by Joan Thomas
She looked back at the page—the man who has control over his will—and rage filled her. How could Peter be expected to resist an enticement like that?
HER PARENTS WERE grieving too. Her father, more silent than ever, spent Saturdays chipping alone at the stump of the sycamore in the backyard, a job Pete had promised to help with. On Sunday afternoons, her mother insisted they play board games, thinking it might console Olive. But not Scrabble, which she admitted was no fun without Peter. So they played Chinese checkers and Snakes and Ladders. The squares on the Snakes and Ladders board were tiny pictures showing children doing good deeds and bad. Olive studied them as she waited for her turn. These sins were easy enough to resist. Who wanted to be a glutton? Who wanted to smash a window with a stick? But when her turn came and she landed on the pointy tip of a snake’s tail, she felt her shame flare in her cheeks.
One day when Olive was crying in her room, her mother tapped on the door and Olive ended up handing her the dog-eared slip of paper Peter had given her.
“A married man,” Livie said after she read the verse from Corinthians. She looked closely at Olive. “Did he ask you to marry him? Before all this started up?”
“He asked me to wait because he was praying God would give him a definite sign. And I said yes, I would wait. But Mama, he wanted to. He really wanted to! I think he was going to propose that very weekend—and then Jim came.”
“Why do you think that, darling?”
The thing about Livie was, she had not been a Christian when she was young. She’d seen the inside of a dance hall, she’d tasted whiskey and beer. She had that dark glamour, that she’d known the world, and she sussed out things any other mother would be too innocent to suspect. She looked searchingly at Olive with her warm brown eyes, and Olive felt the blood rise in her face, she felt the memory of Peter’s touch on her breasts and thighs. It would never fade, it was like the shadows on the Shroud of Turin.
“Were you ever alone with him, Olive?”
“We dated for over two years. Of course we were alone.”
“Did you let him go too far?”
“No!” Her rage and grief burst out in a terrible wail. “No, Mama, I didn’t! I didn’t let him go far enough.”
“Oh, Olive, Olive, hush, hush. It breaks my heart to hear you say such a wicked thing.” She tried to take Olive in her arms, but Olive pushed her away and lay face down on her bed, and eventually her mother went out and closed the door behind her.
7
IT WAS LATE JUNE WHEN Jim Elliot dropped into the Ainsleys’ little shingled house in Seattle like a cougar dropping from a Douglas fir. All through that fall, Peter and Jim toured the western states, raising funds for their new mission, and she heard updates at the Gospel Hall. In December, she endured Peter’s farewell address to the congregation and lined up with everyone else to shake his hand. Then he and Jim were gone, and one Sunday in late winter Kenneth Fleming got up and asked the congregation to pray for them as they moved back and forth between language study in Quito and fieldwork with the Quichua in the jungle.
“Peter is being sorely tested,” he said. “He’s asked to do a great deal of work in areas he is not well suited for—building construction, engine repair, that kind of thing. Even dentistry. And he’s been very ill with malaria. So I know he would appreciate your prayers.”
Another man stood up. “Just to point out to Brother Fleming that God often chooses a weak instrument, so that His own glory might be evident in the work.”
Olive felt her cheeks warm, hearing the man she loved described that way.
He was everything. She’d been like a tightrope walker, moving between the Gospel Hall and the university, keeping her balance by fixing her eyes on a single spot. And now her spot was gone. When university started that fall, she went back—what else was she going to do? She still had two years for her general degree, and it was a goal she kept moving woodenly towards. He’d dragged her into a god-less world and ditched her there. Left her to deal alone with the filthy words girls scratched into the walls of the toilet stalls and the professors who ridiculed God and claimed we came from monkeys.
But at least she was invisible there—until, in one of her classes, she realized with astonishment that someone was watching her. A tall girl with huge eyes, as heavy-lidded and pale-lashed as a camel’s. When the professor asked them to choose partners for a project, the girl blinked those eyes at Olive and then shot her hand up. “Dr. Cortez, Olive Ainsley and I would like to work together.”
The girl’s name was Carol Howard. They walked to the cafeteria after class and she twirled her fork into her spaghetti and explained: “My cousin Betty wrote me that you were at Washington U. She said I should watch for you. And here we’ve got a class together.”
“Betty?” Olive said.
“Elisabeth Howard.”
“I don’t know anybody with that name.”
“You used to go out with Peter Fleming, right?”
“Yes.”
“Well, she knows him. Jim Elliot? He’s Betty’s fiancé. She sailed to Ecuador last month. Or flew, or took a train, or something. How the hell do people get to Ecuador?” She made a crazy face, as if Ecuador was the moon.
Olive stared at this girl with the long, knobby fingers and the large, off-white teeth. “Jim Elliot is engaged? Wasn’t he—?”
“Always preaching about being single! You’re right, he was. Betty broke up with him and suddenly he’s never going to get married, he’s going to be some sort of monk. But that didn’t last long, they’re back together now. You met him, right?”
“Yes.”
