“Where are you going?” Andy said.
“Give this stupid old butterfly to Mutu. The Indians will know what to do.” He ran off toward the shelters, where the crippled butterfly would be replaced by one of a litter of wild pets. The Indians could tame practically everything but Jaguar and Scorpion and Sloth, who was always climbing. Sloth’s wits were too slow, the Indians said, for it to realize that it could not climb to heaven.
“He’s had to grow up a little, poor old Billy,” Martin said, and was startled by the sharp look that Andy gave him; she had changed since they came here, too.
“Who hasn’t?” she said. She followed Hazel into the Quarriers’ quarters.
Though he dreaded her departure, Martin knew he would be happier with Andy gone. Her presence was not worth the distraction she brought him. Or rather, it was worth it, and this made him feel guilty. He watched her constantly, observed her smallest way and habit, and could not give up his vice even when he realized that Hazel knew. How could he explain to Hazel that he loved Andy as anyone might love a pretty child, as unattainable as an angel? True, he had once imagined himself in love with Andy, but surely that was only an evasion of unhappiness; the girl was a kind of lovely wraith that he had shaped to fit his need.
And he and Leslie, though much closer than before, would never work well together among Indians. When the wild bands were contacted, Leslie intended to infect them with a need for cloth and beads, mirrors and ax heads. Once this need was established, their exposure to the Gospel would be assured, and conversion would simply be a matter of time. It was a basic method, used by missionaries across the world, but to Quarrier it reeked of coercion. How did it differ, he asked Leslie, from the alcohol tactic suggested by the Syrian at Remate, which Huben had disdained? Call it economic pressure or call it bribery—would Jesus have approved it? Look at the people of Remate; was that what Salvation meant?
Victims of the Opposition, Huben said.
Well, how about Kori? So far as Quarrier could see, the Niaruna of Kori had no real idea of God, either Catholic or Protestant; they mouthed the few religious terms they knew in return for food and care. Leslie had weaned Kori from his extravagant adoration of the Catholic Blessed Virgin, replacing Her in the old man’s imagination with the concept of a good old-fashioned Hell, and these days Kori, without provocation, would smile beatifically and say, “Fire Place no go, all time, all time stay good, Amen.” Kori was a tall lean-faced old man with a gratifying dignity of feature, and his photograph was to accompany Leslie’s next letter to Mission Fields.
Quarrier intended to start clean, having inherited from his father, an old-time missionary in China, a mistrust of the “rice Christian,” lured to the faith by food. The one lasting method of conversion, he felt certain, was to lead them out of the darkness by Christian example—the food and medicine and time should be given freely. He would not bribe the Indians to love Jesus, nor force them into Christian marriage. One night, excited, he declaimed at supper that marriage might be bad for jungle Indians, since their chronic malaria was thought to reduce fertility; the more various the pairings, the less chance of extinction. Hazel sent Billy out-of-doors; to judge from her expression, extinction was a far, far better state than sin.
Finally, Quarrier disliked the presence in the camp of four Quechua soldiers, with their dim notions of Catholicism—not that the Quechuas and Kori’s Niaruna mixed, for the soldiers, given their heads, would have shot down their compatriots at a moment’s notice. But he felt certain that the wild bands would not come in so long as the soldiers were in camp; he asked Leslie to take the Quechuas away. He felt perfectly safe without the soldiers, he said; if the mission had not been attacked in the first month, the chances were that it would not be attacked at all. Kori, when asked by Huben if he agreed, nodded vigorously, for it was his principle to agree with everything the gringo said and with nothing said by his own people, of whom he was deeply ashamed.
Quarrier felt well-nigh omnipotent at the prospect of his own calling. Even the jungle excited him, especially in those mysteries of early day, with the huge trees shifting in the sun and vapors like tattered masts, the dense smell of flowers from the river walls, the cool clear bells of the forest voices and the thunder of red howler monkeys, like oncoming storm. Hunting along the river, he and Leslie and Billy had started wild pig and capybara from the banks and sand bars, and had glimpsed an ocelot and a shy tapir. The birds like jewels, the kaleidoscopic butterflies, the banks of pink mimosa and purple tonka bean astonished him; the jungle seemed a kind of Eden. Billy was so excited that his happy voice seemed part of the clear forest triumph, absorbed and refracted, echoing back.
