Five Wives

by Joan Thomas

  13

  “SO WHAT EXACTLY IS chicha?” Ed McCully asks, helping himself to a third big scoop of macaroni.

  Nate and Marj groan, they gag.

  “I know it’s a drink, but I don’t really know what it is.”

  “It’s made from yucca,” Marj explains. “You know, manioc, the tapioca root. The women chew it up and spit it into a kettle, and then they let it sit for a few days before they drink it.”

  “Masato!” Rachel cries, dropping her fork. “In Peru they call it masato, the Indians live on the stuff. They use exactly the same method. Not long ago the chief’s wife died and—”

  Marilou has a hand over her mouth. “They drink each other’s spit? That’s just revolting. Why doesn’t somebody introduce them to a mortar and pestle?”

  “I think their saliva starts the fermentation,” says Marj. “That’s what I’ve always assumed.”

  Peter has been reading about it. “The bitter varieties of yucca contain cyanide. Not enough to poison you, but over time it can cause goitres. The enzymes in saliva neutralize it. That’s why the Indians prepare it the way they do.”

  “But how would they possibly know that?” Ed asks.

  “It’s hideous to drink, kind of like raw egg white with lumps in it. But it’s quite nutritious, apparently. I’ll get Perfecta to bring some in.” Marj smiles mischievously at Marilou. “It’s just the thing for morning sickness.”

  “Does it make you drunk?”

  “I don’t think so. For fiestas they let it ferment longer.”

  Rachel finally manages to jump in. “I have a very funny story about masato, what you call chicha.” She raises her voice. “Masato, also known as chicha, almost caused a civil war on the Marañón River.”

  Finally she gets everyone’s attention.

  “About a year ago, the chief’s wife died. She was just a young woman, and she collapsed and died overnight, nobody knew why. The whole settlement was in a terrible tizzy, because the chief was threatening to murder one of the other men and steal his wife. So I went over to his house and insisted he see me. What’s this I hear? I said. He didn’t deny it. I have no masato, he said. The kettle was right there and I could see he was running low.”

  “This was the guy you told me about?” Jim interrupts. “The head-shrinking chief you led to the Lord?”

  “Yes, it was Tariri. He had a huge pile of yucca in the corner but nobody to cook and chew it, because they consider it strictly women’s work. ‘There will be no killing of husbands and stealing of wives on Rachel Saint’s watch,’ I said to him. ‘I’ll get someone to make your masato.’ But you know—I couldn’t! I couldn’t find a single girl who wasn’t spoken for. And so the next morning, I took my partner Loretta by the arm and I said, Come on, girl, we’re on duty at the chief’s house. And we did it—we went every morning to that filthy little hut and boiled up his yucca and then sat on the floor and masticated it and spit it into the kettle.”

  Their laughter explodes.

  “It is not easy work, let me tell you,” Rachel shouts over the hilarity. “I already had terrible toothache, I was just waiting for my leave so I could get to Quito to the dentist, and I was in true agony.” She’s laughing so hard herself, she’s in danger of peeing. “I was in agony, but I went faithfully every morning for two weeks, chewed and spat, chewed and spat. Finally one of the clans came back from a trip upriver, and they had a daughter they were willing to give him, so we were off the hook.”

  Nate almost falls off his chair. “What’s their wedding ritual, Rachel? Maybe it’s chewing and spitting! With this mush I thee wed! Hahahahaha. Maybe you’re married and you don’t realize it! You better get on a plane back to Peru!”

  Her laughter dies. She fixes on him a face she perfected on the Aquitania, where they sat at the captain’s table, and everyone drank like fish, and she witnessed all sorts of godless imbecility and endured shocking ridicule. She fixes this face on her brother, and he shuts up fast, and then she hears Jim.

  “He was in the market for a wife! Oh, Miss Saint, Miss Rachel Saint, it could have been your lucky day.”

  SUCH IS HER pain that she spends the next hour kneeling at the throne of God. She waits with a folded towel under her knees, pressing her face into the pillow. She can hear the others moving quietly below, but no one comes up the stairs to inquire as to her sudden exit.

