At Play in the Fields of the Lord

by Peter Matthiessen

  Yoyo snapped at him, “Son-of-a-whore, they are going to kill us!”

  Naked Indians surrounded them. The air felt charged; he expected to be struck down at any second. He found his voice and cried out, “Moon! I wish to speak with Moon!” But he could not find Moon’s painted face among the savages.

  24

  “JESU-MOON,” MOON ANSWERED HIM AT LAST, IN A FLAT VOICE. HE was incensed by Quarrier’s intrusion, by the ugliness of his fright, the blind agonized eyes, the stumbling, the hands outstretched, the muddy rags.

  As if goaded, Quarrier plunged forward, his big hands rising up in fists; Tukanu brought him up short by swinging his chonta lance across his shins. Quarrier grunted in pain. “So you’ve told them you are Jesus!”

  “Yee-zuss!” Tukanu exclaimed, and laughed. He seized a lock of the missionary’s hair and yanked it out; when Quarrier fell, the other Indians crowded forward.

  Moon sat down and gazed at the sprawled missionary. He wondered where Aeore had gone. “No,” he said, after a time. “They told me that I was Kisu. I didn’t know who Kisu was.” He explained that Kisu, the bringer of flood, was the most feared of all Niaruna spirits; the benevolent Great Ancestor was named Witu’mai. Quarrier coughed and shook his head; he had never heard of Witu’mai. His big head kept on shaking.

  Kisu was actually called Kish’tu; probably it was Yoyo who, to ease his labor as interpreter, had identified Kish’tu with the “Jesu” of Padre Xantes, and come up with the “Kisu” adopted by both sides. When Kish’tu was not treated with respect, he brought the bad floods of certain rainy seasons.

  Moon paused, then said almost idly, “Perhaps you understand now why they are resentful of you, why they fear Jesus Christ.”

  Quarrier kept nodding. His face had gone pale and slack, and his large crude head was bent sideways on his neck like the head of a sunflower on a broken stalk. Moon could not stop; he would have relished telling Quarrier about Kisu all over again in this same remorseless way. The missionary’s dogged hope was too raw to endure; it was unbearable. He would flay that unspeakable hope of his, flay the straining pale white hopeful hulk of him—he shivered and ground his teeth. He felt himself in poor control, and recognized the onset of malaria.

  “All this time,” Moon said, “you have taught them that your Jesu was their Kisu. In other words, you taught them that the white man’s God was an angry and evil spirit; you asked them to love their evil spirit.” He winced at Quarrier’s expression, and turned away. Enough, he thought. Enough, enough. Yet it was all he could do not to vent his frustration on the wretched missionary by knocking him senseless as he sat there. Quarrier looked stunned and stupid, like a man hit on the neck. He was murmuring the news and the warning brought in by the priest; he refrained from pointing out that had Moon stayed away from the mission and from Andy, the epidemic would not have occurred.

  Nor did he point out that Moon’s presence in the tribe need never have been known; it would have seemed as if the Niaruna had organized and were negotiating for themselves of their own accord, as Moon had planned. But now Guzmán had been given the excuse he needed to make the problem of the Niaruna a political and governmental matter rather than a legal and administrative one. And until the influenza had run its course, the tribe would be in no condition to resist the punitive expedition, which might appear at any time. Moon could undo all his work by persuading the Indians to scatter into the jungle; the alternative was an open war in which too many Niaruna would die.

  Moon sat in silence. He had given drugs to all the people in the village, and thought that most would be spared. But a child whose parents refused the white man’s drugs had died the day before, and many others were very sick. Furthermore, the germs had been transmitted to the Yuri Maha through the emissaries who had come to the village since the feast; there was not enough medicine to control an epidemic, even if all the tribes could be persuaded to drop their enmities and suspicions long enough to assemble for treatment. Already the village suspected the Yuri Maha of having poisoned their own allies in the federation.

  When Quarrier had delivered his message, he and Moon were silent once again. Then Quarrier cried, “Do you realize what I have taught these people? Not only that Jesus Christ is evil, but that the Christian God is identical with one of their many gods—I don’t wonder the poor fellows were confused!” Turning to Yoyo, who was shoved forward at Moon’s signal, he asked the Tiro why he had never mentioned Witu’mai.

