At Play in the Fields of the Lord

by Peter Matthiessen

  When Martin tried to smile, Andy smiled also, slipping her hand through her husband’s arm. “We’re awful glad you Mart Quarriers have come,” she said, to warn them of her awareness of their joke.

  “Not that Mart here and I are going to see eye to eye on every little thing!” Leslie slapped Quarrier on the knee. “But maybe until you kind of get the feel of things, Mart, maybe you’d better talk to me before you say anything like you did to the Comandante.”

  Hazel said, “Oh Martin, we just got here.”

  Andy Huben said, “Mr. Quarrier was in the right.”

  “Are you sure you know what we’re talking about, Andy? And anyway, use Mart’s first name; we’re all going to have quite a beautiful Christian fellowship before we’re through.”

  “Perhaps I was mistaken,” Quarrier muttered. He explained to Hazel what he had learned from Huben: that the Comandante had become increasingly impatient about the Niaruna, due to pressure put upon him from the capital to establish colonies and develop a lumber commerce in their lands, and to consolidate with garrisons the common frontier with Brazil; he felt that he had been patient to a fault with the missionaries’ attempts to make peaceful contact with the tribe, but since no real progress had been made, stronger measures had become necessary. The Niaruna themselves had forced his hand, he said, with their raids upon the peaceful Tiro and on the settlement at Remate de Males.

  “Now you have to admit, Martin,” Huben said, “that Rufino is in a tough position with the government. And just remember that without his good will no Protestant mission would be allowed to work here. After all”—he turned to Hazel—“Rufino is a Catholic.”

  “My goodness,” Hazel said, “a Catholic! Imagine a Catholic helping out in the Lord’s work!”

  “He’s a very practical Catholic,” Andy Huben remarked. “He thought that Leslie might open up that country faster than Padre Xantes, who is getting old and has no help.”

  “Then he’s a good Catholic,” Hazel declared. “I don’t know which is worse, a bad Catholic or a good one!”

  Leslie Huben laughed with the rest, but at the first opportunity he said, “Whatever he is, he’s on our side. I worked hard to get him there, and I intend to keep him there.”

  “Oh Martin, really,” Hazel said, “why don’t you listen to Mr. Huben—”

  “Leslie,” Leslie said.

  “—listen to Leslie!” It seemed to her that his beard made Leslie look rather naïve. She smiled unhappily toward the Hubens, taking Martin’s arm. “He’s such a stubborn man,” she smiled. “Yet you say, Mrs.… Andy … that he was in the right.”

  “He can be morally in the right,” Andy Huben said mildly, “and still be mistaken.”

  “Oh, I don’t understand how that can be, I’m sure!” Hazel lifted both hands to her collarbones, begging the embarrassed Hubens to forgive her for her old-fashioned notions. “Well, you can’t teach an old dog to suck eggs,” she told them.

  Martin broke in to remind her that she did not even know what he had done. He told her that he had encountered the Comandante in the afternoon, and after an elaborate exchange of civilities had suggested to Guzmán that an armed attack on savages, except in self-defense, was against the national law. The Comandante had taken this reminder as a threat and had become angry.

  Hazel Quarrier groaned, and Huben shrugged hopelessly, trying to smile. “What a fellow!” he said. “He hasn’t been here a single day, and he knows the law better than the Comandante!”

  “It’s a well-known law,” Quarrier said. “They even mention it in the tourist literature.”

  “One of the first things you’ll have to learn, Martin,” Huben said, “is that here in the jungle, there is no law.” He had jumped up and was pacing around the room. “Why, slavery is against the law, and half the people in this town are slaves! The good Lord knows that slavery is an abomination in my sight, but the fact is that slavery is very difficult to control when the Indians themselves practice it, not only with their captives, but by selling their own children to other tribes. Why, Martin, there’s hardly an Indian in this settlement who isn’t enslaved by somebody!”

  “And Guzmán?”

  “What about him?”

  “Your Mintipos say he profits from the slave trade.”

  “Do you have proof?” Huben placed his fingertips together. “Now you be careful, Martin. If we don’t have Rufino’s co-operation we’re going to be in trouble.”

