Beneath a Southern Sky

by Deborah Raney

  Daria merely went through the motions the rest of the day. She felt removed from her surroundings, as though she hovered in a different dimension. She folded the few items of clothing Nathan had not taken with him to the far village. They were heavy with his scent, and she held them longingly to her face before placing them in one of their small duffel bags. She packed her own belongings next to his, and she allowed herself to remember Nathan Camfield.

  She thought of his hands. Skilled hands, strong and able and roughened because he wasn’t afraid to work alongside the men in the village when he was needed there. Yet his hands were gentle when he examined a sick child, and sublimely tender when he loved her, when he caressed her face, her body. She saw his lanky figure. Nathan had run cross-country in high school and college, and he had a runner’s body, full of energy, like a wire spring, never static. And his wit. He delighted in good-natured teasing. He loved to make her laugh. In her mind she heard his laughter now—a musical, contagious, uninhibited crow. Just conjuring it in her memory made her laugh out loud.

  The sound of her own laughter shocked her. Reality struck—a spasm in the pit of her stomach—and her voice caught in her throat, suspending her breath in that strangling place between laughter and tears. She gasped for air, frightened at the depth and the conflict of her emotions. Near panic, a moan exploded from her. She wept then, her body racked with sobs for this loss of a very part of herself.

  Her heart would never again thrill at the sight of Nate’s lean, tan body hurrying across the stream, anxious to be with her after a day away from the village. He would never again make her laugh as he teased her about her cooking or babbled in her ear in his own silly made-up language, poking fun at her first feeble attempts at the Timoné dialect. She would never again lie in his arms, sleepy and wholly satisfied as his lover and his wife. Weak with grief, she fell upon the sweet-smelling mat—the bed where he had made sweet love to her.

  She remembered how he had hauled the previous missionary Evangeline Magrit’s narrow single bed out of the hut the night they’d first arrived. He had proudly brought in the native-woven mat where she lay now. Nate’s only concession to her comfort had been the extra padding their sleeping bags afforded and the thick mosquito netting that was knotted above her head now. She felt ashamed that she’d ever complained about this hard bed. It should have been enough that she shared it with him. Her sobs rose to strangle her, and the wails that issued from her throat now came out exactly as the keening cries of a grieving Timoné woman. In this nuance of the ancient language, she was fluent.

  The weeping was cleansing, and, when the worst was past, a familiar peace began to fill the emptiness. A bittersweet realization flooded over her: Nathan was in heaven. This very minute, he was looking into the face of Jesus. It filled her with joy as she remembered how much he had longed for that moment.

  She offered a prayer of thanksgiving for the years she had been allowed with her husband, for the precious love they had shared, and for the hope she had in Christ. And she remembered then that this was the reason she and Nathan had come to Colombia—to share that hope.

  She must be strong and show these people how her God comforted her, how he made sense of the senseless. Yet how could she do that when she struggled for it to make sense to her?

  Nightmares breached her sleep that night. In her dreams she saw Nate, badly burned. He staggered toward her from across the stream, but when he crossed over to their hut he metamorphosed into a skeletal body, only his smile remaining.

  She started awake, and each time she fell back asleep, the dreams plagued her. Twice she actually thought she saw Nathan standing beside her mat, but when she reached out for him, the specter faded like a vapor, leaving her bereft and trembling with fear. She lay in the darkness, shivering in spite of the heat, unable to wipe away the terrifying visions.

  She sat up in bed, trembling. Suddenly in her mind she saw clearly the column of smoke that had risen in the north sixteen days earlier. The blood rushed to her head, and she felt her heart beating violently in her chest as she realized for the first time that she had actually witnessed Nathan’s funeral pyre. The thought chilled her, and then, strangely, it began to comfort her. In God’s incomprehensible way, had he allowed her to be present at Nate’s death? To see his entrance into eternity?

  “Oh, God, give me your peace. Please, Father. Take these dreams away,” she begged.

