Five Wives

by Joan Thomas

  She steps back out into the cruel light of the airstrip. She can still see him, the lovely-looking little fellow he was. How much he resembled her. She can see their dad in a shop, in warm conversation with a lady in a red hat. “Nate was painted by Botticelli,” he said, “and so was Rachel.” How attached that little boy was to her! Even after his hair and his voice darkened and he developed the goaty smell they all took on at a certain age, even when he stopped talking to her, she would sense his yearning floating across the room. Now he won’t look at her.

  It’s a narrow cell they dump her into, at the opposite end of the house from Nate and Marj’s spacious bedroom. For whosoever has, to him shall be given. But whosoever has not, from her shall be taken away even that which she has. She is in Coventry, whatever that means, down past the radio room, the storage room, Nate’s darkroom. She is a mile from the toilet. She has a tiny window, but there’s no real airflow, no space for a desk. She’ll be forced to work at the kitchen table, or on her bed. She does have a bed, be thankful for small mercies, and after she’s dragged all her things downstairs, she falls to her knees beside it and presses her face into the coverlet. A picture comes to her, Nate under a turned-over chair, she’s feeding him peanuts. Is this a game or a punishment? She can’t tell. All dead, your brothers? laughs Señora Sevilla. She sees one of them lying face down on the daybed in the kitchen, his shoulders heaving. A big boy, a man really, crying like a baby. Was it Nate? She drifts off, kneeling at the bed, and then the pain in her knees brings her back to herself, and she gets to her feet and undresses and crawls under the cover.

  THE YOUDERIANS LEAVE, the plane from Quito lands. Jim Elliot has a surprise in tow, a wife. A tall, thin woman, and he beams as he leads her up the steps of the veranda and introduces her as his honey, gazing at her as if she’s Helen of Troy.

  They were married in Quito two weeks before. A glorious surprise, even for them, and it all happened because, after Jim had wrestled with the question of marriage for years, God simply spoke to him and said, Enough.

  “What were you doing at the time?” This is Marj, her face all aglow at the joyful prospect of another missionary bride.

  “I was sitting on the stoop in Shandia checking my scalp for ticks. The Indians groom each other every night, and there I was, working at it all alone, feeling sorry for myself, and God said, Go on, then, propose to Betty. I’m tired of listening to you moan about it.”

  Betty doesn’t hit him, she just watches with cool eyes and a little smile. She’s bony and plain-faced.

  “How did you propose?”

  “I wrote her a letter. Get yourself over here pronto, I said, and then Johnny Keenan let me hitch a ride to Quito and I sat myself down in the guesthouse and waited, and after what seemed like years, my angel rode up to the door in a taxi, dressed to the nines in a blue frock and red coat.”

  “You’re making me sound absolutely desperate.” His angel smiles, showing a gap between her front teeth you could drive a truck through.

  “Well, you’ve been giving me the runaround for years. But we won’t tell folks that part.”

  Now they’re moving into the big house he built on the ridge. “Just the two of you?”

  “For the moment.” He winks at Elisabeth.

  “And how is Peter going to manage on his own?”

  “Oh, he’s got plans too. He’s working on a little gal named Olive, writing letters into the wee hours. He’ll wear her down in no time.”

  It’s the sort of brutality God specializes in, putting His finger on the bright thread of your desire and saying, I’ll take that, if you please. Cracking you open to the marrow of your bones, digging out the rosy pith, and stuffing mogey cotton in instead.

  Rachel hears her own voice. “Do you mind if I ask you a question? How exactly did you get visas? As Plymouth Brethren missionaries?”

  “Somebody advised us to apply as linguists, and it worked.”

  “And you’re all trained as linguists?”

  Jim shrugs. “I took a summer course.”

  “I see. Because President Ibarra mentioned to me that they are going to start checking the formal qualifications of foreign workers.”

  She retires early to her narrow cell. She’s been reading through Isaiah in her evening devotions, but God’s on His own with that tonight. In the lounge, the others chat for hours. Their raucous laughter gusts down the hall. On the floor, the cockroaches whisper. Does Marj not sprinkle lime powder? Rachel sleeps, and in the distance someone tortures an infant, and she rolls over and sleeps again.

