by Joan Thomas
She looked older this morning, and very tired. Gaunt, he would call her now, rather than slim, and he was conscious of his own knowledge from the Curaray. He was an eyewitness, as the rules of evidentiality went.
She gave her child a hitch on her hip. “Mr. Capa, this is Sharon. She’ll be a year old next month.”
Cornell put a finger out and touched the kid’s hand and she smiled and clung harder to her mother, as cute as a baby monkey.
“She looks just like her daddy,” Betty said.
“He must have loved her to pieces.”
“He loved everybody. He loved life. Nobody loved life more than Jim.”
“I am so sorry.”
“Well, Jim always knew he was expendable to God’s purposes. We both knew it. Anyway, I came to tell you. We just got a radio call. The ground party’s back in Arajuno, and Dr. Johnston is going to be flown here to brief us. Would you like to photograph that briefing? In an hour or so?”
“Yes, of course. Could I come to the house now? I’d love to take a few pictures while we wait.”
“We can ask.”
He went to grab his camera bag. As they crossed the tarmac, he tried to thank her, saying, as he’d said many times before, “I know it’s very hard to face a camera at a time like this.”
“I think you’ll find that all the wives can testify to God’s sustaining grace. In fact, we are grateful to you.” She paused by the steps to the house. “You know, about ten years ago, a group of missionaries were killed by savages in Bolivia. The world never heard about that sacrifice. It was like they gave their lives for nothing. So when you said you were from Life magazine, I understood that God had something different in mind this time.”
22
AGAIN THE DOCTOR STARTED WITH prayer, and for the first time Cornell heard his words in English: “Lord, our hearts are heavy with grief today. And so we turn to you, the great physician who heals all wounds, and ask you to be among us in your tender loving-kindness and mercy. It’s a dark path you have given us to walk, but we see the footprints where you have gone before, a God who knows grief, a loving father who sacrificed His only son. You ask us to bear nothing you have not borne yourself, you deliver no pain you can’t succour. We trust you, Lord, we call down your presence among us today, we ask that you minister personally to each of these your sisters in their hour of need.”
They’d closed the door to the hall. Just the five wives in the kitchen now, with the comforting angel of death Dr. Johnston at the head of the table, and Cornell Capa, God’s recently recruited documentarian, leaning against the counter with his camera in hand, attempting to wrap himself in a cloak of invisibility. Children in the radio room pressed their faces against the glass, and women came to take them away. Kids were underfoot in every corner of the house, and everywhere the sound of their fretful crying, as if they had shouldered that task for their elders. Everybody Cornell had seen walk across the tarmac in the last two days seemed still to be here. A few Ecuadorean officials, but mostly missionaries from other stations in the area and personnel from the US, white, middle-class Americans of a certain type, earnest, tidy, bland. On their side of the glass, immortality still reigned. Death was close, they’d felt the cold draft as it beat past them, and still they moved and breathed. But inside the kitchen a crossing-over was happening, it was a transformation as profound as death, the shattering of happy families. He was present to it, he was a witness, their eyes all closed, but his open to a scene made sacred by their courage—he watched them and felt his skepticism slip away.
“Lord,” Dr. Johnston prayed, “five of your saints had a happy homecoming last week. And though our impulse is to cry out in pain, to weep with sorrow at being left behind, we know that your divine purpose is being realized here on earth, and we praise you and thank you that we can be part of this holy work, and put ourselves in your loving hands, as these five saints did.”
It was over. The women lifted their heads, eyes on the doctor. He told them matter-of-factly that the ground party had conducted a thorough search of the site on the Rio Curaray on Friday afternoon. Four bodies had been found and positively identified. Peter, Roger, and Nate had died of lance wounds. Their bodies were in the water, a little way downstream from the playa. Jim had been killed with a machete, and his body was caught in the branches of a fallen tree at the edge of the river.