  Finally she slept, and when the sun came up, she went into the forest where she cut thick bamboo stalks and tied them with vines, fashioning a crude cross. She didn’t know where the idea had come from, but she planted the cross near a tree behind their hut. Then sitting cross-legged in the moss beneath the tree, she carefully etched Nathan’s name and the dates of his short life into the trunk. Though it was an empty grave, it seemed important to mark Nathan’s passing in this way. As she carved, she prayed, pouring her heart out to God. Finally she quoted the Twenty-third Psalm from memory. The ancient words and the ceremony of her actions comforted her. And though she still did not understand the why of Nate’s death, God took away her need for understanding, and she felt the tiny ember of peace flicker.

  As Daria tidied the hut, she set aside Nathan’s books to give to Anazu, Tados, and Quimico. Her own books and other supplies she gave to the children. They seemed to understand that Daria was still in mourning. They did not come for morning lessons, did not follow her around the village as they had before. Instead, they waited, tentative, for her to approach them. She craved their chattering and their easy way with her. She wanted back the life she’d known here before.

  But even as she craved her old life, she saw the boat that would take her away sitting ready at the water’s edge.

  As she returned from washing at the river, she came upon Tommi, hand fishing in a fast-running tributary beside the pathway.

  “Catching any fish?” she asked him in Timoné.

  With a fresh shyness in her presence, he held out a basket with five or six small trout in it.

  She smiled at him and spread her hands wide. “You catch a big one for me, okay?”

  “Okay,” he grinned, using his favorite English word.

  She walked on silently, bidding the little boy a final goodbye in her heart. She followed the path back to the village, committing the jungle to memory as she went. Several times along the way, she stopped and closed her eyes, listening to the soothing sounds of the rain forest, recording them in her mind. After today, she might never return, but she would hold this place in her heart, forever entwined with her memories of Nathan Camfield.

  Anazu’s boat sat ready at the trail’s edge. It was time to go, and now she felt an urgency to carry the tragic news to Nate’s family and to her own.

  In an inspired moment, she made a gift of their hut to Anazu and his family. There was no Timoné word for church, but she explained as best she could that she would like them to use it as a place to pray and to seek God.

  “It would make Dr. Nate very happy to know that you remember him here, and that you always pray to the one true God,” she said in her halting attempt at the dialect.

  Anazu thanked her for her gift. Paita embraced Daria, while Anazu’s nephews loaded the small bundles that held her belongings into the boat. Then they hoisted the craft onto their shoulders and, without a word, turned toward the forest pathway that led to the river.

  Daria followed, gulping back tears as she walked away from the cherished memories she had lived here with her husband. She remembered the day Nathan had disappeared down this same trail. It seemed like a lifetime ago.

  Overhead the birds of the rain forest squawked and sang in a harsh cacophony. The sun burned down on her back, its scorching rays a comfort simply because it was something she could feel.

  As she followed her guides along the trail, she turned several times and drank in the scene, trying to sear the picture in her memory.

  Finally, as the village disappeared from sight behind a curtain of thick vegetation, Dar
ia turned back to the trail. Forging ahead, she wrapped her hands protectively over the small mound of her stomach, cradling the only part of Nathan Camfield she had left—the child she was now certain grew within her womb.

  Four

  The trees spread out beneath them as far as the eye could see—an ocean of emerald green broken only by an occasional glimpse of silver ribbon that was the Rio Guaviare. The Cessna 185 Skywagon swooped down into the swell of the jungle like a hungry gull, made a wide circle, and dipped left for another look.

  “There!” the pilot shouted over the roar of the engine. “See how those trees are stripped—there on the east bank where the river curves?”

  He flew lower, and Daria peered out the window over the left wing from her seat behind him. She saw the section of the forest he was talking about, the trees bare of leaves, their bark ashy and grey. Her heart lurched as she caught a brief glimpse of charred debris through the branches. A peculiar sense of reverence filled her. She was looking at the place where Nathan had died.

