by Joan Thomas
They evacuated the site on the Curaray in a panic because a motherfucker of a tropical storm was dropping down on them. They’d found only four bodies and they lined them up face down in a shallow grave. Soldiers were desperately kicking sand into it when the pilot waved Cornell towards the helicopter. But he couldn’t leave, he had nothing, so he ended up joining the ground party, wedging himself into the cavity of a massive dug-out tree trunk between an overgrown American missionary and one of the wheels of the Piper, which, along with several unwieldy sheets of corrugated tin, his new friends were determined to salvage from the site. As he planted his ass in the bottom of the canoe, the sky broke entirely apart and all he could see was the bent shoulders of the man in front of him. Water poured onto Cornell’s head and shoulders as from a spout, and water rose in the tree trunk. His trousers were plastered to his shins and his shoes were ruined. The canoe shuddered and ran to ground. This is where they attack, the missionary shouted in his ear, at the river bends. They leapt out and dragged the thing through brown water where, the missionary shouted, caimans and water boas lurked. Nurnberg was up ahead, screaming orders. Again and again the canoes ran to ground, and the rain never let up. After several hours of this hell, Nurnberg called a halt. He’d spied an open area he thought they could defend. While armed guards prowled the site, the soldiers threw shelters together, using the sheets of tin. Cornell squatted in one of them, deafened by the hammer of the rain. His duffle bag was in Shell Mera. He went through its contents in his mind, the dry shirts and socks, the flask. He thought about the fifth man they were abandoning. He thought with wonder of himself, just yesterday morning riding a yellow cab through Manhattan as the bagel sellers opened their kiosks.
The rain stopped. The light rose. The air was still water-drenched, but they were able to spread out a little. Cornell lit up a cigarette, guiltily. He could see hunger on the faces of the soldiers around him, but he had brought only the one pack from Shell Mera. The Indians cut massive banana leaves for beds and built a smoky fire. The American who had prayed by the grave stood by the fire and prayed again in Spanish, evidently invoking the Americans who had been lost. Señor Jaime, Señor Nathaniel, Señor Rodrigo. This was Art Johnston, the doctor Nurnberg had mentioned. Afterwards, Cornell made his way over and asked, Could I ask you about this mission? He said, Yes, but not tonight. He looked pale and exhausted. No doubt these men had been his friends. An Ecuadorean soldier passed out tin plates of rice and beans with something stringy on the side. Cornell ate and then shot off a roll of film. Night fell, and the racket of the forest replaced the racket of the rain. Guards were organized in two-hour shifts. The missionary who had shouted in Cornell’s ear in the canoe offered to share his rubber groundsheet, but before Cornell could lie down, his stomach declined to wrestle any longer with his supper and he lurched to the edge of the forest and chucked it up. Then he and his bedmate lay down side by side in the breathing, croaking, crawling dark, Cornell’s cameras and the missionary’s flashlight between them.
His name was Frank Drown and he had the bland, handsome features of a TV announcer. He said he was stationed at a jungle settlement to the south of Shell Mera, where he’d worked alongside Roger Youderian, one of the dead men. He was a talker, and the horrors of the day were eating at him. He had a pathological terror of dead bodies, and when they beached, he was overcome by a stench he assumed was rotting flesh, though it turned out to be just a pot of pork and beans the fellows were preparing for their supper the day they died. Then, out in the canoe that recovered Roger’s body, his gorge rose again and he couldn’t hook the tow rope to Roger’s belt loop.
“God does this,” he said, his white face close to Cornell’s ear. “He knows what our weaknesses are, and in His fatherly love, He challenges us on exactly those points. I failed the test. One of the Indians had to do it. Amazonian Indians don’t know fear. When we got the body to shore, and we had to lift it—”
“They don’t feel fear? That’s why you send them in first?”
Frank was taken aback. “Why, it’s only prudent. They know the forest. They can read the signs, how the monkeys and birds are behaving. Whether savages are waiting in ambush.”
“I think it stinks. They’re not even armed.”
“Very well. We’ll let you lead the charge tomorrow, shall we?”
Cornell lay back. He’d tied the hood of the poncho tight around his face, and his flesh was slowly cooking in its rubber case. The taste in his mouth was foul.
A crash, very near, and its echo.
“What was that?”
“Just a tree,” Frank said after a minute. “Their roots are shallow, and when it rains . . .”
“Listen,” Cornell said. “What can you tell me about the Auca?”
“Nothing,” Frank said.
By morning, Cornell’s stomach had settled down and the sky above the canopy was blue; the storm had been a bit of staging laid on by a director with a taste for melodrama. The forest was prepared now to show them its splendour, a thrilling sight. But his chinos were still wet, they were cutting into him. Crotch-rot, he thought. His left leg hurt like hell; it had been jammed between two of those brutal canoes in one of their mad scrambles. He limped a few steps into the jungle and unzipped and directed his piss into a fabulous terrarium. Carnivorous flies feasted on his neck. He resorted to cursing in Hungarian.
They were back on the river when the beating of heavenly wings filled the sky and the whirlybird dropped down between the forest walls. DeWitt beckoned in the open doorway. Cornell glanced back to see Major Nurnberg giving a thumbs-down.
