by Joan Thomas
She hears him running water for the pasta, she hears the pot clunk onto the stove. “Tell me all three.”
“Well, I do a mean stir-fry. I make what I call frittata, which is eggs whisked up and stuff fried into them. But my specialty is the pasta alla puttanesca.”
“And what’s in it?”
“Garlic. Anchovies. Capers. Canned tomatoes.”
“Capers, wow. You’re vegetarian, right?”
“Pretty much.”
“And why is that?”
“I don’t really have a doctrine. I’m . . . I guess you’d call me a crypto-vegetarian.”
She pictures him in his plaid shirt. He’ll have the light on over the stove, he’ll be working in its yellow glow, his head bent. She hears a sound that might be a knife on a cutting board.
“Will, does this menu include salad?”
“Yes. But I won’t lie to you, it’s from a bag.”
“I thought I heard you chopping something.”
“I’m augmenting it with tomatoes.”
“You have fresh tomatoes?”
“Vine-ripened.”
“Why didn’t you use them in the pasta sauce?”
“Fresh tomatoes are contrary to the spirit of the dish.”
She hears cellophane rattling, the bagged greens or the pasta. You can’t be forgiven, she thinks, if you don’t own up to what you did. In her mind she’s perched on a stool by the stove drinking wine and watching him. I am literally a different person, she says to him. Or at least, I am learning.
“Okay, my fettuccine is back to a boil,” he says right in her ear. He’s taken his phone off speaker. “What are you having for dinner?”
“I haven’t thought about it. Listen, I’d really like to talk to you. Are you going to be at the library tomorrow? Hey, I can show you my tattoo.”
“You got a tattoo?”
“Yup. While I was on the road.”
“It’s your first?”
“It is.”
She’d like to slip her hand up and run her fingers along it, as she’s been doing for the last few days—it’s like reading Braille. But tonight she’s wearing the dress she packed for the audition, having run out of anything else clean. Everyone guards in their heart a royal chamber. I have sealed mine. It’s something she came across scavenging in the library. Flaubert, apparently. She didn’t write the quotation down at the time, so her tattoo is a paraphrase of what must already have been a translation. She likes what it says about having boundaries: my heart and my mind belong to me. At first it seemed a perfect affirmation, profound, clear. But while she was driving today, a different way to read it occurred to her—she may have inked onto her rib cage a vow to barricade her heart against love. That is so not what she intended.
“You know, the thing is, just today I realized—I’m not sure the saying works for me anymore.”
“Oh, well. You want to evolve.”
He says this casually, but the insight relieves and delights her. “You’re right,” she says. “Every year on the same date I’ll get a tattoo that expresses what I’m living at the time, and when I die, my grandchildren will be invited to the mortuary to read the story of my life on my wrinkled old back.”
“I like it.”
“I do too. How’s your pasta, by the way?”
“I should check it.”
“Then I guess this is goodbye.”
It’s an abrupt and dramatic hang-up, but she’s afraid she’s going to start crying. It’s been a long time since she talked to a friend.
The predatory cat has vanished. Abby gets up from the picnic table and wanders across the yard. No doubt the trampoline is full of rotting leaves. She shines her phone on it. It’s clean and dry. A divine miracle, or else the kids from next door have been using it. She kicks off her shoes. Her dress is tight, but she uses her elbows and manages to mermaid herself up.
She picked a dress with a narrow skirt for the audition because it was Betty she really aspired to. All day she’s been thinking about her grandma Betty. The deepest thinker of them all, the questioner. Betty must have lived her life constantly negotiating between what she saw as God’s dark necessities and what her heart might have told her. She lived for a year in an Indian home in Shandia with two Waorani women, and she never once asked them about the killing of her husband. “You never asked?” Abby said. “No. I thought—well, if I was going to have a ministry with them, we had to turn the page.”
It’s hard to imagine. But maybe, Abby thinks (and this thought is more painful), maybe Betty lived her life not listening to her heart at all, what with all the other stuff laid on her.
