Acts of faith (59 page)

Tara Whitcomb had departed an hour ago with their colleagues. A little before that Doug and Fitz had flown out for Manfred’s hospital, with the most serious cases and a detachment of soldiers to help carry them off and into the Land Rovers. The plane should have been back by now. If its return was delayed much longer, it would be too late to evacuate the remaining casualties and make Loki before nightfall.

Quinette scanned the vacant sky and said, “They’ll be showing up any minute.”

“Here’s hoping nothing’s gone wrong,” Lily said. “Did I say this place was godforsaken? God never considered it long enough to forsake it.”

With his radio operator standing behind him, Michael knelt at the wounded captain’s side and, cradling the man’s head in one hand, tried to get him to drink from a calabash. It wasn’t a suitable vessel; pouring out of the hole in the top, the water only dribbled down the captain’s chin. Quinette squatted next to him, took out her water bottle, and inserted the nozzle between his lips. His Adam’s apple bobbed as he sucked greedily.

“What’s his name?” she asked.

“Captain Bala. He was one of the two who tried to stop that crazy canon from killing himself.” Michael shook his head. “I don’t know what that man thought he was doing. The people needed him.”

“Do you wonder why he and the other man got killed and Captain Bala lived?” Quinette asked earnestly. “Do you ever wonder about things like that?”

“No.”

“I guess what happened today is sort of routine to you.”

“War is never routine. It’s full of surprises, none of them good.” He thought for a moment. “I suppose the answer is that it was God’s will.”

“And you believe that?”

“Of course.”

“Do you think the canon is with God right now?”

“These are strange questions to be asking at this time.”

“I know.”

“We Nubans believe there is a world beyond this one, so of course he is now with God. Look at that.” His fingers fanning like a magician’s demonstrating a card trick, he gestured at a group of women making a pile of tree branches. “Those are from a special acacia. The ash of its burned leaves is sacred. It’s used to anoint the bodies of the dead. If that and some other things aren’t done, their spirits won’t answer when you call on them. They might cause you trouble.”

Her immediate thought was that this funeral custom wasn’t fitting for people who claimed to be Christians, but recalling the words Malachy had spoken to her, that Sunday months ago in the Turkana village—
“You’ve got to meet them halfway”
—she refrained from voicing it. Indeed, these people, with their half-heathen, half-Christian beliefs, might even be a living reproof to her doubts. Their faith in the eternal life of the spirit had not been shaken; why, then, should hers? It must have been the Enemy who’d planted those questions in her mind. Once again her attention was diverted to herself and to the state of her own soul. She concluded that God was testing her. As the Enemy had tempted Christ in the desert, so was he now tempting her to cast off her faith and make the short journey into despair, in which she would be easy prey for his snares and wiles. She mustn’t give in, she mustn’t fail! If, as she’d thought last night, God was calling her to a new field of action, He would need to know some things about her first, like how strong was her faith.

“Satan, get thee behind me.”
She felt stronger now, rerooted in the firm soil of certitude.
“Like a tree standing by the waters, I shall not be moved.”
She watched a woman borrow matches from a soldier and then set fire to the branches. In seconds the pile was ablaze, black smoke ascending pillar-straight into the windless air. Her gaze rose with it, and then she heard the drone of Douglas’s plane.

The doctor had sent blankets back with him. The blankets were turned into makeshift stretchers, which made loading the second lot of casualties easier than the first. When it was finished, Michael and his radio operator climbed aboard and sat down at the forward end of the cabin, Captain Bala lying at his feet. As the engines revved to an urgent roar and the plane made a rough roll down the runway, Quinette was touched to see him clasp the officer’s hand. He continued to hold it through the climb, the leveling off.

“You must be very close to him,” she said.

“I would not be leaving my command post otherwise. But Major Kasli can handle things for a little while.”

He bent down to speak to Captain Bala, who responded in a rasping whisper, and Michael folded the blanket he was lying on over his chest.

“He said he’s cold. It must be the altitude, the loss of blood. Kasli is my second in command because of his rank, but this one I trust like a brother. We were in the army together.”