  You gave me victory over this, she says to the Lord. Just the other morning. So what the tarnation is going on?

  It takes God a while to answer. I’m not fond of lies, He finally says. There’s the little matter of the conversion of Chief Tariri.

  Chief Tariri of the Shapras, who had so raised her hopes six months ago when he knelt with her in his hut on the banks of the Marañón River and prayed in a paroxysm of emotion, clear evidence of guilt and the conviction of sin. And then, two days later, a terrible massacre took place upriver. When Chief Tariri returned to the settlement, she went straight in and confronted him. “Did you invite Jesus into your heart?”

  He looked directly at her and said, “Yes. But He didn’t come.”

  Anger rises like bilge water in her chest. For God to rebuke her with this! And in any case, what is a lie? Sometimes the moment you imagine and long for, the event that should by rights have transpired, that’s where you’re going to find the real truth.

  She sends this up to the Lord, but it’s too subtle for Him and a long silence follows. And then she digs in. Consider my grievance against you, she cries. Marj. You seem to adore Marj. You’ve made her plump and happy, given her everything. You want truth? The plain truth is that my sister-in-law has created a full-time job for herself as a broodmare. And now this Marilou person! How can they even use the term missionary? So tell me why they are respected when I am not. Is this fair?

  Fair, God says. It’s not a word I recognize.

  Well, maybe you should enlighten me, Rachel rages (silently, silently, her face pressed into the pillow), as to why do you call single girls out to these stinking jungles only to be sneered at by their own people? The danger and the loneliness, don’t you consider that enough? Having nobody to trade glances with at the supper table? Never a loving hand on the nape of your neck? Is the workwoman not worthy of her hire?

  Nothing comes back. She waits, but nothing comes back.

  Her feet have fallen asleep, they’re dead from the ankles down. She hauls herself up and undresses and gets into bed. Doors open and close in the hallway. A man’s voice next door, and then a woman’s—Ed and Marilou, talking just too low for her to make out the words. She listens in vain for Jim. Her thoughts fall away, she starts to drift. Pictures crowd into her mind and transmogrify, the way they will. Dolls in sparkling dresses in the alcoves of the cathedrals, angels or brides or the glory of the Lord. It was a virgin who bore our Lord, wasn’t it? She’s lying on her side and her shoulder is cramping. She rolls over, washed back up to wakefulness, and there’s the answer, as vivid as if it were backlit: the Auca in their green world, faces turned imploringly towards her. A stained glass window with its pure and simple lines, a private shrine to hope.

  THEY ALL LEAVE and the house falls quiet. It’s better, Rachel can give herself to her work without distraction. The new hospital opens and a doctor flies in from Quito for a two-day clinic. Nate comes home without his cast, red as a lobster. Then Marj goes over for what Rachel presumes is a checkup and that afternoon the children, Debbie and Ben, spy someone on the road and shriek to high heaven—it’s Mommy carrying a baby (also red as a lobster) in the crook of one arm. Marj, all on her own, walking back to the house—well, my goodness! David, they’re calling him. It seems Nate is naming his sons after his brothers.

  But Debbie? He only had the one sister, Rachel thinks with a little rub of hurt.

  A week or two later, Nate boards the bus to Quito, and that same evening, just before sunset, they’re sitting on the veranda and a shiny new Piper Cub comes into sight over the trees. Yellow. They all run out to the airstri
p and clap and cheer when it touches down. Nate clambers out, arms raised. “Back in business, praise God!”

  After that, he comes home every night with news from the stations, what goods he carried in, what gossip he heard, who was sick and who was injured, the Indians and missionaries he flew out to the hospital. The work crews he flies into the jungle, because it seems the men have bought an abandoned Shell Oil town. And Marj is back to her old job in the radio room, with the radio squawking all morning, Shell Mera, stand by, Shell Mera, stand by. She still has the muscular Perfecta working in the kitchen, and she hires a thin girl named Sofia to help with the children. And then, of course, what is bound to happen (what is carved into Rachel’s destiny, stamped like a label on her forehead) begins to happen: Marj in the doorway, holding a child by each hand. “If you could just give me a couple of hours? I am swamped down there. Sofia didn’t show up again and Perfecta has gone out to buy chickens. The baby is sleeping, but these two are driving me crazy. Ben has his truck, he’ll play with that. Won’t you, Benjy? And Debbie has her new colouring book.”

