At Play in the Fields of the Lord

by Peter Matthiessen

  Four soldiers were hunted out and separated from their companions; if the four who were finally delivered in a mute and pitiable condition to the boats were not the same men assigned to the trip the day before, they were at least indistinguishable. They were Quechuas of the sierra, slack in the jaw and purple-skinned, with yellow eyes and stumpy mountain legs. The bleak gloom absorbed from their native tundra had been deepened by exposure to the jungle. All of them were full of drink, but the drunkenness only made them appear more brutish and unhappy. Quarrier nodded at them and smiled, and they retreated, bumping into one another like cattle; one of them crossed himself.

  “They must think we’re demons,” Quarrier said sadly. “I wonder how the padre persuaded them to go.” He thought with sympathy of Padre Xantes, who had had to countersign Guzmán’s signature on the note to the corporal at Remate.

  “They have no choice,” Huben said. “The Quechuas have never had a choice about anything. The Opposition has only used them, just as the Incas used them—they are a meek and stupid people.”

  “And shall they inherit the earth?” His own remark made Quarrier uncomfortable. Quickly he said, “Are they really stupid, do you think, or just resigned?”

  “What’s the difference?” Huben’s ironic smile made Quarrier still more uncomfortable, and he turned away. He thought about his reservation Sioux, the terrible apathy of hopelessness that the white man preferred to call laziness and stupidity.

  Billy was already in the bow of the canoe when Hazel came from the latrine; she was ashen. She would not tell Quarrier what the matter was; it was just too awful, too disgusting. But later she said that she had seen two giant frogs or toads squatting half buried in the fecal muck. Trapped in the water of the pit, they had grown fat on the swarming flies and were living out their lives buried in excrement.

  “They live in it,” Hazel choked. “They live in it. Why, no North Dakota frog could possibly—oh, this vile place!”

  He tried to laugh, to tease her about clean-living North Dakota frogs, but she would not be comforted. She sat trembling in the morning chill, teeth chattering, all hunched in upon herself.

  He wondered if Andy Huben had seen the frogs.

  In the early mist the people stood in deferential rows, wide-eyed like children; their murmurings were as gentle and soft as water. Padre Xantes on his monthly visits had taught them that the evangélicos were evil; still, the people did not expect to see these evangélicos alive again, and one or two were moved to call “Suerte!”

  “What are they saying?” Hazel demanded, glaring at them until they backed away.

  “They are wishing us good luck,” her husband said. He climbed clumsily into the second canoe, a long black craft hollowed out of a single trunk and powered by the ancient forerunner of Huben’s new white outboard. The canoe already held Billy and Hazel and supplies, in addition to two soldiers with their kits and carbines.

  Huben had a similar load, but with its new outboard, his boat would be faster. This was the motor sent with the blessing of Leslie’s sponsors in Wisconsin; before departing the United States, it had had its photograph in Mission Fields. Now that he had his outboard, Leslie prayed almost daily for barbed wire to fence the mission hut so that the Indians, with their lice and smoky smell and dirty fingers, would give them a little privacy.

  Leslie wore black basketball sneakers, a red baseball cap on his taffy hair, and a T-shirt tucked into lastex bathing tights pulled up above his waist, so that, with his short torso and long legs, he looked like a high-hipped boy; the golden hair and soft tan of those legs—Hazel said that they reminded her of a pullet—caught the dull light reflected from the river. On the lap of his wife, seated facing him, was his new short-wave radio, which invoked for its proud owner friendly voices from all corners of the globe. This morning he had summoned up American music from Panama, popular tunes to which he crooned accompaniment. The music wandered on the river in the thick cotton mists of dawn; it rose, fragmented, through the roar as he cranked his motor.

  Now Leslie stood up in the stern, and spreading his arms far and wide, cried, “Praise the Lord!”

  “Praise the Lord,” said Hazel, chin out, doggedly. She sat opposite her husband, facing the motor.

  Maneuvering his boat into Huben’s wake, Quarrier waved to the people on the bank; they did not wave back. He was depressed by the settlement Indians, by the filthy pants, the rotting undershirts of their deliverance. The weakest and most opportunistic people in a wild tribe were those who prospered under the white man—a fact no less true because Lewis Moon, in their conversation that night in Madre de Dios, had made this point. He was glad to leave Remate, as he had been glad to leave Madre de Dios.

