Five Wives

by Joan Thomas

  It was an apprenticeship in surrendering her will, those years of waiting. A preparation for what she’s facing now: the loss of the thing she holds dearest. If she wants proof that their choices were in the divine plan, then she herself is that proof, the composure she feels facing the death of a man she loved beyond measure. Every night she crawls into the bed she and Jim shared, every night she lies down in the sheets where they partook of a feast of delights, and she prays, O Lord, bear me up. Every night she props her flashlight on the pillow and takes up her beloved’s bible, Jim’s well-worn bible with its soft leather cover and the gilt pretty well worn off its pages, and she finds that her bed inside the mosquito net is a secret tent as it was before. She lies in that tent and reads until exhaustion overcomes her, until all she can do is switch off the light and close her eyes. And God does not abandon her. Every night He prepares a feast for her in words of comfort and affirmation, and when she comes back to herself, morning light is filling the tent like mist rising from the river, and her baby is calling from her cot.

  Dear Betty,

  It was kind of you to write, and I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to respond. It’s good to hear your voice from time to time on the radio. I miss you as I miss the whole gang and our lively times together. I have been in touch with the other girls, and thought I would share all their news because I know your work does not leave much time for writing letters. Marilou had a healthy baby boy in February, three little boys now. She’s staying with Ed’s parents for the time being. Olive is with her own parents in Seattle. I think she’s going back to school in the fall. Barb Youderian went home for a bit too, but she’s here again with her kids, working in Macuma. It’s not easy, I’m sure, but Roger was very unhappy in Ecuador, and Barb loves the work.

  As for me, well, of course I can’t manage the guesthouse on my own (the generator is on the fritz again at the moment), so Eugene is taking it over. He’s flying home at Christmas to be married, and when he and his wife get back, they will be the new Nate and Marj. Everyone expects me to go home, but I don’t think I could cope with the US right now. Having to tell our story over and over. And supporting my family would be a challenge. I guess I could get a job as a nurse, but who would look after my kids? My father is not well just now and my mother can’t do a lot to help me.

  It’s a daunting thing to be the head of a family of little ones, but we are all in the same boat, and Marilou and I are working together on a plan. The welfare and education of missionary kids is a great concern of mine. Nate was content to send our kids to boarding school, and I was so determined not to let them go, and that impasse caused a great deal of grief between us. The only sure thing my heart tells me is that I am meant to be with my kids. Marilou shares that concern. She has decided to return to Ecuador in the new year, and she and I have come up with the idea of moving to Quito and setting up a school (making it as homelike as possible) where we can raise our families together.

  As for Rachel—you will be interested to know that she and I have had a visit. It came about because of something you said. You mentioned in your letter that you had been reading the diary Jim wrote in the months before the killings, and that it helped you a great deal, that you were moved by the men’s devotion and their reliance on God and their caution. You wrote, “The fellows did everything right, and this gives me great comfort. If their plan was perfect, then what happened at the end was also perfect and in the divine plan.”

  I must tell you that this is not an assurance I share. In fact, Operation Auca has left me with a heavy burden of regret, and one of the things that troubles me most is our treatment of Rachel. So I was determined to make things right, at least with her, and I wrote to her at Hacienda Ila, inviting her to come and see me. One day I heard the float plane land, and there she was walking up from the dock with a suitcase in hand. She had an Indian girl with her, barefoot and wearing the smock blouse and straight dark skirt that Quichua women wear for market day. Imagine my surprise when she introduced that girl as Dayuma. She called her “the first Auca Christian.”

  I hardly know how to tell you everything that happened in the two days they were with us. Dayuma is lovely, with bright black hair that she wears loose on her shoulders. Her smile is marred by missing teeth, but she is pretty nonetheless and has a quiet poise, a way of looking shyly down but still watching you out of the corner of her eye. I remarked that I would not have known her from a Quichua girl, and Rachel took umbrage at that, insisting that Dayuma is far prettier. She wanted to enumerate all the differences, having to do with the way Dayuma’s feet have been shaped by climbing trees, and the holes in her ears. Dayuma bore this inspection patiently. She seems to feel affection and trust for Rachel and calls her by an Auca name, Nimu, which means Star. That Don Carlos allowed Dayuma to fly out to Shell Mera speaks of her new status at the hacienda. She was always a fieldworker, but after the killings Don Carlos dressed her in a calico pinafore and promoted her to the dining room. He has many prominent guests, oilmen and government agents, and he wants to display Dayuma and tell the story.

