Night Must Wait (13 page)

Oroko thought that Lindsey always looked embarrassed about her charities. But the Sisters loved her, prayed for her, and regularly there came in the mail little sheets of lined paper indented with careful penciled words from the children in the school for the abandoned.

Why did she choose such a focus for her attention, he wondered. Children didn't need softness. They had to learn to survive. He'd never tell her that he had three in training now, one nine, one eleven and the third, fourteen years old. All had excellent earning potential. Was it because she was an American that she had this streak of sentiment? In most things she didn't feel soft to him. She knew what she did and she made efficient choices. Perhaps she hid a vein of superstition. She went to many churches but belonged to none.

Should he be watching the movies she showed on "movie nights" to her household servants to see revelations of what hid in her mind? Lindsey must have some things she did to remind herself who she was and where she came from. All expatriates did. The movies and this charity must be two of them.

He'd never tell Sandy about the children he trained either. She had a softness inside unlike Lindsey. Sandy gave without thought. She added bonuses to all the servants' pay, not to buy their favor but because to her it felt right. She knew she would have wanted those bonuses, so she gave them because she could. She was a liability with the street beggars. He couldn't count the times he'd lied to Sandy about having no money in his pockets when she dug through her empty ones for shillings or a pound note, or a half-smoked pack of cigarettes for a cripple or blind man.

Her coppery braid and her little baseball cap were magnets for the professional pretenders as well as the real mendicants. Terribly recognizable.

Oroko left Lindsey. After he passed the envelope to David, he had an unpleasant job ahead.

"Madam," he said, when Sandy called that he could come in.

Oroko lifted the handle and went into Sandy's basement office-laboratory. There she stood, bent over, squinting into a microscope, notes scattered all over her desk. She straightened.

"Oroko," she said, as though she might be glad to see him. He straightened his spectacles. This was his job, not a personal matter.

"Oh fuck." Sandy swiped an unruly lock of hair back from where it clung with sweat to her forehead. "I can see I've done something wrong again. All I haveta do is look at you. Come on, Oroko, I haven't stood in front of a lit window in months, I swear."

"I am sorry," he said. "It is about the beggars."

"There's nothing wrong with a little handout," she said.

"One of them, one that comes to your house, the leper you call Stumpy…"

"What of it—he doesn't mind my calling him that, does he?"

"No. Madam, he's dead. He fought with a blind man for the best place near your garden gate. The blind man wasn't blind, and Stumpy is dead. You must stop your efforts to give charity, Madam Sandy. You mean to be kind…"

He said too much. No more humor or pleasure remained in her tanned face. Her eyes changed in a way that took the green out of them. That wide and smiling mouth thinned and went hard. Her lights went out.

"Stupid," she said. "I'm stupid. Go away, Oroko. Go."

It was the last thing he wanted to do, but he backed out of the doorway. She had to learn. She wasn't a child even if sometimes she reminded him of one. He had to tell her. He was sure she'd never be careless again with her charity, but only now did he know how much he was sorry.

Chapter 21: Wilton

July 1967

Nsukka, Biafra

In the new nation of Biafra, Wilton watched troops practicing maneuvers with wooden guns and palm brooms. Cheerful, boasting soldiers glowing with confidence. A few weeks, and before they'd learned to wheel on command or refuse a line, the war of posturing and words became real.

Wilton stood in her garden, a small cabbage in her hand and heard the distant pop-pop and a rattle like that of an unfamiliar bird. Gunfire. In the hot sunlight she shivered. It was July 6. Her servants brought better news than the radio, tracking which village changed hands and whose relatives had fled. Today Nigerian troops invaded Biafra along the major road from the North that led into her university town of Nsukka. Strange how she suddenly felt trapped, standing here in the open air of Africa.

She eased her left shoulder, still stiff in the mornings from her beating. The headaches had faded unless she worked too long a day. But longer days were coming.

That night, Wilton stacked her boxes in the front room. Final packing in the morning. She'd already sent Christopher down South to find her a place to live in the heartland of Biafra. A hundred miles away in Umuahia.

