Acts of faith (58 page)

“Archangel, Archangel! You nailed ’em!”

“Very good,” Michael replied. “I’ve sent some men in pursuit. Thank you, Doug-lass.”

“My man, slap me five!” Douglas cracked his palm against Fitzhugh’s, then landed the plane.

Fitzhugh sprinted across the runway. Nimble and swift, as if he were dribbling through an opposing team’s defenders, he weaved through knots of dazed people, past soldiers carrying the wounded and the dead, and found her slumped in a culvert, her hands and the front of her blouse spattered in red. Her eyes were open, and she was breathing.

“Oh Christ, where are you hurt?” He fell to his knees beside her, pawing her to find the wound.

She sat up. “Fitz? God, am I glad to see you.”

“Where are you hurt?”

“Nowhere. Not mine, his.” She pointed at the body of a man, lying on his back in a puddle of blood, more blood than it seemed any one body could hold. “His femoral artery,” Diana gasped. “Tried to—no good—came out like—” She flung her arms around him. “God, God, God, I am so glad to see you.”

He embraced her. She felt very small. Her bloodsoaked shirt stuck to his.

“You’re sure you’re not hurt, darling?”

She nodded. “Never saw anything like it . . . came out of him like water from a hose.”

“John?”

“I think he’s all right. It’s over? Tell me it’s over.”

“It is. We got them.”

“What? Who did you get?”

“Later. Come on, we have to get you on the plane.”

He helped her to her feet, this woman whom he loved now more than ever. She stared down at her blouse and then at the dead man and covered her mouth with the back of her hand.

“Come on. There’s nothing to be done.”

An arm around her waist, he walked her to the doum palm grove, in whose shade lay injured soldiers and villagers. More were coming in, some staggering under their own power, some carried in like sacks. Gerhard Manfred was performing triage, ordering this one to be placed here, that one there. He had pressed Quinette and Lily into service, tearing clothes into strips for bandages. Nearby Barrett, kneeling beside a soldier with a shrapnel-grated face, murmured prayers. The CNN reporter stood off to the side with her cameraman, filming the scene. Well, if she didn’t have a story before, she had one now.

“Splendid, not so, Fitz?” Manfred said, waving a hand covered in gore. One man, supporting another who was hopping on one leg, came up to him. “There!” he commanded, pointing, then turned back to Fitzhugh and Diana. “Yes, things have come to a splendid conclusion.”

Diana asked if there was anything she could do.

“There is. Help these girls make dressings with whatever cloth you can find.”

“Start with mine,” Fitzhugh said, stripping off his shirt, epaulettes and all.

“Splendid! Ha! Everyone is behaving splendidly.”

Whatever the overwrought German meant by that remark, everyone
was
behaving, if not splendidly, then with greater calm than Fitzhugh expected after such an assault. A villager retrieved the canon’s crucifix and planted it in the ground to make some sort of statement. People brought the casualties to the improvised aid station and went out to look for others with something like professional efficiency, as if they’d done it often in the past. Undoubtedly they had. Wails of mourning went up every so often, but the wounded bore their pain quietly—a moan was the loudest sound anyone made. Some were still in shock, but the Sudanese capacity to endure suffering probably accounted for their silent forbearance. In their world a mortar shelling was no more unusual than a drought, a flood, an outbreak of relapsing fever. Looking at their quiet, obsidian faces, he couldn’t say he admired their stoicism, for there was an element of apathy or fatalism in it. He thought of a submissive dog that dumbly accepts its master’s beatings, and the more accepting it is, the more beatings it gets. Did he pity these people then? Really, he had no idea what he felt about anything. His horror at the sight of terrible wounds was mixed up with his joy that Diana hadn’t been hurt, a residue of his initial shock and fear with a druglike elevation, a kind of giddiness. He lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply, but it would take more than nicotine to guide him through this thicket of powerful conflicting emotions.

