A Pledge of Silence (25 page)

He laughed with gurgling contempt, drank the remaining contents of the flask, then tossed it aside. It clattered on the floor.

“You always were a mean drunk, Max.”

“So the gray ghost’s still got fight!” He grabbed her arm, and she writhed in his grasp. From down the stairs came a grinding of machinery, a thump, and a wild hurrah.

“You should be with your troops.” She fought against him.

“They’ll keep,” he growled. “You’re unfinished business.” Gripping her arm, he propelled her, stumbling, from the dark hallway into an empty room. She twisted away, but he grabbed her by the hair, yanking her back, spinning her around. She gasped at seeing his one milky, sightless eye. She lowered her gaze to the cleft in his chin.

He jerked her head back, forcing her gaze upward. “Look at me, you bitch! You did this!” Spittle sprayed her face. “You ruined my life. You owe me, and I’ve come for payment.”

She thrashed, trying to free herself, but she couldn’t match his weight, strength, and thirst for revenge. He pinned her to the floor, one hand so tight to her throat it cut off her breathing. He ripped off her cotton dress, laughing at the crocheted G-string as he tossed it aside. Lowering his pants, he drove into her, each thrust like a knife slicing into her, brutal, hard, deep, again and again. He convulsed, spent but not done. He flipped her over, forcing her legs apart. Choking, she screamed as he thrust his penis painfully into her rectum while pinching her nonexistent breasts and fondling her burning vagina. Frenzied, he pounded away at her, while her chin and jutting hipbones bounced on the floor. Licking her ear, he whispered, “When you see your friend, tell her I miss that flicky little thing she did with her tongue.” He rolled away. Straightening his clothes, he nudged her with his foot before he left to join the festivities outside.

Dizzy from pain and terror, Margie slipped on her torn dress, found her G-string in a corner, and limped back to her room. Sitting on her cot, she tried to sip some water, but each tiny swallow hurt her crushed throat. Blood seeped from between her legs; she couldn’t tell from where, because everything down there burned. Then she saw Helen lying immobile on her cot and remembered the plasma. Oh, my God! She had been on her way to get plasma for Helen when Max attacked her. She hobbled over to her friend.

“Helen, honey,” she croaked painfully. “I was delayed a bit. I’ll be right back with the plasma. I won’t be but a minute.” She touched her friend’s cheek, but she was too late. Helen had neither breath in her body, nor life in her eyes.

Margie collapsed onto Helen’s chest, feeling herself shrivel inside, the howling void filling with numbness, bleak desolation, and icy darkness.

That was how Gracie found her some time later, battered and weak, blood and urine soaking her dress.

“Who did this? A guard?” Her gaze raked the room. She closed the door, shoved a cot in front of it, and helped Margie stumble onto it. She assessed Margie all over, muttering obscenities when seeing the bloodied perineum. She placed a folded blanket under her feet and wrapped her in another. “You’re in shock. Keep your head down, okay?”

Margie nodded, dull and dry-eyed, her skin clammy.

Gracie went to Helen’s cot. Seeing Gracie on her knees, Margie crawled off her cot to join her. They prayed together, their voices quivering, “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want …”

Margie’s eyes refused to focus, and her injured throat constricted. She became mute with grief, but Gracie’s voice strengthened.

“I will fear no evil: for thou art with me …”

Her vision dimming, Margie clutched at Gracie before crumpling against her. She awoke a few moments later in Gracie’s embrace, and they clung together, trying to absorb this one more horror, while Santo Tomas’ church bells clanged in good cheer.

Amid the chaos of liberation, burials were haphazard in Santo Tomas. A subdued group gathered to lay Helen to rest in the small garden outside the shack in Broadway. Through incessant gunfire from outside the walls, and bombers and fighter planes roaring and sputtering smoke into the blue sky, Margie spoke of how she met Helen while studying anesthesiology at Walter Reed Hospital, of her loyal friendship, her large family in England, and her unselfish desire to work at the front where she would be most useful. The chaplain led them in prayer, and Gracie sang Helen’s favorite hymn, “In the Garden.” They all joined in at the refrain:

And He walks with me, and He talks with me,

And He tells me I am His own:

And the joy we share as we tarry there,

None other has ever known.

