by Joan Thomas
Not long ago, Jim and I allowed ourselves a quiet hour together after a difficult day of language study. We slipped away from the group to walk through one of Quito’s beautiful old cemeteries. Soon overcome with emotion, we sat and prayed, dedicating our lives anew to the Lord’s service, and I confess there were tears on both sides. When I whispered Amen and opened my eyes, I saw that while we prayed, a full moon had risen and cast the shadow of one of the gravestones onto the smooth bench between us—it was the shadow of a cross. Could God have provided a more powerful symbol of the sacrifice He requires of us? I will carry that image in my heart in the years ahead, and I pray that you might embrace it too. Submission to God’s will is never easy in the moment, but the eternal rewards are incalculable.
Your sister in Christ,
Betty Howard
Olive read this letter through twice, and then tore it into narrow ribbons and dropped them into the toilet. Stubbornly the pieces floated on the surface, black ink swirling off them, until she banged on the flush handle and they were sucked down the foul, stinking pipes to the freezing waters of Puget Sound.
On a Sunday morning when the smell of spring rose from the damp lawns, Peter’s father approached Olive after the assembly and handed her an envelope. “Peter has started to make a carbon copy every time he writes a letter to us. He asked me to pass it on to you, so that you can pray for his work in Ecuador.”
There it was in smeary carbon—the small, quick handwriting she knew so well. Dear Dad and Mother. He never called his stepmother Mom.
He began by saying that he’d contracted malaria again and had to be airlifted to Quito. He couldn’t help but be grateful for this respite from the jungle, where daily his deficits were on display. He didn’t know how to use a gun. He couldn’t play the piano accordion or fix the generator. He got airsick when they went out in the single-engine plane searching for Auca houses, and spent the whole mission with his head between his knees. He had terrible occipital headaches. “I overhear the Quichua kids refer to me as a wawa,” he wrote to his parents. “I don’t believe the word needs any translation.” His honesty was heartbreaking, especially considering how much he disliked his stepmother.
After that, the letters came every two weeks. Olive had to believe that Betty had spoken to Pete, that that’s what had prompted this. There was never a line to her or about her, but Olive treated these carbon copies as deeply personal. She never showed them to her parents. She kept them in a special stationery box in her dresser drawer and read them over and over. He did not describe his new home or the people he was working with, but no doubt his earlier letters had done that. It seemed he and Jim were ministering to the Quichua Indians, which was not what they had intended. But they had no idea how to reach the Auca, and God was bafflingly silent and remote on the subject. Pete and Jim spent a lot of time negotiating with Him, pleading for auguries. If God wanted them to go into Auca territory, would He please communicate this by keeping Peter free of malaria for six months? The next letter, Peter was back in hospital in Quito and had dialed this test down to three months. But even when you made things easy for God, He never met you halfway. They had just finished building a school in Shandia when the river rose and washed it away. They moved to higher ground, and then the river rose again and washed away all the outbuildings plus five hundred hand-planed logs, each one the work of a day for a Quichua man. All gone in a matter of hours. Plus a third of the airstrip, which they had just cleared so it was usable again.
God’s ways were infinitely mysterious.
One Sunday, Olive found herself walking out of the Gospel Hall beside Peter’s stepmother, and she said, “I wonder if I might read Pete’s letters from the beginning, just to get a better sense of the mission?” Mrs. Fleming’s lips puckered at the corners. “Oh, I’m afraid Peter hasn’t authorized that.” She wouldn’t even look directly at Olive. Olive wished then that she had kept her mouth shut until she’d had a chance to ask Pete’s father. But Pete’s sister Mary had overheard this exchange, and the Sunday after, she slipped Olive a little packet of letters. And then gradually a vivid picture of Peter’s home in the rainforest took shape in her mind.
