by Robin Winter
"It's not witch killing. Exorcism." Wilton looked up.
"Can I go?" Gilman hadn't heard anything this entertaining for weeks.
Her friend was quiet for a moment. "An embarrassing question, Gilman. Aren't you on duty at the clinic?"
"Sister threw me out. Said I needed to take a break or she'd break something for me. Told me to get lost. Go find you and have fun. How better than by accompanying you to perdition or wherever you're headed?"
"You and Christopher know there are no witches or spirits really. These things are imagined by people who are afraid and believe that something unnatural brings them bad luck."
Christopher's fine mouth made an uneasy line, but he nodded to Gilman. "It would be better if you went," he said. "You are more powerful than I."
"Christopher," Wilton said. "You're a Christian. You don't believe in evil spirits. God and Christ defend you every step you take."
"Yes, Professor," he said. He backed up and said with dignity, "I will guard your vehicle while you are in the village."
"But there are demons in the Bible." Gilman couldn't resist.
Christopher gave her a look of grave appreciation as if she'd spoken for him.
"The Bible isn't a literal document as you well know." Wilton's gaze went down to the Bible in her hands.
"I suppose you can come, Gilman. My mummery frees people to walk unafraid. Where there's fear, superstition follows, and after that comes cruelty and men pretending to control juju. Your asking is a blessing because I need to repair the car I drove here. You still have your Jeep, don't you? Does it run? No one will commandeer it if we have you along. Doctors are sacred."
Nearly two hours later they drove a distance down a side trail away from the main road and parked the Jeep hidden behind a stand of bamboo. Christopher settled himself in the driver's seat and Gilman could tell he'd spend the time of their absence imagining driving the car. She looked back before they turned into the bush, but he still watched them, sitting erect and proper, his red shirt like a banner against the fine-leaved greenery.
"Do you know something about Sandy that I don't?" Wilton said.
She wasn't looking at Gilman as they walked, her eyes searching the path ahead of them. The question caught Gilman by surprise. She felt oddly guilty.
"What kind of thing?" Gilman said.
"Personal." Wilton glanced at her, black eyes intent. "Possibly something in your line—medical."
"Still not sure what you mean."
"Nor am I," Wilton said. "But I don't know what's important and what's not. I need to know everything that I can, in case."
"You have me puzzled," Gilman said, but she wasn't. She remembered a late night, drunk, when she'd been talking about sex with Sandy. Was that covered by medical confidentiality? A technicality? Did Sandy herself even remember? They'd been shit-faced that night. She shrugged.
"Think on it," Wilton said. "Everything's important."
Gilman knew Wilton's ways. She'd pretend to have forgotten this for a while, counting on Gilman's conscience or curiosity to break the secret. Well one thing Wilton still didn't get was that Gilman had no conscience, did she? Curiosity aplenty, medical ethics, but no conscience, she assured herself. She'd never tell secrets on Sandy.
A good fifteen-minute walk farther on a small path led them into a palm-shaded village, with thatched homes walled with red mud. Oil palms stood casting their fretted shadows across the neatly swept open areas of the village and in moments a spill of children chattering and wide-eyed clustered about the two guests. It felt like the old days to Gilman when she'd gone out to bring mobile clinic service to some of the more remote villages. Here you could believe the war a story or rumor, nothing real.
The children's cool brown skins brushed her when they leaned in unafraid. Wilton must know these people, or Gilman's pale skin and blonde hair would have frightened all. In a moment an old man in his one-shouldered wrap of bronze-and-blue print cotton approached them.
Greetings and the touching of hands, then Wilton perched on an offered stool. More people. A woman brought them a calabash of water. Gilman tipped it against her closed lips before she passed it to Wilton. She knew how water was kept in most villages, open containers in a palm-leaf shed, each one full of wrigglies.
"I have heard of your difficulty," Wilton said, "and will pray to Him, the One God, that these spirits depart in peace."