Then the rains came crashing down, and in the humid spells between, Quarrier knew what Hazel dreaded: the oppression of the jungle, the poisonous green flesh and weight of it. Its latent violence crawled on his skin like fever, causing him to shake and sweat.
The rains had scarcely ceased when the Hubens left, taking the soldiers with them. In his doubts about this day, Quarrier had all but put it from his mind, and he found himself unprepared to see them off. He still had need of Huben’s experience and assistance, and most of all of Huben’s faith. Staring down into Andy’s wistful face as she smiled up at him from the canoe, he knew that she was going off with part of him attached to her, as if his body would be subtly torn, as if he would now slowly bleed to death. To hide his agony from his wife, he played the fool, taking the risk that Hazel would interpret his noisy cheer as last-minute doubt about the advisability of sending back the soldiers. The Quechuas yawned at him from the canoe, unmoved by his wave of parting.
Leslie cried, “God bless the Mart Quarrier Family! You have the Almighty command to go!” Andy Huben called, “God bless you.” Her face was still misted by her parting with Billy, who was so hurt and disappointed by her desertion that he had spoken rudely and was now throwing mud balls out into the river, close to her canoe.
Quarrier knew what his son was feeling; he felt like throwing mud balls of his own. Himself in need, he could not help his wife, whose emotion was causing her to pant. Red hands clasped white, she stood flat-footed in her best black shoes and dress of hearts and roses, staring at all of them as if they were a pack of hostile strangers. What’s happening? her wild eyes seemed to cry.
Leslie gunned his motor, and the overloaded dugout turned downstream. Even after the Hubens had disappeared, the river was watched by the Mart Quarrier Family. Standing there as the silence grew, they could not look at one another, and hardly spoke for the remainder of that day.
The jungle walls had crowded in much closer. Kori looked furtive; the mission might be under scrutiny at this very moment. The wild men were right there behind the trees, doubtless plotting an attack now that the soldiers had departed. For the first time in days Quarrier remembered the fate of poor Fuentes, in this very place. So nervous was he that he had to force himself to check the gift racks, and he felt exhausted by his effort to show calm for Hazel’s benefit. But his wife’s morale had risen with the departure of the Hubens; she worked busily, almost cheerfully. And while he was grateful for this change, he found it strange—was this the cheerfulness, he wondered, of the Christian martyrs? Watching Billy, he was racked with doubt about his decision to dismiss the soldiers, and prayed twice during the day for Divine counsel.
HE was awakened a few days later by a high whining angry singsong from the clearing. Kori, facing the jungle wall, was speaking too rapidly for Martin to follow. When the old man finished, a voice came back out of the jungle, also in rapid singsong and also angry; this voice was not whining. Dressing clumsily, in haste, Quarrier came out into the clearing, holding his hands clear of his sides to show that he was unarmed.
A naked man stepped forth out of the shadows. He was a strong, stolid Indian of middle age, in a crown of monkey fur and toucan feathers, arm bands of fiber and hide ankle thongs, with a necklace of two jaguar incisors set back to back, tips to each side, and a fiber band strappin
g his penis upright to his belly. His rectangular face was streaked with red achote, and twin serpents were painted on his legs. He was followed a moment later by two younger men. The savages carried short lances and bows and arrows, and all three gazed unrelentingly at Quarrier as he walked forward.
In a thick voice he called out, “Welcome! Welcome to the Niaruna people! Welcome, friends!” He had rehearsed this greeting many times, but now it resounded in his ears as false and frightened. Kori gesticulated angrily, then folded his arms on his chest; his people chattered nervously among themselves. In the half-dressed state imposed upon them by the missionaries, Kori’s people lacked any dignity: the eight men in ragged trousers fell back before the three wild Niaruna from the jungle, who showed their contempt by disregarding them. The savages did not respond to Quarrier’s greeting, but neither did they retreat as he walked toward them.
