Five Wives

by Joan Thomas

  Rachel allows herself to be led to the hall. “The boys. Nate and Ed and Jim. Have they started a club?”

  “Oh, no doubt.”

  “I knew it! I know boys. Do I ever know boys!”

  The situation is impossible, Nate agrees. He flies to Shandia and has a private conversation with Jim and Betty. The next day the two of them call in around noon, all neutral and businesslike, and ask to speak to Rachel. Marj helps her down the hall to the radio room.

  “Jim needs my fellowship just now,” Rachel explains to Marj after the call. “He’s going through a bad patch. And Betty is struggling to look after that little girl. I’m sorry to leave you like this, but the need there is greater. They don’t have all the comforts of home the way you do.”

  “I thought you weren’t keen on looking after other people’s children,” Marj can’t resist saying.

  “Well, I only met Betty the once,” Rachel says. “But she didn’t look like a natural mother to me.”

  PERFECTA IS THE laundress, she’s the only one who can handle the mangle. Mangle—even the word puts you off. But when she has time, Marj pegs up the laundry herself, because it’s the only chance she has to get outside into their beautiful yard, the green of childhood dreams, and trimmed every third day year-round by a man with a scythe, Oresto, with his sharp eye for snakes. It’s lush and velvet, it’s a dell. As a child, Marj sang “The Farmer in the Dell” without the vaguest notion what a dell was, but the minute she saw this yard, she knew.

  She yanks the laundry line along on its little wheels, dipping into her clothespin apron, humming as she pegs up the sheets. The year he was grounded, Nate hired two workmen, and under his supervision they built Marj this wonderful laundry shed. It’s a neat, cement-brick building with its own water pump, and roomy enough for the washing machine and the mangle and rinsing tubs and a work table and twenty-five feet of clothesline. The clothesline is on a pulley and runs into the shed through an opening like the slit in the wall of a medieval castle. This is so you can pull the clothes inside when it starts to rain. Farm wives in Idaho would kill for this shed. But then, farm wives in Idaho are not running a hotel in Ecuador.

  Something moves in the corner of her eye and she turns her head to see a brown figure striding across the green. Fray Alfredo, walking with a great deal more ease than at his last visit, and dressed in a long hooded garment like a bathrobe, with a white cord knotted around his waist. Warmth fills her at the sight of him. He’s grown a beard since she saw him last, and he’s a startling sight, an ancient figure appearing out of a brash new forest.

  “Buenos días, Señora Saint.”

  “Buenos días.”

  He reaches out his hand, strangely formal, and she wipes her hand on her skirt and shakes it.

  “It’s very pleasant back here.”

  “It is. Sometimes I think I’m still on our farm in the Midwest. I hear geese honking and cows mooing. The honking is tree frogs, I know, but I have no idea what the mooing is.”

  “It’s the tiger heron. The puma garza.”

  She feels the joy of their peculiar one-sided intimacy, and she reminds herself to watch her words.

  “There’s something I’d like to ask you, Señora Saint.”

  “Of course.”

  “What do you know about the forest people living around the Curaray?”

  “The Auca?” she says. And looking into his face, she understands that this formality is the demeanour of a very angry man.

  “Well, as you call them. Auca is a word the Quichua use for all the forest peoples—the Jivaro, the Shapras, the Shuar and Anshuar. It’s a term of disgust. When we use it, it’s as if we are calling the people dirty savages.”

  “So what is their name?”

  “I believe, from a conversation I had with the forest woman at the hacienda, that they call themselves Waorani. Which just means ‘the people,’ as distinguished from the animals around them.”

  “How did you figure that out?”

  “Well, they have many hunting taboos—the hare, for example. Dayuma tells me that they don’t kill hares because the hare has Waorani eyes. It strikes me that a hare’s eyes look rather human, and I deduced the name from that. I gathered something else from Dayuma’s comment—that the Waorani have a strong taboo against cannibalism.”

  “Oh,” Marj says. “That’s so interesting.”

  “It is. And I wonder if you might share with me what you know. Regarding the size of the population, for one thing.”

