Five Wives

by Joan Thomas

  Betty bent to pick her baby up and held her close, pressing Sharon’s face into her shoulder. She too was shaking.

  “Ven, ven,” said Darwin, their Dear One. He and two other men led Betty along a path to another clearing where the buttress roots of a huge kapok tree made a natural shelter. He set about building a new fire—she could make her tea there. They fetched the kettle, and water, and her canvas bag. They arranged logs for sitting. Betty cradled Sharon on her lap, and when she was calm enough, she opened a tin of crackers and a can of tuna and fed her like a little bird. It was early days to break into her emergency rations, but Sharon needed comfort and so did she. Anticristo stayed with them to mind the fire. His bare feet were splashed with blood. At the sight of it, dread returned to Betty. Even in the best of cases, even if they found the Auca friendly, how could she deal with it? The light was fading and she began to feel afraid of the forest itself—the massive kapok with its indecent roots, the lianas dangling like nooses, and the crude fungi gleaming, every square inch alive with bugs and bacteria and parasites, everything squirming with growth, plants growing on plants, plants sucking on air. An old terror opened inside her, the trap door she had fallen through on the Misahualli. Tiny sobs like hiccups still shook her baby. Betty bent her head over Sharon, trying to still her. She sat stroking Sharon’s silky hair. Jim’s adored little girl.

  And then it was entirely dark, and she could see the hunters’ fire dancing through the trees, and hear the shouts and laughter of the men. Rachel came up the path and helped herself to tea. “Quite a sight,” she said. When Betty did not respond, she said, “The men have made cochla and rice.” Anticristo got up eagerly and the two of them went back to the other fire.

  Betty sat on with her daughter in her arms. She needed to understand how she had come to this place. The year just past seemed to have happened to someone else. She was off her head for most of it, that was the only way to put it. And yet, off her head, she’d brought two Auca women out of the forest, and she had lived with an Indian family for a year, and she had learned the language of the people who killed her husband. She acted from something unthinking, deep in her core. A year ago, Jim in his white shirt had led her into the Misahualli, and all this followed. He came to her vividly as she sat watching firelight flicker off the big fins of the kapok roots, and her anguish about him fell away. She’d had the courage to show him who she was, and he had not flinched at the sight. He saw her strength, and he treasured it. He could have had any woman he wanted, and she was the one he wanted. She felt the deep gladness of this, and also its weight. It was of a scale too big to be reckoned up, his martyrdom and God’s purposes. Consciously or unconsciously, she had followed Jim into mystery.

  Rachel returned with a plate of food, and people began to go back and forth between the two fires. Eventually, Mintaka and Mankamu made their way to Betty. Mankamu nestled in a fork of the kapok roots and Mintaka, with her bloodstained dress, lay with her head in Mankamu’s lap. Sharon was asleep now in Betty’s arms.

  Rachel sat savouring her tea, undaunted by it all. “Tomorrow will be the fulfillment of the dream of a lifetime,” she declared. She began to talk about her call to the mission field, a shorter version of the story than Betty had heard previously, and mostly in Spanish. Soon she’s crossing the ocean on a steamship and sees a vision of needy people holding out their arms and calling to her. Quebi emoe—she’s learned an Auca phrase that fits the bill. “It was a long time before I understood that the people in that vision were the Auca. I had to take a few wrong turns first.”

  They fell into silence, listening to the forest and voices from the other fire. Dayuma wandered into the clearing and sat down by her aunties. For a while it was only the women at their fire, and then Emelio and Darwin joined them. Emelio said something to Dayuma that Betty didn’t catch. And then he said, “You were gone a long time.”

  “In the other world,” Dayuma said.

  “What is it like?”

  “It’s very cold. No one can live well there. That’s why Nimu and Gikari came to us.”

  “Eso es una locura,” Rachel said. That’s crazy talk. She was trying to move them to Spanish. “Dayuma, tell everyone what you saw in America.”

  “Automóviles, automóviles, automóviles.” She did a little seated dance to the words, as if it was a jingle she’d heard on the radio. “Hamburguesa, hamburguesa, hamburguesa.”

