At Play in the Fields of the Lord

by Peter Matthiessen

  But while she sat there, absolutely still, the birds took wing; when she turned her head, she saw a Niaruna. He was standing in the opening at the jungle edge, a tall warrior with a crown of fur and bright red feathers, and two red snakes curling around his legs. His arms above the biceps were bound in strips of bark; his face was masked in black and crimson streaks. She tried to scream, but she could not. He put down his bow and arrows and came toward her.

  “Why didn’t you scream?” Quarrier demanded, more resentful than horrified.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I was too afraid. I just don’t know. I started toward my clothes, but then … he … he stopped me. He put his hands on me.”

  “And you were both … You didn’t have any clothes on!”

  “No, you know that,” she cried out. “What are you trying to do to me?” Until now she had not faced him, but had stared nervously at the ground. When she raised her head, her cheeks looked feverish. “No, I didn’t scream! After that first second I wasn’t afraid; I knew he wouldn’t hurt me!”

  “But you were naked!”

  “Oh, you’re just like Leslie! That’s why I didn’t tell Leslie, because he’d be so angry, just like you are!” When Quarrier only grunted miserably and dropped his eyes, she said bitterly, “I’ll tell you something else. I was naked, and I wasn’t ashamed. Am I a sinner, Martin? Am I a sinner then?” More quietly she said, “Maybe it was because he was naked too, because he belonged there where he was, with the fish and leaves and sun, with that emerald bird. For the first time the jungle seemed like paradise, bugs, heat, mud, and all, and he was part of the jungle, he was beautiful. And I was beautiful.” She looked away, bewildered. “What have we done to ourselves, Martin? Oh, I saw something right then—”

  Before he could ask her what she meant, she smiled in an exultant way that frightened him. “He wanted me”—her mouth hardened—“really wanted me.”

  “You mean you—”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  When she spoke again, her voice was strange. “Don’t you think that religion comes less naturally to women?” She shrugged. “Women like me who don’t have children—we probably have too much time to think. Lately I’ve been thinking quite a lot.” She paused for a deep breath. “I think women get more religious as they get older, or when they begin to fear life, or suppress it in themselves. Or in great disappointment. Especially then.”

  Rudely, Quarrier cried out, “What?” He knew that his feelings were totally unreasonable, yet he felt that she had been unfaithful to him, had betrayed him.

  “Especially in disappointment,” Andy said, staring at nothing. “Then they think, There must be something else. And the church holds out the only hope.”

  He burst out, “You said he … he stopped you!”

  “Yes. He put his hands on me, he touched me, very gently. As if he were blind.”

  “I’m astonished he didn’t—you know, assault you. I mean, an Indian! They aren’t romantic. And you say he wanted you! You know he wanted you!”

  “Why do you question me—oh, don’t be such a child!” She moved away from him, angry again. Her voice was hoarse. “You might as well know this, Martin, because it’s true: I wanted him. When he touched me, I almost burst. I wish he had assaulted me, how do you like that?” Her eyes were too bright and she was jeering. “How do you like that, Martin? I’ve never wanted anything so badly in all my life. But you, you’re such a good man, you’ll say I’m possessed—”

  “No, Andy. Please.”

  “But I pushed him away. And then he went. And my immortal soul was saved.” She coughed repeatedly.

  They sat in silence for a time, watching the twilight birds; a woodpecker tocked on hollow wood, far back in the forest.

  Quarrier said, “You look kind of feverish. Do you feel all right?”

  “No, I don’t. I think I’m coming down with flu.”

  “Why, that’s very serious! The Indians have no resistance—”

  Andy said, “I think it was Lewis Moon.”

  20

  BORONAI AND HIS PEOPLE HAD COME BACK TO THEIR VILLAGE ANGRY and upset. The white man had disdained the medicine that the People had prepared for Billy, and the funeral had seemed to them an insult to the dead. Not only had the white people not howled loudly enough, but their funeral ended while the Niaruna were still waiting for it to begin.

