At Play in the Fields of the Lord

by Peter Matthiessen

  “Sí, claro.” Xantes, frowning, put down his fork with a neat click. “I have abused your hospitality disgracefully.” He made a short bow to Huben. “My apologies, señor. Our differences of opinion have no importance here this evening.”

  Even to Huben, the priest’s skilled candor was disarming. He grunted doubtfully.

  “And you believe,” Quarrier asked, “that your church would support you in co-operating with us?”

  “I did not ask their permission lest they refuse me. Seven centuries ago Pope Innocent III instructed our Dominican Order ‘to extirpate heresy’; as you people are heretics, I have no business among you.” He smiled. “I am quite a renegade, you see. I am perhaps the only Spaniard on this continent who supports the idea of a single Christian Church, a reuniting of Catholic and Protestant.”

  “We do not support that idea here. In fact,” Quarrier said, and this time he smiled himself, “we are tempted to believe in some past union of the Catholic Church and Satan.”

  The priest laughed heartily. “So I gather, so I gather,” he said, delighted, and helped himself to pickles. “And the two have met from time to time. They have been seen in company, I assure you. The Inquisition—why, I doubt if even your fundamentalist Lord of hellfire and damnation would have approved the Inquisition!” He crunched loudly on his pickle. “Our Christian—that is, Western—outlook is rather lugubrious, do you not think? We have persuaded ourselves that abnegation”—and he touched his cassock, not without irony—“and self-sacrifice are superior to joyous self-expression, to the emotions—to simple being? Now … if we could just take time from our teaching of our poor Indians, we might learn something from them. After all, the Indians come out of Asia, theirs is essentially an Eastern culture; they do not seek for meaning: they are. They are not heavy the way we are, they are light as the air; their being is a mere particle of the universe, like a leaf or wing of dragonfly or wisp of cloud. Unlike ourselves, they are eternal.”

  “This conversation is all very sophisticated, I’m sure, but aren’t we forgetting something, Martin?” Leslie stared in an accusing way at all the others, one by one, mouth open in self-righteous injury. With his long blond hair and callow face, his sport shirt and shorts, he looked like a young boy who, confronted with injustice, takes himself too seriously. Andy watched him; when she caught Quarrier regarding her, she turned away.

  “Yes, Leslie’s right,” Quarrier said. “We must decide about the Niaruna.”

  There was little to decide. Yoyo, who could follow a trail, would lead Quarrier to the Niaruna the next morning, for time was running out; Guzmán and his soldiers might appear at any time. According to the priest, El Comandante had arranged with Moon’s partner, El Lobo, to bomb and strafe Boronai’s village; they were only awaiting a shipment of small bombs.

  Without Moon’s leadership, Xantes said, Wolfie had gradually come apart; drunken and lonely, he had now been threatened with extradition by the playful Comandante unless he made an honest woman of fat Mercedes, who was with child. On the other hand, if he bombed as he was told, he would be given his passport and airplane passage west, across the mountains.

  “To the Land of the Dead,” Andy murmured. She looked down at her hands when the men gazed at her. These were her only words during the meal, for she merely shrugged when her husband requested an explanation.

  Padre Xantes did not want Yoyo to return with him, for fear that Guzmán might learn too soon that the Niaruna had been warned. He had already told Guzmán of his feelings about the massacre, which El Comandante—not having to pay them heed—had accepted in good grace. On the other hand, once Guzmán learned that his plan had been betrayed, the padre’s future would be uncertain. He shrugged philosophically. “It appears I must defend myself with blackmail,” he remarked. “After all, it can be proven that Guzmán knew that there was but one raid on the Tiro and that the Niaruna are not—infected?—with foreign criminal elements as he claimed in his report, but only by a pilot he had sent in, without authority, to kill them.” He shrugged again. “It is all so sordid, no?” he said, with an odd kind of satisfaction.

