Five Wives

by Joan Thomas

  “We chose her name from the Old Testament,” he tells Fidel. “In the Book of Samuel, Abigail is described as a woman of beautiful countenance and good understanding.” He can’t resist calling up a photo on his phone and flashing it in Fidel’s direction.

  “Muy hermosa,” Fidel says, sounding sincere.

  Not, Oh, I picked that girl up at the airport yesterday. But it was worth a try.

  Silence yawns between them. David turns his eyes to the window. Green fields, larger than he remembers, and eucalyptus fringing the road. Isn’t eucalyptus an invasive species? When he and Sharon lived in Quito, they used to drive this direction to hike the trails in Cotopaxi park. The Avenue of the Volcanoes, the old highway was called. It wasn’t even paved when his parents lived in Shell Mera. Before Nate had a plane, they made this trip on a local bus crammed with live chickens and sacks of yucca, and it took eight or ten hours. Betty claimed to have done it clinging to the tailgate of a banana truck. Now the volcanic peaks have withdrawn and it’s not such an adventure. They’ll be in Shell by noon.

  David is wiped, actually. It was midnight when he landed and 2 a.m. before he was in bed. He didn’t take time for devotions, either last night or this morning. He’s working his way through Ephesians, memorizing a few verses in each chapter. Unto me, who am less than the least of all saints, is this grace given, that I should preach among the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ. He glances over at the Gentile at the steering wheel. Lord, he prays, you give me the opening and I’ll take it. He cracks the window down an inch, hoping to pick up Ecuador on the wind, charcoal smoke and lime and fish and roasting corn. He gets comfortable.

  What miracle of a child actor are they going to find to play Sharon? David sees her vividly at six, in the school compound in Quito, standing beside the big red fire extinguisher in the entry of the two-storey dormitory he considered home, barefoot on the cold linoleum, her hair a rough and tangled mess. She and her mother had just arrived unexpectedly from Tiwaeno, where they had lived among the Waorani for almost three years. They were on their way home to the US; Betty had finally reached the breaking point with Rachel. She was up in the private quarters, what they called the lounge, with Marj and Marilou, the sounds of her outrage drifting down the stairs, and this strange little girl had been left stranded in the entrance. Eager missionary kids crowded around, bombarding her with questions. She appeared not to understand English. David was the one who took her upstairs to the mothers. He was only seven himself, but a sympathetic connection started up between them that day. The wisps on the nape of her neck when she pulled her hair up. The narrow cage of her ribs. Those things come to him and sleep is never far behind. Then he’s back on the plane as it arcs over the curve of the planet. Green, green, green below, a nubby green carpet, invisible villages hidden in its folds. Did not our hearts burn within us?

  By the time he wakes up, they’re turning east off the Pan-American, they’re near Ambato. Highland Quichua on the streets. Lots of traffic, the smell of diesel. He sits up and closes the window.

  “So, David Saint. A relative of Rachel Saint?”

  “Nephew,” David says in surprise. Was there the slightest hint earlier that Fidel spoke English?

  “Nate Saint was your dad?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your hair was white back then. It’s almost white again now.”

  “You’ve seen pictures of our family?”

  “Of course.”

  “You’re Waorani?”

  He takes Fidel’s silence as assent.

  “Where’re you from?”

  “I grew up in the Protectorate. My parents were converted by Rachel. They were Baihuari—back-river Waorani.”

  “Your English is perfect. You hardly have an accent.”

  “I’ve spent a lot of time in the US. I went to Bible college in Miami for four years in my twenties. I was sponsored by a church in Iowa. The missionaries arranged it.”

  “That’s wonderful.”

  “Which part of it?”

  “Well, the fact that your family found salvation, and that you had the privilege of an American education.”

  Fidel emits a derisive bark.

  He’s obviously spent too long in the US. David sits there doing a full mental one-eighty. “You don’t have a Waorani name.”

  “Rachel named me, actually. I was about thirteen before it occurred to her that I shared a name with the revolutionary leader of Cuba. You know how she hated Communists. So then she tried to force me to change it, but I dug my heels in. Now I carry my Spanish name with pride.”