  “Hijo de puta!” the Indian spat. “Misionero es maricón!” But seeing Moon’s face, he lost his nerve and began to yell that Huben had wanted the name of the great Niaruna god; was that not Kish’tu? How could Yoyo know that he meant Witu’mai, who was beneficent but lived so far off in the sky? Yoyo was naked to the waist because Tukanu had stripped him of his bright red shirt, and Moon ordered the infuriated man placed under guard lest he flee and return again as Guzmán’s guide; the Indian was led away, chattering wildly with fear and hatred, and glaring back over his shoulder at the missionary.

  “Well,” Moon said, “you people made things easier for me. They believed, at least at first, that I was Kisu, which is why they did not kill me.”

  “It’s hard to know then,” Quarrier said, “in which way I have served them worse.” He tried to smile, but he could not.

  Scratching on the earth with sticks, the two men faced each other. Then Tukanu came and bellowed in Moon’s ear, and Moon got slowly to his feet. “Huben’s run out on you,” Moon said to Quarrier. He walked away without telling the man what he had learned: that Aeore and his men, without consulting him, had gone to the mission to kill Leslie Huben. Had not Huben threatened and insulted them? The Niaruna would not be safe until their enemy was dead.

  In the heat and tension of the village, the children seemed to tiptoe; the smallest leaves were still. Aeore was angry that Huben had fled down the Espíritu before he could be killed; this was a bad omen, and he stared malevolently at Moon. The void between them opened further, as if the Indian were standing on the far side of a canyon, beyond reach of Moon’s voice.

  Moon thought, He will kill Quarrier, and there is nothing I can do to stop him. Boronai, who might have helped, was dying.

  BECAUSE Boronai was the headman, the owner of the maloca, his death would mean that the whole village would have to be abandoned and a new one erected elsewhere, and this at a season when the plantations were still full of manioc and wild food was scarce. A new planting of manioc could not be made and harvested in less than half a year. The grief in the village was strident and sincere.

  Moon did not dare tell Aeore that the white men were on their way; in his present temper, Aeore would fight them. Encouraged by the Ocelot, who was still living in the village, he had been advocating not only an attack on the mission but also on the Tiro villages on the Espíritu, all the way to Remate de Males. Until now Aeore and his men had deferred to Kisu-Mu and Boronai, accepting the theory that the Tiro had guns and would be supported by Green Indians. But his men were less afraid of guns than of committing themselves irrevocably to Aeore, whom they saw as too eager for command, too arrogant, like the Ocelot, his Yuri Maha clansman. Their doubt had maddened Aeore the more, for he felt he had lost face; he made no secret of his contempt for the clans of Boronai. In recent days his hostility toward Kisu-Mu had grown so overt that Moon now wore his pants continually, to keep his revolver handy in his belt.

  In the afternoon Moon paid his last respects to Boronai. Each Indian stood in line to take the headman’s hand between both of his own: the men first, then the male children, then the women and girls. They did not exchange words with the dying man, who watched them howl and weep, without expression. Boronai looked no worse than he had for several days; if anything, his fever had receded and his eyes had cleared. But after so many seasons with the tribe, Moon did not question the Indian instinct for the presence of death. Boronai himself had given up the struggle and accepted death, and this quiet resignation of the flesh was instantly
apparent to his fellows; from that moment on, the headman was no longer sick but dead, and was so referred to. “He is dead” meant “he is finished, he has given up.” By this criterion, Moon reflected, half the people he had known in life could be regarded as defunct.

  Quarrier had followed him into the maloca, and his presence there made a bad situation worse. Moon’s inability to weep for Pindi had already caused resentment, and this time the Indians studied him to see what he would do. In this closed world, good manners were more crucial than true feelings; those Indians who had visited Boronai, their duty done, stopped howling and weeping the instant they released his hand. But Kisu-Mu’s silence was a flagrant discourtesy, first to his woman and now to the dying headman. The Indians watched him as he approached, watched the strange white man who stumbled after him, whispering avid questions; this too was a cause for resentment.

