At Play in the Fields of the Lord

by Peter Matthiessen

  Kori’s people had been harried toward extinction by stronger clans of their own tribe. Each time they took refuge at Remate they invited the contempt not only of their wild tribesmen, but of the Tiro and Mintipo halfbreeds, who saw their own position threatened; the latter now had rags to wear and bits of broken glass and ribbons, and were only too glad of the opportunity to despise a people they had always feared. They persecuted and harassed Kori’s poor hunters, sluttish wives and malcontents, who rapidly lost all confidence and sought to adapt their ways to any group that would tolerate them; self-devouring, they smiled gratefully and indiscriminately from dawn to dark. Kori himself smiled so constantly that Leslie wished to change his name to “Happy,” but neither Andy nor the Quarriers shared his confidence in Kori’s beatitude, and the christening was given up.

  Quarrier was sorry that soldiers had been used to establish the mission, though it was true that the death of Fuentes made a strong case for this precaution; Padre Fuentes had erected shelters on Tiro ground, imagining that he and the sisters would not be molested so long as they remained outside the Niaruna forest. Huben did not hesitate to claim the place a few months later, and established Kori there almost immediately. It was through Uyuyu, whom Padre Xantes had designated as their shepherd at Remate before leaving for Madre de Dios, that Huben had persuaded Kori and his band to accompany him: how could the padre be angry, Uyuyu said, so long as they wore clothes and thanked the mighty spirit named God-Jesu for their food? He promised them that they would be well fed and safe, and they believed him, having already recognized that Uyuyu was more intelligent than themselves and that he understood much better how things worked. Padre Xantes had given Uyuyu a bright silver cross on a neck chain and trained him as a teacher, and Huben had given Yoyo a bright red gringo shirt with bright blue gringo penises on it. At first Yoyo wore the crucifix outside his shirt, but after Huben told him to throw the crucifix away, he wore it inside.

  From the beginning Huben had received support from Guzmán. “The local Comandante is a fair and broad-minded man; the Lord put those entreaties in my mouth which would open his heart to our work here with the Niaruna.” These joyful words had appeared in Huben’s first letter from the Niaruna, the one read by the Quarriers in Mission Fields. And indeed, things had gone very well. Though the wild bands refused to come out of the jungle, they had at least come close enough to steal from the Lord’s gardens and they had not attacked. When Huben had gone out to meet the Quarriers a few weeks later, he took the soldiers back with him to Remate, leaving Kori and his band at the new station.

  So far as Kori was concerned, the withdrawal of the soldiery had been a bad mistake. Although he agreed heartily with Huben that the mission was perfectly safe—he had learned from Yoyo’s prosperous example to agree heartily with the missionary about everything—he had fled the place a day or two after Huben’s departure, taking with him his eight machetes and his silver crucifix, awarded him by his former spiritual adviser, Padre Xantes, in compensation for the two women of his band delivered to the savages as ransom for the nuns. In Remate, throwing the last of his prestige to the winds, Kori had claimed that they were driven out after a furious battle with these savages; but on Huben’s return, smiling expansively, he had agreed with Leslie that this impression had been mistaken. He promised to return immediately to the mission on the Espíritu. His people were glad to leave a place where their nakedness had been laughed at and where they had been treated with contempt, not only as savages but as protestantes. The charge had only bewildered them, since they had no idea what the word meant.

  THE first long days were days of hope. Because Quarrier admired Leslie’s supreme faith and self-confidence, they worked together very well, hunting food, clearing and planting the mission garden, and teaching the Indians what they could. Leslie was a hard worker and an effective one, far more skillful than Quarrier with tools and plants and shotguns. And Leslie liked work for its own sake, taking strength from it; when his hands were in use, his whole face eased and softened, and a tentative humor would replace his tiresome sense of moral right. With the vanity evaporated, with sweat on his dirty face and his hip-pocket comb forgotten, the face took on a true handsomeness of strength.