Abby squirms her way to the middle of the taut canvas belly. In high school, she’d lie up here and daringly peel off her swimsuit, desperate to take full advantage of the one hour of sunlight they got in this yard. And right away a plane would lumber across the sun, showing its riveted underside, and freak her out. But the sky is unoccupied at the moment, no traffic and no stars, just a glow behind the ginkgo tree where the moon may be rising. No, it’s not the moon, it’s a street light turning the ginkgo into a yellow-leafed goddess. The cold seeps under her dress when she moves, so she lies still. Her high school gym teacher called this the corpse pose. The goal is to be relaxed but alert, to take in everything around you and also everything within. You use your breath as a guide.
She closes her eyes and sinks into it. Unobserved, stripped of superhuman powers, she lies listening to the hum of the cars on the overpass, attending to the in-out of her breath. Trying to tune in to her heart, doing its thing unbidden in her chest.
Author’s Note
THIS NOVEL IS BASED ON events that took place in Ecuador in the mid-1950s, involving five American missionary families. Thanks to features in Life magazine, Operation Auca was known across America, and when I was growing up on the Canadian prairies, my parents owned two of Elisabeth Elliot’s books. The first of these, Through Gates of Splendor, has sold half a million copies and still sells well.
It’s impossible to overstate the importance of this mission in evangelical churches. Hundreds (possibly thousands) of young people were recruited “to take the place of the five martyrs.” Operation Auca was one of those moving stories that, as far as I travelled from the ideology of my childhood, still lay intact in the back reaches of my memory. Then, in 2012, I read a feature in the New Yorker about the politics of oil in the Ecuadorean rainforest (“Reversal of Fortune” by Patrick Radden Keefe) and began to research the wider story of the impact North American evangelicals have had in Ecuador.
It’s a delicate thing to write fiction about real individuals, and I briefly considered changing names and identifying details. But for me, the power of this story lay in the fact that it had really happened. I wanted to enter these events and try to understand them. I wanted to look at their legacy, at how stories, like the story based on this incident, persist and shape our thinking in the Western world. And at the same time, I was reluctant to write about people still living.
So here is how this novel works: In the contemporary chapters, the characters are entirely fictional. The nine American kids left fatherless by Operation Auca do not appear in this novel, and neither do their children. David, Sharon, Abby, Sean, and Will are invented. So are the contemporary Waorani characters, Enkidi, Fidel, and Carmela. Several films about Operation Auca exist, but the film being made in Five Wives is not based on any actual production.
The principal players in the chapters about Operation Auca in the 1950s, however, are all based on real people, though I treat them fictionally. These include Rachel Saint, Dayuma, Nate Saint, Jim Elliot, Ed McCully, Roger Youderian, Peter Fleming, Marj Saint, Elisabeth Elliot, Marilou McCully, Barb Youderian, Olive Fleming, Mintaka, Mankamu, Don Carlos Sevilla, Yapanqui, and Cornell Capa. Of these, only Olive is still living. Secondary characters in the 1950s chapters are invented (Carol Howard, Inkasisa, Harvey Howard, and Fray Alfredo, for example), with the exception of Alberto Grefa, who still
lives in Shandia.
As for “treating real people fictionally”—what I mean is that I use actual names and biographical details, but that the interior lives of the characters and the dynamics of their relationships are entirely of my creation. I read the available biographies and journals of the Operation Auca eleven, and then set those books aside and let the characters walk into my novel with the personalities they had assumed in my imagination. In the missionaries’ memoirs, “God’s leading” explains almost every impulse. I set out to peer behind that, to explore in human terms actions that astonished me.
I use established facts and timelines, both from missionary accounts and from a handful of secular sources, and I alter chronology in just a couple of instances. Rachel Saint did tour around America with Waorani (Huaorani) converts on numerous fundraising junkets, but she died in 1994, so I tinker with time in having Abby attend one of those meetings. Also for storytelling purposes, I simplify movements in the months in 1958 when Elisabeth Elliot worked with Mintaka and Mankamu. In reality, the women made several forays back and forth before Elisabeth and Rachel trekked into the forest.