It took a beat for the tense to register with Quinette.

“I don’t understand,
were.
”

“Sudan army. We deserted from the same garrison to join the SPLA. We’ve fought side by side from that day to this.” He turned full face to her, and his smile, a bright crescent above his rounded chin, brought a flush to her cheeks. “So now you know you’re sitting next to a fugitive and a deserter as well as a rebel, a man the government would hang without trial.”

“I’m used to traveling in dangerous company,” she said, affecting a jaunty tone.

“Three times I’ve been wounded,” Michael said. “Bala not one time until today. Fighters stayed near him on operations. It was said a powerful kujur had given him a charm against bullets. I wonder if he began to believe that himself. I think that’s why he did what he did, running after the crazy man.”

The captain moaned, his good arm flopped over his waist, his hand slapping his side. Leaning forward, Quinette again fed him her water bottle. He gulped and spit up. She squeezed the bottle hard to squirt the liquid down his throat. He spit up again.
“There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole.”
The words to the old spiritual drifted into her mind—it had been sung at her father’s memorial service in the church he would never enter when he was alive—and she hummed it now.
“There is a balm in Gilead to heal the sin-sick soul. Sometimes I get discouraged, and think my work’s in vain. But then the Holy Spirit revives my soul again.”

A short time later she found herself at one more desolate bush airstrip, holding Captain Bala’s wounded arm tight to his chest while Michael gripped a knotted end of the blanket, his radio operator the other. With great care, they passed him head first through the plane’s door and lugged him toward a waiting Land Rover. The vehicle had been converted into an ambulance, the rear seats removed and a steel rack bolted halfway between the roof and the floor so six people could be carried at once, three on top, three on the bottom. A German nurse named Ulrika determined which six of the fifteen casualties were to be taken first. Wearing a blood-smeared smock, she made a quick examination of each one. “This one
ja,
this one also, this one
nein,
” she said. The fateful litany went on.
Ja . . . ja . . . ja . . . nein.
The captain received a
“ja,”
and Michael and the radiooperator laid him inside, wedging him alongside two others on the top rack.

The sun was low on the serrate horizon. Doug said he couldn’t make Loki before dark, even with luck and a tailwind, and elected to delay the return flight till morning.

“You and Lily might want some privacy, so you can sleep inside,” he said while soldiers began erecting a tent of camouflage netting over the plane. “Fitz and I can bag out under a wing.”

“Oh, I like the idea of sleeping out under the stars,” Lily declared. She gave her dingy brown hair a coquettish flip.

“Might rain again tonight.”

“I’ll take the chance,” she said. It appeared that the idea of spending one more night in the Nuba had suddenly become more agreeable to her.

Lily had just started to build her little nest under the wing when Ulrika bustled up, her bosom thrust forward, her rear end thrust backward for ballast. “You are the girl with nurse’s training?”

“Nurse’s?” Lily rolled out her air mattress. “I was a paramedic.”

“
Ach!
Nurse. Paramedic. You think we care about such distinctions here? You must come.”

“Come? Where?”

“With us to hospital, where do you think? Gerhard instructed me to bring you. We have so many, we need all the help we can find.”

“You’ll pardon me, sure, but I don’t get paid for that, and I’ve got to be back in Loki by tomorrow to do what I do get paid for.”

Ulrika drew back, as if she’d been insulted. “For what you get paid or not paid makes no difference! We have already lost three people and will lose more with your help or without it but more without than with.” She collected herself and tried a less strident approach. “I appeal to you. I am not making a big opera, but this is life and death.”

“Well, hell and bloody hell,” Lily said, kicking the air mattress. “Never fucking volunteer.” She glanced at Douglas and Fitz.

“Up to you,” Doug said, “as long as you’re back here between eight and nine. We want to take off before it gets too hot.”

Quinette looked toward the Land Rover and saw Michael standing on the running board, looking back toward them. “I’ll go with you, Lily, since they need help,” she said.