  Huben stared at the little priest with open loathing. While Quarrier sat in morose silence, the two soon fell to bickering again. Intent on what Xantes had called the “fine distinctions,” Huben derided the Catholic exaltation of the Virgin Mary, while the padre, less angry than amused, called all Protestant teachers “outlaw priests,” since they had not been ordained by the true clergy—those on whose shoulders had been laid, across the centuries, the hands of the apostles. Huben referred him to Acts 8, in the first verse of which the Christians were all scattered abroad throughout the regions of Judaea and Samaria, except the apostles. The fourth verse read, Therefore they that were scattered abroad went every where preaching the word.

  “Those were not apostles,” Huben crowed, “They were simple Christians!”

  Xantes sat forward, not quite smiling. He was less discomfited than gratified that Huben was putting up some sort of fight. They passed on to a dispute over the Eucharist. So it went, back and forth, back and forth, more and more petty, more ludicrous. Should there be water in the wine? Should the service be in Latin?

  Thus you would haggle and nag each other, Quarrier thought, until Heaven crashed about your ears. He got up, unnoticed, and retired to his room.

  On his knees, he prayed for the soul of Billy Quarrier, dead at nine of blackwater fever in the uttermost part of the earth—and now Hazel sat up and stared at him. The hanks of stiff black hair had fallen forward past her eyes like horse blinders, so that her ears stuck out. Her gray-green eyes were bright, her mouth was big and her nose and teeth were small; he glimpsed a savage animal, mad with the suffering twisted and crammed into her big racked body. At one moment he saw the apparition of a girl once lovely to him, and in the next all human ugliness, red-eyed and cornered and swollen, although her outward face was set, her green eyes dry as pebbles in a desert river.

  He had scarcely talked with Hazel since the death of Billy; they could no longer communicate, and preferred not to talk at all. Quite apart from her grief, Hazel was torn in half by loyalty to her marriage vows on the one hand, and by a vengeful resentment, a lack of respect for him, on the other; she would leave him if she had the courage, if she didn’t feel that search for happiness on earth must be immoral. He would leave her too, as perhaps Andy might leave Leslie, but all of them were pinned like butterflies to the frame of their own morality, and that was that. Kneeling there in the dark, observing her, Martin shrugged. They must try to hold together what was left, and stumble on.

  Then Hazel said, “Make love to me.”

  She was sweaty and feverish, and gave off heat, and when he took her in his arms, seeking to calm her, he found himself caught up in a death struggle. They writhed together, soaking wet. Though he went with her, a part of him stayed behind to watch and listen, like a man uneasy at the edge of the night jungle, to cries of ecstasy which were more like howls, and obscene howls at that; they shook the hut. He clapped his hand upon her mouth. She bit it hard. She gasped, “Oh Jesus, make love to me, screw me, cruel Jesus, damn you Jesus.” He reared back in terror and slapped her pale avid face. Hazel lay back on her pillow, her hair crumpled, and gazed at him peacefully for the first time since the death of Billy, and went to sleep as sweetly as a child.

  He lay awake for a long time. Asleep, he dreamed that he was peering up into the highest steeple of a great cathedral; through the steeple’s translucent skin he could see the night stars of the heavens. A star came down, like a wand of God, and touched the steeple’s point; the cathedral dissolved in a burst of ethereal light. All the churches of the world were gathered around this greatest of cathedrals, and they, too, dissolved in showers of light, one by one, as they were touched. But the fragments did not descend to earth; instead they were drawn gently upward, into the starry universe, as if their time on earth had ended—as if God, more rueful than angry, had withdrawn his sanction of man’s c
hurches and mankind, saying, No, you have not learned the Way.

  With the loss of Heaven, Martin awoke and did not sleep again; he stared at a dull low ceiling of thatch and mud. By morning his eyes were dry and taut, and his every organ ached; lying there on his back, he felt split open, like a dressed animal. A dank fog had settled on him in the night; he lay there helpless in its shroud. The prospect of his journey to the savages filled him with terror, but the journey, with faith or without, had to be made.

