by Joan Thomas
They studied the wet mark carefully before it dried. Marilou was only sorry she hadn’t thought to take a picture. “So you’d know I didn’t dream the whole thing up,” she said.
“Nobody thinks you dreamed it up.”
“If it was a footprint, what size feet did he have, would you say?”
“Ten, maybe. And it was wide. At least a double D.”
“How old did the guy look?”
“About as old as The Kid here.” She meant Peter.
“And he was in his birthday suit?”
“He had a . . . a sort of string. He might have had something tied around his wrists too—I’m not sure.”
“Well, we won’t ask you about his gear, Marilou, because we’re sure you didn’t look.”
Marilou batted at Jim’s arm.
Olive took a sip of her lemonade, loving how cold it was, loving the tinkle of ice. These miraculous ice cubes were from Marilou’s kerosene freezer, which had been flown in on a cargo plane; of all the outstations, only Arajuno had a landing strip big enough for a cargo plane. And the veranda was actually decorated for Christmas, with a playful tree Marilou had made of bamboo and hung with the tinsel she’d had the foresight to bring with her from Deerfield, Illinois. Oh, Marilou, so resourceful, so brave, so funny and modest, the star of the party—she was always the star. Not just the prettiest of the wives, but the sexiest, that’s what Olive, perched on an upturned Pepsi case beside Peter, was beginning to understand, that it was something beyond her beauty that drew your eyes to Marilou. Even pregnant! Olive pressed her cold glass to her cheek, and felt her double, troubled heart merge into a single, warmly beating one. The beauty of one was the beauty of all, they were all fools for Christ.
Fermin walked past the porch, calling good night. Three or four other Quichua joined him on the path down to the river. Their houses were all on the other side.
“They don’t swim over, do they?”
“It’s not that deep right now. You could wade. But they keep a canoe tied to a tree. In case we get a big rain and the water comes up. They really don’t want to be stuck on the Auca side after dark.”
Swifts sprang from the direction of the river as if they sensed danger, swirling up into a sky so small and glowing, it looked like an open parachute. They sat and ate their peanuts and talked, and the forest vanished into darkness, and soon they were just voices along the porch. And then the tree frogs started their enormous song and gradually they all fell silent.
Olive drained her lemonade. She’d tasted alcohol just once in her life, on a clandestine night out with her friend Carol in college. Gin and tonics, that’s what they drank. Sometimes lemonade alone would bring it back, the delicate piney fumes, the blurry joy of that evening. She set her glass carefully on the floor.
“Some nights we hear jaguar,” Marilou said dreamily.
“You’re kidding. We never hear jaguar at Shandia. What do they sound like?”
“They groan. They sound like an old man groaning.”
“It may not be jaguar you’re hearing,” Nate said. “The Auca are expert at imitating animal sounds. That’s what Daniel Boone says.”
“Daniel Boone?”
“Carlos Sevilla. You know, the Spanish guy with the hacienda near Shandia.”
Silence on the veranda. And then, from somewhere close, a long, graceful fluting.
“What was that?”
“Haven’t a clue.”
Ed got up to turn the generator on.
“Leave it for a bit, honey,” Marilou said. “Just a few more minutes. We’re having hamburgers, it’s a quick supper.”
He sat back down, a big genial shadow slouching in the dark. Not taut and burning the way Peter was, from the constant athletic struggle of holding his sins at bay. Olive reached for Peter, she laid her hand lightly on his thigh and slid it down to his bony knee. He put his hand over hers and wove their fingers together. The man came into Olive’s mind, the Auca man, as vivid as if she had seen him herself, sturdy and naked and unselfconscious, standing still against the forest wall like the angel God sent out to guard Paradise with a flaming sword.
“One of their warriors showing up like that and not attacking, it has to mean something.” This was Ed.
“Praise God,” Jim said. “The Auca know we’re not oilmen. They can feel the prayers and the love, we’re drawing them in.”
That night this seemed to make sense to everyone, although a week later they’d thought better of it, and when they all flew back in to Arajuno for Christmas, the men got to work and strung an electric fence around Ed and Marilou’s yard.