  Moon took Boronai’s hand as the others had done, and the old man, who only the year before had been a strong Indian of middle age, gazed peacefully into his face. According to Tukanu, the dying man felt that Kisu-Mu had caused his death; yet a spirit was not necessarily an enemy. The mild eyes seemed to know that Kisu-Mu was fond of him, despite the failure to weep and howl. But when Moon, too guilt-ridden to give up Boronai in silence, said to him, “Good-bye, my friend,” the headman frowned at this breach of custom and withdrew his hand. To Quarrier, coming next, he refused his hand entirely, and when the missionary, not understanding, groped for it, Boronai muttered angrily and swung his arm away. The onlookers groaned in disapproval, and Quarrier retreated, following Moon into the yard.

  When the last infant had been held up and its hand placed on that of Boronai, Aeore painted the older man with fresh streaks of achote and placed on his head a crown of feathers from the harpy eagle, to give dignity to his departure; after this he was left alone in his hammock. Though he seemed alert, he was not offered food or water, nor did he ask for any. The cooking and breast-feeding and the scraping of manioc on the thorn boards went on about him; because the plantations would have to be abandoned, the women had harvested as many tubers as they could, drying the surplus in the sun to make a coarse farina they could take away with them. Dressed in his eagle crown, Boronai observed their preparations, ignored because already dead.

  But at Boronai’s death the next afternoon, a cry rose as it had for Pindi. The women and children, forbidden to look upon the body, ran into the jungle. As the children’s cries rang among the trees, the men came trotting to the maloca in somber files. Moon helped them lay out a reed mat in which Boronai was rolled up with his bows and arrows, his shell strings and his paddle; his canoe was brought and the wrapped body laid in it. Then Aeore chanted a eulogy and a promise of revenge. He invoked the Ancestors and the Great Spirit Witu’mai; he spoke of the gentle soul of Boronai which was the soul of Tukituk, the tanager, and as he did so, some of the others wept without ceremony. Then the canoe was carried to the river. It would drift for many moons toward the East, toward the Ocean River Amazonas, toward the Great Sea of Life. There, in the bright morning where the Sun was born, the canoe would sink, and Boronai’s spirit would return into that sky from which, as a star, it had first descended.

  The death canoe was slid out from the bank, the head of Boronai high in its stern. But immediately it began to circle, as if struggling to return upstream; it drifted off slowly, broadside. On the first bend it spun a second time, in an eddy, and wedged itself in flood debris on the far bank. A wailing rose anew, for this was a bad sign, but no one was sent to free the canoe and send it on its way. It belonged already to the spirit world and could not be touched.

  AEORE drank nipi on the afternoon of the death, saying that he would go to the spirit world to learn the name of the enemy of Boronai. Because he was a jaguar-shaman, a familiar of night cats, Aeore would learn the truth, but Moon was certain that the warrior was intent upon the death of Quarrier, and that nothing his spirit would learn in its night among the jaguars would dissuade him.

  The missionary was too near-sighted to read the signs on the faces of the Indians; for a whole day he had badgered Moon for ethnological data on the Niaruna, bemoaning his lack of paper and pencil. His eagerness for information, his stubborn, brave attempt to rearrange the wreckage of his life into some sort of pattern, was exasperating; Moon barely answered this unlucky man who had come at the worst of times to plague him. The man was doomed, had always been doomed, perhaps, and any attempt to intervene might turn the tribe against himself and undo the entire federation.

  Aeore had drunk nipi in flamboyant draughts, which evoked sighs of admiration from his tribesmen; seated in an animated circle, they waited for him to vomit, but he did not. The infusion affected him very fast, and by nightfall he lay rigid on his back, near a fire constructed in the center of the plaza. The women and children were forbidden to look at him; his own young warriors tended the fire.

  As the moon rose, Aeore’s body began to tremble. He shivered and shook, muttering gibberish, and the jaguar necklace twitched upon his chest. “Now his spirit is going,” Tukanu said; his eyes were bald with fright. Tukanu had spoken in a whisper, for should Aeore’s body be awakened while its spirit was absent, the spirit could not enter it again, and Aeore would sicken and die.

  They watched the body through the night. Beyond the black walls of the jungle, down the moonlit river banks, across the high ground and along the swamps where the great anacondas slept, Aeore’s spirit hunted in the body of a jaguar.

