At Play in the Fields of the Lord

by Peter Matthiessen

  When he groaned aloud, she kissed him clumsily on the cheek. “Martin, please don’t despair. Really, you’re such a good person, and I’m so glad to have you as my friend in Christ. I mean, I can talk to you, really talk to you, you’re so darned honest!”

  She continued in confusion, almost angrily, “Oh, we all get a little lonely sometimes, all of us. You and Hazel aren’t the only ones.” Her hands worked feverishly at her dress. It had begun to rain, but she did not seem to notice it. The words rushed out. “Leslie’s a wonderful person, you know that … why, he was such an athlete, you know, in school, and he’s so handsome and brave … well, you know all that. And as I told you, he’s so cheerful and good-hearted, he’s such an optimist … Only sometimes … some things he doesn’t care to look at … There’s an awful lot of things he thinks are dirty, that he can’t even talk about, things he can’t eat, you know … I mean, you’ve noticed … Well, I mean, he’s fastidious. My goodness, I’m not complaining, you know. I’m just so glad to talk a little.” Andy stood there looking past his shoulder, the rain pouring down across her face. “Sometimes—I don’t mean really but—you know, he even finds me a little dirty!” She opened her mouth and gave a peal of surprised laughter. She laughed a little loudly and too long; in the rain her tears were indistinct.

  Over her shoulder, in the doorway, he saw his wife observing them. She was nodding sardonically, with a terrific leer; she waved at him. “Yoo hoo, lover!” Hazel cried.

  They went in to the makeshift table. Leslie said grace: “We thank Thee humbly today, O Lord, for this nice lunch of canned beans, sent in to us by kindly friends at home, to nourish and sustain us in Thy work. We thank Thee too, O Lord, that despite our trials, we remain healthy in Thy sight and that her grief has not prevented Your faithful servant Hazel Quarrier from carrying on her work in the fields of the Lord, nor his intestinal afflictions the work of Martin Quarrier. For God is the Kingdom and the Power and the Glory, forever and ever. Amen.”

  Hazel guffawed in a short loud burst, spitting across the table the baked beans she had sneaked into her mouth. “Intestinal afflictions,” she muttered. “I’ll say! Why, Job himself—I’ve never seen anything to beat it!” And she jerked her head contemptuously at her husband, at the same time hunching low toward her plate to fill her mouth with beans. When she came up again she smiled at Andy, nodding craftily. “Heh, heh,” she said. She maintained her good spirits throughout the meal, exclaiming loudly at every subject that came up, and especially at Leslie’s account of some fornication he had ferreted out among the outcast Niaruna at Remate the year before.

  “Don’t worry,” Leslie told them. “The Lord saw fit to put His words in my mouth, and I scared the daylights out of them. Really, it was disgusting! I had warned Kori earlier in the day that he must not touch that child, that he was a sinner in the eyes of the Lord, and five minutes later I caught them in the bushes, laughing and holding hands and touching. Well, you can just bet I told them about the wrath of God! So that night I slipped around the shelters—you know, turning on my flashlight—and sure enough!”

  “You mean Kori?” Hazel Quarrier said, holding her fork poised at her mouth. “Wow! Getting set to know her carnally, I’ll bet!”

  “Well, not exactly. Kori was asleep. But he sure sat up quickly when the beam of that flashlight hit him. He’d learned his lesson, I’ll tell you that!”

  “Wow! May God forgive him for his lust,” Hazel Quarrier said, and stared straight at her husband. “Heh, heh,” she said. She peered slyly at each of them. “Eh?” she said. “Well, say, it’s great to be in the thick of the old fight, getting the old Devil’s blows right in the breadbasket, eh, friends? Satan doesn’t waste his ammo on a half-hearted bunch! Nosir, he hits his hardest when a fellow is hitting him, and hurting him, right?” She sat back in her seat and belched. “I read that message right in Mission Fields, in one of Leslie’s letters.”

