by Robin Winter
"You shall have no other gods before me, thus saith the Lord."
But she had. She'd looked upon these women and seen how they could serve her Nigeria, help create the vision God gave her, imagined them rising to be greater than human, and she'd forgotten that all love and loyalty belong to God, first. She bent her faith to fit human love and ambition. Now she saw the fearsome greed in Lindsey and how Sandy avoided confronting it, the amorous lust in Gilman, the corruption of purposes. The war itself. Had God inflicted it upon them for divine sin? So, what was to be done?
Always, sacrifice was the price of salvation.
To receive the Grace of God would take the putting away of worldly things and worldly loves. She must sacrifice who she was and who they were to her. All must be remade in His Image.
Her mind wandered then, veering. This hurts. I promise to act in due time. I will consider later. Think of something else now.
Out in the bush she imagined refugees, curled in the darkness waiting for another day of the unending search for food and safety. She perceived a few lumpy shapes alongside the verge that might be sleeping travelers, but her attention remained too fiercely on the road to allow her to make sure. She kept straining her ears to hear some sound other than the uneven firing of her engine, fancying rustles and chirring little sounds in the brooding darkness.
Just a few things to do, Lord, before I make Your sacrifice. You understand, don't you? You who understand all things and see all things.
She saw a cavernous hole in the road. The tires skidded in the dust, then on the rough pebbled surface of the asphalt. Swerving back to the center of the road where the surface remained best, Wilton shuddered. None of the night seemed warm, nor any part of this route familiar.
She had so far to go before dawn, could endure no delay. If He would grant her this little time to accomplish one more task, set up Christopher in a safe place with enough to live on. She owed him that. Surely God understood. Surely God loved him too.
Chapter 58: Gilman
January 1969
Uli, Biafra
The dry light of the Harmattan filtered through the dulled windows of the surgery, the dust gritting in her teeth. Days like this lasted forever.
"Keep away from me, motherfucker—I'll blow your fucking head off."
Gilman looked up from the suturing of a gash. She and Sister Catherine exchanged a glance then the nun held out her hand for the needle. Gilman backed up, stripped off her gloves and automatically checked the time. Ten in the morning with a list of surgeries that didn't need an interruption like this. Something, however, about that raised tone suggested more than a simple disagreement.
Allingham's voice reached them.
"Major, be reasonable. I can't treat you like this."
"That's the point. Get me a real doctor."
Gilman nudged the door to the clinic exam room open. Allingham stood, his back up against the wall, his eyes fixed on Taffy Masters, who lay on the examining table. Supporting himself on one elbow, Masters gripped a revolver in his free hand. Beneath the grime of combat, his skin washed paper white. The tense crouch of his body told Gilman as much as the torn blood-soaked pant leg.
"Dr. Allingham, may I speak with you in the next room?" Gilman managed a tone both firm and reasonable. Masters lowered his Colt with a shaking hand, Allingham followed her out. He moved fast.
"What the hell was going on in there?" Gilman said.
"Nothing," he said. "He was brought in by his boys. I started to treat him and he pulled a gun on me and refused to let me touch him. I didn't think he'd..."
"Didn't you forget something?"
"Like what?"
"Anesthesia?"
Allingham glanced at the door, then a smile flickered over his face.
"I don't think it's necessary in this case. He's such a tough guy, I'm sure he can take anything. We're running short, anyhow. It's a little piece of shrapnel, not too deep..."
"Doctor Allingham. A Fed at forty paces could see he needs it. International Red Cross might think anesthesia called for, if I reported you." Gilman headed back toward the examining room.
"Gilman." Allingham's voice stopped her at the door. "International Red Cross and the press especially, might be interested to know who you're sleeping with, as well."
She faced him. God he was ugly with his greasy face and sneer.
"I'll remind you, I'm no employee. I'd love to know what rock you crawled out from under, Doctor Allingham. Just remember that I won't lose my license for malpractice."
