by Joan Thomas
Gabriel.
“Yes,” she says when she can speak. “I’m sorry. I was dreaming about Señor Jaime.”
“That’s good he comes to you.”
“No. It’s not.” And then she wants to tell him. “I used to see him in the house, and I loved it. But the dreams are terrible.”
The vague shape on the other side of the mosquito net, she tries to bring it into focus. Gabriel, what does he look like? She can’t conjure up a single feature.
“When you meet him in your dreams, you must tell him that you’re orphaned. Huaccha mani.”
“I am not an orphan.”
“It means you have not yet found an ancient soul to accompany you. But you’re walking in the ucupachama, that’s good. An ancient soul will find you.”
He leaves and she manages to sit up. She can feel it in her chest, the wound where those cries were torn out of her. How wise she was to counsel the other wives against indulging their feelings.
Beloved, don’t be surprised at the fiery trial that tests you, as though some strange thing is happening to you. But rejoice that you have been chosen to partake in Christ’s sufferings.
The fiery trial. That this beautiful man should die, the horror of it clouds her vision.
The next thing she hears (through Eugene, through Marj), Rachel has gone to the US, taking Dayuma with her. Soon Marj will be gone too, she will move to Quito with her kids. Betty herself seems to be vanishing. She has never liked to eat and she begins to have trouble keeping food down. Her body appalls her. Its thinness. Its persistence. She pulls off her cotton nightgown and sees the corrugations of her poor ribs and grasps why Jim put off their marriage for so long. Because he could not give up the dream of sleeping with a beautiful woman.
The dog is gone too, Chevrolet with his golden fur and friendly tongue. Sharon looks fretfully around for him. Betty has nothing to offer her daughter, her baby’s very presence fills her with pain. At bedtime Sharon cries and screams for hours, and won’t stay in her cot until Betty spanks her. There’s no pasteurized milk in the fridge, so Betty makes up a bottle of distilled water and parts the mosquito net to give it to her. Sharon sits up and bats at it. Her eyes are livid. Another human consciousness in the room, it’s unbearable. Betty drops the bottle on the cot and tucks in the net and walks away.
She can’t face her bed either. She can’t pick up Jim’s bible, which was brought back from the Curaray and has dried mud along the margins. She turns the lights off to discourage the bugs, and walks to the door and opens it. She rarely goes outside after dark. The cement is cool under her feet. The forest with its vegetable smell throbs and squawks around her. She tilts her face to the cold stars. They’re low and hard, terrifying. Sharon’s crying is a hoarse bleat by now. If your child asks for bread, will you give her a stone? But she’s spoiled, Jim spoiled her. When she cried at night, he used to take her up and walk her. He seemed to want the comfort himself.
How sick Jim was in those last few weeks, how troubled. This is not something she has let herself think about, it’s an occult version of events. But it was terrible, what he went through—it was like Christ’s forty days in the wilderness, when Satan came to tempt Him. Like Christ, Jim was swamped by fear and doubt. He said, “Look at the oil engineers they killed. Look at all the workers from the hacienda. Why are we so cocky about going in?” She hardly knew him; who was Jim without his confidence? She wanted to shake him or deliver a sharp clip to the back of his head. Instead, she sat on the edge of the bed, stroking his shoulder, playing the encouraging wife. “You have God’s promise of protection,” she said. “None of them had that.” Hers was the voice saying, Leap off this precipice. For isn’t it written, God shall give His angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways?
Like Satan, she quoted Scripture. It takes the breath right out of her chest to think about it.
Save me O God, for the waters are come deep into my soul. I sink in mire, where there is no standing.
She sets up the tape recorder again, and listens to Dayuma’s voice, plays it over and over. Not having a translation—it is a good thing, it shatters the illusion that translation is possible. She tries to make the sounds, imitating Dayuma, rewinding the tape after every phrase until she gets it right. She’s a gifted mimic, she always has been. Dayuma speaks with a strange vehemence. This story has been in her heart for a decade, with no one to tell it to. Betty tries out that tone, and likes it. Soon she’s reciting the whole passage. She paces the house, practising until the sounds feel natural, gesticulating as she imagines Dayuma did. This is echolalia, she’s speaking in tongues, she’s given the words, over and over, the phrases build in power. Oh, this is not words, there are no words for this.
