Five Wives

by Joan Thomas

  There was the chief’s hut again. His new wife, a pregnant child, came out just then, and stooped to fill a gourd from a pot by the entrance. Rachel nodded to her. Some of the village men would be sitting with him. Although she’d been away for a month, although she had once spent two weeks in this house lending support after the chief’s wife died, and Tariri, at the end of it, had ceremoniously presented her with a feather crown, no one would look up if she went in. She would stand and wait, cut to a different scale, painted from a different palette, and they would go right on talking, enumerating their ancestors and their feats in killing jaguars, boas, and Indians from other clans. This rudeness, intended to remind her of Chief Tariri’s stature, would continue for twenty minutes before they greeted her. Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, she thought, feeling her rage ignite. Neither cast ye your pearls before swine. The Shapras had a word for pigs, and she knew it, but pearls?

  She turned away and followed the lower path to the river.

  The porters who had ferried her in from Nauta were down at the bank, drinking masato with the local men. “I’m going to bring down a letter for you to carry out in the morning,” she said to the only one who would meet her eye. She climbed back up to their little house. Her partners were eager to talk, but she said, “Tomorrow,” and went to her room, ignoring Doris’s doleful face. Doris, who one night had shaken Rachel awake, sobbing, because she’d found a white-headed pimple in her cleavage and thought it might be the protruding head of a guinea worm, who (if we’re going to call a spade a spade) did not have the mettle to serve in the tropics. Loretta, who was strong enough, spunky and resourceful, but brittle somehow, preoccupied with private griefs and rages. Had they ever really been a team, the three of them?

  She lit a lantern and sat at her desk and began a letter to Cameron Townsend, her mission director. “I am writing to request a change of assignment. My work on the Marañón River is done. The Lord is calling me to Ecuador.” And in the process of writing those words, she felt an airy space open up in her chest and she discerned that it was absolutely and splendidly true.

  God wants me to serve the Auca Indians, a savage people who (as you no doubt know) have never heard the name of Christ. They have eluded contact for centuries, they have not fallen into the clutches of the priests, they remain a ripe and fertile ground for evangelism. I have reason to believe that they are culturally and linguistically related to the Shapras, in whose language I now have mastery. I praise God that, in His omniscience, He prepared me to work with the Auca by leading me first to Peru.

  11

  OVER A YEAR SINCE THE accident, but Nate is still in an upper-body cast. He moves like a cockroach, stiff but quick.

  “So how did it happen?” Rachel asks, settling into a chair on a screened veranda that has a wonderful view of Mount Sangay with its snowy fields.

  “I ran out of fuel, flying into Shandia.”

  “You don’t have an auxiliary tank?”

  “I do, but mud wasps got into the fuel line and plugged it up. It was a sick feeling, let me tell you. I went into a glide and tried for the Napo, thought I might come down on a playa. But I didn’t have enough air under me, the left wing caught a tree.”

  While Nate is grounded, a pilot named Johnny Keenan is doing most of his circuit with a float plane. The church at home is raising the cash for another plane, a brand-new Piper Super Cub, and Nate hopes to be back to flying in the new year. In the meantime, he’s supervising the building of a hospital in the town, and they’re still running the missionary guesthouse. Shell Mera itself is nothing, three rows of shacks assembled by the wind. But the guesthouse, which overlooks the airstrip, has every modern convenience, and they’re at a third the altitude of Quito. The beauty of the rainforest, the refreshing air of the foothills, and all the comforts of home.

  He paces from one end of the porch to the other as he talks, swinging his arms. The itching under his cast is driving him crazy. Finally he charges into the kitchen and comes back with a pitcher of water and a tin funnel. “Honey?” he says to Marj, and she hoists herself up and goes to him. He stands with his head bent while she pours water into the crack between his spine and the cast. “Ahhhh,” he moans extravagantly. “Ahhhh.” Water seeps from his cast and turns his khakis black.

  “That’s exactly the worst thing to do,” Rachel says. “You should be trying to keep it dry. You’re going to develop a deadly fungus.”

  He grins his easy shortstop’s grin. She can see him outside with his brothers, sliding down a snowy slope or swinging on a rope over the river, his face tanned bronze and his hair bleached silver, yelling, “Rachel, Rachel, look, look,” every blessed minute of every day.

