by Joan Thomas
“Nate,” she says now, leaning over him to get his attention in the dark. “Forget Rachel. You’re not ending up in the jungle with a lance through your heart.”
This does get his attention. He rouses himself and sits up in the bed, pulling up his knees.
“You know, Marj, I haven’t told you everything. I didn’t tell you exactly how it happened.”
“Okay. So tell me.”
“Well, remember there was a really low ceiling on Tuesday? The clouds were rock-solid all day, they never broke. But when I was flying home, just as I was crossing the Napo, a hole opened to the southwest. It was shaped exactly like a keyhole, and it was low, close to the horizon, so the sun was streaming through at an angle—it was like one of those pictures you see of the Rapture. Everything was in 3-D. The big old kapok trees were throwing shade on the canopy, and I could see the shadow of the Piper skimming over the jungle ahead of me, almost as if it was leading me on. That was how I spied that dimple in the forest. The chagra. I would never normally have seen it. It was like I literally saw God’s hand. I saw God reach down and open the clouds with a finger. He was saying, Look, Nate. Look. There you go.” His eyes are fixed on her through this whole story. “If God’s calling me, Marjie, he’s calling you. You made a vow.”
He drops back on his pillow, and after a minute she lies down too.
He has never, ever pulled this before. Not once since the day she stood with a bunch of woody-stemmed lilacs in her hand and promised to obey him. The minister explained what the vow meant: Nate obeyed the Lord, and Marj obeyed Nate with the same respect. It struck Marj then as an efficient arrangement—and she knew she had more hope of dealing with Nate than she ever did with God.
She lies on her back and listens to the song of the crickets and frogs and cicadas, and to Nate’s breathing, which, now that he’s said his piece, quickly turns to a gentle snore. Possibly she sleeps, because the next time she opens her eyes, the room is bright and her thoughts are clear and Nate is lying on his side looking at her.
Who can find a virtuous woman, her children rise up and call her blessed.
“Listen,” she says, rolling over to face him full on. “I’ll stop fighting you on this. But Debbie is not going to boarding school in Quito. I’m not sending my little girl to an orphanage a hundred miles away.”
In the morning light, she sees a blink of assent so quick only a wife would catch it.
16
AT HOME IN IDAHO IT’S fall, the cottonwoods will be turning yellow. Here in the big guesthouse on the Rio Pastaza, the lounge becomes a first-grade classroom. Their daughter is thrilled, gravely taking on her letters and numbers. School is what this fall will always be about for Debbie: for her whole life, she’ll remember sitting on a stump stool in a neon-green yard, watching leafcutter ants and reading Dick and Jane.
Davey. That fall he finally develops a taste for solid food, and Marj orders canned applesauce by the case. But still he lies in bliss as he nurses, patting the top of her breast as if to console her. All this drops into a crevasse in his pristine little brain, so deep he’ll never dig it out. He’ll always love applesauce, and one day he’ll love nestling with a woman, but he won’t know why.
Ben. That fall Benjy turns four. When Nate takes off in the mornings, Ben climbs into Marj’s lap in the radio room to watch, it’s their new morning ritual. He watches until the plane vanishes and then he gets down and goes outside and rides his new tricycle up and down the veranda, scooping up impressions with his bright-blue eyes. The clouds, the geckos, a yellow dog he sees and later dreams about, Oresto with his scythe cutting the grass, the puffing white mountain. He’s at the in-between age, still floating in the ocean of sensation but starting to feel yesterday like solid ground beneath his feet.
For Marj, this fall will always be about Operation Auca, and the deal she made with her husband and the dangerous place it took them. The silences between them, which used to feel companionable and now feel cold. He’s standing on the veranda watching a condor over the river, and she leans on the railing beside him. For a second she sees him the way a stranger might, this beautiful, remote man in his prime, his coiled energy, his quick impulses (so private, like a car engine whose inner workings she can’t imagine). And then he’s her husband again, and her senses open to him, his musculature and the easy grace of his posture, his beautiful hand on the veranda railing.
