Night Must Wait

by Robin Winter

  Beans. She remembered genetics professors from America trying to persuade the Igbo and Ibibio that cowpeas would be a good source of protein. Cowpeas never caught on, and who now had enough expectation to rake up a patch of land, haul water to irrigate and grow beans? Human excrement aplenty—she would have used that but there were some things that tradition still forbade. Unclean. Anyway, refugees don't farm.

  Before the war beef came from the North on annual migrations. Tsetse fly killed most cattle in the South so the Northern Muslim herders culled their animals into the waiting markets of the infidel Christian and pagan South. Now the old patterns had shattered like an earthen pot.

  To reshape the country, that was why she carried this wad of Nigerian bills in her money belt to give to Christopher. Illegal currency worth a firing squad.

  Once she'd talked with Christopher about raising rabbits as an efficient meat animal, but they too were forbidden because they ate their own excrement and acted scared of everything and might take the fire out of a man's belly.

  "Nothing takes the fire out of a man's belly like starvation." She'd said that to make him laugh when none of this was serious. She'd often made Christopher laugh.

  He'd been such a scared boy like a leggy rabbit himself when he first arrived at the school when her father supervised the orphanage. Christopher's father came to wheedle a price, promising that Christopher would be clean and obedient in all ways once he belonged to Wilton's father. All ways. She felt the unease with which her father looked upon the man and how he turned his back when he understood this was a sale. Finally he passed over a few shillings in payment for Christopher's labor for a month.

  The man huffed off angry, believing he'd sold his son for a pittance. Christopher ran away the next day. When the older servants brought him back, they laughed when Christopher begged them to let him flee because everyone knew that the whites took boys and cut them in bits to eat raw for virility.

  The first thing Wilton told the boy was that he could run. She said if he hadn't the wit to stay, no one here wanted him and he'd best be off.

  "We have food and it's not from chopped-up boys nor a rabbit like you, so if you want some of the food we have, you have to work," she'd said in his own tongue. "You learn our language, you work with hands and head and we'll feed you, and once every two weeks you take shillings to your father. You'll be afraid, not of us, but of being sent away. Yes, you can run away now, but if you do, never come back."

  They were all Professor Wilton's children. She never told anyone that she wasn't a natural-born daughter to Professor Robert Wilton, but one of his many strays.

  By the time he died, even Robert Wilton seemed to forget that he'd found her in the Philippines as an infant and perhaps meant to pass her on one day to some family but never got around to it. But he left her his name and an American passport. Perhaps one day another minister less absentminded had told him he should leave her his legal heir. She'd faced the news with astonishment.

  She looked down at the soft dust puffing about her sandals and between her pallid toes, and wondered if maybe it did not matter anymore.

  Professor Robert Wilton also left her his mission—raising up a country of the future, the perfect Nigeria that he held always in his mind, like the ideal Jerusalem burning in Afrique's brazen land.

  "I shall not cease from mental fight." She heard the soaring chorus of boys' voices in her mind, shrill and piercing, black and brown faces uplifted on slender necks above the pure white of stiff shirts. "Till I have built Jerusalem…" and she put his own words next. "In Afrique's green and sunstruck land…"

  Once that was started there was no going back. No stopping.

  She taught Christopher how to read out of children's books. Little Black Sambo with the crimson-lined purple slippers and illustrations of pancakes striped like little brown-and-gold tigers. Those first words Christopher's tongue formed from the marks on the page brought a look like fear to his huge eyes, as if it frightened him to do this, or as if he feared the magic might slip away between his teeth. Power filling his mouth with an outrage of sweetness like bush honey. Then he repeated the sounds and glory came into him. He could read.

  She sometimes wondered if his village father wanted to be rid of him because he knew Christopher wasn't of his get. Certainly she saw no likeness between the handsome open-faced boy and the pinched shifty-eyed father he towered over. Even the ears—she had read in Conan Doyle that the pinnae of ears demonstrated genetic affinity, and if that were true, Christopher did not belong in his village, even though as a child he felt safe there.

  Surprising that Christopher hadn't married yet. She wondered if the exposure to Americans and American culture had somehow spoiled him for his own kind, the very kind that would make the future Nigeria rising out of this civil war.

  She walked down among the buildings where refugees squatted. When she looked into the shadows of the makeshift shelters pieced out of old plastic and palm fronds and cardboard, she glimpsed eyes feral with starvation staring back. Every day new refugees hauled bodies out of such shacks and scraped earth to bury them before moving in.

  Wilton walked on, her hat pulled down to shield her own eyes from those waiting in the dim, her revolver heavy on her belt. She saw the bank buildings only a few yards away. Over to the left the fabric section of the marketplace with shades drawn over the path between booths striped with shadow and sun, the still figures of merchants waiting like statues. The day hummed heat over her skin.

  Chapter 61: Gilman

  January 1969

  Uli, Biafra

  Here came Sister Catherine. Too late to run. Gilman jolted upright from her slump against the red clay wall of the dormitory building near her tent, where she'd gone to avoid everyone. Even in its stained and frayed condition, the nun's white gown brought a message of cool and comfort in this hellish heat. The barren orange dirt of the yard and trees, plucked nearly naked of their tasteless leaves, seemed to shift and ripple in the hot air.

  "Gilman." No hint of a smile in the sister's eyes today.

  "I know, I know. I smoke too much and it's time for me to get back to the hospital."

  Gilman pushed herself away from the wall, her shirt sticking to her back. Sister Catherine held out her hand in an unmistakable way.

  "You don't smoke," Gilman said. She'd never seen the nun put a cigarette to her lips before but the deft gesture of the nun's fingers spoke of long practice. Gilman offered a match and the slow enjoyment in Sister Catherine's face as she drew in a deep lungful of smoke stopped any more foolishness Gilman might have uttered.

  "I think you should know about Jantor," Sister Catherine said. "You never asked me anything and yes, I did understand."

  She took another drag. "You didn't want to know. But it's like adopting a dog without knowing who it's bit. Or why. You set him up to fail."

  "No, I didn't. I didn't want to pry," Gilman said.

  "Fuck that, honey." So strange to hear such words in that lovely Irish accent with all the hard parts taken out of the sound but not the meaning. "You know better than that. You always have. You wanted a tamed wild man, with the turn-on of fear but no investment. He kills for a living. You heal. And days come when you're scrambling to heal what he kills. Who do you fool when you pretend you don't know whose bullets you're carving out of war prisoners? Why do you do it, Gilman?"

  The nun's tanned face creased up in the white setting of her coif and wimple.

  "How did you deceive yourself that the left hand didn't know what business the right was about?"

  Gilman told herself she was too angry to answer, that she would lash out if she spoke. But she didn't leave. She watched the nun smoke the cigarette down to a bare fringe of paper and filter.

  "Have another with you?" Sister Catherine said.

  "So you can bash me some more?"

  Sister Catherine looked at her and Gilman dug a bent cigarette from the bottom of her white jacket pocket.

  "That's my last."


  "Good. Now you'll have to make peace with him or quit cold turkey." Sister Catherine's tone put quotation marks around the "cold turkey" Americanism.

  "Last thing on my list."

  "Not hardly. Look, of bad men in the Congo, he was better. No angel, but he stayed a man. You don't know anything about that time, but it was one of the lowest I have seen." She drew another quick angry breath of smoke, shook her head. "You can say that's a damned low level, but it's hard to swim against the tide. Why do you suppose I'm a nun?"

  She glanced at Gilman, then away. "He's the same here as he was there. Jantor was among the worst, in the company of men who loved anything base. Twisted. Perverted. Psychopathic. When anything could be done and was done, he didn't do it. He's the same man here. You could do worse. You never heard the whole story."

  "You saying Samuel deserved to be executed?"

  "No. Jantor shot on the spot. I think Samuel was innocent. Left holding the bag, maybe. But it was what Jantor's bred to do, like a dog. It's deep in him and if you never accepted that, you had no business messing with his mind by taking him to bed."

  "Men do that easy."

  "Sure they do. But he thinks…no damn it, I'm not going to say that. Thank you for the cigarettes."