"Henry?"

"Yes, ma'am?"

He'd settled in his place on the floor of the porch, his guard post against possible looters.

"You hear trouble, you call me," Wilton reminded him.

"Yes, ma'am."

"No, I hear you say 'yes ma'am' here, and you do not mean it." She felt a smile come to her lips. "I can beat twice the men you can, my friend. I have the strength of twenty."

"I hear you madam." Henry giggled. Nigerian men giggled. Wilton loved them for it. American men were such fools, afraid of laughter.

"And I have a gun," she said.

"Soon I will have one. When I join the army," Henry said with satisfaction.

She wanted to say so much then, standing in the dark, imagining his eager young face. What was he, perhaps seventeen? Village boys rarely knew their exact ages unless they could time it by some universal event like a flood or fire.

"A rebel," she said. She'd argued with him about this before. It was too late to turn him now.

"Not a rebel. A Biafran. Yes. I know it makes you sad, madam." The energy in his voice altered as if he felt her emotion. "But I am Biafran and I will be a soldier for my country."

"God go with you then, my friend, and make His Mercy shine upon you and your heart burn with His Fire."

"Amen. Thank you, madam."

She left the porch, her heart slow in her breast. She heard the sleepy chuck of the chickens roosting in the bougainvillea and the soft beep of a nighthawk. If she could make time pause, she would. Time for wounds to heal and anger to fade.

Wilton stayed for a while at the window after the lights had gone out. She traced the edge of the glass louvers. This had been home. She had laid plans in these rooms, looked through these windows to see who came and went, waited for word from agents and hosted friends. A half moon hung in the clear, deep sky, outshining the myriad stars with its brilliance. The street of hulking deserted houses had a pitiful air, like a theater set unused. She looked across the ragged hedge. Waiting, all waiting.

Silence felt good. The shelling, now mere miles away, stopped shortly after nightfall. A civil war, with time out starting every sundown. Rumor said Biafrans fell away from the invading Nigerians, panicked by the guns. Rumor also said the opposite, that the Nigerians couldn't face Biafran bravery and the fiendish booby traps the Igbo and their allies created with wire and incendiaries. Could this war end in a month or two, once honor had been satisfied? She could hope so, she could dream so.

Would a short bloodletting bring both sides to their senses? A few hundred deaths might force both sides to peacemaking. Whatever might hasten that end would be worth the cost. Hear this courteous silent night? It wouldn't do. This wasn't war. It lacked the horror and desperation that make war terrible. Nigerians and Biafrans needed to find war intolerable before they could end it.

Wilton moved through the house, checking locks on doors and windows. The moonlight flooded the side steps. She paused to look at the feathery leaf shadows dancing on the rough cement. A sinuous movement, and a large snake, its scales whispering on the steps, wove through the mottled light and was gone. Wilton retraced her way to her bedroom, where she dozed until the birdsong began at daybreak.

Scarcely dawn, and Wilton heard the sounds of firing again. She went between house and car as if she believed she'd missed something, but she knew better. She didn't want to leave. If she hesitated too long, she told herself, the Feds would overrun the town and she'd be evacuated against her will. An American citizenship combined with her sex had consequences. She looked up to study the hooded vultures circling in the pale morning sky. Vultures and pied crows, all scavengers. She turned at the sound of a ragged voice, a metal wheel squeaking and shuffling feet.

"Madam Doctor, might you assist me?"

Here came a scruffy boy pushing a wheelbarrow. Balancing dangerously, a man in a uniform lying in the barrow, his hands clenched on his blood-soaked thigh. He smiled at her in the pallid light though his black face ran with the water of pain.

"This boy says you are a doctor and we need you," he said, as if he struggled with his words to keep from blaming her for not being where she should be.

"Not a doctor," she said, running to him. "A professor. I'm so sorry."

His face went slack as if at the shock of disappointment. She caught his slumping body but it was too much. The wheelbarrow upset, he slid down onto the asphalt, hitting hard. Loose and heavy like a bag of corn. The boy wailed and the sound hurt.

