Ted Dekker - Outlaw

The food wasn’t me. The stench wasn’t me. The dress, the language, the insects, the snake-infested bushes calling to my bladder…none of these were even remotely me.

I can’t adequately describe the hollowness I felt as I stood there watching Lela. I can still see it all: the rough-hewn poles, the mounds of ash in the fire pit, the bare ground showing beneath the straw, the dirty sparseness of the hut. I should have been grateful for the incredible risk she had taken in saving me.

I should have hugged her and danced around the fire in celebration. But all I wanted to do was curl up in a gunnysack and let sleep shut down my mind.

The only reprieve from my misery was Lela’s announcement that I was forbidden to have contact with any man but Wilam, and then only if and when he called.

My memory of the next week among the Impirum tribe of the Tulim is still somewhat clouded. I managed to survive, but my mind was under a savage and alien sea, struggling to rise out of deep hopelessness, thinking always that there had to be a way home but knowing all the while that there was not. The strange sights and sounds pummeled me into a kind of oblivion that left me too stupid to think properly and too numb to cry. I slowly began to shed the layers of my own identity.

I was terrified of going outside where every eye would turn to me, but I had no choice when needing to relieve myself. I cannot tell you how disagreeable each experience proved to be. Lela suggested that I bathe in the nearby creek, and I needed to wash, but after trudging down to that creek I took one look at the muddy, infested water and demanded we go back to the hut. The children who’d discovered us leaving the village found my behavior amusing. I only found it mortifying.

The village was relatively clean, in part because of the Tulim’s pervasive boardwalks built among their small garden plots. When the pigs outgrew their place as pets, they were tied up in small corrals outside the village. Still, there is no way to keep pigs clean. Their nature is to root in soft soil and mud. The children treated them like babies and the adults chased them from the gardens with sticks.

I could not eat anything but plain sago cakes and the vegetables from their gardens, which consisted mostly of squash. Lela preferred sago mixed with meats, but the moment I saw the makeup of their protein, I blanched. She took great pleasure in making a meal with cooked sago worms, baked insects, cooked lizards, snakes, rodents of all kinds—anything that squirmed, crawled or flew, none of which seemed remotely edible to me.

No more was said of the stranger, this evil spirit who’d apparently facilitated our release.

I spent most of the days thinking of Stephen and my home in Georgia. Strange thoughts crisscrossed my mind, daydreams of the simplest pleasures. What I would have done for one glass of milk or one bite of an oatmeal cookie. How far I would have walked for one pair of clean underwear. In those dreams I would be a queen and Stephen would be at my side. Our servants would bring us a tray of cookies and milk, and we would relish each bite as the court watched. Then we would throw a party with milk and cookies for all.

At night I listened to the distant sound of chanting as the natives beat on hollowed carvings skinned with crocodile hide. Then Lela would lie beside me in the dark and stroke my long hair, telling me not to be afraid because it would all be nice. Soon we would both make babies.

But I had a hard enough time getting used to their nakedness, much less any thought of making babies. Even after living among so many men bared for all to see, I found the sight unnatural.

It all amounted to me staying in the hut, alone. More than once I dreamed of wandering out into the jungle at night, knowing that I wouldn’t last until morning. Perhaps I was better off dead.

My entire existence was consumed with only I . I this, I that, I the other. Not once did I truly think of them . In the world of I, they hardly existed except as savages who were hardly human. I was wam to them and they were all wam to me. The only exception was Lela, but she was only a teenager who couldn’t possibly understand my world. Truly I was awash in self-pity.

And then, a little more than a week after I was put under the protection of Wilam, my world began to change.

I had taken to sleeping late and Lela usually let me sleep, using a stick to ward off any curious onlookers who might want to poke their heads in and take a look at the white wam. She’d become a woman of status in her own right, being the keeper of me, a position she held with great pride and delight despite having to put up with my melancholy.

On this morning, however, she shook me awake, chattering excitedly about bathing in the river. Not just any river, but the Konda, which fed into the Tulim valley two miles upstream. Lela had received permission from Wilam to take me so that I could bathe.

“Bathe?”

“You must go to clean water and make this smell goes away.”

I sat up, horrified. “Smell?”

“The people say this smell, miss.” She indicated my clothes.

I sniffed at my underarm. Musty, yes, but not half as smelly as the Tulim, at least from my perspective. But what about from their perspective?

I held out my arm. “I smell?”

Lela took a polite whiff and covered her small nose. “This skin very bad smell, miss.”

“Just today or always?”

“Always, this white skin very smelly. You must clean.”

I had not thought about what the world looked or smelled or tasted like from the Tulim’s perspective. But the very idea that I was walking around smelling like a cesspool was enough to offend my sensibilities even in my state of despondency.

Their distaste of me extended to the color of my skin. And my long straight hair. And the fact that I wore dirty clothes. And my strange language. In Georgia I was considered a beautiful woman; in that jungle I was hardly more than a pig.

Unless I could give them a child.

“Is it safe?”

“It is very safe, miss.”

Half an hour later we were making our way through the village with Momos, my lanky, broken-toothed guard.

At first sight of me, the children came running, whooping and hollering their delight. The wam is coming, the wam is coming ! By the time we skirted the grassy slopes with the lone tree under which Lela and I had been set free, no fewer than twenty children were in tow. I tried to tell Lela to send them back, knowing that they wouldn’t be bashful about watching me bathe, but she only shrugged.

“No, miss. This children not go away.”

Momos stayed at my right heel, also ignoring the children. I looked back at him and he offered me a crooked grin. Despite his earlier frustration over my refusal to urinate as instructed, Momos seemed somewhat enchanted with his charge.

We walked on like that, Lela and I abreast, with Momos a step behind to my right, followed by twenty chattering children who hushed and smiled wide the moment I glanced back.

A flock of white cockatoos took flight overhead, eliciting a few cries of delight from several of the children, who mimicked their calls with remarkable precision. Others chimed in with lower calls and within seconds, like a pipe organ, they were performing an ethereal yet melodic tune in perfect harmony.

When I looked back, I saw that the girl who led them with her high-pitched call was hardly more than three feet tall, idly dragging a thin branch behind her as she hooted with pursed lips.

The moment she saw that I was watching her, she broke off her birdcall and offered me a face-splitting, toothless smile. I could not look at such an innocent vision and not return a simple smile.

When I turned and trudged on up the path, the children broke out in a chorus of excited voices. Clearly my smile had made an impression.