pressure, blood squirted from the wound, turning the compresses a vivid red. Fighting panic, Quinette bound the tourniquet snugly around the captain’s shoulder and knotted it.
“That should do,” said Lily, a compact bundle of competence as she wrapped the fourth strip around and around the compresses.
With the fifth, she fashioned a sling. The injured man groaned when she crooked his arm across the front of his chest and looped the sling over it and then around his neck. Wiping her hands on her trousers, she stood and looked down at her handiwork and said, “That will have to do.”
Michael spoke softly to the captain in Nuban. The man’s lips parted, but he didn’t say anything. All he did was blink and wince, there in the shade of the palms, where fifteen other casualties awaited evacuation and where the dead, seventeen altogether, lay in a long row, some dismembered, some eviscerated, some full of small red holes that looked like measles or smallpox from a distance. The living hovered over them, waving off the flies, and sent up cries of grief and songs of mourning into the hot afternoon sky. The high-pitched lamentations pulled at Quinette’s already overstrung nerves. Never in her life had she seen anyone die—her father had expired in the hospital at two in the morning—much less seen anyone die in the ways these people had. Their mangled bodies held a certain lurid fascination, like a grotesque highway accident, but she refused to look at them. The sight made her think things she shouldn’t be thinking.
She must have been ten or eleven that winter Sunday morning when her father came down to the kitchen in his flannel bathrobe, his hair mussed and a stubble on his face. He went to the coffeepot—that old Farberware percolator Ardele loved for the aroma it gave off—and without a word poured a cup and stood looking out the window that faced the barn where the tractor and other machinery were kept in cold weather. The rest of the family, dressed for church, ate breakfast. They all four knew immediately that he’d had one of his war nightmares and had woken up reincarnated into the uncommunicative character her mother called “Remote Man” because he would seem so very far away when those spells came over him. It was an inner distancing, a kind of implosion, the man everyone knew compressed, under the pressure of his memories, down to a pinpoint until he almost vanished inside himself. Sometimes Quinette was scared that he would stay there and never talk to her again. It was almost impossible to get through to him when he fell into that black hole, and it was just as difficult for him to speak to anyone else, as though the things he saw in there and the things he felt were inexpressibly awful. But Ardele tried now and then to make contact. She’d tried that morning. “Ted, there’s still time for you to get ready for church. I do wish you’d come with us at least once in a while.” He said nothing. He stared out the window and drank his coffee. “All right, just thought I’d ask.” He turned around suddenly. “Why do you keep asking? You know I don’t believe in that crap anymore. Maybe I never did.” Most times it didn’t pay to contact Remote Man, because most times he was as angry as the real Ted Hardin was gentle. “Ted, please, the girls.” “Like, do you really believe you’re going to heaven with all this churchgoing? Do you really honestly think we’re going somewhere when this is all over?” “I won’t ask again, promise.” “Know that wall they’ve just put up in Washington? Fourteen of my buddies are on it. Three of them, you could’ve sent what was left of all three home in an eight-by-eleven manila envelope. Think they’re somewhere right now, playing their harps?” “Please, Ted, don’t talk like this in front of the girls.” “A shovelful of dirt in your face if you’ve still got one and it’s all over. End of story.” “Not in front of the girls, I’m asking you, Ted.”
Quinette was shocked. How could the sweet man on whose ample lap she sat at hay-mowing time or during spring plowing amid the good smells of turned black earth not believe in God and the eternal rewards awaiting those who did? It meant she would not see him in heaven, and what kind of heaven would that be without him in