Without a word she goes back to the storeroom and begins to unpack the grocery order. She pries open a crate of macaroni, stacking the boxes neatly on a shelf, feeling a bit sick to her stomach. She has no divine illumination to counter Nate’s, just an instinct about the whole chain-of-command thing. You obey your husband, who believes he’s obeying the Lord, but what if your husband got it wrong?
She was never called to be a missionary. When she was a girl, when missionaries came to speak in her church, she always felt a secret cringing, like they were announcing themselves as water dowsers, or spirit mediums, some job that required a special gift nobody normal would want. She knew exactly what she did want. She wanted to go to Boise and train as a nurse, she wanted the protocols and the expertise and the navy cape, and she wanted to share an apartment with her high school friend Susan, a suite in a particular building she had often admired as they drove by. And that’s what she did, all of it, including the apartment in the block with the stained glass transom over the door. Then she agreed to a blind date with a mechanic in the air force, a lonely guy from the East stationed in Boise, and that was that. South America was just part of the Nate Saint package from the beginning. Ecuador, where she would run a house and raise kids, just like her mother did, except there are more vermin here than on the farm and supplies are harder to get.
She did kind of regret putting her nursing aside. But one day, when they were new to Shell Mera, Johnny Keenan radioed and said he was bringing in a Quichua man who had been attacked by the Auca. He hadn’t been able to rouse anybody at the clinic and he asked her to meet the float plane at the dock. The man was dead by the time Johnny landed. He had been speared six or seven times, and they had yanked the lances out to get him into the plane and that had done even more damage. Marj had dealt with her share of terrible car accidents, working in emergency in Boise, but this was like nothing she had ever seen.
Nate is wrong, there’s no other way to understand it. He asked her to barter his life and safety for their little daughter’s welfare. A deal like that is never meant to hold. If he knew for sure he had God’s leading, he would never have made a deal. He would just have said, No, Marjie. You have to listen to God. Now it’s her job to bring Nate to his senses, and she knows she can. She feels something like exhilaration at the thought.
She makes macaroni and sausage meat for supper, a special treat. “You said we. About the gift drops to the Auca. Who did you mean?”
“Ed McCully. The settlement I saw from the air is pretty close to Arajuno, and we can use the airstrip there. And Jim. Jim’s been keen for a long time.”
“Well, we’ll need to get everyone in for a meeting.”
“What?”
“The fellows. Marilou. Betty.”
He stares, she can see his mind working. She looks mildly back, giving him nothing, and reaches for his plate to start the cleanup.
Marilou and Betty are both missionaries in their own right, which gives them an authority Marj might not have. And, she thinks as she dumps soap into the dishpan and stirs up a few bubbles, they are both extraordinary. Marilou lives in the most isolated and dangerous station, she has two tiny boys, and she takes everything beautifully in stride. She had a fancy job in the US, she was the music director of a huge city church, the first lady music director they had ever had, and when Marj saw her walk up from the airstrip with her navy high heels and her fuchsia lipstick and clip-on earrings, she said to herself, This girl will not last a year in the jungle. But Marilou has thrived. She claims to like working with the Quichua more than with the musicians at Chicago First Baptis
t, who she says wasted all their energy on gossip and infighting. She says the Indians are more civilized, much kinder to each other and to her. So for her grit and her happy nature and her lack of airs, Marilou is respected by everyone.
And Betty—she’s almost like one of the men. Before she married Jim, she worked on the other side of the mountains, with the Colorados, Indians who spread mud and red dye on their hair to make stiff lids of it, and paint horizontal black stripes on their faces and bodies. Alone—she worked there alone. And she is terrific in meetings. She speaks with absolute confidence about spiritual things, as though Jesus has just been sitting in the flesh at her breakfast table talking to her. Even pregnancy didn’t put her fully in the women’s camp. Right up until the ninth month, her belly looked like a tightly packed knapsack, and Marj always pictured her unclipping it at night and setting it on a chair before she stretched out in bed, her usual lithe self.
