by Joan Thomas
Betty works a fingernail under a flap of her parents’ letter. It’s in her mother’s handwriting as usual, but with her father’s turns of phrase. They’re distraught that she hasn’t come home. This time her father takes up his straight pen to add a PS in his formal old script. “Do you not feel we have lost enough?” He’s referring to her brother Harvey, and his self-pity appalls her. She slides the letter back into the envelope, squelching their voices.
They assume her calling was to Jim, and not to Ecuador—that’s what is so irritating. She was called to the mission field long before she met Jim. Unlike Marj or Olive, who make no bones about the fact that they just followed their husbands.
On the other side of the playing field, three girls who used to be in her school are cutting palm fronds and fashioning ornate headdresses. Getting ready for some sort of festival, or are they just playing? Jim would have been over there in a flash, chatting and teasing. He was such a gifted fisher of men. Everyone was drawn to him. The girls have seen her, but they haven’t called hello or even waved. She lifts an arm and rests her face in the elbow, savouring the darkness. In it she sees a truth that three years in South America have taught her: she does not have the gift of working with people. She never expects people to like her, they so seldom do, which leaves her freer to speak her mind, which tends to offend people. So it’s a vicious circle, isn’t it.
One of the greater mysteries, why God took Jim from Shandia and left her.
She opens her eyes to see a brown figure cutting across the playing field towards her. Sackcloth Fred, Jim says in her ear. If Fray Alfredo is wearing his cassock, brace yourself.
“Well, that didn’t take long,” he calls.
“What?”
“A new pilot. A new plane.”
“Oh. Yes. Eugene.”
“He’s American?”
“He’s from Wisconsin. Someone donated the plane—a businessman in Little Rock, Arkansas.”
They’re the only two in the settlement now who speak English, and you’d think they might be friendly. But they’re more awkward with each other than they were before. Why? Because he thinks he’s been proved right. Not that he takes joy in it, she doesn’t accuse him of that. Just that it’s between them.
“I hear you’ve sold your livestock. Does this mean you’re going home?”
“We still have chickens,” she says, dodging the question. “Gabriel is wonderful, but he has enough to do with the house and the garden.”
“Yapanqui,” he says automatically. That’s their yardman’s name in the village. It means he who honours his ancestors. Jim and Betty used to call him Yapanqui. Then Jim read somewhere that the name Gabriel meant he who honours God, and they were struck by the parallel, and changed Yapanqui’s name in the hope that they could change his heart.
Fray Alfredo’s eyes fall on the mail on the bench beside her, a brown tube labelled Life magazine. Betty’s already seen the article, she had a look at Eugene’s last week. “That’s the magazine story,” she says. “Would you like to see it?”
“Yes, of course.”
She slips her hand into the tube and tightens the coil of the pages, as you have to do, and she manages to extract the magazine without ripping it. The cover has a photo of a man in a suit, Henry Ford II. But nine pages inside are devoted to Operation Auca. As she hands the magazine to Fray Alfredo, a paper flutters to the ground. It’s from Cornell Capa. Just a note to give her his address, if she should ever need it. How kind.
Fray Alfredo reads the article with great interest while she waits patiently in the sun. Of course, it’s mostly pictures. The photos Nate took of the three Auca visitors to the Curaray (the young man with his private parts painted over). Cornell Capa’s photos of the rescue operation (one shot of a body, not Jim’s). The portraits of the wives. The account is factual enough, but a little unconvincing, as if Mr. Capa dutifully reported things he did not in the least understand. How little sense the operation makes if you ignore the spiritual element.
Fray Alfredo studies Betty’s photo and then lifts his eyes to her face. “How are you, really?” he asks, as though it took this sombre photograph to recall her situation to him.
“I’m fine,” she says, irritated again at the really. “Actually, what I feel most is a sense of urgency. Like something very special is about to happen.”
