by Joan Thomas
They’d pushed back from the table by then. Jim lifted one shoe to his knee, a worn brown brogue, and gripped his ankle in a casual caress. How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who brings the gospel of peace. Olive knew this verse and she suspected Jim did too. She sat still, feeling a new calling take possession of her heart: a calling to strangle a minister of God with her own bare hands.
PETER WOULD SPEND the afternoon with her, that’s how their Sundays went. If the rain kept up, they’d play Scrabble and then have supper together, and he’d drive them to the evening meeting. But while she was rinsing gravy off the plates, Olive heard Jim Elliot say, “What have you got planned for the afternoon, brother?” and Pete reply, “Nothing,” and first thing she knew, they were out the door together.
So Olive spent the afternoon alone in her room, stretched out on her bedspread. She was chilly, but if she crawled under the covers now, she’d sleep until morning. It was that crazy hike they did yesterday, the Chirico Trail. By unspoken agreement, she and Peter did it more or less at a run. They met in a picnic area at the trailhead—Olive had ridden out with the two chaperones and a girl named Marlene—and somebody pumped water. The pump screeched like a donkey and the water was very cold and tasted of iron. When she’d had enough, Olive passed the dipper to Peter. As he drank, he looked at her over the edge of the dipper with eyes that said, Now. The group set off and Pete and Olive snatched the lead, dashing up the rocky ways as fast as they could to get ahead. At a bend, the trail separated and they took the narrower way and scrambled up it. It was a path to a lookout high above, an almost vertical path. Peter swung over the lip at the top and reached back for her. He was on his knees and they toppled breathless onto the moss. He undid a button and nuzzled his face into her blouse. His mouth was looking for the secret place between her breasts. Then it searched lower, it found her nipple. He was lying right on her for the first time. She felt the bulge in his jeans against her abdomen and a wave of astonishment went through her. It was true after all, it was the truest thing she had ever felt. And then there were voices on the trail below, Harry Bancroft shouting, and then a girl, it sounded like Marlene: “Hey, look, they went up this way.”
She rolled over and pressed her face into her pillow. I will praise thee O Lord, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. There’s a verse for everything. And the truly amazing part of it all was this—that what made her parents happy had this wildness in it.
Suppertime came and he hadn’t called. Her mother came downstairs in her navy suit, doing up the little safety pin she used to keep her neckline modest, hurrying so they could catch the six-thirty streetcar, and Olive announced that she was staying home.
“Don’t sulk, Olive,” Livie said.
“I’m not sulking. But I’m not going.” So her parents put their hats on and went without her. She hardly ever crossed them.
After they were gone, she stood for a minute in the kitchen and the cat rubbed itself against her leg. “You’re shameless,” she said, stooping to pick him up. Jim Elliot would be at the door of the Gospel Hall by now, warmly shaking hands, charming all the women. How mercilessly he had turned his blue-eyed charm on her poor mother. Mrs. Ainsley, God loves an inquiring mind. He was not so in love with Olive’s inquiring mind.
She lifted Shadow, pressing her cheek against his soft side, and went slowly back up the stairs. “You little rodent,” she whispered, capping the cat’s bony head, squashing his ears flat, staring into his alien face. He stared back with glassy eyes and she watched the foil sleeve of his irises retract. In her room she set him on the quilt and reached up to pull the elastic off the end of her braid, fingering her hair out into its stiff waves. Then she lay down and picked up her book. Moby Dick. Peter had written his master’s thesis on Herman Melville. Is there a bigger book in the whole world?