  The pleading face, the little backside jogging down the stairs even though Rachel has not uttered a word.

  The girl thrusts a page into Rachel’s face. “Auntie Rachel, I’m doing this one next.” Heroes of the Old Testament, a robed boy at an old man’s knee.

  “Very nice,” Rachel says. She was just finding shelf space in her mind for seven personal pronouns of three syllables each.

  The girl settles herself on her tummy and picks out a crayon. “This is for her hair.”

  “That is not a girl. That is the prophet Samuel, who lived in God’s house and listened to God’s voice. And that crayon is blue. Don’t make his hair blue. You will ruin your book.” The girl lowers her forehead to the floor, overcome at any thwarting of her will. “Samuel’s hair was brown. Look at the lovely waves. Find a brown crayon, now.”

  She turns back to her notes. Seven pronouns in the Quichua dialect, two words for “we.” Nuqayku, nuqanchik. Who worked out this orthography, q with no u?

  The boy is banging his truck on the floor, making revving noises. He drives it over Rachel’s foot. She sends him to the other side of the bed. Then he’s back, driving the truck right up her leg. Rachel moves out of his reach. “You’re a lot like your father when he was little,” she says. “Although he listened better.”

  “I listen,” the boy says sulkily.

  Nuqayku, nuqanchik. How can they both mean “we”? Nuqayku means “we not including you” (we’re going but you’re not), nuqanchik means “all of us.” A useful distinction, when you think about it.

  The boy smacks the truck hard against her toes, butting at her ingrown toenail. “Oops,” he says, peering up at her for a reaction. “That was a truck accident, Auntie Rachel. The truck smashed into a cliff.”

  “What does your mother spank you with, Ben? Does she use a strap?”

  “She doesn’t spank us.”

  “I know that can’t be true.” Rachel gets up and gathers her underpants off her clothesline and unhooks the cord from the window. “Stand up,” she says. “And stand still.” He obeys, watching curiously while she knots one end tight around his waist. She leads him around the bed and fastens the other end to the bedpost. “Pretend you’re a doggie,” she says. “Aunt Rachel has work to do.”

  He barks for a bit and then begins to holler and finally to blubber.

  “He’s crying, Auntie Rachel,” the girl calls from the floor. “He’s crying, Auntie Rachel. Auntie Raaa-chel, Benjy is cryyyy-ing.”

  Rachel senses Marj in the doorway, but she keeps her head bent over her work as Marj, stiff and silent, unties the boy and leads the children out. “You know,” Rachel calls to her back, “I did not do jungle training in Mexico, I did not translate the gospel for headhunters in Peru, to come to Ecuador and look after other people’s children.”

  And then, no surprise, her concentration is shot. She lies on the bed and she and her gecko watch each other for the rest of the afternoon. She knows what she is doing where children are concerned! For months stretching into years, while her mother and father swanned around Europe, she raised five rambunctious boys. She was fourteen when her parents left, and she remembers them hustling to the train station almost at a gallop, so great was their relief to be escaping. “There should be a law against that sort of thing,” Mrs. Parmalee said when she heard this story. “You were only a child.” “I was never a child,” Rachel said. Of course, Phil and Sam got jobs at a warehouse and they paid the rent, but how often did she see them? And when her grandparents came to take her to the grocery store, when they drove up in their beige-and-maroon town car and saw the boys like a gang of hoodlums and paupers tossing a rag football in the Saint yard, she could not bear the superior look on their faces. “We’re fine for now,” she said, although the oatmeal and potatoes had run out and she was feeding the boys boiled cabbage, all that was left in the garden.

  In the mirror, in the stateroom on the Aquitania, she was as beautiful as a Dutch doll. Yet the English did not warm to her. She stared, she spoke her mind, she knew the rutabaga as a turnip. Her social deficiencies were endless conversational fodder to Mrs. Parmalee. “This is all new to Rachel,” she would say, gesturing to the linen napkins and the crystal and heavy silver. “They’re poor as church mice. Dear child—I’m not sure how she grew to such a size. They use their coffee grounds three times over. They wear shirts and bloomers made from the mother’s gowns.”