6
TOLSTOY SAID THERE ARE ONLY two plots: a man goes on a journey and a stranger comes to town. Olive, sitting at the back of the lecture hall and scribbling down every word that came out of her professor’s mouth, thought, Isn’t that the same plot? If you just switch the point of view? Not that she put up her hand to argue with him. She was silent, as befitted the invisible. I’ll ask Peter, she thought. Peter, who could see her. Meeting Peter might be considered the start of Olive’s story, but they had known each other their whole lives. If you wanted an inciting incident, you’d have to think of the rainy Sunday in late June 1951 when Jim Elliot arrived in Seattle. You’d start with the hour before Olive heard the knock on the door, before the whole thing started up, because afterwards she could never see as clearly. She got enmeshed, as tightly bound up in it as if a boa had seized her and was gradually tightening its coils around her, squeezing until her eyes paled to white.
They lived a mile or so apart in Seattle, she and Peter. That rainy Sunday, Peter Fleming drove Olive and her parents back from the Gospel Hall in his father’s green Packard. The Flemings owned a car and the Ainsleys didn’t. Both families were exceptional in the Gospel Hall—Peter’s family because they were rich and somewhat worldly, Olive’s because they had only one child, her, their cherished daughter. Peter was invited for Sunday dinner, he was with them when they stepped into a cool and silent house that had filled with the smell of roasting chicken while they prayed in the Gospel Hall on Rainier Avenue. A spotless house, the dust motes all settled, and a lemon pie tucked into the dark safe of the tiny refrigerator, oozing amber beads onto the white drifts of its meringue. Sundays: you walked in after church feeling hungry and righteous but also strangely chilled and flattened out, and Olive loved it when Peter came home with them and helped bring her back to life. She loved seeing him take off his jacket and undo his top shirt button, as though he belonged in this modest house where they ate in the kitchen at a white-painted table. At Peter’s place they ate in a dining room crammed with heavy oak furniture and draped in lace, and the air was frigid with his stepmother’s moods.
That Sunday, Olive’s mother held out a blue-dotted apron and Olive took it and tied the strings in a bow and set about putting the vegetables to boil. She made gravy, pressing the lumps out with a wooden spoon, and her mother stood beside her and stirred up a white sauce for the peas. They were still a little shy around Peter, Olive’s parents. Olive could tell it moved them, their only child having a private life, choosing a boyfriend all on her own. But that it was Peter Fleming—if they had looked up the components in God’s catalogue and had him custom-made, they would hardly have dared ask for so much. A slender, dark-haired boy from a big stone house on Queen Anne Hill, a boy who was going to be a university professor one day, and whose parents drove an expensive new car and had books on their shelves. The Gospel Hall did not believe in putting one man above another; everyone dressed the same, and the men took turns preaching. But the Flemings—you’d have to call them the first among equals.
And now they were talking easily the way families do, about her father’s renovations in the kitchen and about the wallpaper, which had a pattern of gnarled trees clutching the earth with gnarled roots. Olive trees, the family’s little joke—they could never change the wallpaper.
“You are the only Olives I know,” Peter said.
“It
’s a good name,” Olive’s dad said. “It’s in the Bible. When the flood ended, a dove brought Noah an olive branch as a sign of peace.”
“I wanted to call her Faith,” Olive’s mother said, deftly pouring the gravy from the roasting pan into its little white pitcher. “Alex was the one who wanted Olive. I said it would be too confusing. So then he started calling me Livie. I was never Livie until our Olive came along.”
“It’s usually the child you give the pet name to,” Peter said. His eyes met Olive’s as if he’d said something private and outrageous, and, warmed, she turned back to the stove, where the potatoes were tender to the fork. Hollow with hunger, glazed with happiness, she got out the masher and put her weight into it. The potatoes surrendered their shape, and she slopped soft butter into them, and then they set the food on the white table with its red cotton cloth and took their places.
“Peter, would you ask the Lord’s blessing on the food?” Olive’s father said, and Peter glanced across at her and bowed his head.
