by Robin Winter
"I wasn't going to go there."
"So you call yourself an atheist," Jantor said.
"Well yes. Maybe. Or I did then." Gilman knew she fumbled. Talk about something she didn't want to discuss with Jantor. Was he an atheist? After everything he'd seen how could he be anything else? But what was that old saying about foxholes?
"I looked around her room and realized a person whose creativity made a room like that had no choice. Of course she believed that there was a Maker. We'd agree to disagree. But I also wondered if that was why she and Lindsey, the good Christian, got along on a level I felt I'd never join. Made me jealous, Tom. I wonder how much that has to do with Lindsey never approving of me."
"You could always convert," Jantor said. "But it's not important. Here you are in Biafra and there she is hundreds of miles away in Lagos playing government spook."
"God yes. Do you suppose that's why Wilton made sure we were so far apart? I get along great with Sandy, you know. You'd like her. But Lindsey…"
Nope, Gilman didn't want to talk about Lindsey either.
"So I said, 'We'd take over Nigeria. Look at the talent. You'd make a splendid Minister of Propaganda, I'd be the great medicine man. Lindsey—God what a splendid dictator she'd make with Sandy as her trusted assistant.'"
"You know what Wilton did? She grabbed her notebook, flipped pages and started scribbling."
"'Great,' I told her. 'Take notes. What an idea for a story.'"
"'Yes,' she said, 'a story. Tell me more.'"
She felt Jantor shift again against her, stroke her shoulder.
"'Then she asked me, 'who could you trust with your life?'"
"Hah." Jantor's hand paused.
"Yes, exactly. Hah. When I talk about a Wiltonesque question, that's what I mean," she said. "I had to stop and I didn't like what came out next but it was true. 'No one,' I said."
He chuckled and Gilman felt herself smile.
"But it hurt my pride, like I was saying no one cared enough about me, and I had to explain. I said 'Lindsey's arrogance frustrated mine. Lindsey was righteous. Righteous people know what ought to happen and they'll kill for it. Sandy belongs to Lindsey, like blood brothers, so she'd never be for me first.'"
"'And me?' Wilton looked like someone waiting for a treat."
"'No,' I said. She deserved what she asked for. 'You're a voyeur and too interested in watching, and maybe you too, have a hidden agenda.'"
"I swear Wilton wasn't hurt at all. She was delighted. 'Do you realize that you don't trust a single one of your friends?' she asked. 'What about family? What about John?'"
"Who's John?" Jantor tugged on her earlobe.
"An old boyfriend I was serious about back then. God I can't even remember his face, only the suit jacket he used to wear everywhere. Brown Harris tweed. Elbow patches. He wrote me once in Nigeria like he thought we could get it on again after his first wife dumped him. He thought I made a cute doctor. Hah. Probably living in some suburb of New York now with a second or third wife who gets manicures every week and plays bridge."
"Anyway I thought Wilton had seen enough for one evening, so I made it short. 'I'd trust them with my life.' I said, 'but I'd also owe them mine. That'd make me too vulnerable. Besides…'"
"Yes?"
Oh, she remembered all right. What she'd said was, 'You don't take parents and lovers to the front with you." Not going to repeat that to save her life.
"Do you know what Wilton did? She simply wrote faster. I think I've told you enough stories."
"Yeah," Jantor said, his hand moving down from her shoulder to undo the first button of her shirt.
Chapter 55: Lindsey
December 1968
Lagos, Nigeria
Lindsey stood up when the forty-ish American woman came into the room. Bustled in, with curls sprayed in place, brown hair tamed to proclaim the obedience of every part. The cold-fish handshake and prickly rings seemed predictable. The cat's-eye glasses over which her gray eyes assessed Lindsey, those too reminded Lindsey of her mother. But poor. A missionary, perhaps, in her faded-plaid cotton. That's where the difference lay.
"Mrs. Cook," Lindsey said. "Please sit down."
"Just for a minute, honey. I know you're busy."
