Public Offerings
By
Bob
LiVolsi
When they came to the place that God had shown him,
Abraham built an altar there and laid the wood in order. He bound his son Isaac, and laid him on the
altar, on top of the wood. Then Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to kill his son.
But the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven
and said, "Abraham! Abraham!...Do not lay your hand on the boy or do
anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld
your son, your only son, from me."...
(Genesis 22: 9-12)
Chapter One
Seething from the stormy
Between pockmarked brick walls in an alley the
length of a coffin, a boy stood lookout.
Two weeks worth of peach fuzz no more succeeded in its mission to hide
his swollen acne than it disguised the determined set of his protruding jaw.
Through murky drizzle, he watched his younger brother gather his nerve beneath
a leaky shop awning across the road that ran perpendicular to the alley.
Under the shredded black awning, Sean Farley, short
and skinny even for 11, sucked in deep anxious breaths. He glanced furtively toward his big brother
for a reprieve. Three years older, Mike
acted as both mother and father since Mum's passing nine months earlier. With an intense glare, he lip-synched for Sean
to “get movin’.”
Though he could barely make out the details of Mike’s face in the
fog, Sean read clearly the familiar body language of his older brother’s
displeasure.
One hand latched to his umbrella, the other
squeezing his yellow slicker closed, he trudged forward on the sidewalk’s
crumbling concrete. Ahead, three boys
leaned against a wall, wet cigarettes dangling from their mouths, the orange
ends of the Samsons glowing in the mist.
As Sean emerged from the murk under the awning, the hoodlums crossed his
path toward a dark green Mercedes parked on the curb. The eyes of two large men posted near the
rear of the vehicle followed the teenagers.
Sean hunched his shoulders, wedging
himself between the boys and the right front fender of the Mercedes. Suddenly, the small gang collided with him,
pummeling his midsection with their fists.
He tumbled sideways into the gutter, one shoulder slamming into the
curb, the other against the undercarriage.
As the boys kicked him, Sean scrambled to position the canopy of the
umbrella as a shield against the flurry of booted toes.
"C'mon, ya bloody Prod, on your
feet and take your beatin' like a man," one taunted.
Hidden by the umbrella, Sean slithered
beneath the car. Overhead, the
bodyguards shouted at the rowdies. Sean had only seconds to do what he had
practiced repeatedly. He pulled his tools from his slicker.
"Leave 'im alone, ya
bastards," one of the men shouted. The
boys threw back anti-Protestant epithets and the men were on them, pulling the
punks away from Sean and the car. In the
distance, a policeman's whistle shrieked.
Frantically, Sean fumbled with a very thin wire. He ran it from the base of the doorframe to a
small packet of putty-like Semtek. With
duct tape, he affixed the explosive to the exhaust pipe. His brother had assured him that the blast
would be very confined, hurting no one but the car’s occupants.
Pushing the umbrella ahead of him,
Sean crawled back out. The other boys
still struggled with the men. The
policeman approached in time to see Sean brushing away tears of fright.
"Ya all right, son?" he
asked.
"It's them that did it. They wanted me brelly."
Sean pointed at the boys. The policeman joined the bodyguards in
quelling their youthful exuberance.
Heaving a deep breath, Sean sprang from his toes, dashing around the
nearest corner. As he ran, he shed his
yellow slicker for a black one that had been tightly folded and stuffed in his
pants. Jumping fences and racing
between brick walls, he worked his way round to the alley where Mike
waited. They watched as the policeman
and the bodyguards finally chased off the Catholic rowdies. The three boys would be rewarded later for a
job well done.
Within moments, a large black taxi
pulled up. A woman and two girls stepped
out, one barely a teenager, the other no more than two. The youngest, clinging to her mother’s
elegant hand, toddled in a frilly white dress.
"My Lord," whispered Sean,
"It's his wife and kids. We gotta
stop it!"
Mike grabbed his arm, his fingertips
digging in painfully.
"It's too late, Sean. Besides, they'll probably not go off with
him."
"Who ya kiddin'? Look at the hour. They've come for lunch."
"Maybe they'll walk."
The woman and the girls climbed the
five concrete stairs leading into the building, the toddler awkwardly
negotiating steps half her own height.
Sean watched the soft angelic face of the teenage girl turn to the
bodyguard holding the door. He could
make out "thank you, sir" on the full, red lips curled around her
smile. He felt an unfamiliar tug, a
warm, confusing flush that swiftly intensified into panic.
He surged toward the street, twisting out of his
brother’s clutches. But the older
boy had been down this path. Sean moved
only three steps before a heavy black cudgel clipped him behind the ear.
A moment later, he awoke on the wet
pavement, his face scraped bloody by small stones as Mike dragged him back to
the safety of the alley. He lifted his
head, blinking his eyes in a struggle to focus.
He watched the woman and her children leave the building. A clean-cut, smiling man in a suit followed – the father.
He held one arm around the mother's waist. The other arm held the two year old, her tiny
pink arms encircling her father's neck.
The slightly freckled teenage girl, her alabaster complexion ethereal
under a wreath of auburn hair, cuddled close to her dad and cooed up at her
sister.
Sean had been told the father was a
Protestant bastard, a slum landlord who overcharged his Catholic tenants. Now, he just looked like a good, caring man – his own father before the troubles. There must be another way to fix the rents,
thought Sean. He crawled a meter into
the street, a warning shout forming in his throat, but a rough hand seized him
by the mouth and pulled him back.
