But thus saith the Lord, even the captives of the mighty shall be taken away, and the prey of the terrible shall be delivered; for I will contend with him that contendeth with thee, and I will save thy children. [Isaiah 49: 25]
He slumped to the tower floor and pushed his back to its southern perimeter wall. From there, Shambling could barely see through the slots in the decorative facade surrounding the deck. He hadn’t forgotten his promise to Dalal, but he hadn’t slept well for days. “She called this a lighthouse of the Muslim faith. My candle flickers.” He willed his peepers to open long enough to cap the bottle of covenant wine she had brought him. While screwing down the cap he repeated, “You promised Dalal you’d stand watch through the night; you promised; you promised. His eyes glossed over and closed. “You promised, you prom . . . ised to stand . . .
“ALIM IS DEAD! You killed him; you killed them all.” Sham rolled over, pushed up to his knees, and crawled to the northern perimeter of the tower. “What the ??” He pushed his nose against the lattice work and saw another flash of light, then another, and yet another. “I’m finished. It’s the army. They are coming for me.” Too spent to run but not too cowardly to blow the horn, the deserter grabbed his trumpet, turned toward the village rooftops, put the mouthpiece to his trembling lips, and sounded a triple-tongued First Call.
Jinny and the boys failed to hear the alert. They slept on, undisturbed, in a third-floor room, four blocks from the square.
“TO THE ROOFTOPS! TO THE ROOFTOPS.” As if summoned to a dress rehearsal for the First Resurrection, adrenaline-spiked residents arose from their beds. Leaving behind their sleeping children, they clamored up interior stairwells like fish swimming upstream to spawn and die, ignoring the frightened old folks out of energy along the way. Everyone jabbered at once. It was a librarian’s nightmare.
A widow clung to a handrail and wailed, “Please Lord, not more Americans.”
Tasteless tongues warmed to a broth of fear mixed with a pinch of curiosity. Only Safeed and a few far-sighted friends remained cool and collected in thought. They watched through thick lenses from a rooftop vista and tried to apprehend the strength of the approaching specter. On it came, winding, leaping, lunging, bouncing, swerving, and looking more ominous with each closing mile, its purr gradually swelling to a dragon’s yammer. The serpentine Komodo had twelve eyes.
“How could this be the U. S Army? The drivers are either drunk, frightened, or crazy. I vote drunk,” whispered Safeed.
“I number five Jeeps trailing a Humvee,” added Dalal.” Eight pairs of binoculars nodded consensus. “Dear Lord, may their inebriated state accrue to our advantage.”
Ajani was dead tired. Only the jostling jeep kept him awake. He sat with his shoulders hunching forward, his hands clutching the steering wheel, and he was having a hard time seeing the road through the bug and dust encrusted windshield.
“Unbelievable, but there she is. Peshawar.” Ajani yelped like a kicked dog. “Oh squat, she sure don’t look like a Wheel of Fortune dream vacation to me.” He blinked hard and swore. “Please don’t tell me the Wheel stopped on Bankrupt.That wouldn’t be good for nobody.” Ajani braked, missed a rut, peddled, braked, and—seeing no sign of life in the body next to him—yelled, “Billie Joe! Rise and shine. Or at least, wake up, dude, your shining days are over.”
Karim sat up with a start and rubbed his blurry eyes. He smelled of alcohol, and his brain? Materially, it was destined for Pickleville. He sluggishly copied Ajani’s message into his consciousness with a dull pencil while he stared ahead. “I don’t see nothing.”
Ajani replied, “Keep your peepers open ‘cause thar she blows, Billie Joe.’ The windshield wipers beat time, and Ajani commenced rocking his shoulders, head, and the steering wheel from side to side. “Let’s do an allemande left with your left hand; do an allemande right, but since you’re tight . . .” Karim’s head smacked the door post, and he was out. Ajani regretted not having purchased life insurance.
For a few thousand whirs of the alternator, Karim drifted in and out of consciousness like a fluorescent lamp in need of a new ballast; and then Ajani saw it coming and lifted a right arm defensively.
“Uh . . . uh. . . uh. . . KERCHOO,” all over the unfolded map spread out on Karim’s lap. He blew his nose on his sleeve and burped his first intelligible thought in two hours. “Did you know when grapes die and shrivel up, they’re scooped up off the ground, smashed together and called raisins? Do you cotton on what I’m telling you? That’s like grave-robbing!”
Ajani nodded. “Yep. Yep. I cotton. I cotton on it.”