But as for the building blocks of the plot—the stealing of Rachel’s language materials, the cultural misunderstanding regarding Dayuma’s photo, the shooting of Nampa, Dayuma learning about her brother’s death through an audiotape, the missionaries’ role in helping oil companies seize Waorani land, the belated Waorani report of singing angels—all these elements are written about elsewhere, although most are not acknowledged in the missionaries’ accounts.
The many published accounts of Operation Auca may be called “non-fiction,” but like novels, they are attempts to shape a narrative and they have their silences and gaps. Many of the diaries, memoirs, and biographies I read subscribe to flagrant racial stereotypes and idealize, almost deify, the missionaries. Elisabeth Elliot’s memoir The Savage, My Kinsman (reprinted as a Reader’s Digest condensed book in 1962) was a thoughtful book for its time, but it is just one of five titles on my research shelf that refer to the Waorani as savages. Thanks to the mythmaking of these books, the Waorani people became known worldwide as “the worst people on earth.”
The novel I wrote also has its silences. An intentional silence is at its core: I do not presume to give voices to Waorani people. Some Waorani stories have recently been published in English. Gentle Savage Still Seeking the End of the Spear by Menkaye Aenkaedi and Kemo and Dyowe (as told to Tim Paulson, Xulon Press, 2013) is a collection of oral histories by Waorani elders. Stories like these are a vital thread in the project of decolonization. My subject is the actions and motives of the North American intruders.
I’m very grateful to the team at HarperCollins for making this book happen. I’m especially indebted to my editor, Jennifer Lambert, who grasped immediately what I wanted Five Wives to be and provided such expert guidance, and to Natalie Meditsky for her clarity. A huge thank-you to Martha Magor Webb at CookeMcDermid for her enthusiasm and good instincts, and thanks also to Dean Cooke. Grants from the Manitoba Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts were essential and much-appreciated support during the years I worked on this novel. Thanks to terrific guides in Ecuador, Rodrigo Jipa and Enrique Cerda, and to Alberto Grefa, who took me to see the ruins of the Elliot house and generously shared his memories. My warmest love and appreciation to friends and family whose help has been absolutely invaluable: Erica Ens (my wonderful interpreter), Sam Baardman, Heidi Harms, Jon Montes, Caitlin Thomas-Dunn, Bill Dunn.
I relied on many print and online resources but would like to acknowledge especially the work of four anthropologists: Laura Rival, James A.Yost, Norman E. Whitten, and Wade Davis. “Other cultures are not failed attempts at being you,” Davis reminds his readers. Self-evident, one would think, in the twenty-first century, but these words were on my mind every day as I wrote Five Wives.
About the Author
JOAN THOMAS’s first novel, Reading by Lightning, won the Amazon.ca First Novel Award and a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book (Canada and Caribbean region). It was also longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, among other honours. Curiosity, her second novel, was also nominated for the IMPAC Award and longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Her most recent novel, The Opening Sky, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction. Thomas is a recipient of the Writers’ Trust Engel Findley Award for a writer in mid-career. She lives in Winnipeg.
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Also by Joan Thomas
Reading by Lightning
Curiosity
The Opening Sky
Copyright
Five Wives
Copyright © 2019 by Joan Thomas.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
This novel is a work of fiction based, in part, on real-life events and individuals but including imagined elements and characters. See the Author’s Note here for further details.
Published by Harper Avenue, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
Map by Mary Rostad
COVER PHOTOS: Getty Images/©Varadonn Buarapha (yellow landscape) and Shutterstock (blue landscape and mist)
COVER DESIGN: Zeena Baybayan
Excerpt from Lines: A Brief History by Tim Ingold reproduced with the permission of Routledge, via Copyright Clearance Center.
The cartoon caption here is from the cartoon titled “God” by Liana Finck/The New Yorker Collection/The Cartoon Bank; © Condé Nast. Used with permission.
First Canadian edition
EPub Edition: September 2019 EPub ISBN: 978-1-4434-5855-9
Version 07242019
Print ISBN: 978-1-4434-5854-2
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