  “Hazel—”

  “ ‘Some work in sultry forests,’ ” Hazel bawled, starting to laugh, “ ‘Where apes swing to and fro. Some fish in mighty rivers, Some hunt across the snow …’ ” She stood up and bellowed down at them with all her might: “ ‘REMEMBER ALL GOD’S CHILDREN WHO YET HAVE NEVER HEARD, THE TRUTH THAT COMES FROM JESUS, THE GLORY OF HIS WORD!’ ”

  Martin walked outside again into the yard. He stopped short, standing in the rain; there was no place to go.

  THE world one day was blue and green, and the child by the river had stood still a minute, listening. His hair shone white in the bright hard noon, and behind him at the jungle wall burned purple cassia and yellow-flowered pea. On a near bush sat a white bellbird; it turned its flat head sideways, then snapped it to the front again as its voice tolled.

  The little boy danced toward the brazen bird. The child’s voice was as pure as the bird’s call, a sweet fleeting sound lost in the sun and trees. The white bellbird blinked slowly, snapped its head and clanged again, a vibrating metallic ring so mighty that Billy would not believe a thing so delicate had made it. He went still closer, then knelt, observing it. The white bird’s fearlessness made Quarrier uneasy, and he threw sticks at it, to scare it off into the forest.

  How often he had watched his child fly out across the clearing, his arms like wings and his mouth open to drink the wind. On Billy’s belt was an empty holster with a special thong which, strapping the holster tip to the thigh, permitted a faster draw. The holster was designed for older boys and was much too big for Billy, and its thong was fastened to his bare leg at a point somewhat below his dirty knee. The gun itself had been lost months before, and the weapon protruding from the holster was a crooked twig.

  In Billy’s last days his appearance had been shocking. The head on the pillow was huge on his scrawny neck, and his huge eyes were red, and his smile, distorted by his slackening grasp, looked insidious and sly; he lay on his bed, staring for hours at a time at the only two pets small enough to keep at his side—a caterpillar named Little Imsquint and a brook salamander he called Pipflow. And though his parents loved him all the more, could scarcely bear to look at him without rushing to hug him, at one point they gazed at each other, their eyes inches apart as they tucked him in, and saw the fear in each other’s stare.

  “Here I go! Listen to me, Pa! Listen!”

  Listen, listen.

  “Elemeno P. Q-R-S, T-U-V,

  Dull Byou X, Y and Z.

  Now you’ve hurt my ABC.

  Tell me what you think of—

  ME.”

  THE tropic rain had ceased, and shafts of light broke through the swirling gray; the weak sun glittered in fat puddles in the yard. He stood there staring in apathy, feet rooted to the mud. He blinked, as if just awakened: how unreal everything seemed! How easily, in the absence of children, the whole experience of life became abstracted, a pattern of words and daydreams. Because the life in Billy was so fresh and immediate, he had served as a reminder of reality.

  When he raised his eyes again, he was looking straight at a still face almost hidden in the green of the lianas, ten yards off. His heart pounding, he let his gaze slide past it, though he kept the brown blur in the corner of his eye; the face stayed where it was. Very quietly he turned back again, holding wide both open hands. Smiling, he said quietly in Niaruna, “Welcome. We are friends.”

  The face remained immobile. In those early months, in the nervous time before Boronai’s band appeared, he had been fooled by leaf shadows and shapes, by sun-browned fruit, by the black-and-brown feathers of a hoatzin on the far bank. But this was a living presence; he could feel the dark eyes burn him. Probably there were other eyes; he let his eye travel the green wall.

  Because of the anger of the Niaruna the day the contact had been broken, he had agreed that at the first appearance of wild Indians the soldiers should be alerted. But the four Quechuas were bored and tense; he could see them now, squatting in the shadows of their hut, observing the gringo who stood out in the rain and talked to himself.

 
The savage was still in view. Quarrier did not signal the soldiers. They would only scurry for their rifles, and this first new contact would be broken.

  He spoke again. “Welcome! We are friends!” He pointed at the mission shed and made an eating motion with his hand. When the face remained stolid, he said, “Tell Boronai that Martin is his friend. Tell Boronai to come here to see Martin.”

  Now the Quechuas leaned out of their hut, staring stupidly at the jungle, their faces curling in the surliness of ignorance. The savage ducked from view, or rather, vanished, for Quarrier was not aware of any motion, nor had a leaf been turned. “We are your friends! We are your friends!” he called. But there was only airlessness and the dripping of dead rain, and silence.

