Five Wives

by Joan Thomas

  “Roger’s a decorated war hero,” Nate says. “He was a paratrooper. He fought in the Battle of the Bulge.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “He understands what it means to obey orders no matter what you feel.”

  IT IS ALWAYS possible she’s wrong. That God has something splendid in mind, that He’s picked out their husbands to do something nobody has been able to do for centuries. If that’s the case, then she might be increasing the jeopardy. By not being wholehearted, by secretly hoping they’ll come to their senses. Isn’t there a story in the Bible about a battle that was lost because the soldiers had unbelievers in their midst? She longs for counsel from someone from outside their circle. She thinks of the friar at Shandia, Fray Alfredo, the things he knows and the unexpected opinions he holds, ideas that crash like a wrecking ball into the walls of her mind, opening up startling new vistas. Nate comes in with a fistful of letters from Pen Pal Boy himself, and she feels that eager pulse you might call a leading of the Lord.

  I’m just back from a hacienda on the Rio Ila, where I minister to the campesinos in exchange for three days of the sort of living made possible when a workforce of a hundred is wholly devoted to the comforts of ten. What does the good brother do for the campesinos? you ask. You’ll be surprised to learn that my rudimentary medical skills now include dentistry. A friar retiring from Puyo left me his clamps and when I was next petitioned by a man racked with toothache and infection, I felt obliged to use them. Young, handsome Indians are without doubt defaced for life by my crude practice, but they might be dead of sepsis without it.

  One of the patients I saw at the hacienda was the forest woman Dayuma. I believe I’ve mentioned her to you. It’s sad to see her with tooth decay, as when she arrived at the hacienda six or seven years ago she was in splendid health. But last week the glands in her throat were the size of chicken eggs, and I had no choice but to pull her left canine and incisor. I gave her a good shot of rum, offered her a rosary to hold, and I was in position (with my knee on her chest and my knuckles in her mouth, as it were) when a large white figure galloped across the yard and pounced shrieking upon me. It was an American missionary lady staying at the hacienda. She protested that she planned to take Dayuma to her own dentist in Quito. Sadly, indenture at Hacienda Ila does not provide for discretionary jaunts to the capital, and at Don Carlos’s insistence, I went ahead with the extractions, started Dayuma on penicillin, and sent her sobbing back to her quarters.

  This woman, by name of Rachel Saint, is very fond of Dayuma and did not soon forgive me, but the chance to talk English is irresistible. Turns out she’s the sister of the pilot at Shell Mera, although she’s a good deal older. I gather she was drawn to the hacienda by the romance of the Auca, a passion she shares with Don Carlos. Miss Saint dreams of accompanying Dayuma into the forest to preach to her people. I did my best to press upon her the folly of this. But her conviction of a divine call to the Auca is unshakable. Dayuma was years ago baptized into the Catholic Church, christened Catalina, and has been taking the sacraments every time a priest goes into Ila. This means nothing to Miss Saint. Dayuma will be her first convert, she says proudly.

  Miss Saint is apparently a linguist and she was eager to show me her notes. So we found the overseer and he opened the schoolhouse for us, where she works with Dayuma. I can’t speak to Miss Saint’s linguistic competence, but her enthusiasm and industry are undeniable. She’s created a comprehensive phrase book, and paging through its sections gives you a vivid sense of forest life: Actions. Animals. Beliefs. Family and Kinship. Food and Drink. The House. Hunting. Governance and Warfare.

  I was impressed with her passion for the work, but I told her about the Záparo people who, like the Auca, resisted all contact with the outside world for three centuries. And then the rubber trees along the Napo were tapped out and the traders started going up the tributaries, and the temptation to trade for firearms and machetes was too much. Fifty years ago, the Záparo in El Oriente numbered 200,000 and now they are virtually gone. She did not believe me. She asked me how they could all disappear in one generation, and I said, “They succumbed to the sort of thing you are dead set on taking to the Auca.”

