The papers and computer printouts spread across his desk looked important, and she didn’t want to disturb them. She did gather them into one neat stack so she could dust the top of the desk. She sharpened his pencils and cleaned half an inch of lint and dirt from the jar that held pens and scissors and other office supplies. She resisted the temptation to open his desk drawers and organize them as well. She didn’t want to violate his privacy, but perhaps when he saw what she’d done with the rest of the office, he’d give her permission to do just that.
Giving the desk one last swipe of the dust rag, she stepped back and viewed the room with satisfaction. She emptied the pail of water over the edge of the stoop, loaded it with the dirty dishes and the rest of her cleaning supplies, and started back to her own hut. It felt good to be able to contribute.
David Chambers pulled a dingy handkerchief from the back pocket of his jeans and wiped the sweat from his brow. He shaded his eyes with one hand and tried to gauge how long it would be before the boat docked. After making this trip on the water almost a dozen times, he was beginning to recognize the landmarks along the river.
He hadn’t liked the feel of things in San José one bit. It wasn’t just the paramilitary hanging around the airport. That wasn’t all that unusual. But something was afoot. He could sense it. And he wasn’t the only one. All his contacts in San José had seemed to be on edge.
Though the man hadn’t said anything, there seemed to be caution in the way Pedro Alejandro, the spice vendor at the market, talked, his eyes shifting as if he were searching for something. And Lucretia at the library had been downright frightened. For some odd reason, she had been ready to deny him access to the computers until he reminded her kindly that she owed him a favor for translating an American Web site into Spanish for her the last time he’d been in San José.
David was anxious to talk to Nate about his impressions. And yet he hesitated to say anything. Of all the rotten times for things to turn shaky—with Nate’s young daughter visiting. Or staying, it appeared. The girl was obviously not cut out for the rough life Timoné offered. And yet she was still here. He would have bet his beard that she’d have been on the first boat back to the States with Nate’s sister. Now she was stuck here for who knew how long.
Still, even when the rest of the country was volatile, their village remained fairly safe. The Timoné had no interest in politics, and except for a few isolated incidents, they had not become involved in the drug trade that seemed to be at the heart of so much of the violence.
David shifted on the uncomfortable seat and checked to be sure his duffel was safely beneath the bench. He smiled to himself as he thought of the thick sheaf of e-mail letters bundled inside. Half of them were for the girl. He wondered if the letters would make her regret her decision to stay. A fair number of the posts were from someone named Evan. He hadn’t actually read the notes, of course, but he’d been young and in love once himself, and as the pages rolled out of the printer, he couldn’t help but notice a few phrases that seemed to go beyond friendly hellos. But maybe things were different nowadays. Heaven knew that whenever he went back to the States, he felt the English he heard on television and on the streets was a completely different language than he had spoken growing up in Ohio. Still, he doubted the language of love had changed all that much since he was a starry-eyed young man. If he tried, he could remember what it was like, and a part of him felt envious of what these pages of Natalie’s e-mail represented.
After what had happened with Lily, he tried not to remember those emotions. He’d long ago put aside any notion of ever having those feelings again. It was too painful.
Wiping the sweat from his forehead again, he glanced at his watch. They’d been on the water for almost four hours. It wouldn’t be long now till the dock at Timoné came into view. It would be a welcome sight.
Thirty–One
When the afternoon rains ended, Natalie and her father trekked down to the dock, thinking they might meet David’s boat. Natalie heard the commotion at the landing before she saw the boat. Though this dock, which served a tributary of the Guaviare, was almost half an hour’s walk from the village, it was a popular place for the adolescent boys of Timoné to play. They swam and fished and watched for the occasional motorboat that docked there.
Sure enough, the boat David was on was just mooring as they rounded the bend in the pathway. The boys hung off the pier and dog-paddled in the water, greeting David and the pilot of the boat with whoops and cheers.
When her eyes met David’s, Natalie waved a greeting, but she hung back while her father exchanged welcoming handshakes and pats on the back with him. They began to unload the supplies, and when Natalie saw that there were many boxes and crates to carry, she went to lend a hand.
When they were each loaded down with all they could carry and there were still supplies on the boat, David motioned to two of the younger boys who stood apart from the others watching them work. “Ceju na,” he said, reaching into his pocket. He pulled out a crumpled pack of chewing gum, saying something in Timoné that caused the boys’ eyes to light up. They loaded the lads down with boxes, and the five of them hiked back to the village.
Darkness was encroaching under the forest canopy when Dad set his cartons on the stoop and unlatched the door to the mission office. Natalie went in first and put her load on the small table. Hot and sticky and out of breath, she wiped the sweat from her face with her shirttail and watched David, anxious to see his response to the pristine office.
He put down the boxes he was carrying, relieved the native boys of their burden, rewarded them with the gum, and dismissed them. He glanced around the room, then took the laptop in its padded case over to his desk. His eyes widened, and his Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat, but he said nothing.
While they sorted through the supplies, repacking boxes that belonged in the medical clinic and those that went to each of their individual huts, Dad and David talked nonstop—though Natalie couldn’t understand a word, since they spoke only in Timoné.