Leave before you hit him. She spun about and slammed back into the examining room.
"Now put that goddamned gun away so somebody can get some work done around here."
"Yes, ma'am," Masters said, grinning at her from a face tight with pain. He slipped on the safety and replaced the Colt in its holster. She rummaged in the medicine cabinet. He let himself sag onto the table, the movement wringing a groan.
Gilman's anger vanished. She came over, hypodermic in hand.
"Look," she said. "I'm going to give you a shot. It'll put you out for a bit so I can clean up that leg. Okay?"
"I guess," he said. She swabbed his arm with rubbing alcohol. "But ...wait a minute..."
She paused, needle poised.
"I keep my gun. And you tell that ugly sonofabitching quack not to touch me, or I'll slice his balls off 'n' feed them to him."
"I'll relay the message," Gilman said. She slipped the needle under his skin then set about cutting away his pant leg while the dose began to take effect.
"Works fast," Masters mumbled.
"Yes." Gilman fetched a hot wet compress to soak away the cloth adhering to the wound.
"Masters?"
"Mmm?"
"Have you seen Tom today? Taffy?"
Out cold. Fifteen minutes later she put the final touch on his dressing. She hesitated over the holster, then compromised by relieving him of his ammunition. She called the orderlies.
She helped them lift Masters onto a stretcher. "Listen" she said, "I think the only way to avoid a killing around here is for you to put him on that cot in my office."
Gilman found Tom Jantor slumped in the chair by her office desk, his hat dangling from dusty fingertips. She'd never seen him so tired, unwilling to give even a smile. He'd never come to her looking like this before. He'd never participated in such a military disaster before either. Crossed signals, troops not supporting as arranged, and a complete rout, with a savagely contested retreat. Only the more able wounded had made it to her surgery.
"I'm sorry," she said. He smiled at her then, one side of his mouth only.
He glanced over at Taffy snoring on the cot.
"Don't worry," she said, "he's out for the count. You must be hungry."
Of course he was hungry, they were all hungry, and the best she could offer was scarcely worth swallowing.
"You haven't got much to spare."
"I'll find something."
When she returned with a few pieces of tired fruit, he straightened in his chair and set the hat on her desk. He opened an orange. No protein until the next stockfish and powdered milk came in. Adults couldn't live on fruit, though they lasted longer than the children did. There was hardly a lizard left in all the surrounding countryside.
She shied away from thought of the future. Jantor began to eat, chewing with deliberation, as though doing a duty. Eventually he reached for Gilman's hand, his fingers sliding over hers before they grasped.
"Do you know why it happened?"
"The frigging Biafran generals."
He wiped his hand on the tattered napkin. Gilman leaned toward him and brushed the thick brown hair back from his forehead.
"They got jealous of all the special equipment and special treatment Steiner got from His Excellency. So they made up a conspiracy theory. I don't know how far it goes. This war is fucked."
He seemed restless, his lips tightening. She collected herself, reaching out again to run a hand over his
brown forehead, noticing, as if it were important, how light even her tan looked against the weathering of his skin. She felt him relax a little under her fingers. The hazel eyes flickered to meet hers once more, studied her face with a wary kind of surprise. He didn't voice his thoughts.
Gilman saw then, like a photograph thrust before her, how she could have been. Sitting at a table in a pastel living room in some suburb, John at her side, a roast in the oven. Lindsey and some vague-faced suit by her side. Cocktail glasses and a game of bridge laid out. Pastel paper pads and baby pencils for scoring. She shuddered.
"Someone walking over my grave," she said in response to Jantor's glance.
Later that evening, Allingham sauntered into the mess and sat down opposite her at the table. Gilman, Sister Catherine and a visiting journalist had barely finished eating. Gilman gave up scraping her bowl and pushed it aside.
"Good evening," he said to everyone. "Doctor." He nodded at Gilman. "How's our mercenary patient?"