  They sit down to eat in the kitchen. The cupboards are painted the blue of a bird’s egg, probably the latest thing in Idaho. Marj has a Quichua girl to help. As they eat, she washes up the pots with big, careless motions, banging them together as if they are car parts. The children whine and Marj picks up their spoons and cajoles them with mouthfuls. Rice, plantain, fish. Peas out of a can. Marj is from the Midwest, a nurse by training. A plain girl, not pretty enough to have been chosen by Nate, that’s the main thing about Marj. There’s no baby, Rachel got that wrong, although there will be in a few months. The third. Their girl is about five and the boy Rachel judges to be nine months and a day younger. She studies them and they stare back, unsmiling. They have a Marj-like squatness to their faces, but they got their hair and their eyes from the Saints. Yellow. Blue.

  Sam, Phil, Dan, Dave, Steve, Nate, and Ben. Two short of a baseball team, everyone said. Sam and Phil slept in one room, and Dan, Dave, Steve, Nate, and Ben in another, all in one big bed, three at the head and two at the feet, the quilt stretched tight as a drum by ten grubby hands pulling at it. Nate she remembers best, for what a lovely-looking little fellow he was. Her parents were in Europe when he was tiny, and mornings she’d get up to find him sleeping on the floor across her doorway. She’d trip over him and he’d scramble up and trot behind her to the kitchen and clutch her leg while she stirred the porridge.

  “So what brings you to Shell Mera, Rachel?” he says. “Wasn’t your furlough last month?”

  They’ve been dying to know since they saw her piles of luggage, and she’s ignored their hints. “Well, as it happens,” she says, “I have some very big news. Cameron Townsend has asked me to spearhead a new mission into Ecuador. Wycliffe Bible Translators is establishing a base here, and that base is me!”

  They stop eating at that, even the children, who sense drama. Marj is the first to respond. “Here? In Shell?”

  “For the time being.”

  They are frozen with astonishment. It’s Marj who speaks again.

  “All the language work you did with the Shapras—and now you’re launching into a ministry in Ecuador? You can’t be serious! You . . . you have the Lord’s leading on this?”

  “Of course.”

  “And you have a visa?”

  “I do. In fact, Cameron Townsend and I met last week with President Velasco Ibarra in the palace. He was extremely interested in my work in Peru. I’m coming in at his particular request.”

  She’s longing to tell them the whole story. She’s been waiting for days, imagining how excited they’ll be, the questions they’ll bombard her with. But silence falls over the table like a ton of bricks. It’s not just that they aren’t curious—they seem actually hostile to hearing about it.

  “Will you be working alone?” Marj finally asks. “Do you have housing?” She’s put her hand on Debbie’s cheek, trying to shush her, and she’s looking at Rachel with worry and dismay. No matter, it’s Nate’s reaction Rachel cares about, and she wishes now she had talked to him alone.

  It’s five or six years since she’s seen him. A man in his prime now, but the boy’s winsomeness still in his face. She looks appealingly at him, but he says not a word. His face is blank, even the surprise scrubbed off it. He tips the last of the fish onto his plate and goes back to e
ating. Some instinct warned her against mentioning the Auca, and in the light of this reaction, she’s glad. She’ll be months studying Quichua, in any case. It’s the lingua franca of El Oriente, she can’t do anything without it. And what was it Don Carlos said? There is an Auca girl at the hacienda, and if you learn to speak Quichua, you can ask her about her people.

  Nate sits shovelling rice and fish into his mouth as if it’s his first meal in a week. He’s still wearing that baseball cap, shoved back. She feels familiar ground under her feet.

  “Nate. You’ve left your cap on.”

  “You’re right, I have,” he says. He looks her straight in the face and gives her another jaunty grin.

  THEY PUT HER in an upstairs room with a large window, and she pays them the weekly rate posted in the radio room. “I know we’re family, but I insist,” she says, pressing the money into Marj’s hand. But when Marj is gone, Rachel discovers the invoice the cold-hearted shrew has already set on the dresser.