And this is suddenly true, and sharp. When Sharon’s head dropped into the birth canal, the culmination of months of dreaming—it’s like that. But Fray Alfredo’s eyes are full of pity. She knows what he’s thinking, that she’s expecting this to be over soon, expecting the men to come back. Possibly he’s right.
“Your husband and I disagreed about almost everything,” he says, “but I miss him every day. He had a remarkable energy. I know this must be tremendously hard for you. Whatever you believe about the wider meaning of this loss, you have a human heart.”
“You know,” she says, “it’s only from the perspective of the world that this is a loss.”
“Whereas in your view . . .”
“Well, of course it’s God’s perspective I’m trying to see. We don’t talk a lot about martyrdom in the modern church. But six men now have given their lives for the Aucas’ salvation. That’s a marvellous indication of God’s love and purpose. It seems clear that God has moved a step closer to redeeming the Auca.”
He freezes, startled. “Six?”
“If you think of the original sacrifice of Christ.”
“Oh. I thought maybe you had information about Waorani casualties.”
Something dark flutters across the scene, as if he’s scared it up from the edge of her vision. This is the sort of scolding turn things always take with Fray Alfredo. She’s far better off with just her Quichua friends. From this day forward she is going to scrupulously avoid this man.
She gets up and bends to pick up her letters. “I have to go. I left my baby with María-Elena and she needs to get home for her supper.”
“I’d like to have you and your little girl over for tea,” he says. “I have a wind-up gramophone—Don Carlos gave it to me. And I’ve bought some records through a mail-order catalogue. I’ll play Schumann for you. Would you like to come one afternoon?”
“Of course,” Betty says. The day that pigs sprout wings and fly.
She sets off up the airstrip. The evening rush hour, Jim called this time of day. People trudging home from their chagras, packs held by tumplines over their foreheads. “Imaynalla,” they all call to each other, but they don’t stop to talk. Those baskets of maize and yucca are so heavy Betty would tip right over if she tried to carry one. A new metaphor takes root in her mind, herself struggling under the burden of thought.
A woman with a jug on her head. It’s Inkasisa, Gabriel’s mother; she’s on her way home from the river. A wiry widow of indeterminate age, as brown as a nut, as strong and nimble and busy as an otter. She lives with her huge extended family in a hodgepodge of a house near the Shandia Trail. She has always hated Gabriel working for the missionaries.
“Imaynalla,” Betty calls.
Barely moving her head under the heavy jug, Inkasisa turns hard eyes on Betty. Betty looks eagerly back. Most of the Quichua in Shandia are friendly, ostentatiously friendly. But Inkasisa—what is it that she sees? Betty longs to understand.
With her eyes locked on Betty’s, Inkasisa very deliberately raises a hand to her mouth and lays some words into the palm of it. She purses up her lips and blows the words in Betty’s direction.
That’s a spirit dart, Jim says in Betty’s ear.
And it seems he’s right, because Betty feels the dart land. In her side, just below her rib cage, she feels it sting.
Quickly, she walks towards their path, trying to shake the sting off, keeping her eyes on the distant blue mountains. When she gets to the top of the ridge, everyone’s still in the garden, her curly-haired baby toddling wide-legged between the banana plants. Sharon is racing to catch Chevrolet, whose golden tail bobs just out o
f her reach. The walking is very new, her father never saw it.
Gabriel has cut a hand of tiny bananas, and he opens a finger for Sharon. They all cheer when she puts the tip of it to her mouth. María-Elena is there, and her little brother Alberto, who comes most days to help Gabriel. It’s almost suppertime, they should not be feeding Sharon.
“Gabriel, what does this mean?” Betty shows him the gesture, mouthing words into her palm and blowing them at him. He shakes his head, he won’t say.
“It is a prayer,” María-Elena says firmly.
A prayer. Betty looks from one face to the other, trying to decide who to believe.