  Then the white man laid the child deep in a hole, threw mud on him, and trapped his spirit in the dirt forever with a heavy piece of wood instead of sending it eastward in a death canoe, to be gathered in by the Morning Sun and led up to the sky. The white man insulted the Niaruna by not joining in the Indians’ night of mourning, and they tried to forbid revenge. Worst of all, they called out in praise of Kisu, instead of commending the boy’s soul to Witu’mai the Ancestor—but here the Indians stopped talking, gazing uneasily at Kisu-Mu.

  Once again, due to his link with Kisu, Moon could get no explanation from the Indians, only ill-mannered silence. Aeore, who had been squatting upon his haunches and spitting excitedly on the ground, now snapped his head in calculated rudeness, then rose and stalked off.

  Tukanu had returned from the mission in an especially ugly mood because Taweeda, tired of the mess that the evangélicos had made of things, had fled downriver with Kori to become católica again. Boronai too was angry. In his night of nipi, he had seen that the enemy of Billy was none other than his own worst enemy, Kori, who had fled to Remate before he could be put to death. When Aeore announced in a loud voice that he would lead a party to Remate to kill Kori, Boronai grunted in approval; he glanced at Kisu-Mu suspiciously, to see if the Great Spirit of the Rain had any objection.

  Moon knew that his protest would no longer prevail; he remained silent. Four young warriors went off with Aeore, carrying a small canoe across the watershed to the Espíritu. Three days later the party returned, minus one warrior who had been killed by the Green Indians at Remate. The execution of Kori had been a failure, but on their return they had attacked and killed a family of Tiro caught fishing on the river. The tall missionary and his woman, they reported, had rejoined the Quarriers at the station on the Espíritu.

  The raid upon Remate and the murder of the Tiros meant that time was running out; now Aeore, with the full support of all the band, would go the next day and kill the missionaries, who had not left as Kisu-Mu had prophesied.

  Moon took Aeore aside and explained his plan to him. When Aeore understood that Kisu-Mu would support him as the jaguar-shaman of the whole federation, he nodded his head in approval; he even agreed, after a brief dispute, that his leadership should be established slowly, that Boronai need not be challenged and put to death. The headmen of the People to the East must be gathered at a drinking party, and their support for the federation enlisted with due ceremony.

  Aeore saw that if he himself proposed the plan at the council, his leadership would be all but established in advance, without unnecessary acrimony. He responded quietly and intelligently to every proposition, studying Moon’s eyes; he even accepted Moon’s demand that the missionaries not be killed—or not, at least, until the federation had been established.

  Moon said that in event of battle they must keep their losses at a minimum, and Aeore looked incredulous: to accept in advance the sacrifice for tactical gain of even one of their own warriors was offensive to him. Aeore was sensitive on this point; because of the death of one of his warriors at Remate, he felt he had lost face. Yet his reaction, which would have been typical of a Cheyenne, was a rebuke to Moon, reminding him as it did how far his long experience as a white man, as a white soldier, had removed him from the Old Ways.

  IN this period Pindi had her child, of which Aeore was said to be the father. But Pindi and Aeore had not been together often, and Moon guessed that the child was his own. The Indians preferred to believe that the father was Aeore, for might not the offspring of a spirit be a monster? Pindi herself referred to Aeore as the father of the New Person being made
inside of her.

  Pindi had little use for the New Person, and had told Moon that Boronai would give her herbs to rid her of it. Moon had immediately gone to Boronai and told him that abortions must be forbidden. Boronai looked at him carefully. “It is very common,” he said. “It is her right.” Moon asked him how he reconciled abortion with the knowledge that his band had grown small and weak; why had they made such efforts to procure Taweeda? Why had they taken the boy Mutu? Boronai nodded sadly. “One day we will vanish from the earth,” he said. It no more occurred to them, Moon thought angrily, to provide against this future than it occurred to them not to kill, in time of plenty, more wild pig and fish than they could eat; they gorged on life as fast as it appeared, and were saddened afterward by their wastefulness.

  Boronai did not really see the sense of preserving a child its mother did not want, even to avoid extinction, but he had helped Moon persuade Pindi that she should have the New Person. The idea made Pindi apprehensive. From the way she looked at him, Moon supposed that she feared the child was his, though she said nothing.