  But it was futile. The two are together every hour Don Carlos allows, this mountainous American woman and her small Indigenous friend. Dayuma is a gentle girl, quite extraordinary in her quiet warmth, and no doubt very lonely. She is homesick for her own people; every time I speak to her she tells me of her worry for her mother and sister and brother. But she fled the forest because of reprisal killings, and is afraid to go back. A lonely representative of a society we know nothing about.

  Goodness is a lot more complicated than Marj ever imagined. When she was ten or eleven, an evangelist set up his tent at the fairgrounds in Boise, and her parents drove the family in to a meeting, just the one. The preacher was almost sobbing by the time he got to the altar call, haranguing them to come forward and lay their sins at the feet of Jesus. Escape the lake of fire, be welcomed to heaven for all eternity. Marj looked up and caught her mother’s eye. Her mother gave a quick, private shake of her head. No need, Marj saw in that look. You are a good girl. And she was. Behaving properly just seemed logical. Wouldn’t God’s will be much the same as your own good sense? But now they’re on a runaway train into the fantastical, and God is not doing much to stop it.

  Nate starts to use the bucket. Not only do the Auca get its purpose—they start to send things back! On Nate and Ed’s sixth visit, they cut the bucket off the rope and tie the rope around their own gift. It’s a feather headband. Nate brings it back to Shell Mera. He tells Marj how wonderful that moment was for Ed—feeling the tug on the bucket line while the people below were tying the knot (a perfect hitch knot). The sense that, just for a moment, his hands held Auca hands through the proxy of the rope.

  Nate pulls the crown out of a sack to show Marj. She takes it in her hand and feels her own tears rise. The Auca are real. They live in this material world. They were driven naked out of the Garden of Eden to a place very much like it, and have made their home there for centuries. They are mothers with children, camping as her family camped when she was a girl. They don’t have matches, propane stoves, or axes. What do they have? How do they understand the world? What does this crown mean, this artful arrangement of feathers in alternating colours? Are they wondering about her, as she is wondering about them?

  Then, a week or so later, Nate’s sister, Rachel, delirious, is carried in through the door in a white nightgown. She’s in a very bad way, grey as a mushroom, and with no idea how she got there.

  “God performed a miracle,” she says the next morning, lifting her fever-scrubbed face from the pillow. “He sent a plane to pick me up—and you know, they don’t even have an airstrip.”

  “It was a float plane,” Marj tells her, trying to hoist her up in her bed so she can sip some tea. “One of Don Carlos’s men walked out to Shandia to tell the missionaries you were sick, and Jim Elliot radioed us, and Johnny Keenan flew in to the hacienda and landed on the river. You don’t remember?”

  She has no memory even of falling ill. She remembers being carried down the staircase at the hacienda, only that. The porters had her on a stretcher and they could not make it in one go. They put the stretcher down on the stairs while they caught their breath, and she thought she was tobogganing. Lying there naked with her heart exposed, pulsing in the cold air. She’s surprised to find herself in a nightgown. She examines the lace trim on the bodice and denies that it’s hers.

  “You were wearing it when you arrived,” Marj says. “You don’t need to worry, you weren’t naked. And Doña Sevilla packed up all your things and sent them out. Your bible’s here, if you want to read.”

  Everything Rachel owns in the world was neatly folded into her leather suitcase. Strangely, there were no language notes at all. While Rachel floated in fever dreams, Marj went through it all carefully. No vocabulary lists, no file cards. No notebook wi
th section tabs.

  They’ve put her in the downstairs room she stayed in before. It’s narrow and stuffy but more convenient for nursing during the day, when Marj is busy with the radio. Nate would have checked her into the hospital, but Marj didn’t think Rachel would survive the Shell Mera hospital.

  The doctor is at the clinic and he kindly comes over. He takes Rachel’s pulse, her blood pressure, and her temperature. Rachel never opens her eyes. “P. falciparum,” he says. Marj walks him out to the kitchen and he gives her a supply of malaria medication from his bag.

  “P. falciparum is the most dangerous strain,” Rachel says when Marj comes back.

  “It’s the most common strain,” Marj says. She hands Rachel a pill and a glass of water.