  So.

  After a minute, Fidel says, “I don’t think I ever saw you in the Protectorate when I was a kid.”

  “No, I worked in Quito. At HCJB. I visited Tiwaeno once, oh, it must have been in the nineties.” For a long time when he was young there was no airstrip, and even when there was, his mother wouldn’t take them in because of the outbreaks of polio. He finally flew in when he and Sharon were working at the radio station. What he remembers best is the voice of a gringo preaching in heavily accented Spanish as they climbed out of the plane. A huge radio receiver had been fixed to a pole in the middle of Tiwaeno, with a cage around it to prevent its being vandalized. That was David’s father preaching. Rachel played HCJB World Radio for hours every day, and as David well knew, HCJB had acquired a stack of audiotapes of Nate Saint practising his Spanish.

  “Do you remember what happened when the back-river people were forced out of their territorial lands, or lured out, whichever you prefer, and arrived in the Protectorate?”

  David decides not to whitewash it. “A lot of people got sick, and some died.”

  “Yes. A time of terrible loss. And of starvation. A man was shown the map where Rachel had recorded all the roads being built, the progress of the oil companies. She was very proud of it. That man knew the whole area like the back of his hand, and he stared at the map, tracing the rivers until he understood, and then he fell unconscious to the ground. Fearing for my children, I got faint-hearted, was how he told it after. This incident is recounted in several books. I suspect you’ve read it.”

  “I have.”

  “That man was my father.”

  So they both had their famous fathers.

  David turns his eyes to the side window and tries unsuccessfully to recall Fidel’s father’s name from his reading. Nincambo, he finds himself thinking. No, that was a man in Dayuma’s clan. When Betty and Rachel trekked into the forest, Sharon thought they were going in to meet her daddy. And in her own mind she found him in Nincambo, a wonderful man who was adoptive dad to a lot of children in the settlement, children whose dads had also died by the spear. Sharon fit right in in Tiwaeno. She loved those years.

  The Tiwaeno they saw the day they flew in was a dispiriting place. Rachel had been serving alone there for many years. The Waorani were trekkers no longer. The wild game around the settlement was hunted out and Rachel was having sacks of rice and crates of canned tuna flown in. No more palm-leaf longhouses: individual families lived in tiny plank huts with corrugated tin roofs in a row along the pista, and the children were clothed and ragged, their teeth black with rot from all the Yupi they drank. They crowded around the plane, pressing David and Sharon for handouts. But Rachel managed the supply shed and she had firm ideas about who got what. You had to look beyond the material, he told himself. You had to think about the eternal benefits to the Auca. But still David struggled to reconcile what he saw with the isolated settlement that lived so vividly in his imagination. It was not his aunt he found himself blaming. He blamed Betty. She had a lot of ideas about accommodating the gospel to native ways, modern ideas, and she and Rachel clashed terribly. Rachel was a bully. No doubt there were reasons for that; possibly she had been bullied herself. But she was who she was, she was never going to change. And it seemed to him that, having brought Rachel in, Betty should have stayed and protected the people from her. Sharon didn’t want to criticize. “The people are aliv
e,” was all she would say. They might not have been, if Betty and Rachel had not gone in and persuaded them to stop their civil wars.

  “How long you going to be in Ecuador?” Fidel asks.

  “Eight days.”

  “Are you flying into any of the settlements?”

  “I don’t think so. I think I’ll be in Shell and Puyo most of the week.”

  “If you have time, I’ll take you on a drive up what they call the Vía Auca. It’s the road the oil companies built, south from Coca right through Waorani territory. The government gave parcels of land to homesteaders, so it’s mainly been taken over by Quichua. But it’s still home to most of Ecuador’s Waorani. Some of the men work for the oil companies, road building and laying pipe. But a lot of my people . . . well, the old ways are gone and nothing good’s replaced them.”

  “I take it you blame the missionaries for that.”

  “Thirteen days of oil for America ruined Waorani lands.”

  “Yeah,” David says, “I’ve heard that slogan before.” He wonders where Sean found this driver. Are they going to have to face an inquisition every time they get into a car?