“Marilou,” Dr. Johnston said gently. He turned towards the wife Cornell had just photographed under a tree in the yard, a pregnant woman who had picked up a toddler and held him for her portrait, keeping her eyes on his bright little face. “Marilou, I think you know that six brave Quichua from your station canoed in to the site on Wednesday. They saw the plane and a single body in the river, and they recognized him as their beloved Señor Eduardo. They were too frightened to disembark onto the playa, but they took the time to pull off one of his shoes and toss it up on the sand so he could be positively identified later. I saw that shoe. I wasn’t able to bring it out, but I checked the sole and the size was stamped on it. It was a thirteen and a half.”
Her face was a study in grief. “I know, Art,” she said.
“I’m so sorry, Marilou.”
“Don’t be sorry,” she said. “Think how kind God is, how He attends to the smallest things. Even now, in the middle of all this. He sent Fermin and Ernesto and the others in to find Ed’s body before it washed away, so we could all be certain. I’m so grateful.”
A smattering of gooseflesh rose on Cornell’s arms. Good old God.
Dr. Johnston told them that a storm had been gathering and he’d had to make a quick decision about what to do with the four bodies. It did not seem feasible to bring them out after days in the tropical heat. He said that the playa was beautiful, an airy palm grove with white sand, that their husbands had been buried in the shade of a huge ironwood tree, and that he had conducted a service for them. “It will always be a sacred place,” he said. “Everyone who passes by will sense the presence of God on that playa.”
Dr. Johnston picked up a canvas sack of mementoes he’d brought back. He pulled out a pair of wire-rimmed glasses. They were muddy; he apologized for that, but he’d wanted to come straight here. “Peter’s,” they said, and looked at Olive. A sweet-faced young woman from the Pacific Northwest, a girl new to South America, a girl who had not objected to the word tragedy when Cornell had photographed her in the yard.
She had stepped alone to the spot Cornell indicated, no child in her arms. Someone noticed, and ran over and passed her a big black bible, and that was what she held. As Cornell adjusted the angle of her shoulders, he mentioned the fact that her husband hadn’t had his photo taken with the rest.
“Peter wasn’t really part of Operation Auca,” she said. “He didn’t feel he had God’s leading. But he wanted to support his friends, so when he heard that Nate planned to make a supply run every day, he asked if he could help with that part of it. He decided this just the day before they went in.”
“Oh, Christ,” Cornell said without thinking.
“I know,” she said in a small voice. “Even tragedy is not what you expect. It’s . . . sloppy.”
She reached out now to take her husband’s glasses, not looking at them, just holding them on her lap.
Dr. Johnston handed out wedding rings. The notebooks he’d found up in the tree house. Journals, bibles, half-finished letters. A big stash for Betty Elliot, who was silent, sitting entirely still, only her eyes moving.
Dr. Johnston had a watch. “Nate’s,” Mrs. Saint said. Its hands had stopped at 3:12.
“What time was it when Pete and Nate flew in on Sunday morning?” Dr. Johnston asked.
“About eight thirty.” This was Roger Youderian’s wife, who had been staying at Arajuno with Mrs. McCully. “Marilou sent a meal in for the boys, blueberry muffins and a quart of ice cream.”
Marilou lifted her shoulders. “Just a little treat.”
“And what time was your last call from Nate?” someone asked Mr
s. Saint, whose first name Cornell had written in his notebook an hour ago but had now forgotten.
“Around eleven o’clock.” Her brown eyes brimmed with life. “He said the men were impatient that morning, Jim especially. He wanted to walk in to the settlement. So Nate agreed to fly over to see what he could see. He radioed me from the air. He had spied a party of men on a trail, walking in the direction of the playa. He said, ‘They’re on their way. They’ll be here for the Sunday service. I’ll call you at four thirty and let you know how it went.’”
She spoke calmly. It was heartbreaking. Cornell liked them all. His admiration for them was infinite. And there he was, squeezing off shots.
Then Johnston took a camera out of his canvas bag, a fine little Leica.
“Nate’s.”
“It was lying in water. It’s too bad—those pictures might have shed some light on what happened.”
