She was just about to rouse Betsy when she heard footfalls on the steps of the hut. A soft knock sounded at the door.
She grabbed a wrinkled chambray shirt from her duffel bag and threw it over the cotton nightshirt she’d slept in. Finger-combing her hair, she opened the door to find David Chambers towering over her.
“Good morning,” she muttered.
“I hope I didn’t wake you,” he said quietly. Then looking past her to Betsy, who was stirring again, he said, “I apologize, but I forgot to get something I need for the laptop last night. I’m pretty much at a standstill without it.”
“Oh, sure,” she said, stepping aside to let him in.
He ducked beneath the doorframe and went to the desk on the south side of the room. Natalie watched as he slid a drawer open and rummaged quietly until he came up with a computer floppy disk.
“Oh, I’ll need this, too,” he whispered to no one in particular, closing a large dictionary and tucking it under one muscular arm. He was obviously making an effort not to wake Betsy. Natalie appreciated the gesture and felt guilty that they had taken over his office.
She tipped her head toward the gold watch he wore. “What time is it anyway?” she whispered. “Should we be getting up?”
He shook his head and matched her hushed tone. “Nate—your dad said to let you sleep as late as you like this morning.”
“Is Dad awake?”
Behind the neatly trimmed beard, the corners of his mouth turned up. “Your dad is up long before dawn every morning. He’s put in half a day’s work already.”
“Oh.” She wasn’t sure if his words were meant to be scolding because they’d slept so late, or if David Chambers was simply stating a fact. “Well, I’m awake,” she told him. “I’ll get dressed and be out in a minute.”
He didn’t respond, but held up the computer disk in tacit thanks before ducking outside and disappearing down the steps.
Natalie closed the door behind him and went to her duffel bag to find something presentable to wear. As she unfolded the creased and rumpled clothes, she saw movement from the corner of her eye. She turned in time to see a tiny brown lizard slither into an open compartment of her duffel. She screamed and kicked the bag into the corner of the room.
Natalie’s screech brought Betsy bolt upright on her sleeping mat. “What? What is it, Nattie?”
The lizard chose that moment to come out of the bag and scurry toward Betsy.
Betsy spotted it and leapt to her feet, shrieking even louder than Natalie had. But when she tried to run, she got tangled in the mosquito netting and fell back to her knees. Her sudden movement sent the lizard running back in Natalie’s direction.
Natalie jumped onto the sleeping mat beside Betsy—as if the two-inch-high pallet offered one iota of protection from a lizard. The two women clung to each other squealing, then laughing, then screaming again when the lizard zipped up the wall.
Suddenly the door flew open and David Chambers rushed in. “What happened?” he asked, his eyes darting around the room, his broad-shouldered form poised for combat.
Sheepishly, Natalie and her aunt pointed to the now empty wall.
“There was … a lizard,” Natalie explained, breathless.
“A big one?” he asked.
“Well … he wasn’t really big, but he was—”
“Fast—” Betsy filled in for her. “He was so fast.”
“Did he look like that?” David asked, pointing toward the ceiling above their heads.
They looked up, and Natalie saw the lizard clinging to the thatch directly above their heads, beady eyes blinking at them, tongue flicking in and out like a snake’s. She squealed and jumped off the mat, running to stand at the far end of the room. Betsy started to giggle like a little girl, and Natalie couldn’t help but join in.
David Chambers reached up, knocked the lizard easily into the palm of his hand, carried it to the door, and tossed it over the stoop. “Better get used to those little fellows,” he said when he ducked back through the door. “Would it help if I told you they eat mosquitoes?”
“A little, I guess,” Natalie said in a small voice.
“You’re both okay?” David asked as he turned to leave.
They nodded in silence. He left the room, closing the door behind him, but when they heard him burst into laughter at the bottom of the stairs Natalie and Betsy turned to stare at each other.
Natalie gingerly shook out a long cotton skirt and blouse and started to dress. She worried about the first impression she must have made on David Chambers. Dad had assured her that his colleague had given his blessing on Natalie joining them. So far the only thing he’d seen of her was a giggly, skittish adolescent. Of course, the same thing could be said of her forty-something Aunt Betsy. But then Betsy wasn’t planning to stay.
As she pulled on her socks and boots, Natalie made up her mind that she would redeem the silly schoolgirl image she’d established. Somehow, she would prove that she had plenty to offer the mission at Timoné.
By the time Betsy and Natalie walked out the door, Nathan Camfield was crossing the stream to meet them. “Hollio!” he called cheerfully.
“Hollio,” they replied.
“Ce mangura?” he asked.
She and Betsy exchanged blank looks.
“Are you hungry?” he translated.
“Oh, you have no idea,” Natalie told him. “I could eat a horse.”
“Sorry. No horse on the menu in Café Timoné, but I make a mean fruit salad. And there’s corn bread. I have everything ready at my place,” he said.
“Sounds great.”
They followed him across the stream and into the heart of the village. Nate’s hut was no more than a four-minute walk from the office. Along the way, brown-skinned natives stopped their work to stare at the two American women who followed behind Dr. Nate like ducklings after their mother. The children chattered and pointed, and Betsy and Natalie waved and called out shy greetings of hollio.
