by Joan Thomas
Now they were resting for a bit, staying at a house in Pennsylvania. So Betty had an address—but she found it hard to think of writing to Rachel. That afternoon she walked up the path to the house on the ridge, where Alberto was working in the garden. They got the key out of its hiding place in the shed, and Betty went in. The shutters were closed and she heard the scuttle of roaches on the floor. She felt her way to the cupboard and packed up the tape recorder, along with her stash of batteries and a box for mailing.
The whole household played with the tape recorder for an hour, and then Betty pointed out to Mintaka and Mankamu that they could send a message to Dayuma. They took the job on eagerly, talking in turns and at length. It was a revelation to Betty, the way they talked—far more quickly than when they spoke to her, and with gestures and the sorts of sound effects Dayuma had made on the tape Marj sent. Betty understood very little. But she was thrilled to think of what this would mean to Dayuma, off in Pennsylvania—familiar voices from home speaking her own language. Ten years of news for the wanderer. To learn that it was safe to go back.
The next time Betty heard the plane, she and Mintaka and Mankamu carried the package with the audiotape down to the airstrip and gave it to Eugene.
Some weeks later, Rachel wrote.
We are thrilled to learn that two Auca women have come out of the forest. How the Lord works! We’ll return as soon as we are able. Dayuma is ill just now, but the moment she can travel, we’ll be back.
Betty, before I return, I want to tell you that the Lord has been working in my heart throughout these months, and I have come to accept what happened to the fellows. My brother would be alive today if you had included me—I know that. Rachel Saint would never have allowed those boys to play the fool the way they did! But it had to happen. Something very big was needed to break Satan’s hold over the Auca. So I know it was in God’s plan that you shut me out. God willing, we can now go in together to take the Word to these His children.
27
RACHEL WAS ASTONISHED AT HOW much language Betty had learned, and she was generous enough to say so. She brimmed with energy and happiness in the days they prepared for their trek into the forest. All the gear to gather and pack up! Some she ordered from Quito, but much of it came from Jim and Betty’s house, where she and Dayuma were staying. Kettles they packed, and pots and lanterns and matches and dishes and notebooks. Soap and towels and waterproof sheets. Medical supplies. Bales of clothing for both sexes—Rachel insisted on it. The Elliot bodega, Betty had come to consider that house.
“You know,” Betty said, “since Mintaka and Mankamu have had to wear clothes, they’ve been dealing with rashes in their armpits and groin. They can’t wait to get back to their birthday suits.”
Rachel laughed heartily, new fillings flashing in her teeth. “Even Adam and Eve made aprons out of leaves,” she said.
Well, they were in this together. Betty might feel as if she were running a three-legged race with another species of animal, a goat tied to a kangaroo, for example, but Rachel was the partner God had given her, and she was warmth itself to Betty these days. “Oh, my dear,” she said, when she first saw her, “you look like you’ve been pulled through a knothole backwards. And your little girl! You have let that child go native. It’s a good thing I’m back.”
Rachel: with her bulk and her years and her brisk certainties, she was a gravitational field Betty could not resist. The moment Betty saw that round face in the window of Eugene’s plane, she felt herself swim back into visibility, thinner than ever, her knees thicker round than her thighs, a safety pin holding up her skirt at the waistband. Rachel climbed out onto the runway in a pale-pink shirtwaist dress and Betty felt the bird of love land lightly on her shoulder.
She went to the bedroom wardrobe and pulled out what was left of Jim’s clothes. His shirts had gone to Eugene, but she made a bundle of his trousers and shorts.
When she came back, they were talking about cattle. Don Carlos had had cattle at his former hacienda on the Añangu, he had them taken in by canoe.
“¿Chiquitos? ¿Niños?” said Alberto, who would never try to speak Quichua with Rachel.
“Terneros,” Rachel said. “It’s the best solution.”
To what?
“If we can get the Auca into cattle,” Rachel said in English, “they won’t be able to move around. And we can have a proper church and school. The Youderians and the Drowns used this method with the Jivaro in Macuma. They managed to break their itinerant lifestyle in five years.”