IT COULD NOT go on like that, and it did not. One day a Quichua youth Betty did not recognize came to her door. He was about fourteen years old. He said he was from the forest east of the Shandia Trail.
“The Auca are at our house,” he said. “Will you come?”
“The Auca?”
“Two women.”
“Where is your settlement?”
“On the Misahualli.”
She knew it, a little. She and Jim had once taken a two-hour paddle up the Misahualli. But this boy had walked to Shandia. “How long were you on the trail?”
“Since the sun rose.”
It was just after noon. So if he wanted to get home before nightfall, he would need to head back now.
“Why did you come to me?”
“My father said.”
It sounded like a divine commandment. As it happened, a friend from the settlement was up at the house that day, Panka, a calm, dependable woman who had served them as a language informant for years. It had to be providential. “Can you keep my little girl for a day or two?” Betty asked. Her salvation was drawing nigh. While María-Elena gave the boy something to eat, Betty filled her shigras. She packed a snakebite kit. A bottle of water. A flashlight. A bit of food.
They set out, walking northeast. The Shandia Trail was an old Shell Oil road, overgrown by thorns for long stretches, but often they could walk side by side. Her guide’s name was Amaru. He could not tell her his age. He was reluctant to talk and she soon stopped trying. After about an hour, he turned off the trail onto a path she would never have noticed on her own. Here they had to walk single file. He carried a machete and used it almost as an extension of his hand, expertly slashing the path wider for her. Once he used it to dig a thorn out of the leathery sole of his foot. The path was largely indecipherable to her, but he never hesitated. He would forget how much slower she walked, and she would lose sight of him and have to call out. Three times they forded streams. Did she want her shoes wet or her feet cut? She left her shoes on. The terrain flattened out and the temperature climbed. She tried to ration the water in her bottle. The canopy rose and closed in overhead. It was a mid-afternoon dusk, like a solar eclipse. She was following Jim in his white shirt as he swung nimbly over a fallen tree. Never looking back, trusting her to stay with him. All her life she had talked knowingly about faith. But this was faith. When you felt nothing but darkness, when you understood nothing, and continued to walk resolutely in the direction God had revealed to you in brighter days.
True dusk had erased the forest when they arrived at the Misahualli. She could just make out three houses perched on a low clay bank. They were the traditional oval longhouses. Amaru led her to the middle one. The interior was ghostly, lit only by a white glow coming from two or three inverted pots. It was atamuyo, the oily jungle pods that will burn for hours. Fifteen or twenty people from the settlement had crowded into the house. They greeted her and touched her hands. She did not know any of them, but she and her story were famous to the Quichua all through El Oriente; they called her Señora Jaime. You could hardly breathe in that house from the smouldering termite nests they had hung to drive flies away. The crowd parted to lead her forward. It was evident the settlement had been waiting all day for Betty to solve this.
She turned on her flashlight. Two Auca women squatted on the floor at the back of the house. The women in the longhouse had put cotton dresses on them, but they had the exotic haircuts she had seen in Nate’s photos and plugs in their earlobes. In fact, she recognized one of the women as the older of the two women in the pictures taken at the camp on the Curaray, and a shock passed through her. They looked terrified. Nobody could communicate to ask them why they had come. She turned off her flashlight because it was contributing to the women’s distress. She thought of Jim’s phrases, I like you, I want to be your friend, but she had no confidence in either construction. She squatted beside Dayuma’s aunt. “Mintaka,” she said gently. She pressed her hand to her own breast. “Betty.” But this visibly horrified Mintaka. How could this tall, pale creature know her name? So she turned her attention away to ease their terror. She still had a jar of raisins in her pack, and she called the children around her. The women of the house brought supper for her and her guide. A bowl of chicha, fish on a banana leaf. It was wonderful, fresh and tasty. She was just finishing it when they heard a shout from outside, and the terrifying sound of women’s screams.
