The Darling (49 page)

“Have you spoken to Woodrow? Does he know about this?” I heard low hoots from Doris and Betty and then Doc down the hall, advising me that it was feeding time. In a moment the others would take up the call.

“Yesterday. I went by the ministry.”

“Yesterday? He never mentioned it.”

“I didn’t think he would. He said you wouldn’t leave your ‘dreamers,’ but mainly he still thinks Doe can pull it off as long as Johnson and Taylor are fighting each other. Doe thinks the Marines are gonna land and save his sorry ass. He’s wrong, of course. And ECOMOG’s not gonna save his ass either. All they’ll do is pick up the pieces after he’s gone and keep as many of them as they can for themselves. No, Woodrow’s deluded by Doe, who’s self-deluded. Your husband’s been in government too long. It was useless talking to him. That’s why I came by to talk to you. Woodrow said he planned to ship the boys out to his village, Fuama. But that won’t do you or him any good. And when he goes down, it won’t do the boys any good either. Or anyone else connected to Woodrow, so long as Woodrow stays connected to Doe. That’s going to be a death sentence, Hannah. Even for you.” He grabbed his umbrella and opened the door. Without turning, he said, “If Woodrow insists on sticking it out till the end, let him. But you and the boys, you get out, Hannah. In a few months things’ll be back to normal again, believe me. Charles Taylor will be sitting in the Executive Mansion, and Prince Johnson will either be dead or, if he’s lucky, in a cell, maybe right here alongside your ‘dreamers,’ ” he said and laughed lightly.

“You know that,” I said.

“I know that,” he answered and stepped outside and closed the door behind him. Seconds later, the rain resumed pounding on the roof. Then the chimps raised their voices in unison, hollering for their meal, each trying to outdo the others in volume and intensity. What began as a mild signal to their keeper rose to screeching rage, accompanied by the steady, rhythmic drumming of the rain.

WOODROW’S CAR PASSED
through the gate and up the driveway at the usual time, five o’clock. He drove himself, however, which was not usual. I stepped from the kitchen, where I had started preparing supper, to the terrace and said, “No Satterthwaite?”

“No. Where are the boys?” He came rapidly towards me, ignoring the dogs, who looked after him with downcast but still expectant faces. Woodrow always arrived home with a small bag of meat purchased at a roadside stand and made a big show of feeding it to the dogs. But not today, evidently. Disappointed, they flopped in the shade at the rear of the car.

“In their room, I suppose. I’ve been in the kitchen. Why? What’s the matter?”

“Can’t you hear that?” he said and brushed past me.

Yes, I heard it, I’d been hearing it for weeks, the chatter of gunfire in the distance coming from the other side of the river in Logan Town, beyond Bushrod Island. We’d been hearing it off and on and had grown almost used to it, as if it were not the sound of men and boys shooting to kill people, but some mild form of celebration in a neighborhood we seldom visited and where we knew no one. When, after the first few days, it no longer seemed to be coming closer to our part of the city, I’d more or less tuned it out, and since my daily route to the boys’ school and the sanctuary in Toby and Woodrow’s route to the ministry were all in the opposite direction of Logan Town, the scattered bursts of gunfire we heard in the evening and during the night, seldom in the morning, came to us as if broadcast over the radio from some other part of the country. Despite the war, we’d managed to maintain so much of our normal daily life and routines that we felt not just protected from the war, but as if it were taking place somewhere beyond the border, in Guinea or Sierra Leone. You can do that in a war for a long time when you have enough money and your family and friends are still able to cling to power.

I followed Woodrow into the boys’ bedroom. Dillon lay on his bed, huge, eyes closed, lost in his Walkman, a muscular, barefoot giant of a boy in his green Boston Celtics tee shirt and gym shorts. The other two sat facing each other cross-legged on the floor. They were practicing their newly acquired skill in sign language, learned from a chart I’d brought them after having tried and failed to teach a few basic signs to my dreamers, the signs for
yes, no, mother, father, baby
, and
My name is
… William and Paul had quickly mastered the signs and now could carry on lengthy, utterly silent conversations with each other without our knowing a word of what they were saying.

“Come, come, boys, pay attention!” Woodrow snapped.

Dillon opened his eyes and removed the earphones. He sat up slowly, as if waking from a nap. The twins’ hands went silent.

“Hi, Papa,” William said and sweetly smiled.

“What’s the matter, Papa?” Paul asked in a small voice. He looked to me as if for an answer.

Woodrow stepped over the clutter of the small room and went into the closet, where he rummaged through its contents for a moment before emerging with my old duffel bag, unused for nearly four years, except to store temporarily the boys’ outgrown clothes before donating them to the church. He emptied the bag on the floor and tossed it to Dillon. I suddenly noticed that Woodrow was sweating and smelled of anxiety and fear. His movements were abrupt and ill coordinated, as if he’d been drinking. He turned to me and said, “Get them packed,” and I smelled the whiskey.