“Not all people can digest cow’s milk,” Betty said, thinking about China.
“Well, in our village the Auca won’t be living on fermented yucca mash, that’s for darn sure. It’s hard on the teeth. Not to mention that it’s unsanitary and alcoholic.”
Betty had been drinking chicha for a year. “Not very,” she said.
Rachel ignored this. “We hold a ceremony to smash and burn the tepae tubs. Make it official, a day they will always remember. I don’t kid myself, I know it won’t be easy. Dayuma and I were talking at breakfast about the longhouses. I said, They’re going to have to put away their extra wives. We won’t have that sort of thing on Rachel Saint’s watch. And she said, But women who are alone—they need a man to hunt for them. And I said, If you have beef cattle, you soon lose your taste for monkey meat. And anyway, if they live in one place, the game is going to peter out pretty shortly.”
Betty tried to counter this in her mind. Was it possible to reach people’s souls, and turn them over to Christ, and leave the people otherwise as they were? “The patriarchs in the Old Testament had more than one wife,” she said.
“A fellow living with two or three girls, sleeping with one right in front of the other? You would be fine with that?”
Dayuma was transferring clothes pegs from a bucket into a canvas bag. She had not picked up a lot of English in her year in America. “Dayuma, how do you think your people will change when they hear the gospel?” Betty asked in Quichua.
Dayuma sighed and thought for a minute. “They will sit in a circle when they eat,” she said in her soft way. “With a palm leaf as a plate, and a piece of plantain and a piece of meat on each leaf, instead of just passing around parts of the animal’s body. They will take the balsa plugs out of their ears. They will stop plucking out their eyebrows, and stop cutting off the front of their hair.”
She was back to wearing the Quichua market costume, the white blouse and straight skirt, and Rachel said that every day she looked more like her old self. The day she’d arrived in Shandia, Betty had not been able to believe this was the girl Marj had described. She wore high heels and a navy-blue skirt and jacket. Her hair was pulled up and fastened with a clip. Apparently she’d lost weight in the US and acquired dentures. Her eyes were dull and she rarely smiled. She had not taken well to America. It was as if she’d been flown to Mars or maybe to a galaxy far outside their own, and what she saw there chilled and appalled her.
To compound it all, she had lain in bed in a little house in Pennsylvania for three months, refusing to eat, barely conscious. A doctor came and said it was just a flu, but she could not seem to shake it. “I think maybe it was a spiritual struggle that laid her so low,” Rachel confided in Betty, “because when she got out of bed, she declared that she wanted to be baptized. So I arranged for a baptism in my old church. Hundreds of people came to see the first Auca Christian. It was a marvellous day.”
But even Rachel acknowledged that a light had gone out in Dayuma, properly baptized or not. Her reunion with Mankamu and Mintaka was far from the happy celebration they had anticipated; it was more like broken-hearted relatives coming together at a funeral. So many terrible things had happened since Dayuma left her clan. One death after another, a decade’s worth of loss. Nampa, Dayuma’s beloved brother, had been killed by an anaconda. That was a painful bereavement.
But now they were all going home.
THEY MADE UP a flotilla of five massive dugout canoes, all heap
ed with cargo, each with a pilot and a porter. Mintaka and Mankamu, relaxed and happy, were in the third canoe, Rachel and Dayuma in the fourth, and Betty in the last with Sharon: the end of the flotilla was deemed to be safest in the event of an attack. Betty’s pilot was a terrifying-looking rubber collector with the kindest of hearts. Darwin, he was called; he said it was an English name meaning beloved. Her porter was a thin-chested boy with the regrettable name of Anticristo.
It was Don Carlos who had worked things out. He happened to come through Shandia with three of his men, and of course was keenly interested in Mankamu and Mintaka. With Dayuma to interpret, his rubber harvesters eventually figured out where their clan was, on a ridge between the Añangu and the Curaray, a half day’s journey this side of the playa where Jim and the others had camped. It would take five or six days to get there, the first three by canoe. They would sleep in palm-leaf huts made on the spot. The price Don Carlos named was outrageous, but it factored in the outfitting, porters to carry all their gear, and the very real dangers.
