CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
I’d lost patients before. So many it no longer affected me. It was part of the job and to be able to do my job, and do it well, there was a level of emotional detachment I’d learned to adopt. So why could I not stop crying?
I cleaned Stahgan’s body before they took him to prepare for his burial. I wept at the loss of youth and vitality. Stahgan was not much older than Jonathan had been when he died.
I retrieved the bullet from Bosai’s shoulder with minimal trouble, using the strong bamboo sticks made for eating utensils. The brave young man endured a bit of digging before I plopped it out, lathered on the honey and herb concoction, and bandaged him as best I could.
“T’ank you, Miss Sid-de-nee,” he told me, with a squeeze of my hand. The sweet gesture only caused my tears to grow larger. I only hoped my ministrations would be enough to stave off infection. Only time would tell.
And now, I had time.
The thought came with a sinking feeling. How could I make it back to Makia with shooters lining the perimeter? Perhaps the tears came not only for Stahgan and Talula, love lost before it had hardly begun, but I cried for myself as well.
I sneaked away to the river to bathe, taking the only clothes I had that were appropriate to wear: my ratty khaki pants that I had arrived in and the shell halter Sali loaned me. Stahgan’s blood had soaked through my crude tunic and caked my hands and arms.
I moved mechanically, stripping down and scrubbing myself clean with handfuls of sand until my skin was pink and stinging.
I scrubbed like I might be able to rid myself of the anguish oozing from my pores, but it was no use.
I donned my clothes, feeling more like myself, if not a little more exposed up top.
I didn’t feel like being around anyone tonight. I sat on the edge of the river, watching the dragonflies flit across the water and the stars slowly fill the sky.
Jahnu had a son. Or used to. Thoughts of his pain-filled eyes and angry words filled my mind, and I cried for him, too.
The man continued to be shrouded in mysteries and I didn’t understand my strong desire to unravel them.
Why hadn’t he told me? Of course I had not been completely honest with all my secrets, either.
I recalled the painful flash of rejection in his eyes when I’d told him about Greg, and shame rose in my chest.
Gentle movement from the jungle behind me quickened my pulse, but I knew his presence without looking; that inner relief of my nervous system just at his nearness.
I’d hoped he’d come, but now that we were alone again I didn’t know what to say, so we shared a few minutes of silence that said more than words could ever convey.
“You have not eaten enough today,” his statement deflected from the important decisions yet to be made.
I finally looked up at him standing next to me, the moonlight glinting off his bare chest and shoulders. He offered a banana leaf with whatever they had served for dinner—probably sago cakes by the smell of it.
“Don’t really have an appetite,” I shrugged.
He squatted, setting the leaf next to me. Catching my eyes, he reached his hand to cup my face.
“You’ve been weeping.” Again, not a question, but a statement, and the same concern-filled expression that melted me from within.
I looked away, wiping at the tears that spilled silently.
“When I came here to the Island to help Makia,” I said shakily, “I thought Hundi was the savage enemy. Now I don’t know what to think.”
“We are all savage,” he said quietly, “some are just better at hiding it.”
Looking back at him, I said, “I’m sorry I couldn’t save him.” I gave into the tears now. “He’d already lost too much blood trying to get him here and…”
Jahnu only shook his head and gathered me into his arms, his previous anger abated. I wept bitterly on his chest for a few moments as he kissed my head and spoke soft and soothing whispers of his own language into my hair.
Years of stuffing my emotions, and in thirty days I’d wept against this man’s chest twice now.
Jahnu’s presence had an unraveling effect on my heart, and it was in his strong and patient embrace that I felt safe enough to allow the floodgates of feeling to open—gates I’d kept shut tight my whole life.
As my crying slowed, Jahnu whispered softly in my ear, “Remember, the jungle gives, the jungle takes…even at the hand of another. Talula will learn this.”
“It’s taken everything from you! Your mother, father, your wife. Your son…why didn’t you tell me?”