"Fine, thank you," she said. She noticed that the journalist cocked an interested ear in their direction.
Allingham was all innocence. "I understand he's sleeping it off on the cot in your office."
"Yes," Gilman said.
Allingham smiled, staring at her.
"Beds are always scarce around here," Sister Catherine said to the journalist, who nodded, still watching Allingham and Gilman. "Often the doctors sacrifice their personal space to the patients."
Allingham leaned across the table and whispered.
"Is he as hot a fuck as the other one?"
Gilman flung her coffee in his face. Allingham leapt up from the table with a shriek of pain, knocking over his seat. He mopped at the scalding liquid running off his face.
"You shit." He grabbed the collar of her lab jacket and yanked her from her chair. At white heat, Gilman slapped his inflamed face with all her strength and jerked back.
"Sweet Jesus." Sister Catherine leapt up.
Allingham, apparently remembering the journalist barely in time, lowered his drawn fist. In a flurry of white skirts the nun ran between and grabbed Gilman by the wrists.
"Let go." Gilman yanked at her hands, but even in rage she couldn't hurt Sister Catherine.
The door opened and Jantor walked in. Gilman tried to divest herself of Sister Catherine's grip. She could only imagine how it all looked.
There was Allingham panting, red faced and coffee stained, and the intrigued journalist, riveted with delight. Gilman saw Sister Catherine shake her head at Jantor, trying to catch his attention. Jantor banged the door, then the others looked over at him too.
Allingham turned visibly paler at the sight of the tall mercenary clad in full combat gear. Gilman felt the fight run out of her. She gave Jantor a guilty look, begging him not to ask the obvious question. Sister Catherine let Gilman go and stepped back.
"What's going on?" Jantor asked.
No one spoke. Sister Catherine considered Allingham and smiled.
"Doctor Allingham, I don't know what you said, but now seems like an excellent time to apologize."
Allingham took one look at Jantor and swallowed. He nodded once at Gilman, and she could see it came hard.
"I'm sure I'm sorry if I said anything to offend you, Doctor."
She gave him her best attempt at a smile, and nodded. Speech felt impossible.
"I'm sorry," Sister Catherine explained to the journalist. "We're always under siege and the long hours are hard on our tempers. It's been a long day."
"Yeah," the journalist said. "Jesus."
Chapter 59: Gilman
January 1969
Uli, Biafra
The latest inrush of patients crowded every room and hallway. Nurses hurried to make pallets and bring in a few more cots. Surgery had ended for now. Later they'd organize things better, after the less acute patients had been stitched and bandaged too. After some had died.
"Dead?"
Gilman heard the word not because it was uncommon—God knows it was one of the most frequently spoken words of all in this time and place—but because Sister Catherine's whisper suggested it wasn't meant to be heard by her.
"Who is it? Who died?" Gilman said, making her way across the room to where Sister Catherine bent over a soldier wounded in the neck and shoulder. Sister had stopped the bleeding and the man now lay propped up against the wall of the ward.
Gilman saw Sister Catherine gesture, but the drugged soldier lolled his head against the painted surface to meet her questioning look.
"Oh, he is dead, madam doctor, my friend is dead."
"I'm sorry," she said, on automatic. She tried to make it sound like she cared. She didn't want to show her quick relief.
Not Jantor then. Another soldier, another friend out of all the hundreds. Thousands. She couldn't keep track. She didn't know most of them one from another. His black face gleamed with sweat in the ill-lit room, the whites of his eyes showing how he tried to focus on her.
"Rest," Sister Catherine said. She patted his hand, and it seemed to Gilman that she patted too hard as if she wanted to distract him from Gilman.
"American bastard. Put his revolver to Samuel's head and blam."
He rocked his head back and forth against the thick paint like ice cream that coated the wall.
He repeated the blam, thoughtful, blinking.
"Who?" Gilman said. "Which Samuel?"
Sister Catherine straightened up and stood between the patient and Gilman.
