by Joan Thomas
“How are you feeling about all this?”
“Well, it seems we’re putting the cart before the horse, just a little.” Marilou pulls the bottle away from her baby and holds it up to check the level. “Why are we talking about going in? We need to find some way to learn the language first.”
“Not necessarily,” Betty says from the other side of the table. “The Auca will teach us. The men have all taken courses in the monolingual method.”
“But it takes time to coax language out of new subjects. And if those subjects . . .” Marilou stops mid-sentence and turns her attention back to her baby.
“Isn’t your sister-in-law learning the language?” Olive asks over Davey’s head. “I thought she had an Auca informant at the hacienda. Why don’t they work with her?”
“Nate doesn’t think that’s a good idea,” Marj says.
All three of them look at her with stony faces, and with a lurch Marj realizes that the fraught atmosphere in the room is not just about Jim. Nate upset them too.
Right at the end of the meeting, Betty spoke up to suggest sending a newsletter to all their supporters back home and getting prayer support. Her voice was strong and confident as always and Marj could tell she was getting under Nate’s skin. He cut her off. No, he said. It’s essential that the mission be kept a secret. He went over the code they were to use for radio communication. Marj stands by the counter, her blouse sticking to her all the way from her armpits to her waist, and looks into her friends’ faces and decides that they deserve to know what this is about.
“Nate doesn’t want to involve Rachel. In fact, he doesn’t want Rachel to know. When he says we have to keep Operation Auca quiet, it’s mainly because he doesn’t want word getting back to her.”
This only makes things worse. “He doesn’t intend to include Rachel?” Betty is astonished. “I just assumed she’d be a big part of it.”
“Didn’t she come to Ecuador especially to reach the Auca?” Marilou says. “That’s what Jim told me. He figures she’s working hard on the language.”
“How will she feel when she finds out?” That’s Olive’s soft voice. “I mean, I don’t really know her, but I can only imagine she’ll be terribly hurt.”
The room fills with their confusion and disapproval. The rhythmic thwap of Perfecta’s mallet on the meat could be the blows of Nate and Marj’s cruelty. Frustration slides down over Marj’s eyes like a red screen. Her mind flips through all the things she could say about Rachel, not just Nate’s stories but the weird things she did when she stayed with them. “Rachel . . .” she says hesitantly, and then Rachel herself surfaces vividly in Marj’s mind, her eyes dull and wounded.
Who can find a virtuous woman? She opens her mouth with wisdom, and in her tongue is the law of kindness.
“Rachel . . . I think she will be hurt,” Marj says at last, “and that makes me feel bad. But we know her a lot better than you do. And Nate feels the mission would be in jeopardy if Rachel got involved. He is very clear in this decision. Nate was the one who God led to the settlement. Not Rachel. So I think we have to trust him on this.”
“Well, we knew it wouldn’t be easy when we signed up,” Marilou says vaguely. She sets the bottle on the table and gives her baby a cursory pat on the back, and then she stands up. “I’ll be back in a sec to help with supper,” she says, her voice wobbling a little. “But I need to go upstairs for a bit.”
MARJ GIVES MARILOU twenty minutes and then, Davey on her hip, goes looking for her. Her daughter is in the upstairs corridor, swinging on Marilou’s door, chatting. Debbie loves Marilou.
“You need to run downstairs now and let Mommy and Auntie Marilou talk for a bit,” Marj says. She manages to pry Debbie off the doorknob with her free hand. When Debbie tries to grab the doorknob back, Marj slaps her backside hard and says, “Go downstairs this minute. Don’t you dare disobey me.” Her voice is so witchy that Debbie careens down the corridor wailing.
Marilou’s baby is in the crib and Marilou herself is lying on the bed. She has a balled-up hanky in her fist and when she lifts her tear-swollen eyes to Marj, she is an ordinary frightened girl, her face splotchy and unbeautiful.
“Oh, Marilou,” Marj says, closing the door and going to her.
Marilou sits up against the pillow. She gives her face a quick wipe. “I’m okay now,” she says. “I just had to have a little cry.” She smiles ruefully at Marj. “I’m not sure why it hit me like that. I thought I was fine. Of course, the day I heard about it I was really upset—”
“So you knew?”