Karim crumpled and tossed the map on the floor. “Don’t need you anymore.” He leaned back, let his head bounce against the seat a few times, and tried to focus. “The town looks like a graveyard. I hate graveyards, but I’d go for a good bed about now, as long as it’s not underground. I’m clean tuckered out.”
he overworked windshield-wipers groaned and refused to finish their work. Karim closed his eyes and grunted, “Nothing like a good lynching to put fear in the friendlies.” He stomped on the balled-up map and added, “You ‘member how I squash folks like grapes when they don’t corporate, eh, Ajani?” No reply. “Boy, stop picking your nose! You’re driving me nuts.” Ajani’s eyes watered; his tears welled in shallow pools of self-reflection.
Karim smirked, “Say, you aren’t losing your spine, are you snake-eyes?”
The Humvee hit a rut, Ajani lost control of the wheel, bounced, and smacked his head on the door post. Karim ignored the injury, grabbed the wheel until Ajani regained control, and pointed a thumb at his captive on the back seat. “Don’t forget honcho, soldier boy gets hanged and gutted at dawn tomorrow—but not necessarily in that order. Got any problem with that?”
Ajani vigorously massaged his head. “Yep. Yep. I mean, no boss. I’m right behind you. Or beside you. Or whatever! What the ‘H’! You know what I mean.”
Taken aback by the tremulous response, Karim opened a plastic water bottle, chugged down a few swallows, gargled, and spat on the window, which he thought was open. He reattached and gave the bottle lid a violent twist, breaking the bottle in half, and then tossed it over his shoulder and sneered, “That’s your neck, soldier boy. Keep breathing.” Without turning around, Karim adjusted the rear-view mirror, exposed his tiger teeth, and grinned. “What’s the matter pooch, cat got your tongue?” Captain Durant lay gagged, bound and unresponsive.
“He’d probably like a drink, boss.”
Prodding Ajani’s bicep with an index finger, Karim asked, “Oh, he’d like a drink, does he? You SURE you’re not going soft on me.”
Ajani nodded. “Yep. I mean, nope. Hard as a dry turd. Whatever you say is good with me, boss.”
“Got to do unto others as they done unto me in Arkansas. Shove ‘em to their knees, noose ‘em like dogs, and drive ‘em all to hell. I wish we had a river. You up to it?”
“Yep, if we don’t run out of gas first.” Counter-intuitively, Ajani stomped the accelerator to the floor and, buzzing down the windows to aerate the cab, Karim yelled, “Yippee Ki-Yi-Yay. Don’t buck me off, Whirlaway. . . . Say, what are you up to?”
“Fifty-two miles an hour. Why?”
An alarm sounded in Ajani’s head. He released the petal and tensed, afraid to breath. His bloodshot eyes saucered and darted right like those of a screech owl. “BJ, whoo . . . whoo . . . I can’t breathe.” Karim had drawn his K-Bar knife, reached across the seat, and pressed cold steel to his lieutenant’s throat.
“Do you like close shaves, boy?” Ajani white-knuckled the steering wheel with both hands, took his foot off the gas pedal, and tried to avoid bumps in the road.
“Uh . . . boss. Mind if we change the subject?”
“What subject, little man?”
“Well, how about this? Do you cotton to reincarnation?”
“Say, what in carnation are you trying to pull? It’s a little late to back out, don’t you know? Can you still follow orders?” Karim growled.
“Yep, yep, no question, no question.”
“I thought you just asked one, I mean a question.”
Ajani seized the moment. “Oh, yep, yep. BJ, do you cotton to reincarnation?”
“Huh?” Except to scratch his head with a grimy index finger, Karim didn’t move. After a brain fart or two, he replied, “The only flowers I like have thorns. Do reincarnations have thorns?”
Ajani rolled his eyes. “Could do, boss, could do.” Well, that got me nowhere. Not ready to bid adieu to life’s rocky road, and tired of hampered breathing, he reverted to an old trick—Ajani pumped hot air into Karim’s desperately over-inflated ego.
“I can still see that Taliban psycho’s beak. What a pigeon. You had him eating out of your hand, big chief of the Okefenokee. Mighty good thinking. Yep. Yep. Mighty good thinking.”
Karim grinned, withdrew, and sheathed the K-Bar. Ajani’s breathing slowed to 120 bpm, and he pushed the gas pedal to the floor. “Boss, not only did you save our bacon, if you’d had the notion you could have fried that Talibani’s hide and downed the whole kit and caboodle.”