  “If we condone human slavery, we’ll be in worse trouble still.”

  Huben shrugged him off. “Look. There’s a law here against holding an Indian to any debt he can’t work off in a week—that law is a local joke. When you told Guzmán he is breaking the law, I’m surprised he didn’t laugh in your face! The Comandante is the law here in the jungle, he takes the place of God Himself!”

  Hazel gasped. “Really, Mr.… Leslie,” she began. “You do have a free-and-easy—”

  Quarrier grasped her firmly by the arm and she subsided. “Then what did he mean,” he said to Huben, “when he said he had no intention of breaking the national law?”

  “I know exactly what he meant,” Huben said. He paused. “He has an old army plane out at the airstrip, but it doesn’t work, and its pilot has been transferred. He can’t call in another one without drawing attention to what he wants to do.”

  “There were two planes at the strip,” Quarrier said.

  “That’s right.” Huben sat down again. “Remember when you asked out there about that other plane?” He jerked his thumb, then narrowed his eyes and lowered his voice. “Two Americans. They live right down the hall. They turned up about ten days ago, before we came up from Remate, and Andy says she thinks one of ’em might be pretty notorious; he looks like some feller that had his picture in the paper back home!” Leslie smashed his fist into his palm. “Anyway, they’re the blackest kind of sinners—drunkards, fornicators, killers. Yes, they’re killers, mercenary killers, no better than those who nailed our Lord upon His cross!”

  “Jumping Jehoshaphat!” Hazel cried, placing her hand on her cheek; she winked at Martin in full view of Andy. He knew that she was punishing him because Andy was pretty, and he tried to distract attention from her. He said, “Where did they come from?”

  “Bolivia, I think. There’s been another revolution there. Anyway, they’ve hired themselves out to Guzmán—this is just the chance he’s been waiting for.”

  “But somebody will report this!” Quarrier said.

  “Who will? Nobody will. And even if they did, they would not be believed. And even if they were believed, Guzmán might be embarrassed, but his action would be approved. I tell you, Martin, the government wants those lands developed. So who’s going to report him? Nobody will. Nobody gets in that man’s way!”

  “Martin will,” Hazel said. “Won’t you, Martin?” Her tone was so cold, her voice so very different from the flustered voice of a moment before, that the Hubens stared at her.

  “I don’t know yet,” Martin said.

  “Why, I saw those men this morning, in the street!” Hazel acted flustered once again. “And they’re even more black-hearted than you say they are!”

  IN an early light as clear and warm as melted amber, Quarrier would set forth with Billy to look at Indians in the market place, or to walk the river bank, keeping a sharp eye out for jaguars and anacondas, or to take a boat across the river to the jungle on the far side. There was so much to do. Yet in the end nothing happened; they never found what they were seeking. Even Billy tired quickly once the sun had leaped clear of the trees; the sun grew swollen, lost its outline, turning the sky from limpid blue to dull cooked white, like a gigantic frying egg, until the sun itself turned a sick white, in a white sky.

  Though it was still early in the morning, they would retreat into the Gran Hotel, with its slow creak of ceiling fans and dusty purr of frazzled chickens in the kitchen court. In the bar of the hotel, the people sat all day waiting for rain to cool the air, and whe
n the rain came, every afternoon, they waited for it to clear. The missionaries felt uncomfortable in the bar-salon and did their sitting in their rooms. They were waiting for supplies to come, and meanwhile they sweated like the damned, and sipped on orange gaseosas and prayed prayers.

  For three days now, in time of worship, Andy’s right knee and his left had touched, and he was straining to touch knees again when the brutal shout of the gross bearded outlaw pierced the thin ceiling from the bar below; all four stared at one another, tense with dismay. Only the moment before, Leslie Huben had said, “… and we pray for the Niaruna, O Lord, that they may come to know Thy great love and the blessings of a Christian life in Thy sight and the joy of the hereafter in Heaven above—”

  “—and blow them little brown pricks to Kingdom Come—”

  “Amen.” Leslie, startled, concluded his prayer by mistake.

