, memory of a woman taller and more certain, it seemed, than her mother and herself put together. She heard herself say something like, “Hah!,” swiftly swallowed.

The hairbrush caught in her hair, pulling her head, too sharply, to one side.

∆∆∆

At first Hannah was worried her sore muscles would make it hard to work, and, okay, to show off a little for the newcomer, but physical labor turned out to be just the kick-start her body needed. She liked the way the Burp man subtly checked out whether the first box was a strain for her, then accepted her help carrying the others in a rhythmic teamwork from the large, dinged-up truck bed to the  small, dinged-up storage room. If something was too heavy, she left it for him, and he carried it without saying anything. If something was too heavy for him, they counted to three and lifted it together. She liked that, too.

“So,” he asked, after a time, “tell me more about what you’re doing here. Some kind of training for birth helpers?”

“Yea—unh.” Hannah’s smile became a grimace as she tried to lift the next carton. LeGrand grabbed the other end, and they began a crab-walk towards the storeroom. “We train women in small villages to help neighbors with problems of pregnancy, birth, infancy. I designed it,” she said, then felt she was bragging. “An essential part is that I train an Ethiopian to replace me.”

LeGrand still looked like he wanted to hear more.

“You see, Ethiopia doesn’t allow dual citizenship, and I promised my parents I’d keep the American citizenship I have from them. But I was born here—”

“Really?” He stopped in the doorway to contemplate her.

“Really. Quite a while ago, of course. At Awara, when it was a mission station.” Hannah pointed south with her tongue, as the Anuak did. “Before the missionaries were—” Despite herself, her eyes fell. “—expelled.” Why was she telling this man she’d barely met all these things? She gave him a nod to tell him to keep moving. “And because of some fine print somewhere, that lets me hold a job here. As long as no Ethiopian is trained for it yet.” She grunted as they lowered the carton to the storeroom floor. “Especially if I’m training Ethiopians to replace me. And especially if I’ve raised the money for the program, like in the US.” She shrugged. “So I—”

“Keep training yourself out of a job.”

Hannah regarded him for a moment, then grinned crookedly. “Got it in one.”

Still he stood looking at her as if bemused. “And you come back every—?”

“I live here. With a bit of scrambling now and then, when the government notices I’m still around. But there’s such a need for programs and trainers . . .” She shrugged and let her hands fall to her sides with a slap. “They don’t try too hard to chase me away. I return to the increasingly bewildering USA every few years to renew my passport and raise money for my bottomless Ethiopian causes.” She sighed; now she did feel tired.

“Which are . . . ?” He sat on a stack of cartons, dragged an arm across his forehead and offered her a bottle of water he must have produced from the truck. Blessed man, blessed, blessed water. Hannah took a deep swig.

“Safer pregnancy and delivery, newborn and well baby care.”

The man nodded to himself, half-smiling. “That suits you, Ms. Hannah Craig, it suits you very well.”

Unreasonably embarrassed, Hannah shifted the spotlight. “And you?” What did this man do, how had he happened to drop out of the sky into her well-ordered li—hospital?

“Oh, this and that.”  He offered her a last chance at the water bottle, then closed it off and rose. “The government’s been kind enough to let me try out some ideas here that I’ve been working on for some time.”

Knowing the predilections as she did of the government for grandiose but ungrounded schemes, this didn’t bode well. “What kind of ideas?”

“Farming.”

Hannah was on her feet now, too, having jumped there. “Farming! Don’t tell me you’re involved in those agribusiness schemes that are destroying—”

The man was holding up—dared to hold up—both palms in a shushing gesture. “No, it’s not quite like that.”

“It is quite like that! The Anuak farmers have been doing fine for centuries, using the flood waters of the Baro intelligently, respectfully, getting two, even three harvests a year by hand tilling, supporting the maximum people the land can sustain without damage, and now—!”

“Now the government is leasing acreage the size of some US states to foreign firms to rape and pillage as they will.”

It was a gross oversimplification of what was going on here in the backyard of Gambela, but it caught the gist of it, and took the wind out of Hannah’s sails.

The man gestured as if displaying the sweep of the Baro’s banks to her outside the building. The scent of his sweat filled the room, aggravating Hannah’s irritation. “You want them to stay here forever, hunkering in the mud over a few precious plants of millet or maize, starving every few years?”

Through Hannah’s blaze of anger, it registered that he knew the mode of agriculture, knew her people grew maize, not corn. That probably made it worse, his judgement.

“You know they'll all be dead in a few decades,” he said as a flat fact, any humor in his face gone. “No matter what we do.” He turned to settle the last carton.

Hannah felt as she had once, working too late in a field, too close to a lightning storm. These were her people he was dismissing, her hometown, the friends of her youth, who had played in the mud of the river with her, squishy between their toes. She tore off the headscarf that was probably all that was keeping her hair from standing on end and slapped it against her thigh. “And you could be dead by tomorrow.”

He draped an arm across the cartons they had stacked and watched her storm out. “That I could, Ms. Hannah Craig, that I could.”

∆∆∆