"Ya done good, little
brother. Now just watch your work in
action."
A bodyguard held the back door open. Mother and children crawled in. The teenager, her face shimmering in the
mist, looked toward Sean just before she ducked into the car. Her mouth twitched into a small smile;
later, his memory would struggle to separate fact from illusion, feeling the
flash of her glowing emerald eyes seek out his soul in that split second,
pulling him into her.
Frantic, he squirmed to break his brother’s
determined hold.
The father and the second bodyguard walked behind
the car to enter the front from the passenger side. The first bodyguard finished getting the mom
and the girls in the back.
Sean bit down on his brother’s hand. “No”
erupted from his mouth.
The bodyguard opened the driver's door.
Fire and metal suddenly mushroomed into the air,
the flash blinding, scorching heat instantly drying the damp pavement. The deafening shock wave dissolved Sean’s
warning cry, turning all sound into a ringing hum. In the disorienting silence, he saw the
father and the second bodyguard, not yet to the car door at detonation, flung
across the street. His older brother,
his mouth flapping orders without sound, rushed Sean down the alley.
Sean pulled away, drawn to the carnage. Silhouetted by flames, roasting forms
shriveled in the back seat, their humanity barely discernible on charred
faces. A piece of white dress, one edge
aflame, lay on the cobblestones steps from Sean. Gasping, his ears popped.
“...bloody idiot!”
His brother’s epithets, now audible, landed
without acknowledgment.
Above the din, the father’s anguished wails
pierced the nightmare. Bleeding, one
pant leg dragging and misshapen, he crawled close to the flames and twisted
metal. Repelled by the heat, he latched
on to a tiny white shoe blown into the cobblestones. He hugged it, gazing desperately at the
withering shapes in the car, longing to feel the softness of his wife and
daughters, to feel their warm breath as they nuzzled his neck.
Instead their warmth had become fire, their breath
the curl of black smoke in the mist.
Chapter Two
On his knees, Sean pressed his hands together,
leaning across the bedspread, tears dribbling over his cheeks as he looked to
the crucifix on the wall. Sound still
seemed hollow, like
an echo chamber, the noise of the blast as raw in his
memory as the blinding light of the explosion.
His clothes reaked of smoke. Had
his mother been alive, she surely would have had him in the shower by now, his
clothes in the wash.
At one point, he crawled on the edge
of the bed, nodding off. The auburn-haired,
alabaster-skinned girl floated before him, blood drizzling down her face, her
glow fading into fire. He awoke to the
screams. The wails. But they lived only in his head now.
That evening, as soon as the deep
darkness of early April blended with the mist to turn everything to murky
silhouette, Sean slipped away from the house.
Mike warned him to stay, but Mike had gone to the pub hours earlier.
First, dramatically exhaling a stream of cigarette smoke, he would whisper a
warning of confidentiality to his boys hovered over mugs. The secret might survive two beers, but with
each successive Guinness, Mike would grow louder, his boasting slowly assuming
command, the secret falling victim to the suds.
A foaming mug raised to Ma in her grave and another to Da in his
cell. In their name. All the carnage in their name.
But Ma would not be proud. She would be as horrified and frightened as
Sean. He could see her in his mind’s
eye. Slapping Mike about the head until
he sniveled and cursed her. But Mike
would never strike back. He might kill
on the streets, but never, never raise a hand to Ma.
Every car that skimmed past on the wet
cobblestones outside sent a chord of alarm through Sean. Police or British soldiers, maybe. Or worse, the Prods themselves, bent on
balancing the score. Given enough time,
they would hear of Mike’s bragging.
They would come to the house to take both brothers away. Or kill them on the spot.
Trembling, Sean pulled his ratty
backpack over his shoulder. He stepped
into the big puddle that filled the sidewalk below their stoop. The cold shock penetrated his running shoe,
but it did not deter the fear compelling him. He started to run, but thought
better of it. Walking, he could be just
another boy coming home from a friend’s.
The whir of a siren erupted within a
few blocks. As the siren grew louder, a
strobing blue light appeared at the corner of Sean’s street, moving fast. He stepped into a doorway, pretending to
fidget with a door key. The police van
drove past, its siren now off. He looked
back, watched its red brake lights illuminate the mist. It slowed in front of his home.
He ran.
He found sanctuary in a church. Not St. Brigid’s where he served as an
altar boy until only a few days earlier, but at St. Michael’s. The police – and Mike – would surely look for him at St. B’s. He remained inconspicuous, sleeping on the
pews at night, kneeling with the devout at daily mass in the morning. When others came to work in the church, he
slipped into a confessional and waited until the sounds stopped.
There in St. Michael’s, the haunting began in
earnest.
On the fourth night, his bones hurt
badly from laying on the hard wooden pews.
In the light of a single candle, the one that marked the perpetual presence
of Jesus, he found his way to a carpeted area near the altar to the Virgin
Mary. The sweet smell of the candle
called him to a dark, narrow corner between the small side altar and a plaster
wall. The vague shadow of the virgin
fell at his feet, shifting slowly back and forth with the candle flame.
Light rain pattered on the
stain-glassed windows, their purples and reds floating faintly about the center
of the church, products of the light from a distant street lamp, one of the few
in the block currently not shattered. He
watched the virgin’s shadow, first drifting over his toes and then away,
back and forth in incessant pattern. He
prayed to her, prayed that he not be found, but he did not know where he wanted
to go. He prayed for his Da in prison.