Wade and Kenneth filled in the grave, and Ruth Ann marked the sacred spot with a wooden cross. Margie returned alone to the empty shack to grieve.

Japanese guards remaining in Santo Tomas holed up on the top floor of the Education Building with two dozen internees held captive. After negotiations ensuring their safe retreat, they surrendered their weapons and left through a gauntlet of internees yelling, “Kill ’em! Kill ’em!” and children chanting, “Make ’em bow!”

Shortly, from down the road, Margie heard a chattering of rifle fire.

“Guerillas,” Wade said. “God bless ’em.”

Fierce fighting between Allied and Japanese forces continued outside Santo Tomas. Inside the gates, however, the inhabitants experienced a reprieve. Margie, Wade, Gracie, and Kenneth relaxed on a blanket under a tree near the main building. Each had a bag of food and a container of juice. They watched trucks as they came through the front gate.

“Those eight are food trucks. That makes 16 of them already this morning,” Wade said.

With the mention of food, Gracie reached into her bag and selected a banana. Wade followed suit, but he chose a peanut butter sandwich instead, as did Kenneth.

“Eat slowly. Don’t make yourself sick,” Margie said, as she lay back against the tree trunk. Still reeling from the rape and mourning Helen’s death, she felt detached from the rest of the world. She had no desire sit here with her friends, but Gracie had dragged her out of bed, insisting she come, and in the end it was easier to obey than resist.

Kenneth said, “I think I’m past that. The cereal this morning stayed down.”

Wade ate half his sandwich and put the rest back in the bag. “One bite and I feel full.”

Gracie peeled her banana and nibbled at it. “I’ll never complain about being plump again.”

Kenneth caressed her bony arm. “I’d like to see you plump.”

Another convoy arrived at the gate with a rumble of engines and the squeal of brakes. Since liberation, traffic flowed in and out of the camp almost nonstop. Some trucks arrived with companies of burly American soldiers, others filled with weapons, from side arms to howitzers, and enough ammunition to blow up the whole wretched island. Cannons perched on building tops and tanks lined the perimeter of Santo Tomas.

“We’re an armed camp,” Kenneth said, “which just gives the Japs one more reason to attack us.”

In response, Gracie ragged on her fiancé. “Kenneth Dowling, you are so blessedly pessimistic. I swear—”

“Well, what do we have here?” Wade murmured. Buses filled with people stopped in front of the main building. The drivers coaxed the reluctant passengers to the outside. No more than skeletons, some of the men wore nothing but thongs, and all of them crouched like beaten dogs.

“Lord, do we look like that?” Wade said.

Margie sat up, but had to turn her head away, not wanting to identify with the miserable bunch.

“It’s POWs from other camps. I heard more are coming,” Gracie said,

“There’s no room here. Where they going to put them?”

“By their looks, in the hospital.”

Wade rubbed Margie’s back. He had hovered over her since liberation. In a low voice he asked, “Have I done something to make you angry?”

She shook her head. “I’m exhausted, is all.” The clock on the bell tower announced the quarter hour. “Time for work,” she said.

“You had to say that, didn’t you?” Gracie made a face and leaned against Kenneth.

The nurses worked six hours a day attending POWs suffering from the effects of starvation and soldiers wounded in the battles raging in Manila. Now, buses full of prisoners from other internment camps kept rolling into Santo Tomas.

Margie longed to escape into a deadening sleep. “I don’t think I can do this anymore.”

Wade held her in his arms, and whispered, “Don’t give up, Margie. All we’ve been through. It’s almost over. I love you. I’ll take care of you.” His lips brushed hers.

She slumped against his frail frame, drawing strength from his words, his firm hold, and light kiss, but foreboding haunted her. She would never be free of this cruel place and all that happened here. She felt it in her bones.

The hospital overflowed, but now the staff had enough food, soap, IV solutions, sharp needles, drugs, vitamins, plasma, linens, and bandages—everything they had done without for so long. Doctors arrived with the troops, and they brought with them a new drug called penicillin.

“It’s an antibiotic made from mold,” one doctor said.

Curious, Margie held a vial up to the light. “What does it do?”

