He asked what had happened to the wounded man: he had died. After that he saw them around: they were unemployed and angry because they had believed Liberation would see them in fine jobs and good houses. He employed one at the school as an odd-job man. The other was Joshua's eldest son, who started school in a class full of small children: he spoke pretty good English, but could not read or write. Now he was sick, very thin, and with sores.
Father McGuire did not mention these events to anyone, until he told Sylvia. Rebecca did not speak of them. The nuns did not know of them.
He had to keep an ever-enlarging supply of medicines in his house, because people came to ask for them. He built the shacks and shed down the hill, and asked Senga for a doctor to come: Comrade President Matthew had promised free medicine for everybody. He was sent a young man who had not finished his medical training, because of the war: he had intended to be a medical orderly. Father McGuire did not know this until one night the young man got drunk and said he wanted to finish his training, could Father McGuire help him? Father McGuire said, When you stop drinking, I'll write the letter for you. But the war had damaged this fighter, who had been twenty when it started: he could not stop drinking. This was 'the doctor' that Joshua had told Sylvia about. Father McGuire, in a chatty letter to Senga, complained that there was no hospital for twenty miles and no doctor. It happened that a priest visiting London had met Sylvia, with Father Jack. And so it had all happened.
But there was a good hospital planned for ten miles away, and when that opened, this disgraceful place – Sylvia said – could cease to be.
‘Why disgraceful?’ said the priest. ' It does good things. It was a good day for us all when you came. You are a blessing for us. '
And why had the good sisters up the hill not been a blessing?
The four who had seen out the dangers of the war had not always been behind their security fence. They taught at the school, when it had still been a good one. The war ended and they left. They were white women, but the nuns who replaced them were black, young women who had escaped from poverty, dreariness and sometimes danger into the blue and white uniforms that set them aside from other black women. They were not educated and could not teach. They found themselves in this place which was a horror to them, not an escape from poverty, but a reminder ofit. There were four of them, Sister Perpetua, Sister Grace, Sister Ursula, Sister Boniface. The ' hospital' was not one, and when
Joshua ordered them to come every day they were back where they had escaped from: under the domination of a black man who expected to be waited on. They found excuses not to go, and Father McGuire did not insist: the fact was, they were pretty useless. Gentility was what they had chosen, not suppurating limbs. By the time Sylvia arrived the enmity between them and Joshua was such that every time they saw him they said they would pray for him, and he taunted, insulted and cursed them in return.
They did wash bandages and dressings while complaining they were dirty and disgusting, but their energies really went into the church which was as pretty and well-kept as the churches that had beckoned them to become nuns when they were girls. Those churches had been the cleanest and finest buildings for miles and now this one at St Luke's Mission, like those, never had a speck of dust, because it was swept several times a day, and the statues of Christ and the Virgin were polished and gleaming, and when dust swirled the nuns were up shutting doors and windows and sweeping it up before it even settled. The good sisters were serving the church and Father McGuire, and, said Joshua, mimicking them, they clucked like chickens whenever he came near.
They were often sick, because then they could return to Senga and their mother house.
Joshua sat all day under the big acacia tree while sunlight and shadow sifted over him, and watched what went on at the hospital, but often through eyes that distorted what he saw. He was smoking dagga almost continually. His little boy Clever was always with Sylvia, and then there were two children, Clever and Zebedee. They could not have been further from the adorable black piccanin with long curly lashes that sentiment loves. They were lean, with bony faces where burned enormous eyes hungry to learn and -it became evident – hungry for food too. They arrived at the hospital at seven, unfed, and Sylvia made them come up to the house where she cut them slabs of bread and jam, while Rebecca watched, and once remarked that her children did not get bread and jam, but only cold porridge, and not always that. Father McGuire watched and said that Sylvia was now the mother of two children and he hoped she knew what she was doing. 'But they have a mother,' she said, and he said no, their own mother had died on the violent roads of Zimlia, and their father had died of malaria, and so they had become Joshua's responsibility: they called him Father. Sylvia was relieved to hear this history. Joshua had already lost two children – another had just died – and she knew why, and what the real reason was – not the 'Pneumonia' that was on their death certificates. So these two were not Joshua's by blood: how useful, how painfully pertinent that old phrase had become. They were both clever, as Joshua had claimed for Clever: he said that his brother had been a teacher and his sister-in-law had been first in her class. The little boys watched every movement she made, and copied her, and examined her face and eyes as she spoke, so they knew what she wanted them to do before she asked; they looked after the chickens and the sitting hens, they collected eggs and never broke one, they ran about with mugs of water and medicines for the patients. They squatted on either side of her watching when she set limbs or lanced swellings, and she had to keep reminding herself they were six and four, not twice those ages. They were sponges for information. But they were not at school. Sylvia made them come up to the house at four o'clock, when she had finished at the hospital, and set them lessons. Other children wanted to join in: Rebecca's, for a start. Soon, she was running what amounted to a little nursery school. But when the others wanted to be like Clever and Zebedee and work at the hospital, she said no. Why did she favour them, it wasn't fair? She made the excuse that they were orphans. But there were other orphans at the village. ‘Well, my child,’ said the priest, ' and now you begin to understand why people's hearts break in Africa. Do you know the story of the man who was asked why he was walking along the beach after a storm throwing stranded starfish back into the sea, when there were thousands of them who must die? He replied that he did it because the few he could save would find themselves back in the sea and be happy.' 'Until the next storm – were you going to say that, Father?' 'No, but I might be thinking it. And I am interested that you might be thinking on those lines too. ' 'You mean, I am thinking more realistically – as you put it, Father?' 'Yes, I do, I do put it like that. But I've told you often enough, you have too many stars in your eyes for your own good. '
The Studebaker lorry, an old rattler donated by the Pynes to the Mission, to replace the Mission lorry which had finally met its death, stood waiting on the track. Sylvia had told Rebecca to say in the village that she was going to the Growth Point and could take six people in the back. About twenty had already clambered in. With Sylvia stood Rebecca and two of her children – she had insisted they should have the treat, not Joshua's children, not this time.
Sylvia said to the people in the back that the tyres were very old and could easily burst. No one moved. The Mission had its name down for tyres, even second-hand tyres, but it was a forlorn hope. Then Rebecca spoke in first one local language and then another and in English. No one moved and a woman said to Sylvia, ' Drive slowly and it will be okay. '