When Olive started first grade, her mother walked her up to her classroom and they stopped to admire a display in a glass case in the corridor. It was a collection of dead bugs on pins with little labels in English and Latin. “Beetles of the North-West. Collected by Pete Fleming, 3A,” her mother read out. From the time she could remember, he was her hero and her friend. There were very few Plymouth Brethren children in their school, and the girls with their long braids and shapeless dresses stood out more than the boys did, and were teased for it. But kind and brave, Peter often walked her home, wheeling his bike along the sidewalk. A quiet boy who devoured the newspaper, who puzzled out books in Spanish and French, who copied down Bible verses and taped them to the handlebars of his bike so he could memorize them while he rode. Who talked to her about books, and began to lend them to her. Olive’s family did not have books; her father had grown up in a house where only the Bible was allowed. But Peter got Olive reading. When she was eleven, he lent her The Swiss Family Robinson, and her parents read it as well. Then he began bringing over adult books for them, Christian stories by Amy Carmichael for Livie, but also Gone with the Wind and The Good Earth. All Quiet on the Western Front for Alex.
She had never dreamed of going to university, but Peter came over and talked her parents into it. He was the first from their Gospel Hall ever to go to university, where he did a double honours in literature and philosophy. What was philosophy, when you thought about it, but questions? More than once, Olive had seen him striding down a corridor with a professor, elbow to elbow, locked in argument. And still he was the fair-haired boy at the Gospel Hall, where questions did not exist, where the whole point was to clutch on to truth that had come down to you two thousand years ago, while all around you the world careened in crazy, runaway change. Think how intense and disciplined he had to be to navigate all that. For her it was easier; no one expected her to speak up about anything.
She was still pretending to read when her parents came home. She was in the middle of Chapter 46 and they still hadn’t clapped eyes on a whale. She got up drowsily and went partway down the stairs. “Did you see Peter?” she asked.
“Saw him up at the front,” Alex said. “Didn’t have a chance to speak to him, though.” He and Livie both seemed agitated. “Just want to look up the verse that Elliot fellow preached from. What was it again?”
“Matthew 19:12,” Livie said, pulling out the pins that held her hat in place and setting both the hat and the pins on the sideboard.
Alex sat down with his bible and began to leaf through it. He found the passage he was looking for and lifted the bible and read it aloud. “Matthew 19:12. There are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. He who is able to receive this, let him receive it.”
He looked over at Livie, troubled. She frowned and reached a hand towards him. It was his reading glasses she wanted, and he gave them to her. She stuck them on, and dug the dictionary out of the drawer in the sideboard and paged through it, muttering, “U-N-E . . . U-N-E . . .”
“No, Mother,” Alex said. “It’s E-U-N.”
“Eunuch,” Livie finally read out. “‘A castrated man, especially one formerly employed by Oriental rulers as a harem guard or palace official.’” She looked up at Olive aghast. “He did talk about the Orient.”
“He talked about El Oriente,” Olive said. “You heard him—it’s a region of Ecuador. And that other—it’s just a figure of speech. It means he’s taking a vow to be single for the rest of his life.” She was still standing on the stairs looking down at them and she could not stand the gormless expression on their faces. “It’s a fancy way of saying that he hates women. Like, in his own mind, he’s been fixed.”
OLIVE HERSELF WAS to blame, she always thought (in a certain way): a stranger came to town, and she got up from the table and answered the knock at the door.
She and Peter had been dating for two and a half years. Since a wintry night when the young people’s group came over for hot chocolate after a skating party and Peter stayed behind to help Olive wash the cups. As they finished up, she stepped away from him and he pulled his tea towel taut and fli
cked it in her direction, snapping it against her thigh. She felt it bite through the wool of her skirt, saw it in slow motion, like a big long tongue, like a frog’s tongue catching a fly—Peter choosing her—and she turned her eyes to him, and saw in his face that in that moment it was done. For him. As for her, she’d known it forever, and she beamed her love back at him. In those days, she had no experience with lying. Her lips did not lie, and neither did her heart. There had never been the need.
All that summer after Jim Elliot’s visit, Olive heard nothing from Peter. He was not at the Gospel Hall on Sundays and he never called and explained. It was thoughtless, it was cruel, and it was nothing like Peter. At first she told herself he was busy, and imagined all the things he was doing, and woke up each morning knowing he’d call that night. She sustained this for longer than you’d imagine any sane person could. And then, well, it was like being in the sort of nightmare where you suddenly discover that you’re desperately lost, you’ve wandered without realizing it into a landscape where nothing is familiar.