After leaving Quito, they had moved into the Tidmarshes’ house at a Quichua settlement called Shandia, on the Napo River. The house was split bamboo, set up on posts, with a thatched roof. They used kerosene lamps and they threw their waste water into a ditch that ran like a shallow moat around the house. They had a servant, an Indian man named Yapanqui, whose first job every morning was to sweep up the cockroaches that had succumbed to the DDT during the night. He lived with his family nearby. The Quichua subsisted by farming, by hunting, and by selling rubber and tapir skins. They ate yucca, maize, and bananas in every form including soup. Some were indentured to a nearby plantation—they had taken trade goods at massively inflated prices—and would never get out from under that burden. They suffered from intestinal parasites, snakebites, tuberculosis, malnutrition, and malaria. Jim and Pete had learned how to give injections but could not keep enough penicillin on hand. Often the witch doctor would get to people first, and they would die. Shandia also had a resident Catholic priest, an American. Pete and Jim had entered Ecuador as linguists and teachers, and under the terms of their visas they were not allowed to try to convert the people or to set up churches. The priest was watching them like a hawk. But Jim paid off the plantation debt for two young men and hired them to teach him and Pete the language. They were hoping to translate the Gospel of Mark. They trusted the Holy Spirit to rise up off the pages and speak to their informants, who could then share the good news with others.
“I often think of the echolalia in the New Testament,” Peter wrote, “the speaking in tongues. We Brethren have viewed this gift as overly emotional, a sort of ecstatic babbling, and have not sought it. But I wonder now if we were mistaken in this. Did God give the Apostles the gift of an actual but unknown language so that they might share the gospel more swiftly? This is the subject of much discussion at our supper table. But so far we are acquiring the Quichua language the hard way.”
SUNDAY MORNINGS, THE light at the window would pull her from the land of dreams, and she’d be lying on her side, Pete nestled behind her, his hand cupping her breast. She’d float there until her mother called, and then she’d get up and dress and go with her parents to the Gospel Hall, where she sat listening to the silent prayers of the women and their silent songs (almost deafening, the silence of the women). Weekdays, it was her alarm clock that woke her. Then she’d get up in the dark and wait sleepily on Stanley Street until the streetcar came to carry her to the university. She was assigned Anna Karenina, and in the library she discovered whole shelves devoted to the nineteenth-century novel. She’d often read for hours between classes, enjoying the thick old paper and the vague lines of type, which occasionally wavered or even lifted from the horizontal like birds taking off. She read hungrily, her heart beating fast for the heroine; whether she was a servant girl or the wife of a high-level government official, she was full of longing, she didn’t quite fit. Then terrible things happened, and she’d be desperate, and do something reckless, steal money or take a train to meet the wrong man. But by the end of the book, it would be done. She’d be walking a path along a cliff at dawn, or cradling a child in her arms while rain fell outside the window, and she’d be changed, the meaning of everything fully revealed and throbbing within her.
Olive sat holding the small leather-bound book between her two hands, as it seemed she herself was held and sustained in the mind of the author, a benign god: only things that had meaning were allowed in this world.
It was dark again when she caught the streetcar and walked home from the stop. Walked through drizzle that made gauzy circles in the street lights, and into the room where her parents sat companionably in the heat from the little coal burner, her mother knitting and her father reading, the two of them oblivious to how stale the house smelled, a smell Olive traced to her father, to his exhaustion.
All her life he’d gotten up in the dark to do his milk route. Afternoons he lay down for a nap, but he seldom slept. Saturdays he went to the library to feed his recently uncovered passion for warfare. Battle Stories of German Tank Commanders. The Siege of Leningrad. Blood of Our Heroes. This was what Peter had given him by bringing books into the house, fuel to stoke a bellicose fire. He read every evening now, just getting up occasionally to open the door of the stove and tip in a shovelful of coal. He was preoccupied with the state of the world, and troubled at the way the rules of decent conduct had been forgotten since the servicemen came home from the war. It was his most cherished grievance, the new wave of permissiveness sweeping America, and he had a new culprit to blame for it, Christian men like Peter and Jim who had gone overseas and abandoned their country to its folly. Abandoned it to the Communists, who were everywhere and invisible, eating their way like termites into the foundations of government, planting messages in newspapers and films, corrupting people’s ideas and values, so that some ordinary morning Americans would get out of bed and find that their way of life had been entirely stolen away.