“It saves lives. Infections start clearing in 24 hours. It’s a miracle drug.”

“From mold, huh? If only we’d known. What other changes have I missed?”

“You’re going to be surprised. It’s a whole new world out there.”

Yes, a new world, she thought. One that had left her behind with worthless knowledge, outdated skills, and no strength or desire left for catching up. She cared for patients too weak to eat, going from bed to bed, offering encouraging words, and bits of mashed banana. She checked their IVs, cleaned and medicated their broken-down skin, and made their beds with clean linens. Still, the hours dragged; when the next shift of nurses arrived, she always felt relieved.

The movements of trucks and tanks had rutted the path to her shanty, and Margie stepped cautiously over the furrows. Already there, Wade had disposed of Helen’s ragged clothes, along with the dried food he found hidden under her cot. He had saved an address book, letters from her family, an unfilled journal, and an empty fountain pen with the inscription, “To Helen. Happy Birthday. Love, Mabel.”

“That’s all she had,” he said.

As Margie slipped the fountain pen into her pocket, sadness descended again like a wall of clouds. Together they read the letters. “She wanted to go back to England,” she said. “That was her home.”

“Would you like to write to her parents?”

“Yes, and her cousin, Mabel.”

They composed the letters. The one to Helen’s parents told them how Helen was loved and cared for until the end; the other to Mable to let her know how much Helen admired her. Wade addressed the envelopes and put them in his pocket.

Huge explosions vibrated the ground and lit the sky like the Fourth of July. Margie and Wade dropped to the floor, vulnerable to Japanese shells lobbed into the tinder-dry shantytowns. Palm-leaf roofs crackled and bamboo hissed as wind-whipped embers flared to flames. People swarmed out of their huts, children crying for their mothers and fathers, parents assembling their broods. Sirens wailed.

All medical personnel reported for duty. At the hospital, Margie stuffed her pockets with dressings, tannic acid for burns, and a 20cc syringe of morphine for those in pain and shock. Outside, with shells popping and fires burning around her, she ministered to the wounded, the burned, and the lost and crying children. Her mind numbed with fear again, and she practiced her skills automatically. A pair of soldiers placed a stretcher at her feet. “Head injury, lots of blood,” one of them barked before running off.

Lifting the dressing covering the man’s face, she jerked away from the stare of a blind, milky eye. Revulsion speared through her like an icicle. “Well, well, Max, isn’t this a twist of fate?”

Struggling to speak, he slurred his words. “Get me a doctor.”

Her vision narrowed, and the clamor around her faded as her thoughts shifted into an alternate reality. She whispered into his blood-streaked face, “Give me one reason why I should.”

He struggled to sit up. “I demand a doctor!”

She pinned him down with her body. The feel, the smell, his look all focused her loathing for him into a plan. Moving deliberately, she waved the syringe of morphine in front of his good eye. “It’s full, Max.”

He tried to call out, but she covered his mouth with her hand, and watched his eyes grow wide as she uncapped the syringe with her teeth. Too bad, she thought, such an easy death, a surge of warmth, then the slide into unconsciousness.

With the quickness of desperation, Max gripped her wrist and pushed the syringe toward her face. Morphine leaking from the needle’s point trickled onto her white knuckles. She wrestled against him: this time, her strength equaled his, but Max grabbed her throat with his free hand, and squeezed off her airflow. She choked, then rammed her knee hard into his crotch. As he convulsed, she collapsed on top of him, sunk the needle into his neck and depressed the plunger.

Within seconds, he went limp.

Margie sat back on her knees, hands covering her mouth, eyes bulging in horror at what she’d done. Max’s lifeless eyes stared accusingly at her. She retched then vomited a bitter green bile.

Gracie dropped down beside her. “Margie, a wall fell.” Then she saw Max and gasped. Looking furtively around, she removed the syringe from his neck, capped it, and put it in her pocket. Her eyes asked—
was it him?

Margie nodded.

Gracie summoned a medic. “Head wound,” she shouted. “Died on impact. Margie, come with me.”

Margie rose, weak-kneed and dazed. She wobbled through the bedlam of the injured, the screaming, the moaning, the mangled, the dead, and the dying—the memory of her evil deed already buried deep in her psyche.