She put her hands to the wound when his hands slid away, but after a few weakening spurts it slowed to a trickle. Femoral artery? Gilman would have known. Arteries didn't stop except for death. There were more wounds. One had torn his shirt. He'd been an officer. She didn't recognize the insignia, but she could tell he had some rank from the makeshift markings, half stitched, half inked upon his shirt. A Biafran half sun. Who would have thought there would be so much blood in a man. Macbeth, paraphrased.

"I am sorry," she said again, as if it mattered.

She put her hand out to the boy, but he turned and raced off crying down the road, leaving his tilted barrow and the dead man. She looked back toward the house and Henry running toward her.

"Are you hurt, madam?" Henry said, but he reached past her to touch the soldier with shaking fingers, his eyes white rimmed.

"No, not me, but this poor..." Her throat went dry. She jerked her head at the body.

"Henry, take him back to his men, his troops." She swallowed hard to make the words. "They must know that he didn't run away. He thought I was a doctor. I think he wanted me at the fighting. God knows."

She'd wasted her life with birds, she wanted to say to the dead man. She should have known how to help him. She had no use here.

Chapter 22: Wilton

July 1967

Umuahia and Orlu. Biafra

Wilton followed Christopher's instructions. He'd gone back to the village to care for his mother, so she was on her own for now. After four hours on the road Wilton found the house she'd arranged to rent and paid off the servants who'd stayed to guard it.

"Madam, can you sign this receipt?" the oldest man asked, his face creased with anxiety.

"A receipt?"

"For my master's things and his family's belongings. I have the boxes here. We touched nothing but to move them to this room."

"I can't promise to protect anything," she said.

He shifted his bare feet on the linoleum. "But if you sign, my master won't be angry with me when he comes back."

"Then I shall sign," she said. She wrote while he waited, his bloodshot eyes fixed upon the blue Bic pen.

"God bless you, madam." He gave her a small salute, holding the paper in his hand so tight it creased between his stubby fingers.

One room held the hastily packed boxes of the Colorado State University employee and family who had lived here and composed part of an ambitious outreach program in the sciences. She'd store their goods for now. But in the closets and pantry they'd left sheets, blankets, cooking utensils and canned goods. She would be surrounded by more comforts than she'd troubled with for years. Christopher, her first convert from her childhood, would be back in a day and help her make decisions about how to share these items among the refugees. Only a trickle walked the roads so far, but there would be more as the Federal armies moved in.

How long before Biafra lost the coast and Port Harcourt? Then it would transform into a landlocked nation, completely dependent upon air support. She would gather information for Lindsey here, and if by sabotage or misinformation she'd accelerate the little nation's fall. Peace as soon as possible.

She anticipated Christopher's return. She recalled his angled face, its big eyes beautiful with excitement and wonder. Her best student, her trusted servant. Christopher would likely be drafted into the Biafran Army unless she interfered. She remembered teaching Christopher to read, teaching him about the Cross, about the sacrifices of the Apostles and the salvation of God, and above all, the Nigerian nation to come.

These past months he held his tongue among the Biafran enthusiasts. She'd given him permission to misrepresent his feelings to his fellow Igbo, for he wouldn't be able to do God's Work for her if he were imprisoned or killed for his lack of belief in Biafra. Day after tomorrow she'd take him with her in the car when she headed to see Gilman. Make sure the doctor was all right in the Orlu area, with the nun, Sister Catherine. Gilman would feel the obligation, the excitement of commitment to a rebel cause. She'd feel more proud yet if Wilton showed up and admired what she did.

Wilton picked up a large soft stuffed frog a child had left on top of the last unsealed box, and looked into the googly blue-and-black eyes. The mouth didn't curve up in the reassuring smile of most toys, but stretched wistful and uncertain across the green-and-yellow plush of the frog's face. There must have been some last minute debate, she imagined, the child clinging to take the frog along, the parents explaining that it was too big, that only essentials could go with the evacuees. She stroked its head and tucked it safely under the cardboard flaps.