One day Olive asked her father if she could do his milk route with him. At three he was in her bedroom doorway, dressed in his white uniform and bow tie. They were picked up by a van that ferried all the milkmen to the dairy at Licton Springs, where their trucks were parked. The milkmen walked across a big parking lot to the office while Olive stood shivering alone in the dark. Above her, individual stars stood out white from a milky field. She tried to make out shapes, but she could never see the constellations other people saw. When her father had joined her again with the keys to his truck, she said, “I wonder sometimes if the constellations are just made up. Wouldn’t you see entirely different pictures if you just picked different stars?”
He shoved his cap up so he could look at the sky. “The Big Dipper is real,” he said. The dipper! He was making a milkman joke.
She had never seen her father drive, and this hidden competence moved her. They drove all the way to Holmann Road, through a city that had nothing to do with them, the ships in the harbour below, the warehouses and the sinister locked-up taverns with their neon signs dark. Her father turned off into a modest neighbourhood and parked. He swung his iron rack out of the truck with ease and set off up the street, leaving two or three bottles on each stoop, picking up the empties. Sometimes a housewife had forgotten to put out her empties and Olive thought he might show mercy and leave milk anyway, but his rules were clear, grace did not figure into it. She trailed after him and marked his sales in a little notebook. They worked in the dark for a couple of hours, and then lights came on one by one in the houses and Seattle woke up around them. Boys slipped out of back doors and gathered in a little park and began to pitch a ball around, a happy pre-breakfast game of catch in the ringing air. As Olive and her dad walked by, she glanced at his face. It was as closed as ever. He took no joy in the scene. They were all perishing, those kids, going to hell.
He did not preach at the Gospel Hall like most of the men, he did not have that gift. He did not build cabinets, or write books, or plant trees. He had no work that would last. Olive was his only enduring project. Three or four times a week for her entire life, he’d taken her into a hall to sit in silence and learn about God’s intention to condemn most of humanity (and possibly her) to the lake of fire, where they would be tortured forever with hot pokers. She did not really hold this against her parents; they did what they thought they had to do, but they also clothed her in love, so that she was immune to it. The sermon would thunder to an end and she would step out into the sunlight and the spring wind would blow the greasy ash and brimstone right off her skin.
But looking at her father’s face in profile as he turned the key in the ignition (his down-turned mouth, the flesh starting to sag under his chin), this was her question: if you were going to latch on to one story to explain everything, why that particular story?
THE FIRST PERSONAL letter Olive got from Peter was a straightforward proposal of marriage. It arrived in early February 1953. He told her that Jim Elliot had been led by God to ask Elisabeth Howard to give up her ministry to the Colorado Indians and come to El Oriente. Jim had built a fine new house up on the ridge, and he and Betty had recently been married in a small ceremony in Quito. And now Peter was alone in the Tidmarsh house, and was himself considering marriage. “I’ve always known that, if I were to have a wife, it would be you,” he wrote. “It was just a question of whether God wanted me to marry at all. And now I see that He does. We may never entirely understand His reasons for subjecting us to this painful separation, but I know we are the stronger for it.”
The word sorry did not appear, or the word love. It was as if he were hiring her for a job. He’d worked out all the logistics. His first three-month furlough was a year away; they could wait and talk this over then. But if she agreed to an engagement now, they could be married when he came home and she could return to Ecuador with him. And doors would open for her, she could use the intervening year to get ready. For example, she could take a Missionary Medicine course (he recommended one in Los Angeles) that would be tremendously helpful in their ministry, and was open only to individuals who had already been assigned to a mission field. He prayed that God would advise her.
And then this last paragraph:
Olive, just knowing that you exist in this world, a girl so fine and so true—on the darkest days it’s the only hope I have. I am so tormented, my thoughts poison everything around me. But then you come to me, and you are whole. I need you desperately. I share every moment of every day with you. I can’t bear to be apart from you any longer.