After slobbering down a can of warm beer without breathing, Karim replied, “Now you’re hitting it out of the park, hot dog.” Self-absorbed and over-inflated, he slapped Ajani on the shoulder, burped, relaxed, and calmly asked, “Did you eat all the potato chips?” Ajani swallowed and started to sweat.
Here we go again.
As the six-segmented dragon closed on the village, horns blared, dash-dash-dot-dash. Not a code. A war cry! Thirty-six bleary-eyed escapees, drivers and passengers alike, had blood alcohol levels well over the speed limit. Distracted by roadside junk—the true spoils of war—one derelict jeep’s passenger lost his grip and rocketed over the back, only to be run over four times. Karim witnessed the ejection through the rear-view mirror and swore, “Road kill.”
One hundred yards.
Fifty yards.
Twenty-five yards.
Karim grabbed and jerked the steering wheel, forcing the Humvee to execute a tight donut in the gravel and roll his captive to the floor like a child’s crayon from a church pew.
“Okay, now you really scared me,” yelped Ajani, boiling over like the radiator—both damaged to the core. “We were going too fast to pull off that stupid stunt! You almost flipped us over; awful, awful close,” he blurted.
Karim’s eyes narrowed, forcing his brow to furrow. “Close to what?”
“Uh . . . close to . . . riches; yep, yep, tomorrow we’ll be rich.” Ajani slunk down in his seat and tried to lower his heart rate by taking deep breaths.
Karim unlatched his door and set his mind to cogitating on what lay hidden in the shuttered shops lining the west side of the village square. Without dropping his foot to the ground, he mumbled to himself, spat on the ground, and pulled the door closed. “Lets you and me clean out this chicken coop, rule the roost, kill the goose, and gather the golden eggs . . . like what the govermint does in America. Now listen real careful. What we snatch we divvy up fair and square, equal shares. Do you copy?” Ajani knew enough about tragic opera to perceive that when the curtain fell at the end of act three, few if any of the gang would survive to spend their shares in Islamabad. What he didn’t know was that Karim considered whacking them all and taking a bow alone. When the curtain fell, it was sure to hit someone on the head.
Ajani nodded. He’d climbed in too deep to scale his way out now, so he kept securing his psyche to the backstage wall by pounding on the same blunted piton: BJ saved my skin; BJ knows what he’s doing; BJ knows what he’s doing.
“On my orders—meaning when I say so—let’s put the fear of the whole Okefenokee tribe into whoever’s holed up here and kick ‘em on the kneecaps. But first, organize the men; find me an HQ with a bed; post guards; and keep your eyes open. Tomorrow at dawn I’ll hang and gut Captain Catfish right here in plain sight with everybody looking on. If the residentials hate the American soldier as much as we do, maybe they’ll be more corportive. If not, you know the drill. Let’s snap, crackle, and pop.”
“Back up, boss. What do you mean by ‘snap, crackle, and pop’?”
“Have you already forgot how I saved your sorry-self from the Klan?
“No BJ, you won’t let me.”
“I mean ‘snap-crackle-pop’ like that. Haven’t I told you of how I got onto the straight and narrow? My mammy’s preacher, Dogleg Dooley, knew how to get a barbecue started. He’d snap to it and cry, ‘Dearly beloved, we are gathered here to bury the pig, take up a collection, and treat all you born-agins to a good old-fashioned Southern barbecue.’ Then the fire would crackle, and the pig’s eyeballs would pop. Now do you get it? I listened good in them days. So, after I got out of the big house, somethin’ snapped inside of me, and when I snuck into Arkansas that last time, the fire crackled, folks went running for buckets to douse the flames, and I popped the collection box open and high-tailed it out of town with some loose change.”
“That’s not all that’s loose, Boss.”
“But do you get my meaning little man? I’m saving up to stay in one of them fancy Motel 6’s in Islamabad. I like the sound of that name, don’t you?”
“Motel 6?”
“No, idiot. Islam-a-BAD.”
“Yep. Yep, Boss. Got it nailed . . . right here.” Ajani put a finger to his temple, extended his thumb, and pulled the trigger. Like Karim, his past was spattered with blood, soot, and graffitied with caricatures of his victims—the drawn faces of the innocent—but neither reprobate paid them any mind.
Muttering, Karim again unlatched the door. “Ajani, we’ll use just enough gas to stoke the flames, then burn Peshawar to the ground. I can smell Southern-style cooking already,” he snorted.