  “I don’t think anybody knows that.”

  “I also wonder if the Waorani have ever been exposed to measles or flu or polio or tuberculosis? Do they have any immunity at all to our diseases?”

  “I don’t really know. Maybe you want to talk to Nate.”

  “Why Nate?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why refer me to your husband? Don’t you bear any responsibility for what happens out of this mission station?”

  Emotion floods through her. His keen eyes are fixed on her. It seems their intimacy is not one-sided after all. He sees her, a plain woman made lovely by work, by faithfulness, and by loyalty. He sees the bargains she’s made, he sees she’s not equal to this challenge.

  “Fray Alfredo, say what you want to say.”

  “I will, then. The Waorani people have shunned the outside world for centuries. They have thrived on their own. They are masters when it comes to navigating the rivers. They know the forest like the back of their hand. It’s only from the sky that they’re vulnerable.”

  “You know about the airdrops.”

  “Yes. The Indians in Shandia and Arajuno notice everything and they talk to each other. The other day I was out near the airstrip when your husband flew over. Some Quichua men heard the plane coming—they always hear it about two minutes before I do—and do you know what they did? They stripped off their shirts and pants and picked up sticks to use as pretend lances. As the plane flew over, they danced around naked and threw those lances up at it. I asked them what was going on. They were pretending to be Waorani. Maybe he’ll drop a few tools for us, they said. They’re furious that their enemies are getting all these goods and they are not. Having a machete of his own would transform life for the poorest of those men.”

  He’s even angrier than he was that day in the kitchen, and her heart gives a painful squeeze. She bends to picks up another little nightshirt so he won’t see her face.

  He takes a step closer. “Have you thought about the chaos you will cause? Not long ago, Shell Oil provoked a civil war among the forest people. They dropped a machete from a plane, a man picked it up, and the others speared him to death for it.”

  Marj drops the nightshirt. “So you want them to live forever in the Stone Age? Killing each other, never knowing God? I thought you were supposed to be a man of faith yourself.”

  He lifts his hands in an I give up gesture and turns to walk back to the road.

  “Let me just point out,” Marj calls to his back, “we’re not the ones who came in with the conquistadores and slaughtered the Indians by the thousands.”

  “Well, you’re not finished yet, are you,” he shouts without turning around.

  NATE FLIES ROGER and Barbara Youderian to Shell Mera for a few days to get them up to speed. They bring their two kids, a four-year-old girl and a tiny boy. The orientation meeting has to be moved to the evening because they are so late getting back. Nate doesn’t respond to the radio, but finally Marj gets a terse call: on our way. They arrive and Marj directs the Youderians upstairs to their room and then follows Nate to the darkroom for a quick chat.

  “Whatever happened?”

  “It was Roger. We were ready to leave, and then he wouldn’t get on the plane. Finally he said he would come if I let him bring some special equipment. Marj, it was body armour. He’s made himself a breastplate and a belly plate out of an iron drum. It weighs a ton. He can’t even walk properly in it. I tried to let on it would put me overweight, but he force
d me to itemize my load and he could see I was lying. Marjie, I ended up bringing his body armour. It’s in the hangar under a tarp.”

  Marj doesn’t want to rub it in, so she doesn’t say anything at all.

  The day is not going well, and in fact began very badly. She woke up with a terrible feeling in her belly, not fear, as you might expect, but sadness, as if something awful had already happened and she hadn’t been able to cry. The feeling has dimmed, but it’s not entirely gone. While they waited for Nate to come back with the Youderians, she was alone in the kitchen and had a chance to sort the mail. Fray Alfredo had written a letter to his friend M, and she eased it open and furtively read it, squinting her eyes to see through the black cloud of acrimony that rose from its pages. A long rant about his trek back to Shandia. He and his porter took a wrong fork halfway along and wasted two hours on a narrow trail where he was almost bitten by a bushmaster. Of course, he blamed this on Nate. Then there was this, which floored her because, when she went back over their conversation out by the laundry lines, she could not put her finger on a single thing she had said that absolutely betrayed her:

  Beyond controlling the airspace, the gatekeepers in the gospel house in Shell Mera handle all the mail to Quito and quite possibly vet my letters. (Hello, my dear, if you’re reading this: Yes, we Papists were handmaidens to the conquistadores, we will be making reparations forever—but that was in the sixteenth century. For you, nothing has changed. You say you love the indigeni, but all you really want are their souls. How can you hope to minister to people you despise?)