  It’s been a thrilling few weeks, but she sits on the edge of the bed tasting disappointment. Maybe they’re jealous. They may have got to Ecuador first, but she’s the one with tribal experience. It must bother them that she’s a real missionary, while they just offer material support. And when you think of it, it must gall them that she arrived in Ecuador and right off the bat had an audience with their newly re-elected president. Oh, she longs to tell Nate about the beautifully carved mahogany chairs they sat on while they talked. And what a scrawny chap Ibarra was, an aging egghead with thick, circular, black-rimmed spectacles, who told them all about his vision of a transformed Ecuador, ushered into the twentieth century with the help of foreign investors. Roads, industry, schools. Secular schools—he’d had it with the Catholics, who bred subservience into the people. His face glowed, a beautiful man. He promised as many visas as they wanted to go into El Oriente and establish schools. They’d have full rights to radio and air, providing they built airstrips for general use. Their mandate was to speed the transition to an oil future, where the Achuar, the Shuar, the Cofán, and the Secoya would provide much-needed labour for road building and the like.

  Cameron Townsend had coached Rachel over supper the night before they met with the president. “We go in as language specialists and teachers and pilots. We don’t preach. We don’t set up churches. Remember, we are not the Wycliffe Bible Translators. We are the Institute of Linguistics. You will be talking to the president of Ecuador himself, but this is not the place to witness for the Lord. Ecuador has never given a visa to a Protestant missionary.”

  “I wouldn’t feel comfortable lying,” Rachel said.

  “Listen,” Cameron Townsend said. “People used to come up to Jesus all the time and say, Who are you? He never told them. Who do men say that I am? That was his answer.”

  She didn’t actually have to utter a lie during the meeting, thank God. At one point, Velasco Ibarra’s attention was caught by her Shapra feathers, transformed now into a ring hat with a bit of black netting tacked to the front, an enhancement suggested by Doris and executed by Loretta before she left Peru. The feathers reminded him of flying over El Oriente during his last term, and he told them how the natives—los infieles, he called them, the way Don Carlos had—had thrown lances at his plane. “But the lowlands really are our orient. Ecuador has no future without oil. Are we going to abandon our richest territories to our most primitive people?”

  Rachel spreads a towel on the bed to protect it from her shoes and lies down. Nate needs to put his pride aside. There’s no competition in God’s army. Maybe they’ll even lure Phillip here from Venezuela. Think of the years God spent building the Saint team, unconventional, intrepid, exceptional in any enterprise they turn their minds to. “Santa Felipe, Santa Natanael, Santa Raquel,” someone mused at the Sevilla party. It takes her breath away, to think of the separate ways the Lord brought them to this point.

  In the meantime, this room is a palace. A little island of America, with a light bulb dangling from the ceiling and a big window overlooking the airstrip. It even has a gecko, showing its green tail to her from the top louvre.

  12

  NATE AND MARJ ARE ABLE to provide Quichua word lists, and Rachel spends her days at the desk by the big window memorizing them. Her third week there, a young American gets off the bus from Quito and walks across to the guesthouse with a duffle bag on his back. He’s pale and thin and has a tremor in his hands. Marj greets him with sympathetic cries. “They discharged you far too soon,” she says. “Look at the colour of you. Oh, poor Peter.”

  Peter Fleming is new to the field and deep in language learning himself. He’s from the west coast, sponsored by one of those primitive congregations, Anabaptist or apostolic or whatever they call themselves, where the working poor sit on folding chairs in a wood-frame hall and sing without books or an organ. But he seems very nice. When he hears Rachel is studying Quichua, he tells her he has a package of materials his predecessor Dr. Tidmarsh made up, a grammar she might find useful. “I’ll make you a copy,” he says, and in spite of his fatigue, he spends the next two days in the radio room typing up the pages for Rachel. He gives it to her without a fuss. “I enjoyed doing it,” he says. “It was a good way for me to learn.”

  They talk on the veranda while Marj puts the children to bed on the other side of the window. He tells her about the flood that destroyed all their efforts of the first six months. He tells her about his work with the Quichua in Shandia, the medical clinic and the boys’ school, how difficult that ministry is. Indians walk by on the road as they talk, and they watch them together, and it’s clear to Rachel that it’s too late to rewind history and save the Quichua. They’re like the Shapras, they’ve had just a big-enough dose of Christianity to inoculate them against it for life. But what’s to be gained by discouraging this young missionary?