HE WAS A miraculous gift to Betty. Jim Elliot, the heartthrob of Wheaton College, where both Betty and her brother Charlie were freshmen. Betty knew him slightly, they had one class in common, New Testament Greek, at which Betty excelled. Wheaton was considered the Ivy League of Christian colleges, but generally speaking, it had disappointed her. The girls were all in a tizzy to find husbands. Betty was serious and thin, she couldn’t carry a tune, she never caught on to jokes. Team sports horrified her. Most girls could twist themselves into any giggling shape they thought would please, but there was never a danger of Betty Howard being anything other than what God had made her. Her nickname as a kid had been Mantie, short for praying mantis. At Wheaton she overheard the dorm supervisor refer to her as a wallflower. Well, people could call her what they wanted—the Lord knew her as the work of His hands.
That first Christmas, when her brother Charlie invited Jim home to Birdsong, they had a pine tree with real candles. Jim was helping them decorate and he crawled behind the curtain in the attic where they had always been forbidden to go and opened a box and found fifteen or twenty candle holders, pressed tin with clamps on them like clothes pegs; they were from when her mother was a girl. It was Jim who went out to buy candles and Jim who talked her mother into it. If it’s going to be beautiful, it’s got to be dangerous, he said. The candles burned for an hour, each one making a little shrine of the branches around it. They turned off the lights and sat gazing in wonder, breathing in the beeswax and smoke and pine, singing carols and telling stories about other Christmases. She was never shy, ordinarily, but she could hardly look at Jim. Dumbfounded by his face in the flickering light, its beauty and its danger.
That night, when everyone else had drifted off to bed, Jim and Betty and Charlie sat in the kitchen talking. After an hour or so, her brother, a tactful chaperone, fell asleep on the daybed. Her parents could not have disapproved: all Jim wanted was to talk about spiritual things.
She was sitting on the bench against the wall where as a little girl she’d sat between Charlie and Harvey. Charlie, who had now returned from the war, and Harvey, who had not. It would soon be the second anniversary of Iwo Jima.
“You must miss him terribly at Christmas,” Jim said.
She shook her head. “He was never home. He was—well, I don’t want to say my parents disowned him, but he wasn’t welcome here from the time he was about sixteen. He never accepted Christ. When he did come home, it was just to fight.” She stopped for a minute, seeing Harvey’s defiant eyes. The raised scars on the insides of his arms, rows of them (how they got there, she could not begin to imagine), the cigarettes in his breast pocket. Always the smell of liquor on his breath. “It was like he was trying to bring Satan right into our house. I don’t know how else to describe it. Even when he was a little boy. He had a rebellious spirit from the beginning.”
Jim leaned on his elbows, listening with his very posture. “What a heartbreak for your parents.”
“They blamed themselves. They used to say you have until a child is eight years old to break his spirit. And they thought maybe they hadn’t been hard enough on him when he was little. But they were terribly hard on him. Nobody had more whippings than Harvey. I don’t know what else they could have done.” She did not cry, her voice was steady, but she felt her eyes sting. “And so now . . . well, it hurts to think that he has no more chances. That he’s in a worse place even than when he was crawling on his belly in the Philippine jungle. I know it must grieve God too. Because I know God loved Harvey.”
Most people in their church said, You have no idea what happened in his final hours. He knew the way of salvation. You have to trust that he repented and Jesus took him home.
Jim did not offer her that consolation. He said, “God is a God of love. He’s also a God of justice.”
“Yes,” she said.
“It’s hard, but it’s the heart of the gospel. Our heavenly Father hates sin. Could we wish it otherwise?”
Their faith was like a knife. She sat on the hard bench and felt the sharpness of it at her core. The light shone off his hair. Off the kettle with its coiled handle. Outside in the night, snow was falling silently. Yes, she thought. Where Harvey is concerned.
“Charlie tells me you’ve been called to the mission field.”
They talked for a long time about why China so thrilled Betty: how foreign it was, the mystery of the language and the script. It was a challenge that corresponded to her gifts. She ran upstairs and dug out the folding fan Betty Scott Stam’s parents had sent her and showed it to Jim. She got a notebook and pencil and demonstrated the Chinese characters.
