by Joan Thomas
He sits in the spring morning with his head bowed, listening. To a yearning song intended to baffle everybody on earth equally.
Marj’s Mission
15
THEY ARGUE IN THE MIDDLE of the night with a sodden baby sleeping between them and they don’t make up in the morning. Nate grabs some breakfast and runs out to the hangar to load up for his northern circuit, and then Marj sees him hurrying back to the house and she thinks, Okay, he’s coming in to apologize and to kiss me. But all he says as he dashes through the kitchen is, “Toilet.” While he’s in there, Marj senses someone on the veranda. She opens the door and Sofia’s daughter is pressed against the wall, waiting to be noticed. “My mother can’t come today,” she says in Quichua. “She’s dying.” Marj is used to this sort of melodrama from her Indian house workers. “Tell her I’ll see her tomorrow,” she says, or tries to say. The girl seems to understand, she nods and takes off, and Marj goes back into the kitchen. It’s exactly seven and the radio is already squawking. David is writhing in the carriage, frantically searching for his food source. Debbie is playing with her doll on the floor. Benjy is somewhere else, ominously quiet. Then there’s a tap on the door and the priest from Shandia walks in, looking for Nate. Nobody thinks of this house as Marj and Nate’s home. The priest is dressed like any ordinary working guy, in chinos and a worn blue shirt.
“He’s just leaving to do his northern circuit,” Marj says. “He won’t have time to talk to you, I’m afraid.” She bends to pick up the baby. Nate’s a stickler for his schedule and normally he’d be taxiing down the runway by now. She hears the bathroom door open and he steps into the kitchen behind her. No pleasantries are exchanged in any direction. The priest tells them he hiked in to Shell Mera to see the doctor. He asks Nate if he’ll fly him back to Shandia in a day or two.
“Listen, I could tell you I’m fully booked all week, but I don’t want to lie. We won’t be carrying you fellows in or out anymore. It’s a new policy.” Nate’s voice is even, but Marj knows its registers, she knows this colourless tone.
“Us fellows?”
“You know what I mean.”
“And why is that?”
“We just want what’s best for the people. We don’t fly liquor in either.”
Father Alfredo’s eyebrows notch down. He and Nate stare at each other like two species of primate meeting in the forest. “You’d fly in empty and leave a man to a dangerous eight-hour slog through the forest just because he’s a Catholic.”
Nate gives him one of his grins. “I seem to remember you were against us even building an airstrip in Shandia.” He’s wearing his huge new wristwatch, and just then the alarm in it rings. “I have to go,” he says, and does.
Guests will be arriving in a few hours on the bus from Quito, Peter Fleming and his wife. Cramps are crabbing at Marj’s belly, the first time since the baby, and Sofia is a no-show again, and now an irritated priest is standing in her kitchen while David grovels at her, trying to get his head into the opening of her blouse. She swings him up and down to distract him. “That watch!” she says. “It’s annoying, but it’s the only way Nate can manage his circuit. Every station he stops at, the missionaries are starved for somebody to talk to.”
The priest just keeps standing there. It would be the Christian thing to offer him a cup of coffee, but then he would sit down, and how do you give your breast to a baby in front of a priest? He’s about forty, with thinning hair, and he looks like a nice man, someone who doesn’t enjoy the taste of anger. His skin is fair and unevenly tanned, as though one freckle is trying to take over his face. It makes his pale-green eyes look eerie. She asks him where he’s staying.
“In the hotel, if you can call it that.”
“And I hope nothing’s seriously wrong?” She’s a nurse, she can ask, and people are usually glad for someone to tell.
“Nah. A bad case of piles. Makes trekking pretty unpleasant.” Debbie hits at him with her doll, wanting to show him its open-and-shut eyes, and he leans over and examines it. “Did your father just insult me?” he asks her.
“Yes,” she says eagerly.
“I realize alcohol is a big problem in Shandia,” Marj says. “Jim says the traders are giving the Indians palm spirits for their tapir skins. He told me one of the men from the village passed out on the trail and in the morning the kids found him half-buried by scavenger beetles.”