  In the weeks before the birth, Aeore was to share Pindi’s seclusion. “It is I, after all,” he said meaningfully to Moon, in a manner intended to deny Moon’s parentage, “who must give New Person breath. It is I who must form New Person’s soul. The woman makes only the body of this New Person.”

  But because his role in the pregnancy meant passing long days in his hammock, eating nothing but manioc lest New Person choke on fish bones, Aeore decided that the former husband Tukanu, who had a taste for indolence, might as well be father. This was agreeable to all parties, and Tukanu set about his parental duties that very day. He went groaning to his hammock, and there racked his poor brain and smote his brow, that his own wisdom and attainments might be infused in New Person. His labor, when it came, brought him far more suffering than his ex-wife underwent; he howled so in psychic agony that the whole village quaked with the uproar and took fright, astonished by this pain that could not be endured in silence. Tukanu lay exhausted for three days afterward, while his people came to his hammock, one by one, to marvel at him.

  Pindi, on the other hand, was delivered by herself, out in the manioc plantation. There were twins. After resting a little, Pindi dug a hole in the ground and placed the girl twin in it and covered her with dirt; the boy she brought back to the village. She cauterized the umbilicus with an ember, washed him quickly, and took him to Boronai, who painted the red serpents of the Niaruna on his legs, placed a string of red seeds around his neck and tied soft fibers to his arms. Moon asked if it might be better to feed the child first and get him warm—the day was wet and cold—but the Indians only stared at him, surprised that he took notice. “Until it is painted,” Boronai said, “it is not a Person. It is nothing.” He lifted New Person above his head and presented him to the attention of the four winds, that they might aid the child on his life journey. Then he went down to the Tuaremi and blew tobacco smoke, and spoke an incantation to the Mother of Anacondas.

  It was the Ugly One who learned from Pindi of the twin. When she mentioned it to Moon he ran to the plantation, and the Indians ran gaily after him. The baby was half uncovered, and its mouth was full of dirt; he knelt beside it.

  “Kin-wee?” the Indians said. “Kin-wee?” Good? Good?

  He snarled at them to drive them back. Their eyes were flat with the intensity of their pack intuition; they were insulted by his horror, and his anger threatened them.

  Well, the little girl was dead—what would he have done had she been living? And perhaps she was better off. He crouched there in the rain. Was this his child? Then he deepened her grave and placed the muddy blue scrap of flesh that was not a New Person back into it; covertly he kissed his fingertips and touched her forehead. He could not get over the idea that she had never felt the sun. He covered her, and stood. “You do not give such a child a funeral then?” he said.

  A funeral! The Indians giggled in relief that he had joked and was no longer angry with them.

  It is not a New Person! It is nothing!

  Moon returned to the maloca and stared at the one on whom had been thrust life. He had never had a child, and he did not quite know how he felt about this one, with its tiny twitching fingers and its wrinkled blindness and the tiny organ which had saved its life; in a way, it was a murderer already.

  Pindi had heard from the others that Kisu-Mu was angry.

  “Only animals drop more than one,” she said. “I was ashamed.”

  SINCE Kisu-Mu’s arrival in the tribe, the Indians had feasted in honor of the palm-nut harvest, of the small Fish People who lived in the Tuaremi, of the Mother of Manioc, of the Morning Star and of the Moon; the brave Moon, Boronai said, had wished to be the bride of Sun until, learning that the People of the Tuaremi would be destroyed by the collision of Sun fire and Moon tears, she had chosen to go her separate way around the far side of the Earth.

  Now the Pleiades had risen in the heavens, and the rains relented. The beasts drifted out of the dying forest to drink once more along the rivers, and fish collected in the deeper pools, and a new feast was held. This “Feast of the Falling River Time” marked the beginning of the Indian year, and the new plantings.

