Five Wives

by Joan Thomas

  The men talk aviation. High-octane fuel, directional gyroscopes. Their voices are low and casual, in a different register now. The sky gathers up colour and the cone of the mountain darkens against it. On the other side of the wall a child cries, and one of the women murmurs in comfort. They talk about Shell Oil, about a whole town abandoned in the jungle, and all the spoils to be bought up. “Don McGrath!” Rachel cries. “An American I met in Quito. He’s in charge of selling off the assets. You could look him up—he’s staying at the Cordillera Hotel. He—”

  “That rathole,” says Nate. “I was almost knifed on the street outside the Cordillera.”

  They’re in a row against the house, with Jim on the railing facing them. They drift to the subject of the Catholic Church. Nate knows all the priests in the region. The Americans and the Spaniards tend to be Communists, but the Italians are even worse, mean-spirited, ignorant, and superstitious. They teach the Indians that Protestant missionaries are supai pagris, devil priests. “The priest at Macuma, where Roger and Barbara Youderian serve, is a real piece of work,” he says. “Roger gave out mosquito nets to the new Christians, and the priest went around warning the people that the nets would trap demons inside during the night. Can you believe it? And when Roger started administering penicillin by injection, Father Bruno—”

  “Nate,” Rachel says. “Don’t call him Father. You have an earthly father and a heavenly Father, and those men are neither.” His mouth turns down in irritation and he doesn’t look at her. “Not that I disagree,” she adds, “about the priests. The stories I could tell you from Peru.” No one responds. “Even President Ibarra is disgusted by them. He told me they used to be carried from village to village on a litter, demanding tribute.”

  More silence. You met President Ibarra, Rachel? she waits for someone to ask. However did that happen?

  Jim launches into a story about the day he and Pete arrived in Shandia. “First day there, we’ve just trekked eight hours through the jungle, and we open up the Tidmarsh house and of course it’s crawling with roaches and rats, and then we hear a voice and there the guy is at the door. He’s put on his robes and his long crucifix, and he’s come over to the house to order us to leave. It’s his village, he says. That was our welcome party! I’m trying not to laugh, but then I look over at Pete here and I kind of lose it.”

  Peter shrugs. “He didn’t exactly order us to leave. He’s worked in Shandia for fifteen years, and he said that within a month the Indians would be playing us off against each other. You can’t deny that he was right—that’s exactly what’s happening. There are a lot of settlements in El Oriente with no Christian presence, and he thought maybe we could agree on certain territories.”

  “Well, I said to him, with all due respect for your fifteen-year ministry, Father Alfredo, I have not exactly noticed a Christian presence in Shandia.” The bedroom light comes on and falls yellow over Jim’s face. He looks at Rachel. “Sorry. You’re right, Miss Saint. We shouldn’t say ‘Father.’” He hitches himself sideways, swinging one leg up onto the railing, and says to Ed, “The guy’s from Albuquerque.”

  “He’s Chicano?”

  “What I want to know is where he’s getting his booze these days,” Nate says. “A few months ago he had a full case of whiskey shipped here from Quito, but Johnny takes one look at it and says, ‘No way I’m flying that in.’” He hunches his shoulders as if his cast is bugging him, twisting his head from side to side.

  Beside him, Rachel sits still in her chair. I am Miss Saint, she thinks. I am neither fish nor fowl.

  Suddenly Nate’s on his feet, he’s thumping on the window frame. “Marj! Marj! Get out here. Bring the kids. We’re going to have a show. And turn off that bloomin’ light.”

  Only then do the rest of them notice grey puffs rising from the cone of the mountain. The yellow light goes off and Marj and Marilou hurry out to the veranda, each carrying a sleepy child. The screen door slams and the volcano erupts, comets of orange light shooting in all directions. They’re all on their feet, they cry out in amazement. It’s an excess of beauty, it’s from another world. Lava like molten gold races down the slopes of the cone. Rachel closes her eyes and the sight is stamped on her eyelids. I am God, and this is my work. All the hurt falls away, all the petty resentment and competition: you are frail and flawed, but here you are and here I Am. “Immortal, invisible, God only wise,” she finds herself singing, and a beautiful male voice picks the song up—Jim Elliot’s, it’s Jim’s voice—and then they’re all singing, they move into four-part harmony, and she feels, rather than hears, the deep thrum of the bass voices. “We blossom and flourish as leaves on the tree, and wither and perish, but naught changeth thee.”