“Isn’t he a riot? God’s Quarterback, I like to call him, just to bug Betty.” She gave up the fork twirling and just slurped up a clump of spaghetti, wiping sauce off her chin with the back of her hand, laughing at her own clumsiness. “I don’t know how well you know him, but he can’t do anything like ordinary guys. He’s always striking these Man of Destiny poses. When he reads the Bible, he has to read it in Greek. When he was wrestling, he always had to be matched with the champion. When he decides to get married—”
(“He’s engaged?” Olive repeated stupidly.)
“—he has to marry the most terrifying girl in the entire USA. Because she is, you know, Betty.”
“How long has she been his girlfriend?”
“Oh, for years. I think he first got the idea of being a missionary from her. She was going to China. She gets a call from God, so she gives Jim the boot, and that’s when Jim decides to go to South America and starts talking about being a eunuch. But then, guess what? Last fall, the Communists throw all the missionaries out of China, and God leans down and taps Betty on the shoulder or whatever the hell He does and says, Doll, I’ve changed my mind. Turns out I want you in Ecuador.” The girl rolled her large, pale eyes. “Surprise, surprise.”
She had been right about Jim. He had played with Peter like a toy. For a moment her hatred coloured everything. She hated God, the vicious traps He sets. She hated Carol, the over-jocular bearer of ugly news. But along with the fury that threatened to burst her rib cage, a little incandescent flame of joy began to burn: down in Ecuador with his new friends, Peter had been talking about her.
After that, she spent every spare hour with Carol. A born-again Christian friend at university! Olive was like an immigrant overhearing a voice on a streetcar and knowing it was a cousin from her own village halfway around the world. But how reckless and irreverent Carol was—that was new.
The course they took together was the Pre-modern World and this was their assignment: Select an artifact and discuss what it reveals about the mores and beliefs of the pre-modern society that produced it. They arranged to meet in the main library. Olive suggested an artifact from Ecuador and Carol jumped on the idea. But the periodicals catalogue in the library had very few listings about the Indigenous people of the Amazon basin, and the term Auca never appeared.
“Well, they have no culture,” Olive said. “No mores
or beliefs. According to Jim.”
“I know,” Carol said, “let’s write to Betty! It would be brilliant to have a direct source. Maybe she could send us an actual artifact.”
“Do we have time?”
“No, course not.”
They claimed a table behind the crumbling pillars in the anthropology stacks and pressed each other for confidences, heads down to avoid the dark looks of the library clerks. Carol was from a farm east of Walla Walla. She had three oafish brothers, her mother was desperately downtrodden, and she had been thrilled to leave home. She boarded with an elderly woman named Mrs. Fanistel, where she did housework in exchange for her room. Her grandmother sent her money and she’d bought two dresses, the first store-bought clothes she’d ever owned. She wore them on alternate days. One was a striped, button-fronted sailor, the other raspberry rayon with a flared overskirt—a peplum, she said it was. She looked like a species of dog in those dresses, a thin hound dressed up to play poker in a calendar picture.
She had no more news of Peter, but lots to say about Betty. Betty had grown up in the East, in New Jersey, and Carol had stayed there for a summer. Like herself, Betty was tall and flat-chested, that was a Howard thing. “And she has a gap between her two front teeth. It’s the first thing you notice. So she’s not exactly beautiful—well, she’s not even pretty, no one has ever described her as pretty, and everybody was really shocked when Jim fell for her, because let’s face it, that guy could have any woman he wanted. Girls throw themselves at him, left, right, and centre. It’s embarrassing to watch. But from the day he met Betty, there’s been nobody else for him.”
Olive felt a bit of respect for Jim stir, hearing this. “But what’s Betty like?”
“She is the smartest girl you will ever meet. She’s going to be famous someday. And she always speaks her mind. No one shoves Betty around. She’s full of sand. That’s what my dad always says: ‘Your cousin Betty is full of sand.’”
Carol was coy about her own beaux, but she was dying to hear about Peter. In recent months Peter had transformed in Olive’s mind from an icon of perfection to a very flawed man—but when pressed, she found this made no difference to her. It was like he had been silver before, and now he was streaked with lead, but heavier because of it, more solid and real.
“He’s a fine person,” she said. “He’s not always trying to impress people, the way Jim is.”
“He is not weighed down with the burden of his own charisma,” Carol said.
“Exactly.”
“But the love just wasn’t there?”
How could Olive make her understand? Finally she told her how Peter had given up skiing. “I couldn’t understand it. I just love skiing and I know he did too. We had some great times with our youth group at Crystal Mountain.” She was remembering the afternoon she’d got stuck on the chairlift, and Peter did a jump turn below and sent her up a doughnut on the end of his pole. His bright, loving face peering up at her. “But suddenly he quit skiing altogether. Because he was starting to get obsessed. He realized it was dangerous to love anything too much.” This was a new and profound insight to her, and her voice shook a little as she put it into words.
“Hmm,” Carol said, watching Olive skeptically. “I wonder—can you love too much?”
Turned out that Carol had been raised in a garden-variety evangelical church, not as strict as the Gospel Hall. She was aghast that women were not allowed to join in the hymns in Olive and Pete’s assembly.
“Well, we can sing,” Olive explained. “But only in our hearts. We contribute through our silence.”