"Sergeant Samuel Asika. Don't ask him any more. I've administered a sedative. It should help."
"Which American?"
"He said Jantor executed Samuel about some problem. It's one of those. We won't know the truth for hours, if then. Men say many things."
"It's some mistake," Gilman said, looking at the nun's quiet triangle of browned face in the white shape of her wimple and cap. Sister wasn't meeting her gaze, her blue eyes preoccupied as if this wasn't important.
"Sergeant Samuel and Jantor got along."
She found herself looking at Sister Catherine's back when the nun bent down again to check the patient.
"Finally heard something that makes you think twice?"
She recognized Allingham's voice from behind her, the habitual sneer of it, and the lift of his satisfaction.
"Go back to work, dickhead," she said, "before I turn around."
Gilman smelled the cigarette first, a good one, so it had to be an officer. She wasn't ready to see Jantor but walked on around the corner of the hospital building from the deep shade to the full blinding sun of the afternoon in the open yard.
There was her love, leaning against the trunk of a jacaranda tree whose feathery shade made the yard's sunlight tolerable. Waiting for her. She moved under the edge of the patterned shadow. He offered her a cigarette, but she hesitated.
"Where's Samuel? Your sergeant?"
"Dead."
"How?"
"Executed. Firing squad."
"That's not what I heard."
"Shouldn't believe all you hear."
"No, I shouldn't."
He stood straight now, no longer leaning against the tree trunk. Gilman could see nothing in his face even in this bright place that suggested regret. Jantor took another long drag on his cigarette and then put the pack away. He was as handsome as ever, wasn't he? Or did his eyes seem a little too close set, his face as innocent as only a pathology can make it? She still wanted to touch him, to pull herself against his familiar warm body. To take him to the secrecy of her bed, and feel the pace of loving overcome everything that the day had held and all the fears and doubts that extended this afternoon into an eternity.
"What crime did Samuel commit and when was he tried? I would have spoken for him," she said.
"He disobeyed orders. Civilians don't testify at a court martial. Not at one I convene."
"Yours."
"Yes. Mine. Command isn't up for discussion."
He let the smoke drift from the corner o
f his mouth. Familiar mouth. She knew how it felt. Knew how it could change from an ask to a demand. Had loved those lips any way he chose to make them, until now.
"Did Samuel kill a prisoner?"
"Do you want to know? Really?"
"Yes," she said, though she doubted even as the word came out.
"No, honey, you don't," he said. In spite of the endearment there wasn't any inflection, merely a flat statement. "Goodnight," he said and walked away.
Chapter 60: Wilton
January 1969
Umuahia, Biafra
You can't stop. Wilton knew that.
Surgery or swallowing or cutting a chicken's throat, once you start, you're committed. There's no taking it back or putting it off for another day. And if the thought crosses your mind, then you have to move faster, harder, more sure, more clear about the end.
Wilton stood still in the sunlight and pulled her straw hat into place. She could feel the thickness of bills in her money belt under her loose dress. The gun in its holster on the belt she wore over the dress. Awkward.
"But you can't stop," she said.
No one near enough to hear. She'd meet Christopher down by the cloth section of the marketplace sometime after noon and warn him. Now was the time to move out. The Nigerian Federal Government would start bombing rebel civilian targets in two months. She had Lindsey's word on that. Russian bombers with Egyptian pilots, English bombs. A quota of proven hits to make.
Only a few people out here on the road where the sun lay hard over stones, but she looked ahead down the long straggling way where the old buildings clustered and thought she saw more people moving toward the market center, even if no one sold what they all needed.
The Igbo always had something for sale even if it wasn't the right thing. Cloth and trinkets, ballpoint pens with the translucent sides so you could see how much ink was left even though you couldn't tell if it was dried up. You could buy aluminum buckets, rubber shoes all in one size and color, and even purslane for greens, or sometimes a withered yam, but not meat.