They had to sit on the roof, enclosed by the roof-rack, which they clung to as the Land Rover rocked side to side or leaned at precarious angles when one set of wheels rolled along a ridge in the center of the road. On the running boards, clutching the braces of the sideview mirrors, Michael and his radio operator had the look of charioteers. The road was so badly ditched and potholed that the driver couldn’t go much faster than ten miles an hour. In some places it became a series of evenly spaced heaves and dips, and Quinette watched the hood rise and fall like a boat’s bow in a storm.

Up on her unstable perch, she felt daring and adventurous and reveled in the roughness of the ride, the dust blowing into her face. They possessed the glamour of hardship. She flew out of herself and pictured the scene as if it were a movie: the sky behind a shimmering rose, dusk gathering in the sky ahead, and the two vehicles filled with casualties of war plunging on through a strange landscape where rocky needles stabbed out of acacia forests and wind-carved boulders stood like fantastic sculptures. The image poured its drama into her, nourishing the conviction that she was where she belonged, living with the intensity that had always been meant for her.

At the hospital Lily was issued a surgical smock, mask, and latex gloves and shanghaied into the operating room, which was nothing more than a tukul set a little apart from one of the bungalows that served as wards. Quinette was relegated to helping a male nurse prepare the patients for surgery, cutting their clothes away from their wounds, sponging them with hot water and bacteriological soap. There weren’t many beds open, so the injured had been placed on blankets on the ground, under an awning of plastic sheets propped up by crooked wooden poles. She and the nurse worked by a hissing high-pressure lantern that was a magnet for insects. He spoke only Arabic and a few words of German picked up from his boss, forcing him and Quinette to communicate mostly in an improvised sign language. She hadn’t eaten since this morning and was dizzy with hunger, its pangs occasionally overcome by a swift, sharp cramp of dysentery. Her knees grew stiff from all the stooping and squatting, but she relished these afflictions; the thing she was doing wouldn’t be worthwhile if it didn’t hurt a little. And hunger and tummy cramps were next to nothing compared with the patients’ sufferings. The fabric of their bodies gouged, slashed, and punctured, they appeared not to have been maimed so much as vandalized by some malicious delinquent.

Captain Bala was unconscious. He didn’t flinch when the nurse, after replacing the makeshift tourniquet with a rubber tube tied below Bala’s shoulder, ripped off the dressings. He motioned to Quinette, and she sponged the gash. The arm was swollen, and she feared septicemia had set in; and yet when she laid the back of her hand against the captain’s forehead, his skin was cool to the touch, almost cold. If he had an infection, he would be running a fever, she knew that much. The nurse had meanwhile wrapped a blood-pressure cuff around Bala’s good arm. He pumped the bulb, read the gauge, pumped again, and with a grave expression softly whispered, “
Ya Allah
—my God.” Then, as he took Bala’s pulse, his hand resting on the captain’s midsection, he appeared to feel something strange, for he let go of the wrist and pulled up Bala’s shirt, revealing a lemon-sized lump, with a red-rimmed pinhole in its center, just below the ribs on his right side. The nurse pressed it, and Bala awoke with a sudden jerk, a startling cry. A flurry of gestures told Quinette to fetch one of the stretchers leaning against the bungalow’s wall.

The captain was Michael’s size, well over two hundred pounds, and her back nearly popped as they lifted him onto the stretcher and carried him to the operating room. She was out of breath when they set him down outside. They waited. Bala lapsed back into unconsciousness. From somewhere behind the tukul, a generator throbbed. In a few minutes the door swung open and two orderlies passed through the rectangle of bright light, carrying a woman rolling her head from side to side, the stump of her right leg swaddled in bandages. Manfred and Ulrika followed behind, pulling off their masks. They cupped their hips in their hands and arched their backs and took deep breaths of the still night air before they each lit a cigarette. The lighter’s flare illuminated Manfred’s bloodshot eyes, the half-moon sags beneath them. His whole face looked like it was under the pull of a powerful gravity. The poor man had been bandaging and cutting and stitching and pulling metal out of people for the past eight hours. He and Ulrika smoked while the nurse apprised them of Captain Bala’s condition. That’s what Quinette assumed he was doing; she couldn’t understand a word. The doctor motioned to bring the wounded man inside.