Carol laughed until she almost choked, but Olive found herself defending it. “Honestly,” she said, “sometimes it feels like a better way.”
As for Carol, she hadn’t been to church since a Sunday morning when she was fourteen and walked out in the middle of the sermon. Her parents tried every tactic, including locking her in her room for a week, including sending her to her fanatical aunt and uncle (Betty’s parents) in New Jersey, but she never went back.
“Was the minister preaching about hell?” Olive asked.
Carol grinned. “No, actually, he was preaching about heaven. How we’ll stand around waving palm branches and praising God for all eternity. I’ve had it with buttering up the men in my life. What kind of egoist needs that much praise?” She went to movies now, and drank and went dancing and wore crimson lipstick. This might have fooled others, but it did not fool Olive for a second. Even when Carol smoked, she looked conscientious, as if she was in training to be a smoker. Her efforts to be modern and daring were as futile as her efforts at beauty.
They still hadn’t settled on a topic. “What about the Plymouth Brethren?” Carol joked. “They’re prehistoric.”
“We need an artifact.”
“We could write about your hairdo.”
Somehow Olive never got offended. Even when Carol took the Lord’s name in vain. Gawd, she said all the time—but it was a breath away from a prayer.
SHE COULD HAVE written to Peter, there were ways to get his address. It was a shameful coward who extracted Elisabeth Howard’s address in Ecuador from Carol, and wrote to Elisabeth, and sealed the letter up without reading it over, and carried it to the corner and dropped it in the letter box. And then she had weeks to wait for an answer, and she could hardly recall what she’d said.
Meanwhile, their assignment was almost due. They started pulling journals from the shelves at random. “Look at this,” Carol said. Photographic plates showed small clay figures, human figurines, with doors on their chests that swung open to reveal a chamber. In that little chamber sat another human figure. “Are they pregnant?” Carol asked. “Is that their womb?”
“I don’t think so,” Olive said. “Look.” Some of the figures were men, you could see the little clay bud between the legs.
Host figurines, they were called. They’d recently been found in pyramids in the ancient city of Teotihuacán, close to Mexico City. Apparently the Aztecs revered and collected these little figures, but they were not made by the Aztecs. They were from an earlier civilization, one that ended abruptly a thousand years ago.
“How does a civilization end?” Carol asked. “Does it mean they all died, or they just got conquered?” She went to the file drawers to look up Teotihuacán and Olive stayed at the table, examining the plates, which were black-and-white but seemed to her to glow with hidden meaning. Little clay people sitting naturally, cross-legged or with their clay legs scissored to the side, and some of them lifting their heads as though they were taking in the sun. They were beautifully crafted, their faces detailed and expressive, their mouths lined with even clay teeth, their hair raked by a comb. The figures inside their chests were elaborate, with headpieces and feather cloaks.
Real people had fashioned those figurines, Olive thought with a wrench of surprise. If you studied the clay under a magnifying glass, you might find fingerprints. Real people from centuries ago used this clay to describe their deepest experiences, and she longed to understand.
Carol came back and they took a break. The cafeteria was full, so they carried their Cokes out to the corridor and sat on the stairs. Olive’s mind was still on the last photograph she’d studied, a figurine that had a chest chamber with no little figure in it. But on the door, on the inside of the open door, a human face had been carved in bas-relief. So when you closed the door, that secret face would gaze through the dark into an empty heart. Olive took a drink of her Coke and felt her eyes sting. But Carol didn’t see her tears.
“Where were you when you asked Jesus into your heart?” she asked, leaning back against Olive’s knees.
“In the kitchen with my mother, apparently. I don’t remember.”
“Hey, me too. But it was a special moment for my mother.”
Olive’s free-floating love landed on Carol, sparking off her shoulders and her rough caramel-coloured hair. Both of us are cut loose, Olive thought. And she wondered which of them was on a more dangerou
s path.
ELISABETH HOWARD. WHEN an airmail letter arrived for Olive, she ran up the stairs and locked herself in the bathroom before she slit the blue form open with her nail file. The ink was black and the handwriting spiky and forceful, like a man’s. Olive slid to the floor and read:
Elisabeth was glad that Olive had approached her with her grievance, though it pained her to read of Olive’s distress. She wanted to assure Olive that Carol was entirely mistaken regarding her relationship with Jim Elliot. They were not engaged and never had been. True, God had knit their hearts together with a love such as she had never experienced and did not previously know existed. But there is a higher love than the love between a man and a woman—the love of God and service in His Name.
Elisabeth had been called to minister to the Colorado Indians, a tribe situated in the western lowlands. She would be stationed across the Andes from El Oriente, where Jim would soon be serving the savage Auca tribe. The extreme danger of his mission finally confirmed their conviction that they could not marry. They were currently in Quito together, in an intensive language program. “I know you were fond of Pete,” she wrote, “and terribly hurt when your friendship ended, so perhaps you can imagine how excruciating it is for Jim and me to see each other daily, to work side by side, but be unable to touch or to speak of our love.”
And then Elisabeth was moved to share a precious confidence with Olive:
