Night Must Wait

by Robin Winter

  Not him, Lord. Lindsey or Gilman or even Sandy. Anyone else, but not him, not like this, all my promises broken.

  "Professor," he said, as though he could not taste the blood in his mouth.

  She drew her gun from her belt, knelt and released the safety.

  Chapter 64: Wilton

  February 1969

  Umuahia, Biafra

  Had hours passed? A day or more? Wilton couldn't think back, or trace the passage of time. She made her way down a side street on the east side of the bombed marketplace, then followed her imperfect memory to the old Pentecostal Church. It too stood bombed, the shell broken, but Pastor Josiah, an American hanging on in town, had moved his congregation and his brass cross to a deserted store on the other side of the street. His sign hung over the doorway, its two pieces spliced together where it had splintered through the C.

  Wilton leaned on the sagging counter in the little shop Pastor Josiah had acquired and swallowed again. She began to know where she was and with whom, though she couldn't remember what she'd already said to this man. He knelt on the other side of the room, pulling out the box she'd left with him from its hiding place under the storage cupboard. His bald head seemed to shine in the dusty room as though he'd not only lost the hair but polished the resulting surface. For now the familiarity of his face was all she wanted, even his tamed mind with all its predictable opinions. A foreigner like herself. Someone who knew another world, who translated life here through a different lens.

  "He died," she said. "Christopher's dead."

  "Yes, yes, you told me that already. It preys upon your mind. I know. I have your things here," Pastor Josiah said, but what she noticed when he handed it to her was how firm his grip seemed and how he looked healthy, full in his flesh. His shirt clean except for a little rubbing of pinkish earth. Pastor Josiah had been a favorite of Christopher's or she'd never have trusted him. The Pastor did too well. He ate more than his share before God.

  "So many people die every day. It's dreadfully sad. Every day there's someone. I'll pray for Christopher. A blessing you were there to comfort him in his passing. He was a good convert and a good church member. God will give His peace in His time," Pastor Josiah said. Wilton wanted to hit him. God's mercenary—she'd had that thought before about missionaries.

  God meant her to sacrifice everything, the message was clear. All the human attachments, the ambitions, the plans. He'd made Christopher's death easy on her, most gracious Lord. If she said that, she would believe it.

  "I'll pray on the loss of your faithful servant. Be comforted, daughter."

  Her gorge rose as she accepted the box. She bent to ease it into her unzippered pack. No, no daughter of his. Missionaries coming maggot pale from America with their no-native policies and their pressed mouths like shopkeepers of salvation. She once visited Protestant missionaries in Jos who didn't allow natives to sleep on the premises. Nationals was their term. No nationals after dusk on the premises. Her servant Christopher would have to pay for a hotel, they told her. Wilton and Christopher drove through that night.

  Pastor Josiah was one of those, a missionary who earned cheap salvation measured in days ticked off a calendar as if the tours served like prison sentences were requirements to gain the Kingdom of Heaven. Christopher was to him another black face. Another servant. Another national. Lots more where that one came from. Every day there was someone, he said. He saved Africans? Sucking up their respect. Eating their food. Converting them to faithful servants. Creating white-only islands within the great theater of Africa with its booming skies and flashing days. But never breaking bread with them or allowing them to sleep in the dust on a missionary's floor.

  She wanted to rage in pity for the dispossessed, the unwanted. Blacks turning into aliens in their own land. All tribes, every tribe. Everything that had value was imported, rules and language, formula instead of breast milk, skin lighteners for beauty. It all mixed in her head including her, and Lindsey and Gilman—the tribe she'd brought. Wilton turned away, afraid of calling down the curses of the older displaced gods. But she couldn't stay silent.

  "What have you to do with Christ and the beggar at the door?" she heard herself ask.

  If there was a warning, the drone of a plane, neither she nor Pastor Josiah could hear well enough to tell after the earlier explosions. The sun seemed to come bursting in between them, brilliant beyond color, breaking the air so there was nothing to breathe. She felt herself weightless, tumbling over in the dirt clouds. Then a crushing fall and pressure so great it felt more terrifying than pain.

  A minute or less later—she had no way to tell except that the sun returned to the sky and shone through swirling motes, diffusing yellow brilliance. Something pushed down on her and her face hurt. Wilton drew herself up on her elbows and looked along the length of her body, saw the braces of the old door cast crooked across her, and dust smoldering up from the wrecked building where she'd been talking with Pastor Josiah. She was deaf. She guessed the explosion threw her through the doorway, and some of the sill wood and framing lay across her. But she felt no real pain besides her bleeding lip and cheek, and a jab in her side that was only bad when she tried to take a deep breath. She pulled herself out from under the weight of the broken door.

  Wilton crawled over to the mounds of rubble, choking, and pried at the pieces of wood. Find Pastor Josiah. She kept seeing his peaceful face, the wire rimmed spectacles perched on his narrow beaky nose, the thin lips curled up.

  Maybe she could get him out. But the thought hurt, overbalanced, twisted in her mind like a snake carrying its own poison. God's mercenary.

  They should all die. All the outsiders who come to feed on the soft stomach of Africa.

  She lay down to peer under a shaft of wood. The air cleared and she glimpsed Pastor Josiah. Only his head and the point of his left shoulder. Concrete chunks and dirt covered him, his face chalk with plaster dust like a geisha ready for her stage. A trickle of blood, light pink, bubbled from his mouth. She saw his eyelids flutter.

  Wilton saw more than that. She saw herself calling the villagers and all the tense hours of desperately careful work to extricate this one white man, each wrong move bringing down more broken concrete and timbers, each loyal man, woman, child panting with the suspense of salvation, grain by grain, any error condemning the one who slipped. Faithful servants. Unbearable.

  He shouldn't be here. Pastor Josiah was all wrong. The evil came with him and everyone like him. She'd brought it too, transplanted her maggots, and look what they'd done. Lindsey and her broken promises. Africa helpless while parasites multiplied under her skin.

  Wilton's body wound tight, the muscles in her arms jerking, she yanked with savage concentration on the beam she gripped. A cascade of rocks and concrete fell. Wilton blinked into the tiny cavern, saw a beam of sunlight made its way through the settling dust. She could see Pastor Josiah's eyes, looking at her, myopically blinking wide with terror. His mouth opened and closed like a hookworm's, ragged with blood. She braced, then hauled the rest of the teetering building down on his head. His nice bald American head. She struggled in that dust-cloud blindness to throw, shove, propel every bit of rubble and stone on him, to crush him, bury him before anyone might come and see. She shoveled dirt forward with frantic hands. He must be buried. It must be over now. She needed it to be over now. All of it.

  Pebbled chunks of concrete, pieces of metal, refuse from the ditch. She pried with her fingers, tearing at the piles of wrecked building and wall, digging in the deep ditch, moving the world. Burying it, ending it.

  Once you start, you can't stop.

  Chapter 65: Gilman

  February 1969

  Uli Area, Biafra

  Startled to see Taffy Masters walking into her clinic, Gilman thought he'd never approach the hospital unless he'd been shot again. Or was Jantor injured? Taffy rapped his swagger stick against his leg as though embarrassed. Her heart pounded but he spoke before she could, his leathery face squinting.
>
  "Doc," he said. "I've got a friend of yours outside. Found her in Umuahia after the bombing yesterday. Some chum of hers dead. She spent hours trying to dig him out from under a collapsed building. Civilian bombing site. She freaked. I..."

  Gilman jumped up.

  "You brought her to me," she said, pushing past him before he could answer. "Masters, I owe you. Big time."

  "Hey, watch it, Doc," he said. "You'd better..."

  His words had no hold on her. She hurried through the door.

  What kind of injury might Wilton have suffered that made Masters so anxious? Shock? God forbid—rape? Who'd died? What did one say? Not until she stood by the side of the vehicle and looked Wilton in the face did Gilman realize that anything she said wouldn't make a difference.

  Gilman forced herself to act, aware of Taffy Masters standing somewhere a distance behind her. There was nothing he could say to help.

  "Wilton." Gilman felt astonished at the natural sound of her own voice. "I'm glad you've come back. We missed you here. It's been crazy busy."

  At the Land Rover she reached for Wilton's hand, drawing back when she saw the battered oozing fingers. Instead of the hand, she took Wilton by one wrist. No resistance. The other arm clenched a sealed cardboard box and a canvas bag to her side.

  "Come on, Wilton," Gilman said. "We have to take care of this. You shouldn't leave cuts like these unwashed, they'll get infected. This is Africa, you know."

  Wilton submitted to her gentle tugging, lurching out of the Land Rover with a suddenness that nearly toppled both down. Masters and the nearer soldier helped to steady them, then Wilton found an uncertain balance, still clutching her goods.

  "Twenty days," Wilton said.

  It seemed inconceivable that any face so dead of expression and so lacking in response could have spoken. Gilman saw Masters's grim expression and felt an unbearable panic. Clean her up, fix those hands. She'd be better when she had something to drink. Wouldn't she? They moved the patient toward the clinic door.

  "Wilton," Gilman said. "I need your consent."

  She sat by the cot. Other more urgent cases had delayed her until now, but she wanted to do this job under the best light she could get, and while she still could focus. Wilton stared up at the ceiling, her box and bag laid on her stomach. Nothing to see up there but the olive canvas roof and maybe a spider.

  Gilman could put Wilton under now that the vitals had stabilized. She turned Wilton's inflamed fingers between her own, noting the glitter of imbedded slivers of glass. Wilton caught her hands away and clenched them together. Gilman winced.

  "Wilton." Gilman tried to coax the hands apart. "This is Gilman. Remember me? Please? Please listen."

  She looked over at Sister Catherine and Allingham, who stood outside the doorway. She saw Allingham glance at the sister, maybe looking for advice to pass on, but the nun didn't notice, intent on the patient.

  Wilton turned her head with unfocused eyes, then rolled it back again.

  "Let's get an IV going," Gilman said to Sister Catherine, trying to think. "She needs more rehydration, plus a sedative so we can get to work. I don't think we have any hope of gaining her consent, so let's just pretend we did."

  Chapter 66: Wilton

  February 1969

  Uli Area, Biafra

  "Wilton, wake up, please…"

  From the haze of something deeper than sleep, Wilton could hear. She could have seen if she tried, but kept her lids sealed against the world. Let them think her incapacitated. Noises warned her of the presence of others, she felt them with her skin, the movement of air, the vibration of their nearness. Too tired to pull herself back into one person, she let herself fragment, slide away and drop down into that safer place.

  "Wilton? Wake up, please?"

  She'd been hearing this same cadence. It beat upon her, irritating, urging, gentle and repulsive in its tender intonation. Wilton barely lifted her lids, saw Gilman bent near, blurred face. Wilton rolled her eyes up. Let Gilman see the whites and leave her alone. Leave her. Until God wakes me, I leave life. Until I leave until leaves fall until the fall of leaves until He leaves me from my fall.

  Pain woke her the next time. She let it move in waves through her pulsing hands and arms, the knitting-needle stab in her side, the throbbing of her head. She felt sweat under bandages, the irritant fever of living. She felt her fingers swell with too much blood. Slit them, let it go, let it all flow.

  No one with her. She let her bones sink into the lumpy cot mattress, let knowledge seep through. No one to see her pray. No one to hear her ask God for her last chance. She must give herself. A true gift given with willing heart.

  The decision tree of Abraham. The whispers in her dreams said, there is no lesser sacrifice. No escape. For God you kill what you love. So the next question is how.

  For Abraham there was a ram in the bushes. Surely, she did not sin if in her act she left a chance for God to send an alternate sacrifice. It is not because I would cheat You of what is due. It is because I would put the choice in Your Hands.

  Chapter 67: Gilman

  February 1969

  Uli, Biafra

  Gilman unlocked the door to her frame tent as quietly as she could manage, knowing from the past few days' experience that Wilton might go ballistic if startled. She cringed inside while she eased the door open, peering around the edge of the frame. At first in the darkness she could see almost nothing and waited for her pupils to adjust. Would Wilton be sleeping? She looked first at the cots.