“I smell something, too,” mused Ajani.” He leaned his head out the window, sucked in some dewy air, and gazed through the side-view mirror. Seated in silence, none of the men had dared climb from the jeeps without the order: “Okay, let’s move it,” but each weary wannabe needed to stretch and take care of business. So did Karim. After wiping his nose on a sleeve—the one bearing the stars and stripes—he pried himself from the seat and dumped his overstuffed, pilfered BDU (battle dress uniform), decorated with potato chips, into the village square where he broke wind.
Tittering broke the silence.
Without a word, Karim eyeballed his offender, walked bowlegged to the second jeep, drew the semi-automatic, and shot the driver dead,stunning each man in every jeep—especially the one riding shotgun. The bullet, a through and through, struck him in the neck. He gurgled like a harmonica being played by someone without lips. “I’m hit. Boss, you shot me.” The gurgling stopped. His comrades looked on, riveted to their seats, confused, mouths gaping, and in shock.
Karim crowed loudly, his retort self-congratulatory and unabashed: “Two for one day! Come and get it.” Aspiring pallbearers, weary of fasting, reverently circled a thousand feet above his smoking gun. The sadistic southerner retrieved a half-pint of whiskey from the jeep and nonchalantly retraced his steps to the Humvee. He leaned through the window, forced an ugly smile, and aimed his side-arm at the hogtied hostage on the back-seat floor. “You’re next, Captain Catfish.”
Numb-bummed, Ajani snatched a crumpled cellophane bag, finished downing a few unsalted pistachios, climbed from the Hummer, and pretended to inspect the crew, all still in shock. “Everybody give me your attention–not counting these two. He stared blandly at the dead then dished out orders to a pair of back seat survivors. “Seaman’s Cap, you and What’s Your Name grab two shovels—that would be one each—cross the main road, dig a big hole, go back up the road and get Huey, then bury him, Dewey, and Louie side by side. But don’t fill the hole just yet. And don’t forget to say a few choice words.” The men complied—several times.
Karim hadn’t holstered his smoking gun because he was groping the minaret with his bloodshot eyes. He spat. “Them Moslimites are everywhere except Mississippi.” He shook his head disgustedly, hitched up his pants, walked over to the shops lining the west side of the square, rattled a few shutters, and knocked a few doors. All were padlocked or barricaded on one side or the other. Karim hissed, “I hate these lowlife centipedes already! All legs no brains. These shacks smell of Sunni.”
“Speaking of stench, look who’s talking,” murmured lieutenant number two, sitting at the wheel of the third jeep. His name, like his skin, was Coco, a former Taliban lieutenant and a Kandahar Sunni by birth. He enjoyed a love/hate relationship with his boss—he loved hating him, and Karim wasn’t having one of his better days. His ill-fitting uniform, now missing a button and spattered with blood, was so filthy it could have stood at attention without a body. Each shoulder displayed a symbol of military rank—on one, Karim was a captain; on the other, a lieutenant; to the villagers and his men he was demonstrably a thug.
Four blocks away, wary brown eyes darted back and forth. Jinny lay on her back. Gunfire? At the range? At this hour? No, dear, wake up. You’re still in Peshawar. She felt measured breaths against her cheek and turned her eyes toward Asif, who lay on his side, his left hand pillowing his head, his right arm draped over Jinny’s slim waste. Asad faced away from Jinny, close enough that she could feel his warmth against her left side. His arms were pulled up tight against his chest, and Alim’s sheathed knife lay within reach on the floor.
Jinny stared at the sooty ceiling and then at the one, two, three, four, five bleak apartment walls. A dusty floor-to-ceiling hutch appeared to have been anchored to the skinniest wall, but gouges on the floor suggested the hutch had been moved many times. Curious. Jinny gently relocated Asif’s arm, sat up, and clambered to her feet. Nauseous and dizzy, she stepped over Asif, into her boots, tiptoed noisily toward dawn’s early light, and knelt by the broken window to gaze at the horizon.
An unseen hand had gloriously water-colored the sky with pastels—timeless, tinted evidence of an Artist whose work Jinny greatly admired—an Artist ever at work. “Time?” Jinny pulled up a sleeve and glanced at the untanned silhouette on her wrist. Timeless is right–no tick; no talk. Wait a minute, what’s going on over there?