  As they circled again, Bob Warrington put his binoculars down and turned to her from his seat beside the pilot. His face was pallid and drawn, as her own must have been. “Are you all right, Daria?” he shouted.

  She could only nod and put her head against the window.

  “There’s nothing we can do here,” Bob told the pilot, his voice grave.

  The deafening drone of the plane’s engine drowned out her sobs as it turned westward and gained altitude.

  Coming through the doorway into the terminal waiting room of Kansas City International Airport, Daria felt as though she had stepped into another dimension. The bright lights and the throng of bustling, well-dressed travelers unsettled her. The mechanical jangle of computers and telephones and the public address system was strange to her ears, more surreal than the jungle sounds of Colombia had ever seemed, even in the beginning. Each breath she drew in carried a stranger, stronger scent than the last—detergents and soaps, colognes and lotions that all seemed to be garish imitations of the softly fragrant flowers and herbs of her rain forest. For a moment she ached for the familiar noises and smells of Colombia. She now felt more a foreigner here than she had felt at first among the Timoné.

  “Daria! Daria!” She heard her mother before she actually saw her face. Margo Haydon’s tremulous voice rose above the din. Then a gasp. “Oh, honey, you’re so thin!”

  She fell into her mother’s embrace, grateful for someone to lean on. Her father wrapped his strong arms around the two of them, and for several minutes they stood there, holding one another, too emotional to speak.

  Almost against her will, Daria, flanked by her parents, was swept into the crowd and carried along the concourse toward the baggage claim. As they walked, her father took her carry-on bags from her.

  “Are you okay, honey?” he asked, putting an arm tightly around her shoulders.

  Daria nodded, managing a small smile for her father. “I will be.”

  “You poor baby.” Her mother patted her back. “I wish you’d never gone to that horrible place—”

  Erroll Haydon shook his head, and Daria’s mother clamped her lips shut. “Well, at least you’re home now.”

  “Did…did Nathan’s parents come?” Daria looked around the terminal but saw no familiar faces in the sea of people that flooded the airport.

  “No, honey, they wanted to give you some time,” her father told her. “They’re pretty broken up over this whole thing.”

  Tears welled up in Daria’s eyes.

  “Let’s go get your stuff and get you home,” Margo Haydon said, setting her lips in a hard line.

  In spite of her sorrow, it was undeniably good to be back with her family. The river trip to San José del Guaviare had taken its toll on her. And there she had waited for two agonizing days at an airstrip crawling with paramilitary before flight arrangements to Bogotá could be finalized through Gospel Outreach’s headquarters.

  And yet the farther her travels had carried her from Timoné, the farther she felt from Nate. As the plane had lifted from the tarmac at the airport in Bogotá, she had been overcome by panic, feeling as though she were betraying her husband by leaving him there. The mission had sent a search party into the region but had warned her that it was likely that, because so many had burned in the fire, they wouldn’t be able to identify Nate’s remains to bring them home. In a strange way it comforted Daria to know that Nate’s body had burned, that she wasn’t leaving flesh and blood and a grave behind. Only precious memories.

  It seemed a lifetime ago that she had lost him, but in the presence of her parents, her grief was fresh.

  Dead. It still seemed impossible. Nate had always embodied the word life. She pushed away the images of his lanky form, his pale blond hair whipping in the breeze, his crooked, winsome smile. She had to be strong in front of her parents, especially when she remembered how much they had been against her going away.

  She recalled a late December day two years ago in this same airport. After all the years of planning and dreaming, she and Nate were finally going to Colombia.

  Their parents had thought they were crazy. Both of their mothers cried for days when they realized that nothing they could say would make a difference. They didn’t understand the faith that compelled her and Nate to go, the desire to see a world in love with Jesus.

  “But there are so many right here who need help,” they’d argued.

