At Play in the Fields of the Lord (17 page)

“Like a missionary’s wife.”

“I
am
a missionary’s wife!”

“Then why did you follow me out here, with your hair still wild?
Agnes Carr!
Maybe you were never meant to be a missionary’s wife.”

“Mr.
Moon, I came to beg you not to attack the Niaruna.”

“All right.”

“All right what?”

“All right, beg me.”

“Oh please!
You mustn’t attack them—”

“I won’t attack them; I’m just heading eastward.”
And he told her eagerly about his dream, about how all the signs had pointed eastward; that Indians said the Source of Life, the Sun, lay in the East, and that in the West, where the Sun touched the Darkness, was the Land of the Dead.

She nodded: The Tiros believed that because the white man came to them from the far side of the Andes, he was the Spirit of the Dead.
As she spoke she gazed at him, and her face changed.
This made him happy; he awaited her, saying nothing.
“How strange you look—your eyes, I mean!
And your voice, when you talk about these things, it’s so quiet, so gentle.
I don’t understand you!
Why do you do … And just now, coming here, I saw you crouched on all fours, like an animal!
You looked like a cat!
Really, you frightened me!
What were you doing?”

He felt removed again and did not answer her.

She said, “You must listen to me.
There’s nothing east of here but jungle.
For two thousand miles!
You can’t just
go
there!”

“That’s the only way to do it—
go
.
When there’s a jungle waiting, you go through it and come out clean on the far side.
Because if you struggle to back out, you get all snarled, and afterwards the jungle is still there, still waiting.

“I don’t understand you.”
She looked annoyed; he was trying to see her body through her bathrobe.
“You promise then?”

“I’ll promise if you like.”

She got down on her knees.
“O Praise the Lord!”
she said, and began to pray.

He too got down upon his knees, to see her face better.
“What are you doing?”
he inquired.

“Saying a prayer for you.”

He took her hands and raised her to her feet.
“Don’t,” he said.
“Please don’t do that.
I knew yesterday that I would not attack them.
Listen—I
know
something, Andy …” But he had forgotten what he wanted to say.
He reached out to her and touched her face; her face implored him.
“Agnes Carr,” he murmured.
He took from his pocket the wild diamond, the clear drop of river fire and mountain rain, and squeezed it hard into her hand.
She ran.
“Good-bye,” he called.

Good-bye, good-bye.

It was still dark, dark and starless, when he turned the plane at the far end of the runway; he could scarcely make out the wall of trees at the far end or where earth merged with sky.
His hands on the controls moved swiftly and precisely but he was breathing urgently, and he did not wait for break of day as he had planned.
He roared away into the darkness, veering wildly from side to side; when he thought he was running out of ground he sighed, hauling back on the wheel, and the plane bounded aloft.
The black wall was much too close, and jumped at him; he rolled his wing to miss a treetop, hooting, and then he was high and clear.
Already, off to the east, the horizon was fire-black against the glow of the morning sun rolling toward him across Amazonas.
A lone black palm, bent sadly on the sky of dawn, sank away into the darkness as he rose.

He flew boldly, straight into the sun.
He was sailing eastward into all the mornings of the world, as the cloud forest and dark mountain range, the night and the dank river mists fell far behind.
There had never been a day so brilliant.
The dawn light caused the swamps to glitter, and pierced the muddy floods with life.
It sparkled on the canopy, and illumined from within the
wings of birds; a flight of parakeets shimmered downriver like a windburst of bright petals, and an alabaster egret burned his eye.
He laughed with joy and sang.

The cabin of the plane confined him; he would burst the plane apart.
He was oriented to the sun, as if he had soared into its field of gravitation.
He was the sun in the sun-flecked wings of a golden insect, crawling across the dome of sky inside his windshield; he was the sun in the white wings below, the sun in the huge voice of the bird morning.
All air and light and sound poured through him, swelling the universe.

To meet the sun he had wandered from his course, and now he whirled off northward; today, without effort, he could feel his bearings like a bird.
Remate was in the distance; he was headed straight for it, though he had not checked his compass.
He
knew
.
He could trust his eyes and hands to take him by dead reckoning.

At Remate the inhabitants rushed like chickens to the center of the clearing; he passed overhead, up the Espíritu.
It was not until he crossed a Tiro village that he felt a first somber dread.
Realizing where he was, not sure why he had come, his hands grew cold.

He checked his gauges.
His journey to the sun had consumed much too much fuel; he must turn back now if he was to reach Madre de Dios.
But Madre de Dios was the past, he had come across into the present, and in the next moment the dread left him and his mind soared once again.
He switched on his radio set, wishing to sing something to the world; he sang “Shenandoah” and “Columbus Stockade” and “All My Trials,” and the Portuguese words of “Jesus Wants Me For A Sunbeam”:

He flew onward.
Because he did not know as yet how he would do what he must do, he swung wide of the Niaruna village, circling at a distance, and all the while he talked and sang.