She dries the milk glasses and lines them up on the shelf. She can’t drop in to visit Marilou and Betty, and she can’t talk freely on the radio. She can only count on their good sense and their love for their husbands. She can only make sure Nate ends up in a room with both of them.
And Peter and Olive, she decides. Cautious types.
“Why don’t you include Peter and Olive?” she says to Nate, who is still at the table nursing his tea. “You can’t involve one Shandia couple and not the other.”
He frowns.
She drops the dishtowel and goes to him. “You really need a haircut,” she says, reaching over and touching her fingers to the back of his neck. “If you can find the clippers, I’ll do it after the kids are in bed.”
He seems willing enough when they pick a date. She sets about getting the rooms ready and plans out meals for fourteen. On that morning, Nate flies them all in. Olive and Peter arrive first. They seem relaxed and happy, they’ve got their honeymoon glow back. Then Jim and Betty and their baby, Sharon, six months old now, a little blondie who looks just like her dad. Then Ed and Marilou and their two sturdy little guys. Where did Marilou find that skirt? An Inca design that is so much nicer than anything you see in the market at Baños. Nobody mentions the purpose of the meeting. Marj can sense anticipation in the air, but nobody says a thing. Perfecta has made canned-ham sandwiches and they eat lunch on the veranda. It’s always a joy to be together and to see each other’s kids. A hoatzin screams from the big tree, and Marilou’s older boy screams back and makes them all laugh. Marilou’s eyes hold Marj’s for a minute, thoughtfully. We’ll be all right, Marj thinks. They finish eating and the women go upstairs and settle the little ones for their naps, and Marj asks Sofia to keep all the kids up there while the adults gather in the kitchen.
Nate is the one who opens the meeting, standing tall against the turquoise cupboards, wearing jeans and the white shirt that is such a beast to iron (she was up until eleven), her golden-haired husband flushed with excitement and glowing with that special light the priest noticed. He’s not nervous, he doesn’t know what it is to be nervous, but he is sober with this new role. She’s never known him to try to sway people with words. Facts, yes, words, no; normally he uses words like a technician, like a man accustomed to the shortwave radio. But to her surprise, he starts his story early in the morning, taking them into his day, recounting all the judgment calls he has to make, what it is to be constantly monitoring cargo weight, fuel, time, the radio, the wind, the clouds. He takes them into a landing, coming in low over the trees, avoiding the chickens and the children that wander onto the airstrip, dodging potholes, responding to the Indians who crowd around the plane, ministering to the missionaries, who haven’t seen another white guy in weeks.
And then flying home with a bit of extra fuel in his tank, and making the discovery. He paints the picture with incredible vividness, as he did for Marj in the night: the keyhole in the clouds, the light streaming through like in the Rapture. And people on the paths between the houses, hearing the plane, lifting their heads in the sudden light-and-shadow. Men, women, children. How did he know they weren’t Quichua? They were naked as jaybirds, he says, and the hush in the room is broken by excited laughter.
He speaks over them with evident emotion. “Lots of days I feel close to the Lord when I fly, but that day, I literally saw His hand. I saw God reach down and open the clouds with a finger. Look, Our Lord was saying. These are lost souls, whom I love and gave my Son to save.”
Nothing is as moving as the heartfelt eloquence of a man not given to words. They’re all silent then, and in the silence Marj senses something like awe. Surely the presence of the Lord is in this place.
Nate gives that silence its due and then he speaks again. He’s been doing daily reconnaissance over the Curaray River. He’s found a long playa not far from the Auca settlement. He’s not keen to land on sand, but he’s done it before in a pinch. They’ll prefab a platform in Arajuno and fly it in and hoist it up into the trees by ropes. That’s where they’ll sleep, so they have a vantage point and can’t be ambushed. He’ll fly supplies in every morning. And then they’ll wait and pray.
He keeps talking, and Marj understands.