“No!” Cornell hollered. He was waving both arms like a maniac. “Yes! Yes!”
SO. THE LILY-LIVERED Manhattan photographer was coptered out to Shell Mera and for two days sat on a canvas stool and smoked and watched and waited. His shoes were bloated and shapeless, his leg was turning purple, and rather than subsiding, his insect bites were brewing up new venom. He sat against the freight shed even while the equatorial sun was straight overhead, letting it burn the memory of the rainforest off him, the bloated bodies hanging in brown water, the white foot fixed in a tree, the failings that bled up from his core and blossomed on his skin. From time to time he reached down for his sore leg and lifted it manually to ease the aching. When nothing happened at the house, he studied the faraway Andes, a child’s drawing of mountains. Then the two marines were in his face, driven back by boredom, and he pulled out his flask of Canadian Club and passed it around, an instant hero. When it was empty, the three of them walked in the direction the marines called uptown. A small boy ran towards them crying, “Carne! Carne!” and led them triumphantly to a tiny kitchen crammed with heavy-bottomed sacks of corn, where a woman with a baby tied to her back sold tin plates of food through a window. Cornell peeled off one lilac-coloured bill for the cook and another for the boy. He had no idea what he was eating, but he liked it. Misery has a short memory.
On the way back to the airstrip he noticed a white form behind the mission house, and said goodbye to the marines and cut across the yard. A tall and very thin girl in a sleeveless dress was standing like a crane beside a tree, studying the bark. He walked across the grass towards her, trying not to limp. She saw him and gestured. “Look. Look at the size of it.”
The light was failing by then and he couldn’t see anything. She bent and picked up a stick and touched it to the trunk and a patch of bark repositioned itself. Then he could see it: a tarantula with a mottled body as big as a mouse. It moved again, packing itself like a dilapidated umbrella into a knothole in the trunk. Perfectly still now, though the hole was too small to accommodate the entire hairy apparatus of its legs.
Her eyes met his in shared amusement. “It thinks it’s hidden because it can’t see us,” she said. She smiled, showing a gap between her front teeth. She was, he guessed, in her late twenties. She had light-brown hair pulled into a ponytail, and she was barefoot.
“Shouldn’t you have shoes on?”
�
�I should. They keep the yard trimmed so short that I think I’m in New Jersey.”
“You don’t live here?”
“No. I work at the Shandia station. It’s about a day’s trek north and east. I’m Betty Elliot. And—you are?”
He told her his name and that he was a photographer doing a piece on the missing men. He kept a bit of distance, conscious of the booze on his breath. “What exactly is your work?”
“I’ve just started a girls’ school. And we’ve been running a medical clinic out of the house. But my main focus is learning the Quichua language so I can translate the Scriptures into it. Our mission society requires us to write a grammar and have it approved before we can begin to translate. So right now I’m working on that. It’s such a challenge.”
“Languages are brutal.”
She looked at him critically, no doubt hearing his accent. “What languages do you speak?”
“Yiddish. Hungarian. French, sort of. Parisians don’t enjoy hearing their language massacred. I guess it was because of language that my brother and I took up photography. You say it all without words.”
“Yes, well, you don’t know a brutal process till you try to learn an Amazonian language. It’s not just that we don’t have common roots. It’s—well, it’s a whole different way of looking at the world.” The gap in her front teeth gave her a rakish look, but everything else about her was intent and focused. “Quichua verbs all have endings that indicate evidentiality. Whether the speaker saw what happened with his own eyes, or inferred it, or learned it through hearsay, that sort of thing. It’s so hard to master. And so—well, you end up casting the Holy Scriptures as a sort of hearsay. Because there’s no verb form that allows for divine revelation. I have all these girls in front of me with such spiritual hunger in their eyes, and it’s almost like their language doesn’t let me share the gospel with them.”
“Hearsay,” he said. “It sounds like heresy. I wonder if one is the root of the other?”
Her eyes sharpened. Darkness was falling fast, the air was cooling, and he could feel his sunburn pumping out heat. This girl was tanned to the point that her face was the same colour as her hair.
“Just think if God had allowed humanity one language,” she said. “Our work would be so different.”
“Isn’t there a fable about that? About a time when everybody spoke the same language?”
“It’s not a fable,” she said, amused at his ignorance. “It’s in Genesis. All the nations got together to build a tower. The Tower of Babel.”
“Right—I know that story from a rabbi. He called it the Tower of Hubris. Jehovah dropped down into their bedchambers at night and scrambled everybody’s brains—right? When they went to bed, they all spoke Hungarian, or maybe it was Yiddish, and in the morning they each spoke something different, and they never figured out how to get past it. They had to schlep their stuff onto their camels and walk off in different directions.” He smiled at her, hoping to get another glimpse of the toothy gap. “Hey, maybe it was Esperanto.”
She gave her head a little shake. “It was Hebrew,” she said, as though this was a matter of historical fact.
He had no idea how to talk to these people.
A yellow square fell onto the grass—they had turned a light on in the house.
“That house must be full tonight.”