  There were chambers of cold air upon the river. He was tired and nervous and cold, and shook so violently that he could scarcely steer. When the canoes had rounded the first bend and Remate had disappeared from view, he nodded to Hazel and they prayed. One hand on the outboard tiller, the other to his forehead, he prayed that the Lord would bless them and keep them, that His work might be done, Amen. She prayed dutifully for the health and safety of His servants, Leslie and Andy, that they too might work for the Glory of the Lord, Amen. He watched her as she prayed. How grotesque and right it was that at this moment, stubbornly erect, borne against her will into the hated jungle, she should be facing backward—this poor great mule of a woman, he thought, with the last grace kicked out of her.

  He said, “Almighty God, we pray for Lewis Moon—”

  “No!”

  “—that he be still alive, and that he may walk safely from the wilderness, to seek his own salvation in Thine eyes, Amen.”

  She spoke in hate: “I’d pray for Guzmán first!”

  From the river rose sad supplicating limbs of submerged trees, writhing and shivering in the current; on a sand bar at the bend ahead a pale caiman five feet long lay with its jaws agape, straining to swallow a sword of light which pierced the green escarpments. At the approach of Huben’s motor it rose on its short legs and ran, carrying its body clear of the ground, like two men borne forward by a heavy log which they are about to drop; headlong and obscene, it plunged into the current. A thrash of its armored tail and it was gone, leaving a soft spreading welt on the slow water.

  At Billy’s shout she had turned her head in time to see the reptile, and was gagging.

  “They’re harmless, Hazel. They say only the black crocodiles are dangerous.”

  “The crocodiles,” she muttered. “The black ones. Where are they?” She fixed her eyes on the big red hands folded tightly on her lap. He did not want those hands to touch him, ever again.

  A scent of the jungle caught him unaware; he stared at the engulfing trees. Perhaps the canoes were being watched, had been watched since they left Remate. But this was Tiro country, after all, and the Tiro had been tame for many years; like the Quechua, they had made their peace with exploitation. At the same time one never knew what impulse might seize this people, whose resilience must have its snapping point, and for whom, unlike the Niaruna, stealth and treachery ranked high among the virtues; on this narrow river it would be the work of moments to fill the chests of the Lord’s ambassadors with arrows. Having hidden any food and valuables, the Tiro could then paddle downriver to Remate with the news of another Niaruna massacre.

  Quarrier stared at Billy’s small eager body pressed into the bow. Perhaps the only thing staying the Tiro hand was that the idea had not occurred to them. He shuddered violently with cold. A need for peace came over him; he had an impulse to cut the motor of the boat and drift silently backward into green oblivion, letting his hand trail in the cool water.

  Along the river banks where sun had touched the earth, wild walls of flowering trees and shrubs sprang up on every side: pea vines with yellow flowers, stilt-root garcinias and spiny palms, myrtles, cecropias and acacias, pineapple, and plantains with their scarlet blossoms. Hazel pointed at the pea vines, wondering if the fruit in the pods tasted anything
like the garden pea. She also recognized deer callaloo, with its edible greens, but when Quarrier angled over to the banks to let her pick some, she held them in her hands suspiciously, then dropped them into the water. “It’s some foreign kind of pokeberry, like we have home, but different,” she muttered. “I don’t trust it.” And she relapsed into her dejection, though Billy sought frantically to bring her back, pointing out bright barbets, jacamars and tanagers which crossed back and forth in front of them; he shouted as a stream of parakeets spun around a treetop, and a small, somehow familiar emerald bird bounded from limb to limb ahead. “A kingfisher!” Billy called. “Lookit that funny kingfisher!” They saw huge ant nests high up on the trunks, and the hanging nests of the caciques and oropéndolas: “Lookit the giant orioles!” But Billy’s voice was deadened by the motors, and as the sun rose higher the birds and colors vanished, like the mist. Hazel had long since turned to stone, and the child stopped calling.