  There is a story here, and it’s unlikely that Fidel knows it. One afternoon when David was about twelve, his aunt Rachel and Dayuma appeared in the courtyard of the boarding school, their arms full of goodies. They had flown into Quito that morning, and a car had picked them up at the airport and taken them straight to the presidential palace. There, they had signed the official documents that gave the Auca their own land. The Protectorate, people called it, but at Rachel’s insistence the map read Dayumaland. Rachel, of course, could not sign on behalf of the Waorani. They did not have a chief—for some reason they were against the whole idea of leadership, and certainly they were against negotiating with white men in Quito to give up their lands—so Rachel presented Dayuma as the Waorani’s leader, and no one in the government objected. After the signing, they walked through Plaza San Francisco and bought treats for a celebration, figs in cellophane, humitas, bottles of Pepsi. All the teachers were invited to the party, all the missionary kids, and David remembers them singing, “To God be the glory, great things He hath done.”

  It was only gradually, as he grew up, that he got the picture of what had happened that day. The Protectorate comprised 8 percent of Waorani lands. (Isn’t it actually just an Indian reservation? Abby had asked.) Rachel got a promise that roads would not be built through it and that homestead rights would not be granted to non-Waorani people. In exchange, she agreed that the Waorani would surrender mineral rights and promised they would not interfere with (i.e., kill) oil workers coming in to extract the oil. What happened next was a vicious trick, Rachel said later. She was asked to step outside, leaving Dayuma alone with the government officials—this was to ensure that a foreigner did not exert undue influence—and while she was out of the room, the officials stroked out all the clauses that limited development in the Protectorate. Dayuma was not fluent in Spanish and could not in any case read, but Rachel had taught her to write her name, and when they asked her to, she wrote it.

  “You know,” David says to Fidel, “Ecuador was going to develop its oil in any case. The army was prepared to support the industry. There would have been a bloodbath. The missionaries just did their best to make sure that transition was peaceful.”

  Fidel responds with silence. David turns his eyes to the fields on the far side, where labourers in a straggling row are digging up what looks like potatoes. It strikes him that his family’s story always sounds better in the US. You tell it there and people are moved to tears.

  Near Baños they drive into rain. Terraced fields, and then they’re in the clutches of the Andes, dramatic cliffs plunging down to roiling water. This is where the old road was especially treacherous, switching back and forth, barely clinging to the slopes. The new road has guardrails and it also has tunnels, long, long tunnels that strike David as dangerous in their own way, with dim lights intermittently installed, with fallen rocks in both lanes, and water running glistening down the walls.

  Mid-tunnel, Fidel starts talking again in a low voice. “You know, I try to understand and to forgive. I think about Rachel Saint, who had no empathy, who had no understanding of my people, who had no respect for them, who referred to them as heathen scum—did you know she said that?—and I remind myself that she was suffering from lead poisoning.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “It was well known. She ate a can of tuna every day for thirty years.”

  “Wasn’t it more likely mercury poisoning?”

  In the yellow light, David sees Fidel grin. In David’s family they rarely talked about Rachel, because you always ended up in this sort of conversation.

  They come out to sunlight and they’re in the Rio Pastaza flats. Fruit stands line the highway, oranges hanging in long plastic sleeves. They pass a cyclist, a girl with a big orange X on her back. An American, no doubt. Not Abby, but she makes Abby possible. They drive through Shell, where military jeeps and oil trucks cram the street. They drive past the air base. And there is the house, looming beside the road in its lush glen. Fidel pulls up. It’s beautiful. They used a warm cedar to rebuild it. There must be a new chemical for treating wood. They installed new windows and new screens on the veranda. The house looks smarter, no doubt, than the day David’s dad finished it.

  The rain has let up. “¿Vienes?” David asks.

  “Voy a recoger a Sean,” Fidel says. Smiling politely, reverting to the Fidel who picked David up in Quito.

  AN EXCITED FEMALE voice calling in English—it’s an American woman running across the green yard. “Dave Saint! Pastor Dave Saint! Oh, I would know you anywhere! It’s amazing!”