The man and the other adults who had gathered didn't like her mentioning the difficulty so directly, but after some negotiation, she took out her materials and showed them to her audience without letting them touch. The women called the children away from her. They went silent, eyes wide.
"Show me the place," Wilton said, "and I shall beseech my God."
The site was near the river, on a bank of disturbed earth where none of the villagers wanted to go. They stopped and pointed, refusing to accompany, so Gilman followed Wilton. Flies here in unusual numbers and a miasma of decay.
Wilton laid her items on the earth. An ambiguous bit of bone, a shredded piece of white cloth. She lifted her blue bottle and poured a few drops of colored water from it, set it back down and opened her Bible at random.
"I thought God said, 'you shall have no other gods before me.' In the Old Testament," Gilman said. Wilton seemed so serious, with hard lines at the corners of her mouth.
"I don't worship ghosts. They have no reality, so long as God is with me. He armors against evil of all kinds, spirits and intentions, so long as I dedicate myself to His Purposes. Should I ever see or sense that something occult is there, that is how God will warn me that I have taken a step away from Him."
Gilman suppressed a shudder. She'd always suspected that Wilton took faith as a serious matter, but it unnerved her now, with a stench of old death by the brown rush of river.
"Can I smoke without hurting what you're doing?"
"No," Wilton said.
"Do you suppose there are crocodiles here?" Gilman asked.
"Don't worry, Gilman." Wilton shared a tight smile. "You'd rather think about physical dangers than spiritual ones, but you're with me."
Could she mean that the way it sounded? Maybe it was still a good idea to avoid discussions of religion. Gilman stood back and waited for Wilton to do her hocus-pocus.
"'As my Father has sent me, even so I send you,'" Wilton read aloud in English from the New Testament. She touched her palm to the beaten earth. Out of the woodland fringing the river a flight of hornbills erupted, honking dismally, flapping as if they could barely keep aloft, straggling away. Gilman saw the startled twist of her head as Wilton looked after them.
"Did you expect that?" she couldn't help asking.
"Birds," Wilton said. "Black-Casqued Hornbills. It's the right time of day for them to finish feeding and begin searching for a safe roost."
She bent her head again in what seemed silent prayer and Gilman fidgeted. The rotting smell seemed stronger, a nasty thickness in the air.
"It is done," Wilton said. "You see—it's nothing, and everything."
They gathered up the bit of bone and the bottle. Wilton handed Gilman the Bible to carry. The book felt warm to her touch, the worn leather supple. Had it belonged to Wilton's father? Had he left her anything else?
"So what caused these people to think they might be haunted?" Gilman asked.
"Several weeks ago a couple of their young women brought six Federal soldiers to the village for some sex. They planned it with the village. The villagers crashed in at an opportune moment and killed the soldiers. They're buried where we stood. A war effort," she said, "but later the elders had doubts. That always opens the door to bad spirits."
Gilman shrugged off a shiver. They walked together back to the path that led through the palms to the Jeep.
"Wilton." Gilman looked down the path to where Christopher's brave red shirt showed him waiting. "Do you have any Nigerian friends?"
"What a peculiar question," Wilton said. "I work with Nigerians all the time. I
've done so all my life. I know them better than I know any American."
Then why doesn't it feel that way to me. Gilman didn't dare say it. If you're closer to Nigerians than Americans, am I really your friend? She pushed the thought back, shook off the question. Of course Wilton was.
"I hear there's an offensive coming. I need to get out of the way," Wilton said. "Don't speak of it openly, please, when we go back to the town, but I need to go West, back to Lagos."
Chapter 24: Wilton
July 1967
In Transit, East to West, Nigeria
Lean palms rose above the thatch of rain-matted forest where the road barely survived as a beaten double track of red earth. The way meandered along in permanent green twilight. Wilton had to tilt her head back in the driver's seat to see the violet-gray patch of sky.