Black and white figures—some animated, others just stand-ins—had gathered on a rooftop promenade across the way. The assembly looked like the cast of a silent movie: Lights-camera-action; but no organ music. Unwilling to awaken the boys, Jinny waved, cupped her hands, and attempted a subdued greeting. No voice. She cleared her throat and tried again, but her vocal chords merely juice-harped: “H-e-l-l-o, I’m over here. What’s happening and why all the commotion?” She waved her arms. Exasperated at being ignored by the dullard cacophony of actors, Jinny finally relinquished her tryout for stage manager to another day or time. She resolved to remain alert and protect her brood by retreating to her trail-worn ruck sac, where she sat, disassembled, cleaned, oiled, and reassembled her weapons.
“Now, Jinny, how best do we exfil this bunker?”
She arose and tiptoed around the perimeter of the five-walled apartment, paused at the boarded-up bathroom, and stopped behind the entry door. “Only a rat could sneak up three flights of stairs from the cobbled street undetected. Contrarily, the stairwell offers our only ready means of escape. You’ve got to stop talking to yourself, Jinny girl.” She returned to the broken window. It had once been shielded by a pair of wooden shutters; but one shutter remained, and it hung by a single screw.
Jinny surveilled the courtyard. In a pinch we could rappel to the ground . . . when I find some rope. “Safeed? Yes, Safeed!” Her countenance brightened as she gazed upon the tokens of Safeed’s benevolence lined up along one wall: One dozen capped plastic containers of water; a box of foodstuffs bulging with good will; and a potbellied stove near the window, kindled with kindness. A large, capped barrel had been scoured clean and stood upright. Around it nested four smaller barrels, each branded in black, Made in China. Together the barrels clotheslined Jinny’s drip-dried BDUs and a change of clothes for the boys. Near where they slept, the kettle, wooden spoon, and a small bag of games tokened yesterday’s misery. Jinny’s Kevlar vest, helmet, and boots stood at attention in the corner by the cleaned sniper’s rifle. A few shards of glass—reminiscent of Isabelle’s puzzles—remained on the window sill; otherwise, the worn plank floor had been swept clean, ostensibly, by Safeed.
Jinny stood and toppled gracefully forward like a sawn tree, its descent buffered by branches. Palms down, she completed a perfect two-point landing without making a sound, hoping nothing lurked in the spider-webbed corner under the stove. Before investigating, something else caught her eye. She pumped from the floor in one fluid motion and landed on her feet. The door! I failed to barricade the blasted door. We were vulnerable all night. Oh, empty head, fill with wisdom.
While berating herself, Jinny threaded the holstered Ruger onto her belt, slung it around her waist, cinched it up, and then examined the heavy slab door. The latch-spring was sprung, the strike-plate missing, and the doorknob wobbled and spun, dizzy with age. The gap between the door and floor was large enough to admit a platoon of rats, noses held high, while they marched shoulder to shoulder fifing, Yankee Doodle Dandy.
RATS! Curly’s barn! The black duffle bag! Not now; not now, O’Dwyer! Stay focused. Jinny shuttered the memory, wedged a piece of firewood between the door and floor, and then tiptoed back to the broken window. Actors, extras, and stage crew had vacated the distant roof, leaving it to the sun’s rays to turn green, orange, and purple ceramic tiles into calescent coals. The fire-walk had lost its appeal as a revered passageway to manhood; although, many a daring foot—excepting three-toed variety—had lost skin in the game.
As if on cue, a mourning dove caught a breeze and fluttered down, fanned her tail feathers, and landed on the window sill. Observant but cautious, she pecked at her reflection in the broken glass and then turned her head and eye-balled Jinny, who had stopped breathing. The dove soloed a reassuring, “Coo. Coo-coo. Coo-coo,” and then effortlessly lifted off and winged away as unobtrusively as she had appeared. Jinny watched her soar into the alley and alight on another sill to offer comfort, ask for a handout, or perhaps ask for directions. The dove continued on toward the village square and was soon obscured from view by tattered clothing strung down and across the alley from one peeling windowsill to another—languishing laundry, lifeless, pinned to the line, and branded with pigeon dung. The laundry never relieved itself; never retrieved itself; never pressed or folded itself. Deserted, it flapped in vain. Isolated.
That’s how Jinny felt—flappable and isolated. Because she and the boys were sequestered some distance from the village square, she had yet to receive word of Karim’s invasion. What she did wonder about was perplexing. Who fired the shots that woke me up? What scared the villagers? And why is the alleyway through which Safeed guided us last night deserted this morning? Does no one else know we’re up here? No matter. I do.
Sergeant Virginia O’Dwyer spun an about face and smiled at the sleeping children, mindful that they would soon awaken and be hungry. She stepped forward and then, as if her thwab had snagged on a nail, she twisted free and down into a spin. On full alert, Jinny scrambled for her rifle, crawled back, and peaked over the windowsill. Without extending the barrel through the opening, she shouldered the rife, scoped the alley, and whispered to herself, “somebody’s down there and doesn’t want to be seen.”