Another voice crackled thinly over the radio; it had been crackling for some time.
He put the earphones on and listened.

“This is Les Huben at Madre de Dios.
How do you read me?
Over.”

Moon pressed the button on his transmitter.
“This is Jesus, up in Heaven,” he said affably.
“How do you read me?
Over.”

But Huben ranted on.
Offers of help and prayers for Moon’s safety were interspersed with flight talk:
“By my estimate,”
Huben’s voice said,
“fuel-range ratio of your aircraft is very critical.
Can I assist you?
Over.”

“How about some last rites?”
Moon responded.
“Over.”
But he realized with annoyance that he had neglected to press his transmitter button.

Huben came back again:
“You are under the effects of a powerful drug; repeat, you are under the effects of a powerful drug.
You must try to concentrate, you are in emergency; repeat, you are in emergency.
May the Lord forgive you and keep you, Amen.
Over.”

“Thus spake the Lord to Leslie Hubens, His false witness:
I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing.”
In the silence that followed he bellowed, “Deuteronomy, 30:16.”

Huben’s voice said, “30:19.
For the last time, fella, you are in emergency; repeat, you are in emergency.
Where are you proceeding; repeat, where are you proceeding?
Over.”

Moon looked a last time at his gauges.

“What is your exact location; repeat, what is your exact location?
Over.”

“I’m at play in the fields of the Lord,” Moon said; he removed his earphones.
“Repeat, at play in the fields of the Lord.”

According to his own estimate, he would run out of fuel in a few more minutes.
The girl had said that to these Indians the white man was a creature from the west; he circled wide and came in upon the Niaruna from the east, out of the sun.
They spread like ants.
A few stood still.
They awaited him, just as they had awaited in his vision.
But of course he could not land, not even a crash landing; flyers who pancaked their small planes onto the canopy had starved to death, for there was no means of descent from the monstrous trees.
As for the river, it was too narrow and overgrown for an approach, and there were no sand bars.

In the vision he had leaped into the air, and he would do that
here; there was no wind, and if he timed it right and used his shrouds, he might drop into the clearing.
He reached back across the crate of bombs and dragged the parachute up front, then began his climb in a widening circle, higher and higher, with the sun, until the canopy stretched away so far on every side that the whole jungle lay beneath him.

The climb had burned up the last of his fuel.
The gauge was lifeless, and he knew that he might stall at any time.
His breath was short; the altimeter read 9600.
He leveled off for his approach, so intent on his work that only when he braced the door open and the cold air seared his hand did his fear verge upon panic.
But his breath came again, and with it a new exaltation; on such a morning, all light and purity and color, even death must be magnificent.

He tried to work himself into his parachute.
But his vast solar energy was instantly exhausted; he sat there gasping.
“Hoo, boy,” he said, trying in vain to cheer himself.
He bound his arm in the straps of the chute, and grasping the strut, inched out onto the wing; how cold it was, in this cold light of heaven!
He was afraid again.
He clutched the parachute to his chest, and with his other arm—the one run through the strap—he hugged the strut.
Now he pulled the cord and the silk bulged at the crack.

Now you’ve done it.
This time you’ve
really
done it.

The wind tore at his face, and his arms ached.
Short of the clearing, a mile and a half above the trees, he kicked himself backward and away.
Shoving his free arm among the straps, then clasping both arms tight to his chest, he closed his eyes against the gut-sucking suspense, and the blow of the silk snapped open; he fell the length of a long howl before the impact all but wrenched his arms out of their sockets.
He blinked, in tears; he was alive again, laughing idiotically in the clean sunlight of the upper air, legs dangling and swaying like the legs of a rag doll, drifting, drifting down through the great morning, in a wild silence like the wake of bells.

T
HE MOON HAD TURNED
,
AND A WEAK SUN FILTERED THROUGH THE
heat from the sky somewhere above.
The supplies had come on the DC-3 two days before, and now the Quarriers waited on the river bank for the mission seaplane that would fly them to Remate.
Even Hazel, in her conviction that no other place on earth could be so awful, was glad to leave Madre de Dios, although she remained angry with her husband, refusing to understand why Padre Xantes and Wolfie should come down to see him off.
Martin reminded her that in this place, where death from apathy was a constant threat, the most insignificant arrivals and departures were events that all attended, but she did not relent.

In recent days Wolfie had sought Quarrier’s company, but he merely came and sat and fumed, and scarcely spoke.
His beard had grown ragged, and there were small bits of tobacco in it.
“You run inta Moon out there,” he muttered now, averting his eyes, “you tell’m if he thinks Wolf’s gonna hang around here forever he’s off his nut, because I ain’t.”
Quarrier advised him to
give it up and go back home.
“The Old Wolf can take care of himself, don’t worry,” Wolfie said.