  Then the next day, Mrs. Parmalee would introduce Rachel as the heir to the Proctor fortune. “Her mother is a famous beauty in Pennsylvania,” she would tell people. “She was the belle of Wellesley. Ezra Pound was her lover, but she threw him over.” People thought Mrs. Parmalee was crazy, but still they sought her company. Money will buy you any amount of friendship. Well, it did not buy Rachel’s.

  When she came home empty-handed, without so much as a parting gift, her mother was furious. “You have no idea what was at stake. All you had to do was get along with her.”

  “You mean the money.”

  “Yes, of course the money.”

  It was noon and her mother was still in bed, in worn sheets cut in half and sewn back up sides-to-middle. She was not having a baby this time, it was something else. Her hair was unwashed and tangled, the colour of dirty linen.

  “But you didn’t want money. You gave it all up.”

  “Oh, Rachel,” she said. “I had no idea.”

  The gecko gazes at her, its throat going in and out in contemplation. I thought Mrs. Parmalee offered to make you her heir, it says. Sometimes I think she did, Rachel says. It’s hard to remember what actually happened. Sometimes she pictures the stateroom on the Aquitania, and there are piles of yucca in the corners.

  There’s an atmosphere at supper, and frosty is the only word for it. A missionary family called the Youderians are at the table, an ex-soldier and his horse-faced wife, two fretful children. They’re en route to Macuma, a Jivaro settlement a few hours south. The bus from Quito broke down, so they hired a private driver and rolled in hours earlier than expected. Supper will be slim pickings; apparently Perfecta couldn’t find fresh chickens. “Family hold back,” Nate says in a low voice when Rachel passes him in the hall.

  “Youderian,” Rachel says after the grace. “That’s a different sort of name. Where are you folks from?”

  “Montana,” the man says, looking right past her. A morose and unfriendly chap. Does he hate Ecuador in general or just other missionaries?

  The platter comes to her. It’s meat loaf and Rachel does not hold back. If they will not honour me, then I must honour myself, she thinks. At such moments she feels it clearly, the shiny arotama she swallowed at birth.

  THE NEXT MORNING, Marj appears in her doorway and tells her that Jim Elliot will be staying in Shell Mera for a few days. He went to Quito on his own, and he’s on his way home.

  Rachel feels the skin on her arms prickle at the news. She turns towards th
e window to hide her gladness.

  But there is more. “I want to ask you if you would mind moving downstairs. With the Youderians here too, we are going to need your room.”

  “The Youderians are leaving tomorrow,” Rachel says. “As you well know. There’s plenty of room.”

  “Even with the Youderians gone,” Marj says, “we have a problem. We’re not comfortable billeting you alone upstairs when single men come in. It doesn’t look good.”

  “I’ve stayed upstairs with Jim and Peter before. Each of us in our own rooms. I don’t believe the police had to be called. I don’t believe the world came to an end.”

  She turns to look at Marj, who is still standing in the doorway, patting the little simian sleeping limply on her shoulder. She might be pretty if her eyes were not so fatally close together (for peering through keyholes, Rachel’s mother said privately to Rachel, the first time Nate brought his girlfriend home).

  “Well, as it happens,” Marj says, “several families have booked the second floor in the coming weeks, so I’m afraid we’ll have to consider this move permanent.”

  Rachel goes over to the hangar. Nate is there, in overalls. He lifts his shoulders when she tells him. “Nothing I can do about it,” he says. “Marjie is the boss.”

  “Really? You are called by Christ to be the head of your home. If Marj does not submit to you as to the Lord, well, then you have a real problem.”

  He turns his back and starts digging through a bin of nuts and bolts.

  She walks towards the door and on impulse goes back. “You know, when you were little, you used to call me Mommy.”

  He looks over his shoulder at this and his mouth turns down unpleasantly. “I never called you Mommy. That was Ben.”