One day when her mother was out, she stood in the hall with heart thudding and telephoned the Fleming house herself. Peter’s sister answered and called him. He sounded subdued. He said he’d been away, he’d just gotten back, and he was planning to call her. He was going back to his job and he asked her to meet him in Denny Park on his lunch hour. The next day she took the bus downtown and he was in the park when she arrived. They sat side by side on a bench shaded by huge trees. She was wearing a new dress she and her mother had sewed, pale aqua cotton with a narrow yellow belt, and her white sandals. It was the end of August and patches of red already hung in the maple trees.
Under the circumstances, the joy she felt at seeing him was absurd. She spoke warmly because she didn’t know any other way. “So, Sillence,” she said. This was his strange and beautiful middle name, pronounced (he’d taught her) like the French word for silence, and she used it only when they were alone. “What have you been up to all these weeks?”
That was when she learned he was going to Ecuador, hoping to leave by the end of the year. Jim had been looking for a partner for months, he said. Jesus sent his disciples out two by two. Two men, that is. It was dangerous work and there was no place for girls in it. He opened the neat wax paper packet his ham sandwich was folded into and waited for her to respond, not meeting her eyes.
She sat very still. In that moment what she felt most strongly was her own necessity: she knew he was lost without her. She could see him in his new jungle home, Jim Elliot jawing away in a hammock on the other side of a thatched hut and Peter with the inconsolable face he’d had when he was sixteen and his mother died so suddenly. He came to school the day after her death. Olive never expected to see him, but there he was, walking alone down the corridor. She caught up with him and put her hand on his arm, and said, “Oh, Sillence,” and her own tears spilled over. And then he started crying too, and she pushed open a door and led him out onto the playing field, and they leaned against the bleachers and wept. He told Olive that he was the one who found his mother. She was outside under the laundry lines, an artery had burst in her brain. Her eyes were open and at first he had the crazy idea she was just lying there enjoying the sky, which was very blue that afternoon. Olive put both arms tenderly around him. “You shouldn’t be at school,” she said.
“Why not?” He stooped and pressed his face into her shoulder, sobbing in the dry, rackety way of someone who seldom cries. He was trying to talk, but she could barely make out the words. “Why not? I know she’s in heaven with Jesus, there’s no reason to mourn.”
He sat now clutching his sandwich, misery in every line of his body. He was blind to what he needed Olive for, that was the biggest part of his need. “A wife could make a home for you,” she said, feeling her heart begin to beat as though it had been lying dormant in her chest until that moment. “You’ll need a home.”
“Well,” he said stiffly, “when the Lord calls, He provides. I guess we’ll muddle along.”
Olive stared at him, trying to see him clearly, thinking, This began long ago. It began last summer, when he went on the road with Jim. He was finishing up a master’s in English and he spent the summer passing the offering plate at gospel rallies. It was a boot camp in dialectics, he had said at the time, to explain why he did it. Dialectics. She’d smiled, and he leaned against her, his weight trapping her against the brick wall of the Humanities Building, and they kissed.
“This call from God,” she said. “How do you know? Did He send you some sort of sign?”
“I guess He did.” A single steamer fare to the coastal town of Guayaquil is $315, he had said, and when he and Jim tallied up the offerings they collected after speaking to the five Plymouth Brethren assemblies in Portland, the total was exactly $630.
“That’s it?” she cried, incredulous. “You’re going to give up your whole life because of a coincidence in numbers?”
“No, of course not! You asked me for a sign, so I told you. But of course that’s not how the call came. In the last few weeks, Jim and I have immersed ourselves in Scripture. And I can’t tell you how much it’s changed me. It’s changed everything. I was on the wrong path, Olive. How did I think I was going to spend my whole life reading and teaching modern literature? When it’s so base and degraded, so devoted to filth?”
She saw that her instincts about Jim Elliot had been right. “What about Jim? Don’t you think he’s attracted to filth? Think about the horrible things he said about the Indians in Ecuador. He enjoyed telling us that stuff. I think he made it up to shock us.”
