by Joan Thomas
Then Cornell couldn’t work fast enough.
An Indian girl walks away from the camera, long hair hanging down her back. You can’t see her face. Another shot of her looking over her shoulder at the airplane. Same stretched-out earlobes, her hair cut into the same thick fringe. She’s young, attractive, unsmiling, unaware of what the photographer’s up to, checking things out. Then a shot of her face-on, leaning back in a pose that looks almost seductive. She’s holding an open magazine, holding it strategically, as if someone gave it to her to cover herself.
In the foreground of frame eight, a different woman sits on a log. She’s older and stouter, and she has deflated breasts such as Cornell has never seen, flat, triangular flaps. Her head is half-turned to look at the girl, who clutches a drinking glass in one hand and whose other arm is full of stuff, as if she’s been given so many gifts she can hardly hold them all.
They had made peaceful contact, at least at first.
And of course the wives knew—they’d been communicating with the men all week. That’s why they kept mentioning Friday.
Frame nine was the money shot, Cornell decided, and someone other than Nate Saint had taken it. The young man is squatting comfortably on his haunches and Nate is crouched beside him with one knee in the sand. Two good-looking men in their prime. The Indian man’s body is compact in relation to Nate’s, he’s much smaller. The man’s mouth is wide open, he’s eating what looks to be a hamburger, and a hand reaches in, dribbling something from a small bottle onto his back, bug oil, it must be, as if they can’t introduce him to America fast enough.
Nine printable frames. Then, on the film, the encroaching water like spilled blood.
THE NEXT MORNING, Cornell was out on the runway early. The two mechanics from the rescue service were at work on the copter, breaking it down. This mission was over.
He still hadn’t seen Nurnberg. Rumour had it that the R4D was going to fly in from Arajuno that morning and then straight out to Quito. Cornell spied a marine moving around and asked him if he knew what time the plane was due.
“Zero eight hundred.”
He glanced at his watch. It was ten to eight.
He had exactly two cigarettes left and he wanted both for himself, so he walked up the tarmac a way, his duffle bag on one shoulder and his camera bag on the other. Out of cigarettes and out of film, something he’d been careful to avoid for his entire professional life.
He glanced over at the house, thought of the brave women pulling themselves out of their solitary beds and getting breakfast for their kids. This morning he’d woken up to the pain of this calamity. A shitty, shitty thing. Eight little kids growing up without their dads. Nine: Mrs. McCully was heading home to give birth to another baby alone, her heart full of gratitude to God.
Is it better to have an empty drum of a heart, or to fill it how you can?
He was wearing his city trousers. In the pocket was the half page Edith had ripped out of her manuscript for him. Edith. He opened the folded paper. “I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature.” The words had force but no meaning. He lifted his cigarette to his lips and then, in the inhalation, he was breathing him in, his brother, more alive to Cornell than the young marine he’d just talked to. His dark, straight eyebrows, his extravagant, hungry features, the lithe way he moved, how fully his spirit occupied his body. His knowing. Oh, Endre. Cornell turned towards the river flats and gave himself over to drinking it down, today’s acrid cupful of grief. At a world moving on without Endre—it was unendurable. It crashed at him, wave after wave. Oh, my brother. He spat out a clot or two of it, and the wave subsided a bit, and he reached into his pocket for a handkerchief. Finding nothing, he bent over and pinched the top of his nose and blew hard, the way they dealt with snot playing in the alleys of Pest. When he surfaced, an American woman was standing ten yards away, watching him. A little older than the women in the house, and tall and stout. But she had that same look of wilful plainness about her. He stood for a minute or two to compose himself and then he walked towards her and said, “Cornell Capa,” and stuck out his hand. Not surprisingly, she ignored it.
“Rachel Saint,” she said. Another wife? He must have telegraphed his confusion. “The sister,” she added.
“Oh. My sincere condolences.”
She didn’t respond.