“Aren’t they adorable?” Natalie whispered to Betsy, as a pair of dark-eyed brothers waved shyly from the stoop of a tidy hut. They looked to be about six or seven.
“Ah, don’t let those two fool you,” Dad told them. “They’re twins. Double trouble—as ornery as the day is long. They’re Tommi’s boys, Nattie. Maybe you’ve heard your mother talk about him. He was one of her favorite students when he was little, and now he and his wife are some of our best workers in the church.”
She didn’t tell him that Mom rarely spoke of her days in Colombia.
“How many converts do you have now, Nate?” Betsy asked.
He rubbed his chin. “Oh, we usually have anywhere from thirty-five to fifty in the service on Sunday morning, but I wouldn’t say they are all converts. There are usually some there out of curiosity—and some come just to make trouble. There are half a dozen young men who come every week without fail, but they refuse to step under the shelter. They stand outside, rain or shine, and watch everything that goes on. David has even caught them singing and clapping to the worship choruses on occasion, but they still won’t join us.”
“Are they spies or something?” Betsy asked.
“I’m really not sure,” Nate said. “I can’t get anything out of them. I’m just choosing to see them as elders in training.”
He turned and flashed them a conspiratorial grin, and Natalie’s heart warmed. It was so nice to be with her father. He seemed so relaxed, not tense like he was at Grandma Camfield’s. Here he was … at home.
“Here we are,” Dad said, as they approached a small hut at the edge of a grouping of the primitive homes.
The steps that led to his stoop were steeper, more ladderlike than those at the mission office. Her father led the way up and opened the door to reveal a table laid with three bowls overflowing with fruit, some of which Natalie couldn’t even identify. Mismatched mugs held juice, and slices of corn bread sat on shiny leaves that served as plates. They viewed the appetizing spread through a lay
er of nylon netting, put there to keep the bugs at bay, she guessed.
“Nate, this is lovely,” Betsy exclaimed. “You turned out to be quite the homemaker!”
He waved off her compliment, dipping his head and looking self-conscious. “You might want to hold your praise until you’ve tasted it.”
He removed the sheet of netting and pulled out stools for Natalie and Betsy. While they got settled, he poured coffee from a thermos, then sat and bowed his head. They followed suit.
“Father God,” he prayed in the husky voice the long-ago fire had given him, “we come before you this morning with praise and thanksgiving for the many blessings you have given us. But especially, Father, we thank you for bringing Betsy and Natalie safely here.”
He paused, and Natalie suspected that his emotions had choked him up. A lump lodged in her own throat.
“Bless this food to the nourishment of our bodies, and guide and bless the work of our hands today and every day,” Dad finished.
Natalie looked up to find him smiling at her. She ate her first real meal in Timoné amid warm conversation and happy laughter. She had so much to be thankful for, so much to look forward to. Maybe here she could finally put the pain and guilt of her past behind her.
A silly cliché sang in her head: Today is the first day of the rest of your life. This morning it seemed neither silly nor cliché.
Twenty–Nine
Hhere do you want me to put these, Dad?” Natalie asked, holding up a stack of what appeared to be foreign language medical brochures.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Nate said. “They came with the supplies some clinic in the States sent—or maybe it was a church. I’ve forgotten. But since they’re in Portuguese, they don’t do me much good.” He scratched his head. “Maybe you should give them to David. He might be able to tell if there’s anything in them that would be helpful.”
“David speaks Portuguese, too?”
“Not fluently, but probably well enough to get the gist.”
On their fifth day in Timoné she and Betsy were helping Dad clean out the mission clinic. Situated beside Nate’s hut, the timber structure stood in rather stark contrast to the primitive architecture of the rest of the village.
Natalie laid the pamphlets by the door so she wouldn’t forget them and turned back to sorting through the books and magazines on the shelf. As far as she could tell, the cabin that housed the clinic was the only concession to modern civilization her father had allowed in Timoné. Well, besides David’s bed. The revelation that David Chambers slept on a real bed—box springs, mattress and all—had niggled at Natalie for two days now. She hadn’t had much trouble adjusting to the heat and humidity of the tropics, and she was even learning to take the lizards in the hut in relative stride. But she did miss her bed. And since learning this piece of information, she’d become nearly obsessed wondering how David had gotten his bed here, and what it would take to get one for herself. She fully intended to mention it in her next e-mail home. Or better yet, in her next letter to Grandma and Grandpa Camfield.
“What do you want me to do with this?” Betsy held up a cardboard box with an illustration of a fancy macramé hammock on the front.
“Hmm? I forgot I even had that. I think Mom sent it in one of her care packages a couple of years ago. I just never got around to putting it up. I guess … just store it in one of those cupboards.”
“Hey, I’ll take it,” Natalie said.
“Help yourself,” he told her. Then, with a wink, “Just don’t expect to have a lot of time to spend using it.”
He picked up a large box of books and started for the door. He paused for a minute to watch Betsy, who had started scrubbing down the examination table. “Hey, Bets,” he said, “doesn’t this remind you of the good ol’ days when I used to pay you to clean my room?”
