James Patterson: Woman of God

By the time all surgical patients were in the recovery ward and the operating tables were empty, my back was stooped like that of a little old lady, and my joints ached, too. Jup yelled, “Bar the door!” and we were all too tired to laugh.

I was seeing double, and I was starting to talk to myself.

“That’s it, Brigid. Put down the knife. Take off your mask. Day is over. You’ve done good.”

I sang out to Jup and Colin-well, croaked out, to be accurate: “I’m leaving now. Don’t anyone try to stop me. I can’t do anything else. I’m used up, worn out, past dead on my feet.”

“Good night, Brigid,” Jup called.

“Go,” said Colin. “You don’t need to explain.”

I went. I walked along the dusty track to the ladies’ dorm. I waved to the people who called my name, and minutes later, I was in my little room. I wolfed down the crackers and tinned, porklike meat and slurped up the delicious bowl of canned peaches that Toni had left on the table by my bed.

After stripping off my scrubs and kicking off my shoes, I showered in cold water, and it was good. I wrapped myself in a wet sheet and got into the creaking, sagging cot, which was the best and most welcome spot in all of South Sudan.

I had a few words with God, asking Him to please try a little harder to protect the people whose lives were entwined with mine, and dropped into a dead sleep.

I awoke to someone calling me. It was Colin.

“No, no, no,” I said, rolling over, facing the wall. “Leave me alone. I have to sleep. I have to…”

But he didn’t go. He pulled a chair over to my bedside and told me that it had been a good day. “We saved more than we lost. New tally. Fifty-one percent to the good.”

Why was Colin in my room, talking to me in the dark? I rolled over and asked him, “What’s going on, Colin? You okay?”

He reached out and put his hand behind my neck and gently brought my face to his. And he kissed me.

He kissed me. I opened my eyes, and in that moment, he was gone-but I was wide-awake.

What had come over Colin? What a strange, strange man he was, but I had to admit to the only person I could talk to about this-me-that I liked the kiss.

I liked Colin, too. Seriously liked him. It was stupid to have a crush on this abrasive and combative and often thoughtless man. But there I was-instead of sleeping, I was staring up at the ridges in the corrugated tin roof, dreamily replaying a brief, whiskery kiss from Dr. Colin Whitehead.

AZIZA AND Jemilla were waiting for me in the staff dining hall when I got there for my morning cup of tea.

It was a real stretch to call this room a hall, but it was a pleasant space, with a hand-hewn slab table and two benches, three windows, and a ceiling fan. An old Philips radio rested on top of the fridge, and when there was no one eating here, the medical staff had been known to dance.

But there would be no dancing this morning. The girls had come for their math class, along with a whole-grainy cereal with goat’s milk and bananas, their paycheck for running errands around the hospital compound.

I hugged them both at once, and the giggling cracked me up. I braided Aziza’s hair while Jemilla braided mine, and after breakfast and tidying up, class began.

Math is far from my strongest subject, but I manage basic arithmetic with dried beans. This morning, math devolved from bean counting to bean jumping on a kalah board, a game something like checkers, which Aziza took seriously but which made Jemilla literally fall off the bench laughing.

Breakfast and beans over, the girls and I hurried to the O.R. I was gowning up in the scrub room when young Rafi flew through the door and grabbed me around the waist, screaming, “They killed them! It’s Zuberi’s work, Doctor. It’s a massacre!”

I’d seen pictures of Zuberi’s work. It was beyond hellish. In another realm altogether. I felt faint, but I fought it off, dug in my feet, and grabbed Rafi’s shoulders. I yelled down into his terrified, upturned face.

“What happened, Rafi?”

“They killed so many.”

I disengaged from the little boy and shouted to my colleagues in the O.R., who were up to their wrists in blood.

“There’s been-I don’t know. Something bad. I’ll go.”

Sabeena came with me. We climbed into the donkey cart we use as an ambulance, Sabeena taking the reins. We caught up with Rafi as he ran down the road, and slowed to let him into the cart. I put my arm around him and held him tightly as the donkey pulled us to the front gate.

I didn’t say this out loud, but in my mind, I was asking God, What now? What bloody horror now?

The gate is made of hinged chain-link fencing anchored to concrete posts and walls that are topped with barbed wire. There were more than a hundred people bunched up at the gate, and I couldn’t see around them. Someone helped me down from the cart, I don’t know who. The crowd parted to let me through, and I remember the terrible wailing.

I stepped outside the settlement walls alone and saw something so gruesome, so inhuman, that at first, I couldn’t make myself believe what I saw. The hacked and shot-up bodies, stacked like firewood and covered with a moving blanket of flies, were real.

THAT NIGHT, Jemilla and Aziza came to my open door and crowded into my room. They’d slept with me before, but I didn’t want this to become a habit. The room was hardly bigger than the narrow bed, and tonight, I was so done, I had nothing left, even for the two girls.

“Not tonight, kids, okay? I need the whole bed. I have to sleep. I’m on call, you know?”

Jemilla was persistent, and Aziza looked terrified, and I relented, of course. When Aziza was lying on my left side, tight up against the wall, and Jemilla, with her gun clutched in both hands, had pinned me in on my right side, Rafi came in and shut the door.

A great cloud of suffocating heat had collected under the tin roof and went all the way down to the dirt floor. We needed any small movement of air in this windowless room. Needed it. Rafi leaned hard against the door with his shoulder to make sure that the latch was closed, then he said, “I’ll be right here.”

I couldn’t see him in the dark, but I heard him settle down on the floor between the bed and the door. I had thought that the children wanted me to keep them company. Now I understood. They were there protecting me.

We sweated together in the dark, and I tried to think. After the bodies of the twelve soldiers had been buried, and while I was doing an appendectomy, there had been meetings. Senior staff, meaning not me, had gotten together in the dining hall. Then the staff had called the home office in Cleveland.

As Colin explained it to me, the two-thousand-person contingent of Black Like Me soldiers hadn’t planned to stay at Kind Hands. That had been a wishful interpretation of what was meant to be a stop on their way to help in a larger battle against the Grays in the ongoing, unofficial civil war.

Colin had told me, “They’re leaving within a few days. All we can do is wish them luck.”

Lying in this oven with the children, I began to shake. The attacks were increasing. We had limited means to hold off the militia, and now we were losing our last hope.

I had come here without a clue. Now I had one hell of a clue. We could all die. I could die.

Aziza squeezed my hand.

I knew a lot about Jemilla, but Aziza had kept the horrors she’d lived through to herself. She looked to be about thirteen, but even she didn’t know her age. I loved these orphans. I was pretty much an orphan myself.

Aziza asked now, “Do you believe in God, Dr. Brigid?”