He sat, looking out across the gently flowing river, “I do not know. So many times I wanted to. But saying it out loud makes it real…sometimes it does not feel real. I am, maybe, living a bad dream and I will wake up and he will be next to me.”
“Tell me what happened.”
“Talmu? My son,” he sighed. “He was…he was only six—just a year old when his mother died. I went away early the morning of the fire while he was still asleep in the treehouse. The roots caught from the fire underneath the earth…the fire spread…the treehouse fall. I was not with him.”
“I’m so sorry, Jahnu. I had no idea.” I held his hand and he entwined his fingers in mine.
“My wife, Alupa say to me when she die, ‘Take care of our son,’ but even this I do not do.”
“But it wasn’t your fault. It was an accident!
Just like the sickness that came to the village.
Sometimes things happen and there’s no one to blame.
” Even as I said it, I realized I’d wanted someone to blame for Jonathan’s accident, even if that someone was myself.
“Makia didn’t know this would happen,” I continued, trying to convince him.
“They were just looking to progress their tribe.”
“No, Sid-de-nee, that is not true. Makia knew. You do not know the whole story. Makia is not innocent in this. When peace talks began they agreed not to begin work on the forest. But they were impatient and sold to the logging company anyway. That is man,” he said firmly, “that is human nature. Greed and impatience. When a timber company comes, it must pay royalties to the landowners for the right to extract resources. But the royalties, once divided among the tribes, amount to little. The foreign logging company soon gains a foothold in the country, and as years pass the tribes begin to feel like tenants. It has happened before. The company starts to behave like it is the landowner. I tell Makia this, but they do not believe me. They only see the promise of money. Draining the land, they would destroy the earth out from under us, but they do not care. They cannot wait for a better choice, but take what they want without thought on how their choice affects others. What will the forest look like for our children? Where will the trees be for making canoes for the next generation? That is why we fight them, to tell them what they do is not ok.”
This realization left me speechless for a moment.
Makia had left out that little tidbit of information when they’d requested aid from the mission.
Would we have done anything differently had we known the whole story?
Like Greg said, it wasn’t really our fight, even though now I was more invested than I ever imagined I could be, and not even on the side I had started.
Was this how war operated? Given different information crafted around a different perspective, could you decriminalize the other party’s actions?
Of course I realized that each group was naturally predisposed to sympathize with their individual tribe’s interpretation of the event.
But given an objective, outside view, who could say one was right above the other?
Wasn’t that the very reason all wars were fought?
“I didn’t know that. I’m not sure any of our team members know, either.”
“Truth is always the first victim of war…but it does not matter, now.”
“But it does matter. With this information, the peace talks could continue and the war wouldn’t have to start. Makia would be held responsible, and there wouldn’t have to be any more killing.”
“I may not be able to prevent war, Sid-de-nee. Not now.”
I was silent for a beat, looking out across the water reflecting the moon, trying to figure out how to solve this problem. Finally I sighed. “How do you do it?” I turned to him, searching his eyes for an answer.
“Do what?”
“Stay so calm with all this loss. When things don’t turn out the way you thought they would…with all this death of people you love?”
He didn’t answer right away. Thoughtful, he looked up into the stars, his arms rested on bent knees. “I do not always stay so calm,” he dipped his head with a sheepish grin.
“But how do you learn to live without any sense of control, without the anger eating you alive?”
“I do not know. Sometimes I let the anger control me. But then I remember I am part of something greater than my own life.”
“What do you mean?”
“You live here, now. Most people live only for themselves…and when things happen to them they react with anger…but I am the chief. I am living all the lives of my people before me because of their choices, so I know I must make choices for all those who come after me. Just as the mushroom spring up quickly after the rain, so we are here for a brief time. The generations of my people showed me that. Life is too short to live in a prison you make for yourself because of the choices of another, or accidents that happen. If I stay angry at everything life give me, I would not be the right man.”
“But I don’t know how to do that. I don’t know how to let go of the anger.”