  It was true. An hour from the Haydons, in Wichita, and only minutes from the Camfields in Kansas City, homeless people littered park benches and sidewalks with their foul-smelling bodies and battered grocery bags that carried the sum of their existence. Even in the small farming communities where she and Nate had been raised, there were those who had never truly heard the gospel message, had never understood the significance of Christ’s sacrifice for them.

  But that was not where God had led them. And to go anywhere else would have been to disobey the One they loved most.

  After a bittersweet Christmas with their families, they drove to the airport in a four-vehicle caravan. They stood at the departure gate surrounded by their parents and Daria’s brother, Nate’s sister, and five young nieces and nephews.

  She and Nathan boarded the plane on a river of tears. They carried three bags apiece, filled mostly with cooking utensils and medical supplies, along with a few books and writing materials. In their pockets they carried passports and their marriage certificate and photographs of their loved ones.

  They had never looked back. But neither had they ever imagined that it would end like this, that Daria would return alone.

  “Are you hungry, Daria?” Her mother’s shrill voice jerked her from her reverie. “Should we stop and get something?”

  “No, Mom. I ate on the plane.” Never mind that it was half a bag of peanuts and a Diet Coke. It would satisfy her mother to know she had eaten something.

  “Did Jason come?” Daria asked, anxious to change the subject. She was eager to see her brother, though she wasn’t sure she could face his sympathy right now.

  “No, sweetheart,” her father said gently. “He thought it would be best to wait for you at the house.”

  “When…will the Camfields come?”

  “They’ll come to Bristol as soon as we let them know we’re home.”

  They arrived at the baggage carousel, and Erroll Haydon motioned for his wife and daughter to sit down while he waited for her luggage to come around.

  The rest of the day turned into a haze in Daria’s mind. The long drive home, her mother helping her get settled in the room that had been hers as a child. Then a house full of visitors. Her brother and his family, and later the extended family and Nate’s family, all came to see her. The outpouring of sympathy touched her, and yet it overwhelmed her so that when they’d all gone home she could scarcely remember one conversation.

  On Saturday, one week after she arrived home, her parents’ church—the old clapboard country church Daria had grown up in—
held a memorial service for Nathan. It seemed as if the entire town had turned out. She stood beside her mother and father at the doorway in the vestibule and greeted those who came to pay their respects. After living in a uniform of cotton skirts and tennis shoes for two years, she felt ill at ease wearing stockings and heels and the simple black dress her mother had loaned her. But she smoothed her skirt and tried to smile and be gracious as friends and neighbors—most of whom she hadn’t seen for years—filed by to cry with her and offer their support.

  The wide doors to the vestibule opened once more, and a group of her high-school friends came in together. Her heart lightened just seeing them. “Nancy! Melinda!” Daria cried. “Oh, Cathy, it’s been such a long time. Hi, Diane. Oh, thank you for coming, all of you.” The smile she gave them was genuine.

  Nancy leaned in close, her glossy red hair a long curtain. The sad smile on her face made Daria feel as if she truly shared her burden. She reached out and hugged her, taking warmth and healing from the embrace.

  “How are you holding up, Haymaker?” Nancy asked gently.

  “No one’s called me that in almost ten years,” Daria smiled.

  Melinda, Cathy, and Diane moved close and formed a circle around her, and the knot of friends moved away from the door.

  “Let’s go talk outside,” Daria said. She caught her dad’s eye. “We’re going to step outside for a minute,” she mouthed, motioning toward the door.

  Erroll excused himself from the conversation he was involved in and came over to greet Daria’s friends. Then he turned to his daughter, putting a hand on her arm. “You go on,” he reassured her. “We’ll fill in for you here. You need to get reacquainted.”

  They found a shady spot away from the front door, and soon Daria was caught up in conversation, accepting their tender empathy, catching up on news of other friends who had moved away, even laughing as they remembered old times together. It felt wonderful to be with these childhood friends who knew her so well. Slowly Daria began to feel more like her old self.