  “It can cause kidney failure. I should be monitored for edema.” Rachel pushes up the sleeve of her nightgown and presses her fingers hard into her forearm. She starts counting. It takes ten seconds for the dent to vanish. She’ll need to be checked again in an hour. If no one will nurse her, she will have to nurse herself. “No creatures on earth are as unsympathetic as nurses,” she says. “You think suffering is entirely normal.”

  “It’s true, we do,” Marj says.

  “As long as it’s happening to somebody else, eh,” Rachel says.

  Her hair is greasy and she reeks of sweat and yeast. She needs a good sponge bath. Marj carries in a pitcher of hot water and a basin and sets to work, scrupulously gentle, feeling guilt and duplicity drip from her fingers. In spite of her illness, Rachel is fatter than she was, especially in the chin area. It’s the hacienda living Fray Alfredo wrote about.

  “I won’t wash your hair today. You don’t have the strength. But tomorrow you’ll feel better and we’ll do it then.”

  All this exertion wears Rachel out. Her head falls back and her breath deepens.

  Marj picks up the pitcher and stands by the bed for a moment. She’s struck by Rachel’s thick braid on the pillow: previously golden, now streaked with pewter. She’s not quite forty, but her illness has opened a window to her future, the broad-faced, doughy old woman she will be. A woman no one loves or wants. It’s a terrible thought: how could you persist in drawing a breath in this world if not a single soul loved you? Rachel committed the offence of not being loved and they turned against her for that. Not just Nate, but the wives, when Rachel stayed in Shell Mera all those months. And we were so good, Marj thinks. So nice and so good. We never talked about her behind her back, we wives. Not once, which is pretty darn amazing. We just made a silent wall against her.

  MARJ HAS SEEN people cycle through the phases of malaria before, the aches and chills and then the raging fever and delirium and terrible restlessness. Two jaguars are fighting inside her, Rachel says, an expression apparently used by the Auca. One night when Marj brings supper in, she is lucid but strangely unlike herself, full of sisterly warmth and confidences. “I’ve been working with Dayuma,” she says. “She’s the Auca girl who came to me in a vision many years ago, when I was crossing the Atlantic.”

  “Have you been able to lead her to the Lord?”

  “It’s early days for that. We need more language first. In Peru I learned not to force things. Because the people will just say what you want them to say, and then you don’t know where you’re at.”

  “And how is the language work going?” Marj manages an unconcerned voice.

  “Well, it was discouraging at first,” Rachel says, taking a big spoonful of soup. “I went into the hacienda full of hope that the Auca language would be a dialect of the Shapra I had learned in Peru, but it turns out they don’t have a single word in common, not that I’ve discovered. I think the Auca language is a true isolate. But we’re making real progress. Dayuma speaks Quichua and some Spanish, so that makes things faster.”

  “Are you learning a lot about Auca life?”

  “I am learning a lot about killing!” she cries, the blue beams of her eyes flashing. “There is a savage they call Moipa rampaging through the jungle, killing people on a daily basis. Dayuma ran away because of him. She relishes stories about spearings, and believe you me, she has a lot of them. She recites them almost like a song. She says the same thing over and over, she moves on and then jumps back. She never looks at me and her eyes are half-closed, like she’s going into a trance. It’s quite something to witness. But it’s helpful when you’re trying to learn the language. If I miss a phrase, I know I’ll hear it again. And she makes the wildest gestures, and grunts and groans, like a person might as they’re dying from a spear through their spleen. I don’t think this is all for my benefit, it’s just the way she tells stories. So, yes, I would say I’m making great progress. Let me show you my beautiful phrase book.”

  But of course it’s not among her things, and she’s terribly upset.

  “It’s blue,” she says. “It’s a lovely blue hardcover book with marbled end sheets. I bought it in Lima and saved it for a special purpose. You should see it! My lists are wonderful. Everything is in it.”

  Marj is desperate to talk to Nate, but he’s down at the docks. She finally goes to bed and falls asleep for an hour and then wakes to find that he’s not with her and the generator is still running. She puts on her slippers and robe and goes up the hall and sees that the darkroom door is closed. She taps and he says, “Turn the hall light off if you want to come in. I’ve got something in the bath.”