  It’s a song from Rachel’s childhood, but never in childhood did she hear it with so much wonder.

  LOOKING FOR A quiet place to work the next morning, Rachel opens the door of the radio room to see Jim Elliot studying the map on the wall. The eastern Amazon basin, with little flags on pins marking the fifteen mission stations Nate serves when he is able to fly.

  “Come in, come in,” he says. “Don’t let me stop you. I’ll be out of here in a flash.” He pulls out the desk chair for her. She sets the Tidmarsh grammar down, and he gestures to it. “That’s a terrific help, isn’t it. Quichua is a nightmare of a language!”

  “You’re not just kidding,” Rachel says. “You know, don’t you, the Quichua used to tie knots into coloured strings as a form of writing?”

  “There’s a metaphor if you ever need one.” Jim laughs.

  They are just the same height. They look at each other directly and she feels his clear gaze taking her in, not dismissing her. She sits on the office chair and he perches on the edge of the desk. “Every evening I turn to God, and I say, Lord, you reached down at Babel and touched the tongues of the folks there, and next morning they woke up speaking different languages. Couldn’t you just reverse that miracle for us? Because I promise you, if we had a unified language today, we wouldn’t be wasting it on building any old tower. We would use it to spread the good news of Christ to all the nations. But so far the Lord hasn’t taken my advice.”

  He gets up and goes back to the map. “And Quichua won’t be any help where I’m hoping to go. This is all Auca country. You’ve heard of the Auca? Entirely unreached. Nate doesn’t even fly over their territory. If he had another forced landing, he’d end up in a stewpot.”

  Hope or fear, she’s not sure which, surges through her. “How far does Auca territory extend?”

  He shows her. It’s a wide belt, bounded by the Napo in the north and the Curaray in the south, and by the border with Peru in the east—although that border is a fluid thing, isn’t it, and would be meaningless to forest dwellers.

  She tries to keep her voice casual. “And you said you’re intending to try to reach them?”

  “Well, I don’t know how to answer that question. When God called me two years ago, I thought it was to the Auca. But I haven’t figured out a way to make that happen yet. We don’t know where they are, and the other Indians are not about to guide us. So for now I’m working with the Quichua. It’s kind of hard to know if you’ve misunderstood your calling. Sometimes I wish God would speak up so I could be sure I’ve got it right.”

  “You know why He whispers, don’t you? It’s to keep you close to Him.”

  He smiles politely and she regrets preaching to him like that. To get the friendly mood back, she tells him about all the obstacles she faced when she first tried to enlist as a missionary. She came home from her grand tour with Mrs. Parmalee, her heart full of her wonderful vision, and enrolled at the Philadelphia College of the Bible, where she worked like a Turk for three years. And when she graduated, the mission board turned her down! A weak back, they said. Nothing about her was weak. They (those men, they were all men) saw her strength and it scared them silly. Silly was the only word for it, and it set her back by ten years. How do you make sense of it when God’s very own servants set out
to block you? “It was only after the war,” she tells him, “when so many men had been killed and they were desperate for recruits, that they finally accepted me.”

  “Miss Saint,” he says, “there is a flat and sterile spirit in the church in America. Frankly, I was happy to leave. I long to fight for Christ in a real battle with evil, where you can smell the stench of demonic forces. You must have sensed that in Peru.”

  That she can attest to. She tells him several stories about the Shapras, their history of head-shrinking, and the chief’s shenanigans, which leads naturally into the story of the night Chief Tariri sought her out in so much distress, wanting to pray.