  They worked on the language late into the evening, and coaxed the Indians toward prayer. The crude chapel they had built—crotched saplings supported its eave pole, the bamboo sides were walled with mud, and the roof bamboos were overlaid with palm fronds—seemed to Quarrier the loveliest building he had ever seen. They restored a small shelter for the Quechuas—Kori and his band had moved back into their own communal maloca, a rectangular palm house which, in their spiritual decrepitude, they scarcely bothered to clean out—and they put up a lean-to cookhouse shed; they partitioned the main shed and constructed a stove of baked mud brick that would burn wood. They replanted the manioc and planted papaya and bananas, and every day they went out to the clearing edge and checked the presents for the savages that they had placed on racks raised above ground. The gift racks were set on five-foot poles, not only as a protection against ground insects and animals, but so as to be readily seen; one had been erected on each of the three edges of the clearing, and a fourth a short distance into the jungle, on a faint trail leading eastward.

  A time came when the gift racks were emptied each night for a fortnight; they prayed earnestly. Then Billy found his friend Mutu playing with one of the Lord’s machetes, and Kori’s people were told to return the gifts. Both Huben and Kori were enraged. “Are we not Niaruna too?” Kori howled. “Does God not love us?” When Leslie answered this with a stern lecture about stealing, Kori responded with a violent lecture of his own: Did not his people share with the gringos everything they had? Did not Mutu teach Billy everything he knew? Then why did the gringos lock up their food and knives and tools, and share with the Indians only when they wished the Indians to work or pray? His people had taken the articles from the racks to punish the gringos for their bad manners.

  The soldiers were furious that Kori’s band might have got away with something, and offered to shoot the entire lot for theft; once again, they muttered, as it had been since the days of the Inca, the faithful Quechuas had been foully used. The Quechua católicos and Niaruna protestantes stamped and ranted, mutually unintelligible, and by no means clear as to why they had been dragged out to this pesthole in the first place.

  HUBEN planned to return to Madre de Dios after the rainy season, leaving Quarrier in charge at the new station. The prospect made Quarrier uneasy, no less so because Hazel was most anxious that the soldiers stay. Her fear and dislike of the jungle had not overcome her loyalty, if not to her husband, at least to their marriage vows; nevertheless she made it clear that she thought his attitude irresponsible and pig-headed and one which placed the child in danger. Shortly after their arrival at the station on the Espíritu, she had retreated into a vast and unforgiving silence, against the day when disaster would prove her right.

  Quarrier told her, in effect: If we sincerely believe that we are here in Jesus’ name, then our son must share our responsibility and our risk; if you do not agree, then you must go home with him to North Dakota. Hazel turned on him, started to cry out, raised her fists, dropped them, groaned, blinked, burst into tears and turned away, martyred again. “Is that what you want?” she sobbed. “That’s probably exactly what you want! Well, we’re not going!”

  Hazel was disgusted by Kori and his people, who were constantly underfoot, or rummaging among her things; once when she was trying to sew, Kori’s old brother squatted before her, and placing his hands upon her knees, gazed up earnestly into her nostrils, as if to see what made her tick. The next day, having established himself as harmless, he lowered his head to peer beneath her dress, persisting in this until she jabbed him smartly with her needle.

  The Indians’ nakedness she could accept so long as it seemed innocent; she eventually became resigned to the custom among young mothers of giving suck to dogs, and to loud, public, devil
-may-care flatulence. But she decried the wholesale preparation and consumption of their masato beer, to which they devoted nearly half their manioc crop; she tried with no success to teach them that all excess manioc should be reduced to farina meal, which could be bartered in Remate for printed gingham and cotton shorts.

  Hazel became obsessed with shorts and dresses, once she perceived how sensual these Indians were. Though they went off into the bushes to make love, they indulged publicly and with much laughter and enthusiasm in erotic games. The girls stroked one another’s breasts; the women grabbed the hands of men and clapped them, giggling, to their crotches; casually, young boys masturbated one another. Quarrier himself was shocked. Yet everything was done in great warmth and good spirits. The Indians of all ages touched one another constantly, consolingly, as if to affirm and reaffirm the solidarity of the clan against the night, wild creatures, storm, against dread spirits. He tried hard to convey this idea to Hazel, for he saw that her rigidity confused them and would do harm. On one occasion Hazel struck away the hand of a young woman who was stroking the genitals of her little boy. Seated on the ground, the mother stared at the white woman, astonished.