He stubbed the cigarette and went off to round up his passengers and to see if any had been injured. It took a while. The aid workers were scattered about, helping to collect the wounded and the dead, while the journalists were taking photographs. Finally he got them all together. Only one had been hit, a guy from Norwegian People’s Aid with a superficial wound to his arm. The two Christian soldiers from the Friends of the Frontline had had a close call—a large mortar fragment had driven into a log they’d been hiding behind. They couldn’t stop talking about it, how the shard, almost as big as a railroad spike, had struck with a thud
right between them
and sent wood splinters flying over their heads. A bilious resentment flooded into Fitzhugh. It was as if the perverse, malign spirit that ruled over this cursed land had decreed that only those with black skin would suffer death and serious injury.

After assembling the group in the palm grove, he boarded the plane and told Douglas everyone was ready to go. Manfred was in the cockpit with Douglas.

“Your passengers will be having in their travel plans a little change,” the doctor said.

The Gulfstream was going to evacuate the casualties to his hospital, a mere twenty minutes away by air. Tara Whitcomb was coming in to pick up the reporters and aid workers.

“Tara?”

“I tried to get one of our planes, but they’re all committed and too far away,” Douglas explained. “Tara was near Malakal when she monitored my call. Only hitch is that she’s in her Caravan. Fourteen is the most she can take and we’ve got sixteen. Your job, my man. Find two people who really like the scenery here.”

“K
EEP THE PRESSURE ON
, don’t relax,” Lily said.

Quinette clamped the man’s shoulder with her hand, her thumb pinching an artery to stanch the bleeding in his upper arm. The wound was a deep, almost surgical incision that went nearly all the way around his bicep, as if someone had tried to amputate his arm with razor-sharp hedge clippers. The man was conscious, but he didn’t utter a sound, his eyes blinking erratically. There seemed to be a question in them, encrypted in the rapid blinks.

Michael was helping out, stretching a jelibiya taut between his outspread hands so Lily could cut it into even strips with her pocketknife—a menial task for a commander, but the casualty was one of his best officers, a captain. Looping four strips over her arm, Lily handed a fifth to Quinette.

“Tie a tourniquet where your hand is,” she said. “Not so tight you’ll cut off his circulation. And be quick about it. He’s lost enough blood as it is.”

Then she folded two strips into thick compresses, knelt down, and held them to the wound, one on each side. When that temperamental Manfred had called for someone to give him a hand, Lily had stepped right up. It turned out that she’d been a trained paramedic in northern Ireland before she’d joined Concern, and had plenty of practice treating traumatic injuries on Belfast’s bomb-blasted streets. Quinette had no experience along those lines, beyond a high school first-aid course, but she’d felt bound to help her friend in any way she could. Now, taking a deep breath to steady her nerves, she released her grip. With the relaxation in pressure, blood squirted from the wound, turning the compresses a vivid red. Fighting panic, Quinette bound the tourniquet snugly around the captain’s shoulder and knotted it.

“That should do,” said Lily, a compact bundle of competence as she wrapped the fourth strip around and around the compresses.

With the fifth, she fashioned a sling. The injured man groaned when she crooked his arm across the front of his chest and looped the sling over it and then around his neck. Wiping her hands on her trousers, she stood and looked down at her handiwork and said, “That will have to do.”

Michael spoke softly to the captain in Nuban. The man’s lips parted, but he didn’t say anything. All he did was blink and wince, there in the shade of the palms, where fifteen other casualties awaited evacuation and where the dead, seventeen altogether, lay in a long row, some dismembered, some eviscerated, some full of small red holes that looked like measles or smallpox from a distance. The living hovered over them, waving off the flies, and sent up cries of grief and songs of mourning into the hot afternoon sky. The high-pitched lamentations pulled at Quinette’s already overstrung nerves. Never in her life had she seen anyone die—her father had expired in the hospital at two in the morning—much less seen anyone die in the ways these people had. Their mangled bodies held a certain lurid fascination, like a grotesque highway accident, but she refused to look at them. The sight made her think things she shouldn’t be thinking.