  I was of course curious as to how she made the huge transition from the jungle. Modern conveniences do not seem to appeal to her, and she says she does not like the food at the hacienda. Apparently she experienced extreme culture shock at her arrival. The guns frightened her, and she almost had a stroke the first time she saw a horse. But according to what Don Carlos told Rachel, the thing that terrified her most was the oil portrait of his mother. It absolutely horrified her—how alive the face looked, and yet flattened like a pancake into a wooden frame.

  On the subject of pictures, I learned that Rachel had never seen the photographs Cornell Capa developed, so I brought them out. Dayuma did not react to the photos as such, just to their subjects. Betty, she knows the forest people our husbands met and photographed on the Curaray! They are from her very clan! She immediately identified the older woman as her aunt, Mintaka. She put her finger on something in the photo I had never noticed—that the woman’s stretched earlobe was once torn right open, there’s an obvious scar. Tears flooded her cheeks and she lifted the photo and pressed it against her face. So then of course she examined the others with great interest. The man we call George—Dayuma’s beloved brother Nampa would be about his age. She stared at length but finally shook her head, certain it is not her brother, and not able to say who it is. Then we showed Delilah to her and immediately she began to weep again, believing she recognized her sister Gimari, who was just a tiny girl when Dayuma left the forest. So it was a very emotional afternoon. How foolish we were to imagine that the Auca do not love each other.

  I did manage to have a quiet word with Rachel, but it was not quite the meeting of hearts I had hoped for. I said, “I know how much Nate meant to you when you were children,” and in her stony way she said, “No, it was Ben who was my special little boy.” I told her simply that I was sorry we had shut her out. I could not give her any reason for having done so, but all the same, we parted on better terms, and her generosity touched me. I showed an interest in the language, and she asked whether I would like to have an audio recording of Dayuma speaking. We set Nate’s machine up. Dayuma took it all in stride and willingly talked into the microphone. I suggested she might tell the story of how she came to leave her people and go to Hacienda Ila. I did not know what I was asking—the story is a fraught one for her, as you could tell by the way she spoke, often crying and apparently reliving brutal attacks. I had intended to have Rachel translate the tape, but she was upset by Dayuma’s distress, and said that she had learned to keep their study sessions to single words and phrases to avoid this very thing. After they left, I decided to send it to you. No doubt you are better equipped than I am to derive meaning from an unknown tongue with no translation.

  The children need their supper, so I’ll sign off. I have sometimes marvelled at people who pour out their souls in long missives to their friends, but it seems I have become one of them. Betty, know that I think often of
you and your little girl as we go about discovering what our new lives hold for us.

  With sisterly love,

  Marj

  O God, Save Betty

  24

  THE RAINS ARE OVER FOR the season, and they are facing hot, hot days. Chevrolet has vanished and Gabriel won’t speculate as to what happened. Alberto wanders the yard with a wretched face. “Puma,” he says. Betty tries to get him to put this in a sentence. Does he mean, “I saw a puma take Chevrolet” or “Others told me a puma killed Chevrolet”?

  He starts to cry and Gabriel answers for him. The verb form he uses is inferential. “A puma must have killed Chevrolet.”

  All right, then. Chevrolet may well be back.

  She plans to restart her girls’ school, but the settlement is in the midst of a fiesta. Palm booths line the playing field with monkey carcasses propped up in them, blackened with smoke to preserve them. The people put cigarettes in their mouths and mock them, because they believe monkeys carry the souls of foreigners. Recently a fight broke out and a man was killed. So Betty avoids the settlement. She needs to keep a close eye on Gabriel. Yesterday he asked her to call him Yapanqui, and this morning when she forgot and called, “Gabriel,” he pretended not to hear. When Jim was alive, Gabriel once asked for days off, alluding to an illness in his family, but apparently went into the forest to drink hallucinogens the shaman gave him. He was in a strange mood when he came back. What would she do if she lost him?