  He’s had three medical evacuations in the last year. “That is par for the course,” Rachel says consolingly. Her own malaria came and went her entire first year on the Marañón River. It took her a long time to recognize what it was. “It felt like a miracle at first,” she says. “Being cool, for the first time in months. I dreamed I was sledding. Nate was there, sliding on a tea tray, and the snowflakes parted like a mosquito net. But in the morning, shivers began to chase over my arms, waves of gooseflesh, and I started trembling. I walked through the settlement with my arms folded, trying to hide the fact that I was shaking like an old man with palsy. Stop it! I kept scolding myself—you’re doing that on purpose! But I couldn’t stop.”

  “I went through that stage too.”

  “And were you a little crazy?” she asks. “When it really set in, I thought the child who hauled our water was Jesus. I tried to go down to the river myself because I didn’t want our Lord fetching and carrying for us. The can I took was half-full of kerosene, and I filled it to the top with water. Then I slipped in the mud and sprained my shoulder, just to add to the general misery. My partners were beside themselves!”

  “I didn’t hallucinate,” Peter says. “But I had—I guess you’d call it poor control of my impulses.”

  Rachel senses a juicy story. “What did you do?”

  “Oh, I wrote a letter I should never have written. Fortunately, no one mailed it and I had the chance to burn it when I was lucid again.”

  This boy is articulate and educated, not what Rachel assumed at all. He wrote a university thesis on Herman Melville. “Melville,” she cries, thrilled. “Herman Melville courted the grandmother of a dear friend of mine.” It was Mrs. Parmalee’s grandmother, in fact. So then she tells him about her own mother’s academic career and various suitors.

  “Ezra Pound!” he exclaims in his turn. He’s sprawled on a bamboo chair, so thin he seems to be part of it, and he turns his eyes towards the town and recites, “‘Empty are the ways, empty are the ways of this land, and the flowers bend over with heavy heads.’”

  She beams at him. Even Nate has no idea who either Herman Melville or Ezra Pound are. Al
l that interests Nate and Marj, really, are the children, and the properties and efficient functioning of generators and kerosene refrigerators, and whether they are being swindled by their grocery supplier.

  A day or two later, Pete’s partner Jim Elliot arrives, having walked the jungle trail from Shandia. His hair is drenched with sweat and his shirt is plastered to him, but he bounds up the steps of the veranda, noisy, exuberant, the cock of the walk. “Nate’s got a sister?” he says when he shakes Rachel’s hand. “I thought the Pennsylvania Saints was a full team of heavy sluggers.”

  “We are,” she says, staring him down.

  An American couple, Ed and Marilou McCully, are joining the work—that’s why Jim trekked out from Shandia, to welcome them. Late that afternoon they roll in on the bus, carrying their eight-month-old son. Ed and Marilou flew Chicago–Houston–Quito, no stinking ocean freighter for them. So just yesterday they had cornflakes for breakfast, just yesterday they were driven up the turnpike to O’Hare Airport. They look hot and exhausted, but still unmistakably new. As they mill around the veranda, shaking hands, embracing, the clouds part to reveal the perfect cone of Mount Sangay, forty miles away. Nate has combed his hair and put on a white shirt, buttoning it up over his grimy cast. Standing beside him, Rachel can feel his excitement. It’s been cloudy for a week, but, a proud host, he laid Mount Sangay on especially for them, the snowfields pink with the failing light.

  Jim Elliot leads them in prayer, thanking God for Ed and Marilou’s safe arrival. “You are bringing your team together, Lord,” he prays. “We can only watch in humility and awe as your plans are made manifest. We ask that you counsel and guide us as we prepare for the glorious harvest that lies ahead.”

  Marj has been saving a case of Pepsi for the occasion and she hauls it out. They drink their Pepsis, they talk and laugh. Marilou McCully is a good-looking woman in a mint-green suit and navy pumps. It turns out she’s expecting a second baby, she’s not just buxom as Rachel assumed at first, and she and Marj are soon sitting with their heads close together, murmuring in low voices, their hands straying now and then to their bellies. The children are crazy for pop, they guzzle it down and beg for seconds. When their whining turns to shrieks, Marj announces that it’s time for bed. Marilou stands up too. She swivels towards Rachel, telegraphing a polite invitation. Oh, I don’t think so, Rachel says to herself, pressing her bum firmly back in her bamboo chair.