  They went on into the growing day, up the brown river, the green canyons. The dry season had already begun; the river was shoal in places, with sand bars lengthening at the bends, and sunken trees emerging like great black feeding reptiles of another age.

  A spotted sandpiper bobbed and teetered; when it flitted off—peet-weet—Hazel cried out in recognition of this gentle bird from home and burst into tears. The Quechuas swung slowly around to grunt and peer and gape. When Quarrier smiled at him, Billy glanced at his mother, shrugged in an effort to look unconcerned, and turned away again.

  The wan glaze of the strip of sky over their heads had clouded to vapor above the trees, and the fierce greens had softened, thickened, closing off all sound; the motor’s roar rebounded from the green, defeated by the weight of stillness. In this world gone dead Quarrier saw a sloth, pressed to a high trunk for camouflage. Eyes fixed on the tree, he reached out to touch his wife, then turned when he did not find her; his hand was wavering near her breast and she watched it without expression. The boat jumped a sunken tree and yawed around, sluicing a spray of water across their legs; it plowed into a canebrake at the bank, and the motor stalled.

  Over Hazel’s shoulder, in the sudden silence, he met the gaze of the Green Indians. He grinned. “Muy estúpido,” he said. They did not smile back. Nor did Hazel; her face was straining, but she could not help him. Billy’s careless whistling, well meant, was thin and airy, and pained Quarrier worst of all.

  “There was a sloth,” he said, “up in that tree.” He pointed.

  She nodded, brushing aimlessly at her wet skirt.

  “I wanted you and Billy to see it.”

  She nodded again, and he dropped his eyes in fear of the smile that she would force. Now the river silence he had longed for was unbearable; he yanked violently at the cranking rope, twice, three times, four, rocking the boat with the misspent strength of his own clumsiness.

  They reached the abandoned settlement at Esperanza as the sun, shrouded by the pall, slid across the narrow avenue of sky between the treetops. In 1912 the Niaruna, enraged by the brutality of the white man, had put aside their inter-village quarrels and banded together to destroy this place; there had been three survivors. The old rubber camp had lain at a confluence of streams, and the last trace of it was a banana grove gone wild; after the massacre a metal cross had been erected on the bank. The memorial was ten feet high, on a concrete base, and for a time it had apparently been tended. But now the vines were so thick upon it that only one arm protruded through the green; it had lost its form and soon would be difficult to find. Quarrier yelled at Huben, “Shall we stop and clean that cross?” but Huben said, “That papist cross?” and shook his head.

  THE Niaruna station was a two-hour journey above the Esperanza ruin. Perched on a bank of rufous clay above a river bend, the mission shed was visible a quarter-mile downstream. Both Tiro and Niaruna recognized the place as a frontier, which the Niaruna, but not the Tiro, crossed at will.

  Now the clearing came into view. On both sides were plantations of manioc; well, Quarrier thought, Padre Fuentes was here long enough to plant. Then he stared at the mission bank in disbelief.

  “Hey, Pa!” Billy turned around, mouth open, frightened. “Pa!”

  Now Huben saw what they had seen; he slowed his motor, then circled back and came up alongside the second boat.

  “This could be very good,” he said, “or very, very bad.”

  Quarrier was glad of Huben’s coolness. In plain view on the bank stood a party of Niaruna, fourteen men, each with his black bow of chonta palm and long cane arrows. The bright black hair on the brown shoulders was arrayed in fur and feathers, and the faces and chests were streaked in bold patterns of red-orange dye. Another band of red wound up each muscled leg—the serpent. Except for a fiber band which held the penis of each man pressed to his belly, the savages were naked; but at the end of the line, also in face paint and carrying bow and arrows, was a barefoot Indian dressed in shirt and pants too big for him, and wearing on his head the dark blue neckerchief which the missionaries recognized as that of Lewis Moon.

  The boats slid forward, slow against the current; the Green Indians cocked their rifles. Hazel Quarrier leaned forward and dragged Billy back across the seats into the stern. “May the Lord forgive him,” she said. “May he rest in peace.”

  “Amen,” Huben said. “He who lives by the sword, right?”

  “Oh Leslie,” Andy cried. “You needn’t gloat!”

