Apologize, Apologize! - By Elizabeth Kelly Page 0,105

the pit as he ran for his life. We were hiding in the forest, in flight from men who were thrashing through the deep tropical undergrowth, hunting for human prey, slashing away at stubborn, spiny plant fronds.

I was shaking uncontrollably, my teeth chattering violently, and my noisy terror threatened to give us away. My savior pushed me down and clamped his hand around my mouth, nearly suffocating me, pinning my face in the mud until I passed out.

“You speak English?” I asked him finally when I came to.

He looked at me and shrugged.

“Are you a Catholic?” I asked him, thinking it was a safe question even if he couldn’t understand a word I was saying. “I’m a Catholic, too,” I said. I was having trouble standing.

“You’re probably wondering what I’m doing here,” I said, feeling practically delirious as we walked along together, his arm around my waist, my arm thrown over his shoulder, my left foot dragging along the ground, him not saying a word. And then I told him the whole story, about lying to Pop and Uncle Tom about the holidays, about how the Falcon had tried to keep me from making the trip, about how I’d built the chicken coop for the farmer and his family.

“I’m here helping,” I said as he looked at me as if I were out of my mind. My knees buckled—there was a lot of that going around.

My leg was chewed up and pulsing. It was infected, and I kept passing in and out of consciousness. The man from the village talked someone into driving us to a makeshift clinic—a converted chicken coop—full of young kids being treated for injuries they’d suffered as soldiers after being kidnapped and conscripted by rebel forces. The man who dragged me out of the hole was scanning the beds, obviously looking for someone. He left disappointed without saying good-bye. I never knew his name.

There was only one doctor, assisted by a handful of nurses. He was French. The nurses were Belgian. One of them, named Madeleine, seemed to be in charge. She had a nice way of being bossy as hell. They were going crazy trying to treat all the kids, and they just kept pouring in—it was like using your thumb to try to stem the flow from a breached levee—and it was the middle of the night and there was nowhere to put them, no one to take care of them.

They treated me and my leg, and after a few days I started to come around. Madeleine offered me the use of a primitive cane and asked me to help her take care of the kids. I had my shirt collar pulled up over my face—the smell—I was slipping and sliding among the dross of a charnel-house floor. One little boy, he seemed dead to me, needed a transfusion—there were no blood supplies, no electricity. The French doctor pointed at me and called me over and told me he was going to take 500 cc of blood from me for this boy.

“But what if I’m not a match?” I asked, thinking it was a reasonable question.

He wound up and hit me in the face, knocking me into the wall. And then again, he hit me again when I straightened up. I put up my hands, the cane went clattering to the floor, and I was saying, “It’s okay, just do it, take my blood if it will help.”

He calmed down a bit, not much, but by now I was feeling pretty upset. He hit me one more time, open-handed, a slap upside the head, for good measure. Then, his hands shaking, he and Madeleine set up to do the transfusion.

Lightning illuminated the black sky. The night was a cold and shining lake. A flame from a single white candle fluttered, creating the illusion of quietness where there was none.

The French doctor was like an unvisited place, his solitariness so thorough that it was as though I were seeing him from a distance. The dead and dying were all around him, hanging overhead, unsightly as flypaper, part of the architecture of his calling. He finished with me, and then he just got up from where he was sitting, didn’t say a word to me, pushed me aside, bumped me with the edge of his shoulder, and went on to the next kid and then the next one after that. I tried to stand up, but I started to black out. I fell back onto the