  In the silence Martin thought, Can God be laughing at us? He really meant, laughing at me, for he realized that none of the others had grasped the juxtaposition of Heaven and Kingdom Come, nor even the obscenity, but only the dreadful callousness of that man’s exclamation mounting from the lower regions. It was left to him, Martin Quarrier, to see the lurid irony of the timing. Why had he seen it? And why—since the event was circumstantial, after all—had his first thought been that God was laughing?

  Or had the Lord intended that hellish cry to draw his attention to his own behavior; for an instant his leg had actually been pressed to hers, because Andy had swung half about, and gazing straight through him, blind to his confusion, said, “May God have mercy on his soul.”

  “Amen,” her husband said again.

  “No,” Hazel said. She had started up like a goaded beast, then sank back heavily once more, her shoulders slumped, her ears protruding through her hair; her bun, ordinarily immaculate, had collapsed since their arrival, and reminded her husband of a loose rat’s nest he had once found in the barn. “Sometimes we ask too much of Him. Our God is a just God, and He will strike down such iniquity with His terrible swift sword!”

  “On Judgment Day, perhaps,” Quarrier said. He rose and went to the window. In his guilt he did not wish to look at Hazel, who wore high sneakers and a big print dress with hearts and bright red roses on a shiny background; his guilt made him feel irritable.

  Huben jumped up and walked the room, up and down, his eyes upon the floor. “I’ll be franker than I was the other day, Martin. If the Niaruna can be cowed a little, they will be softened up for an outreach of the Word, and this will make our work—yes, your work too, Martin, don’t look at me like that—a darn sight easier. Don’t you forget that the Opposition is just lying in wait to see us lose the advantage I have won in Jesus’ name.”

  Quarrier said, “It is our responsibility to try to stop him—”

  “It is not your responsibility. It is my responsibility.”

  “Yet you don’t accept it.”

  “I beg your pardon.” Huben stopped short in his pacing. “Now you be careful, fella. We have other people working with the Tiro and Mintipo in this area, and I can’t, I won’t jeopardize those fellows for your sake—”

  “I certainly understand that you can’t jeopardize the other missions, so what I’m after here is permission to talk to Guzmán again on my own responsibility—”

  “No,” Huben said. “You’ve caused enough trouble already. I’m sorry, Martin, but I forbid this.”

  “I’ll talk to the Americans then.”

  Huben shrugged. “Go ahead. You’ll get nothing but jeers from men like those.”

  “They are devils,” Hazel muttered. “The limb of Satan. That hairy one—he could pass for a devil himself! And that other one—I’ve never seen a face like that in all my born days. That man has looked Satan straight in the eye!”

  “I don’t know,” Andy said slowly. She had moved across to Hazel, who had never once lifted her eyes from the hands clenched in her lap, and now she put her arm around Hazel’s shoulders. “That second man, I saw him in the corridor. Maybe Martin could talk to that second man.”

  “Yes, I’ll try.” Quarrier turned his gaze from Leslie to Andy. “What does he look like?”

  “You must have seen him in the hall. In a strange way, quite an interesting face. Dark, a little hard. Indian blood. And he always wears a dark blue neckerchief round his throat.”

  “What makes you think he’s Indian?”

  “Oh Andy!” Leslie snorted. “She’s got this idea that this Moon fellow comes from up our way. He looks more like some kind of an Italian to me.”

  “I know he’s an Indian; he’s part Cheyenne.” Andy got up and walked about the room. “I knew I’d seen that face before, and when I learned that his name was Moon, I was certain of it.” She turned and looked at her husband. “He’s from our mission schools, somewhere up in the Northwest.”

  “That hairy one?” Hazel, distracted, was gazing out the window after Billy, who was playing in the streets. “That hairy one never came from our Sioux mission, I’ll tell you that much!”

  “No, no, the other man.”

  “Andy, honey, just because this fellow looks a little Indian—”

  “I told you, he’s part Cheyenne or something; anyway, he’s from the reservations. And he was bright, and he had a fine war record, and he was a Christian, so they decided to make an example of him, don’t you remember? Years ago. He was the first Indian from the missions to go to the state university—Somebody Moon. There was a lot of talk about it. I remember, because my dad was all excited.”

  “But you were only a child!” said Leslie, frowning.