He was furious with her, for the first time ever. “He didn’t make it up. He didn’t make it up, Olive.”
“Well, how could he know such a thing? If these people have murdered every outsider who ever entered their territory?”
“I don’t know how he knows it. But I can tell you he’s not lying. And how can you dare say it makes him happy? I’ve seen how it grieves him. It breaks his heart. He’s prepared to give his life to take the gospel to the Auca people. Literally, his life! Can you imagine how much love that takes? How much courage?” He set his sandwich on the bench, mangled from his furious grip, and reached up to his shirt pocket. “Look. God gave me this verse. I wrote it down for you so you’d understand.”
He wanted only one thing from her, she saw it in his face: that she would take the note he was holding out to her and vanish from his life without a fuss. So she took it and got up without a goodbye and walked swiftly across the grass and onto the street. She couldn’t bear to wait for a bus where he could see her, so she walked up Denny Way, climbing the steep hill all the way to Broadway, where criss-cross wires hung between her and the sky, and there she caught a streetcar. As soon as she got a seat, she opened the paper and read, in Peter’s neat hand, I would like you to be free from concern, and she heard Peter’s voice, her boyfriend’s loving voice, and the tears broke through. Leaning her head on the dusty window, she sat and sobbed, indifferent to the curious looks coming her way from across the aisle.
But when the first storm had passed and she was able to read the rest of it, she saw that the “you” in this text was not her at all, that this Bible passage Peter chose to leave her with was all about him. I would like you to be free from concern. An unmarried man is concerned about the Lord’s affairs—how he can please the Lord. But a married man is concerned about the affairs of this world—how he can please his wife—and his interests are divided. I am saying this for your own good, not to restrict you, but that you may live in a right way in undivided devotion to the Lord. 1 Corinthians 7:32–35.
The words were mild and reasonable, but Jim Elliot came vividly to mind—his thick neck, and the single horizontal line that creased his forehead, and the furious way he hitched his chair around to shut her out of his line of vision. Against Peter’s careful, thoughtful ways, the wrestler had prevailed.
She managed to get upstairs without attracting her mother’s attention. Her bathro
be hung from a hook on the door, and she leaned against it and pressed her face into the dark terry. The smell of soap and her old life made her cry harder. Finally she wiped her face and turned to the bedside table and picked up her bible. It was a slim, leather-bound bible, a gift from her parents, and on the flyleaf her mother had printed, THIS BOOK WILL KEEP YOU FROM SIN OR SIN WILL KEEP YOU FROM THIS BOOK.
She wanted to get the whole story. She turned the flimsy pages until she found 1 Corinthians, Chapter 7. She began to read from the top, as Pete must have done. She came to this: If anyone is worried that he might not be acting honourably toward the virgin he is engaged to, and if his passions are too strong and he feels he ought to marry, he should do as he wants. He is not sinning. They should get married. But the man who has settled the matter in his own mind, who is under no compulsion but has control over his own will, and who has made up his mind not to marry the virgin—this man also does the right thing. So then, he who marries the virgin does right, but he who does not marry her does better.
This was in the Bible! He who marries the virgin does right, but he who does not marry her does better.
This was what tore them apart. It was that mossy ridge above the Chirico Trail, it was the afternoons her parents thought she was in the library when Peter picked her up and they drove down an alley off the Pike/Pine corridor and parked, and turned helplessly towards each other. It was the Sundays when Pete came over for dinner and she sat across from him at the table, demure in her long, shapeless skirt and white blouse, her hair pulled into a single braid and the braid pinned modestly up on the back of her head, her heart and her mind carefully fortified with Bible verses (Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil)—it was the way they sat in full view of her parents, and he slid his ankle against hers and the heat shot all the way up her inner thigh. That was it. All these months, she’d felt not a bit of shame. Peter had been praying for a sign from God, and Olive understood that they’d long ago received it. Would they get engaged before he left for grad school in California? They talked like that was the big question, but it was a different deadline they were racing towards, and they both knew it.