  “But I gave him pleasure!”

  With her Indian sensitivity to disapproval, this woman became more and more angry, and her sulking infected the whole band; the Indians grew moody and depressed. Finally the woman and her husband had to be taken downriver to Remate, and Quarrier said to Hazel, “The next time you strike an Indian for any reason, it is you who will be sent away; they do not understand it and it could be very dangerous for us all.”

  She said, “And Billy? Do you want him watching these filthy tricks? Is that what you want?”

  “Unless you tell him they are filthy, it will not occur to him; it will all seen very natural.”

  “Natural! And if one of those nasty little monkeys puts his hands on him?”

  “He might enjoy it,” Quarrier said harshly.

  Hazel did not know that her son, at eight, was a seasoned voyeur, having accompanied his friend Mutu on innumerable expeditions into the bushes to watch their elders puff and groan and thrash about with one another in the dirt. Billy had not yet connected this engrossing spectacle with the phenomenon of birth, much less suspected that he himself was the product of a similar compulsion on the part of his parents. After his first experience, in fact, he ran to report a wild and fascinating Indian custom to his father—“Boy, Pa, what savages they are!”—describing it as a kind of death struggle between man and woman. “What good does it do them?” he demanded of his father, a little embarrassed now by the details he had suppressed not only because they upset him but because a description of acts so outlandish would never be believed. “You should’ve seen it! And afterwards they just kind of lay there in the dirt! Grown-up Indians, just laying there looking up at the sky. Like they were trying to remember something. It made me feel so funny.” The child’s voice grew thick and halting. “Real grownups, the way they looked. I felt sorry for them, Pa. I felt so sorry for them!” When Quarrier took Billy in his arms, the child burst into tears. “You should’ve seen it,” Billy blubbered. “It was awful.”

  Quarrier failed to comfort him with the concepts of God and love, the creation of children, human birth. As he began, the little boy was staring at him, innocent, but as the implications gathered, as the realization came that this man beside him had grappled with his own mother in that desperate manner and that, still worse, he himself was the consequence and living proof of such activity, he gradually turned his head away. The nape of his thin neck was fiery with astonishment and shock; Quarrier did not dare touch him. For a long time, father and son sat there together, digesting the ways of the world.

  Billy whispered, “You mean, in your birthday suits?” He did not turn to see his father nod.

  “And Mrs. Huben—she does that with Mr. Huben?”

  Now Quarrier grew very red himself, and was glad that Billy did not turn around on this occasion either.

  “You mean …” Billy exclaimed at last, “you mean …”—his voice rose high and clear—“you mean …”—and he jumped to his feet, and standing there under the giant trees, pointed at himself, a small outraged boy named William Martin Quarrier, aged eight: “You mean I just came crashing down into Ma’s underpants?”

  ONE day Andy saw a face among the leaves. Catching her breath, she leaned minutely to one side, to be quite certain; the brown face, like a leaf shadow, leaned with her. When she straightened again, it straightened; when she leaned far sideways, it leaned far sideways. She smiled; it did not smile. When she called quietly to Leslie, it disappeared. After that she saw fleeting shadows several times, but they would never answer.

  Not understanding about shoes, the savages buried bamboo slivers in the pathway to the gift racks, to pierce the white men’s feet; the racks themselves were left untouched. The whites had to assume that wherever they went, whatever they did, eyes watched them; they felt permanently self-conscious and afraid. All they could do was wait, and the wait was endless. Only Billy Quarrier, who played with Mutu and had his own small bow and arrows, welcomed the shadow faces in the trees; the child’s bottomless joy in his new life gave strength to all of them, even Hazel, who rarely left the cook shed. There she took solace in the sight of household articles, and hoarded the last of the cheerfully packaged foods from home.