  In the dark, in the quiet, she finds herself standing outside the net, intent on an errand elsewhere in the house. Scorpions, God says, breaking His silence. Put your shoes on. She squats to buckle them and makes her way down the hall, passing the kitchen and the radio room. Crossing a patch of moonlight from the windows in the lounge, seeing in the silver light her alabaster limbs, the strong, bare legs of a mountain woman. She comes to the stairway and tramps methodically up and turns down the corridor. Past the upstairs toilet. Past the bed where the lovers float together in a single dream. She walks the length of the house and tramps back downstairs. A sinister noise has started up, she moves towards it with the resolve of a watchman. Squawk, squawk, squawk, squawk. It’s Nate’s room, and she’s at the doorway, and she understands. They’re at it, Nate and his bride, Nate and the curly-haired Cyclops, they’re riding the bedsprings, panting with one voice, panting, grunting, moaning (hard work, the making of a saint!), huh, huh, huh, huh, huh. She stands still, skewered by the noise. If she had a willie, she’d lift it and piss on the floor. Just here, against their closed door. The boys did that sometimes outside her bedroom. One winter the whole house stank of piss.

  They yelp like foxes and fall silent. A quick business when you think about it. She waits a beat. “I hope to God it was worth it,” she calls into the crack of the door.

  A startled gasp, an angry shout, and she turns and strides down the hall and into the bathroom, where she hooks the little hook and lowers herself, breathless, onto the toilet. She’s beginning to feel cold. Her feet hurt, and the sacks of flesh on her chest. She lifts them with her hands to ease the weight. Jugs. Useless jugs of fat she’s toted now for almost thirty years.

  Footsteps in the corridor, a line of light under the door. “Rachel?” Nate says in a low voice. She can feel his fury through the thin wood. She sits still until he leaves and she hears his bedroom door close.

  Back in her room, the mosquito net hangs bride-like over her bed. Her heart is beating funny. She presses her hand to her chest on the left side, below her breast. The skin underneath is bubbled in some places and scaly in others. What fresh hell is this? She pulls off her nightgown and finds her flashlight and peers into her hand mirror, holding her breast up. A big patch of broken skin the colour of beets. The same rash under her right breast. She drops the mirror on the side table, and the beam of her flashlight catches the white splash of her nightgown on the floor. And there’s her bible, which she declined to open for evening devotions.

  Well, you’re up now, the Lord says.

  Let me put my nightgown back on first, she says. She shakes the scorpions out of it and struggles into it and crawls into bed, arranging the mosquito net, stuffing her pillow behind her. Then she’s propped up in her little tent, trying to catch her breath.

  The Old Testament, God says. We’re at Isaiah 54.

  She tucks her flashlight under her chin. The light on the snowy pages dazzles her. She finds the chapter and puts her eyes to the words, but she can’t read. Whatever language this is, she says to God, I don’t speak it.

  Listen, God says. You think I’m cruel. But you don’t see the whole picture. Just read when I ask you to read.

  Isaiah 54

  Sing, barren woman, you who never bore a child;

  Burst into song, shout for joy, you who were never in labour;

  Because more are the children of the desolate woman than of her who has a husband.
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  Do not be afraid; you will not be put to shame.

  Do not fear disgrace; you will not be humiliated.

  You will forget the shame of your youth and remember no more the reproach of your widowhood.

  For your Maker is your husband—the Lord Almighty is his name—the God of all the earth.

  It’s eight by the time she wakes up. Outside her window, fat drops of water plop into a barrel. Has it rained? No, it’s an oropendola in the ficus tree. The night heaves its way to the surface of her mind, a hot, hallucinatory night, like a malaria dream. She listens for a hum in her blood, but all is quiet there. She slept, she’s refreshed. She gets out of bed and dresses with a sense of occasion, tucking in the hem of her favourite pale-blue blouse. Sunlight lies on the floorboards of the kitchen. The children are eating their breakfast and Marj has the coffee made. “Good morning,” they all say.