  He’s sitting on his stool, bathed in the red light from his developing lamp. She can tell right away that he’s just as worked up as she is. He stopped by Rachel’s room to say good night and Rachel called him Father. But he thinks she was faking delirium, just to yank his chain.

  He doesn’t get up to offer her the stool. She spies a wooden case under the table and pulls it out to sit on. She feels painfully the separation between them. How petty (she thought at one time, weeks ago) if this is all about Rachel. But it’s not petty at all. It’s not something you can resist, the iron engine of your childhood, it drives you forward until the day you die. Nate has a wife and three kids, but his new family is ghostly compared with his old.

  “How much of the Auca language do you think she has?” he asks Marj. His eyes look demonic in this light, and hers must too.

  “Quite a bit, I think. But they didn’t send her notes out with her.”

  “Well, I wish I knew how to get some phrases out of her without making her suspicious. Because I’ve had a really good idea.” He drains his Pepsi, and then he tells her about a new, enhanced use for the spiral bucket.

  This is what he could do, if he had the language: he could take a public address system up in the plane and put a speaker in the basket, have it dangling by a wire, so the Auca below will hear friendly greetings and gospel messages coming from the basket.

  “You would really do that?” Marj says. “Instead of going in on the ground?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Probably not. It’s just a dream I have, because I like the technology.”

  Marj leans back, the edge of the counter like a blade in her back. Yes, she thinks. That’s how it can be done. Safely done. If they had the language, they could share the gospel through a loudspeaker from the plane.

  So then she tells him about the notebook full of language, still at the hacienda, just a three-hour walk up a jungle trail from Jim and Betty. It’s blue, she tells him. It’s a hardcover blue book. It’s her master phrase list. It’s likely in the schoolhouse. Jim would need to find the overseer, he has a key. The overseer will let another American in to pick up Rachel’s things.

  Who can find a virtuous woman? The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her. She will do him good and not evil all the days of her life.

  18

  THE QUININE FINALLY TAKES HOLD. When Rachel’s fever peaks now, it’s only 102. She’s getting bored. She’s alert to every noise in the house, full of questions. Soon she’ll be mobile, lurking in the halls, spying on their lovemaking, manhandling the children. Soon she’ll be noticing the flights to the north
east, overhearing conversations, finding caches of trade goods destined for the bucket, and she won’t rest until she figures it out.

  Sure enough, late one afternoon, Marj is in the lounge with Debbie and David when Benjy gallops in screeching, “Mommy! Come right away! Auntie Rachel is in Daddy’s room and she won’t listen!”

  She’s in the darkroom, with the door open for light.

  “This is Daddy’s room,” Benjy shrills. “We are not supposed to be in here. None of us. Not even Mommy.” Delighted, he slips past Marj and past his auntie and begins to grab at things Nate has laid out on the shelves. Marj swings him around and out of the room and pushes him up the corridor, feeling the wing-buds of his shoulder blades under her hands. Plunking him down in his bedroom and closing the door, she goes back for Rachel.

  “My Shapra feathers!” Rachel is literally wringing her hands. She’s staring at a row of photographs clipped to the clothesline Nate installed for drying photos. Portraits, eight-by-ten glossies. This is what Nate was developing the other night: the missionary men of Operation Auca with friendly smiles. He wants to drop them from the plane, so when the men walk into the forest, the people will recognize them and think, These are the kind fellows who bring us the gifts. Why would we spear men who wish us nothing but good? And in the photos, Jim and Nate are holding the feather crown the Auca sent, and Ed—for whatever reason, Ed has chosen to wear the crown.

  “Those fellows stole my crown!”

  “No, Rachel,” Marj says. “Your crown is in its tin in the top drawer in your room. Doña Sevilla sent it out. Let’s go back and I’ll show you.”

  “I wonder where they got that one? They look like the Masons. Have they started some sort of secret fraternity?”

  “Who?” Marj asks stupidly.