  “Suppose they try to drive us off,” Quarrier said irritably. “Are you going to shoot?” One of the two soldiers in his canoe, still half drunk, leveled his rifle, and Quarrier shouted at him; gazing back at the missionary with yellowed eyes, the soldier opened his mouth wide and probed the front side of his lower teeth with a slow tongue.

  “We will shoot into the air,” said Huben. “Let us pray …

  … Thou shalt not be afraid for

  the terror by night; nor for the

  arrow that flieth by day;

  “Nor for the pestilence that

  walketh in darkness; nor for the

  destruction that wasteth at noonday.…”

  The Indians stood rigid as the boats approached. Their naked silence was so close, so overpowering that the women turned their heads away. All prayed. The Indians had raised their bows when the soldier raised his rifle; they were still tense. Then the warrior in Moon’s shirt and pants loosed an arrow which dropped neatly between the boats, causing them to circle once before proceeding.

  “Satan is surely among them!” Huben cried, “Even the serpents on their legs—!”

  He called out to them in greeting, and the man in the blue neckerchief snapped his head sideways in a gesture of contempt; now he drove two more arrows into the ground, so that they formed an X, facing the missionaries. He then stalked toward the trees.

  “Friends!” Huben shouted after them. “We are your friends!” He waved a gift ax that he had grabbed from a pack, but they were gone.

  “How did they know we were coming?” Andy spoke to Hazel, trying to smile. “Isn’t it strange?”

  Hazel did not answer: she held Billy to her breast, muttering fiercely. The boy tried discreetly to work free; he glanced unhappily at his father.

  Quarrier said, “Well, what did you think of those wild Indians, son?” His own voice sounded froggish to him; he longed to turn and go, and keep on going.

  They stepped gingerly onto the bank, leaving the motors running. But even after they had shut the outboards off and begun the process of unloading, Hazel Quarrier sat stolidly in her seat. When her husband came and laid his hand upon her shoulder, she raised her eyes and stared about her.

  “The black ones,” Hazel murmured. “Where are they?”

  12

  THE FEATHERS OF THE CROSSED ARROWS, TREMBLING IN THE LIGHT air, were all that stirred in the quiet of the clearing. A feathered club leaned like a token barrier in the doorway of the main shelter, a dolefully sagging structure of bamboo and palm fronds. These were bad signs, even to Hube
n, who liked to dismiss such heathen doings as inconsequential. When Quarrier took the club and stuck it up under the thatching of the roof, Huben demanded, “What are you saving that for?”

  “Because it interests me. These warning signs invoke some kind of evil spirits.”

  “Evil spirits!” Huben exclaimed scornfully. He began a loud casual humming, accompanying his faithful radio which blared away on the far side of the clearing. Quarrier marveled at this man, who was convinced that Moon and Wolfie were possessed by demons, yet could dismiss the Indian equivalents with such conviction. “Bye, bye, love,” sang Leslie Huben. The blare of the music was unbearable in the tense silence of the jungle; Quarrier crossed the clearing and snapped off the radio.

  “Relax, fella,” Huben called.

  For a long time after those painted shapes had vanished back into the forest, the missionaries saw no sign of a wild Indian. In the first week they set about clearing the vines, repairing the thatch roofs, weeding the low undergrowth from the yard and freeing the roof cross from the strangler fig that was dragging it to earth.

  The plantation of maize and manioc had been looted, and many half-ripe vegetables left to rot. The Indians had taken everything of value except the short-wave radio, which they had hurled into the river; Huben found it in a muddy pool below the bank, the silt swirling past its metal face. They assumed that this pillage had been done by the wild Niaruna, but Quarrier became less certain of this when, three days after their own arrival, Kori’s band of outcast Niaruna from Remate appeared in their canoes; too innocent as yet to lie adroitly, they brought suspicion on themselves by the vehemence with which they condemned their brethren. “The people of Boronai,” they yelled. “They are still savages! They are not like us!” Kori insisted that Boronai and his savages had been the culprits in the looting, and to prove this he burst into tears right on the spot, out of pure shame that such Niaruna could exist. Huben was annoyed when Quarrier laughed.