At Play in the Fields of the Lord

by Peter Matthiessen

  Moon accompanied Aeore to the mission. He crept up to the clearing edge and was straining for a look at Andy Huben when Quarrier, who was alone in the clearing, turned and caught him off guard. Moon froze where he stood, and for a second the missionary’s gaze swung past. But then Quarrier was speaking to him, and he stood there at a loss, considering what he must do. He had only to duck backward to disappear behind the vines, but he had an impulse to try out his disguise—more as a game than for good purpose—and so he stared back fiercely. His game was spoiled by the hope in Quarrier’s face; Boronai had shamed him with that same innocence the day he had shown Moon the fetish that would bring laughter to the angriest man on earth.

  The next day the mission was scouted again, and again Moon in his restlessness went with the party. He strayed off from the others, circling around behind the mission sheds, until he found Andy sewing in her dooryard. From the forest came Tukanu’s cricket whistle, but he did not answer. He watched her for a long time, and when she slipped off toward the river, he followed.

  He crept down along the bank. Like a child, the girl was dog-paddling, kicking her sneakered feet in the shallow water, her hair in her face, her solid back and bold white hips awash. Every few moments she stopped to listen. When she came out of the water and sat gingerly on a log, he wanted to turn away, but he could not. He was aroused, and his bellyband hurt him; he fumbled to ease it. Because he could neither avert his eyes nor suffer the covert, peeping role in which he found himself, he stepped out into plain view. But her back was to him, and he had moved quietly out of habit, and he stood there for a maddening long time before her head turned slowly and she stared at him. Her lips parted in fright and her arms crossed on her breasts as she rose and turned away from him; she had gasped, but she did not scream. There were drops of water on her back, and red marks and bits of bark on her white hips.

  He moved forward. In Niaruna, she was saying “No,” over and over. He placed his hands gently on her shoulders, then drew her body back against his own, feeling her flinch and shiver as he touched her. The sweet smell of her body filled him, the air and sun danced on his skin; and he swayed in a torrent of sensation. He slid his hands onto her breasts. Her taut buttocks relaxed and opened out against his belly, her profile turned toward him, toward his mouth, her body turned … Later he imagined he must have kissed her, but perhaps he hadn’t, for just then she sucked up a short desperate breath and held it. Her body tightened; she was going to scream. He stepped away from her. She faced him.

  Though he had never taken his eyes from her, he could not recall an hour later what her body looked like, remembering only the arms, simple at her sides, the wide stricken eyes and the pounding wonder in his head.

  Then she was gone. From the direction of the mission he heard her coughing.

  That evening, for the first time, Kisu-Mu persuaded Pindi to sleep with the Rain Spirit after dark; they went down to the river bank near the canoes. He had grown used to the Indian way of love; in this world where the plants writhed, where seeding and flowering, life and death, were all entwined, one could copulate as naturally as one would sleep. Yet he still disliked making love before an audience, and was enraged when Pindi’s laugh revealed what Kisu-Mu was up to, and brought the Indians flying from their hammocks. Pindi called greetings as round heads appeared over the bank, and jokes and speculation flew. Moon clutched her brutally in frustration. His skin was quickened by the cold and by the rough ground, he wished to shake and crush her, strangle her, devour her. In a fever he searched the girl’s hard rubbery body, the strange cool skin, the unnamable strong odors which goaded him. His whole body was like iron.

  Sensing this, Pindi stopped laughing and struggled wildly to receive him; she yipped in pain as he forced himself inside her. A minute later, splayed out on the dirt among the weeds and insects, his head spinning, he stared up at the black leaves of night where the hunting lizard, throat vibrating, tuned its senses to the shrieks of laughter. The only unhappy thing about it was that before the Indians had come to watch, before he lost himself and screwed the world, he had pretended that he held not rank brown Pindi, but the white clean pious flesh of Andy Huben.

  “Kisu-Mu! Kisu-Mu! Kin-wee? Kin-wee? Ho, Kisu-Mu?”

