Cutting for Stone Read Online Free PDF

trained as a nurse, the civil surgeons (who at the time were mostly Englishmen) had floated around serene and removed from the patients, with the assistant civil surgeons and junior and senior house surgeons (who were all Indian) trailing behind like ducklings. At times it seemed to her they were so focused on disease that patients and suffering were incidental to their work. Thomas Stone was different.
    She felt his invitation to join him in Ethiopia hadn't been rehearsed. The words had slipped out before he'd been able to stop them. What was she to do? Saintly Amma had identified a Belgian nun who had broken away from her order, and who had made a most tenuous foothold in Yemen, in Aden, a foothold that was in jeopardy because of the nun's ill health. Saintly Amma's plan was for Sister Anjali and Sister Mary Joseph Praise to start there, perched above the African continent, and to learn everything they could from the Belgian nun about operating in hostile climates. From there, after correspondence with Amma, the sister-sisters would head south, not to the Congo (which the French and Belgians had covered), not to Kenya, Tanganyika, Uganda, or Nigeria (the Anglicans had their fingers all over those souls and disliked competition), but perhaps to Ghana or Cameroon. Sister Mary Joseph Praise wondered what Saintly Amma might say to Ethiopia.
    Saintly Amma's vision now felt like a pipe dream, a vicarious evange lism so ill informed that Sister Mary Joseph Praise was embarrassed to mention it to Thomas Stone. Instead she said in a breaking, hopeless voice, “I have orders to Aden, Doctor. But I thank you. Thank you for all you did for Sister Anjali.” He protested that he'd done nothing.
    “You did more than any human being could do,” she said and took his hand in both of hers and held it. She looked into his eyes. “God be with you and bless you.”
    He could feel the rosary still entwined in her fingers, and the softness of her skin and the wetness from her tears. He recalled her hands on him, washing his body, dressing him, even holding his head when he retched. He had a memory of her face turned to the heavens, singing, praying for his recovery. His neck grew warm and he knew his color was betraying him a third time. Her eyes showed pain, and a cry escaped her lips, and only then did he know that he was squeezing her hands, grinding the rosary against her knuckles. He let go at once. His lips parted, but he didn't say anything. He abruptly walked away.
    Sister Mary Joseph Praise couldn't move. She saw that her hands were red and beginning to throb. The pain felt like a gift, a blessing so palpable that it rose up her forearms and into her chest. What she couldn't bear was the feeling that something vital had been plucked out and uprooted from her chest when he walked away. She'd wanted to cling to him, to cry out to him not to leave. She had thought her life in the service of the Lord was complete. There was, she saw now, a void in her life that she'd never known existed.
    THE MOMENT she stepped off the Calangute onto the soil of Yemen, Sister Mary Joseph Praise wished she'd never disembarked. How absurd it had been for her to have pined to come ashore all those days they'd been quarantined. Aden, Aden, Aden—she'd known nothing about it before this voyage, and even now it was no more than an exotic name. But from the sailors on the Calangute, she gathered that one could hardly go anywhere in the world without stopping in Aden. The port's strategic location had served the British military. Now its duty-free status made it the place to both shop and find one's next ship. Aden was gateway to Africa; from Africa it was gateway to Europe. To Sister Mary Joseph Praise it looked like the gateway to hell.
    The city was at once dead and yet in continuous motion, like a blanket of maggots animating a rotting corpse. She fled the main street and the stultifying heat for the shade of narrow alleyways. The buildings looked hewn from