Over his shoulder Quarrier called to Billy to bring three machetes and a mirror; the boy came flying, barefoot and unbuttoned. When Quarrier took the gifts from him, the man in the monkey crown grunted and snapped his head, chattering rapidly at Kori; Kori yelled out in his dreadful Spanish that Boronai wished to receive the gifts from the child. Billy retrieved the three machetes, which he carried against his chest like logs of wood, and his father laid the mirror on top of them, instructing him to give the mirror to the man wearing the crown. In this instant the vulnerability and beauty of his little boy, mouth wide, eyes shining with good will and expectation, took Quarrier’s breath away; he wished to say something to his son, but there was nothing to be said.
Billy ran forward, and unable to see the ground, sprawled on his face; the Indians in both groups laughed. But when Quarrier approached to make sure that Billy had not cut himself, the naked men raised their bows. Quarrier stopped. Then, ignoring a shout from Kori, he moved forward again, holding his arms wide, and helped Billy to his feet; the latter, unhurt, had gathered the gifts while still on his knees, but could not rise under the load.
The Indians lowered their bows. When the mirror and machetes were delivered, the man removed the monkey crown from his own head and placed it on the head of Billy. The child fled back toward his father, leaping like a goat. But Boronai stopped smiling when the white man extended his hand toward the Indians; again Kori called, “Gringo, no vengas.”
Hazel came out with a large bowl of rice. She walked without a tremor, and Quarrier smiled at her in a flood of gratitude and admiration. She did not flinch when one of the younger savages pointed at her and then at Quarrier, and resting his weapons on his shoulder, jammed one forefinger back and forth through the fingers of his other hand, nudging his companion as he did so. She placed the bowl upon the ground, between her husband and the Indians, then retired out of sight.
Quarrier sat down before the bowl, his son beside him. Pointing at it, he made an eating motion with his fingertips. The three savages came forward and squatted on their haunches; one shifted sideways to keep an eye on Kori’s men. When Kori himself approached the feast, this young warrior raised his lance as to a dog. Kori yelled at him, but came no farther.
Quarrier was dry-mouthed with excitement, and a vast relief poured through his body. Exultantly he said to Billy, “The Lord be praised, Bill—oh, the Lord be praised!” Billy whispered, “These are real ones, you found the real ones—that’s more than Mr. Huben did!” The child’s words made him laugh aloud; he recognized the happiest moment of his life.
Then the hard-faced young Indian who had driven Kori from the feast reached forward with his new machete and jabbed Quarrier sharply in the chest; Boronai and the other man, who had stopped eating, grunted in angry approval. For in his excitement, in his conviction that the Lord had blessed his decision to dismiss the soldiers, that for the first time in his ten years of mission work he had actually accomplished something in Jesus’ name, Quarrier had so forgotten his own knowledge of Indian ways as to reach into the bowl of rice; he had had some vague idea of demonstrating that the food was not poisoned. When the Indian jabbed the steel into his chest, he dropped the rice slowly back into the bowl and despite his pain tried to smile; at the same time he grasped Billy’s arm, for the child had reached to stop the blade.
The Indian’s face was taut with a hostility beyond anything that Quarrier had ever seen—a flat hard squint between the fierce bands of charcoal and livid paint that made the wild eyes vibrate. The gaze horrified Quarrier; he sat there, faint and stupid in the sunlight, feeling the warm blood trickle down his chest.
13
HE DRIFTED DOWN A VAST BLUE SKY TOWARD THE MORNING.
The empty plane slid peacefully away, back toward the west. He mourned it: a derelict ship could be commandeered, but a derelict plane was irredeemable, droning blindly toward oblivion. It was as if such a machine would never strike the ground, but must vanish soundlessly in some far corner of the heavens, in a burst of sun. He was still a mile above the ground when the engine sputtered, coughed, sputtered again and failed, and in the enormous silence of the sky he watched his plane fall off the edge of life into its final glide. The spectacle gave him a turn of vague uneasiness; the machine had only come alive as it was about to die.