  HOW strange it was that a creature he had held so often in his arms, who had laughed and moaned with life only days before, should now be dying. He did not want to go to her. He had taken the small Indian girl so much for granted, like the food; it sickened him to realize that he had waited until she was dying to become aware that she was more than a smiling toy to him, that he was fond of her. As for Pindi, she had seemed to love him, though he could not be sure of this: love was a land he had not learned much about. In any case, he could not weep if his life depended on it, as it occurred to him that it well might.

  Pindi had caught his own bad cold—where had he got it? She had mounted a wild fever, then sunk into a coma; it looked like influenza. It had scarcely occurred to him to seize medicine from the mission, when he heard the ululating whoop of an old woman, followed by a groan and stir, as if a wind had passed across the village.

  Boronai was giving up his leadership; while Pindi lived, the cures were performed by Aeore. For three days, and throughout her final night, Aeore danced and chanted. Brandishing a gourd rattle full of spirit voices, he sucked demons from her body and blew tobacco smoke upon her, but Pindi did not rise out of her fever; she only moaned, and gazed expectantly at Moon. Aeore too awaited him: if Kisu-Mu was content that Pindi die, then all his cures would be in vain. But when she died, at the end of a violent fit of coughing brought on by the tobacco smoke, Aeore yelped in surprise and grief. When Moon came into the maloca, the Indian was shouting in heretic rage at the “Old Murderer in the Sky.” Then he rushed outside and went howling off into the jungle.

  No nipi would be drunk to determine Pindi’s enemy. The men glanced at him furtively; the old women muttered openly with old women’s cynical fearlessness, nodding their heads: she who had dared sleep with a spirit in the night had brought a god’s infection on herself. They could scarcely revenge themselves on the Spirit of the Rain, and as for him, he could not proclaim that Kisu-Mu was innocent, not only because they might kill someone more innocent still but because their instinct had been right: an infection had been brought by Kisu-Mu.

  Too much was happening at once. The strength he needed was displaced by listlessness; he felt constricted, short of breath. In the afternoon, along the river, his feet went out from under him, and he slid clumsily down the bank. The frailty of his body had returned, and the need to take care where he placed his feet. He felt abandoned by the wind and sun.

  Four more Indians had flu and lay weakly in their hammocks, coughing; the strange epidemic frightened them. But New Person, whom Pindi had given to the Ugly One’s daughter to suck and rear, had so far escaped. Moon told the Ugly One’s daughter that she must keep the child away from all the sick people.

  New Person was healthy, full of push and noises. He spent his days in a cane-splint basket, on a bed of silk cotton from the lupuna tree; in fair weather he was taken out to the plantation in a hip sling. Moon liked to watch him; Look at him kick, he thought, look at him kick! In other days he had picked him up and smelled him, and felt him gently to see how he was made, but now he was frightened of infecting him, and kept his distance.

  WHEN the people at the mission showed no signs of leaving, but on the contrary made new plantings in their garden, Aeore led three men to the mission garden and destroyed it. Because he suspected that Moon would be angry, he returned to the village in an anticipatory rage and yelled out that the following day an attack on the mission would be made. The white men meant to stay, he said to Boronai, and there was no excuse for further delay.

  Since Pindi’s death Aeore had been in a state of grief the more fanatic for being inadmissible; he had painted his whole body black with genipa as a protection against ghosts, for he saw evil omens everywhere. The other members of t
he tribe, infected by his rantings, were surly and volatile as well.

  Moon cautioned Aeore obliquely, addressing his remarks to Boronai. It would be foolish, he said, to kill the missionaries, for many more soldiers would return to take revenge on the Niaruna. Therefore a war party must go to the mission and tell the white men that they must leave Niaruna land, that if they were not gone by the next moon—about eight days away—the Niaruna would attack them.

  Seated on the ground, Boronai nodded uncertainly. He could no longer control Aeore, and he knew it, and he knew that the tribe knew it, and he had enough sense not to put old leadership to the test. Since the missionaries had first appeared, since Kisu-Mu had come and the ways of the People had been disrupted by fear and greediness and strife, Boronai had grown old. His shrewd bright eye had dimmed, like the eye of a shedding snake, and in the way that the snake casts its skin he was preparing to recede stoically from his days, to die in the way the Indians so often died, by releasing his hold on life without a struggle. Boronai’s people seemed to know this, for they spoke of him indulgently, and began to neglect him as an old man would be neglected. He was not old in years, but in the swift rhythms of the jungle he had been defeated and replaced. The life he knew was coming to an end, and he would go.