  The house now fronts a whole compound of new buildings, and she’s coming from one of them. She’s up the steps, in her hand a length of bamboo with the key wired to it. “I am so sorry I kept you waiting. I went across the yard for my lunch, and then I looked out the window when I was putting the kettle on and there you were all on your own.”

  She gives him her free hand and it seems a hug is in the offing. He’s still trying to get a good look at the bronze plaque by the door. NATE SAINT HOUSE. Very classy. “Sean Youderian told me tomorrow! And now I have a great big tour coming in. They’re from a Baptist church in Georgia, they made this pilgrimage especially to see your dad’s house.” Kelly, she says her name is. She has a Wisconsin accent. She’s lived in this compound for ten years, right through the reconstruction, hosting all the crews. She’s forty, maybe, at that poignant tipping point into middle age. “How did you get here?”

  “I had a driver.” He looks back to the parking lot, but Fidel is gone. My suitcase, he thinks. It’s in his trunk.

  “Fidel?”

  “Yes.”

  “And how was that?”

  “Seems like a good-enough driver.”

  “But he wanted to vent his grievances?”

  “Yeah, he kind of did.”

  “Poor Fidel. He’s full of bitterness. He’s involved with—I don’t know, some sort of socialist organization. His niece Carmela has learned the language, and she’s Sean’s interpreter, and I guess that’s why they hired him.” A huge tourist bus has come up the road and is navigating the turn into the parking lot. Kelly says in a rush, her eyes on the bus, “He’s a super-talented guy and everybody had such high hopes for him. But in the end, Rachel had to throw him out of the Protectorate. He was such a bad influence on the young people. It’s been quite a disappointment.” She makes a rueful emoticon of a face. Her hand is on his arm. “Listen to me! It is such a blessing to meet you. I can’t wait until we have a chance to sit down and talk. David, I’m going to head this gang off. I’ll give them my spiel in the yard first so you can be on your own in the house for a bit. Maybe you’d be willing to chat with them later? They will be so thrilled to meet you.”

  She’s got the door open. She shoos him in and closes it behind him.

  The interior of t
he house looks old and it smells old. He stands for a minute breathing it in, trying to shake off the last few hours. Here it is, just as in the pictures, the radio room with a glass between it and the kitchen, the blue cupboards his mother so loved. Debbie was here last year for the grand opening and she said she spent the whole day in tears. He takes a few steps in. Something moves in his chest at the sight of the stool by the two-way radio, where his mother sat through so many painful hours. A residue of what she must have felt, a brave young woman facing life alone with three tiny kids. She had a great view of the runway from her stool. David looks out the window and pictures the hangar door opening and Nate coming out and starting up the path. He’s wearing a white T-shirt and baggy chinos and his sandy hair’s in a crewcut. He moves with a lot more energy than David feels these days.

  The radio room is lined with shelves displaying all sorts of artifacts. Miniature lances and blowguns. Feather crowns and woven bracelets. Notebooks. A battered bit of the Piper’s fuselage. The Life magazine article in plastic sleeves. A propped-up frame of Jim Elliot’s famous He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose—the motto that hangs over David’s desk in the church office.

  A collection of children’s books in Wao-Tededo, the Waorani language, is fanned out on a counter. He looks at them with interest. When he and Sharon worked at HCJB World Radio, they tried for a while to do a half-hour weekly broadcast in Wao-Tededo. They went to Limoncocha, where the Wycliffe Bible Translators had a centre, and worked with three Waorani informants in translating and adapting Bible stories: Daniel in the lion’s den, Jonah and the whale, Noah’s ark. Rachel would verify the translations, and then they recorded them for broadcast. In a stroke of inspiration, they asked the Waorani to suggest names for the Biblical characters, and they used Amazonian fauna for the animals in the stories.

  The books on this counter are almost certainly based on those audio translations. From the illustrations he extrapolates into English: Endiki in the puma’s den. Kimo and the river dolphin. It was controversial at the time, using Waorani names, but it’s likely standard practice now, as a way to incorporate Indigenous culture.