  “Stop that now,” Rachel said. “Tell them properly.”

  Dayuma pressed her lips together playfully, and then she said, “We went to a big iglesia that had a row of trees in the front. Smooth palms, which chanted with a big voice.”

  “¡El órgano!” Rachel exclaimed. In English she said to Betty, “I took Dayuma to the Washington Cathedral and she heard that grand organ, the cathedral’s marvellous pipe organ. ¿Y que mas viste ahi, Dayuma?” And what else did you see there?

  “I saw Nimu’s picture.”

  “She saw my father’s windows. The famous stained glass art of Laurence Saint. She saw the window depicting yours truly!”

  “What did you think, Dayuma?” Betty asked.

  “Muy hermosa,” Dayuma said pertly, and Betty couldn’t help but be pleased to see her being cheeky with Rachel.

  Not long after, Dayuma got up and walked away in the direction of the stream, evidently going to relieve herself. Betty sat feeling restored, enjoying the crackling of the fire against the wall of forest sound. Rachel always talked with such confidence about her calling and the prospects that lay ahead: light and dark colliding, the love of God confronting primal fear and hatred. Whereas my calling, Betty thought—it’s more like a worn stone amulet you might wear on a string around your neck.

  She finished a second cup of tea, and Dayuma still had not returned. Betty also needed to pee, so she got up and transferred her sleeping child to Rachel’s lap. She didn’t bother to dig out her flashlight. Thirty feet down the path, she stopped to let her eyes adjust. When you took time to wait, you soon learned that the nighttime jungle was not that dark. Tonight it was lit by a high half moon. And fireflies winking here and there, and the eternal stars. It was lit by a phosphorescence that seemed to rise from the earth itself. This was what the next months would be, for her and Rachel: a time of waiting for their eyes to adjust.

  A little way on, the light caught Dayuma’s white blouse. She was sitting on a log just off the path, holding her tin cup of tea. Rocking back and forth, and sobbing.

  “Oh, Dayuma,” Betty said gently. “You’re feeling afraid again.” She lowered herself onto the log. “You will be all right. You are their daughter.”

  “No,” she said emphatically. “No, I am not.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They won’t know me. I am born again.”

  Oh, Betty thought. She slipped an arm around Dayuma’s shoulders. How could she begin to explain metaphor? Then she caught a whiff of something sharp and medicinal.

  She reached for Dayuma’s cup, and Dayuma moved it away and began to cry loudly and recklessly. “Oh, oh, oh, Gikari, oh, I am sorry. I know it’s wrong, I know it’s wicked, but I’m afraid.”

  Once you realized Dayuma had been drinking, you could see that she was actually very drunk. Betty managed to wrest the cup out of her hand and dump it. They were all drinking! That was why the men had led her to her own fire. The thought of Mintaka and Mankamu passed out under the kapok tree made her so angry she could hardly speak. “Look at Rachel. Look how calm she is. She doesn’t need spirits. She knows God will take care of her.”

  “Yes, yes, everything’s fine for Rachel.” Dayuma said this in a bitter tone Betty had never heard from her before.

  “What do you mean?”

  “She’ll be safe, they won’t be afraid of her. Her brother’s killing is all settled.”

  “What?”

  “Everything’s equal. A brother for a brother. My brother for her brother.”

  “Your brother. You mean Nampa?”

  H
er shoulders shook again with sobs.

  “But was he . . . you said he was killed by an anaconda.”

  She made a derisive sound. “Everybody is killed by anaconda.”

  Betty’s mind refused to take this in. “Nate?” she finally said. “He shot Nampa? During the attack?”

  Dayuma’s sobs deepened.

  “How do you know? Mintaka told you?”

  “She told me in America. She told me on the machine.”

  The audiotape Betty had sent to Pennsylvania. Dayuma in a cold, alien land, hearing all that terrible news alone. Three months she was sick. Because Betty, off her head or not, had made that tape and arranged to have it sent, congratulating herself on her cleverness.