  Huben was standing in the doorway, his radio in his hand like a small suitcase.

  “They’re back.” Quarrier was grinning happily, the first time he had grinned since Billy’s death.

  Huben wanted to post sentries. “These people have already killed Moon and that priest, and they tried to kill us too. Listen, fella, we’re dealing with the most dangerous tribe in the eastern jungles!”

  “If we post sentries against them, Leslie, we might as well go home. And if they want to attack us they’ll kill the sentry first, and we’ll be one man less. Anyway, those four soldiers couldn’t stop them. They can get us from the jungle, one by one.”

  “You’re very casual about it, I must say!”

  “No. I’m frightened. But I have faith that they will not attack so long as we let them come to us and do not go to them.” Then he said sincerely, “Perhaps you’d prefer to take Andy and Hazel back to Madre de Dios.”

  Leslie went red in the face. “Are you suggesting that I don’t have the courage to stay here?”

  “No.”

  “You’re taking on a lot of responsibility, Martin Quarrier! You took responsibility for Billy too, remember?”

  “What are you trying to say?” After a cold pause he said, “If we tell the soldiers, they’ll be firing those guns of theirs at shadows. In my opinion they have no business here at all. They are Catholics and we are Protestants. It isn’t fair to them and it isn’t fair to us, and anyhow, they are a hindrance to us.”

  “Guzmán ordered us to bring them in.”

  “He didn’t order us to keep them. If the Niaruna wished to kill us, they would have done so long ago, soldiers or no soldiers.”

  Huben said, “Well, I happen to agree that it’s an offense to the Almighty to harbor four papists in our very midst.”

  Quarrier glanced at the papists, who were squatting like toads under the large silk-cotton tree by the river. “The poor devils,” he said. “They’d be glad to get back to Remate.”

  “In that pit of Satan they’ll be drunk day and night, cursing and blaspheming; that’s the Opposition for you!” Leslie smote his fist into his palm. “All right,” he said, “I’ll take them back tomorrow. But from now on, Martin, try to remember which of us is Regional Director.”

  Quarrier nodded. “With your permission, I’ll check the gift racks.”

  “Go ahead,” said Leslie Huben, patting him on the shoulder.

  Each of the racks held a new machete, a steel ax head and a jar of salt. At first Quarrier had checked them every morning, noon and twilight, but after a time he visited the racks only once a day, for fear that he might be scaring off the Indians. He would move slowly from one rack to the next, saving until last the one on the jungle trail; this one would give him the first clue of Indian presence. He could not get over a painful dread that his first clue might be a silent arrow, tipped with poison.

  ANDY saw the second Indian, and the third and fourth. One man appeared out of the forest by the river, standing clear of the tangle in plain view, only a few yards from her. The Indian watched her calmly until, gathering up her wash, she got up off her knees; then he turned and disappeared. The next day she saw another one, and perhaps two, a mere shifting of shadows in the trees. Her husband attributed this latter sighting to her nerves, but Quarrier said that he had heard the Indians whistle, a sound like a cricket that they made with a small signal flute hung from the neck. After that, although all three searched the jungle wall from dawn to dusk—the soldiers had been returned to Remate, and Hazel was oblivious—the Indians did not show themselves again for several days, nor were the gift racks touched.

  The missionaries’ tension grew like fever. Their suspense and fear were made still worse by Hazel, who spoke wildly of the jungle and could talk of nothing else, describing obscenely the obscenity of the flowering and rot, the pale phallic trunks and dark soft caverns, the rampant hair, the slime and infestations. Once she ran naked from the hut at noon to sprawl and roll in the center of the clearing, writhing and howling, her arms extended to the forest, shivering as in a fit. “He is here,” she cried, “Satan is in this place, and He will take me!” Quarrier reached her first and took off his shirt to cover her; she was sweating so in the terrible humidity that she was covered with dirt and bits of leaf and humus.

  Huben came forth and preached to them of demons. His rantings penetrated Hazel’s shock; she cried out, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabach-thani!” and her eyes rolled in her head. When he realized that she was saying what Christ Himself was said to have uttered in extremis, he castigated her the more, until Quarrier gave Hazel to Andy to lead away, and went to Huben and shook him violently, saying, “Stop that, stop it, do you hear! She cannot help it!”