And he chanted: “Eternal rest grant unto Ma,
O Lord, and let perpetual light shone upon her.
May she rest in peace. Amen.”
Repeatedly. Ten times, counted on
his fingers. And then ten more because
he’d become distracted. He wanted
the prayers to be right. He wanted his
mother out of purgatory.
“Don’t take my doin’s out on her,
Jesus. It’s me that did it. Ma would never ha’ let it happen.”
Maybe she could hear him, too.
“Ma, I’m so sorry. If there’s any way to bring those
people back to life...”
He stopped.
No such miracle. A boy from the
streets of
Now he cried making the virgin’s fuzzy shadow
even shimmer through his wet eyes. Then
he bawled, wailed, not caring who heard.
If they caught him –
if they killed him –
he deserved it.
Fifteen minutes later, his face rough with the
dried salt of his tears, he fell asleep.
Soundly.
She waited for him on the other side of closed
eyes. Her alabaster face pressed into
the breast of her killer’s ma, her auburn hair cascading over the forearm
of the woman who held her. The girl
slipped from Ma’s arms, crumbled to the floor in the blood-streaked white
dress, its edges black from flame. She
lifted her head, her face toward his.
Her wet, green eyes glistened above a soft smile on a face uncreased by
time.
She whispered.
He did not understand her. She whispered again.
“She’s mine now.”
He felt his mother’s concurrence. He had killed and he had lost her even in
heaven.
“I could have loved ya, boy,” the girl
breathed, “What if we had a future?”
You’re so beautiful, he thought.
“You killed your future, Sean. Sure as ya blew up my own mother and my
sister.”
I’m so sorry, he thought, wanting to get the
words out, but finding his body completely paralyzed, his mouth unable to move.
She reached for him. A hug.
To comfort him. But her arms
passed right through him. He felt only a
tingling and a fleeting warmth right in the center of his chest.
He felt a hand on his head, heard his mother’s
voice.
“Ya have penance to do, Sean.”
Anything, ma.
Tell me what to do.
He felt her caress his face.
“You’ll know. And when you’re done with it, we’ll
see what’s left of us.”
And he felt her part, first her touch
and then the sense of her presence. The
explosion filled his ears again. The ball of fire singed his eyebrows. And the wailing tore out his heart.
The wet, warm humidity of a September in
Fr. Fogarty found him, listened to
him, hugged him and forgave him. He
created a baptismal certificate that matched the name on the birth certificate
of a boy who died just days after his birth 12 years earlier. Then, Fr. Fogarty took him to Derry, walked
him to a plane to the
In
A man in shorts and a golf shirt met
them at baggage. “Adam,” he said as he introduced himself. He showed them to his SUV that smelled of
cigarette smoke. He dropped the nun at a
parish in Stone Mountain before continuing the journey to the monastery in the
rolling green hills halfway to
Chapter Three
August 2003
“Sixth Station: Veronica wipes the face of Jesus,”
recited the priest, his Irish trill still audible after all this time away.
Brawny and tall with jet black hair, Father
Jim Reilly genuflected, planting his knee firmly in the thick grass of the
small clearing. Sweat dribbled down the
side of his face. In ten years, he may
have grown accustomed to the West African humidity, but it seemed he never
stopped perspiring.
As he rose again, the small congregation recited, “Because
by your holy cross you have redeemed the world.”
With the tips of the fingers on his
still folded hands, he wiped a line across his brow in an effort to keep the
stinging sweat from his eyes. Unlike
most of his peers, Jim did not read the Stations of the Cross from a book or
pamphlet. He knew them by heart.
“Lord,” he said, “When
did we see you hungry, and feed you; or thirsty, and give you drink? And when did we see you a stranger, and take you
in? And the Lord answered, ‘Amen, I say to you, as long as you did it for one
of these, the least of my brethren, you did it for me.’”
He dropped to both knees, kneeling, pondering the
words. A lightning bolt
flashed in the distance. Jim counted it
down in a whisper.
“One one-thousand, two one-th...”
Thunder rumbled through the
clearing. Less than two miles away. And only at the sixth station. The storms here did not bother Jim. Few of them matched the violence of a
“Ninth Station...,” he
intoned.
The choice to accelerate the prayers
pleased the Lokoma faithful. The rainy
season in
“Jesus falls a third time. We adore you, O Christ, and we praise you.”
He genuflected again, bouncing up and
down more quickly this time. Another
thunderclap.
The villagers responded, “Because
by your holy cross you have redeemed the world.”
Jim returned to his knees and then lay
facedown on the grass, his head lifted just enough to allow his voice to
travel.
“I lie prostrate in the dust,”
he said, noting that the area had not seen dust for months, “Give me life
according to your word...”
He aspired to be only Christ-aware, no longer a
willful human being, no longer feeling the haunting horror of his sin. In the rare moment when he thought he had
achieved this, the simple recognition of his sin re-awakened his hideous
self-awareness, the knowledge of himself and all the ways he had let the Father
down, no longer at ease in the numbing peace of Christ. He chastised himself for his failure,
convinced that guilt kept him self-aware, a constant reminder that he remained
unworthy of the sacrifice Jesus made.
Another thunderclap. Much closer.
Much louder. Different. The villagers ran, some shrieking.