“Ed told me a while ago.” Marilou swings her legs over the edge of the bed and sits up. “It’s just . . . it feels so dangerous, and so close. They speared the engineer who lived in our house. He was an American, and they speared him.”
“Really? Did the Shell people tell you that?”
“No. I just know.” Her voice breaks. “I’ve seen him. It’s like he’s in the house. I see him with . . . with all his . . . injuries.”
“Oh, Marilou,” Marj says, reaching for her. “Marilou, you’re dreaming. You’re afraid, and it’s natural, because you love Ed so much. But it won’t happen to us. The boys have God’s leading.”
“No, I know it won’t. Ed says God has given him an absolute promise that the men will all be safe. I believe God. I do.” She hunches up a shoulder to wipe her cheek. “It’s just—I’m pregnant again.”
“Oh! Oh, honey. Are you sure?”
“Yeah, I’m sure. I’m almost three months along. Due at the end of January.”
That baby in the crib is six months old and his brother just turned three.
Still with Davey on her knee, Marj moves over to the bed and puts her arm around Marilou. They sit in silence for a long time. Not (as in months past) because the glamorous Marilou doesn’t need advice from the likes of Marj. They sit in silence because there is nothing anyone can say.
From there, Marj goes up the hall to Jim and Betty’s room. Not someone to waste a minute, Betty is sitting at the desk with what looks like language notes spread out in front of her. Marj stands in the doorway. “Listen, I wanted the chance to ask you on your own. Are you convinced Operation Auca is a good idea?”
“Not entirely,” Betty says, and Marj’s heart leaps. Betty straightens her thin back. “It seems needlessly complicated,” she says. “This long buildup with airdrops. Why not just go in? Since God showed us where the settlement is, that’s what we’ve been thinking. We’ve been talking about going in by canoe, Jim and I and the baby. Who’s going to attack a man with his wife and baby? But we really value the fellowship of this team, so if everyone is sure they have the Lord’s leading on this, then we’re prepared to go along with it.”
“You were thinking of taking your baby in?” They both look to the centre of the bed, where Sharon lies on her tummy in a golden heap.
Betty turns back to Marj. “Well, either we trust God’s promises or we don’t,” she says evenly.
Her tawny eyes never, ever blink. Her thinness seems like a spiritual victory, as if she’s had every molecule of doubt burned out of her.
AFTER EVERYONE HAS been flown home to their stations and it’s just Marj and Nate and the kids in the house, Marj walks down the hall to Nate’s favourite hideout, the darkroom. The door is closed. Nate might have a film in one of the baths, but she doesn’t care, she flings the door open without knocking. His head snaps up. He’s sitting reading an old Time magazine, obviously hiding. She says, “You promised me you would only do airdrops.”
He doesn’t look the least bit ashamed. “Are you going to stand against the Lord in this?” he says.
It is the worst moment of their marriage. She walks back to the kitchen and sets about making the bread. She sprinkles yeast onto a dish of warm sugar water, and then pulls out the flour canister and begins to sift the flour to get the bugs out. Is there an instance in the Bible where God spoke to a woman and contradicted what her husband said? She can’t think of one, but she
doesn’t know the Bible as well as she should. It occurs to her that she hasn’t prayed in months, possibly years, except maybe to her mother. What’s to be gained by nagging God? No doubt He’s as besieged moment by moment as she is.
She checks the yeast. It’s only produced a few feeble bubbles along the edge.
Then he’s at the doorway. “Marj. Did Dunlap radio in from Quito?”
“No.”
“He was supposed to send out a torque plate for the brakes last Friday.”
Something like hot metal fills her chest, a feeling she would call hatred in other circumstances. For Dunlap, whoever he is, for Nate, for men. For torque plates, and lances, and Enfield bolt-action rifles. Chainsaws, sledgehammers, stinky football pads, khaki-painted tanks with guns sticking erect out of them. Men in uniforms, swarming the decks of ships, cheering like imbeciles. All through the war, when they sat in church and prayed for the troops going into France and Italy and the Philippines, she thought, This is men. This is all men, God included. Men in their gangs. Men doing what they want to do. Jim, Ed, Nate—remember the day they roofed the house? Goading each other on, vying to be the biggest fool on the ridgepole. Operation Auca. It is all about men.