Lindsey knew what that opening meant. All the people who wasted her time said something of the kind. Who gave this woman permission to call her 'honey'?
"Yes, it's true that I am. But you must have an urgent concern to have sent a note last week."
Mrs. Cook didn't like that, but true to her hairdo she sat firm and still, under discipline. She cocked her head, looking around the room with a faint air of disapproval, pausing at Oroko's statue-like presence near the window.
"You've only been in Africa for a few years, dear," Mrs. Cook said. "We've served three tours of duty. It's a place where nothing can be hidden for long. I'll get right to the point since you have no time to spare."
Lindsey met an expression of such dislike that her neck prickled. She straightened and focused. This wasn't a petition for new church funds after all.
"Do you worry about your servants respecting your privacy?" the woman said.
"No." Lindsey smiled.
"Well, I haven't quite your confidence," Mrs. Cook said. "Besides, what I have to say is strictly private. Please tell him to go away."
"No," Lindsey said. "I don't think it's appropriate."
"It's your business," Mrs. Cook said and she smiled too. "Let me get on with it."
Indeed, yes. Lindsey kept the words off her tongue.
"My husband, the Reverend Cook of First Presbyterian Concordance, and I decided it would be most discreet if I were to approach you about your attendance at our little community services."
Lindsey saw Oroko shift slightly nearer. His arms unfolded.
"I have thought them very fine on the occasions that I've managed to attend."
Lindsey had been careful on Oroko's advice to change churches in an erratic pattern. The First Presbyterians—they built the whitewashed church on a flat piece of land north of Ibadan. This woman had gone through some difficult traffic to reach her.
"Well I find myself obliged to request that you not return."
Mrs. Cook's face didn't even flush. Lindsey waited a moment.
"I understand then that my presence isn't welcome at the First Presbyterian Concordance," Lindsey said. "I'm a little surprised. May I inquire the basis for your concern?"
The mouth pinched up and Mrs. Cook's back went rigidly straight.
"It's a question of example," she said. "You must realize that with the irregularity of your living arrangements, we cannot allow you and your…companion to sit in the midst of our congregation as a contaminating influence."
Lindsey felt no obligation to answer. She looked at Mrs. Cook, interested to see that the woman displayed nothing but pleasure in her announcement.
"We are here in God's service to protect and nurture our dark-skinned brethren, guiding them toward the Light. Your example in the community cannot be countenanced."
"And you are saying?"
"That you and your catamite…"
"The term isn't catamite, Mrs. Cook. You should be more careful with your English and your accuracy. Let me understand. You are saying my friend Miss Hemsfort and I are engaging in an illicit relationship?"
"Obviously."
"On the grounds of what evidence?"
"We have heard things. Many more things than you know."
"Oh, that I do not doubt," Lindsey said. "Indeed, if I have a lover of any sex or kind, it's a piece of news to me."
"You put a brave face on this," Mrs. Cook said. She moved her chair back like a lady and rose to her worn heels' best height. "I think you will find when the word spreads, that there's no tolerance for your kind here. You represent your country. You must be blameless to aspire to that role."
"You conjecture without evidence," Lindsey said, "upon surmise about why my friend and I share accommodations here in Lago
s. Did it occur to you that pooling our income we can afford a better flat?"
"Meretricious argument."
Linsday rose to her feet. Now indeed she prized her ability to appear unmoved. "Then I think our business is done, wouldn't you say? By the way, could you clarify if your husband agreed to this visit and this message?"
"Of course, Miss Kinner. We believe in the inerrant truth of the Bible's message, that the woman shall yield to her husband who is the head of the household in all things."
"Not a perfect quote," Lindsey said. "Good day, Mrs. Cook. I shall consider your message."
Oroko made no gesture of helping Mrs. Cook out. He remained where he stood and when Lindsey looked at him, she could tell nothing of what he thought behind those glasses. She sat down and turned her pen between her fingers for some minutes.
"Oroko, I have an assignment," she said. "I want to know who the doctor attending the Cooks might be."