Mortar fire, registered the priest. The villagers knew the difference after eight
years of civil war. The distant
thunderstorm no longer held their interest.
Miraculously, the fighting had left the isolated
village intact, threatened on several occasions with nearby explosions and
gunfire but never actually experiencing invasion or a direct hit. The surrender of the central rebel leadership
had tempered the threat even more, but the priest, like many others in the
countryside, knew opportunistic criminals led the rebel bands. The bands would continue ravaging the
countryside as long as it served their greed, with or without a united
front. The central government, toiling
to simply breathe new life into the national carcass, had neither the resources
nor the broad-based support to launch full scale military maneuvers against the
warlords. As long as the bands stayed
out of the urban centers, the government looked away while random violence
continued in the rural mountains and rainforest.
After the flock scattered, ten year
old Jacob Karanja stood steadfast before Father Jim.
“Why aren’t you running?”
Jim asked him.
“My father wouldn’t run. A chief never runs.”
Jim’s face widened into a broad
smile. For a moment, Jacob subsumed the
silliness and the reckless play of boyhood into a proud bearing. The priest had known the boy since he was an
infant, supported him and his family through an early illness, ultimately
baptizing him with the chief and many others a few years earlier.
He worried about him more now. Jacob still hurt from the loss of his seven
year old sister to malaria four months earlier, a sister he had treate
d badly
at times. He compensated by catering to
five year old Sara. In his
overprotective zeal, he even insisted on tasting her food first.
“Where is your father?”
“Getting the truck. We’re going to find out who’s
fighting out there.”
A horn honked. At the edge of the clearing, a rusted flatbed
with makeshift wooden railing pulled up.
Chief Hamara Karanja threw open the door to let in his son.
“How de body, Father?” Hamara said.
“Bein’ good,” Jim responded,
“Join ya?”
“Happy to have ya.”
Jim squeezed in the passenger side and
the truck pulled out. Another
mortar explosion sounded, this one very close.
Hamara leaned into the steering wheel, scanning his field of vision for
any movement.
“I can’t see anything,”
he said.
“Pull over, chief. I’ll climb on to the flatbed for a
better view.”
Hamara stopped the truck. Jim clambered into the flatbed and Hamara
drove on. As the truck ground into gear,
the priest tightly gripped the splintered wooden rail surrounding the truck
bed.
Accelerating, the old farm truck swerved, bouncing
violently over ruts in the dirt road to avoid a bomb crater. Small arms fire crackled in the forest
ahead. Jim leaned toward the driver’s
window.
“I thought the government said they weren’t
even close,” he shouted over the racket of the truck’s engine.
“This doesn’t mean they
are.”
“So, then, who do you think is firing at who out
here?”
“For all I know, it’s friendlies out
for target practice.”
“Government troops?”
Hamara held a hand out the window for
Jim to see, fingers crossed.
“Friendly doesn’t seem to
apply to them either,” Jim shouted.
Hamara turned his hand palm up as
though to shrug.
“At least, they don’t
mutilate civilians as often as the rebels,” Hamara shouted back over the
cacophony of metal truck frame and squeaking springs.
The Karanjas and their tribe, the
Lokoma, kept to themselves, territorially unambitious and self-sufficient. The chief and the tribe’s elders took
comfort in knowing they had nothing others would want, short of a peaceful
life, not something attainable through conquest.
Another explosion, the fiery impact
less than twenty yards away. The concussion slammed into Jim, knocking him
backward on to the flatbed.
“Father, you okay? Father?”
Jacob called, leaning halfway out the passenger window.
Jim did not answer. The boy’s call entered his
consciousness in the background. Rolling
to the edge of the truck bed, he instinctively grabbed a rail.
“Papa, stop!”
His legs dangling off the side, Jim pulled them up
to his chest. Realizing how close he had
come to falling out, he blinked to clear his eyes.
“It’s all right,” he shouted
toward the cab, “I’m okay.”
He latched on to the truck’s wood rail. Something ahead caught his eye. He pulled himself up to the cab.
“We have problems,” he
said, leaning over the cab toward Jacob, “Look over there.”
Jacob followed Jim’s finger. Rebels in t-shirts and shorts raced across
the road less than 50 yards ahead, just over a rise. They looked like an elementary school class,
but every one of them carried Kalashnikov AK-47s, as long as many of the boys
were tall.
“There! There!” Jacob
repeated, too excited to explain to his father.
Jim banged on the roof of the truck to
get Hamara’s attention. The chief stopped the truck and leaned out the
window.
“Turn it around, chief. Bandits crossing the road just over that hill.”
The chief did not pause for
conversation. Jerking the gearshift into
reverse, he backed into the side of the road to turn around.
As he did, bullets whistled over head,
splitting off tree splinters behind the truck.
Jim flattened himself on the bed.
The truck’s gears ground painfully and noisily as Hamara struggled
to get the vehicle moving. Lifting his
head, Jim peered up the road.
Six boys close to Jacob’s age
raced over the hill in his direction.
The sides of the truck thunked and pinged as fire erupted from the
barrels of the boys’ weapons.
Hamara leaned on the gas, pulling away from the boys.
Cresting a hill, just out of the boys’ sight
line, the truck smashed into a crater, nearly turning over on its side, its
driver side wheels spinning helplessly in the air. Jim slammed against the side rail as his
splintered hands slipped from their hold.