Well, discounting Betty.
IN THE GAUZY morning light filtering through the mosquito net, Marj says, “The girls were asking about Rachel. Wondering why she’s not involved.”
“Did you tell them what happened when Jim and Betty turned up after their wedding? How Rachel threatened to tell the government they’re not trained as linguists? If Rachel gets involved, this mission is doomed.” His voice is low, his hand is splayed on her thigh. “You know, Marj, Rachel almost ruined my chance to be a pilot. It’s because of her I never got to fly with the air force.”
So he’s back to that. It’s an old story—how thrilled he was when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and how he waited in line the day the recruiting office opened, and then, the night before his medical, fell sick with a fever—the return of his osteomyelitis. It was from a skiing accident he’d had when he was twelve, when he hit a rock and his ski broke. Six years later, splinters of wood were still working their way out of his shin. So of course the air force turned him down.
Normally at this point Marj says, How in the world is that Rachel’s fault? and Nate says, I didn’t have proper skis. None of us did. We would race down steep, rocky hills with barrel staves wired to our boots and tree branches for poles. Can you imagine? Rachel was in charge of us and she completely ignored the danger, she was just glad to get us out of the house. Then I had that ugly gash in my leg, and she pooh-poohed it. Until the infection got so bad she had no choice but to take me to the doctor. I’m just lucky they had penicillin by then. I’m just lucky my leg didn’t have to be amputated.
To which Marj always replies, You got training as a mechanic. You weren’t asked to drop bombs and kill thousands of people. And eventually you got to be a civilian pilot. I think that’s a wonderful example of the way God works.
But this time she just lies in silence. On the other side of the wall, thudding starts up, wood on wood. It’s David bouncing in his crib, politely signalling time for breakfast. He’ll be rehearsing his dazzling morning smile, it’s always in place when she puts her head in the doorway.
“Nate. In the meeting, Jim said he was going to hold target practice. Why do you need target practice? If you’re only going to be firing warning shots in the air?”
“He just misspoke. He meant gun safety training.”
David lets out an experimental holler and then goes quiet. The thumping has stopped.
“Don’t think about it,” Nate says. “We won’t be using the weapons. We’re just carrying them so you girls won’t worry. We fire even a single warning shot and we can forget about making friendly contact with the Auca in our lifetime.”
After a minute he says, “I was thinking about using the spiral bucket.” This is one of Nate’s inventions—a canvas bucket he lowers on a long rope from the plane, circling above until the bucket hangs steady close to ground level. He first dreamed it up for mission stations that didn’t have an airstrip, so he could deliver essentials like penicillin. He doesn’t have all the kinks worked out and he hasn’t tried it with the new plane. “I thought, if I get good at it, we could lower the gifts to the Auca in the bucket. It feels more respectful than just dropping stuff from the open door of the plane. Here, neighbour, you’d be saying, here’s a small token of our concern for you.”
“Neighbour?” she says, raising herself up on an elbow.
“Well, we have to call them something. On the radio, I mean.” Nate lifts his hand and caresses her cheek with the backs of his knuckles. “I took it from the Lord’s greatest commandment: Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. We do actually love the Auca—they just don’t know it yet.”
She gazes down at him. His handsome face is illuminated, not from the window but from within, from his heart, which she has always known to be good. She drops back to the mattress.
Debbie’s light voice starts up. She’ll be peering down from her bunk bed, her hair a shiny waterfall, chatting to her brother in the bunk below.
Morning. Nate hoists himself out of the nest, swivels his shoulders. Gathers himself to flap off to his secret haunts in the jungle.
17
THEY PUT THE GIFTS TOGETHER with the greatest of care. An aluminum kettle. A bag of salt. A little bag of coloured buttons and some ribbons. Nate will do a gift drop on the same day every week, so the Auca will start expecting it. This will build trust.