“Packed? What for?”

“I’m taking them to Fuama,” he said and roughly pushed Dillon on the shoulder and the twins by the back of their heads. “Hurry up! We goin’ now.”

“What about the checkpoints? Prince Johnson controls the road to Fuama, doesn’t he?”

“We’ll get through. I got money. It ain’t Johnson I’m worried about anyhow.”

“Who, then? Not Charles. Charles is our friend,” I said. “Remember?”

He ignored me and set about helping the boys, tossing random articles of clothing, sneakers, and a few books into the duffel. “Hurry, hurry, hurry!” he said. “For God’s sake, hurry up! Hannah!” he shouted and abruptly turned to me. “Go wrap some food, as much as you can. Rice, tinned beef, beans, anything. Hurry!”

I did as instructed, and by the time I’d put together a large string sack of provisions, Woodrow appeared in the kitchen, ready to go, the boys coming along behind him, bewildered and frightened.

“Hurry up,” Woodrow ordered. “You comin’ wit’ us,” he said to me.

“I’m not staying in Fuama,” I said. “What on earth are you running for anyhow? Who are you running
from?
Look at the boys, you’ve got them terrified.
I’m
terrified, Woodrow.”

He grabbed me by the wrist and pulled me towards the door. “You go where I say you go. Don’t vex me now, woman,” he warned. “Wit’ you in the car, them soldier boys’ll let us pass the checkpoints.”

“No! I’m not leaving this house, I have to be here for my dreamers. And you can’t take the boys until you tell me what’s happening.”

He looked me coldly in the face, as if at that moment he despised me and wished he’d never married me. “Sam Clement seen you at Toby today, didn’ he?”

“Yes, he came out for a few minutes.”

“An’ you think Doe don’t know that?”

“What if he does?”

He shook his head sadly. He no longer despised me; he pitied me. “This man Doe is crazy, but crazy like a fox. Look, he knows the Americans got their hand in this war from the beginnin’. He knows they been secretly backin’ Charles. He knows you an American, missus! An’ ’cause of that old business ’bout me an’ Charles, Doe been puttin’ two an’ two together. He sent two of his soldier boys aroun’ for me this afternoon, but I knew it was a trick, so I sent Satterthwaite across to the Barclay Barracks where Doe and his top boys all holed up, tol’ him to say I be right along, an’ when Satterthwaite didn’ come back, I know what Doe got in his head for me.” He passed me at the door and scooted the boys outside. “Get in the car,” he ordered.

“What about Bruno and Muhammad Ali?” Paul asked.

“Never mind them dogs, they’ll guard the house. Jus’ get in the car. Jeannine or Kuyo or somebody’ll take care of ’em.” He turned and grabbed my wrist again and yanked me outside.

“Let me get the food,” I said, and he released me, and I returned to the kitchen.

“Wait a minute, Papa,” Dillon said. “I forgot something, too.” He followed me into the house and jogged into the living room, and when he returned he carried the camera bag and video camera. Except for the video I made for Samuel Doe, no one but Dillon had ever used it. He had become fairly proficient and had accumulated a small collection of home movies, mostly of his friends and sports events, but a few family events as well, which we usually watched once after they were shot and not again.

“Might be something interesting out there to tape,” he said, as together we passed out of the house. I locked the door and walked to the car, where Woodrow waited impatiently. Dillon got in back with the twins, and I walked to the gate, while Woodrow backed the car down the driveway and out to the street, where he stopped and waited for me to lock the gate. It was our routine.

This is how it happened. As I turned to clip the padlock onto the gate, I saw them waiting for us, Satterthwaite with three men I didn’t know, civilians in sweat-stained sleeveless shirts and caps and sneakers, street kids, the kind of feral young men without jobs or family whom I’d gotten used to seeing hanging out on corners and stalking the alleys in Monrovia over the last few years. Satterthwaite moved on me, his face expressionless; the others, carrying machetes, went for the car. Satterthwaite lifted his shirt and showed me a pistol against his bare belly. “Go back inside,” he said and pushed me through the gate, then quickly closed and locked it. The dogs, sensing my alarm, barked once; then, having recognized Satterthwaite, stopped.

“Woodrow, go!” I screamed. “Drive!
Drive
, for God’s sake!”

He didn’t move. Several seconds passed as the men walked to the car, two of them on Woodrow’s side, the other on the passenger’s side. Satterthwaite leaned his back against the gate and watched the car. Woodrow, round faced, wide eyed, looked over at me, a prisoner locked in our yard behind the iron-barred gate, and the boys did the same. They stared at me as if I were standing on the deck of a departing ship and were waving goodbye to them.

“
Leave
, Woodrow! Go!” I yelled.

