Children Are Diamonds by Edward Hoagland

Author:Edward Hoagland [Hoagland, Edward]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Goodreads: 16284894
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Published: 2013-05-19T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

• • •

IN AFRICA, WHEN YOU SAY GOOD-BYE IT MAY BE FOR KEEPS, SO THERE is an extra squeeze in the handshake to register that. Bol had assembled eighty kids or more in front of our cracked blackboard with multiplications on it underneath the tamarind tree, his sad, long, aging face carefully devoid of added expression, as they hollered, “Saaarreee!” to me.

“Tell them!” urged Ladoku, hurrying up in a frayed, left-behind, High Church Anglican cassock that he saved for exceptional occasions. Never having been to a city with multiple streets, restaurants, movies, clothing and magazine shops, he wasn’t wistful, like Bol, or particularly distracted by apprehension about his own safety. He led a child who was limping badly, almost capsizing, not from an injury but from some orthopedic problem that even a layman could perceive might interest a surgeon.

“This isn’t a bus,” I told him, pointing to the fact that Margaret was already in the passenger seat, with the paper sacks that were her luggage and Otim in her lap, the little poleaxed Acholi boy who’d been forced to eat strips cut from his parents’ vital organs, next to the gearshift; plus Ya-Ya and Nyoka, the two walleyed girls, at sixes and sevens in the back; and Tongkwoit, the cross-eyed, diminutive Kakwa; the harelipped Bari boy, Ladu; and the Wild Man from Borneo, whose name was Oryean and whose hair we had decided to leave like a Fuzzy-Wuzzy’s in order to improve his prospects at the early roadblocks, because although he claimed not to care if the soldiers shanghaied him, we didn’t believe that.

“It’s an ambulance,” Ladoku corrected me quietly, as thin as a cormorant. He had been shrewd enough to bring along a couple of mothers, since the boy with the nightmarish hip, for instance, named Pityea, was too young to travel without a parent. The other woman thrust forward a post-toddler who had tripped horribly into a cooking fire and, somehow surviving the burns, needed skin grafts and other medical care. Resigned, I waved them toward the Land Cruiser.

The Dinka major had materialized to observe our departure and nodded at Ladoku. “We are fasting,” he agreed.

I was irritated. “If you hadn’t killed those four U.N. people, you wouldn’t be starving.” It was absurd that only children needing surgery and deportees could go, and I put my forefinger to my temple to recapitulate how gratuitously two of the U.N.’s aid experts had been executed. Ladoku looked alarmed on my behalf, but Ruth laughed because she figured that the Dinkas had finally learned that white people are tribal, too. If you killed them, the others got mad. So I was in no danger from the major’s anger. And actually, he wasn’t mad. He nodded, acknowledging tacitly that that action by his superiors had been a mistake.

Ruth waved, vanishing into her clinic shack. Our few fly-in Baptist doctors—who arrived intermittently, and maybe because of a midlife crisis they’d been having in somewhere such as Little Rock—knew no big wheels east of Arkansas whose strings they could pull, and neither did Ruthie or Al.

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