“Yeah, and don’t think you won’t get a bill for this, too,” she dead-panned.
He laughed and pushed the door open with one hip. “I’ll be right back,” he said.
“Sure you will,” Betsy teased. “I know that old trick. You’ll be back when the work’s all done is what you mean.”
Natalie smiled at their banter. She was going to miss Betsy something fierce. She enjoyed watching the camaraderie between her father and his sister. It did her heart good to see how happy Dad seemed to have them here; how happy he was here. She realized that ever since she’d learned her parents’ story as a young girl, she’d pictured her father pining away, sad and lonely in a remote place, living among strangers.
But in the few short days she’d been here, she’d come to see that Nathan Camfield was quite content with his life in Colombia. She heard her father’s voice outside the window. He was speaking with one of the native men. The man was gesturing broadly. Nate listened, then said something that caused a wide smile to stretch across the bronzed face of the Timoné man. Nate clapped him on his bare back, and they laughed together. Though Natalie couldn’t understand a word of their conversation, it was obvious that they shared the amity of friends.
It still intrigued Natalie to watch her father with the natives, to see a strange language flow effortlessly from his lips. She tried, and failed, to visualize herself interacting this way with the villagers. She was doing well to spit out a hollio each morning as she walked through the village with her father. Without a written language, there was really no way she could study or practice. She longed to be able to speak with the children who had taken to following her around the village.
A few minutes later, Dad came back into the clinic and pulled several file folders from the four-drawer cabinet in the corner of the room. He sat down at his small desk and began to sort through the contents of the first folder.
“Hey, Dad, how do you say ‘My name is’?” Natalie asked.
He looked up from the papers and smiled. “Ne apronez Natalie,” he translated, putting a foreign inflection to her name so it sounded like Natah-LEE.
She repeated the phrase.
“Very good,” he said. “And don’t forget, the minute we put Betsy on that boat, you’ll not hear another word of English.”
She groaned. David Chambers had suggested this torture at dinner the other night when Natalie and Betsy were complaining about how much difficulty they were having with the dialect. “It’s for your own sake, Natalie,” David had told her. “Studies have shown that people learn a new language much more quickly if it’s all they hear or speak.”
It had sounded to her like an excuse to make things more difficult.
“Betsy, are you sure you don’t want to stay a couple more weeks?” she moaned now.
Her aunt laughed. “You don’t think that would stop them, do you? They’d just impose the same punishment on me.”
“Hey,” Dad said, a note of seriousness in his voice. “It’s not punishment. It’s called education.”
“It’s just a lot harder than I thought it would be—the language.”
“It’ll come. Goodness, you haven’t even been here a week yet. It’s not worth losing any sleep over.”
“Easy for you to say,” she shot back. “You’re not the one who’s going to be suffering.”
“I put in my dues.”
“I know. I’m just griping.”
Nate looked from her to Betsy, smiling. “What is it with you women anyway? Gripe, gripe, gripe. Is that all you do?”
“Hey, buster,” Betsy countered, “I can take this dust rag and these work-blistered hands somewhere else if that’s all the appreciation I’m going to get.”
“Ouch,” Dad said dryly. He smiled and held his hands palms out in submission. “Okay, okay. I guess I better quit while I’m ahead.”
Natalie and Betsy laughed and set back to work.
That night the four Americans shared dinner together one last time. Tomorrow David Chambers would take Betsy downriver to Conzalez where they would both be flown to San José del Guaviare. Betsy would fly back to the States the next day via Bogotá. David would remain
in San José for a few days buying supplies, doing research on the Internet, and collecting the mail and e-mail that had come for the mission.
“Can I pour you another cup of cazho?” Nate asked, getting up from the table and reaching for the thermos of coffee on the stoop behind him. His hut was too small to accommodate all of them comfortably, so they had brought a table from the clinic and put it in front of Nate’s hut. They were enjoying the relative coolness of the evening. Citronella candles and an abundance of repellent lotion kept the mosquitoes to a tolerable minimum, and the candles provided a pleasant remedy for the early darkness that came to the huts under the forest canopy.
Natalie pushed her plate away from the edge of the small table. The remains of her tamale-like entrée sat untouched. “That was wonderful,” she said. “But I can’t eat another bite. And here I thought I might lose a couple of pounds eating jungle food.”
David Chambers laughed. “Jungle food?”
“Well, you know— I thought it would all be fruits and vegetables and rice and all that healthy stuff. Who knew that everything would be deep fried?”
“In lard, no less,” Dad said, rubbing his stomach.
Natalie detected a glint in David’s eye as he turned to Nate. “Should we tell her now or wait until the getaway boat has already gotten away?”
“Tell me what?” She shot them a suspicious look.
“Better tell her now,” Dad said conspiratorially. “It’s only fair.”
“What?” she demanded.
Dad cleared his throat. “David and I had an executive meeting, and we’ve decided to appoint you to a very special position—a position of great honor and responsibility—”
“No-o-o … oh no …” she protested. “You’re going to make me cook, aren’t you?”
“You got it,” Dad said, making his hand into a pistol and pulling the trigger.
After the Rains Page 25