Attached to a long neck, a very round head pogoed like a tipped-over jack-in-the-box from between shutters at a third-floor window fifty yard away. Jinny forgot the hidden aggravation in the alley below and chortled, “Safeed.” He spotted her and hardened like petrified wood. She lowered the rifle and waved. “Sorry Safeed. Wow, you read my thoughts. Come join us for breakfast. Can you hear me?” The young benefactor forced a grin and proffered a thumbs-up. Although bare headed, Safeed had much on his mind; much to do before the end of day: Assess the strength and intent of the enemy bivouacked in the square.
Before relinquishing his view of the alley, he licked a finger and felt for a breeze. Craning forward, Safeed looked east toward the enemy-controlled village square and became agitated. He coned his hands. A rapid-fire outcry in Arabic validated his concern. Unseen by Jinny, a distant neighbor’s grandchild was peeling paint from a windowsill, collecting it in her cupped palm, and licking as if it were powdered sugar. Or opium. Both Safeed and the guileless child were ignored, except by Ajani, also a keen observer. He spotted Safeed from the alley and heard a woman speak.
An American! Recoiling against a shaded alley wall Ajani hissed, “Now this should interest Billie Joe!”
Also peeking, hidden between her own shutters at a second story window, an ignoble gossip cluck-clucked aloud through loose dentures. “I tell you Rami, that bald man is a voyeur, gawking as he does at that woman. Can’t you just imagine what’s going on between them? Come and see.”
“Come see, come saw. Bawk-bawk-bawk, or is it balk, balk, balk? Either way, take your base, Mira!” Rami was a Dodger fan. The radio was on. Preseason play had not begun, and she’d been too long cooped up with her sister, whom she detested. Rami stroked the Rhode Island Red nested on her lap, while together they stared and Mira. “Your wattle jiggles every time you cluck, dearie.”
“I heard that.”
“I was speaking to the chicken, dear. Such a shame you no longer lay. Such a shame; today’s cluck is tomorrow’s stew.”
“I tell you Rami, he gawked at her AGAIN!” Leaning too far forward, the busy-body tumbled off her rocker and crushed a dozen candled eggs.
Needing to scramble back to work, Safeed had smiled a goodbye to Jinny. She waved. Her genuine, although passive response flew to him as if borne on gossamer wings. Her sanguine benefactor, soon to be co-owner of the building complex, withdrew from the window, retired to his mother’s bedroom, and knelt beside his sister.
“Is she still breathing?” he whispered. “Ommy, can you hear me?”
Gharam mopped her mother’s lined, pale forehead. “Her poor blistered face. She has suffered so. Her breathing is shallow.” Minutes passed silently.
Safeed gently held a finger beneath his mother’s nostrils. “She’s gone.”
Placing a hand on her forehead, he stroked back her matted, grey hair and kissed her goodbye. A wave of emotion swept over the kneeling siblings as their mother slipped silently into an eternal sea. They knelt on its shoreline and wept until they had to stand. To stop her nose from running, Gharam sniffed, then shuffled to the old seaman’s chest at the end of the bed, its lid hinged by aging leather straps. She drew forth a shawl knitted from wool spun back home by her own hands, unfolded, and draped it over her mother. “Safeed, you have much to do. You must go. I will attend to funeral arrangements and contact Abdul.” Gharam’s face was stained with unwiped tears. “The woman to whom you spoke, she is an American? I heard her voice.”
“Yes. Few know.”
“The children?”
“Refugees. They are called Asad and Asif. Abdul charged me with their care. The American woman must be assisted to return to her army, but the old man in the hospital must come first. He is helpless.”
“That is a lot of ‘musts,’ Safeed.” Gharam sighed and gently snuggled against her brother. “You climb stairs to shuttle fuel and water; you administer to the aged; the sick; the widows; you give generously from your own pocket; you lead out in times of crisis—all without presumption or expectation of reward.”
“Enough, big sister.” Gharam squeezed her arms tightly around Safeed’s waist.
“Yes, you are doing enough; more than enough.”
“That’s not what I meant, little sister. But as Jesus would say, “I must be about my father’s business.” Safeed kissed Gharam on the forehead, and then stared across the room at a delicately cross-stitched, even-weave fabric, framed in mahogany, and hanging on the wall near an oval mirror, which read, ‘Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.’ [James 1:27].