She tried to pay close attention to pick up the gist of what they were saying, but not one syllable sounded like anything she had ever heard. Their exchange seemed to be friendly banter, and Natalie guessed that David was asking how things had gone while he was away.
At one point she interrupted, holding up a box of supplies. “Whose pile do these go in?”
“Ni,” David said, shaking his head with a condescending smile. “Timoné.”
She groaned, then yielded. Smiling sweetly she raised her brows in a question mark, and pointed to the box. “Que?” she asked simply. There was more than one way to skin a cat, and sign language was the same in any dialect.
The two men laughed.
“Mi utta,” David answered, amusement in his eyes. But he did proffer the benefit of sign language back to her, pointing in the direction of his hut. Of course. Mi utta. My hut. She added the box to the stack near David’s desk.
He and Nate went back to their conversation, leaving Natalie out of the loop. Soon their voices changed, and she thought she detected the tenor of anxiety in David Chambers’s tone. She watched her father’s face carefully. Once she caught his glance as though they might be talking about her, but when their eyes met his expression gave nothing away. She felt the blood pump a little faster through her impatient veins.
They finished their sorting, and Natalie picked up two boxes of supplies intended for the clinic. She’d been helping her father in the clinic long enough that she knew where things belonged. It would be a good excuse to get out of here. She cleared her throat to get their attention. Both men looked up at her, but they didn’t break stride in their conversation.
She lifted her chin smugly, indicated the boxes, and turning on her heel said, “Dr. Nate’s.” Well, after all, that was his name in Timoné, too.
Still rattling off something to her father and all but ignoring her, David Chambers opened the door for her.
“Égracita,” she said c
urtly. Then, pointedly, she told her father, “Mi utta.”
She huffed down the path toward the clinic. The further she walked the more furious she became. She began to mutter to herself—in defiant English. “I’d like to know what makes him think he can decree what language I speak? By George, I’ll speak English if I feel like speaking English. And not so much as a ‘thank you’ for cleaning off his pigsty of a desk.”
The boxes were heavy, and by the time she reached the clinic she was sticky with perspiration and indignation. She worked the combination on the padlock that secured the door and went in to put away the supplies. Then she went to her own hut.
It was too early to retire for the night, and she was anxious to see if David had brought any e-mail for her, but she decided that she would go to bed anyway. She had no desire to see David Chambers again tonight—or anyone, for that matter. She was relieved that she had her own place to sleep and that it was a good distance from there to a certain hut on the other side of the stream.
Alone in her utta for the first night, sleep did not come easily. She tossed on the grass mittah under the gauzy netting and made a mental list of all the Timoné words she knew. It wasn’t very impressive. And when she thought of how few of those words in her meager vocabulary could be strung together to make an intelligible sentence, she almost despaired. She certainly hadn’t realized how much she liked to talk. Though she and Sara had had their share of all-night chats, she’d never seen herself as a typical gabby female. But now the thought of not being able to communicate on a level deeper than grunts and hand gestures—for who knew how long—overwhelmed her.
She threw back the mosquito netting from around her mat and rose to her feet, padding barefoot across the small room and back, then back again. She clenched and unclenched her fists. She wished Evan were here. He would know what to do. No, Evan wouldn’t have let things go this far in the first place. He would have stood up to David’s ridiculous rule.
Well, she would show him. She would study the Timoné language and learn more quickly than even the precious David Chambers.
David came into the mission office the following morning low on sleep and even lower on patience. He looked again at the damage that had been done to his desk, and with a plea heavenward for self-control, he began to try to sort through the mess.
He had just located his misplaced dictionaries when Nate made his usual morning appearance at the office.
“Whoa!” Nate exclaimed lightheartedly after taking one look at David’s desk. “Are my eyes deceiving me, or did you actually clean off your desk?”
“No, I did not,” David answered. He tried to keep the resentment from his voice, but apparently without success.
“Ohhh, I see. You had some help?”
He shook his head and bent over his work, hoping Nathan would catch the hint that he wasn’t in a mood to talk about it.
“Did Natalie do that?” Camfield asked.
“I assume so,” David replied, busying himself sorting through the papers she’d desecrated.
“I’m sorry, Dave. I’ll have a word with her.”
“No!” It came out more stridently than he intended. He deliberately softened his tone before speaking again. “It’s all right. I’m sure she meant well.”
“Yes, I’m sure she did. But if I don’t say something, she might make this a weekly habit. I’d better speak with her.”
“Please … don’t say anything. I’ll talk to her myself.”
He felt Nathan’s eyes looking down on him. After a minute, he glanced up and met the older man’s thoughtful gaze.
“Go easy on her, will you, Dave?” Nate said softly. “I’m sure she thought she was doing you a favor.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll be nice.” He went back to sorting through the mess on his desk. When he left for San José, there had been carefully indexed books laid out in precise order on his desktop, pages of word lists and definitions organized by category. Scraps of important notes had been strategically placed where he could easily find them. Natalie might as well have been a Kansas tornado. He could not find one thing he needed. The word lists were a jumbled mess. He was beginning to fear she’d thrown some pages away.