  So now, for a long time, the headman was silent. Then he spoke in the silence of the clearing, recounting his life and the old history of the tribe: how they had arrived out of the sky, how they had come to these rivers from far off to the East where the Sun was born, how the white man had come to them out of the West, where the Sun died. The Indian was the Spirit of all Life—was he not born, and born again, in everything upon the Earth?—and the white man was the Spirit of the Dead. But now the white man was among them, and must be driven out.

  Boronai spoke sadly, in simplicity. It was this enviable simplicity which in those bright green early days he had thought within his grasp that Moon felt himself on the point of losing. Even the sense of the universe he had glimpsed under ayahuasca had slipped away from him; was that because he had not really earned it? He was sick to death of thinking, of words. One knew the jungle best when one no longer struggled, when one flowed with its rains and wind, breathed with its creatures, drank from its rivers out of green-leaf cups, took shelter from it in the common warmth of the night fires.

  The headman was silent again. Moon watched a huge blue butterfly bounce across the sunlit clearing; it lit on a passion flower at the jungle wall, then closed its wings and disappeared.

  The spirit in the white man was evil, and his teachings were evil, but these white men had not yet done the Niaruna harm. Therefore, like the bushmaster and fer-de-lance, the great anaconda of the backwaters and deep swamps, the missionaries must be approached politely. They must be told that there was no home for them in Niaruna land, that they must return to their kingdom to the West, that if they did not do so their house here would be destroyed, that the Niaruna were a brave people and would kill them with their arrows.

  Boronai raised his hand. To his people he said, “Aeore will lead you, and Aeore will speak for you.”

  There was a murmur of approval. Aeore gazed at Tukanu to see if he would make objection. Tukanu was silent.

  Moon agreed that the missionaries must be driven out; this first step would activate the federation. The headmen of the Yuri Maha were coming to the village frequently and were clamoring for massacre; nevertheless, with his reverence for protocol, Aeore would obey Boronai’s last command. After that, the missionaries would be in danger, for the new headman had lost all awe of Moon and scarcely listened to him.

  That night Boronai’s wives lay with other men. Even the Ugly One was taken by a virgin boy. When Aeore left for the mission the next day, Boronai did not ask to come, and was not asked. He lay in silence in his hammock, his eyes closed, expressionless, while the women barged past him and chattered loudly across his body, as if he were invisible. With his heavy somber dignity, his lined heavy face, his heavy stillness, he reminded Moon of the monolithic old men of his boyhood.

  Moon accompanied the twelve warriors who arrived at the mission a short while after daybreak, when the river mist still strayed in whorls among the stumps and skeletons of the felled trees. When one of the white men came into the yard, they stepped out of the jungle in a file. They were in full paint and feathers, and each held a long black chonta bow and long cane arrows. Aeore took his place at the end of the line, where the Niaruna leader always stood, with open space on his right hand, his arrow hand.

  Leslie Huben had a white face towel across his shoulders and both hands full of toilet articles. He stared at the savages, at Aeore’s blackened body, and made obscure small sounds; he spread his hands and dropped his things to show that he was unarmed. Then he said in English, very loudly, “Praise the Lord!”

  At the edge of the forest, the Indians remained motionless; they muttered excitedly about Leslie’s pretty toothpaste tube. Huben called out again, over his shoulder, “Praise the Lord!” and came toward the Niaruna, his arms wide. He wore a flesh-colored bathing suit with rust spots on it, and a two-day beard.

  “Niaruna! Welcome to the House of Kisu!”

  The Indians glanced at Moon and grunted, all but Tukanu, who sniggered without smiling, and Aeore, who raised his bow in a careless way, as if he were stretching, and drove an arrow into the ground a few yards in front of Huben.

  The missionary halted. “Niaruna! We are your friends! We have presents for you! We will eat with you!” He held out his arms imploringly, still smiling, and Moon shifted in discomfort. He recognized Huben’s courage at the same time that he despised him.