  She sat on the log beside Dayuma and tried to comprehend. Rachel’s brother. It was Nate who had fired his gun. But Betty could think only of Jim. She saw him on the wrestling mat, his grotesque grimace. She saw him prying open the crate he had brought from Ambato, the joy he took in those guns, stroking their barrels. She saw him and she felt something precious breaking. He was a pacifist, she had always been so proud of that. The pain she felt was ugly, it was unendurable.

  You think you have surrendered everything, but there is always something more.

  “Does Rachel know?”

  “No.”

  WHAT WAS IT Yapanqui had counselled Betty to say when she walked in the ucupachama? Huaccha mani. I am orphaned.

  In the coolest hour of the morning, they trekked past the abandoned Sevilla hacienda, where so many had died. She would not have noticed it was there. They were a sombre party. They were ill, most of them. Mankamu and Mintaka especially were in a wretched state. After breakfast, Betty had asked the three Auca women to take Sharon down to the stream, and had had it out with the men. Shouting was a great relief. She shouted in Spanish and then she shouted in Quichua. There was no more, they swore, they’d drunk it all. Don Carlos, who was holding their payment—what did they think he would do when he heard? Would they ever work for him again?

  They stood with their heads down in shame, or at least a pantomime of it, and she seized the advantage. “We had an agreement and you broke it. You can’t be trusted. So now I want your guns. All of them.” She had brought a canvas to use as a groundsheet, and she yanked it out of the hut where she’d slept with Sharon and made them drop the guns onto it. “Anticristo,” she said. “Come here. Tie this up. You are going to take this bundle back to the river, where Octavio is, and wait for us there.”

  Rachel was mortified that she hadn’t caught on, after years of dealing with drunks at the Colony of Mercy. Yet this morning she’d chosen to believe that Dayuma had resisted the temptation of the palm liquor, that Dayuma had come to spill the beans to Betty. “Dayumaland, I think we should call this territory,” she said. “Out of respect for that brave girl, the first Auca Christian.”

  This was the day. The trail was clear now, frequently used. They were expected to reach the settlement before dark. Unless Betty stopped them. I’ll raise my voice, she thought as she trudged along the path, and call to Emelio at the head of the line, Stop! We’re turning back. Dayuma would be glad. She was frightened, for reasons Betty could not quite grasp. Rachel would be bewildered, she would certainly fight Betty. But then, as Dayuma had said, Rachel will be okay, her brother’s killing is all settled. What does it mean for a killing to be settled? And does this mean that Jim’s is not? What did the killing of Jim mean for Jim’s wife and Jim’s child?

  Surely, whatever happened, Sharon, her bright-faced little beauty, would be spared. But what would become of her, if the Auca kept her and did not kill her? Betty Scott Stam, in China, hiding her baby when the Communists came—how is this known? Someone from her mission must have come looking. Betty pictures a scene, a search party pushing into the rainforest and encountering a tiny blond girl. And then it’s Cornell Capa she sees, tramping up the trail on his big flat feet. Because he said he would come, didn’t he, when they said goodbye in Shell Mera. She told him she was going to watch for a chance to reach the Auca, and he said, Okay, I’ll go with you. He’ll find a way in, she told herself. It was a dream, she knew it, but it comforted her.

  She longed for the privacy of her thoughts, but Rachel was right behind her, insisting on walking close, ruminating on what lay ahead. Even ignorant of the situation, her talk was uncannily to the point. “This afternoon you are going to meet the men who killed your husband,” she murmured in the confiding voice Betty loathed. “And I will meet the men who killed my brother. But, Betty, we don’t ask about it. We don’t even dream of asking. Dayuma has made this very clear to me. If we ask, they might assume we are planning to venge the killings.”

  I have to tell her, Betty thought. How would it affect her? Something always protected Rachel. She never changed, she just became more of what she was—that was the essence of Rachel. No lines carved her ivory face. She was a large, crafty child. She used the word venge as a verb. Betty felt the taste of her own hatred sharply in her mouth. She did not change either. It was a proud heart that beat in her chest, a savage heart.