It seemed they had done this many times. The men moved slowly and methodically to the sides of the car. The one on the far side opened the rear door and pointed his machete at the boys and said something to them. Another opened the driver’s-side door, and the third reached in and grabbed Woodrow by the arm and pulled him from the car to the street. It happened in an instant. While the first man stood by the open rear door and kept the boys inside, the other two forced Woodrow to his hands and knees. One of them pulled Woodrow’s head back, forcing the small of his back down and his narrow shoulders up, and the other flashed his machete on a deadly path parallel to Woodrow’s back and shoulders towards his head, then lifted the machete, and with a single blow separated my husband’s head from his body.

There was no sound, not a word or a cry from any of us, no screams, no weeping. Nothing. The dogs remained silent. There was only the sound of the birds and the cicadas and the frogs and the evening breeze in the trees. Woodrow’s body collapsed onto the street and poured blood into the dirt. The boys, as motionless as a photograph, stared out the car window at their father’s body. The man with the machete looked at the other, who held Woodrow’s head in his hands. He pointed at the head with the tip of his machete and laughed, an odd, high-pitched, silly laugh, and the other tossed the head across the street into the gutter like a rotten melon.

Satterthwaite turned to me and brought his face close to the bars between us. I remember his yellowed eyes, his handsome broad nose, his thin moustache and sharply defined lips. I remember his loathing. In a low, cold voice, he said, “Take your boys now, an’ go home to America wit’ ’em.” Then he joined the others, and the four nonchalantly walked down the street together and were gone.

The boys were still inside the car, peering out cautiously as if at a forbidden movie. I shouted, “Stay there! Don’t leave the car! I’ll be right there for you! I have to fetch another key for the gate!” I cried and ran for the house, cursing myself for not having kept a duplicate on the ring with the house key. I found it in Woodrow’s desk drawer and raced back outside and, fumbling with thick fingers, managed to get the padlock open and off the hasp and pushed the gate back. I stepped quickly past Woodrow’s body without looking at it and flung open the rear door of the car.

The car was empty. My sons were gone.

I REMEMBER DRIVING
through the city like a madwoman chasing ghosts. There was very little traffic—a few military vehicles was all, trucks and jeeps carrying soldiers who handed open bottles to one another, laughing and, when they passed by, ignored me as if I were invisible. A pack of teenage boys in looted clothing ran from an electronics store lugging stereos and armloads of CDs, the Indian shopkeeper gazing mournfully from the doorway. A few cars with household possessions lashed to the roof were headed inland to some imagined place of safety. It was not quite dark, and plumes of black smoke rose ominously in the south from the vicinity of the airport, where Charles Taylor’s forces were rumored to be dug in, battling the remnants of Doe’s ragtag army. From Mamba Point the sea was glazed red by the setting sun. Across the harbor there was more smoke rising. Prince Johnson’s bands of marauders were advancing towards the city, looting, burning homes, killing and raping women and girls as they came. A large crowd of people was gathered outside the closed gate of the American embassy, shouting to be let inside. Behind the gate a pair of stone-faced Marines with automatic weapons stood ready to fire if the crowd tried to climb the wall or rush the gate to get inside, where they imagined entry visas to the U.S. were there for the grabbing. People shook their fists, held up their babies, and waved their hands pleadingly as if for alms. I recognized some of the faces of my neighbors and several people we knew from the government agencies and ministries, a judge, a doctor and his wife with whom Woodrow and I had occasionally played bridge, the man who owned the big appliance store on Broad Street, a teacher from Saint Catherine’s. Still I drove, left and left and left, in a gradually widening circle, like a rat seeking its way out of a maze. Out by the hospital, when I came to a barrier of burning tires, I stopped, reversed, and started turning right and right and right, until I got held at a checkpoint by a half-dozen soldiers and was forced to turn back. My sons had disappeared, that’s all I knew. I didn’t think they’d been marched off at gunpoint by their father’s murderers or by Doe’s soldiers. I hadn’t left them alone in the car long enough for them to have been captured and taken away. But how long were they alone? How much time passed when I ran into the house and got the key to unlock the gate? I didn’t know. It could have been sixty seconds, it could have been five minutes or even ten. But what good would it do anyone to imprison the three sons of Woodrow Sundiata, now that Woodrow was dead? It was Doe who had him killed, I knew that. Probably from the beginning Satterthwaite had been working for Doe and not Woodrow. Until the end, because of what Satterthwaite reported back to him, Doe believed he had nothing to fear from the small man who ran the Ministry of Public Health. But now, with Charles closing in from the south and Prince Johnson from the east and north, with his army abandoning him in droves, and then with the Americans stepping stealthily away from him and Sam Clement visiting first Woodrow and later me, suddenly Woodrow must have seemed dangerous or, at the least, disloyal. But in this chaos, no one was loyal. Alliances were made and broken hourly. Betrayal was standard operating procedure for everyone.