Maybe she’d flown in from New Jersey or Pennsylvania or somewhere when the crisis broke, to be with her brother’s family. But he hadn’t seen her in the house. Well, it was a big place, with numerous closed doors along the corridor. She was still staring at him. She had the most intense eyes, pale, otherworldly. She was wearing a white cotton dress and her fair hair was braided into a fat queue, in the style of the Quichua. She made him regret his lack of film.
“You’re the photographer,” she said suddenly.
“Yes. And I’ll be writing a short feature. So any insights you have about what happened, I’d be grateful if you shared them with me.”
“Insights.” She made a little humph of disgust and looked away.
“Really, I’m very sorry,” Cornell said after a minute. “It’s a terrible loss for you. I understand your brother was a wonderful man.”
No reaction. And she made no effort to leave or to change the subject. She stood like a huge, disconsolate child, her eyes on the orange windsock. She gazed at the mechanics over by the helicopter. Then she turned her head and stared again at Cornell with the same impassivity.
“I have some idea what you’re going through,” he said helplessly. “I recently lost my brother. He stepped on a land mine in Thái Bìn, in Vietnam. He was a gifted photographer, a bit of a legend in his own lifetime. Robert Capa.”
She kept staring, as though she didn’t grasp that he was sentient and looking back. Under her gaze he couldn’t seem to keep his mouth shut.
“It’s very hard to lose someone who seemed to be invincible. My brother was five years older than me and I followed him into photography. Hell, I even took his name. I guess I’ve tried all my life to be half the man he was.”
This unleashed a savage denunciation. “My brother followed my vision to the mission field. He tried all his life to be half the servant of God that I am. Turns out he was nothing but a liar and a cheat.”
Ragged trees, and the kid with the rifle, motionless against the freight shed. The snowy cone of a mountain pinned to the sky. Over the delta, white birds lifted and tilted.
Ralph Waldo Emerson was just wrong. Nothing in Cornell’s life was ever as real to him as this moment. Losing my brother made the world real. That’s what he’d like to say to this woman.
“You’re flying to Quito?” he asked.
“No.”
But she stood waiting implacably with him, as if it made no difference to her or to anybody else where she was or what she did.
We Sorrow Not
23
THE YEAR BEFORE BETTY CAME as a bride to Shandia, Jim dreamed a house on the ridge and then he built it. So close to the Jatun Yaku that you can hear the murmur of the rapids as you drift off to sleep, so close that the fish are still flipping in the basket when fishermen come peddling their catch to the door. But high, high up, safe from floods: a house that stands in the forest, and is made of the forest, and fraternizes with the forest through its many windows.
Just walking the path to this house is a meditation. You feel you’re rising rather than climbing. The heat falls away, the squalor of the settlement, the demands and reproach of the people. You come first to a wonderful garden full of native plants Betty can’t name, although Jim could. He collected everything, especially orchids, tiny and delicate and spotted, carrying them home in the waist hem of his T-shirt and planting them in a tree. Then you come to the kitchen garden, the avocados, pineapples, corn, papaya, yucca, plantain, tree tomatoes. Then the roses, the gardenia. The orange tree Jim planted the day Betty moved in—it was in instant fragrant blossom. The profligate hand of nature and her husband�
�s husbandry: working together, they re-created Eden on this ridge.
When Betty was flown back to Shandia after the men’s bodies were found, the whole settlement streamed out to the airstrip. Olive was on the same flight; she had come to pack up or give away her things, and then she was going home to America. The instant the pilot cut the engine, the Quichua mourning wail began. A collective scream that rose in pitch as each of the women climbed out of the plane, and then descended in three mournful notes. Betty struggled out with Sharon in her arms, and imploring hands reached at her from all directions. The people had adored Señor Jaime and Señor Pedro, their hearts were broken. But she could not stop to speak to them. Jim was waiting for her in the house; after two weeks apart, she was desperate to get back to him, and the wail was unendurable. Picture a deep, deep well and wave action starting up in the black water at the bottom of it.