The rail came loose and gashed his head, causing a stream of blood to
spill down the right side of his face.
The small of his back landed on the edge of the two-by-four rail, a
loosened bolt drilling into a kidney.
Groaning, he rolled on to the ground, just eighteen
inches below where he had sprawled on the nearly overturned vehicle. He pulled himself up and ran to Hamara’s
window. It stood nearly a head taller
than Jim because of the truck’s cockeyed angle in the ditch.
“You two all right?”
“Damn road!” cursed Hamara, his temples
throbbing beneath the smatterings of gray on his short, coiled hair.
“Dad! Not in front of a priest,” Jacob said.
“Should we run for it?”
Jim asked.
Bullets whizzed overhead. If the child soldiers had the presence of
mind to stop and take aim, death would be a certainty.
Without answering, Hamara pulled himself up and
peered out the driver’s door, noting the long drop to the ground from
that side. He looked beyond his son to
the passenger side, but saw that the door had little room to open. He saw, too, that if the truck tilted any
further, someone climbing out the passenger side risked being crushed.
“Give me your hand, Jacob,”
Hamara instructed.
Jacob latched on.
“Climb over me. Hurry!”
The small boy scampered to the window
of the driver’s door. Jim stood
below, waiting to catch him. Jacob
jumped and the priest grasped him at the armpits, easing his flight to the
ground.
A round skipped over the top of the
cab.
Hamara called down.
“Jacob, lay down in a rut so you
can’t be seen. No argument. See a way out of this one, Father?”
Jim had already assessed the options.
“Just start driving when I say
go.”
Jim seized the broken rail. He wedged it between a rock and the suspended
right rear tire to provide traction.
A round splintered the top of the truck bed’s
remaining rail. Leaves overhead rained
down as bullets flew through them.
The priest raced around and placed his back under
the passenger side of the cab, pushing back with all his might, his boots feet
sinking into the dirt.
“Go! Hamara! Drive!” he yelled.
Hamara’s left foot jumped off the clutch, his
right foot slamming down on the gas. His right hand latched on to the black
gearshift knob. He shifted back and forth between first and reverse as his feet
danced on the pedals. Alternating
between grinding and roaring, the truck rocked in search of footing. Trying to use the momentum of the rocking to
leverage his 230 pounds to right the vehicle, Jim strained backward against the
cab with all the force he could muster, the veins bulging on his blood-red
forehead and neck.
Nothing.
Jacob appeared beside him and began pushing on the
cab with his hands.
“Get back down, Jacob. You’ll get hurt.”
“You need help, Father,” the boy
shouted over the roar of the truck’s churning engine, his sandals sinking
into the mud as he pushed.
The weapons fire continued overhead, now taking
splinters out of the trees just a few inches over Jim’s head.
“Pray with me, then,” Jim said, “Hail
Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee...”
Jacob joined in, leaning a shoulder into the truck,
a grimace of determination on his face.
The truck rocked.
First gear. Reverse. First gear.
Reverse. First gear. Some give. Reverse.
First gear. More give.
Hamara gunned it.
In a single leap, the truck hurtled out of the crater.
Jim and Jacob sprinted and leapt on to the truck
bed, sprawling flat to provide smaller targets.
“Go! Go! Go!” Jim yelled.
“...pray for us sinners now and at the hour
of our death amen,” Jacob continued.
Both of them looked back. The heads of the lead boys appeared over the
hill as the old truck accelerated, putting distance between them and the
danger. In less than 20 seconds, they
hurtled around a sharp bend in the road and out of harm’s way.
As the truck bounced further down the
crusted red dirt of the road, the gunfire slowed and then faded. Hamara braked to a stop, turning off the
engine to listen. The chirping of birds
and the stirring of leaves resonated around them. Fading gunfire showed that the fighting had
moved south and east, a near miss for Lokoma village, but a miss
nonetheless. Like tornados, rebel
attacks cut a narrow swath, devastating everything in their direct path, but
leaving everything else untouched.
“How de body, Jacob?” Jim asked,
admiring the kid’s courage.
“I’m the son of a chief, Father,”
the boy said, “I always be right as rain.”
But Jacob registered that he, his father and the
priest had almost died. He needed to be
able to defend his family, his village.
He remembered the long, loud guns the other boys carried.
I need one of those, he thought.
Chapter Four
Chuck’s
fingers trembled as he held a tiny brown bead of rosary between thumb and
forefinger. In the empty church, lit
only by the dusty multi-hued rays of sun passing through stained glass, he
struggled to place meaning behind the rote prayers, a struggle that dated to
his childhood, one that never seemed to end.
“Our Father,
Who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name...”
Your name is above
all, he thought.
“...Thy
kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven...”
Grant
that we... not we... that I know what to do.
It should never have happened. Where’s
the God in this?
He
found himself at the end of the prayer and on to a Glory Be before he realized
that he completely zoned out the words in the last half of the Our Father, the whole
“Give us this day our daily bread” thing. He thought the words on one track of his
brain, but his focus shifted somewhere else entirely. Again, he pushed back the heartache, the hole
in his stomach, the need for a rewind button for life.
He
tried to mumble the prayers, to move his lips like the nuns and the priests
taught him not to do. It would help him
focus. If he stayed focused, answers
might come.
“Hail
Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb...”
What
the hell did that mean anyway? Oh, no,
he thought, looking up at the blue and white statue of the Blessed Virgin on a
small altar to the right. I didn’t
mean that. Not “hell.”