A man burst into the house, followed by several others. Betty could not understand what they said. Some of the people in the house ran out, some stayed, talking in anguish. The same man came back and tried to get the Auca women to go outside to see. They resisted him, pressing themselves down on the mud floor. He tried to get Betty to go. “No,” she said, thinking of her daughter. She went just as far as the doorway. A body was carried up to the next house, one arm dangling. “Honorio!” they all cried. Honorio, returning home from a day’s fishing, had been found dead on the path, riddled with Auca lances. His wife, Maruja, had vanished, evidently stolen by the Auca. The mourning wail started up. Betty turned back into the house. She could not tolerate the dark, she switched on her flashlight.
Men carried in the lances that had been yanked from the body, they wanted to confront the Auca women with them. The lances were ten feet long, and barbed. They were smeared with gore, it gleamed in the light. Betty could not stop herself from counting. Eighteen. Eighteen lances. She touched the shaft end of one, and it was hard as iron. She could see the Auca women stealing glances at the feathers and carvings close to the heads. They murmured a few words to each other. It seemed obvious to Betty that their warriors had tracked the two women, had observed that they had been taken into a house, and were retaliating. She sat on the floor digging her fingernails into her ankles. Mintaka began a low chanting, as if to comfort herself, and the woman who was not Mintaka took it up. A man said, “These women were sent to cast a spell on us. In the night the Auca will attack and kill us all.”
Betty had left her child with a stranger and willingly come to this place. Betty Scott Stam, she thought. It was never about China, it was about giving yourself up to this. She began to have pains in her chest. Others said, “The Auca never kill twice in the same place. They have killed Honorio and they will be miles away by now.” An old woman took Betty’s hand and said, “Please don’t leave us, Mother. We will build you a house.” It came to Betty that she was the one who had led the Auca to this house, that they had spied her and her guide on the trail. She heard herself say, “You are all in danger with these women here. Let us stay until morning. God will protect us during the night. Then I will take the women out.” Rain began to patter on the thatched roof. In a moment the downpour started, and that seemed to settle the matter. Someone led Betty to a caitu, a bamboo sleeping platform. She was shivering now, because the temperature had plummeted with the rain. The house emptied; everyone except Betty and the Auca women went next door for Honorio’s wake.
In the morning, Mintaka and her friend understood that they were to leave with Betty. Amaru was again their guide, along with another young man who carried a shotgun, although Betty gathered he had no ammunition. Both men were pale, their eyes glazed from the wake. Betty felt light-headed and frail herself. It seemed to her that she had lain awake all night to the raucous sounds from the next house—although at some point her water bottle and flashlight had vanished from beside her, so she must have slept.
They started off. An hour out, a viper slid obliquely across the way. The pattern on its skin perfectly mimicked the splashes of sunlight on the path, but Amaru noticed the movement and called out. The woman who was not Mintaka refused to go farther. The guides speculated that the serpent was an omen. They were also afraid, but they were more afraid to linger on the trail. They pleaded with the woman in Quichua and then harangued her. Finally they started off without her, and eventually she followed, walking almost at a jog and even leading the way at times.
They were all strong and accustomed to trekking; they were constantly waiting for Betty. The path was so slick from the rain that in places the men had to make a harness of lianas to haul her up. Her shoes were bricks of mud and she abandoned them—she was better off with her toes for traction. The sun was high and steam rose from the earth. Both women took off their dresses and tied them to their heads. They all began to be hungry. The guides had packed boiled yucca, but they had shared it early on and Betty’s food was also gone. The streams were swollen from the rain, and swifter now. The guides took them across the widest river one by one. They waded up to their waists, groping with their feet for a purchase on the rocks. While they rested on the other side, Mintaka wandered into the forest. She came back with a little basket she had improvised of a palm leaf, filled with grubs about as big as Betty’s thumb. Betty shook her head, but the others ate them.
They started off again, and she felt a fiery stab to her right leg, just below the knee. It was a conga ant. She had witnessed such stings but never felt one. The pain spread swiftly until its flames licked at the edge of her vision. It was horrifying, a thousand times worse than a wasp sting. She tried to show her fellow travellers, but they were indifferent. The trail had vanished, it could not hold its own against this voracious foliage. Then they came to a place where all was dead, all the trees choked and ghostly and pale, grown over with mould, a swamp where white muck sucked at their feet. Now they were truly lost, or overnight the country had fallen under a curse.