“Oh, maybe they’re from Friday,” one of the women said fervently.
Cornell spoke for the first time. “You might be able to salvage something. Do you want me to take the film and develop it when I get back to New York?”
“You can do that here,” Mrs. Saint said.
The meeting was over, the children could no longer be contained. Mrs. Saint walked quickly down the hall. He followed her to a darkroom, a well-equipped darkroom. A stainless-steel daylight tank and reels. Four large trays, all the chemicals lined up and labelled. No running water, but a barrel with a long hose. A good thermometer. A standard enlarger with an excellent lens. It was even equipped with a drying cupboard, a clever affair with an electric hair dryer fixed into it. The room was windowless and the doorway had a strip of felt top and bottom to seal off the light. Mrs. Saint closed the door to show him, flicking the light off.
“Nate built it especially, when he built the house.”
“It’s wonderful. It’s—professional.”
“I know. He—”
Her voice broke and a long wail tore through the dark. Cornell reached for her and tried to guide her to the stool, but she was caught in the vise of grief. She was bent over in the dark, her face on the counter. He stood with a hand on her shoulder while she wept. Her beloved husband so present in this room, or so horribly absent.
Finally she quieted and he sensed that she had straightened up and was trying to clean her face. He pulled out his handkerchief, and she took it with a whispered thanks.
“We promised each other we wouldn’t do that.”
“Not cry? How could you not cry?”
“We don’t want people to think we’re questioning God.”
“Oh, I don’t think that.” He reached around her and turned on the light. “Would you like to stay and keep me company while I see what’s on this film?”
She seemed glad for the distraction. She perched on the stool and he could see her trying to calm her breathing by an act of will. He began to line up the beakers, getting things ready so he could work in the dark by feel. He was still pressing his memory for her first name.
“Have you been a photographer for a long time?” she asked after a minute.
“Twenty years. My whole adult life.”
“And you develop and print your own work?”
“Not anymore. But I always worry when I don’t.” He gestured towards the drying cupboard. He couldn’t resist telling her. “My brother was a war photographer, and he went into the D-Day landing with the troops. That day, under constant fire, while men were dying all around him, he shot off a hundred and six frames. All but eleven of those shots were destroyed by a lab in London. The kid in the lab knew everyone was eager to see what Robert had, so he closed the doors on the drying cupboard to speed things up and the emulsion fried three of the films and half of the fourth.”
“Oh, that’s terrible. How did your brother react?”
“You know, I never heard him complain about it. But then, those eleven frames made his career.”
He put the chemicals in a water bath to standardize their temperature. Room temperature was seventy-four degrees. He’d have to cool this water a bit. “You wouldn’t have ice, would you?”
“I’ll get you some.”
When she came back with a little bowl of ice, she said, “I can’t stay. It’s chaos out there. I have to give the kids their supper and put them to bed.”
“Aren’t there others who could do that?”
“Yes. But not tonight. The kids are missing their dad. I’ll get them settled and I’ll try to come back when you’re ready to print. I’m really hoping the pictures are from Friday.”
Then she was gone, and he turned off the lights and set to work, winding the film into the daylight tank, counting off the minutes, shaking it methodically. The film in Nate Saint’s Leica was twenty-four exposures. It looked as though nine frames had something on them, and then the rest of the film was whitened by the water. When he’d finished fixing the strip, he clipped it into the drying cupboard, set the temperature to low, and went down the corridor and out the door for a smoke. The whole gang seemed to be in the kitchen. He slunk past, avoiding all eyes. He’d begun to hate them in the hours they’d waited for Dr. Johnston to arrive. Not the wives, but the others, who struck him as feasting on the crumbs of tragedy. No doubt Frank Drown will be among them, back from the Curaray.
In the night, lying on that rubber sheet in the jungle, they’d heard a sound like a savage wind keening over steppes.