How the hell did
Fr. Jim make a life out of this? he wondered.
Bad language again. Relax. Just say the words and let it go. God listens.
Let him judge the quality. He’s
the all-knowing one.
His
eyes moved to the main altar, to the crucifix.
An African Jesus hung there, chocolate brown in sharp contrast to the pink
face of his mother Mary’s statue.
Chuck’s
fingers passed through five beads of Hail Mary’s while he pondered the
statuary. Without noticing, he had
mumbled every word of the prayers.
Did they
count? Or matter? Why am I so easily distracted? he challenged
as frustration rose within.
He
jerked his folded hands against the top of the pew. He could not even pray rote prayers. Concentrate, he demanded. Gritting his teeth,
he pounded the top of the pew again. The
beads popped out of his hand. He lost
his place.
“Dammit,”
he mumbled.
Pushing
off the pew in front of him, he stood.
He stumbled over the kneeler as he exited to the aisle. The dangling plastic of the rosary rattled against
wood as his hands latched on to the curved pew rail to break his fall. The feel of the smooth wood of the varnished
pew recalled some seminal memory, a flash of calm entering him. Re-gaining his composure, he jammed the beads
in his pants pocket and marched down the aisle.
Some other day, he
thought.
Stepping
into the bright sunlight of
Typically far less
congested than other parts of the city, this upscale neighborhood, lined with
consulates and the homes of
Around him, people
balanced woven baskets on their heads or lugged them on their shoulders,
baskets that probably carried all their remaining possessions. An occasional goat, too skeletal to provide
meat, tethered to a rope, held out the promise of a future meal as its owner
urged it to feast on the thinning grass.
Seeking to escape
the carnage that devastated their own humble communities, the refugees thought
that neither the rebels nor the government would fire on the US Consulate and
the streets surrounding it. No matter
the outcome, the
The
American consul tried to discourage Chuck from walking in the area; the
presence of any American, let alone an executive thought to be wealthy, offered
a target of opportunity. Still, Chuck
needed to get away from the bureaucrats, find some peace. The church did not do the trick. Maybe he just needed to feel the people,
experience them directly.
The environment
had no correlation to his home of
His promotion to
president and chief operating officer – and its income and trappings – filled him with pride and haunted him with guilt, not the complete
contentment he expected. The money
seemed its own prison, not enough of it to retire and do whatever he wanted,
not even enough in the bank to take off for six months – not if he wanted to pay for mortgages, car loans
and insurance. But at least he could
pay for them, unlike so many others – as long as he performed and kept his job.
Now, he lived for the
initial public offering – the IPO - the big
one-time event that could liberate him once and for all, give him enough money
that he would not have to worry about keeping his job, enough to give money to
people in need – to assuage the
nagging guilt he felt about his own unwarranted good fortune – and still have plenty left over to take care of
Olivia’s future, for family travel all over the world, to retire and
write books or music. The IPO could
happen within six months. He had the
ball. He had invested everything about
himself in it. And, to his surprise,
risked everything. Everything and
everyone that mattered.
Two months ago, he
came home one evening to find his luggage on the front stoop and the locks
changed. For over an hour, he
negotiated and pleaded with Mel on his cell phone, shamelessly shedding tears
while sitting hunched on the concrete steps, occasionally catching her pull
back a curtain to peek at him. Crushed
and humiliated, he moved into a motel by the interstate, setting up house with
a laptop and a hot plate.
So he
traveled. It needed to be done, but he
would have been far more likely to delegate it until the separation. Mel had not been happy about his
promotion. She kept waiting for his
workaholism to wind down, not up. She
claimed that Olivia, their 15-year-old daughter, hardly knew him; he certainly
did not know her, she asserted. Then,
Liv’s diagnosis pushed everything over the edge. For all of them.
He
had not been alone with Liv since the split, Mel fiercely holding on to
custody. And he wanted to be with her
more than ever. Mel relied on that. He had seen Liv only briefly at the lawyer’s
and then in Mel’s presence. When
he asked her questions, she looked to Mel for approval with each answer,
restricting herself to safe one-word responses.
But as he left, she threw her arms around him and whispered, “I
love you, Daddy.” He felt her wet
tears on his cheek. He wanted to hold on
to her forever, to make things better.
Mel jerked her away.
Someone jostled
him. Then someone else. Instinctively,
he grabbed his front pants pocket to protect his wallet and passport.
A skinny teenage
mother pushed two little boys past him.
“You
go brush your teeth,” she commanded.
She looked much
too young to have a boy that looked five.
Barely a teenager. Liv’s age at best. The little boy and a friend continued to
laugh and poke at each other as the mother continued to propel them along.
“You
go now,” the mother repeated.
Remarkable,
Chuck thought. Her unique obsession with
hygiene in the middle of this hell impressed him. The girl must have come from a well-to-do
family in one of the embattled areas. He
tried to see her teeth, one of the indicators of social status, but she she
kept her determined lips tightly together as she hitched her basket further up
her shoulder.
Without verbal
response, the boy and his friend ran ahead to a home two doors down. Chuck wondered if they really would do
it. He felt a weird form of affirmation
when the little guys put toothpaste on their brushes and leaned into the water
sprinkler, a courtesy the sympathetic homeowner had extended for two hours each
morning.