The first drop is October 6. Nate and Ed find the clearing empty, but they drop the gifts anyway. The second is October 13, and Nate says six or seven people rushed over in excitement when the gifts landed between the longhouses. After that, the sound of the Piper coming over the trees draws a crowd every week.
In the morning they watch Nate take off, Benjy in Marj’s lap. Marj runs her palm over the bristles on the top of his head, enjoying their bluntness. She’s just given him his first crewcut. “Who’s that in the airplane?” she asks him.
“Daddy,” he says flatly, bored by the question.
The fourth week, Nate jacks up the gift lode: he starts to drop machetes. Because it’s such great sport to watch the excitement on the ground when the people look up and see what’s falling towards them.
“Nate,” Marj says. “Didn’t Shell Oil try airdrops before they went into Auca territory?”
“Yeah, they did.”
“Didn’t they drop tools like machetes?”
“Could be.”
“And weren’t some of the Shell employees later killed by machetes?”
He’s sitting on the stool, staring at her wordlessly. “Okay,” he finally says. “I won’t drop machetes.”
He flies the men in so they can practise with the spiral bucket, and Olive comes to Shell Mera with Peter. The men spend the afternoon at the airstrip. The trick, as Marj understands it, is to pit centrifugal force against centripetal force, and somehow factor in drag. Marj watches Nate’s first pass over the airstrip, discovers that the weight swinging from the end of the rope is her new kerosene iron, and takes the kids to the lounge.
An hour or two later, she hears the men in the backyard with the football. They sound excited. It must have worked.
Olive comes to the kitchen to help with supper. “I can make boiled yucca taste just like mashed potatoes,” she says. “It’s my only jungle skill.”
So Marj surrenders the yucca to her and turns her attention to browning the pork chops.
Olive stands close to her at the stove. “I need to tell you something.”
Marj poured too much oil into the frying pan and the pork chops are spitting like crazy, drilling minuscule fiery darts into her hand. “You’re pregnant?”
“No. Not that. It’s just—Peter is thinking seriously about pulling out of the operation.”
“He is?”
“Yes.”
Marj dials th
e flame down and turns towards Olive. “What’s that about?”
“Well, he’s been praying and praying about the mission, and he can’t seem to get any peace about it.”
Shouts float in through the window and they both glance over and watch Jim throw a long pass. Ed lifts into the air and hooks the football down with exceptional grace.
“Peter is a really intelligent person,” Olive says. “I don’t know if the others recognize that—he always feels like a junior partner in this group, especially with Jim. And you know how it is, he wants to be one of the gang. But back when he was recruited, he kind of fell under Jim’s thrall, and he doesn’t want that to happen again. So he’s stuck. He’s stuck between wanting to belong and wanting to be his own person. That might not be how he would explain it, but it’s the way I see it.”
Shouts draw their eyes back to the window. Ed and Jim have added a tackle element to the game. But Pete—as if in deliberate illustration of his wife’s point—Pete is standing with his back to the house, batting the heels of his hands against his thighs in a parody of eagerness. Please throw to me. Oh, please don’t.
In bed that night, Marj says, “So I hear Pete is thinking about pulling out of Operation Auca.”
Nate’s shoulder moves under her cheek. “Yeah, sounds like it.”
“Apparently, he doesn’t have assurance that this is God’s will.”
“Yeah, that’s what I hear.”
“Well, that worries me, Nate. Don’t you think God might be trying to tell you all something?”
“He’s telling us something I already suspected. That Peter is not cut out for this operation.”
“You would go in with just three?”
“We’ll still be four. I’ve been talking to Roger Youderian.”
Roger Youderian! One of the missionaries on Nate’s southern circuit. He works with Frank Drown at Macuma, a thirty-minute flight away.
“Do the other men even know him?”
“No. But they’re prepared to trust me with this.”
Marj knows Roger, though, and she is absolutely dismayed. “The guy is miserable,” she says, thinking of his dour presence at her kitchen table. “You can see it at a glance. You could have asked Frank.”