Then Yoyo came, accompanied by the mother-and-daughter team which he had acquired from Huben’s band of tame Niaruna, the same band that had given up two women to ransom the captive nuns.
Leslie had seen to it that the union of Yoyo with the daughter was sanctified in the eyes of the Lord, but the mother had been angry at being excluded from the marriage, since in the eyes of the band she was Yoyo’s first wife and her daughter little more than a courtesy to the new husband.
But Leslie had placated her with beads and had thought of her subsequently, for religious purposes, as the mother-in-law.

Yoyo pretended not to hear Quarrier’s greeting and peered about as if the missionary had addressed someone else.
Finally Quarrier turned away and stared out at the jungle on the farther bank.
Remembering the fate of Padre Fuentes, he was overcome by sudden dizziness; how had Leslie found the courage to establish a mission at the same location on the Río Espíritu?
Or was it faith?
It seemed to him that Huben’s faith, to judge from the support it had had from the Almighty, must be far greater than his own.

Behind him, in elaborate insolence, Yoyo cleared his throat and spat.
Quarrier glanced at Xantes, who raised his eyebrows and drew his cassock closer in a gesture of fastidiousness.
So
that’s
what you’ve taught him, the priest’s expression seemed to say, and both men smiled.

Quarrier disliked the idea that the Niaruna mission had been set up through Yoyo, who with his wives, dog, shotgun, and trading goods went off every few weeks in Guzmán’s canoe on a slaving journey up the inner rivers.
In his red shirt with rockets on it, Yoyo crossed frontiers at will.
He sat in councils, attended feasts, and everywhere was treated as a man of consequence.
At the same time he was recognized by brown and white alike as a spy and a liar, an agent of Guzmán who was not trusted even by Guzmán himself.
Yet many of El Comandante’s operations, balanced intricately between the law, the practical realities of the jungle, and a nostalgia for the grand old days of the rubber
boom when wild Indians were shot on sight, were based on the tribal information he obtained from Yoyo.
Sooner or later the latter would reappear in Madre de Dios, his canoe loaded with Indian artifacts, otter pelts and skins of caiman and boa.
More often than not, he brought along one or more Indian children, purchased ordinarily from their parents, whom he sold to the plantation owners along the banks of the main rivers.

For reporting this situation Quarrier had got himself disliked by everyone in Madre de Dios—including, he suspected, Leslie Huben.
Yoyo treated Quarrier with servile rudeness; like Guzmán, he had not forgiven the missionary for noticing the trade in slaves, and the hate in his moist yellow eyes was plain.
Unlike Wolfie and Xantes, he did not wave good-bye to the Quarriers—the first time, Martin reflected, that Yoyo had ever declined an opportunity to imitate the white man.
In the shadow of the warehouse, pistol on hip, the Comandante stood, thick and still in his white shirt and pants; he did not wave either.

O
N
the bank at Remate that same afternoon, Huben stood, feet spread apart and fists on hips, considering the Lord’s unconquered fields.
Standing beside him, Quarrier felt rumpled and inept; his nerves, after the long wait in Madre de Dios, were frayed by doubt and fear, and he grappled constantly with an impulse to outrage Huben.
Still, he had to admit that the man’s confidence cheered them all, and he wondered if Leslie’s true crime in his eyes was not simply the possession of Andy.

From where they stood, all of Remate could be seen; how dared they put it on the maps at all!
Its dispirited clearing was surrounded on three sides by low thatched huts, like a debased caricature of a colonial plaza; the fourth side faced the Río Espíritu.
In the mud of the clearing, thin dirty chickens picked and small hogs sighed.

To Quarrier, as to everyone who came there, the name “Culmination of Evils” caught the spirit of the place exactly.
The clearing scarred a wall of jungle which could not be held in check; the green absorbed both fire and machete, flowing back
across the tangle of ugly blackened stumps to close the wound.
The huts fought off rank weeds and thick lianas which crept up from behind, and the interiors were infiltrated by pale tentacles, squalid liverwort and creeping fungi.
The plaza itself, worn bare by feet and pigs, and beaten flat by heavy rains, had been a quagmire for half a century; its soil was a sterile orange-red, as slick as grease.

Through the prism of the mist, the heat of the low jungle sky seemed to focus on this wretched spot, where tarantulas and scorpions and stinging ants accompanied the mosquito and the biting fly into the huts, where the vampire bats, defecating even as they fed, would fasten on exposed toes at night, where one could never be certain that a bushmaster or fer-de-lance had not formed its cold coil in a dark corner.
In the river, piranhas swam among the stingrays and candirus and the large crocodilians called lagartos; in adjacent swamps and forests lived the anaconda and the jaguar.
But at Remate de Males such creatures were but irritants; the true enemies were the heat and the biting insects, the mud and the nagging fear, more like an ague, of the silent hostile people of the rain forest.