  QUARRIER asked the priest to take Hazel to Madre de Dios; Andy would accompany her, and would put her on a plane and send her home on leave to North Dakota. Hazel offered no resistance to this plan; she had even forgotten that Padre Xantes was a Catholic. She had withdrawn to the asylum of her past, and would have departed with this same serenity for the moon.

  Quarrier took her clumsily into his arms and said good-bye to her as to a stranger; she giggled loudly, blushing, and he found himself in tears. “Good-bye, good-bye,” called Hazel, to no one in particular; standing there in the early mist, her black shoes square and sensible, she looked like a head nurse on her day off, bound for a nice excursion on the river.

  Andy was to wait in Madre de Dios until notified by radio that the Niaruna situation had been resolved; if there was any mission to return to, she would then be flown back to Remate, and Huben would fetch her in the boat.

  The only person hostile to these plans was Yoyo. The priest tried to explain to the Indian why he was being left behind, but no one could possibly have made him understand why it was that the white people could commandeer his boat—for though both boat and motor actually belonged to Guzmán, the prestige that went with them on the rivers had adhered to Yoyo, and he regarded them as his own. In his torment he shouted rudely that Padre Xantes did not know how to run the motor, that the priest would surely overturn the boat at the first bend and drown the lot; they would all be eaten by piranhas! Unless he, Yoyo, was there to protect them, the Tiros would foully violate the women! El Comandante would be very angry and would punish evangélico and católico without distinction!

  This address was delivered from the stern of the dugout, from which he refused to budge; then he started up the motor in an attempt at flight, slamming the motor into reverse and churning backward. Quarrier, who had leaped for the boat’s liana, was yanked headfirst down the muddy bank into the water, but he held on long enough for Huben and Xantes to rush to his assistance. For one wild ecumenical moment the three holy men, grunting and thrashing in the mud and water, did violent battle with their maddened convert and his outraged machine. Then the clutch slipped and the engine’s roar exploded in the jungle morning; the motor belched smoke as Yoyo howled, and the canoe lashed back and forth like a dying dragon. When the motor stalled, they drew the boat ashore. Quarrier seized the raging Indian and hauled him out onto the bank and shook him.

  The priest was vexed at having soiled his habit, and Huben was enraged that his wife was laughing. Quarrier too was extremely angry; he was wet and muddy, he had wrenched his knee and was in pain, and worst of all, he had lost his last pair of glasses in the river. This was such a blow that for the moment he did not even wish to think about it; he stood there blinking, trying to regain his breath. Andy was laughing, and although he saw precisely why she laughed, and shared every drop of her despair, he could not laugh himself for fear he might not stop.

  He still held Yoyo tightly by the arm. Hatred had drawn the Tiro’s small dark face so taut that Quarrier, startled, released him as he might release a snake. Yoyo’s hand flicked to his hip; though he did not draw the knife, he did not bother to disguise the gesture. He simply stood there, half turned, body coiled, not even breathing, in his white-man’s haircut, his Indian tattoos and the red shirt which, exposing his crucifix, was so large for him that it covered the mission shorts and hung on his bare brown legs like a baby’s frock; his yellow eyes were slightly averted, like the eyes of an angry dog expecting to be struck.

  Padre Xantes told Yoyo that he was needed to guide Quarrier to the Niaruna, that his was an important mission, that he would be well paid. Yoyo neither moved nor spoke. He did not return the priest’s good-bye, or even wince as Padre Xantes, navigating with suspicion and distaste, turned the canoe clumsily about and started downriver.

  The skirted forms were soon so indistinct to Quarrier’s poor vision that he never knew if anyone returned his wave. This did not matter much, since he himself could not have truly said which of the women he was waving to.

  When the boat had gone, he and Huben searched for the glasses in the soft mud along the bank. Leslie poked vaguely at the mud; at one point he reared up in irritation and ordered the Tiro to come and help them. This worsened matters; all three stood stiff until Yoyo broke the triangle, coming slowly down the bank like a man entranced. They hunted together, bent-backed, in the brown slow current of the Espíritu. Finally Yoyo straightened, followed by Huben. Quarrier hunted for a little while longer, his bare feet flinching in his fear of stingrays and electric eels as he moved farther from shore; he only hunted to forestall his dread of sightlessness, and soon he too gave up and climbed out on the bank.