The rush of silence in the wake of the dead engine left him face to face with his own apprehension; his remarkable plight startled him so that he cleared his throat to assure himself of his reality. A few hours before, he could not have distinguished reality from hallucination, and the one thing that persuaded him that he could do so now was his awareness that were he not still under the effects of ayahuasca, his lack of regret at this very moment could only be insane. For here he was, on this fine morning, coming down from the sky in a parachute into which he was not even strapped, with a mile to go on the strength of arms already in such pain that they felt broken; unless he bound them more securely in the back harness, he was not sure they would hold out, and if he did bind them, he would be unable to work the shrouds to steer the parachute and would lose his chance, already remote, of landing in the Niaruna clearing.
High in the sun-white and whirling blue, he struggled to work a loop of harness over his shoulders and up under his arms. A twisted shroud bound the revolver tight against his ribs, and the metal hurt him; he wished he had thrown it away. Spurts of fear robbed him of strength. He rested a moment, then brought his knees up to his chin and got one leg through a second loop, an arrangement which turned him on his side, like a trussed chicken. This freed his arms to seize the shrouds; he was now able to haul himself upward to a better angle. In this way, tied in knots, he continued his descent.
The airplane, still visible, was dropping as lightly as a leaf; it would disappear into the forest without a sound.
He hauled mightily on the shrouds nearest the clearing. The day was windless, but there had been currents in the upper air that he had not gauged; he would fall short. He slacked off on the near shrouds and hauled hard on the back ones, for if he had to fall short, he had better fall far enough away to give himself a little time; dangling from trees at the clearing edge while the Niaruna shot arrows at him was only the most unpleasant of the variations on his own death which now confronted him.
This much was in his favor: the Niaruna were in awe of the plane and therefore of the man who came to them out of the sky; if this coming were accompanied by the explosion of the plane, by the only loud sound they could ever have heard on a clear day, so much the better. And the mere sight of the parachute’s great white canopy should insure a respectful welcome; if he comported himself properly, they would have to accept him as some sort of deity.
At the same time, his safety now or later was so uncertain that the calm he felt must spring from another source. Was it the ayahuasca then? He did not think so, for the shock of the jump, with the struggles of the descent, had sobered him to the bone.
Swaying down out of the sun, with the calls of strange birds and the faint shreds of savage voices rising to meet him, he watched the plane crash as he had prophesied, in silence, in the
distance, leaving the canopy through which it plunged all but unscarred, as if it had dived beneath the sea. There was only a thin plume of smoke, invisible to the Indians, for with the wing tanks empty, the explosives had survived the crash. And this was bad luck, for the plane had banked in its descent and had come down no more than a mile beyond the village.
By rough estimate he would strike perhaps a quarter-mile short of the clearing, near the river; there was a pocket in the trees on his line of drift, and he steered for that. The Indians were still in view, running and howling like goblins; two men started across the clearing in his direction, then ran back again.
First the river, then the clearing disappeared. He saw the far wall of the clearing, then the rolling greens, still sparkling with dew—green leaves, blue sky, a bright red bird. He worked his leg out of the strap before the trees rushed up to seize him; he dropped through the canopy into the shadows. His knees were bent for the roll and tumble when the chute caught on the middle tiers and stopped him short; stunned by the jolt, he swung helplessly in the forest gloom, some thirty feet above the ground.
In the seconds that he hung there, straining to hear if the shrieking and jabbering were coming closer, the explosives in the airplane ignited. Though the roar was muted by the weight of vegetation, a thunder rumbled through the forest, stirring the leaves and echoing dully in the naves and somber avenues. When it had passed, there came a silence so complete that a faint rain of twig fragments on leaves a hundred feet above his head was clearly audible.
He was delighted, like a little boy astonished that his plan has worked; high in the air he cheered. But a moment later he was shocked by the irrelevance of his own voice in this huge and awesome silence. A wood moth with large eyes on its wings danced past his face as if he did not exist, and down the forest came the tee-tee-too of a cotinga; its live green flicked between dark trunks and was swallowed up again.
At Play in the Fields of the Lord Page 17