  Rachel cuts two slices of bread and butters them, and the bagpipes in her chest start to drone and fill her with a silent vibration. Rolled away, rolled away, rolled away, every burden of my heart rolled away.

  Nate carries in a wooden crate, the top pried off. “The Quito flight is in,” he says. Condensed milk, tinned ham, marmalade! “Carlos Sevilla was on the flight. He’s got a ton of cargo. He’s hired a barge for the hacienda. They’re just loading it.”

  Rachel closes her eyes for a minute, not speaking to God, just letting Him speak to her. Yes, he says, I meant what I said. She gets up, she leaves her bread and butter on a saucer on the yellow oilcloth and walks out the door. A crowd is milling around the cargo shed at the far end of the airstrip and they part at the sight of her.

  Don Carlos stands outside the shed in a panama hat, smoking. “Bien, bien, bien,” he says, tipping his head. “La patrona del Perú.” The patron saint of Peru, our lady of the languages.

  Singing in Tongues

  14

  HE RESPECTS HIS DAUGHTER’S NEED for distance, he really does—just one quick call after breakfast to make sure she’s safely settled with Olive. Turns out she’s not there and Olive hasn’t heard from her. David tries her cell and she doesn’t pick up. He’s scrolling through his contacts, trying to decide which of her friends to call first, his hands starting to tremble, when the land line rings. Sean Youderian. “Pastor Dave! Sorry about the telephone tag. It was just—all hell broke loose here yesterday.”

  “Before you launch in,” David says, “you don’t happen to know where Abby is, do you?”

  A silence. “I might. She didn’t tell you?”

  “Tell me what?”

  “She’s headed to LA. She’s got an audition later this week.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You set this up?”

  “Well, sort of. I passed her photo and contact info on to Walter Varga. He’s the director. I thought we might have a better chance if somebody else approached her.”

  “This is for one of your films?”

  “I’m a producer.”

  “I just saw your parents at Wheaton. They didn’t say a word.”

  “Yeah, well, I asked them to keep it on the down-low. We were in some really heavy negotiations with funders. But it’s full steam ahead now.”

  “So Abby—you said LA?”

  “Yuh.”

  “She was driving down on her own?”

  “I guess.”

  “Where’s she going to stay?”

  A little silence. “You know, Dave, if I could give you a word of advice. Maybe just lighten up on Abby. She’s not a kid. She knows what she’s doing.”

  David almost hangs up. I’ll track her down, he thinks. There was a world of hurt between the two of us after that talk. She’s getting her revenge.

  But here’s why Sean called—to brief David, which he does, at length. After years of beating the bushes, they’ve put solid funding in place for a feature film on Operation Auca. They? Sean rhymes off a string of names and titles. There’s always been money out there for this story, but his team has a particular vision. First, the story’s not going to be watered down. The Lord’s hand is going to be visible in everything. Second, the film is going to be pitched to a secular audience, to non-Christians, to the world at large. No more preaching to the choir. A lot of people think those two mandates are incompatible, but picture a Venn diagram. Where the circles overlap, you’ve got a viewership that’s spiritually hungry and a message that’ll rock their world. And now they’ve found a super-wealthy businessman who is grateful to God for his prosperity and wants to give back. He’s not a young man, he’s dealing with heart disease, and he’d like to live to see the film. The shoot is scheduled for September, and in fact Sean is flying to Ecuador on Thursday with a few other guys. “So here’s the thing. You up for joining us in a day or two?”

  “What?”

  “We could use you to consult on locations.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “’Course I’m serious.”

  “You realize it’s years since I was in Ecuador.”

  “I do realize. That’s why you’re perfect. You’re going to walk into a scene and say, That was not here, that was not here, nix the cell tower in this shot, whatever. Find a few donkeys.”

  “I was just away, for Betty’s funeral. I can’t take off again.”

  “Don’t you have a youth pastor? That Ryan guy? He’s dying to step up.”

  He’d be able to abandon his sermon on the Islamic caliphate, he thinks, and then, to counter the unworthiness of that thought, he suggests September. “Wouldn’t it make more sense if I went when you were shooting? Like, in terms of consulting on details?”