  Now Quarrier appeared, and behind Quarrier came Andy Huben.

  “S-ss-tchuh! There he is,” the Indians murmured fearfully. “The Hairy One.” Tukanu, who had seen Quarrier’s naked chest, had told them that this missionary was the white man’s guhu’mi, that he taught evil, that his penis was so gigantic that he wore those long cloths on his legs to hide it, that his glasses, which served as mirrors, enabled him to gaze for hours into his own head.

  Andy came forward firmly and took her husband’s arm. “Welcome, friends,” she said. She looked them all straight in the face until she came to Moon; she started, but did not avert her gaze. And because she was not ashamed, he suddenly felt foolish in his nakedness.

  Quarrier’s face was set and angry. He had halted beside Huben, glaring at the arrow. Then he searched the faces. “Welcome, Aeore,” he said. “Tukanu, you are welcome here.” He smiled briefly at the Indians he did not know. “We are happy you have come,” he said. While saying this, he stared straight at Moon; then he moved forward, past Aeore’s arrow. A second arrow thumped into the earth, so close to his shoes that dirt flecked at his khakis; when he moved past it as well, all the bows came up.

  “Martin!” Huben said.

  Moon murmured to the Indians that they must not harm him. Quarrier, who had halted, came forward once more until he was opposite Moon. To the Indians he said, “Where is my friend Boronai? Tell him he is welcome here. Tell him we have planted a new garden.”

  Aeore raised his arm and pointed at the river. His voice mounted angrily as he spoke. With his finger, in eight sweeping arcs, he traced the sun’s course across the sky. When the moon was old again, he shouted, the white man must be gone.

  “I wish to speak to my friend Boronai,” Quarrier said.

  “This is what Boronai has said!” Aeore banged himself upon the chest with the heel of his hand. “This is what Aeore has said!” He stalked away into the forest, and the others followed.

  Moon was at the end of the file, and as he turned to go, the missionary said softly, “Moon.” He was not looking at Moon, but at Leslie Huben, who had rushed to the jungle wall and was pleading loudly with the invisible savages in Jesus’ name. Quarrier said quietly, “You are a madman. This is your doing, isn’t it?”

  “Paleface speak with fork-ed tongue,” Moon said, and grinned. He was surprised that Quarrier h
ad recognized him; he felt naked and absurd. And the sound of his own name pronounced aloud had startled him; with the use of it, a spell had been rudely broken.

  In his realization that Moon’s presence had made the whole episode a farce, the blood rushed into Quarrier’s face, and his big hands rose in fists. “Curse you!” he grated. “May the Lord curse you!” He grasped Moon roughly by the upper arm. “This is your doing, isn’t it? Now answer me! And you made them destroy our garden!”

  “This is your doing, Quarrier.” Moon pried the man’s fingers from his arm. Over Quarrier’s shoulder he saw Andy gazing at her husband, apprehensive; Leslie was still exhorting the vanishing Niaruna at the top of his lungs. “Does she know, too?” Moon said.

  “You are a monster!” Quarrier exclaimed. “Just look at yourself! A painted demon! How can you stand before her in your nakedness—” He stopped short. “How dare you?” he muttered. “How did you dare?”

  Moon said, “You people better get out of here.” He started away again, but now Leslie Huben was coming at him, the terrible smile still fixed upon his face. “Welcome! You are—we are your friends in Christ! Eat! Eat! Kin-wee? Kin-wee?” Huben made eating motions. “Kin-wee? Kin-wee?” In English he cried, “Help me, Martin!”

  “You’ve undone all my work,” Quarrier muttered. He held Moon by the shoulders and was shaking him rhythmically. He spoke dully, thickly, surprising Moon by the strength in his grip. “All that hard work,” he said, “which cost me my son and now my wife.”

  “Martin, you know better than to touch an Indian!” Huben snapped. “And you’re speaking in English!” When Quarrier let go, Huben whirled once more on Moon. “Kin-wee? Kin-wee? Niaruna mori Quarrier, mori Huben, mori Kisu? Eat? Presents? Kin-wee?”