“You are mighty, Lord. You furnish all our needs,” he prayed in his calm and precise voice, and Olive, watching through her lashes, registered something yellow in the corner of her eye. It was her mother’s housedress. For the first time ever with a guest in the house, her mother had gone upstairs and taken off her navy Sunday suit and put on her yellow housedress. Mom knows, Olive marvelled, bowing her head. She knows, and she is happy.
It was a fork-in-the-road day. It would have been anyway, even if nothing else had happened, even if, just as they were settling into their meal, a thump had not sounded loudly on the door. Olive put her fork down, pushed her chair back, and went up the hall. She opened the door. A young man stood on the front stoop with the brim of his hat turned down against the rain.
She had never actually met Jim Elliot, but she knew him as a friend of Peter’s. He was from Portland and was scheduled to speak at their assembly that evening. He wore a suit but no tie, like all the Brethren. Not much older than Pete, but while Pete was reading Nietzsche and Sartre at the university, Jim had been going around the country preaching in soup kitchens and jails or buttonholing people on the street. And here he was, springing through the door with his hand out, carrying his celebrity into their little house.
She took Jim’s hat and led him into the kitchen and they all got to their feet. “How did you track me down?” Peter asked, looking pleased and embarrassed.
“I have my spies out,” Jim said. Olive’s dad went to the living room for a chair and Olive went for another plate. She could see her mother at the cupboard, no doubt regretting the yellow housedress, casting around for something to make this meal special. She came back with dill pickles in a cut-glass dish.
“I’m sure you folks have already said a blessing over this wonderful dinner,” Jim said as he sat down, “but I’d like to tell God how grateful I am to be sharing it.”
He was not a tall man, but he was powerful and lithe. He looked like a wrestler, which he was. Olive had seen wrestling, she had stood in the entry to the gym at the university and watched muscular, bare-chested men lumbering around each other, stooped and glaring, grabbing as if they were trying to kill each other with their bare hands. “Civilize the mind, but make savage the body,” said Peter, who was with Olive at the time. This wasn’t from the Bible, it was an ancient Chinese saying. Peter said Jim’s wrestling was a wonderful tool for God. He walked into saloons and challenged drunkards to arm wrestling, and when a crowd gathered, he preached to them.
Now he sat holding a big hand out in either direction. It was not something they did, they didn’t link hands for grace, but Livie put her hand in his with a smile, and Jim grasped Pete’s hand where it lay on the table, and while the chicken grew cold on the platter, they had a second and lengthier grace. Olive’s parents valued modesty, her father could hardly bring himself to use the pronoun I, and Olive thought it possible that Jim Elliot was overreaching himself.
“Did you serve, Jim?” Alex asked as he passed the chicken up the table. In the war, he meant. It was a dark preoccupation that he tried to keep hidden.
“No sir, I did not,” Jim said, spearing himself a drumstick. He had a disarming dimple, just one. “I count it a blessing that I’m called to go out into the world with the good news of the gospel of Christ, instead of bearing death and destruction. And you folks probably share my belief that as followers of Jesus we are citizens of a heavenly kingdom, not citizens of this world. So I cannot in conscience participate in either politics or war.”
This was a question Peter loved to debate, and Olive tried to catch his eye. But he was caught up with his dinner. It struck her how unlikely his friendship with Jim Elliot was. And yet last summer, on a whim, they had spent six weeks travelling together, living on cans of beans heated on the engine block of Jim’s 1942 Ford while they drove.
“What do we have here?” Jim asked, lifting a bowl.
“Creamed peas,” Olive’s mother said. “This is the way we serve peas in Canada.” It was the most exotic thing about the Ainsleys, that Livie was a Canadian.
“You’re a Canuck?” Jim said, slopping a huge spoonful onto his plate. “Canada’s a complete mystery to me. Tell me about it.”