  “Yes. I was only a child, but I cut his picture out of the paper and even kept it in my room. I felt sorry for him, I don’t know why. I mean, I guess I felt sorry for all Indians, the way we treated them. And especially the Cheyennes—the first time I read about that journey from that Oklahoma reservation, all the way north across Kansas and Nebraska and South Dakota and on into Montana, and getting shot down by those stupid, stupid people just because they wanted to go home, I cried all night—it makes me cry right now!” She laughed at herself, for angry tears had risen to her eyes. “So anyway, I prayed for him.”

  “Dull Knife’s people,” Quarrier said.

  “Martin knows all about Indians,” Hazel said in a flat voice. It seemed to her that her husband, in the past years at the Sioux mission, had grown more and more indecisive, masking a loss of evangelical zeal with his “respect” for the Indian culture; how was he ever to redeem a people whose religion seemed to him so beautiful? It was her theory that his fascination with the tribal sacraments, the respect he paid them, not only impeded the harvest of souls but was downright disrespectful to the Lord. Martin claimed that his gradual methods laid a better foundation for true faith than quick conversion, but his dogged adherence to these methods was the sin of pride.

  “Well, a lot of my mother’s people were massacred by Sioux in Minnesota, so our family isn’t quite so sentimental as Andy’s is.” Leslie looked impatient. “You mean this Moon got his picture in the paper for going to the university?”

  “Well, yes. And again for being thrown out of it, just before graduation. A lot of folks hollered, ‘Darn drunken Injuns!’ but they were pleased it happened. And then a third time when he was sentenced. Only he never came home again—they never caught him.”

  “A criminal!” cried Hazel, who had never seen one. “I might have known! And a backslider, at that!” When her husband smiled, she immediately looked cross; this was a rule of her game.

  “Well, it wasn’t all that simple.” Andy seemed sorry that she had brought it up.

  “I think I do remember,” Quarrier said. “Somebody Moon. I certainly do remember. He assaulted somebody, stole his money—don’t you remember, Leslie? It was in all the mission newsletters for months.” He rose and started for the door.

  “At that time, probably,” Leslie said, “I had not been called by Jesus. Anyway, it just goes to show you what you�
��re up against. A man like that will only mock you.”

  “Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers,” Hazel intoned as her husband went out, “for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness?”

  And what communion hath light with darkness. II Corinthians, Martin thought as he went down the stairs. He had never dealt with this aspect of his work, the hostility and jeering, the contempt. How strange that the contempt should be so frightening—as frightening, yes, as the danger from the savages … Well … He drove himself along the corridor, determined not to reconnoiter but to make a firm entry and demand an audience.

  In the door to the bar he collided with Padre Xantes. The priest smelled of liquor but was otherwise composed. “Good evening, sir,” he said to Quarrier. “You are looking for the bar?” And he smiled pleasantly at Quarrier’s consternation.

  Quarrier grinned, frowned, said “Excuse me,” said “Good evening,” and finally in a fit of nervousness and impatience extended his hand, which the padre took, and to his dismay, did not release. They struggled silently in the passage.

  “Why do you hate and fear us so,” the padre said, “when all we feel towards you is mild astonishment?”

  Still smiling, Quarrier thrashed politely, desperate to free himself. This is absurd, he raged; why does he cling to me?

  Over the padre’s shoulder he saw Huben’s convert, Uyuyu, who skulked past them, hissing, “Buenas. Buenas noches.” The padre said, “Sí, sí, poor Uyuyu. Such a promising boy!” He gasped for breath, but still he clung to Quarrier like a blind man. “Sí, I raised him myself in the mission, raised him a pure católico, and now he is—eh? What is he, this Indian we have fought over? A Protestant? Do you believe so? Is he neither? Is he both?” The padre stopped smiling; he gripped Quarrier’s hand in his bony fingers. “Answer me, Señor Quarrier. Do you think he knows the difference?”

  Later Quarrier wondered at that last remark; did the priest not mean, “Do you think He knows the difference?” How false and cynical, if true—did it betray a papist lack of faith in their own dogma? He should not have talked to the priest at all. Just at that moment he broke loose—or rather, the padre threw his hand away, casting it up into the air as if setting free a dove.