  “We’re eleven for supper,” Marj says to Nate. “I need to go and get cooking.” God help me, she thinks, because suddenly the slightest demand feels overwhelming.

  In the ammonia-smelling dark, Nate reaches for her hand and lifts it to his chest. “Marjie, will you come to the meeting tonight?”

  “I thought you just wanted the men.”

  “No,” he says. “I need you there.”

  BARBARA YOUDERIAN IS a calm presence, clear-eyed, uncannily like a girl Marj admired in her nursing class but never got to be friends with. She’s subdued today too, a slender girl balancing a huge weight. They do the dishes almost in silence, and Marj is glad: her mind is on the meeting. I will speak, she’s been telling herself. I will tell them everything Fray Alfredo said. After the children are in bed, she gets out the precious can of cocoa powder and, as they come in for the meeting, dips everyone a mug of hot chocolate. Pete and Jim and Ed—Nate flew them in that morning. Not Marilou, who is not travelling much these days, and not Betty, who has, well, Rachel. As for Peter, he seems to want to demonstrate his goodwill by coming to all the meetings, although this actually causes a lot more trouble for Nate, and no one is keen to include him in the discussions.

  They sit around the table and fill the Youderians in on the day the Auca man appeared in the yard in Arajuno. Nate and Ed share exciting news from this week’s flight over Terminal City. The Auca have built a bamboo platform like an observation deck, as if they’re trying to get closer to the plane. And on the platform, a model plane is mounted! Ed trained the binoculars on it, and he was amazed at its perfect proportions and fine details.

  “Well, that cage is really something too,” Nate says.

  Cage? Marj thinks.

  The Auca sent out a live parrot. It was in an intricately woven cage, and it had a banana as provision for its journey. They send gifts up every visit now, often food wrapped in banana leaves. Fish, yucca, a smoked monkey tail. Nate and Ed don’t always manage to spool the line in. They end up dragging the gifts over the canopy to Arajuno, and things don’t fare well in the landing. The pottery vessels the Auca sent were all smashed to bits. Two squirrels were both DOA. But the parrot survived. It was lying on its side, stunned, but Ed dumped a mug of cold water on it and it started moving. Now Marilou’s kids have a bad-tempered parrot for a pet.

  And so they are making gains in building trust. They drink their hot chocolate, and Ed and Jim tip back their chairs and spar as usual, but Marj is struck by how flat their voices are. Everyone seems privately anxious. It may be the effect of the new recruit, who sits at the end of the table taking notes, saying very little but exuding a dark energy, his face so long it seems a mask, and his eyes deeply set, ringed with black and full of what, from her experience in hospitals, Marj can only call suffering. He asks who’s been assigned to do the operational plan. They admit they don’t know what that is. It specifies each man’s task every quarter-hour, he says.

  “No one so far,” Nate says.

  Roger says he’ll take it on. He’ll also create a list of symbols to be drawn in the sand in case of emergency, so rescuers flying over can see them.

  The Quichua say that at any moment you are either living or dying. In their terms, this man is dying, and it gives him a strange authority. Marj finds herself longing for Fray Alfredo. I should have dreamed up a pretext for Nate to fly him in, she thinks wildly. He could have talked to them. She can’t bear the thought that she might walk out of this meeting with nothing changed.

  Nate is all business. He’s got a formula for measuring distance on the ground against the speed of the plane, and on a windless day recently he flew over Palm Beach dumping a big scoop of bright-pink plaster of Paris out the door every seven seconds. From counting these markers, he was able to calculate two hundred yards of runway—long enough, but just barely. The question is when they will go in.

  “Well, actually,” Jim says, “the Lord has answered that for me in unmistakable terms. But before I get to that—does everyone have the Auca phrases?”

