At Play in the Fields of the Lord (18 page)

“I never doubted it,” Quarrier said.
When Andy had led Billy off to show him the tame Niaruna, he said to Hazel, “From
now on, I’ll also take the responsibility for disciplining Billy; I never did like to see a child slapped in the face.”

Hazel startled him by cringing; she drew her arms up toward her face and moaned.
He had never seen this gesture in all the ten years of their marriage; unable to look at it, he turned away.
His eyes met the flat gaze of the merchant.
Though the Syrian did not speak English, he had been interested in the exchange and had felt no inclination to avert his eye.
Now he opened his bad mouth to smile, and shrugged his shoulders.
Once this man had exclaimed to Huben that if the Niaruna could be given a taste for beads and liquor, their conversion would become a simple matter—why, look at the Tiro, he had said.
But he had since become more philosophical about the stupidity of missionaries, and went on about his business without complaint.
He had already amassed a considerable amount of money, in part through enterprise—his Tiro had shown him that the green pinfeathers of the common parrot would emerge yellow if dyed with toad-skin fluid, and he now sent quantities of rare yellow-headed parrots across the mountains—and in part because he preferred to live alone in squalor rather than spend his savings.
The Syrian had no hope, no heirs, no joy, and yet he was content.

Señor Haddad, that same evening, sat with the missionaries around the crude table on the earthen floor of his store, gazing unhappily at his hissing lantern, which was consuming fuel.
Because the community was lightless, its hours were the hours of day, but since he had sold them supplies and rented a shed to them which otherwise would have gone empty, he did not feel he could turn the lantern off under their noses.
Quarrier was watching the avid face, flat and hollow like a soft balloon, when Huben pointed at the corner.

The tarantula did not make Hazel scream; she closed her eyes and shuddered, and Andy said, “Oh, goodness.”
Haddad picked up a flask of kerosene used for the lamp.
Without leaving his seat, he jerked some liquid out toward the spider.
When it was drenched, he flicked a match toward the spot where it backed around in a half-circle, all hair and knees, probing the spatter of kerosene with its bent legs.
Hazel cried out at the same instant
that the Syrian laughed, for the spider had ignited; the small flame ran a yard or more before exploding quietly, in a soft puff.

Quarrier did not know whether Hazel’s cry was a delayed reaction to the spider or a reaction to the Syrian, or to the fact, suggested by the man’s strange skill, that tarantulas were commonplace and that dealing with them in this manner was less hardihood than sport.
It did not matter.
Remate de Males might break her nerve entirely, and he dreaded the night, the hammock slung in the open shed, the night cries of unknown creatures, the brown water and the vile open latrine.

The four adults lay side by side, guts rumbling with fried manioc and beans, and listened to the drunken singing of sad mountain
huainus
by the soldiers across the clearing.
The unseemliness of the sleeping arrangement had been outweighed, even for Hazel, by the lack of choice, and by the fact that the child, in all his innocence, was there to serve as a rein on lustful thoughts.
They had searched the shed with a flashlight for night beasts and had fallen back, disheartened, before the swarms of giant roaches.
Hazel had lain down to her rest without a murmur, but even in this blackest darkness Quarrier knew that she was rigid as a corpse, that one more provocation from the jungle would make her scream again and that one day she might not stop.

Yet he could scarcely keep his mind on her; it turned insatiably to Andy Huben, who actually lay there in the same room with him, only a few feet away.
He ached with a longing that was not lust and he ached with guilt; he could not sleep.
Then he thought about what awaited them, and the fear grabbed his stomach and would not let go.
He peered at his watch again: it was past midnight.
Tomorrow had come, when they would go up the Espíritu.
The small band of Niaruna led by Kori—the people related to Yoyo by marriage—would follow them upriver to the mission, and they would also take from the Remate garrison four Quechuas, known to the jungle tribes because of their uniforms as the “Green Indians.”

Haddad’s mosquito netting had a strange and acrid smell; just outside its close thick heat, the night insects whined.
Quarrier
slept fitfully.
When daylight came, they rose exhausted in the cold jungle dawn, to a breakfast of watery
lima
fruit and a little farina meal mixed with hot water.

Four soldiers were hunted out and separated from their companions; if the four who were finally delivered in a mute and pitiable condition to the boats were not the same men assigned to the trip the day before, they were at least indistinguishable.
They were Quechuas of the sierra, slack in the jaw and purple-skinned, with yellow eyes and stumpy mountain legs.
The bleak gloom absorbed from their native tundra had been deepened by exposure to the jungle.
All of them were full of drink, but the drunkenness only made them appear more brutish and unhappy.
Quarrier nodded at them and smiled, and they retreated, bumping into one another like cattle; one of them crossed himself.

“They must think we’re demons,” Quarrier said sadly.
“I wonder how the padre persuaded them to go.”
He thought with sympathy of Padre Xantes, who had had to countersign Guzmán’s signature on the note to the corporal at Remate.

“They have no choice,” Huben said.
“The Quechuas have never had a choice about anything.
The Opposition has only used them, just as the Incas used them—they are a meek and stupid people.”

“And shall they inherit the earth?”
His own remark made Quarrier uncomfortable.
Quickly he said, “Are they really stupid, do you think, or just resigned?”

“What’s the difference?”
Huben’s ironic smile made Quarrier still more uncomfortable, and he turned away.
He thought about his reservation Sioux, the terrible apathy of hopelessness that the white man preferred to call laziness and stupidity.