  Though the big cats often circled the village in the night, swelling the jungle with huge hollow coughs, Moon had seen a jaguar only once. It was lying on its side on the flat limb of a low hoary tree found along the rivers, camouflaged so demonically by the deep shade and shifting sun spots that he almost passed beneath it. Because the cat was on its side, the yellow pupil slit burned vertically, a jet of flame; it fixed him in his tracks. In that instant, expecting the jaguar to crouch and leap, he saw the ear twitch and the mad pulse in the throat, the flowering of the black rosettes as the cat breathed, the dead black belly spots, the nervous rippling of the flank, the metronomic thump of the black tail tuft on the rigid wood. And because the jaguar never roared, nor sprang, nor fled, nor even raised its head, but simply watched him, he was shaken for days by the malevolence of this were-jaguar that the Indians so feared.

  Now, like the Indians, he awaited in awe and silence the return of the jaguar-shaman. The frogs and the night birds tocked and whistled in the ringing silence, and the bats crisscrossed the clearing, and the scent of the night flowers grew and vanished. Rawk, rawk; ror-awk: the rodent Marato, moved by its dim processes, uttered a hollow warning to the world.

  The stars turned in the black hole above the clearing, and the Indians sighed. Even Quarrier was infected by the Indians’ awe and did not sleep. Though unaware of his own danger, he was as sensitive as the rest to the tremors of the night malaise. “Demons,” he told Moon. “There are demons. I can feel them.”

  Toward day the body of the shaman twitched again, heaved over and settled. Its tension slackened. In the greenish light the jaguar-shaman stared blankly at the sky. After a time he sat up, slowly and stiffly, his head bent on his chest, arms at his sides, legs and feet pointed straight ahead. The other Indians turned their heads away, out of politeness. In a dull monotone, the jaguar-shaman recounted his travels in the night, how he had stalked and run and climbed great trees and plunged into black rivers, on the trail to the Sea of Life. There he had met with the spirits of the Ancestors. He repeated this, and paused. The others waited.

  Slowly Aeore rolled onto his haunches, in a crouch; when he spoke again, his voice was a vibrant singsong. The pupils of his yellowed eyes were still dilated, and his nostrils were flared and flattened, and the sinews of his limbs coiled on the bone.

  The Ocelot, grinning, hunched in closer. Moon’s mouth went dry. The Niaruna would never doubt what Aeore was about to say, or restrain in any way this self-appointed judge and executioner, for it
was not Aeore who would speak but the spirit world, through the words of their jaguar-shaman. Aeore himself would hear the words as vision and divination, brought from his mouth by nipi. Balanced on his fingertips, head switching back and forth, he spoke his message dazedly, voice mounting, and the tribe repeated his phrases in a chant; his voice did not seem to come from his own mouth, but from the air:

  “We are the People of the Tuaremi, from the Creek of Agoutis to the rapids of Tai-wi-’an.

  “In former days our clans also controlled the Tiro forest. In the Tiro forest, in former days, the clans of our mothers fished and hunted Wutari the tapir, and now Our Time has come again. We will go with all the clans of all the Peoples to the East. We will live again on the Tiro rivers. We will kill the Sloth People, the Tiro, and we will hunt Wutari the tapir.

  “The white man is the friend of Tiro, and Tiro is our enemy.

  “The white man is emita. He has brought us sickness. He has killed our woman Pindi. He has killed our father Boronai.

  “We are the People, and the white man is our enemy.

  “The white man now among us is deceitful. He has said to us that Kisu is the only god. He has said to us that Kisu loves the Niaruna. None of this is truth. He has sent poison to the people of our clan, and they have died. He is our enemy.

  “We will kill the enemy among us.”

  Aeore sprang forward and crouched in front of Quarrier. The missionary struggled to his feet, and Aeore rose with him. Quarrier understood that Moon was powerless, and he actually smiled a vague loose smile which, in combination with his sightlessness, made him look as giddy as a baby. Moon turned his head away.

  Aeore had been brought a feathered club, and now he set himself to crack the white man’s skull. Moon stepped between them. Aeore sprang back, his mouth stretched wide; the Niaruna shrieked and chattered in dismay.