That was Jim Elliot, interested in everything. He professed to love creamed peas and he identified Livie’s secret ingredient in the tomato aspic (Worcestershire sauce). He learned that Alex was a milkman and he portrayed him as a hero, on the front lines of Washington State’s successful battle against childhood rickets. He discovered that Alex and Livie had met when Alex took a vacation trip to Canada to see the goats grazing on the roof of a store on Vancouver Island, that Alex got lost and wandered into the diner where Livie worked, where he ordered liver and onions and handed his waitress a gospel tract. Which opened the door for him to lead Livie to the Lord, and, of course, to court and marry her. “Wasn’t that an amazing coincidence?” Livie exclaimed, as she always did at this point in the story. But Jim would have none of it. “You followed God’s call, Mr. Ainsley, though you had no idea of all the wonderful things He had in store for you. Praise God for that. Well, the Lord is calling me to a foreign field as well, and I intend to listen.”
“To Canada?” Livie laughed, not ready to give it up.
“I pray that some man of God gets to the Canucks before the Commies take the whole place over,” Jim said. “But it won’t be me, I’m afraid. God wants me in South America.” He pressed a shallow dent into his mashed potatoes for the gravy and, while he ate, told them the whole story. He’d thought his calling was to preach in America, but one day, out of the blue, he received a letter from an Englishman named Dr. Tidmarsh, who was serving God in Ecuador, in the eastern region known as El Oriente. Dr. Tidmarsh worked with the Quichua, miserable, impoverished Indians who were indentured to plantations where they dug yams from morning to night, drunk on palm spirits, many of them children with no idea who their fathers were. Dr. Tidmarsh had recently suffered a terrible accident: the little aircraft carrying him and his wife into his jungle station crashed. By God’s grace everybody on board survived, but the pilot’s back was broken and Mrs. Tidmarsh was badly injured and would have to go home for good. Dr. Tidmarsh had heard of Jim and he wrote to ask him to seek the Lord’s will about coming to replace them. While Jim was praying about it, he was led to attend a summer course in Oklahoma to learn how to translate the Scriptures into Indigenous languages. And there, the man assigned to mentor him was a different missionary on leave from El Oriente, that very region of Ecuador.
“What a coincidence,” said Olive’s mother.
Jim smiled at her and his dimple flashed. “Mrs. Ainsley, if you give your will entirely over to the Lord, you will never again use the word coincidence,” he said. And then he told them how, after the linguistics course, he shut himself into his room at his parents’ house in Portland and waited and prayed. God can’t lead you if your heart is clouded by sin, and Satan went after him like crazy. “I was tormented by terrible lusts,”
he said frankly. “I had murderous thoughts about people who I believed had wronged me.” On the tenth morning, weak from these battles and from living on the tea and bread his mother delivered to his room, he woke up and his heart and mind had been washed clean. And then he heard God’s voice, which was indeed a still, small voice. God was not leading him to the Quichua Indians after all. His mission was to the Auca, a tribe farther afield, people who had never once had a peaceful contact with civilization. He’d heard about them at the Summer Institute, and his heart had burned within him, but at the time he hadn’t recognized that as a sign.
The Auca were Stone Age Indians who inhabited a vast territory in Ecuador, rich in rubber and oil and possibly gold. All those resources were inaccessible to the civilized world because the Auca speared everyone who tried to enter. “These people live in utmost darkness. They have no culture, no laws, no morality whatsoever. They go about naked. They bury their elders alive. They bury children alive.”
“But—” Olive said (how could he possibly know this?), and he cast a quick look of scorn and dismissal her way and kept on talking.
“They act entirely on impulse. If a man wants a woman, he takes her. If a mother is irritated by her baby’s crying, she strangles it.”
It was her mother who successfully cut him off. “My stars! Why would anyone want to live like that?”
“They don’t know any other way. They have never heard the name of Christ.”
“Yes, there are many unsaved folks living on this street, and they don’t go around strangling their children.”
Yes, America was on a dark path, but it was not the Amazon, where Satan had had a free stomping ground for centuries.
By the time the pie was served, Jim had shifted gears and was talking in a low voice, paying her parents the huge compliment of confiding in them. He told them how grieved he had been that God had not blessed his ministry in America; eighteen months in, he had almost no fruit for his labours. But now he understood what God was up to. This is not your place, Jim, God was saying. I want to lead you farther. It was no small sacrifice. Jim knew he could never expose a wife and children to the dangers of this mission. He had had to surrender his most cherished dream of home and family. “But the Lord calls and I obey,” he said simply.