When their guides and porters assembled in Shandia, Betty was shocked at the size of the party and the menace it projected. Ten men in rotting trousers and ragged military vests, red bandanas tied around their big rough heads, rifles slung over their shoulders. But Dayuma knew most of them from the hacienda—indeed, some of them remembered finding her trembling in the forest ten years earlier—and she called them amigos.
Betty and Rachel fronted them the money for the canoes and food, and gave Don Carlos the rest of the fee to hold. The next morning they discovered that he had abruptly left for the hacienda, leaving Betty and Rachel to spell out their expectations for the men. They forbade liquor in no uncertain terms, and at first they tried to forbid guns. But the men needed to hunt on the trail, they needed to protect the party from puma, anaconda, and caiman. The best Betty could get from them was a promise that the guns would be out of sight the day they approached the Auca settlement.
Mornings on the river were idyllic but Betty’s body was never built for a dugout canoe. So it was always a huge relief when the guides began watching the bank for a suitable campsite. They stopped around four o’clock, thrilled to be out of the canoes, and the guides would get busy setting up camp. Rudimentary palm huts went up in an hour, wet wood was persuaded to burn—it was a marvel to watch. The men had trawled the river all day and they served fish with rice for supper. Betty had a tin of tea and she would brew up a kettle. Mintaka and Mankamu were taking in two little dogs, gifts from Inkasisa’s grandson. A bad idea, it seemed to Betty, but what could she do? After the meal they sat around the fire, laughing at the antics of the puppies. In the undergrowth the ferns were edged in light. Every evening the rainforest gave itself to them tenderly. Not so aloof, not so caught up in its own wild growth, part of God’s creation after all.
The fourth morning they said goodbye to the river and to one of their guides. Octavio was left alone with a rifle to guard the canoes and some of the cargo, which the porters would double back to collect. They were deep in Auca territory now. It was a ridged forest that cut you down to size. They moved slowly because their guides and porters were carrying staggering weights. Mankamu and Mintaka had their puppies to deal with. At first they struggled to get them to walk at the end of leashes made from lianas, but eventually they found bark cloth and made slings to carry them. Sharon rode on Darwin’s back in a carrying brace the men had fabricated back in Shandia; it had once been a wooden chair.
So far they had slept well and had entirely escaped snakebites, scorpion stings, tarantulas, conga ants—it was nothing short of a miracle. But that morning Sharon woke up with red marks behind her ear. “A bat bit me,” she said to everyone. She was speaking mostly Quichua, but she called the vampire bat tõõnae, an Auca word, because that’s what Mankamu called it. Mankamu was the one who noticed the bites. She went into the forest and came back with a fungus shaped like an ear. It split readily into layers. She peeled a layer off and pressed it to the wound.
On the trail the men were sober and alert, but all morning Mintaka talked, and to Betty’s surprise they did not hush her. She did bird calls, she imitated the screech of a spider monkey on the indrawn breath. She marvelled at plants that had matured since she had last seen them. She saw a beehive and borrowed a machete to mark the path so she could come back for it. They walked by a chonta palm grove managed by her clan. These were the trees the Auca used to make their iron-hard lances and their ceremonial drink. The trunks were covered with terrifying spikes, but each one had a smooth-barked tree planted on purpose beside it for the Auca to climb to do their harvesting.
Then Mankamu and Mintaka spied the hoofprints of uré, collared peccaries, and they fell silent. They wanted to see the herd. Occasionally they signalled to each other with a clicking sound, the sound uré make while eating. The forest itself was silent in the heat of the day, just now and then the raucous cry of an invisible bird. It was both farther than Betty had imagined and nearer. All morning she had tried to locate them in her mental map of the jungle, a green firmament wider than all her childhood, throbbing with darkness and barbarism. It turned out Auca territory was just like any other stretch of rainforest, and domesticated by Mintaka’s familiarity. Known and ancient paths ran all through it.