  Hazel never tried to penetrate the jungle wall, even to inspect a gift rack, and she had avoided the wall itself since the afternoon when, resting in its shade, she was spied out from directly overhead by monkeys; these animals, after their habit in the presence of invaders, lavishly befouled her, and this so suddenly that it seemed to Hazel that the heavens had opened up and voided on her. She burst into tears when the others laughed.

  In a dream that night Hazel stood in a church with a clean simple country altar and stone bowls, and the cold clean light of a late North Dakota autumn streaming through the glass, and a choir singing. She was lost in the beauty of this experience, and stared enchanted at the choir. But the choir lacked red cheeks and seraphic faces, and its members were not innocent; even as their voices soared they sniggered and itched and hitched soiled cassocks to scratch white hairy legs, and some broke wind. Their faces were loutish and their mouths pimply, and they were passing things around. The flaunting of their frailty in such a place disgusted her and pained her heart, and this pain in her heart was like a wound, and the wound transcended her, forming again as a round opening in the clean granite ceiling of the church, like the base of a chandelier. She gazed up at the vaults of stone to ease her pain, and then the hole opened and spewed slime, which dripped on the stone and glass and silver of the church, and down the singing faces of the choir. But the psalm still swelled throughout the church, and the voices remained brave and pure, and a light shone everywhere, inextinguishable, illuminating the slime itself, transfiguring it, infusing the very stink of it with eternal life.

  Hazel was so frightened by this dream that she woke Martin. Oh, how disgusting! My mind—what is happening to me in this place! That hole—do you ever dream such sickening things? Does everybody, or is it only me? It was like those monkeys—those creatures with men’s faces in the trees … Oh Martin, help me, that hole was the hole of God—! She shook her head behind her hands.

  But the end of the dream is beautiful, Quarrier said. She was stricken and would not be comforted; he knew that she hated him for having listened, for failing to take her in his arms.

  Billy could not find his mother any more; the distance grew between them. He turned more and more to Andy, who loved to play with him. The sight of them, heads together, inspecting odd flowers or small creatures of the jungle, gave Quarrier such pleasure that he scarcely noticed that Hazel watched them too. One day after breakfast, when Andy and Billy were crouched in the dooryard on their knees and elbows, exclaiming at how the sunlight caught the blue of a pet morpho butterfly, Hazel came forth and said to them in a monotone, “That lovely col
or isn’t real. It isn’t real.” She reached down and pinched off its wing and ground it between her fingertips, then held out her fingertips and muttered, “See, it turns to gray. It’s nothing but gray dust. Dust unto dust.” In tears, she started back toward the hut as the butterfly flopped along the ground in a crippled circle.

  “Now Hazel, honey …” Martin started, much upset.

  “Well, that was silly of you, Hazel, I must say!” Andy jumped up, shaking off Martin’s hand. But if Hazel had heard she gave no sign, going on into the hut. “It doesn’t help her to indulge her, Martin,” Andy said coldly. Seeing the child’s face, she groaned with exasperation, and sank to her knees and hugged him. “If we start giving way to our nerves like that, we’re all going to be in trouble,” she warned Quarrier over the child’s shoulder. “If there’s a way to reach her, you’d better find it.”

  “If you’ll excuse me, you seem a bit on edge yourself.”

  “That’s right! We’re all on edge! And small wonder—we’re not idiots! But even a slap across the face can be more help and comfort sometimes than ‘Now Hazel, honey’; it can bring you back among the living.” Her voice trailed off; Billy was watching them.

  “She’s gone crazy!” Billy muttered tearfully. “I hate her!” Andy managed a little laugh and whirled the boy off the ground, and his father said, “Don’t blame your mother, Bill. She’s feeling kind of peaked in this heat.”

  He had never called him Bill before, intending it now as an appeal and compliment, and Billy nodded. “Sure,” he said, “it’s kind of hot, all right.” Self-conscious in this mature role, he twisted rudely from Andy’s embrace and snatched up the butterfly, handling it roughly.