  A mob of squirrel monkeys flowed down a branch, turning their attentive little faces towards Rachel and Betty. The bond between the two of them was undeniable. The bond of being shut out of the drinking party, the bond of speaking English, of being tall, of carrying toothbrushes and notebooks and sanitary napkins and bibles and scissors, of having the skin peel off your white nose, of wearing shoes, of wearing underpants. Of bearing this thing they called faith; she pictured it in that moment like a blindfold.

  If Betty goes in broken and ashamed, will that protect her and her little girl?

  The path was low now. Leaves tramped into the mud spoke of recent traffic. Betty’s blouse was soaked with sweat and sticking to her. A fallen trunk lay across the path, perfectly level like a closed gate. She crawled over it and turned to help Rachel, the partner God had given her. Jim was not leading her now. She had a knowing Jim had never attained. They always talked of how they would change the Indians, what they would bring to the Indians, but they didn’t think of what the Indians would bring to them.

  The path they were on led them to a little stream, and they began to follow its bank. This stream was the Tiwaeno, Mankamu had said at breakfast. A harpy eagle screamed, very close, and excitement telegraphed along their queue. They didn’t falter, they kept on up the path, her friends Mankamu and Mintaka first, each carrying a squirming puppy. Still wearing their dresses, they hadn’t taken them off. Then Dayuma in her cotton blouse and skirt. Rachel, unaware, her head down. Betty, then Darwin with her tiny girl in the carrying brace, sleeping the way only a child can sleep, her head hanging down.

  Betty stepped back and put her hand on Darwin’s arm to stop him, and then she saw what she had not seen before: under the chair where her daughter slept, he had a rifle fixed.

  They were on the same side of the stream as the settlement. The peak of a palm roof with dry thatch. It was up on a mud bank, so they had come in slightly below it. Three Auca men stood on the bank, motionless, watching intently, their faces expressionless. Children had been sliding, brown mud was greying on their legs and backsides. They froze with surprise as Mankamu and Mintaka stepped into the clearing, the puppies in their arms. A baby at the breast sensed its mother’s shock and lifted its eyes, not disengaging from her nipple. Smoke drifted in the windless forest and the harpy eagle glared from under its thatched roof.

  No one spoke. The people looked past their kinswomen. Their eyes found Rachel and then they found Betty, and the tousled head of her little girl.

  It was that peaceful hour of late afternoon, when the work of the day is done and soft light teases the forest open. It had the look of a scene in nature you might walk by. Nothing, not a thing in that clearing, that was not of the forest. In every molecule a silent life moved, a life independent of Betty and indifferent to her. In the hunchbacked eagle with its preposterous crest, in the dark well within her. And these two things, the stil
lness of the eagle on its perch and the long, unspooling eternity of her soul—for a split second her mind held both of them.

  David Saint, This Is Your Life

  28

  THE DRIVER SEAN SENDS TO David’s airport hotel is a good-looking Indigenous guy, probably in his forties, maybe early fifties. His hair is blunt cut, his face bony. Not Quichua—he’s stockier than Quichua men tend to be. He’s wearing a woven bracelet. Probably Shuar, but his name is Spanish, Fidel. He drives a five-year-old red Hyundai. He hands David his business card, and David tucks it into his wallet.

  He’s tasting mountain air, feeling a little weightless. Quito is to the north—he can vaguely see it, spread like ancient ruins on the mountain slopes—and he feels its pull. But they’re heading south. This road is the new Pan-American, a wonderful four-lane highway. You can take it as far as Tierra del Fuego. In fact, you can follow this route north through the US and Canada, all the way to the Arctic Ocean. This is the new Ecuador. This is what oil money did.

  Fidel has the reserve and the warmth of expression David associates with Amazonian peoples. He manoeuvres the interchanges like someone who’s done it a time or two before. He comments on David’s being a cineasta, and David says no, no, soy pastor. David tells him that he grew up in Ecuador, and mentions that his wife was also born here, and that she passed away a few years back, and that they have one daughter. It’s a pleasure to be speaking Spanish.