Sitting on Lindsey's office desk, ten days later, Sandy fiddled with her packet of cigarettes. She'd be gone in a minute, by the signs, off to the smoking room or her office.
"I hear that the First Presbyterian Concordance Church is getting a new minister in a few weeks," Sandy said.
"That was fast," Lindsey said. "I don't remember the sermons being all that bad."
"Oh, it's a scandal," Sandy said. "Apparently a medical checkup was misread, and the first time around the doctor missed that the blood work on the minister and his wife came up positive on the Wasserman's."
"Syphilis? Oh dear," Lindsey said. "I wonder if it was the husband or the wife."
"No way to tell. Now it's both. They'd never have known if an inquiry hadn't come from the States about their eligibility for life insurance."
"So the doctor had to check the files and caught the red flag after the fact."
"And everything's public in this community," Sandy said. "No quiet doses of penicillin and hush-hush. Want to go hear the new minister when he comes into town?"
"I think we shall," Lindsey said.
Chapter 56: Wilton
December 1968
Uli Area, Biafra
She killed the dog. She found him cringing in the broken hut behind a wooden sugar box and knew him for what he was, a foreigner. Like her. A dog from the years before the war, brought from England, maybe. Fine black fur gone dull, anxious liquid eyes that once held brown confidence and the questions of an equal. Crouching as though to avoid a blow, the leg feathers tattered, the tail torn, but the head tilted.
"I see you," she said. In Africa it means more than it sounds. They mean more than they say. "I'm Wilton."
He understood she was foreign and a woman and he met her gaze. She sat down on the box. A scrap of stale bread brought him to her hand, a warm wet tongue larping over her fingertips and a whine that let Wilton know it was her eye and her hand that mattered, not the food. Starving for his people. She drew her hand away.
He settled by Wilton's dusty foot, a whine low in his great chest. She'd wanted a dog so much as a child. A flat coated retriever looked like this, she remembered from the books. So different from the pariah dogs that skulked about the villages in times of plenty. This could be one, and looking at him hurt her heart. Her father never allowed her a dog.
"Your people left you."
She imagined an early morning with the African mist moving off the ground into the towering tangled trees, urgency in the hushed voices, all changed by what had to be done. A sun like a broken egg rising. People getting into a little bus waiting with its chugging stinking motor. The dog's people, dragging suitcases, a stuffed toy in the arms of the child and the real warm animal held back by the choking collar until one of the servants dragged it over to a strong tree and tied it there.
He must have watched his people leave. A dog less moveable than a suitcase. How he wanted them and called with deep whimpers, because he was a good dog. Only one bark or two when the bus turned and pulled away, before he gulped the barks down and leaned panting, the sounds striving in his chest. All the world gone to this soreness, the lack, the broken pack. Maybe if he were quiet they might come back. Maybe if he were good. Wilton looked down at his dusty black head. Her fingers smoothed the dry fur.
Night and day, he would have waited, unable to while time away as a human would with fantasies and promises and hope. All the lunging he must have done, pacing paws going sore. An occasional gulp of water. He would have nosed the food brought to him and left it for the flies.
"Did you have one servant who tried to take care of you? For love or loyalty or the fee your people promised to send him? How long before you finally ate again, even as the villagers around you began to run out of food for themselves?"
Maybe months or more tied in the village among thin brown children afraid of his size and blackness, until the cord broke. A dog searching ever since. The fouled rope still hung on his neck, the hair worn and matted under it.
"But dog," she said to him, "the scent died at the river, at the tarmac, at the dock. There is no home without your people, is there?"
Wilton saw Gilman's shadow then on the floor, but Gilman chose not to come into the hut, not to interrupt them. Wilton knew Gilman thought the dog would comfort her. Gilman believed in the innocence of dogs just as she believed in the innocence of children.
The dog shifted a little and she felt the warm lean of his bony flea ridden flank. She could see the ways for the future splaying out before them, the dog happiness that snatched from moment to moment seems to a watching man so complete. Women know better. She could see his dreams, the flickering hope that finding her had brought him closer to his own. Did he smell in her some remembrance of his pack? Or merely a moment of refuge before he moved on?