“So I heard.”
“I just mean, it must be hard for priests to preach to the Indians about alcohol if they use it themselves.”
She’s going to offend him even more, she can’t seem to help herself, but he actually appears amused. “Just for the record, I’m not a priest.”
“You’re not?”
“I’m a friar. We take the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, but we don’t perform the sacraments. I’m a Capuchin. Do you know the word?”
“I know the monkey. By friar, do you mean a monk?”
“No.” He launches into an explanation involving cloisters and vineyards and the copying of manuscripts, but it’s hard to listen with David gumming the side of her neck. She’s afraid he’ll give her a hickey. She pries him loose and sticks a finger in his mouth, and all she really catches is the last word.
“Mendicant,” she says thoughtfully, as though she’s been listening.
“It means we subsist on the charity of others.”
“You do? So do we. Well, we have a base of donors in the US.” Marj notices then that he’s carrying a letter. Letter writing seems to be his hobby; every week he posts six or seven. Pen Pal Boy, Nate calls him. “I’m sorry, really, about the flight. But give me your mail. I’d be happy to take that.”
Then his face turns dark under his mottling. “You’d be happy to take it? You’re the authorized agent—you don’t have any choice in the matter.” He puts it on the table and she picks it up with her free hand and drops it into the mail sack for Quito.
“Don’t make us out to be petty. It’s not that.”
“It’s not? You know, I understand your visas are based on a reciprocal arrangement with the government. Regarding providing transportation in the region.”
“I really don’t know the details. But if Nate says he can’t carry you, there’s nothing I can do about it.”
He watches her for another minute and then reaches into his back pocket and pulls out another letter. “Why don’t I give you this one too,” he says, and leaves without saying goodbye. He walks like someone whose bum is hurting.
She waits a minute after the door closes and then lifts the second letter and studies the envelope. It’s addressed to a government office in Quito, the Ministerio del Interior. It’s stamped, but it’s not sealed—maybe he was having second thoughts about what he wrote. Holding David squirming against her with one arm, she slides the letter out of the envelope and shakes it open. It’s in Spanish. But even an Idaho farm girl who (newly married and swiftly pregnant) puked her way through language school can make out phrases like son misioneros protestantes and iglesia evangélica and la conversión de los indios. And the words avión and servicio de aire, over and over. He’s a little rat! He’s ratting on them! But does he have any pull at the ministry? Seemingly not—the letter is addressed to Señor Ministro. She seals it up for him and righteously drops it into the mailbag.
Perfecta is banging above with her broom, stretching out the cleaning because it’s more peaceful upstairs. Marj needs to think about supper. Peter and Olive will arrive around four, they’re coming in on the bus from Quito. Maybe Perfecta can get fish at the dock. The children will usually eat fish without a fuss. Benjy. Marj dashes down the hall and finds him in their bedroom, running a dead cockroach along the baseboard like a toy truck. She makes him throw it in the toilet and drags him to the radio room to play with Debbie. Still cradling David, she takes a call from Roger Youderian, the missionary at Macuma who can turn a request for a five-pound can of lime powder into a ten-minute life-and-death saga. “I’ll pu
t it on your list for tomorrow,” she says firmly. Over and out. Finally she settles on the rocker in the kitchen, where she can watch the kids through the glass while she feeds David, who pauses now and then to use her nipple as a teething ring. She has never heard of a healthy child resisting solid food this long. They’ve had wild battles, but in the end she needs him to nurse too, and when she gives in, he lies looking victoriously at her out of the corner of his eye as he sucks. Not long ago, her mother wrote, “Tell me about an average day.” She wrote back, “Mother, you have no idea what you’re asking.” Then her mother wrote to say, “You are Martha in the Bible, burdened with care. Find time to sit at the Lord’s feet.” She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Not Martha, she’s Jesus Christ himself, walking on water. Benjy has his face up to the window. He doesn’t respond to her smile, just presses his nose against the glass. She should have scrubbed his hands after the cockroach. Oh, well. She was up three times in the night, once before the fight and twice after. Who can find a virtuous woman, for her price is far above rubies. Even Nate has no idea. She and Nate are on a teeter-totter. She’s