  “I can’t imagine the joy you must have felt,” Jim says, “ushering a heathen soul into glory. I haven’t had a single convert here. I walk around feeling like such a failure. Satan can really use it to drag you down. I look at the Quichua, and honestly, I question whether they are my real ministry. They’re like children. They’ll say anything to get on the right side of you. Basically, all they want from us is trade goods.” He pulls a chair out from the wall and sits facing her. “Do you work alone?” he asks.

  “Cameron Townsend promised to send me a partner, but so far no word on that.”

  “Well, there is a wonderful liberty in singleness. The first missionary, the Apostle Paul, preached celibacy, but very few Christians take him seriously. The Catholics, whatever we might think of them, got that part right. It’s a huge sacrifice, and I have been struggling with it for years. For a while Ed McCully shared my vision, and he and I were planning to come to the field together, and then Marilou strolled into his life, and that was that.”

  “Well, yes,” she says. “I often think of the freedom Nate would have had if . . . well . . .”

  They sit looking comfortably at each other, their knees almost touching. He’s rolled up his shirt sleeves. The veins lie along his arms like cables, outside the muscle, just under the skin.

  “You said something about a stewpot,” she says. “But the Auca aren’t cannibals, are they?”

  “I don’t think anybody knows for sure. Tidmarsh heard somewhere that they bury their children alive, and their sick, and the elderly. Anybody they don’t want around anymore. When you think of it, a hundred generations have gone by since our Lord came to earth. All those centuries under Satanic influence—it must have a terrible impact on a people.” He reaches a hand towards her. “Would you join me in laying that ministry at the throne of God?”

  His hand is damp with sweat, but it’s firm and strong, and God help her if she doesn’t thrill to the touch as they bow their heads in prayer.

  THE SHANDIA CREW stays in Shell Mera for almost a week. Johnny Keenan’s not flying; his float plane is down and the parts he needs have been back-ordered. Hiking in to Shandia takes eight hours, and Ed and Marilou need to acclimatize first. Plus, they need to hire porters and sort out all the gear that just arrived in steel barrels from the port at Guayaquil, some of which (the record player and Marilou’s sewing machine, for example) will not be carried in.

  It’s an absolute tonic to have them there. Jim alone has the energy of ten, he makes a festival of every meal. They spend the days in prayer and fun and singing and conversation. It’s a foretaste of heaven, that week, God’s children enjoying themselves together in God’s presence. It was never like this in the station on the Marañón River. The spirit is very different in a house full of men.

  The only dark thread is Nate, who never speaks to Rachel unless he has to. Now that the gang is there, he’s started to mock her openly. One day when they’re singing together on the veranda, he gestures grandly at the end of the song and says, “With thanks to Miss Rachel Saint on the bagpipes.” And more than once, when a question comes up, he says, “Maybe Rachel can ask her friend Velasco about that.” She brings out meanness in him, and she has no idea why. You’d think he’d be grateful to her—it was her vision on the Aquitania, and he grabbed it up. And the missions were happy enough to sign him on the instant he was old enough. Nate and Phil, they’re both in South America thanks to her, and neither of them has ever acknowledged this.

  It’s always in her mind to ask him about the Auca, whether he’s seen any sign of their settlements as he makes his rounds by air, but any ambition she shows for outreach into the field seems to invite his ridicule. He knows she met Don Carlos in Quito; he refers to him as Daniel Boone. One day Rachel asks him to show her on the map where the hacienda is. It’s on the Ila river, with no settlement nearby.

  “Have you ever flown in?”

  “How would I land?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Hard to land without an airstrip.”

  The red flag closest to the hacienda is the Shandia mission station.

  “Could you fly in to Shandia and walk from there?”

  “You could.”

  “How long a walk would it be?”

  “Three, four hours.”

  “Is that how the Sevillas get in and out when they go to Quito?”

  “No. They go up the river, they use a barge.” He peers at her. “What’s up? You got a thing for Daniel Boone?”

  That’s what it’s like with Nate.