  "Thinks what? C'mon, Sister Catherine."

  The nun's sturdy march did not falter, her steps angry.

  "I don't need this," Gilman said.

  Chapter 62: Gilman

  February 1969

  Uli, Biafra

  Sweat trickled down her back, made Gilman twitch. The operating room was a steaming oven. Underground for safety meant no fresh air. She fought an insane desire to tear off her surgical mask and gloves. Ten hours began to tell on her, but her hands still held steady.

  This final case was one of the worst. They'd been picking pieces of federation fragmentation grenade out of this young boy's abdomen for at least two hours. Gilman hoped the bit of shrapnel she fished for might be the last. Her hands cramped, complaining at the close slippery work. She squinted in the glare from the high-intensity lamp close overhead.

  "I think, people, this is it. Just a scrap and we'll call it a day."

  A flood of venous blood suddenly obscured the field. Gilman swore and changed her grip on the retractor. She freed her right hand to receive the clamp that should have been magically forthcoming. It wasn't.

  "Sister?" Concentration broken, Gilman looked up from her work. Above Sister Catherine's mask she saw the closed eyes and pale sweat-beaded face of a person seconds away from a dead faint.

  "Fortunatus." Gilman's call came late. The male nurse got there barely in time to ease Sister Catherine to the floor.

  "Isn't she a little experienced for this kind of thing?" Allingham asked from the next table.

  "Stuff it, Allingham."

  He did and went back to his amputation.

  Gilman looked at her priest-anesthetist, who shrugged his shoulders and passed her a clamp. She set about tying off the troublesome vein, suctioning the field.

  "What in hell's going on down there?" she said.

  The bleeding stopped, Gilman struggled to get a firm grip on the shrapnel with a Kelly clamp.

  "Is it the heat?"

  "I don't think so," Fortunatus said. "Cool skin. Pulse rapid and shallow. Respiratory rate up. Sister is waking."

  Gilman heard Sister Catherine move.

  "No standing," Fortunatus said. That was an order if Gilman ever heard one. She had to smile.

  Gilman laid the bloody bit of metal on the tray next to fifteen others.

  "How about some gut and a needle, someone? Who's scrubbed in?"

  One of the Biafran operating nurses stepped up, handing the ready tray. Gilman began mending the nicked intestine. She heard Fortunatus head off to the sink and wash up again, readying himself to assist.

  Sister Catherine sat up and cradled her head on her knees.

  "Sorry, Gilman."

  "Too much blood for ya?" Allingham asked.

  Sister Catherine's laugh sounded breathless. "Something like that."

  "Okay." Gilman finished with the intestine and looked down at Sister Catherine. "Fortunatus, do you feel up to closing for me?"

  "Certainly, Doctor."

  Sister Catherine staggered to her feet, opened her mouth to protest Gilman's leaving the table, but she stopped at the look of pleasure on Fortunatus's face. The operating nurse slipped fresh gloves over his hands. Fortunatus had excellent surgical skills and ought to have been a surgeon. He thrived on chance opportunities to solo.

  Pausing only in the locker room to remove the masks, caps and gloves, Gilman walked Sister Catherine to one of the post-op rooms and pointed to the empty cot.

  "Lie down."

  Sister Catherine obeyed. Gilman scrounged a laundry bag and stuffed it under her friend's feet. She then came to stand over Sister Catherine with a thermometer in one hand.

  "Explain to me what's going on?"

  "Don't fuss. I gave some blood this morning, that's all."

  "That's all?"

  "That's all."

  "Then how come you're breathing like you just ran the Boston marathon? Don't bullshit me, Sister."

  "Well, so I did give a little extra."

  "How much?"

  "Two pints."

  "Two pints?" Gilman's voice rose. "And who took two pints from you?"

  "Don't get so excited. Fortunatus took one, and Father Joe took the other. They didn't know."

  "Imbecile. Serve you right if I put one of those pints back where it belongs right now."

  "You can't, Doctor." Sister Catherine giggled then. "You used both on that chest wound this afternoon."

  Gilman glared at her for a moment.