This is not a meeting to discuss the risks and vote yes or no; this is a meeting to brief the girls. The plan is glorious and complete, it’s an extravagant bird in full flight. A tree house features prominently in it, and code. The men have been hatching it for weeks, standing in the shade of the airplane on jungle airstrips, heads together. Working out the details of a ground mission, not just gift drops the way Nate promised. He keeps talking, and she looks around the room at the women she counted on to speak up and sees carefully guarded expressions. He keeps talking, and she understands that he’s far ahead of her, that she’s a baby in treachery compared with him. While her days were taken up with scheming, he was cementing his plans. Look at me, Nate, she breathes, and he does, his eyes straight on hers, a high red flush around them, and she reads in them what only she can read.
It’s not what she thought. It’s not, This will teach you that you can’t undermine me.
It’s this: Please, Marjie. Please give me this.
He finishes and leans back against the counter, and Jim takes the floor. Marj sits with her hands clasped to control their shaking, letting her panic out in little breaths. Oh, dear God. Jim, his job is to address the concerns of the wives, who will naturally worry. They’ll have the hardest role, sitting at home waiting for word. Nothing to do but pray—but they need to remember that that is the most important job of all! He wants them to know that the men will spend several months doing gift drops before they ever embark on a ground mission. And they have put a meticulous safety plan in place for when they do go in. They’ll go in at full moon, nobody’s going to sneak up on them. They’ll take in the portable two-way radio and extra batteries. They’ll build their tree house first thing, and one man will be posted up there to cover them with a gun as long as they’re on the beach. He himself will be in charge of weapons and ammunition. He owns an Enfield bolt-action and a carbine and he’s ordered two more. Not that they would ever shoot an Auca, and send an unsaved soul to eternal perdition. But the Auca only have lances, so firing into the air will scare off anybody who arrives looking for trouble. Jim grew up in Oregon, where kids are born with shotguns or rifles on their shoulders, and he’ll be conducting target practice with the men. He learned the hard way not to go turkey hunting with greenhorns. With a grin, he ducks his head and parts his hair to show them a four-inch furrow across his scalp. He got that scar when he was fourteen. His buddy didn’t know the proper way to hold a rifle when he climbed through a barbed-wire fence.
It’s a long meeting and at a certain point Sofia can’t contain the children—they giggle and shriek from the stairs, they invade the kitchen in a horde. Marj clamps a hand over Benjy’s mouth while Jim closes the meeting with a prayer, and the men escape outside, and the wives open their arms to that clinging, prodding, whining, wailing gang in their stinking diapers. Marj takes Davey from Sofia
and undoes the top two buttons of her blouse. Three nursing mothers—no, only Marj is breastfeeding, Marilou and Betty (modern women) are heating up bottles of diluted condensed cow’s milk on the stove. Four Christian wives, no doubt they all made the same vow Marj did. Well, possibly not Betty, she was married in a civil ceremony in Quito; who knows what she promised. Marj strokes Davey’s head and breathes in the smell of him, and thinks fiercely, Jim. He didn’t want to dwell on the threat of violence, he said. It was not the guns that would keep them safe, it was the Lord. Safe. Where, when you thought about it, would they be safer than in the Lord’s arms for all eternity? He was poised as he spoke like a pole vaulter about to start his sprint. “If God asks the ultimate sacrifice of us,” he cried in his ringing voice, “what greater glory could there be? Than to be ushered through the gates of splendour in our prime, obeying our Commander’s voice, giving our all?” The kitchen is still full of the distress of that moment. But how can you talk about it with Betty sitting right there? They chose their husbands, but they didn’t choose each other, they hardly know each other. They said almost nothing in the meeting and they’re still not talking, just murmuring softly to their children, who are hungry and thirsty. In an hour the men will invade, ravenous, and Marj needs to start supper. She has a pile of flank steaks waiting, tough as leather.
“Hold Davey, will you?” she says to Olive, pulling him off her breast, reaching for her buttons. She runs out to find Perfecta, and drags her in and puts her to work at the counter pounding the meat with the mallet, the sort of job Perfecta is good at. Then she gets out the pitcher of orange Kool-Aid she made earlier, and lines up a row of tumblers and starts filling them, though her hands are shaking. She lifts her face to Marilou, their eyes meet.