James Patterson - Woman of God

I scowled. “Stop it. Be nice. You might like it.”

Colin handed me a towel. And he smiled.

It was out of my mouth before I knew what I was saying.

“I can’t imagine what will happen to us after we leave Africa.”

“I can,” Colin said. “You’ll have an extraordinary, exemplary life, and I’ll drink myself to death.”

“You’re not going to do that.”

He gave me a dazzling smile.

No doubt about it. As bad as Colin Whitehead was or tried to be, I was falling for him.

A DRIVER from the village stopped in the dining hall to drop off mail and medical supplies. I was worried about the BLM forces and asked Mosi if he’d heard any news of them since they left Kind Hands.

Mosi shrugged and said, “I haven’t heard anything. I think you should say to yourself that they went back to America.”

After a guilty breakfast of cereal and fruit, Jemilla, Aziza, Sabeena, and I took the donkey cart to the gates. Another large group of refugees had arrived at the settlement, and soon, Sabeena and I would pick through them, looking for people we could save for a day before turning them out to be slaughtered.

Father Delahanty had gotten a head start on us this morning, and I saw him at the gates, praying quietly, looking about as sad as anyone could be.

When he opened his eyes, I said, “How can God allow this?”

He said, “We do what we can and leave the big picture to Him.”

That afternoon, I had a young girl on the table. She had a bacterial infection that had run through her body like wildfire and had begun to shut her organs down. In order to save her, limbs would have to be amputated. Several limbs. And then what would happen to her?

Colin said, “Brigid, you’re wanted in Recovery.”

“What do you mean?”

“Your patient with the head wound. If I were you, I’d go take a look.”

I went. The boy with the wound was alive. I knew that when I went back to the O.R., the girl who was dying on the table would be lying in a bed, intact and dead.

I dropped to my knees outside the hospital, and once again, I prayed. “Please, help me understand. Am I helping? Is this good for anyone? Are you testing me? And if so, why, dear God, why?”

I finished by asking Him to bless everyone, and then I went back to work. I spoke to all my patients. I held their hands, told them that they would be okay, and I closed the eyes of the ones that died.

That afternoon, I walked over to the radio and shut off the Red Sox game. I had no idea if my team was winning or losing, and for the first time in my memory, I didn’t care.

THE LOUDSPEAKER crackled and squealed, and then Jup’s amplified voice boomed, “Wounded at the gates. We’ve got incoming wounded.”

Sabeena and I had been making beds, but we dropped everything and ran for the donkey cart where Jemilla and Aziza had already grabbed places in the back.

I knew this donkey. Colin had named him Bollocks, and he was wicked stubborn. Sabeena took the reins, clucked her tongue, slapped the reins against his back, saying, “Come on, Bollocks, you old goat. Let’s go. ”

But, while he brayed, twitched his tail, and stomped his feet, he wouldn’t move forward, not an inch. And we didn’t have time to waste.

I got out of the cart and went around to his head, where I scratched his forehead, wiped some dirt out of his eyes, palmed his muzzle. And I said, “Bollocks, please, no funny business. Be good. I’ll make it up to you. Do we have a deal?”

When I got back to the cart, I saw that Father Delahanty was sitting in back with the girls. Colin started up his Land Rover, and Victoria and two boys got in.

We followed Colin, choking on his dust, and when we reached the gates, they were wide open.

Gunshot victims had been dropped right there, where they waited for help outside our gates. Some were alive; all of them were a warning. The moans and cries of the wounded were horrific and almost unbelievable. It was as if a Breughel painting, The Triumph of Death, had come to life between the gateposts of our settlement.

I scrambled out of the cart and ran with my bag, passing wounded UN workers as well as our own downed people. Father Delahanty was right behind me, and Sabeena was bringing up the rear. My eyes were on the wounded, lying in the dust, many of them writhing in agony. I never noticed the Grays, boiling up over the riverbank on foot, until they were spraying bullets at us with their AKs.

Nothing about my life in Boston could have prepared me for an attack like this. Father Delahanty grabbed me by the arm, and we ran back through our useless chain-link gates. Everyone who could flee was doing so, and I saw the young men, our self-appointed volunteer militia, along with UN workers, staging a defense.

Sabeena had been racing ahead of me and was now standing at the cart. I ran toward her. And then I felt a sudden weight on my arm, Father Delahanty pulling me down. I knew he had stumbled, and I whipped around to help him to his feet. But he hadn’t simply fallen. He’d been hit. I dropped to the ground beside him.

“William. Father. Hang on. Help is coming. We’ve got you.”

He rolled to his side and coughed up blood. I looked around for help. Colin was leaning across the hood of his Land Rover, firing on the Grays, who were now coming through the gates.

I yelled, “Sabeena! Help me!”

She had her hands full. The girls were with her. Bullets were flying. I wasn’t sure that she had even heard me.

I said to Father Delahanty, “I’m going to help you up. You have to help me get you to your feet. Grip my forearm.”

But he didn’t do it.

He was losing so much blood. He was going into shock.

And then he said in a whisper, “It’s been two weeks since my last confession.”

“You have to get up,” I said. I was frantic.

“I must confess.”

I sat back down beside him and held his hand. I wanted to fall on his chest and cry, but I contained my sobs and tried to keep my voice even.

“Tell me,” I said.

COLIN SWORE all the way back to the hospital. Victoria sat in the backseat with me, held me while I sobbed. Behind us, in the rear section, was the dead body of my new, late friend, Father William Delahanty.

I knew so little about him, but enough to know how good he was, enough to be able to speak over his grave, enough to be able to tell his parishioners and friends in Chicago how kind he was and how bravely he had died.

If only I could.

I stared out the window at the dust flying up from our tires, turning everything outside the car an opaque ocher-brown.

I was picturing the devastation we had just left at the gates. I didn’t know how many people had just died, but I thought all of our attackers had been shot or had run away. Still, I was sure that this skirmish was not the full force of Zuberi’s army.

The young Gray murderers were scouts or recent recruits, wearing the rebel group’s colors and leaving bodies and the letter Z before the real onslaught began.

We parked outside the hospital. Eyes followed me from the waiting benches to the O.R., but I was single-mindedly looking for Ahmed and Rafi. I found them stoking the fire for boiling water and asked them to take Father Delahanty’s body out of Colin’s car and put him in the O.R. until I could tend to him.

I went back through the O.R., and I got a bottle of water from the shelf over the sink. Half the water was for me. I went out to the cart and poured the other half into Bollocks’s mouth. I patted his shoulder. I talked to him about what a horrible day this had been.