The
boys spit foaming toothpaste at each other, laughing and playing like five year
olds anywhere. Liv’s laughter
echoed in Chuck’s head, a peaceful smile crossing his face. He closed his eyes briefly to savor a memory
of his little girl.
Shouts erupted
from the crowd. A whistling sound. Chuck dived to the ground; others followed,
landing on him and each other. To his
right, the two boys looked up from the sprinkler. Panic crossed the first boy’s face, his
brown eyes wide, his tiny hands reaching out to his mother across the
yard.
Suddenly, he and
the other boy disappeared in a rain of dirt, smoke and shrapnel. The concussion stunned Chuck’s
eardrums into eerie silence. He lifted
his head; it felt heavy. The boy’s
mother screamed silently as she raced over the grass, stepping over prone
bodies that awaited the next mortar.
Struggling
to his feet, Chuck wobbled over to the crater to help. The mother swung her arms, yelling for him to
stay away from her son. She lunged into
the smoking hole, frantically grabbing at pieces of clothing, bone and flesh. She appeared to be trying to put her son and
his friend back together from the fragments.
With only a humming sound in his ears, Chuck saw her mouth move, repeatedly
forming a circle that he knew screamed “no.” He could see her teeth now, all stained in
browns and yellows, at least two missing.
Chuck,
not realizing he was shouting, asked a woman nearby how he could help. She motioned for him to leave, staring at his
white skin as though it were a disease.
He stepped
backward out of the yard. He tripped but
kept his feet. Looking down, he saw the
bloody sandal that tripped him. The shadow
of a coconut palm, untouched by the blast, hovered across it. Chuck looked back. Collapsed, clutching pieces of cloth and
bloody flesh, the young mother wailed in the arms of an older gray-headed
woman.
He
wanted to do something. What? Short of getting a gun or a mortar himself,
what could he do? What could he
change? Maybe fighting was not an
option, but he could help. He could
pray. Not enough. Something real. Something he could touch. Hell, he proved earlier that he still struggled
with prayer anyway. He knew people at
Doctors Without Borders; they had a hospital less than four blocks from the
consulate. They could use his help.
More
mortars came. Amidst fresh explosions,
fear surged through Chuck. He ran. Weaving through pedestrians like a halfback, he
found himself bound for the nearby consulate’s gate, thoughts of Doctors
Without Borders completely suppressed.
A mass of people
throbbed around the gate. Chuck pushed
his way through the panicked Nigerians.
As he neared the front of the pack, a pungent stench filled his
nose. At first, he thought it came from
the people in the pack, but it grew stronger as he drew closer to the
gate. With a final shoulder nudge, he
reached the gate with its closely placed iron bars. On the other side of the gate, five young
Marines in dress blues, brass buttons glittering in the sun, stood out of reach
of pleading arms. The Marines’
eyes reflected repulsion, fear and confusion.
One of them spoke on a phone asking for guidance. At the foot of the gate lay a ragged stack of
eight dead Nigerian civilians, their blood still wet on their open wounds,
their bodies not yet rigid. The
Nigerians pleading at the gate sought burial for their loved ones. Somehow, the rumor had spread that the Americans
had the means and the intent to help.
Gasping,
Chuck inadvertently inhaled a deep breath of the wretched air, swallowing a
gulp of the acrid intestinal gasses emanating from the rotting bodies. He gagged on a rush of vomit he barely kept
down. As he backed out of the crowd, one
of the Marines looked to him for help.
Chuck turned, cleared the crowd and began jogging. For once pleased with the strong exhaust
fumes that quickly masked the taste of death in his mouth, he sucked in the
thick city air. As his pace accelerated,
he broke into a sweat that soaked his button down shirt and slacks, pooling in
his shoes by the time he reached the hospital.
The walled
hospital compound had been the residence of the volunteers for Doctors Without
Borders less than six months earlier, the place they came for orientation
before heading out to the bush for weeks or months. Pristine, white-washed buildings occupied
grounds of precisely manicured lawns with thick blades of green grass, the kind
that felt cool and soft beneath the tread of bare feet. Urgent need and self-sacrifice had caused the
doctors to convert their home and safe haven.
Now, under once carefully trimmed trees, sick and frightened people
competed for shade, completely obscuring the lawn, worn to red dirt after
nearly two weeks of wounded passing through.
A mass of shouting
Nigerians pressed against the front entrance blocking Chuck’s path. The scene seemed similar to the one at the
consulate. He knew the back entrance and
sought it out.
The back of the
building, formerly the great room, housed the triage unit. Every conceivable option for a bed had been
used to make room for the wounded. In
the midst of the bodies, Chuck saw Adrian Alder standing. The lanky Alder afforded Chuck only a glance
from beneath unkempt salt and pepper hair.
He had been touring the facility that morning when the mortars began
raining on the neighborhood. Recruited
into aiding the doctors triage the sudden influx of patients, Alder affixed the
tags identifying treatment for the victims.
By the black color of the tag just placed on the toe of a young girl
laid across empty fruit crates, Chuck knew Alder had a tough assignment. Cued by the tag, the medical staff would rush
by the child, focused on other cases with more hope.
As the West African
program director for the International Monetary Fund’s health programs,
Alder headquartered in
Alder and the
Aldrich Institute, a key development partner for Prodeus, wanted the first
product deployed in
But an even bigger
picture existed.
“I
thought you’d already gone up to
“What’s
your name, son?” Alder asked.
“Gerard,”
the boy squeaked.