“You know, I envy you,” he said, studying the characters. “I wish God would get around to telling me what He has in mind for me. But He’s . . .” After a long pause, he said, “Betty, I’d like to tell you something I haven’t told many people.”
They both glanced at her brother, who was snoring gently. It was a cold night in a drafty old house, but the grate from the coal furnace was right under Betty and her feet and legs in their wool stockings prickled with dry heat. She swung her legs up onto the bench and smoothed her plaid skirt over them. She tipped her head back against the wall to take him fully in.
That was when she learned about the path of glory Jim saw before him, the very special calling. “It’s hard to tell people because it sounds so much like ego. But it’s not. I know what I am—I’m nothing. I’m flawed and weak and prone to sin. But I’m willing. In fact, I’m consumed with it. With the desire that God should take this wretched life and use it for His purposes. And God has told me He has something really big in mind, a glorious work for the ages, and all He needs is an obedient servant. And I’ve said, Here I am, Lord.”
“‘May Christ be glorified whether by life or by death,’” Betty said softly. This was the note John Stam scribbled the day the Red Army came for him.
The brighter the flame, the faster it burns. Jim had rolled the sleeves of his red flannel shirt up over his muscled arms and he seemed to exude warmth. Everything was clear to Betty in that moment. The courage it took for him to confess to such a grand conviction. His passion for Christ—he spoke a language she privately knew but had never had a chance to use. And the energy between them, the heat in Jim’s gaze, the filaments of attraction that glittered through the air and snagged up her nerves, here, and here, and here—that delight too was part of God’s glorious purpose. As for God, His way is perfect.
It was like a drug, this radical obedience to the God of the universe. Once you had a taste of it, you had to ask: why would any Christian choose to live any other way?
They went back to college more or less a couple, and the astonishment was palpable. The Lord was teaching a lesson through Wallflower Betty, saying to the others, Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added unto you. Most Christians give lip service to promises like that, but she was chosen to testify to the reality of it. And then, perversely, as the months and years went by, to the discipline of renouncing the passions of the flesh to more fully serve the Lord. They loved each other from that Christmas Eve on, but it was five years before they married. God made them yearn for each other, and then He asked them to deny their yearning. Of course, China was an impediment at first. But then that changed, and Betty and Jim were free to go together wherever God led, and still Jim did not
pop the question. He liked to let on that the delay was down to Betty (My gal has thrown me over, he’d say to people ruefully), but it was always him and his anguished conviction that God was calling him to celibacy. A fraught conversation in a corner of the student lounge (they would talk for hours, praying, sometimes weeping, until she had no idea what she was saying) and in the morning she’d wake up and realize they had put things on hold yet again. Why did he court her? He was drawn to her because he thought she was immune to his charms. He was so charming, always, relentlessly charming, that the world was almost manipulated into loving him. He loved her as a corrective to his excesses. He needed something to tether him to the earth. In that, she failed him—she was never immune to his charms.
And so we wasted years and years, she finds herself thinking furiously. But, she reminds herself: God gave us Quito. Swift sky and the rumours of mountains, the houses glued to each other instead of planted on the hills. Sparrows with jaunty crests hopping on the cobblestones. Thin mountain air that emptied out her head and fed her senses. The wood-panelled office where they were finally married, the promises they made in a language they imperfectly understood. A civil ceremony, it perplexed everyone. But they didn’t need a servant of God to join their hands; God himself had done it. Their hotel room overlooked Plaza San Francisco, where a grupa from the mountains played and the sweet thread of panpipes insinuated itself between heavy curtains. Naked, in the afterglow of sex, Jim told her how maple syrup is made. The sap that comes out of the trees is thirty parts water, and you simmer it forever on a low flame to get syrup. That was us, he said. They waited so long that the concentrated sweetness almost killed them.