  But Sean gets an idea in his mind and reason only irritates him.

  David finally says he’ll think about it.

  “What’s to think about? Dave. Dave. You get an all-expense-paid trip to Ecuador. You get a consultancy fee—we should be able to stretch to a couple K. You get a screen credit—wouldn’t that be cool? You’re helping us take our story to a new generation. What’s the downside?”

  “Well, Sean, I’ll tell you what it is. I’m not sure I’m keen on working with you. I’m pretty disappointed in something Abby told me—”

  “She got things wrong,” Sean interrupts.

  “So there was nothing to it?”

  “Let me just say—it was not what she thought. And I’ve got to believe our Lord forgives.”

  On this mixed note, the call ends.

  David sits stunned in front of his cereal bowl. Oh, God, you have surely broken this day wide open. He goes out the back door into a fine June morning, his cellphone in hand. He sits at the picnic table and texts Karen at the church. Working at home for a bit.

  The timing is astonishing. Betty dies, Abby is in crisis, and then this. How amazing it would be for Abby. Potentially life-changing. She’s made the mistake of trusting in her emotions. A little dryness of the spirit and she thinks God has abandoned her. But then He reaches down and He says, This.

  Ecuador—David’s green world. It gleams in his mind, the leafy longhouses guarded by a harpy eagle, the courage and sacrifice. It’s a beauty of a proposition. He’s never been back. At first because of Sharon, who was so sick for so long, and then, well, it’s hard to say. It was a relief to have a bit of distance from some of the problems there. Things in Tiwaeno were bad enough when he and Sharon were in Ecuador, but worse in the last years of Rachel’s life. All sorts of rumours about dementia, heavy metal poisoning, something to do with the diet.

  Everybody else went, all his Operation Auca cousins and their kids. It seemed they needed to take a pilgrimage to see where the men had lived and died, and of course he didn’t need that. One of the McCully granddaughters, Cheryl, went maybe a year ago and e-mailed to tell David about a tour she took in Cuyabeno. She called it the Toxic Tour and went on at length about the pits of abandoned crude, how fouled the rivers were, and the health problems the local people faced. A lot of people have this romance with the rainforest, an
d they want Indigenous lands to be left untouched. It’s a form of nostalgia. They don’t expect us to ride around in horse-drawn buggies in America, but they get all worked up when native people move into the modern era. Anyway, los afectados she talked about—they were Secoya and Cofán, not Waorani.

  Of course Ecuador will have changed, but he could play a role in taking people powerfully back to the story. And they’ll shoot at the guesthouse in Shell Mera, he thinks with a spurt of excitement. Frame houses don’t last long in the tropics, and it was abandoned and boarded up in the 1960s. No one had the heart to tear it down, and now it’s been rebuilt. Churches in the US raised the money, and crews of volunteers flew down to do the work. David wasn’t involved in that project, but if he says yes to Sean, he’ll see the house. He pictures Abby in a cotton housedress, standing in front of his mother’s blue kitchen cupboards, buttering bread for sandwiches—but then he thinks, Betty. Betty’s part is sure to be bigger and more dramatic.

  He picks up his phone and crafts a text:

  Just had a call from Sean and it looks as though I’m going to be a consultant on his movie. Feeling pretty hurt that you didn’t tell me what was up—but holding you in my prayers. Abby, sweetheart, I need to know where you are and how you’re doing. Love Dad.

  He sets the phone down and almost right away it pings.

  Not Abby. It’s an e-mail from Sean.

  just in case you’re having doubts about God’s leading it thrills me to forward you a song we hope to use on the soundtrack. it’s by singersongwriter leo duric a brilliant artist and a real man of God and if you google him youll see hes on the cusp of a massive breakout. ran into him and told him about the project and a week later he sent me this song. says he’s never had music given to him like this before.

  David touches the link. Digital instrumentation and a voice that’s pure California schmaltz, all vibrato and emotion. He can’t make out the lyrics. They’re not in English or Spanish, nor do they sound like any Indigenous language he’s ever heard. It must be like a Cirque du Soleil song, written in a made-up language so nobody in the world is privileged above anybody else.