Dayuma too remembered this neighbourhood. She pointed out the outlines of a yucca chagra they had planted when she was young. It was filled in now with balsa trees. But somehow seeing it broke her fears open, and tears began to slide down her cheeks. “They will spear me in this dress,” she said to Betty.
“Well, maybe you want to take it off. I don’t think Mankamu and Mintaka will wear theirs.”
“They still have their comi.”
This was the fibre band they wore around their bellies. Dayuma was right, her aunties wore their comi under their dresses. “They would help you make a comi.”
“I can’t wear it. It means we are dentro.”
“Dentro?”
“Inside,” she said vaguely.
“Inside?”
“It says, we are not shy. From birth to death, we are like this.” She wove her fingers together.
“Like lovers.”
“Yes.” She began to cry again.
They were holding up the last half of the party. Anticristo with his heavy burden leaned against a tree, his face expressionless. This girl has reached the limits of what she can take in, thought Betty.
“Leave your dress on,” she said. “Even with clothes, you’re family. Nothing changes that.”
But what did she know? She knew nothing. She had paced around her house reciting Dayuma’s story, but even now she understood little of it. She began to think about the night on the Misahualli when the fisherman Honorio was found dead. Eighteen lances—she saw them, she counted them. And then her own fear so took her over that she could hardly walk. She turned and looked for Sharon. She was riding high on Darwin’s back, grabbing for lianas. Betty let them pass her on the path, reaching out to touch her daughter’s perfect little foot. She tried to form her emotions into a prayer. She tried to call up Scripture verses. But God had a new contract with her, the contract of silence.
Rachel in her cotton dress with her tie-up shoes plodded along in front of Betty. She never looked around. She was like Dayuma riding in an automobile through Manhattan. Yet when they stopped for lunch, she told Betty she had been studying the terrain. She was thinking about where the Auca protectorate should be. If the Auca settled, if you could get them to settle, consider what a vast territory would open up for development. She had had several appointments with people in America, her connections in the oil industry, well, mostly Cameron Townsend’s connections, all of whom were eager to invest in Ecuador. The CEO of Maxus was an evangelical Christian; it was wonderful to see how God brought such things together. She couldn’t help but think how pleased Velasco Ibarra would be. Can you imagine how wide he would open the doors to the missionaries if they solved the Auca problem?
Ra
chel is frightened too, Betty thought. She is distracting herself with visions of glory. She always claimed to be personally acquainted with the president of Ecuador, it was a bit of a joke in the house in Shell Mera.
They were in the neighbourhood of Don Carlos’s old hacienda, and Betty had thought they might overnight there. But the men considered it an ill-fated place. So in the afternoon, with three hours left of daylight, they followed a path that led to a little stream and set up camp on the ridge above it. They were not the first to camp there: Betty could see several clearings, and the charcoal of other fires. They were near the Tiwaeno River, the men said. But the Auca rarely built their settlements on rivers.
After the huts were built, most of the men loaded their guns and set off into the forest. Mintaka was very excited to join in—she had never been part of a hunt with guns. An hour later, they burst gleefully back into the clearing. Emelio had shot a howler monkey, an iwa. Mintaka had it, she seemed to be giving it a piggyback ride. Its eyes were open and its face looked over her shoulder, austere and thoughtful. But when she dropped it to the ground, Betty saw that its chest was blown open. Blood soaked Mintaka’s skirt and ran crimson down her legs. Someone had built a fire and they tossed the monkey whole onto it. “Aren’t you going to clean and butcher it?” Betty cried. No, no, they wanted to singe its fur off. Mintaka and Mankamu were more animated than she had ever seen them. It was stifling hot, and they both took off their dresses. Mintaka put her hands on Mankamu’s shoulders and they began to dance. The stench of the burning fur was sickening. The fire found the poor creature’s black face, and its black lips lifted, its yellow teeth grinned below its black eyes. And then, horrifyingly, the creature shrieked, and laughter rose, everyone was laughing—at Betty, who had leapt back. Oh, it was Sharon shrieking, her mouth stretched into a terrified O.