squatted awkwardly on the ground, pots and pans and the shortwave radio and all the account books on her lap and her three children clinging to her head and shoulders, while Nate, dashing and handsome, is perched silhouetted against the sky, chatting with God and the angels, immune to the very notion of gravity. If she tried to tell him how she feels, he’d get her a watch with a timer. Ring ring, and she’d pry David off her nipple and say, That’s it for now, kiddo. Poor David—he wasn’t even allowed to be born on his own terms. Marj wasn’t due for another week, but Dr. Johnston had flown in for a clinic. Her back was killing her and when he said, “Would you like me to break your waters while I’m here?” she couldn’t resist. So then there was David, dazed and bleary like a bear cub dragged out of a cave in the middle of winter. Maybe that’s why he’s hanging on to her now. We all have our ways. Mrs. Dr. Tidmarsh used to order a particular candy from Quito, some melting caramel thing, and allow herself one a day. She told Marj she thought about that candy from the minute she got up in the morning until she finally ate it in the evening. Until she finally et it, she said. You have to have some little thing for yourself, she said. Mrs. Dr. Tidmarsh—now, of course, she’s back in England, paralyzed from the fifth vertebra down, and when they talk about Nate’s accident and how terrible it was that he was in a body cast for a year and how wonderful that God fully restored his health, no one ever mentions her. That sadness lies in Marj’s chest like sludge, like the silt left in a building after a flood. Her abdomen tightens just then like a mini labour pain, and she breathes until it eases. The cramp leaves a new sadness behind, for the priest, who will be forced to trek a day through the jungle when Nate could have him home in half an hour. Marj had hemorrhoids when she was pregnant with Benjy. It was shocking how much it hurt. She and Nate came to Ecuador to do good, to make things better for people, and the priest looked at her warmly and then switched to looking at her like she was the enemy, and in a way she is.
David has stopped sucking, he’s drifting off. She lays him carefully on his side in the carriage and seats the older two at the table and gives them a snack of milk and some little crackers that are too stale for the adults to eat. The mailbag is sagging open on the kitchen table, and there’s the priest’s letter, the first one he handed her, a fat letter bound for the US, to somebody in North Carolina named J. Sampson. Just J. Sampson. No Mr. or Mrs. or Miss. It feels like he’s taunting her. Flaunting something, his privacy, or the way rules don’t apply to him. She picks up the letter and tests the seal. Glue is always gummy in this humidity. You can tease a flap open without having to rip it at all, and envelopes reseal themselves with just a little pressure. “Dear Podge,” the letter begins. Podge?
Dear Podge,
It’s siesta. I was going to write this letter after breakfast and just as I sat down a man from the settlement upriver was at the window saying, “My wife is dying.” This is not always as dire as it sounds. There are only two states of being in the Quichua tongue, living or dying. You’re on the upswing or you’re on the down. Nevertheless I packed up my kit and went back with him by canoe. I found a woman of about forty with a low fever. Likely pneumonia. I started her on an oral course of penicillin. Her husband was not pleased. He wanted what he called “sticking medicine.” This is the fault of my new neighbours, the jolly gospellers. They give penicillin by injection because they have a refrigerator to store it, and the Quichua are convinced it’s a more powerful magic.
F tells me you’re back in the States and receiving mail at this address. I think it must be 18 months or 2 years since we wrote each other (fall 1953?). I seem to remember regaling you with stories of my then-nemeses, the Tidmarshes (Marmite-eating Brits, straight out of Somerset Maugham, although much-loved by the people). Their tenure in Shandia ended with a plane crash, and I had a year on my own (as it were), with the occasional company of the priest who comes from Coca to say mass, a Spanish Franciscan who is a progressive thinker regarding the Indigenous peoples. I was contemplating asking the Ministry to impose some sort of territories on Pastaza Province so we and the evangélicos are not constantly undermining whatever progress each is making. But just as I was working myself up to write that letter, two American men stepped out of the trailhead from Shell Mera, followed by five or six porters laden with all their paraphernalia. And that was that. As with termites, once you see the evangélicos in the flesh, it’s always too late to do anything about it.