  Jim, though! Jim, she can tell, holds her in respect, and even seeks her out. Something burns so bright in Jim, a bright flame of faith. Rachel knows cant, she’s encountered it far too often in Christian circles, and she generally prefers a more modest manner. But Jim seems entirely honest, both in his spiritual victories and in his doubts. This should be the norm in the body of believers, but sadly it is not.

  They talk in low voices, up at the end of the veranda, mostly about the singleness issue. It pains him to see Ed and Marilou together; it’s hard to understand what God is up to when he believed for so long that Ed would be his partner in the work, and when he himself surrendered his dream of a lifetime of love and companionship with a soulmate, and ended up having to recruit Peter. “When did you first realize that God was calling you to be single?” he asks Rachel.

  “Well, in fact, I feel more like a widow,” she says. And she tells him. The man she loved was named Raymond. He signed up for the war and was sent to Italy. Rachel’s brother Sam was a telegram messenger at the time, and he came home one day and told her he’d carried a black-edged telegram to a house on Spiggot Street. He’d forgotten the soldier’s name—that big guy with the Alsatian, he said. Rachel didn’t even know Raymond had a dog, but she knew right away that it was him.

  “Oh, I’m very sorry,” Jim says kindly. “Were you engaged to be married?”

  “No,” she says simply, and it seems this only deepens the tragedy.

  She’s never told a single soul before, because she took the whole thing as a lesson in the follies of the heart. Raymond Molgat filled her dreams in the years after she was turned down by the mission, when she was drying out drunks at the Colony of Mercy, a dark, dark time, all those long days and longer nights in a mouse-smelling house crammed with wretched men who under other circumstances might have been husbands for her, but all of them ruined by the last war, ruined by going or by not going—and then there he was with his long legs and black beard, a new usher at the Church of the Covenant, a mountain man, her brothers called him, and it seemed the two of them were a perfectly matched set. For a long time she watched and waited, thrilling to the realization that God had planned this from the outset, that the missionary business had been a test, the Lord checking to see how willing she was, like God asking Abraham to butcher his own son Isaac. And then one Sunday morning the banns were read out in church, and she sat in the pew among her brothers and actually reached up to bat at her ears because she thought they were playing tricks on her. Raymond Molgat and Margaret Mallender. Margaret Mallender! A stick insect of a girl who would have to clamber up on a chair to kiss him properly. The day Raymond got engaged to Margaret Mallender was the day she learned that her own heart (which had offered her so much sterling proof in the way of smiles and conscious glances) was
a treacherous counterfeiter.

  And so what to think now, when the same currents begin to course through that same beating heart?

  She’s not a pathetic fool. Jim is a decade younger than she is, and full of the sort of easy charm that draws everyone to him. Nevertheless, there is such a thing as sensing exactly where an individual is in the house at any moment, there is a spontaneous sort of laughter that bubbles up in your chest when you’re around a fellow who has as many jokes and silly songs as he has, there’s the softness that comes over you at the sight of muddy brown shoes at the door, their backs broken down from the wearer’s haste in thrusting his big feet into them because children in the yard are calling for someone to throw a ball or a porter on the road is struggling alone to straighten the load on his donkey. There is all that. Oh, her heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked. But it is the only heart she has.

  And then there is, in the early morning, a sense of waking up to herself, lying on her side in her beautiful room with the wide window. Opening her eyes and fumbling for the hem of the mosquito net and reaching for her clock. Ten after five. Her drying underpants a row of silvery flags in the morning light. She drops the net and rolls over and lies listening to the birds. Rachel Saint. She is Rachel Saint, tall and big-boned, her stomach a mound under the sheet, a woman spurned by men, reviled and persecuted by the world, but created and beloved by Almighty God. She lies in bed and feels His love silver her very core. God is planning something great for the Auca. It will be an extraordinary work, like David Livingstone’s in Africa or the Apostle Paul’s, wherever he went. God has called her and given her certainty. He’s brought her to this house, and He’s called that gifted man sleeping down the hall. Celibacy, Jim said, holding out the word like a chalice. Holding it out to her, to Rachel Saint.