“We’re
going to take good care of you, Gerard.”
“Thank
you.”
“Tomorrow
morning,” Chuck answered, looking at the boy, wondering how much could be
done about the gaping wound on the far right side of his chest.
“Good,
turns out we’re on the same flight.
No deals here, right?”
“I
told you at the reception last night. I won’t
agree to anything until I see all the data.”
“Do
you think you can deploy PDNAs with any control in this environment?”
“The
Nigerians need the PDNAs to dis-prove this bull about the polio vaccine being some
kind of Trojan horse for AIDS.”
“Don’t
forget infertility. The whack jobs say it
causes infertility, too.”
“Right.”
“Chuck,
do you think the imams spreading those rumors really believe them?”
“I
don’t know.”
“It’s
politics. Worse than that, it’s
religious politics. The Muslims hate the
Christians and the Christians hate the Muslims.
If anyone doesn’t feel that way, someone will kill their relative
tomorrow and push them over the edge. It’s
not about the facts. It’s about greedy boys on all sides using religion
to seize power.”
“
“Not
the same thing. Talk to the priest. He’ll tell you. A few stray rebel bands left in the boonies aren’t
an issue. The civil war’s over in
Chuck
did not answer. He wanted to do what was
right. He had a history with Fr. Jim and
helping out in
Passing among the
wounded behind
“Lord,
please let this man know you love him. Bring
him into your presence...”
“You’re
wasting your time.”
“Why?”
“You
think that a good God would let this crap happen?”
Showing
resignation, not anger, Alder’s eyes lingered on Chuck. Sunday school answers scrolled through Chuck’s
mind. Pat answers that no longer
satisfied a lifetime of questions. But
Chuck survived on hope, sometimes more fumes than substance; for much of his
life, he had only that. He lifted a
silent prayer that the victims not experience the same kind of despair as
“Stop
it, man,” Alder whispered, seeing the prayer in Chuck’s eyes.
“How
can we do this to each other?”
Alder
shrugged.
“We’ll
talk on the plane tomorrow,”
Chuck nodded. Alder placed another black tag.
“How can I
help?”
“You should
see the lady doctor in the dining room,”
Maneuvering
around makeshift gurneys, Chuck reached the doctor coordinating the activities.
“Hi,
“PDNAs
won’t help any of this, will they?” she said as she finished
writing a note, “What are you doing here?
Your wife will kill you if you ruin those clothes.”
Chuck
did not explain about his marriage.
“There
are more important things than my clothes,” he said.
“Thanks,”
she said, “We can use all the able bodies we can find. I have a serious problem on the other
side. You’ll need to recruit some
locals to help you. We can’t
leave the dead piling up at the main entrance.
It’s a sure recipe for epidemic.”
She
registered the shock on his face.
“Never
mind. That’s not fair of me. You don’t need that. There are plenty of other jobs to do. How about...”
The teenage
mother’s wails echoed in his mind, cut through to his soul.
“No. I’ll do it. Where do I put the...ah...?”
“The
dead. You can use the word. It’s more common than water this last
week.”
“So
where do I put them, Sharon?”
“I
wish I knew. We need a makeshift
morgue. The room we’ve been using
is too small. It has patients in it now,
anyway. Be creative. Try the consulate. I hear you can get asylum if you’re
dead.”
“Been
there.” Chuck smiled and started
to walk away.
“Yo,
Chuck.”
He
turned just in time to catch a handful of loose items thrown at him.
“You’ll
need those,” she said.
He
looked at the sterile gloves and surgical mask in his hands.
“Thanks,”
she said, “Keep this crap up and you’ll be dead from something
exotic within the year.”
She
winked, a small grin appearing.
“That should
be good for the company stock, then,” Chuck said.
“Make sure I
get some. Body bags are in the cabinet
to the left of the door.”
He headed for the
bodies. Dead within a year, he
thought. Since Mel threw him out, he had
dark moments when that did not seem to be soon enough. The Black Dog, Winston Churchill called
it. This quiet urge to die, to drift
into sleep and never wake up. A lifetime
of this haunting, kept at bay by faith, it’s hold broken by Mel’s
love – its demise
cemented by Olivia’s birth. Until
now.
At the doorway, he
affixed the surgical mask and kept his mouth tightly shut. Still, the pungent,
cloying odor of human decay penetrated, stinging his tongue as though it had
been plunged in a septic tank. He longed
for spray cans of deodorizer and insecticide. Throbbing maggots in one corner
of the pile suggested that at least some of the bodies had lost their
freshness. Wounds on bodies near the top
and center of the heap still glistened with wet blood suggesting death within
the last few hours.
The
surrounding crowd cried out with pleadings, not hostilities. As with the American consulate, word had gone
out that the hospital would find a way to properly bury their loved ones. Organizing them to be claimed and buried now fell
on Chuck’s shoulders. The backyard
of the compound had enough open space for a temporary alternative, weather
permitting.
He looked at the
broken bodies caked with mud and blood.
It surprised him to see elderly people and children among those in the
pile. His intellect knew they would be
there. His spirit struggled with
it. He gazed over them, most of their
bodies contorted in agony, some of their faces frozen in horrified surprise.
Dead within a
year, he again pondered. How many of
them thought they would be gone within the year?
He
pulled on the gloves, tossed a handful of body bags over his shoulder and
plunged into the crowd of the living to seek recruits.