“Howler monkeys,” Frank said. “You can hear them for three miles. They roar like that to guard their territory. The sound is pneumatically amplified by the bones in their necks. It’s curious, though . . . the loudness of the male’s howl is negatively correlated to the size of his testicles. You’re familiar with the term negative correlation?”
“You know quite a bit more about the monkeys out here than you do about the people.”
Frank had stirred, irritated. “As it happens, the Auca are outside human ken.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“They know what it is to have devils inside of them.”
“I have no idea what that means.”
“My point exactly.” He’d lifted himself up on one elbow. “Did you take note of the plane? Did you see how viciously it was attacked? They ripped all the fabric from the fuselage. They bent the struts of the landing gear. Steel—they bent steel! Think of the malevolence—they were crazed with malice.”
“Maybe they’re just tactical. When the US Army went into France, they disabled a lot of German equipment. Lit the gas tanks of the trucks, threw grenades into the fucking panzers.”
“Well, that was war,” Frank said.
“What was this?”
He declined to answer. After a minute he said, “You talk like an American, but you’re not, are you.”
“I was born in Hungary.”
“So you’re a Catholic.”
“I’m Jewish. I fled the Nazis.”
“Ah, a Jew. Like our Lord himself.” He mulled this over. “Do you know the Lord?”
“Not personally.”
“Very few people grasp that as you do. The need for a personal relationship. I would say it’s a good start.”
A vague figure on the veranda had Frank Drown’s stooped posture. Cornell stepped into hiding around the corner of the house. He smoked two cigarettes and then went back to the darkroom, and a Quichua woman came down the corridor with a plate of food from Señora Saint. Rice and fried luncheon meat and canned peas. He ate it and then he snooped through the darkroom. Nate Saint had a lot of gear besides his photographic equipment: batteries, extension cords, lanterns, an audiotape recorder, a slide projector, boxes of slides and audiotapes, all neatly labelled. On a shelf was a stack of leaflets on cheap paper with the headline “¿Dónde vas a pasar la eternidad?” During the night in the jungle, Frank had turned his flashlight on to show Cornell a similar paper he was carrying out. Nate Saint had been found with a lance through his heart, he said, and this paper was wrapped around its shaft,
tied on with palm fibre. Cornell had been half-asleep. “The Indians wrote a message on a paper?”
“No, of course not. It’s a gospel leaflet. The fellows must have dropped it from the air.”
“These people are literate? In Spanish?”
“How could they be literate?” He turned the flashlight off and laughed softly in the dark. “I don’t know why Nate would . . . I guess you just try what you can. But my point is, without being able to read, without knowing the language that leaflet was written in, the Auca understood that it threatened their savage ways, and they rejected it in the clearest possible terms. That is an understanding that can only have come from Satan.”
And here was a stack of those papers. Maybe the missionaries thought they had magical properties, like Tibetan prayer flags.
The film was dry. He didn’t bother printing a contact sheet; he was going to want a good look at every frame. He’d make a double set of prints, with the assumption they’d give him one.
So then he moved to the enlarger.
Camp-out photos, boys having a jungle adventure. The tree house slapped together with the sheets of tin that had proved so useful to the rescue party, and two heads peering out of it. The plane, and three men lounging in the shade beside it, killing time, rubbing themselves with bug oil. A bare-chested American standing in the river exuberantly holding up a huge catfish. That was Jim Elliot. A match for Betty in vitality, Cornell would say, although more conventionally good-looking. From what the doctor said, he knew it was this man’s body he’d spotted in the tree in the river.
Frame four was a single human figure. Watching the image appear, Cornell felt the hair on the back of his neck prickle. It wasn’t an American. It was a naked, brown-skinned man. Young, and sturdy, not an ounce of excess fat on him, his chest and face hairless. He’s wearing nothing but a fibre band around his belly as a jockstrap. His earlobes are stretched around big round plugs. His hair is long, but cut short around his face and over his ears. He looks straight at the camera. His face is expressionless. He has what appears to be a model airplane slung over one shoulder, and behind him a long, slender machete is stuck by its point into a log. The background is a river.