Billy was already in the bow of the canoe when Hazel came from the latrine; she was ashen.
She would not tell Quarrier what the matter was; it was just too awful, too disgusting.
But later she said that she had seen two giant frogs or toads squatting half buried in the fecal muck.
Trapped in the water of the pit, they had grown fat on the swarming flies and were living out their lives buried in excrement.

“They live in it,” Hazel choked.
“They
live
in it.
Why, no
North Dakota frog could possibly—oh, this vile place!”

He tried to laugh, to tease her about clean-living North Dakota frogs, but she would not be comforted.
She sat trembling in the morning chill, teeth chattering, all hunched in upon herself.

He wondered if Andy Huben had seen the frogs.

In the early mist the people stood in deferential rows, wide-eyed like children; their murmurings were as gentle and soft as water.
Padre Xantes on his monthly visits had taught them that the
evangélicos
were evil; still, the people did not expect to see these
evangélicos
alive again, and one or two were moved to call “
Suerte!
”

“What are they saying?”
Hazel demanded, glaring at them until they backed away.

“They are wishing us good luck,” her husband said.
He climbed clumsily into the second canoe, a long black craft hollowed out of a single trunk and powered by the ancient forerunner of Huben’s new white outboard.
The canoe already held Billy and Hazel and supplies, in addition to two soldiers with their kits and carbines.

Huben had a similar load, but with its new outboard, his boat would be faster.
This was the motor sent with the blessing of Leslie’s sponsors in Wisconsin; before departing the United States, it had had its photograph in
Mission Fields
.
Now that he had his outboard, Leslie prayed almost daily for barbed wire to fence the mission hut so that the Indians, with their lice and smoky smell and dirty fingers, would give them a little privacy.

Leslie wore black basketball sneakers, a red baseball cap on his taffy hair, and a T-shirt tucked into lastex bathing tights pulled up above his waist, so that, with his short torso and long legs, he looked like a high-hipped boy; the golden hair and soft tan of those legs—Hazel said that they reminded her of a pullet—caught the dull light reflected from the river.
On the lap of his wife, seated facing him, was his new short-wave radio, which invoked for its proud owner friendly voices from all corners of the globe.
This morning he had summoned up American music from Panama, popular tunes to which he crooned accompaniment.
The music wandered on the river in the thick cotton mists of dawn; it rose, fragmented, through the roar as he cranked his motor.

Now Leslie stood up in the stern, and spreading his arms far and wide, cried, “Praise the Lord!”

“Praise the Lord,” said Hazel, chin out, doggedly.
She sat opposite her husband, facing the motor.

Maneuvering his boat into Huben’s wake, Quarrier waved to the people on the bank; they did not wave back.
He was depressed by the settlement Indians, by the filthy pants, the rotting undershirts of their deliverance.
The weakest and most opportunistic people in a wild tribe were those who prospered under the white man—a fact no less true because Lewis Moon, in their conversation that night in Madre de Dios, had made this point.
He was glad to leave Remate, as he had been glad to leave Madre de Dios.

There were chambers of cold air upon the river.
He was tired and nervous and cold, and shook so violently that he could scarcely steer.
When the canoes had rounded the first bend and Remate had disappeared from view, he nodded to Hazel and they prayed.
One hand on the outboard tiller, the other to his forehead, he prayed that the Lord would bless them and keep them, that His work might be done, Amen.
She prayed dutifully for the health and safety of His servants, Leslie and Andy, that they too might work for the Glory of the Lord, Amen.
He watched her as she prayed.
How grotesque and right it was that at this moment, stubbornly erect, borne against her will into the hated jungle, she should be facing
backward
—this poor great mule of a woman, he thought, with the last grace kicked out of her.

He said, “Almighty God, we pray for Lewis Moon—”

“No!”

“—that he be still alive, and that he may walk safely from the wilderness, to seek his own salvation in Thine eyes, Amen.”

She spoke in hate: “I’d pray for Guzmán first!”

From the river rose sad supplicating limbs of submerged trees, writhing and shivering in the current; on a sand bar at the bend ahead a pale caiman five feet long lay with its jaws agape,
straining to swallow a sword of light which pierced the green escarpments.
At the approach of Huben’s motor it rose on its short legs and ran, carrying its body clear of the ground, like two men borne forward by a heavy log which they are about to drop; headlong and obscene, it plunged into the current.
A thrash of its armored tail and it was gone, leaving a soft spreading welt on the slow water.

At Billy’s shout she had turned her head in time to see the reptile, and was gagging.

“They’re harmless, Hazel.
They say only the black crocodiles are dangerous.”

“The crocodiles,” she muttered.
“The
black
ones.
Where are
they?
” She fixed her eyes on the big red hands folded tightly on her lap.
He did not want those hands to touch him, ever again.

A scent of the jungle caught him unaware; he stared at the engulfing trees.
Perhaps the canoes were being watched, had been watched since they left Remate.
But this was Tiro country, after all, and the Tiro had been tame for many years; like the Quechua, they had made their peace with exploitation.
At the same time one never knew what impulse might seize this people, whose resilience must have its snapping point, and for whom, unlike the Niaruna, stealth and treachery ranked high among the virtues; on this narrow river it would be the work of moments to fill the chests of the Lord’s ambassadors with arrows.
Having hidden any food and valuables, the Tiro could then paddle downriver to Remate with the news of another Niaruna massacre.

Quarrier stared at Billy’s small eager body pressed into the bow.
Perhaps the only thing staying the Tiro hand was that the idea had not occurred to them.
He shuddered violently with cold.
A need for peace came over him; he had an impulse to cut the motor of the boat and drift silently backward into green oblivion, letting his hand trail in the cool water.