  Aeore took advantage of this feast to summon all the villages along the Tuaremi. Boronai himself, not suspecting that the feast was meant to lay a base for a great federation, issued the invitations in person, going away with Aeore downriver. The headman hoped to heal the feuds between the clans, some of which were so serious that had Kisu-Mu not been in Boronai’s village as an attraction, most of the People to the East would have spoiled the party by disdaining to appear. Aeore felt insulted in advance, so nervous was he; he was still angry that his village had not been invited to a drinking party given downriver on the moon previous, a party he had counted on refusing.

  For several days wild-shouting fishermen speared fish in the dammed and poisoned pools. Moon yelled at Boronai from the bank that they must use barbasco sparingly, or the fish in the whole Tuaremi system would be wiped out and the Niaruna threatened. Boronai said mildly that the pools where most Fish People lived were too large to poison; when the river was high, the fish would replenish the small pools which had been poisoned in the Falling River Time. “This is our way,” he cautioned Moon; with a deft thrust, he pierced a dying sabalo on his trident spear and tossed it, sparkling, into the shallows.

  The fishermen brought in large pirarucu, matamata turtles, some small caimans and a whole dugout of bright small fishes; the hunters returned with guans and tinamous, red howlers and black spider monkeys, a few peccaries, four capybara, and many pacas and agoutis. The young boys ranged the river banks and forest for palm and cashew nuts, for berries and rose apples and guavas, for palm heart from the terminal shoots of the young trees, and for palm fruits for the masato; they brought large leaves full of white palm weevils taken from dead trunks.

  The women smoked the fish, and dug and hauled and cleaned the bulky manioc, grating it to shreds on scraping boards inset with teeth of the piranha, then wringing the poisonous fluids from the mass by twisting it in a mesh bag hung from a tree. Some of the manioc was baked into flat cakes, which would be dipped into a common pepper pot. The rest was masticated by the girls and women, then spat out into wooden troughs where, mixed with water and palm fruit, the paste fermented; by the day of the feast it was strong and thick and sweet.

  Off in the forest the men fashioned giant masks of bark and palm fiber. The place was kept secret from the women, who were forbidden to suspect that the legs protruding from the Mask were human; the woman who saw a Mask before the dancing, Tukanu said, was subject to mass rape.

  Meanwhile the maloca had been repaired and cleaned, though not so scrupulously as to make it appear that Boronai was giving himself airs. The guests would already be offended that Boronai’s village claimed the presence of Kisu-Mu; they would be on the lookout for an excuse to show disgust for the whole boastful performance and go away.
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  Finally the men painted their faces and bodies with the greatest pains, as if one false line would undo the whole effect. They were less careful in their decorations, choosing impulsively from the shells, trinkets, feathers and fur strips at hand; monkey-fur bands and caps of egret feathers were favored, but no two chose alike, there was no pattern. Often the head decoration was capricious: an old animal tail, bird claws, a plume of river reed, pink petals of mimosa. If one wanted an ornament belonging to another, the object was admired lavishly; its owner, failing to convince the admirer that the object was ugly and worthless, was obliged by courtesy to give it up and make himself another.

  Only Aeore never asked for anything, nor was he asked. His paint and dress were constant as the plumage of a bird, as if he knew exactly who he was, had always been and always would be. His lean canoe, his falcon face bands and his bold crown of jaguar fur and yellow toucan feathers all singled him out as the man apart that he meant to be.

  Moon asked the People why they were so careful to go painted. Tukanu said, “It protects me from the heat and Insect People.” And Pindi said, “I wear it so that I may know Pindi in the river’s face.” But Aeore said passionately, “We are naked and have nothing! Therefore we must decorate ourselves, for if we did not, how are we to be told from animals?”

  There it was. The unbearable thing was not the fear that the Great Spirit had forsaken man, nor even that in granting awareness of death, He had made man’s hope ridiculous, but that from the beginning He had made no real distinction between the mindless animals and mankind.

  ONE midafternoon the canoes of the Yuri Maha came into view, in single file under the banks; against the current they moved slowly. They approached in silence and drew up at the landing. Astern, the headmen of the clans steered the canoes; they stared straight ahead as their people debarked, as if struck dumb by the poor appearance of Boronai’s village, while for their part, the people of Boronai took not the slightest notice of them.