  In the afternoon, while María-Elena plays with Sharon in the garden, Betty sets up the tape recorder. It’s moving to hear Dayuma’s low voice. Jim took a photo of Dayuma when he went into the hacienda and Nate developed it. Meet Miss Rosetta Stone, Jim joked when he showed it to Betty. They regarded her as the key to everything. Where is that photo? She can hardly remember now what Dayuma looked like.

  The voice on the tape is tentative at first, but soon gathers vigour. The language sounds profoundly different from Quichua and from Colorado. Is it tonal? Marj is right, you can learn a great deal from an untranslated audiotape, but Dayuma’s obvious emotion complicates the listening. She begins a sentence and her voice thickens, and it’s hard to know what is feeling and what is linguistic inflection, or possibly a glottalized vowel. In fact, it’s hard to tell what are sound effects and what are phonemes. Betty identifies only eleven consonants, if you count ñ. She never hears a fricative. She never hears j, or s, or r, f, h, l, v. (No j, no s. They will have to find a new name for Jesus.) When she’s familiar with the whole tape, she transcribes as much as she can into the International Phonetic Alphabet. There’s no way to divide phrases into words. Rachel, with her fetish for the single word! Jim was a little like that, he wanted a magical leap into language. But from the time they took New Testament Greek together at Wheaton College, Betty always knew that the mind forms itself around the language (and even, can we say, the world forms itself around the mind?).

  She works at it for an hour, sweat worming down her temples and her ribs. And then her resolve crumbles and she does what she has forbidden herself to do: she goes to the mahogany cupboard and gets out Rachel’s blue book of language notes. The notebook Jim carried to the camp on the Curaray, the notebook Dr. Johnston found in the tree house and carried back out and handed Betty at the kitchen table in full view of the others, its cover a little grubby from the journey, smeared with mud. Marj Saint is the only other living soul who knows the provenance of this notebook.

  In the days at Jim and Betty’s just before Jim flew into the Curaray, Rachel was weepy, softened by her fever. She fretted constantly about this phrase book. “You don’t think they will have thrown it out, do you?” she asked.

  “No, of course not,” Betty said. “Don Carlos is eager to learn the language. He’ll recognize how valuable it is.”

  She told Rachel that Jim was hiking into Hacienda Ila by way of the Shandia Trail. “Don Carlos is selling him piglets,” she said, which was true, as far as it went. “He’s got a passion for bacon. You know Jim, once he gets an idea.”

  “Did you ask him to look for my phrase book?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  She was working hard to avoid a lie, but her heart ached terribly when she looked at Rachel; she knew what it was to lose a whole year’s language work.

  When Jim and Gabriel got home the next day, Rachel heard their voices and called out. Betty went to the room. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Men—it’s just, he had this idea about the pigs, and—”

  “Don’t try to tell me about men,” Rachel said, turning her face to the wall.

  The next morning Rachel’s fever broke and she dressed herself and appeared at the table, her long hair uncombed and heavy on her shoulders.

  “Come outside and see the piglets,” Betty said.

  Rachel followed her down the path. It was a jolly scene, Jim leaning against a sawhorse by the shed with a squirming piglet on each thigh. They were thin, hairy creatures, grey with black patches, nothing at all like American pigs. Both of them had neat rows of teats, like the tiny buttons on a double-breasted waistcoat, but no one could decipher their genitals, except to note that they were identical. “He swore it was a breeding pair.” Jim laughed.

  Sharon was in Betty’s arms. She was more interested in Rachel than in the piglets. She reached over and clutched at Rachel’s hair.

  “Sorry,” Betty said, trying to pry her fist free.

  “I need to braid it,” Rachel said, arching her back to ease the pull.