The inhabitants of Remate—ragged woodcutters for the most part, more Indian than not; a small detachment of Quechua soldiers on punishment duty; and the inevitable Syrian or Lebanese trader of the inner rivers who tended to these people’s needs in the only shack in good enough repair to close and lock—all vied with one another to tell the Quarriers the latest news of the Niaruna.
A party of warriors had appeared only the day before, in a large canoe.
They had raised empty hands in sign of peace, then held up otter skins.
The storekeeper had ordered the eight Quechuas to hold their fire, and the soldiers were still sullen about this.

“Why would you fire?”
Huben said.
“You’ve seen Niarunas here before.”
He was annoyed that he and Andy had been off downriver, testing the new outboard motor.

The storekeeper shook his head.
Not those tame Niaruna of the padre, he grunted, pointing disdainfully at a small knot of
half-clothed Indians at the clearing edge.
These had been
bravos
from the inner river.

Huben said, “We are not padres.
We are not
católicos
.”

The storekeeper, a fat man of cold resilience, smiled briefly and shrugged his shoulders as if to say, It is all the same to us.
He continued his account.

The Indians had been told to come to the bank and to keep their hands on their paddles; the Syrian had no confidence in the soldiers’ aim, even on those rare occasions when they were sober.
But the Indians would not come in until the soldiers had drawn back; the latter did so after shouting a little and shooting off their rifles into the air.
For each otter skin, worth thirty pesos, the Syrian had given a machete worth four and a half; then the Indians withdrew.
Out on the river they took up their bows and loosed arrows at the settlement, then slipped quickly to the far bank, paddling upriver in the shadow of the trees.
The soldiers came running, firing as they ran, and in the battle a small child suffered a bullet wound in the leg.
The Syrian reported to Madre de Dios a new attack by savages on the settlement of Remate de Males, and ordered large quantities of cane alcohol in anticipation of extra soldiers.

Seeing Billy’s open-mouthed delight, Hazel shook her untidy head; she then looked bleakly at her husband.
He suggested that she and Billy walk around while he and the Hubens saw to their lodgings.
“Didn’t I tell you?”
Huben crowed.
“Madre de Dios is like Omaha compared to this!”

Hazel and Billy had not been gone ten minutes when he heard her scream; she came rushing back to the Syrian’s store, Billy in tow, her rough hair so disheveled that she looked mad.
“This is no place for a child!”
she gasped at him, as an admiring audience of halfbreeds fell into place behind her.
“These people—why, they’re monsters!”
The monsters grinned shy monstrous grins, the cuffs of their pants slack in the mud.
One man had a small marmoset on his shoulder; its black head was pressed close to his own, like a demon whispering in his ear.

A drunken man in a canoe along the bank had called out to
Billy, laughing evilly and pointing at the water; evidently he was suggesting that Billy would make a tasty meal for the piranhas.
When she told the child to pay no attention to him, the man felt insulted.
He shouted after them, and when they turned, seized a live chicken from the bottom of the canoe and tossed it into the water, causing his own wife to scream at him.
Billy stared in fascination as the chicken, fluttering futilely, became soaked and began to drown.
The piranhas did not appear, and the people on the bank laughed at the drunken man.
Enraged, he jumped out of the canoe and grabbed a tame trumpeter bird which was picking along the water.
Taking its legs, one in each hand, he ripped the flapping thing almost in half, then tossed it out after the chicken.

“Oh boy, Pa, you should’ve seen it!”
Billy cried, unable to contain himself any longer.
“Wow!
The whole water kind of got all wrinkled and then there was this kind of little noise, you know, like
chopping
, and it got all red in the water and everything, and that old bird was gone and the chicken too—they went after the chicken too.
And then—”

But here he stopped, for Hazel slapped him.
“You see!”
she cried.
“You see what’s happening to him!
And now you want to take him even further into this awful jungle, to see still more dreadful things, more cruelty and filth!
And you’re risking his life—our lives!”

The Syrian, Señor Haddad, belched.

Quarrier took her by the shoulders.
He had seen relish in Billy’s face but he had also seen a kind of triumph in Hazel’s eyes, the triumph of right, of the avenging angel.
“You are free to go home,” he said.
“I won’t hold it against you.”

“Yes, that’s it!”
Hazel cried.
“You want
me
to take the responsibility!
Well, I won’t do it!”
She glanced at Andy Huben, who had come running at her scream and was now trying to slip away.
“We are your family!
We’ll go where you lead us, Mister Quarrier!”
She folded her big arms upon her chest, with an air that said that on the moral battlefield she was ready to take on all comers.