  Nate and Ed do; in fact Marilou was able to use them when the Auca man appeared in her yard. But Roger and Barb don’t, of course. Jim dictates the words phonetically and they write them down. Apparently they mean: I want to be your friend. I like you. Christ died for you. Roger, who doesn’t seem to know about Rachel, asks Jim how he got the phrases.

  Marj holds her breath. If he lies, he will be lying for me, she thinks. But he simply acts as though he didn’t hear. “As for the timing,” he says, “I think it’s imperative that we land at the next full moon, which is right after New Year’s. If we leave it too much later, the rains will start and the playa may be washed away. And—you fellows will laugh, but it’s actually Satan’s shenanigans that have convinced me the time is right.”

  Marj sits with her hands clasped in her lap and does a trick she has to blur her vision: she doesn’t look away but neither does she take in Jim’s face. Just his words, just his hoarse, impassioned voice. He describes how restless he’s been for the last month, how depressed. He can hardly pray or read Scripture. He feels anguish at his lack of progress with the Quichua, who parrot everything he says to them but never change. Even this new mission was starting to turn to ashes in his mind. Why should they assume the Auca will be any more responsive than the Quichua are? For a few days he stopped eating, food sickened him. It was Betty, his wise helpmeet, who first grasped what was going on. Satan is trying to prevent this new mission. Satan senses that his domination of El Oriente is coming to an end, and he is throwing his worst at them. So, having realized the cause of his depression, Jim is more eager than ever to get the ball rolling. Last night, something happened that sealed his new resolve: he learned that Operation Auca is no longer a secret.

  “The friar at Shandia came over to the house. Somehow he’s figured out we’re doing airdrops on the Curaray. He wouldn’t say how he knew. He wanted to tell me stuff about the Auca, how they’re busy killing each other off in vicious reprisal spearings, for one thing, how unsettled they apparently are right now. He was all worked up, he thought we’d drop our plans right away when we heard this. But really, it clarified everything for me. I went to bed, and during the night a terrible sound woke me. A hideous scream—it took me a minute to figure out what it was. And then I realized: God was allowing me to witness the cry of a dying Auca as he hurtled headlong into Christless damnation without even a chance.”

/>   Jim stops for a minute, and Marj focuses her eyes and sees that his face is working, as though he’s fighting tears.

  “Brothers and sisters,” he says in a voice thick with emotion, “we can’t afford to wait another month.”

  Is there a space as comforting as a tidy kitchen? The saved and the unsaved alike have their kitchens, many as pleasant as this one, with its cream-coloured walls and aqua cupboards (a colour scheme Marj dreamed of when she was a girl) and the cream-and-orange canisters lined up in descending order (a wedding present from Marj’s auntie) and the wide window through which a cool breeze blows in from the river. It’s dark now, the window is a black square filled with the invisible jungle. The dangling light bulb floods the kitchen with harsh, hot light, and against that black square their faces bob, white and ghoulish, unattached to anything, and out of nowhere a memory comes to Marj, a story from her childhood, something that happened to people on a neighbouring farm.

  This family had the same sort of cellar Marj’s family had, an earthen cave that you accessed by lifting a ring and pulling up a square of the kitchen floor on a hinge. As at Marj’s, all their preserves were kept down there in rows of dusty jars on home-built wooden shelves. One day in early spring the mother sent her daughter, a teenager named Margaret, for a jar of canned cherries. After what seemed like forever, the woman said to her son, “Reg, go down and see what’s keeping Margaret.” A few minutes later the kids still weren’t back, and she called and got no answer. Her husband, who’d been snoozing on the daybed in the kitchen, was awakened by her shout. “What are those darn kids up to?” she said to him. He got up with a sigh and went to the hole in the floor and lowered himself down the ladder. The woman was busy getting supper on, she ran out to the garden to pick some greens. When she came back, the kitchen was still empty and the house was silent. Then a terrible dread seized her and she lit a kerosene lantern with trembling fingers and lay down near the cellar door, dangling the lantern into the dark. And saw the first pair of legs, her husband’s, sprawled on the earthen floor below.