But then they were on the Shandia Trail—and things were worse, not better. There was no shade. She wanted to vomit. She towered over the others, staggering, afraid she would topple. Her hands and feet were distant and possibly detached. There are three ways to form rock, igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic, but she was always igneous. Other fragments of learning came to her in their beauty, her beloved scribbler with its cover of Chinese red. It occurred to her to seek shade and sit, but she was a beast that could only plod. In any case, she was no longer hot. I’m cold, she said to her new friends, discovering with surprise that the Waorani had a word for this. And they had a word for skates. I’m accustomed to the cold, as a child I skated on the river. You can endure anything if you think the whole world is watching.
Fear of Flying
25
KAREN, THE CHURCH SECRETARY, INSISTS on driving David to the airport. She’s more excited than he is. “So they couldn’t find a job for Abby?”
“Oh, you know, things are a little rough with Sean,” he says vaguely, because Karen will go crazy if she gets wind of a possible acting role. They turn onto Wilkes, where the traffic is bumper to bumper. Karen is a fearless driver and she nimbly overtakes two semis trying to shut her out of the turn lane. All Dave feels is a sense of heaviness about leaving Abby. Your grandfathers killed my uncle. It makes him a little sick to think that this is the path she’s following. Mi tío. Who in the world is she talking to that would put it to her that way? He sees an airport sign and the wild idea pops into his mind that she’s gone to Ecuador. He’ll roll into Shell Mera and she’ll be there. It’s nuts. But then, how fervently he wishes he’d thought to check her top drawer! He knows where she keeps her passport, tucked under a jewellery box.
Karen brakes to a stop outside Departures and pops the t
runk and jumps out to say goodbye. “See you in the movies,” she says. She’s sweet and funny and she’s still looking for Mr. Right. David is cautious with his hugs, because there’s no point getting her hopes up.
On his own at the check-in terminal, his jitters begin. What is this questionnaire, firearms, surfboards, explosives, knives—some sort of perjury trap? We weren’t meant to fly (is the realization that always wallops him the minute he gets a boarding pass in his hand), it’s not in the Bible. So if you’re going to let yourself be tossed into the upper atmosphere in a steel capsule, it better be for a sacred and important purpose. A lot of the people lined up in security are going to a country music concert in Houston.
He sinks into a chair in the boarding lounge and surveys his fellow passengers. There they sit in rows, gazing stupefied at their phones. Strangers in a secret cohort who’ll soon be hurtling together towards the annihilation of their earthly bodies. Some of them going joyfully home, some facing judgment and eternal damnation. Stop already. To distract himself, he pulls out his phone. Another text from Sean. Why did the search and rescue party only find four bodies? It’s becoming clear that this movie is pretty much in David’s hands. He tried the other day to put it to Abby that she would be Betty’s natural heir, but really he’s been the guardian of the story for a long time.
It was a new story when he was growing up in Quito. There were still things they were putting together. At a certain age he became passionate about it. When he was eleven, his mother married Abe, a widower who ran HCJB in Quito, and they left the mission school and moved to his house in a Quito suburb. Fatherless kids, they’d felt entirely normal at the boarding school, where nobody had parents. In fact they were luckier than most: they had their mother. So the adjustment to Abe’s house was hard, dealing with three step-siblings who had a father and who were calling Marj “Mom.” Benjy and Debbie would tell stories from Shell Mera, seizing every opportunity to conjure up their real father (a hero and martyr) in the presence of Abraham Van Der Puy with his funny name and his suspenders and his bushy eyebrows and the coiffed waves of his hair. Benjy still had the yellow model airplane their dad had given him that last Christmas, and Debbie remembered their father making her a dollhouse and the two of them painting it together. Whereas David had nothing. You would think some little thing would have pressed itself into his infantile brain. Instead, he became an avid student of Operation Auca, reading his dad’s journal and Betty Elliot’s memoir as if they were books of the Bible.