  "Touché. But that was damned stupid. You've got to protect your health. You're essential, for Chrissake. And I draw the line at people passing out in OR."

  "I'm sorry. Thought I could manage. I nearly did, too. If it weren't so infernally hot."

  "In case you've forgotten, we're in Africa, Sister. No excuse. Save your breath and pay attention. You will stay right where you are for at least twenty-four hours. You will eat and drink everything set before you. And if this ever happens again, Sister Catherine, so help me..." Gilman couldn't think of a threat strong enough and broke off.

  "So help you what?" Sister Catherine looked at her, bemused.

  "I'll..." Gilman started to laugh. "I'll see you're fired."

  "Promise?" Sister Catherine too, laughed, hiccupping.

  Fortunatus came through the door.

  "How's the patient?" Gilman said. "Any trouble closing?"

  "Fine. No trouble at all."

  "Good. Could you do me a favor and take this half-wit's vital signs while I grab her something to drink?"

  Chapter 63: Wilton

  February 1969

  Umuahia, Biafra

  The bank's main room still held some of the cool of the night, its floor swept of Harmattan dust, the counters of worn formica polished. It looked like it had been built for a grocery years ago, cracked window glass replaced by boards.

  Wilton folded the Biafran notes and placed them in two bundles in her pockets. Cash in hand was hard to obtain, no matter what a bank statement might say. She thanked the Biafran bank official, delighted by his formality even in this makeshift building, and by the fact he'd preserved his old threadbare uniform, which must have been pressed daily to maintain its creases. Or maybe he slept with it folded under his pillow. He smiled, all grace, before he nodded to the next customer, a man in suit and tie.

  Outside, Wilton narrowed her eyes against the sunlight, looking toward the cloth section of the marketplace, where she expected to find Christopher. She'd scarcely walked a block when she heard the engines. Coming in fast. Ilyushins. Two bombers. No time for the ditch.

  Like some rabbit she stared up at the incredibly fast approach. When the sunlight shivered, she covered her face and plunged to her knees. Through her fingers she saw the palms bend
, ragged fronds tearing in the first blast. The sky shuddered with unnatural brilliance, smashing her against the hard ground. She could hear nothing—then the tremendous air slammed into her. Fire splashed the sky, smoke swelled. A wall of red dust rushed at her.

  She was released by sound. Wilton rose, turned, ran into the hot dust for cover. Another bomber on its return flashed down and she felt the earth shift under her. She clawed back to her feet, staggered, forcing herself past the people fleeing toward her. Was she going the wrong way? Were they? Strafing fire.

  "Two months." She felt her lips begging Lindsey. "You promised me two months." But she couldn't hear her own voice or explosions or other human voices. "Two months before you bomb more civilian targets in Umuahia. I need the time."

  The hits clustered in the marketplace. No excuse for bombing a marketplace in full day at the height of business. None except that she'd argued for it. Not now though, she'd said later, later, Lindsey, weeks from now. Lindsey had agreed.

  Hundreds would be injured, killed, maimed. She stumbled to a halt. She saw Christopher.

  He ran across the marketplace, ducked between the racked stick and grass shelters. The whites of his eyes flashed. She waved her arms to signal him she was here. The ground and air shook again and Christopher vanished in a rolling cloud. She ducked and in the act felt one sob tear from her constricted throat.

  Something moved in the smoky billows. Christopher emerged, red with dust. Hot blood jetted from his torn thigh. It wasn't the blood that stopped her half-motion to meet him, but sight of the shaft of wood that spitted his belly and the bulge where it hadn't broken through on the other side. His eyes didn't know that he was a dead man. The next explosion swept her against the side of a ditch yards away. For a moment she clung blind to the packed earth, on her belly in the offal and feces. She saw the lid from a Fanta bottle, the neat little crimped edges looking surprisingly clean in the swirling orange dust. Like a doll's pie pan.

  She crawled back and away from the filth-clogged ditch, pulled her feet under her and stood. She reclaimed her balance, cringed forward then stumbled a few steps later over a man. She looked down and the body was his, Christopher's. Christopher's eyes happy, relieved of fear, focused upon her face in all the swirling ash and smoke.