And it was signed, Sillence.
The Auca Scale
8
THE DUSTY LITTLE CAR PARKED beside the garage used to be Sharon’s. A blue Ford Fiesta with a Jesus fish on the bumper—Abby’s dad gave it to her when she turned eighteen. She swipes the ginkgo tree crap off the hood and windshield and drives to the gas station on Robson Road. There she fills the tank and washes the windshield and checks the oil the way her dad taught her. The oil is fine and so is she.
Out on the road by nine thirty, she’s already in a movie. The sort of film that starts with collecting up all the players from across two continents, a minute or two of backstory for each. Abby’s in her dad’s house in Portland, alone, paralyzed, her path blocked no matter which way she turns—and the phone rings. And then she’s on the I-5 heading south, driving a car that belonged to the mother she lost so tragically in her youth, and this is a crane shot, or maybe the crew is up on the ridge. No, they’ll have a helicopter tracking her as she barrels along. The soundtrack . . . Abby reaches into the console and pops a CD blindly into the tray. The music is playful and spunky—it’s her mood, it pulls her forward, snatching up details from the landscape, plucking at the trees she spins between.
She passes Salem and for a while she’s in a tunnel of flickering brilliance, where trees shoot their shadows over the highway. Then she’s at Gold Hill and she doesn’t remember Grants Pass. Maybe the strobe did something to her brain. They used to drive a lot, she and her dad, in his old Pontiac. They drove and drove and drove, especially the summer after Sharon died. They didn’t talk much in the car. David was constantly sleepy and Abby was tall for her age, so sometimes he let her take the wheel. Not on this highway, though. On this highway he always made her bury her face in her arms, because strobe light can cause seizures in young people.
She turns the music off. All night, when she surfaced from sleep, she was thinking about the part she might be asked to play. What if the director gave her a monologue, and she offered to read it in different voices? Nobody else they audition will know the characters well enough to do that. Well, she didn’t actually know Marilou very well, or Barb Youderian. Even Olive is a mystery. And her two real grandmothers, Marj and Betty—it was hard to know what they actually thought. When Sharon was sick, her granny Marj used to visit and spend all day cooking up sou
p and chili and ladling it into containers for the freezer, while Abby sat at the kitchen island writing up labels. Once in a while Operation Auca would come up and her granny would say, “Well, it was hard, but at least we were all a hundred percent in agreement.” Could that possibly be true?
She sees a first billboard for Sacramento, and stops for a taco. By early afternoon she’s across the California state line. The notion of a movie, the phone call from Walter Varga, feels less and less real. It’s dangerous, it’s reckless, taking off to California without telling her father. She tries to call up the voice of this serial killer who did such immaculate research to lure her to LA. He sounded all business, a little uninterested even, like he was doing his job but didn’t care all that much whether she turned up or not.
The bigger issue is how her father will react if she gets a part in this film. She feels a little sick at the thought. All the criticisms that have prickled in her mind for years, things she’s never talked about with a living person—they’ll be given words and splashed on a big screen. The outside view. Walter Varga talked about the cultural context, and about an anthropologist. What will that mean for them? Will she be asked to portray her character as stupid, or deluded? It’s one thing to drift away, it’s another to publicly trash the women who raised her. Her beautiful mother, who truly believed in heaven but fought for her life, fought to stay with Abby. Her kind granny Marj, and her grandma Betty, who may not have been warm but was sure about things, and clever, and brave, all of which you need to be. Olive.
And then she thinks, Olive herself opened the door just a tiny crack, last time Abby was in Seattle.
They were looking at the Life magazine article about the killings. Olive had cut the pages apart and slid each one into the plastic sleeve of a photo album. She’d added a cover page with a verse hand-printed on it: Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. The pictures were very familiar. A body face down in water, being towed by a canoe. Who was it? Abby was glad not to know.