She must have been ten or eleven that winter Sunday morning when her father came down to the kitchen in his flannel bathrobe, his hair mussed and a stubble on his face. He went to the coffeepot—that old Farberware percolator Ardele loved for the aroma it gave off—and without a word poured a cup and stood looking out the window that faced the barn where the tractor and other machinery were kept in cold weather. The rest of the family, dressed for church, ate breakfast. They all four knew immediately that he’d had one of his war nightmares and had woken up reincarnated into the uncommunicative character her mother called “Remote Man” because he would seem so very far away when those spells came over him. It was an inner distancing, a kind of implosion, the man everyone knew compressed, under the pressure of his memories, down to a pinpoint until he almost vanished inside himself. Sometimes Quinette was scared that he would stay there and never talk to her again. It was almost impossible to get through to him when he fell into that black hole, and it was just as difficult for him to speak to anyone else, as though the things he saw in there and the things he felt were inexpressibly awful. But Ardele tried now and then to make contact. She’d tried that morning.
“Ted, there’s still time for you to get ready for church. I do wish you’d come with us at least once in a while.”
He said nothing. He stared out the window and drank his coffee.
“All right, just thought I’d ask.”
He turned around suddenly.
“Why do you keep asking? You know I don’t believe in that crap anymore. Maybe I never did.”
Most times it didn’t pay to contact Remote Man, because most times he was as angry as the real Ted Hardin was gentle.
“Ted, please, the girls.” “Like, do you really believe you’re going to heaven with all this churchgoing? Do you really honestly think we’re going somewhere when this is all over?” “I won’t ask again, promise.” “Know that wall they’ve just put up in Washington? Fourteen of my buddies are on it. Three of them, you could’ve sent what was left of all three home in an eight-by-eleven manila envelope. Think they’re somewhere right now, playing their harps?” “Please, Ted, don’t talk like this in front of the girls.” “A shovelful of dirt in your face if you’ve still got one and it’s all over. End of story.” “Not in front of the girls, I’m asking you, Ted.”

Quinette was shocked. How could the sweet man on whose ample lap she sat at hay-mowing time or during spring plowing amid the good smells of turned black earth not believe in God and the eternal rewards awaiting those who did? It meant she would not see him in heaven, and what kind of heaven would that be without him in it?

Now that she’d seen what he had in Vietnam, she understood why he’d uttered those bitter words. It was the fact of mutilation that caused her to think the inappropriate thought
There is no life after death.
The mortar shells had laid bodies open, seeming to expose a terrible truth—a human being is only skin, muscle, bone, blood, organs, and slimy viscera, no fit dwelling for an immortal soul. The randomness of those deaths troubled her just as deeply. Why had those particular seventeen people been killed? Pastor Tom would say that God had summoned them for His own good reasons, but as she’d lain in a ditch beside Lily, Quinette had perceived no selective process in the arbitrary explosions, in the chaotic flurries of hissing shrapnel, flying every which way above her head. It seemed that pure chance determined who died, who got hurt, who escaped unscathed. The deeper mystery, the one that vexed her most, was why God had permitted this to happen in the first place. How could he allow people to be killed and horribly maimed just as they were singing hymns in His praise? The moment before Lily had pulled her into the ditch (for she’d been standing up, in a paralysis of bewildered terror), she’d seen the canon marching down the runway with the crucifix raised high. It was a brave act of faith, and for it he’d gotten killed. Why would the author of all things good license such an evil? Unless it wasn’t an evil but only appeared to be one to her limited human mind. Oh, these thoughts were so perplexing. Dangerous as well. They sowed doubt in the ordered garden of her belief, and Pastor Tom had often preached,
“In matters of the spirit, there can be no room for doubt, for it is but a short journey from doubt to despair.”

“Done all we can,” Lily said, intruding on her reverie, and a welcome intrusion it was. “Nothing for it but to wait. Looks like we’ll be spending one more night in this godforsaken place,” Lily added with a look at her watch. “Know the old soldier’s advice, ‘Never volunteer’? I’m wondering if we should’ve listened to it. It’s my own bed I’d like for tonight.”