They kept all the syringes and the needles in a sealed plastic box on the floor of the Jeep. The Jeep growled into a lower gear and the wheels grabbed at the slippery road that ran up the mountain. Beyond this last hill was Madeleine, the second city of St. Michel, tucked at the southern point of the crescent-moon-shaped island. Everyone on St. Michel believed the rebels owned Madeleine, even if there were some government troops billeted there.
“Why do we need to meet with a man like that?” Sister Agnes Kozowski had asked in St. Michel town, before the journey. She always asked the obvious questions.
“Because the mission is in the mountains again. And he has control of the hills.”
“They aren’t real mountains. Not like in Colorado.”
“As you’ve told us many times.” Sister Mary Columbo gave Agnes short shrift because Agnes, for all her generosities, had a sometimes whining nature. She had acquired it as an only child in a rich family.
The third nun in the Jeep, dressed like the others in simple khaki trousers and a cotton blouse, was Sister Mary St. John of God. She was the oldest of the three women but was not the leader. Sister Mary Columbo thought that she was probably a saint.
Sister Mary Columbo was sure that sainthood was not very close to her. She had been a nurse and skilled field medic in Vietnam. She had worked with a MASH unit in Vietnam more than fifteen years before. She was forty but she felt so old and despairing at times that she prayed herself awake all night. She was a practical woman. Sometimes, it frightened her to think that everything she did in the world did not matter.
Sister Agnes, on the other hand, knew she was making a difference by her actions and that she was saving lives. Which is why Sister Agnes was impatient about making the trip down the coast from St. Michel town to Madeleine to seek out permission from the rebels to cross into the hills that followed the line of the island on the windward side above the coastal road.
The nuns had medical supplies: penicillin and vaccines against scarlet fever and whooping cough—both diseases currently prevalent on the island among the children—and polio vaccines. There had been a polio epidemic in the hills the previous summer and more than a hundred children had died and many more had been crippled.
There were also books that contained prayers and stories. There were many rosaries as well because the people in the hills prized them and wore them as jewelry, which annoyed the archbishop down in the capital. Still, thought Sister Mary Columbo when she thought of it at all, bringing all those rosaries was a useful defense against the habit of ritual marking and the piercing of nostrils, earlobes, and sexual parts that was still practiced for ornamental reasons among the most backward of the hill people.
“It is too horrible sometimes,” Sister Agnes had confessed one night during the summer, on their last mission in the hills, after another baby had died of polio.
“God is with us,” Sister Mary Columbo had said. She had grown up in New York City, in the section called Hell’s Kitchen on the West Side. The remarkable thing was that when she spoke of God, she believed all she said.
The Jeep was covered with dust so that the windshield was opaque save for the half-circle cleared by the wipers. The Jeep followed the last long blind curve to the summit. It was necessary to drive slowly here because a driver could not see a car coming from the direction of Madeleine; on the other hand, if you drove too slowly, there was a risk of stalling out the engine. Dense forests lined either side of the road. The tropical pines smelled sweet in the mountain air, and it was not so humid here. The road had been asphalt when it was built, but in too many places the asphalt had been broken up by neglect and the rains and the binding had dried up and the cinders broke away so that it was as treacherous as a gravel road. As the Jeep neared the summit of the hill that overlooked Madeleine, the road grew very narrow.
“Be careful,” said Sister Agnes, who always said such things at moments like this.
Sister Mary Columbo bit her lip. She shoved the gear down the last notch and popped the clutch. The wheels spun and bit at the sliding asphalt base and nearly lost it and bit again and this time, they dug in. The Jeep protested the incline. The Jeep climbed the last hundred yards to the top of the hill, whining against the strain. The sound of the motor was so loud that they did not hear the first burst of the automatic weapons.
Sister Mary St. John of God, who had been sitting next to the supplies in the rear jump seat, saw the top of Sister Agnes’ head blown off in a bloody clump. She saw this and was puzzled for a fraction of a second and then she could hear the sound of the weapons and she understood.
The bullets smashed the old nun’s face and she fell sideways, still gripping the roll bar, still staring with sightless eyes now at the bloody bowl of Sister Agnes’ head.
Sister Mary Columbo flinched at the firing because she had flinched for two years in Vietnam and even when she got home, she flinched at every sudden, sharp report. She did not look at Sister Agnes but pushed at the pedal and urged the engine up. The Jeep bucked and slipped again on the asphalt and then smashed sideways at a very slow speed into the soft wood of the pine trees at the side of the road. Sister Mary Columbo was slammed forward and cut her head on the windshield.
“I’m all right,” she said in an odd voice to her dead companions. “I’m all right,” she repeated and her voice was detached from her body. She felt no pain. She heard no sound, not even the firing that came from the men who were in the forest. She felt very calm. She stared at the trees.
The bullet struck her chest.
She spun around against the steering wheel. She saw Sister Agnes then. Blood covered her face and her dead, open eyes.
“I’m all right,” she said softly.
The second bullet smashed into her back and she jerked like a puppet and fell out of the Jeep onto the soft undergrowth beneath the pines on the side of the road. She tasted blood on her lips.
The men came out of the forest then and took the plastic cases of medical supplies from the back of the Jeep. They had to pull Sister Mary St. John of God’s body out of the Jeep to get all the supplies. One of the men prodded at the body of Sister Mary Columbo at the side of the road and said something that made the other men laugh. Someone fired his automatic weapon again into the trees. The birds were silent. When the firing stopped, there was no sound at all. The engine had died in the soft crash into the trees and made no sound.
“Should we burn the Jeep?” one of the men asked in the singsong patois.
“No. There is no need to destroy it. It’s always good to leave a vehicle like that. You don’t know when it might be useful sometime.”
One of them tore Sister Mary Columbo’s blouse and turned her over. He took out his knife and cut her brassiere. Her wounds were still bleeding and there was blood on her lips. The man used the knife to cut a small mark above her breasts. It looked like a geometric symbol.
After a while, the men walked back into the forest, carrying the supplies in plastic boxes.
After a long, silent time, the birds began to speak again in the trees. In the undergrowth beneath the pines, insects buzzed and whirred and noisily continued the pursuits of their small lives.
It was the sound of the insects that Sister Mary Columbo heard first when she opened her eyes.