Through the gaps in the broken wall Wilton saw the village, thatch slumped upon crazed earth. Palm fronds, mud walls tumbled like giant's tantrums had scattered them. People standing, sitting; members of a dismissed cast. Dusty with red earth they did not brush away.
She looked down. What white man's hand once cupped this smooth head and ran along the curve of his neck? She heard the dog's sigh and the skin twitched along his ribs.
Now she saw him drinking this small comfort of a human being who understood a dog, and Wilton knew he would never be hers or anyone else's. She imagined the tears his child might have shed. She heard the yearn in an Englishman's voice who knows he asks the impossible and dreams of faith restored. "You will take care of him, Daniel? Until they let us come back? The war will be over fast. We'll return in a couple of months as soon as the peace comes."
"No one knows what they do," Wilton said to the dog. He lifted his eyebrows, tired, and sighed again. She didn't know either. He had lived all these months on a rat snatched here, a mouthful of lizard. And carrion. Not garbage. Biafra had no garbage. Humans ate it all. There are worse things than eating garbage.
"You terrify me more than the children," she said. She looked into his eyes and saw there no promise and no beginning.
"Dog is good meat—" she said to the old woman watching her from the doorway. "Bleed it fast and cook the meat well."
The woman panted to move him. Fifty odd pounds of slack weight, bone and gristle and offal with some lean meat. The woman was old with want, weak beyond weariness. Others came, and she would have beaten them back if she could. Of course she would have to share. Wilton could not even see the dog any more, there were so many people. So busy like ants.
"What have you done?" Gilman screamed behind her, and Jantor caught Gilman around the waist. Her hair tore loose red and gold in the sunlight, spinning out against his camouflage jacket.
"There wasn't anything else to do," he said.
"We could have kept it..."
"And starved what one of our people to feed it? And taken it with us? Kath, we can't even take one patient, how could we take a dog?" So gentle, his arm still reaching to hold her back.
"It was happy with Wilton and she killed it."
"It's not the kind o
f dog to be happy with anyone but its own people. They're never coming back, Gilman. Never. A moment's comfort and shot fast. Never felt a thing. Wilton did right."
Wilton turned away. Never felt a thing. In all the months of the dog's searching, only enough to break a village of hearts. To even break hers. Never felt a thing, Jantor said.
Wilton hoped he had not seen how easy the gun lay in her hand.
Chapter 57: Wilton
December 1968
In Transit, Biafra
Wilton headed North from Uli in the early black morning before Gilman rose. Gilman didn't want to talk with her anyway, still smarting over the dog's death.
Wilton's hands ached on the Citroën's steering wheel after an hour of driving, the scars tugging, throbbing. Once a gang stopped her at an intersection. They'd set up a block with trunks cut from the forest, but a phrase in Ibibio sent the men melting back into the black trees. Twisted branches rose skyward on both sides of the road, seeming to writhe in the feeble gleam of her headlights. She felt the frustrated presence of the old gods all around her.
She kept her eyes on the dim track. Pitted asphalt and dirt, potholes and broken tree limbs...
"'Oh God, who dost punish sin and willingly forgive,'" Wilton whispered, remembering a book in Wellesley's library. It had fallen open in her hands like a sign from God. "'I have loved this people. If I have loved them too well, pray forgive me, for I did not know.'"
But she'd known. Surely she had. In those days at Wellesley when she looked at the controlled purity of Lindsey's profile and saw in her a leader, when she had looked at Gilman's intemperate enthusiasm, her passion for the medical arts, she'd known she loved them. Too much. Adored them for the spirit and power in them, but she pretended it wasn't love. Then the flyaway vulgarity and soft heart of Sandy who could always make her smile, who understood that Wilton prayed whenever she looked down. Sandy would fall silent too in that brief moment of grace before rattling on with her stories and impious jokes.