  Their faces were inches apart.

  “She has a demon,” Huben muttered. “The demon must be exorcised!”

  “My wife is sick. I am going to send her home.”

  “You can’t do that! You can’t leave us here alone! My wife should leave here too! We’ll all go!” When Quarrier said nothing, Huben said, “It’s very obvious that the Lord has not worked things out to open His doors to this tribe. He is warning us of our peril, Martin. We must go.”

  “I’m not going. If you are taking Andy out, I’ll send Hazel with you. Otherwise I’ll radio and have her picked up at Remate.”

  “You mean to say you wouldn’t accompany your wife, in her condition? Don’t you recall your marriage vows—in sickness and in health? I won’t permit it. We’re all going.”

  Quarrier wished to see to Hazel, but he turned back. “There’s nothing I can do for her, and you know it; I only make her worse. Leslie, I’m not leaving, no matter what you say. My work is here.”

  “I tell you, I won’t leave you here alone!”

  At dinner nobody but Hazel spoke; she was cheerful, and ate her canned tuna fish with appetite. Quarrier had told her she was going home, and like a child, wide-eyed and excited, she told them all about the farm in North Dakota; the silos and corncribs, the grain elevators shining in the distance, the blue sky and the golden plain without a tree.

  In the morning there was a broken arrow on each of the three racks around the clearing, with the presents still untouched; on the rack in the forest the presents were also untouched, and coiled on top of them was a fer-de-lance. It was a big one, at least six feet long, its head crooked neatly on the blotchy pattern of the topmost coil; it seemed to stir. Quarrier was close enough when he first saw it to find himself transfixed by its flat eye, and for a moment he did not realize it was dead. A file of huge black ants moved up and down the pole, and others swarmed upon the snake; in the dim light it shivered as they devoured it. Peering closer, he could smell the jungle flesh, sense the snip and clicking of a million pincers, the red-toothed struggle for food and space and light, the strangler figs and probing root, the silent hunters and devourers, the broadcasting of cells and seeds and energy in mindless waste. And he saw for a moment what his deranged wife had seen in her agony of the day before, that in this place they were forsaken; then there swept over him the significance of the snake, and he groaned aloud and sank to his knees and prayed.

  “Almighty God,” he began in a half-whisper, “show us the true way to these people, for I have failed to f
ind the path—” He rose suddenly with a cry of pain and jumped about, slapping at his pants and kicking, for the ants on the ground underneath the pole had rushed to the attack. Once again he thought, Can God be laughing at us?

  From the edge of the forest he could just make out the weak glint of the machete, overflowing with cold scaly coils. Already the machete blade was coarse with rust, and before long the termites would eat away the wooden haft and the cross carved upon it.

  ON this same day, in the late afternoon, Andy sought him out. She was very upset. At first he thought that she was still shaken by Hazel’s breakdown, by the growing dread, the stifled panic, which had infected all of them. She did not have to say that she could not entrust what had just happened to her husband’s nerves.

  Upstream from the camp, cut off by a thick underbrush, there was an oxbow where the river bent around an island of massed driftwood, and here Andy had gone to bathe alone. All had agreed that they would bathe out of pails of water, less because of caimans or piranhas—the caimans this far upstream were very small, and the piranhas, so long as one had no open wounds, were harmless—than because both the whereabouts and attitude of the savages were still uncertain. But the longing to feel clean and private, if only for a few minutes, had eroded Andy’s morale, and finally she had disobeyed the rule. Taking a cake of soap, she had slipped away behind the huts and made her way to the deep pool. She was nervous about the creatures of the river, but after peering into the water for a long time, she had taken off everything but her sneakers, and slipped in.

  After her bath, having no towel, she sat down on a log to dry herself in the pale sun. In her private world of leaves and warm wood and clear water, she felt happy and relieved for the first time in weeks. Sabalo trout were drifting in the shallows, and she could see bright shells of the fresh-water mussel. A sandpiper came and teetered cheerfully along the margin, and a tiny emerald hummingbird perched near her head.