“It is. Johnny Keenan brought in almost everybody in the area. The fellowship is so rich—but sometimes I can hardly breathe and I have to get away.”
“Very sad that their mission ended the way it did.”
“Ended?” She seemed genuinely surprised. “As long as the Auca are unreached, this mission hasn’t ended.”
“Well, you have to concede it’s a setback. And a great tragedy for the families.”
But she wanted to quarrel with that too. “I don’t think the word tragedy has any meaning here. We have no idea what God has in mind. His ways are not our ways.” She began to move slowly towards the house. She told him that she used to work with the Colorado Indians on the other side of the Andes. She had a gifted language informant, a man named Micadio who was fluent in both Spanish and Colorado. One day he was killed and no one would tell her why. Then later, she was travelling to a meeting in Quito and the suitcase containing all her language notes and files was stolen off the back of the banana truck. “I prayed and prayed,” she said. “I was convinced God would return it. But he didn’t. A whole year’s work down the drain, and no way to go forward. Why? Why would God allow such a thing to happen?” She turned her keen face towards Cornell. When he didn’t answer, she said, “It forced me to trust in Him. I had no option. And so I think about that now. This—on the surface, it’s devastating. But we don’t see what God sees. The very fact that He would call for the sacrifice of five such wonderful men—well, it suggests that His plan for this is . . . glorious.”
In the yellow light from the window, he could see her shining eyes and the cloud of insects around both their heads. He didn’t take against her as he had against missionary Frank. She was a loping greyhound of a girl, a plucky young woman working alone in the tropics and putting her mind to the hardest questions there were.
“You said ‘five wonderful men.’ You don’t think it’s possible any of them escaped?”
“No. They’re all dead. How could it be otherwise?”
“Well,” he said, “from my point of view, it’s a terrible tragedy. Listen, I usually travel with a Life journalist, but I’m on my own this time. I really need to speak to the families. I haven’t wanted to intrude. But I wonder—”
She interrupted him. “Life. You mean the magazine? THE Life magazine? That’s who you’re with?”
“Yes.”
She looked at him intently with her mouth slightly open, and he saw that he had found himself a go-between. “I’ll set something up for you. Not tonight, but tomorrow. Are you staying at the airstrip? I’ll come over and get you. For tonight—I need to go in now, but—” She paused, thinking. “Would you like photos of the men?”
She ran up the steps. It was ten minutes before she came back and handed him a big brown envelope. “These pictures—you might think of them as calling cards. Nate tinted the first set so they’d look more realistic, and then the men dropped them from the plane so the Auca could get to know their faces. I’ve written the names on the back. The fifth man was Peter Fleming. I don’t have a photo of him, but I’ll get you one.”
Cornell took the envelope over to the mess tent, where a generator was running. Four headshots of American men in their late twenties or early thirties. Probably too young to have served in the war. He studied the photos, trying to animate the faces, and also, heavily, to match them to what he’d seen on the Curaray. Good-looking men, all smiling with determined goodwill. Three of them held a ring of feathers such as jungle dwellers might make, held it up beside their faces, and the fourth was wearing the feathers. He turned that picture over. The man wearing the feathers was named McCully. He turned the next one over. The name on the back was Elliot.
He sat back. Betty Elliot.
Nothing in that woman’s manner had suggested she was a grieving widow. Nothing. It wasn’t just that she was composed—she was animated, and engaged. She’d talked as though she was outside this tragedy, with space in her heart and mind to turn it over and look for its finer meanings.
He slid the photos back into the envelope. A strange fatalism takes you over when the unthinkable happens. Eagerly, so eagerly, you try to leap straight from stunned disbelief to the distant shore of acceptance, avoiding all the shit in between. Well, it’s happened, what can you do? Life goes on. People call this “shock.” In his experience, it protects you for about two days. Three at most. This was a week in.
But of course the news had come out to these women in drips.
DEWITT CAME BACK the next morning. Cornell walked over to the chopper to get the news. They’d located the Auca settlement from the air, DeWitt said. They found the longhouses burn
ed and the yucca ripped up, hastily harvested. The Auca had vanished, moving deeper into the forest, which apparently was what they always did after a massacre.
Cornell asked whether the Ecuadorean army was going to try to track them down.
“Doesn’t look like it,” DeWitt said. “Colonel Izurieta’s been on the shortwave with the missionaries. They want him to leave the Auca alone.”
“Why would they have a voice in that?”
“I don’t know. Seems like they run the fucking place.” He lifted his sunglasses to the top of his head and Cornell saw his eyes for the first time. Lashless, sore-looking. “Want to go see what’s uptown?”
But Cornell kept his vigil by the freight shed. It was early afternoon before Betty Elliot came across the tarmac to get him. The sun was bright, eating at her from both sides, but when she got closer, he saw she was carrying a tiny child.
He got up and walked towards her. “Mrs. Elliot,” he said. “I’m so sorry. I had no idea when we talked last night that your husband was part of this excursion.”
She shook her head, dismissing his chagrin. “I realized you didn’t know, and I should have told you, but I guess I was glad for the chance to talk to someone who was not feeling terribly sorry for me. I think the Lord sent you over just as I stepped outside, because it helped me to talk to you.”