  “Well, Yoyo!” He tried to smile. “I’ll need you all the more now that I’m blind.”

  The Tiro gazed at him without expression.

  Quarrier changed his clothes and prepared to leave. Huben grew more irritable each moment. He began by questioning the priest’s warning; perhaps Guzmán had accepted their assurance that no help was needed. And what made Quarrier think that Aeore’s men would not kill him the moment he appeared? Quarrier said nothing. The presence of Yoyo, Huben pointed out, was no guarantee, but the reverse; the Niaruna had already taken Tiro life and would not hesitate to take another, especially if the Tiro was friendly with the whites. For Quarrier to go alone and half blind into Niaruna territory was suicidal; far better to wait and see if Guzmán came, to prepare the boats for flight, to stick together. “We could put up the barbed wire!” Leslie said.

  Finally he pointed at Yoyo. “Do you give yourself the right to place this man’s life in jeopardy?”

  Leslie was afraid to go with Quarrier into the jungle, but he was also afraid of being left alone. Martin understood this and was sympathetic; in Huben’s place, with everything to hope for—entirely unsustained, that is, by hopelessness—he too would refuse to go.

  Leslie was yanking desperately at the balky rolls of wire, and cut his hands; he seized at every straw of solace, following Quarrier a little way into the forest, then darting back quickly to his wire. “Listen, Martin, you’ll be back today now, without fail? Martin? Can you still hear me, Martin?” He was only a few yards away, a thin silhouette in the light of the clearing.

  Quarrier turned. “If I’m not back by tomorrow morning, you’d better leave.”

  “Tomorrow morning! Before dark, you mean!”

  “I don’t know how far it is,” Quarrier called. “It may be a long way.”

  He started off again. Ahead of him, Yoyo waited. Behind him he heard Leslie call, then call again, his voice much higher. Through the jungle gloom, the lost words searched like spirits of the forest: “Martin?” A pause, a twig, a dry pod falling from the canopy. “God damn you, Martin Quarrier! Why don’t you answer me?”

  Already Yoyo had picked out the trail, drifting so far ahead that Quarrier kept losing him. The bright red of Yoyo’s shirt, spinning in the funebrial shades like a huge butterfly, lured him farther and farther from the light; but for the shirt he would scarcely have known that he had a guide at all, for the Indian’s feet and tongue were silent. Several times he had to shout for him; the huge dead weight of leaves submerged his voice.

  The penalty of blindness kept increasing; he hurried along, tripping and stumbling, sinking to his knees in murky holes. What was there to stop Yoyo from abandoning him, or worse? And the terror drew tighter each time the Indian reappeared, for he never came from the direction Quarrier expected but would materialize from behind, as if he ha
d followed for some time, listening to the white man shout. Quarrier could not make out his face, but he could imagine the hard mask through which the thin flat Mongol eyes observed him.

  It occurred to him that Yoyo meant to kill him. Abruptly he would wave the Tiro ahead, though he never knew just where ahead should be. He had lost all track of time, and all direction, all orientation of any kind with anything he had ever known; he wanted to pray but was no longer confident that God would hear. He had lost all sense of things; in the absence of air and space, of light and sky, he circled aimlessly in the dense core of a huge ball. The feeling that Yoyo meant to kill him grew; he plunged ahead, clambering and falling, pursuing and fleeing the Indian in the same impulse.

  The red shirt halted unaccountably, not far ahead. He caught up, gasping with exhaustion, his ears ringing; it seemed to him that he heard voices. The Indian moved ahead, muttering crazily; he seemed on the point of bolting. Soon light appeared, and as they neared the clearing, a loud whooping arose; Quarrier whirled to see three savages who had been escorting them. Two more drifted in on Yoyo’s flanks, and now the whole group moved out into the sunlight in a blinding din of dogs and sun and macaws.