She stepped onto the trail to the ridge, and many of the mourners followed. At the first rise, her servant Gabriel turned and stopped them with a command. The wail hushed and she climbed alone up to the house, her hand on her baby’s plump little thigh. She opened the door and stepped inside. Jim, his joyful spirit, was there, as she had known he would be. She walked through the house and sat down on the bed, still carrying her baby, at peace.
SIX WEEKS LATER, bending and pulling out a drawer, she marvels at how God has sustained that peace. She’s going through Jim’s shirts, picking out a few that are not too worn or stained. She started this job an hour ago, and got lost in thought and wandered away, and now she’s back at it because the new pilot will be here soon. His name is Eugene. He was working as a crop-duster in the Midwest when he heard about Nate’s death, and within a month he arrived in Ecuador. Not surprisingly, he’s poorly equipped for the full range of the climate. Marj radioed to ask if Betty could help, because (practical above all things) she had already given Nate’s clothes to the poor of Shell Mera.
A widow’s job: all five of them face the wrench of disposing of their beloveds’ things. People might picture them weeping over the task. Fray Alfredo, for example, has very definite ideas about mourning. Not long ago, he climbed the trail to the house to offer his condolences. “How are you, really?” he asked, his mild eyes full of sympathy.
“I’m doing well,” Betty said.
“There is often a grace period with a bereavement, a numbness, and then the force of the loss hits.”
It’s true that she was numb for a few hours after the call came, after Marj called to report radio silence from the camp on the Curaray. It was early on the Monday morning and she was turning the handle to keep the shortwave radio going (their radio had a crank, she had to labour to learn the news), and as Marj signed off, Betty looked up and saw Rachel standing stricken in the doorway. Maybe that’s why her voice was so strange and so flat—she had to fill Rachel in, and then she had to tamp down Rachel’s fury. There was never an instant when they fooled themselves about what that radio silence meant. In the stupor of those hours they had to decide what to do. She was a wooden creature moving, telling Gabriel some version of the news, making arrangements for Johnny Keenan to pick them up with the float plane, packing their things and closing up the house. They walked the Shandia Trail to a stretch of the river where Johnny could land, and then waded into the icy water, Gabriel carrying Sharon, Alberto and María-Elena with the suitcases on their heads. The shock of the water threatened to rip her limb from limb, and God said, When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee. She crawled into the back seat, and they handed Sharon to her, and then the plane lifted into the blue and the cabin filled with light, and she was filled with a sort of rapture, just at that lift. In a swoop she was with Jim in his ascension, she could almost see him, striding among the silver-edged clouds piled white on the river.
Numb? She runs her hand over the beautiful mahogany of the bed frame. Everything bears a richer meaning. This bed: it was Jim who built this bed with all its clever storage. Betty knew the mahogany as a tree growing close to the house, and then as a giant crashing to earth, and then eventually as their squeaky four-poster with Jim’s shirts folded into a drawer beneath it. In the corner of her eye she sees him on it now, sprawled on his stomach, Sharon sleeping on his back like a baby possum.
We sorrow not, even as others who have no hope. The widow’s task is not weeping but thinking. Every widow has to grasp the new shape of her life, so that she might embark upon it wholeheartedly. Every widow has to understand how one event led to the next. All along, Betty thought they were seeing what really was, but apparently not, because this new preoccupation absorbs her every waking minute.
Years ago, in the grey city of Brussels, Betty and her brothers were sent into treeless cobblestone streets to hand out gospel tracts in French. Their job was to entice passersby away from the echoing cathedral on the corner and into the bare room behind a shoe shop where their father preached. Then their father was found to have sugar diabetes and they were forced to come home. They moved into a big old house in Moorestown, New Jersey, and Betty’s father bought a printing press and set it up in the shed and began to produce Sunday school materials. The house had trees around it and was named Birdsong.