After a while Nate stood and headed for the door. “Well, I think I’ve done about all the damage I can do,” Nate said. “I need to get over to the clinic. If you want to take a look at that radio later on and see if you can fix it, be my guest.”
David grunted. Wrong thing to say, buster, he thought. He would be doing well if his desk was “fixed” by this time next week. He sure wouldn’t have time to work on that piece-of-junk radio.
He sorted and reorganized for another hour, and the steam began to subside. All his papers did seem to be here after all, and once he figured out that the books had been filed in alphabetical order by title, he realized that it was actually kind of nice to have them off the desk and out of the way. Still, that was no excuse for her to take it upon herself to clean off his work area. He was lucky she hadn’t tried to clean out his desk drawers. If she’d gone that far, he would have personally escorted her to the dock to wait for the next boat out.
“Hollio,” Natalie said, coming into the office. Then, with almost perfect inflection, she said in Timoné, “Dad said you wanted to see me?”
“Yes.” He leaned over the desk and cleared off a chair for her. “Please, sit down.”
She smiled and actually shook a finger at him. “Ni. Timoné,” she scolded, taking a seat.
Why that impudent little … He couldn’t help himself. He leapt from his chair and launched into a diatribe like he hadn’t delivered since his best Spanish student had told him he was dropping out of college. “What makes you think you can come in here and rearrange my things?” he said, arms spread wide, fingers splayed. “Every single book on my desk was exactly where I needed it to be. I have passages marked for my reference in every one of those books.” He strode back and forth, his words gathering steam. “Now I can’t find one thing I’m looking for. You have set my work back weeks. I might as well be starting from scratch! What were you thinking, girl? Well, let me tell you. You weren’t thinking.”
He ranted and paced behind his desk, saying everything aloud that he’d muttered under his breath since he’d first realized the damage her little cleaning spree had inflicted. When he’d finally run out of words, he took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his forehead, realizing how foolish he must appear to her.
He looked at Natalie, who sat in front of him with her mouth hanging open in stunned silence. And he realized that it was only by God’s grace that he had delivered his entire speech in the Timoné dialect.
Natalie looked at him for a long minute. “Excusez, ni comprendé,” she said with a shrug. Her words were a jumble—more Spanish than Timoné—but he got her drift. And then he realized that she had got him—and got him good. He started laughing. Which was apparently the wrong thing to do.
The girl burst into tears, pushed the chair back, and made for the door.
“Wait!” he shouted.
She struggled with the latch, still trying to escape.
“Natalie, please. Just a minute.” He spoke clear English as he came from behind the desk and went to where she stood. Haltingly he put his hand on her arm. “Natalie, I’m sorry.”
She turned toward him but kept her eyes on the floor.
He felt like a fool—the scholarly linguist, suddenly tongue-tied. He was disgusted with himself for letting a mere girl get to him like this. He put his fingers under her chin and gently raised her head, forcing her to look at him. “Natalie, please forgive me. I know when you—when you cleaned off my desk, you were only trying to help. I shouldn’t have yelled at you—in any language.”
He thought he saw a hint of a smile play at the corners of her shapely mouth. He knew he should say something more. Explain to her why he’d been so upset. But looking at her lovely face, the thoughts that pelted his brain frightened him. Suddenly he realized th
at her chin still rested on his hand, the warmth of her skin searing his fingers. He dropped his hand as though burned and took a step backward.
What was he thinking? He’d been down this road before. He thought he had escaped temptation’s clutches long ago, and now—completely without warning—it stood mere inches from him. With her pale, silky hair and her sun-kissed complexion, Natalie Camfield was as opposite from Lily’s dark beauty as she could be. Yet something about her—the emotion that sparked in her eyes, the vulnerability in the tilt of her head—caused memories of Lily to swirl around him. Memories of the good times. Before—
He yanked his thoughts back to the present and turned away from Natalie, muttering a few more feeble words of apology.
“It’s all right, David,” she said quietly, swiping at a tear-stained cheek. “I was trying to help when I cleaned off your desk. But I see now that what I did wasn’t helpful at all. I … I wasn’t thinking. Please forgive me.”
He stroked his beard, chastened. “No, I’m the one who needs to ask forgiveness. I know you meant well. I let my temper get completely out of control … I acted like a complete brihacho. There was no excuse for that.”
“Brihacho?” Her inquisitive smile was a gift.
“I’m sorry. I sometimes lapse into Timoné without even realizing. It means ‘idiot’ or ‘jerk.’ ”
“Oh,” she said, her grin widening. “I’ll remember that.”
Thirty–Two
Rain pelted the ground, and thunder rumbled in the distance. The rainy season had begun in Timoné, and the work of each day was now determined by the weather. Natalie grabbed an umbrella and headed for the village commons. She could think of plenty of things she’d rather be doing today than helping her father vaccinate dozens of screaming babies and toddlers. But this particular vaccine had been hard to come by, and now that he had it, Dad was anxious to get it into the Timoné children. He had even asked David to set aside his translating work for the morning to help with the task.
After the Rains Page 27