"Let me pass." Wilton wore the faded-blue dress and she made sure that she sat in the auto as if she were afraid. Elbows in, shoulders hunched. "I'm an American citizen. I've the right to leave."
The soldier spat into the bushes. Wilton could see him wondering how much money she might be worth. With luck, he would see her poverty and shabbiness and assume she'd already given what little she had in bribes along the way. He put his hand on the door of her vehicle.
A wheezy thing, this blue Volkswagen beetle, not a wealthy woman's car. The Citroën stayed in Umuahia. For this trip she bought a Volkswagen so old she could see the ground pass if she looked down through the holes in the floorboard. Christopher helped her screw a sheet of tin over the floor that should hold for a few hundred miles. She wished she could insert thoughts into this soldier's brain. Look at her—see a missionary who tried to stay for God, but panicked at first blood.
"Madam," he said. "I cannot let you go through gate. My army general he go shoot me." He grinned at Wilton.
Wilton kept her hands on the top of the steering wheel. She could guess how boring this soldier's day had been. He held the fourth roadblock on this road. With infinite time to bicker, she'd never pay him. But soon it would rain again. Sometime in the next hour, the sheeting water would make her road a river of red clay, forcing her to a high verge to wait the storm out. She didn't want to be here with this man and his machete when the rain came.
"'I am an American citizen,'" he repeated the words that had worked magic before. Singsong. Mockery. So the magic faded. Her flesh crawled. Of all the kinds of people she could pretend to be, she suspected none would work upon this man. She reached for her wristwatch and unbuckled the strap.
"A fine soldier like you must have a girlfriend." She casually held the watch draped across her wrist where he could see it. New, with a glossy red patent-leather strap.
She heard sunbirds snicking scissor sounds, but dared not turn her head to track the iridescent flicker in a tumble of flowering vines by the track. A moment's hesitation, then the soldier's brown hand came through the open window, covering the watch. When it retreated, he left Wilton's wrist bare.
"I see your papers." He made that scrap of red disappear into his breast pocket. He took the documents she offered and looked at them for some minutes. She could tell by the way that his eyes moved that he couldn't read.
"I be a very, very poor man."
She sat still as if she didn't understand his hint. He tsked and waved the papers at her, pointing to a line at random.
"I'm sorry," she said, meek. "The Umuahia office said the papers were in order. They let me through the other road checkpoints."
He shook his head and looked around as if he wished to refer the matter to a higher authority. Finally, he shoved the handful back into her face.
"Take them," he said. He leaned down and whispered to her in a breath redolent of garri and pepper sauce.
"You Americans need help my country. You will tell them when you go for home? Sorry you go run like this. I let you go. No fear. We go win. Biafra rises."
He stepped back from her car, slapping the roof as if it were the flank of an ox.
"Go." He lifted his honed machete in signal to the small boy at the makeshift gate. Wilton started the engine and eased her way down the road. She waited until she reached the next bend before she floored the pedal and sent the ancient vehicle careening on, bounding from rain-filled pothole to pothole. Driving on these roads that no one maintained was by approximation not art.
On to the West and Lagos, with urgent information for Lindsey. The rebels planned to invade the West. She'd have to find a way to cross over from the former Eastern Region, now Biafra, into the Federal Government territories of Nigeria and reach Lagos.
One more wristwatch left. She'd made her passage cheaply. Most of the roadblock soldiers hadn't challenged her. But soon that would pass when the war gained reality. She, like the other travelers who dared the roads, would have to submit to searches of car and person, and the filching of any goods the soldiers desired. Grace of God, and the devil's luck, an appearance of poverty and piety would get her through.
The problem was petrol. She wondered if that cave under the riverbank west of here still harbored the tins of gasoline she'd cached a year ago.
"Get out, please, ma'am."