  No, Wilton stood at the far end of the tent, vaguely outlined against the dense drab of the tent side. On her own two feet. Wow. Oh, that was a huge improvement. Gilman drew in her breath to warn Wilton she was coming in, then thought better of it and knocked softly on the wooden door frame.

  What happened next was fast. Wilton jerked around and Gilman saw the gleam of metal in her bandaged hands. All Gilman heard in her head was Jantor saying "Self-injury…never understood it." Wilton's hands rose, the gun clasped in bandaged fingers.

  Gilman flung herself across the room, knocking the revolver out of Wilton's fumbling hands, and thrust Wilton against the desk. The revolver fired. In the strange silence after, Wilton fell across the chair. Even knowing that the gun had gone off from striking the floor, Gilman held her breath, scrambling back to her feet. Running feet and calling voices outside. She saw Wilton pull herself into a sitting position, shaking, as if everything hurt her.

  "I'm sorry, Wilton," she said. She babbled. Slow down, soothe. "I was afraid, you startled me. Where did you find that? You shouldn't be handling guns. You'll scare the shit out of all of us. In fact I think you already have."

  She'd left it in the locked drawer of her desk. Jantor used to mock her for keeping a loaded revolver under lock and key. Said it would be useless when she needed it. But she still had all her keys dangling on a string around her neck, normally hidden between her breasts but now out swinging, clinking against the buttons of her shirt because she'd pulled them out to get into her tent. Wilton moved again, straightening herself, staring in the dim at Gilman while a voice shouted outside.

  "Doctor, you all right in there?"

  "Okay in here." She drew a long breath. She sidled to the gun, scooped it up, slipped on the safety. "Accident. Dropped the damned gun. Anyone hurt out there?"

  "No, dammit, Gilman. Talk about a fool thing to do," Allingham's voice coarse with rage. "For Chrissake…"

  "Got enough people shooting at us without you joining in," Sister Catherine said from somewhere outside.

  "God will give you peace," Wilton said, clear, perfect. She placed her bandaged hands in her lap.

  Gilman puttered about the tent for as long as she could, but she got nothing from Wilton who sat at the desk like a doll, her face slackening back to that idiot look that Gilman found so unbearable.

  Checking the drawer, Gilman found the lock hadn't been broken. How could she have been so damned thoughtless to leave it unlocked with a patient alon
e in the room? Criminal carelessness. She would never be so stupid again. In fact she'd use the holster and belt Jantor gave her, damn his eyes, and make sure the cursed thing stayed as far from Wilton as possible.

  She tried to coax another word or act out of Wilton, but Wilton slipped so far away again that she soiled herself sitting there in the chair and Gilman had to clean her before moving her back to the cot. Gilman took the restraining straps to secure her friend, though she struggled with a disconnect between who this was and what she had to do.

  Gilman stood for a while in the faint chill after lighting her lantern. Wilton belonged on the ward instead of in this seclusion. She wasn't safe, that was for sure. So hard to make a decision, maybe a side effect of not enough to eat. Gilman had asked Sister Joseph to stay here last night while Gilman was on duty, but she couldn't keep demanding extra service. Pure luck Wilton hadn't snuck the revolver last night. And there were other things than revolvers.

  She went to find the orderlies to move Wilton back to the ward. She couldn't see any more ways to fail.

  Chapter 68: Gilman

  February 1969

  Uli Area, Biafra

  "Well you know she can't stay here," Gilman said. She fretted about infection in Wilton's hands. Had she really removed all the glass? Metal was easier to find. She sat across the little table from Sister Catherine in their post op room and tried to find answers in the triangle of the nun's face.

  "I've got to take her away," Gilman said, answering herself. "We don't have the sodium pentothal to treat her. I've never worked with shell shock before, and hell, Sister, what if I tried the standard procedures and blew it? She's got to get into the hands of a specialist. Once I get Wilton to Lindsey..."