  “I’ll help you wash it first if you want.”

  Rachel followed her back into the house. “It was the malaria,” she said. “People dream things up when they have malaria. I thought all of you were plotting behind my back.”

  “Oh, Rachel,” Betty said, touching her arm.

  That’s her sharpest memory from the two weeks Rachel stayed with them: touching her arm, saying, Oh, Rachel.

  They were fraught days and Betty never actually examined the notebook.

  She opens it. On the inside cover, Rachel has victoriously recorded the five Ws, so essential to language acquisition. Dayuma’s voice ringing in her mind, Betty studies the entries, flipping back and forth, trying to locate elements she’s identified on the tape. It’s a lengthy but crudely annotated lexicon. Its obliviousness to the culture is bizarre. Rachel has an Auca word for cheese. She has an Auca word for nightgown. The diacritical marks, so essential to pronunciation, are baffling. Beyond inaccurate, Betty begins to understand—they seem to be entirely arbitrary, macron and circumflex and umlaut stuck in here and there according to some decorative whim. And the vowels. Rachel uses only five, and sometimes y. Rachel doesn’t actually know IPA.

  It is, Betty sees with growing heaviness, an imitation of a linguistic phrase book, as created by a non-linguist. It offers no reliable clues as to how words should be pronounced.

  They all want to blame Rachel for what happened. They don’t say this aloud, but it’s what they all feel. She was cruel to Nate when he was a boy. She came uninvited to Shell Mera and she was a selfish and demanding house guest. She discovered Dayuma before they did, and wrangled an invitation from Carlos Sevilla to go and work with her. She showed up again when Operation Auca was in full swing and poked her nose in, prompting them to act in haste. And now, Betty discovers, she pretends to know linguistics when she does not. So when Jim stood on a sandbar and shouted her phrases into the forest through a battery-powered megaphone, no one had a clue what he was saying.

  She goes to bed enraged and she faces the morning sleepless and heavy with shame. Their high-handed taking from Rachel, it was not just theft, or lies: it was a failure to love. They pounced on her strangeness, they revelled in it. Can any good come out of such cruelty? But surely the punishment was disproportionate to the crime.

  This is new, and bitter, to think of Jim’s death as a punishment.

  Her distress grows as the day goes on. She’s racked by the need to confess. She sees herself walking to Fray Alfredo’s little house
on the Rio Talac and knocking on his door. Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned—isn’t that what they say? In her mind she crafts the penitent letter she will write to Rachel, in her mind she wraps up the notebook and takes it down to Eugene. In her mind Rachel receives this package, and opens it, puzzled, and discovers, in her grief, the full extent of their treachery.

  She paces the house, she can’t work or eat. After her Quichua workers are gone and Sharon is asleep, she takes up the blue phrase book and sits at her desk. Doggedly, she copies out the five Ws, because she understands that she will be learning this language, and the interrogatives are invaluable. Then she carries the book to the firepit and sets it on the embers left from cooking their supper. She fetches kindling from the bin and builds a pyre over it. The heat snatches at her hand ( for that, Betty) and then with no thought she’s pressing her palm down on the living coals ( for that last theft, when you knew full well). She sinks back against the cupboard, tasting the pain, resisting reaching for the water pitcher.

  Next time she looks at the firepit, there’s just one smouldering ruff of paper to be nudged onto the coals.

  HOW TO UNDERSTAND the darkness she falls into then? Jim comes especially to tell her, I have to go into the box. Not a coffin, it’s like the entry to a falling-down house, low and cobwebby. He is fully himself, flushed with life, and she tries in anguish to persuade him not to go (If you’re here now, you’ve escaped), but he’s immune to her pleas, as though death has already captured his will.

  The pain begins to come out of her, not just out of her hand (which blisters and then scabs) but out of her belly. Lying in bed in the mornings, she can’t hold it in. Not weeping. It’s like a tooth being yanked out of a jaw, the way the pain comes out of her.

  One morning she surfaces from a bout of it and hears a tap on the door frame.

  “Señora Elisabeth.”