Once, a lady came to stay at Birdsong. She had a smooth, round face and round, black-framed glasses. She wore a blouse the red fabric of which had been made by silkworms, and her hair curved into smiling points at each ear. The lady was to sleep in her bed, so at bedtime Betty’s mother got out an old quilt for Betty to use on the daybed in the kitchen. But the lady said, “Oh, no, she must keep me company.” They arranged the quilt on the floor beside Betty’s bed, and when they were tucked in, the lady talked to her about China, where she served, where millions and millions lived in darkness. “Picture their souls like the stars in the heavens,” she said. After Betty was asleep, the lady got out of bed and stepped on her, and Betty let out a shriek that scared the lady, and they laughed and laughed. Then Betty helped her find her way to the downstairs toilet, and afterwards the lady said, “It’s cold, come up here.” And Betty did, lying still on the rim of the narrow bed while the lady slumbered beside her.
The thing is, the lady’s name was Betty: Betty Scott. She went back to China and married a fellow missionary named John Stam, and the next year gave birth to a baby girl. In the mail one day a newsletter came. It had a photograph of the Stam family standing by a big gate with a dragon carved on it. At the bottom, four Chinese characters were written in ink, with this note: For little Betty. Then, months later, the minister at Moorestown First Presbyterian told the congregation that John and Betty Stam had been murdered by Communists in China for telling people about Jesus. They were at home and they heard a mob coming up the street. While John scrawled a final note, Betty hid her baby in a sleeping bag. Then she and John were dragged out to be killed in the village square.
It was winter in New Jersey. It had rained and then turned cold, and the sidewalks were coated with ice. “What does ‘beheaded’ mean?” Betty asked as they walked home, and her brother Harvey made a chopping motion to his neck. Their father heard Betty cry out and he wheeled around and smacked Harvey on the side of the head and sent him sprawling.
Later, Betty’s father came to her room and sat on the wooden chair. Betty was still kneeling by the bed. “God will be looking for someone to take Betty Stam’s place,” he said. “Yes, I thought so,” she said. Her chest and her throat hurt terribly from crying. She was nine years old. She wore Harvey’s outgrown boots with butcher twine for laces. She parted her hair cleanly behind her head and braided it herself into two tight whips. She was nine years old, but she was not a child as she knew other children to be; she had been born knowing everything. After supper, her father brought her an address and she sat at the kitchen table with fingers blue from the cold and wrote a letter to Betty Scott Stam’s parents to tell them she would do it when she grew up.
One of the first fruits of martyrdom is the way
it inspires others. Like Eugene, who now needs shirts.
This one, Betty thinks, holding up a white shirt in thick, soft cotton—this one I cannot bear to give away. She was with Jim in Quito when he bought it.
Excited voices float through the window. María-Elena has taken Sharon outside. The dog barks. Who knows what he’s found in the garden, quite possibly a snake. But Gabriel is with them, their faithful house- and yardman who worked for Jim and Peter when they first came, and for Dr. Tidmarsh before that.
Betty slides the drawer closed and leans back against the bed, turning her face in to the mattress. She lived and breathed China for years, and it turned out to be a dead end. Now she studies herself, a pigtailed little girl writing a letter at a kitchen table, working out how horror can be translated into glory.
IT’S NOT EASY to leave that cool house in the murmur of the rapids, but having tramped her way down to the sun-sapped settlement, calling greetings to the people sitting on their stoops or working at their weaving, having put her hand on the heads of five or six children and helped to chase a chicken off the airstrip, having greeted Eugene calmly (he’s terrified, he’s homesick, she can see at a glance), and having surrendered Jim’s shirts (including, in the end, the white shirt she loves), she finds herself sitting on the bench between the airstrip and the playing field, a pile of mail on her lap, unable to drag herself back up to the house.
The burden of thought has lifted somewhat, that’s what it is.
It’s a very pleasant village with the blue peaks of the Andes above it to the west. Dr. Tidmarsh was the one who laid it out. He persuaded the Quichua to settle and work at a nearby hacienda, and he had the men clear this huge playing field at its centre. Maybe he had cricket in mind, or maybe the commons of an English village, but it gave Shandia a nice formality, the houses spaced out all around the field. Jim and Ed and Pete always dreamed of a football league, although the Quichua boys didn’t really take to team sports; they were more inclined to kick the ball exuberantly into the forest or run wildly over to help out their brothers on the other side.