Marj finds that her hands are trembling. The first personal envelope she’s ever illicitly opened and it is turning out to be gold. Well, okay, the third or fourth, but the others were not worth counting. She shoos Debbie and Benjy out onto the veranda and sinks into the rocker. The letter is one-sided on onion skin, and ( judging from a little smudge) written in real ink. She counts the pages. In what sort of reality would you have the leisure to write a six-page letter?
My new neighbours are from the Pacific Northwest and are totally green. They spurn my counsel so, absolved of all responsibility, I lie in my hammock on the ridge above the Rio Talac and watch events unfurl. They spent their first few months here extending the airstrip and building a school, a clinic, and a house right on the banks of the Jatun Yaku. They were almost finished when the river rose overnight and washed it all away. They moved up the bank and started again. It rained for five days and nights and the river rose higher. Elliot, the boss of the operation, stops by my house and postulates that the end times are upon us, when weather systems will go crazy and usher in the apocalypse. It floods like this every second year, I say (a slight exaggeration, as this flood was spectacular). But the Indians build their houses right on the riverbank, he says. Well, yes, they do. Palm huts. They build them in a day. I deliver this information and settle back into my hammock. Donkeys live a long time.
But they’ve succeeded with rebuilding their airstrip, which now runs from the Jatun Yaku to the Talac. An airstrip in the rainforest is no small enterprise. Just the building of it changes a settlement, because all the able-bodied men are on wages. And then of course it’s built and the gringos start bringing stuff in. Bags of concrete. Chainsaws. Generators. Cans of diesel lashed to the plane. The pilot who serves these missionaries has fabricated some sort of rig to carry in sheets of tin for roofing. He’s an American, eponymously named Saint, an enterprising fellow. He has about him the glamour of those who slip the surly bonds of earth—the young men in the settlement all imitate his way of wearing his cap (while I, formerly the object of their admiration, can hardly walk due to an infirmity I won’t bore you with). Anyway, in a few short months this settlement has been transformed—for those who can afford it. Me, I’m sticking with thatch. It’s cooler than tin and quieter in a rainstorm. And it’s entertaining. I get both snakes and rats living in my roof, and every week or so they put on a show.
As for my own ministry, not a lot has changed since our correspondence lapsed. Please take
for granted my avid interest in all you are up to and write me at length. M told me about your reading club and I laughed out loud. We don’t need Sigmund Freud to tell us what a snake means. My own stash of reading is low. Send Graham Greene if you can. Start collecting records for me. The gospellers are corrupting me. Now I want a generator, not for the lights, but for music. I want Robert Schumann, Carnaval. I discovered it the year I was in Atlanta and enjoyed it, but I didn’t know then (I just learned from an old New Yorker M sent me) that Schumann composed each of those 21 pieces as a portrait of one of his friends. Send me the album, and I will tell you which piece is Podge.
The handwriting is pleasing and clear, and something between the lines makes emotion swell in Marj’s throat. It’s not the priest’s words that move her—it’s being inside his mind, like stepping into an otherworldly garden full of delicate plants she’s never even imagined. He thinks of himself as doing good and them (Nate, Jim, Pete) as doing bad: this hits her again with a force that dazes her.
She’d like to keep the letter, she longs to keep it. But it’s Thursday, she has to bundle up the Quito mail, so she presses the envelope under a can of evaporated milk until it’s resealed and drops it into the bag. Perfecta is back in the kitchen and looks at Marj with reproach, as if she knows what’s going on. But reproach is Perfecta’s usual expression. The radio squawks. It’s Helen Swift, she runs the mission guesthouse in Quito. She’s calling because Peter Fleming asked her to let Marj know that he and Olive have decided to take a commercial flight to Shell Mera. The driver just took them to the airport. That means they’ll be at Shell in an hour. She doesn’t say why they’re not taking the bus, and all Marj says is, “All right, then, thanks for letting me know, over and out.”