Wilton obeyed, her legs quivering from the long hours in the car. Lots of soldiers here, and an air of professional efficiency. They all seemed busy in this clearing in the forest, moving boxes from trucks toward a group of low buildings tucked among the trees. How much of that professionalism would prove real? The voice that ordered her to put her hands on the car had the precision of a good English accent. Fingers flat against the car's rain-washed hood, she endured the frisking of hard palms and brisk fingers then turned to face the tall Igbo soldier. He held his head with the kind of arrogance that made her doubt.
"Who are you? Where are you going? What is your business? Where have you come from?"
"Professor Kate Wilton, American citizen…"
The wind rose, gray clouds colliding overhead with a grumble of thunder. She heard engines, as if of numerous trucks, and a distant barking of orders.
He asked his questions faster than she could answer them, always with impatience, with a curtness, that suggested that he didn't care what she said. Lovely British accent. He had her identification and now stepped back to read it, gesturing for another soldier to cover her. She noted the Federal uniforms, with improvised Biafran badges sewn over the old insignia.
These men trained in the army years ago for the Federal Government of Nigeria. They must have split away on tribal lines to join the defense of their homeland, like Robert E. Lee resigning from the US Army to serve his native Virginia. Biafra rises indeed. No question about this man's ability to read. He clapped her passport shut and gestured to the soldier who covered her.
"Where are you taking me?" She let her voice shake a bit. Acting the belligerent American would only bring her trouble here. Scared was better.
He didn't bother to answer, smiling a quick secret smile. Perhaps in the past some American or English woman had lorded it over him and now he enjoyed the reversal. He jerked the submachine gun and she obeyed, walking through the red mud toward what looked like a secondary-school building. Clouds thickened and the air seemed to darken with imminent rain. The bubuls among the trees made short flights now, a sure sign that the weather would break in a moment.
"I am a foreign national," she said to her escort. "An American citizen, trying to reach an operative airport and go home."
"All airports in Biafra are operative," the first soldier said. He repeated the public statement she'd heard so many times.
"I haven't been able to obtain a seat on any airplane," she said, cursing the propaganda that had this Biafran believing everything worked just as well if not better after the revolution. Then she caught another glimpse of his face, and she knew he was no more deceived than she.
"Where are you taking me?" She had to decide within the next minute whether she should go along or not.
"For interrogation."
He paused before the open do
or of the school, where she saw more soldiers within. Not all so well dressed, but they were trying to look like members of an army, the Biafran emblem stitched on shirtsleeves of many hues. Reassured by the presence of many, Wilton went in. She saw a familiar face, Ephraim, a former servant from her father's days. He looked instantly aside as if her gaze would mark him. It would, she realized, her throat seizing.
Down the grubby unornamented hallway to a classroom with a closed door. The soldier holding her passport knocked, then swung the door open.
"Sir!" he said, saluting.
"Yes?"
"A suspected foreign spy, sir."
The officer at the scarred wooden teacher's desk was a heavy-set man, perhaps in his fifties, with frost in his hair and moustache, a settled patience on his broad face. His chair creaked. He scarcely looked at Wilton, but nodded to her escort.
"Leave her passport and papers here. Very good, Corporal Emmaus. Dismissed."
Wilton felt the wave of protest that came from the soldier holding her passport. But he said nothing. He deposited the booklet on the desk, then saluted, spun on his heel and left the room, the other soldier retreating with somewhat less snap. The door closed behind him, sharp as a rebuke.
"So," Wilton said, relief weakening her knees, "discipline is not quite perfect yet?"
She spoke in Ibibio and the major rose from his chair and nodded to her.
"How are you?" he asked in the same tongue. "It has been long since we shared a meal. How is it your husband did not tell you to stay home?"
Wilton could not stop herself from smiling.
"What, you still refuse a husband?" He shook his head. "Will you make me reconsider educating my daughters, if such behavior is the wisdom education brings to you?"
She tensed.
His hands hung still by his sides, without welcome. "What are you doing here?"
"Going to friends." Wilton straightened, echoing his formality.
"Don't make me shoot you." He switched back to English, his voice so low she could barely make it out against the patter of hard rain on the long windows.
